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The surviving necromancers and cavaliers, whom she had to remind herself were here precisely because they had not survived, were arranged silently around the room’s perimeter. Abigail was sitting on the floor, still a coruscating blue flame, and her husband had his arm around her and was leaning heavily into her with a face taut with pain: neither of them watched with any particular joy, but with a hungry intent, a cold anticipation. Dulcinea and Protesilaus had crawled to each other, leaving long snail trails of blood behind them, to meet exhausted at a point in the middle. Only the lieutenant had managed to stand, with the stiff-backed and impassive precision of a woman on a parade ground watching a drill. She looked as though at any moment she might blow a whistle for halt.
Harrow suspected a whistle would not be enough to halt this particular duel. It was like nothing she had ever seen at Canaan House, nor even like the practice bouts on the Mithraeum, which had been inhumanly fast and skilful but somehow bloodless, more dances than fights. These were two people who had spent their lives doing nothing but fighting, now freed from the shackles of flesh and time, focusing their entire selves on the business of murdering each other.
If Gideon had been there—no, if Gideon had been there, Harrow still couldn’t have hoped for a running commentary. Griddle didn’t know how to do running commentary. She would suck her breath through her teeth, or mutter in ecstasy words that meant nothing to anyone who wasn’t her, things like, “right foot,” in tones that suggested that if she died on the spot, that right foot would have somehow been the apex of her existence. Nor could she ever explain a fight after the fact in terms that Harrow could understand. But if her cavalier had been there, Harrow was fairly sure that she would have sucked her molars out of their sockets from sheer intensity of feeling.
Gideon, watching this single combat, might have better appreciated the anonymous monster called the Sleeper for what she truly was. In life she must have had few, if any, equals. Her people—whoever they had been—must have cherished her as their finest champion. She was a prodigious fighter: fast, brutal, ruthless in exploiting advantages, terrifying in her force and aggression. She had gained a wicked-looking knife with a serrated edge in her left hand, balancing the baton in her right, and she struck with it at eyes, groin, or anywhere else she could reach. The heavy haz suit did not seem to slow her at all, and she had a catlike agility in keeping with her earlier handspring; she kept swerving her body away from strikes and mixing elbow jabs, knee strikes, and even kicks into her overall assault. There was no trace in her of the beribboned show fighter: she fought like she wanted to kill you and she hoped it would hurt.
And her opponent was Matthias Nonius.
A thousand years ago, Drearburh had produced Matthias Nonius. He had not become cavalier primary until very late—more correctly he should have been Matthias the Ninth, but Harrowhark had never heard anyone refer to him that way. He had never been described to her as anything other than the greatest swordsman of our House. He was rather short of stature—arms averagely long—neither of those was correct, surely. Ortus had always given the impression he was perhaps seven feet tall and three feet wide. Nonius’s ghost had emerged from the fog of legend looking more like a meek priest than a warrior.
But with the sword in his hand—a black prayer-wreathed blade of her House—and his offhand knife in the other—the type of simple black blade carried by chaplains, or nuns—he was a poem. He was absurdly still, which she thought was against the rules of all rapier swordplay; he stood lightly in place, feet positioned hip’s width apart, and the Sleeper would pummel at him—take that black cosh and whip it cruelly at his ribs, gouge that long knife upward toward his inner thigh—and no blow would land. Nonius calmly parried them away as though he’d studied a list of the moves to come. It did not even seem to take him effort to block the lightning action of the knife, or of the club, or of the kick: he just stood there with the black candleflame gleaming off ebony steel and made himself a barricade.
And then he would move. He had lift Harrowhark had never seen in a human being: as though gravity changed its rules for him. His movements were never hasty or choppy. He would give all he had to one beautiful fall of the sword, and the Sleeper would begin to bleed. There were fully half a dozen slits torn in her suit now, and all of them were smeared with red.
But she neither stopped nor slowed, and gradually it was wearing him down. Nonius always did wear down, in long fights. From Books One to Four he was matchless—his enemies died if he looked at them—but later Ortus had seen fit to add long specific duels between his god and a few named and honourable rivals. If a foe got a hit in on Nonius, it was a good indicator that they would be present for at least the next ten pages, even if half of that was talking.
The Sleeper smashed her baton down at Nonius’s skull with enough force to stave it in. Nonius stepped clear and kicked her in the outside of the knee, sending her stumbling for balance, and took the opportunity to lash a clean line down her thigh with his rapier’s tip. Blood spattered the floor. As he slid back into guard, Harrow saw that her clothes had changed. The bright orange haz suit had somehow become a suit of fibre duelling armour much like Nonius’s own, with a padded cuirass sporting several bloodstained gashes and a set of plex-amalgam greaves. The ensemble was still the same warning orange colour, which produced a very strange effect. The blank hood with its face plate was now a peculiar curved mask of what looked like deep gold, wrought in stylised likeness of a proud face with a beaked nose and slitted holes for eyes. Only the knife and baton remained unaltered.
Bewildered, she looked up to the find the room was changing too. The nine-sided structure was the same—doorways in every wall and the great coffin at the centre—but the doorways were now arched and ceremonial, rather than squared off and industrial. The dark metal panels had become dark stone blocks of a familiar type—although the floor, with its ring of candles and the remains of its diagram, was still of metal tile patched with frost. Some of the fleshy webbing clung on the walls, but in places it had vanished along with the signs it had covered. In the corner between two arches there now hung a single ragged black banner, emblazoned in white with the Jawless Skull. It was no specific hall on Drearburh that Harrow had ever set foot in, but it was unmistakably a room of the Ninth House.
By our very presence in the River, we briefly exert space on non-space.
The struggle for control backstage is leaking over into the action out front …
She had been, once again, so slow. The Sleeper had found herself unable to use her firearms because there weren’t any firearms in the Noniad. Ortus disdained them: even the nameless enemy soldiers Nonius faced were always described as wielding spears or clubs. Just as the force of the Sleeper’s hatred had translated into unreasonable strength against Harrow’s necromancy—the power to smash through solid walls and turn constructs into dust with her bare hands—now the force of Nonius’s devotion to the Ninth, refracted through the prism of Ortus’s accursed poem, was overwriting the Sleeper’s rules. Even the wounds, she realised with a start, were correct. Whenever Nonius faced a serious opponent, both parties always ended up running with blood from a series of largely cosmetic wounds. In one pivotal duel in Book Nine, Nonius and a rival cavalier fought for a full hour, both bleeding heavily the entire time, and at the end simply shook hands and exchanged epigrams on valour rather than jointly passing out from hypovolemic shock.
The Sleeper had seized control of Harrow’s staged memory, the story her brain was telling itself about Canaan House, and used it to prosecute her guerrilla war against the Nine Houses. Now Matthias Nonius—or at least, Ortus Nigenad’s version of Matthias Nonius—was trying to turn it into an epic poem.
He was not altogether succeeding. The space was in flux. As Harrow watched, the floor beneath her feet began shimmering into close-set slabs of black lacquered stone, but the slabs faded like mist almost as soon as they appeared, and the metal tiles returned. The Sleeper whipped her baton into the side of Nonius’s face, sending him staggering, and followed up with a vicious knife thrust to his belly; he turned it with the thick part of his blade, but awkwardly, and the Sleeper managed to knee him in the flank and score the knife’s point down his sword arm for good measure before he shoved her away and fell back into guard.
They paused, breathing hard. Blood showed plainly on the bizarre orange armour, blooming in startling curls and petals; less so on the black Drearburh leathers, but the floor around Nonius’s feet was spattered red. The Sleeper’s golden mask remained smooth and perfect, whereas Nonius had gained a gash down his cheek and a split lip.
“Few have I fought so ferocious. To match you in arms is to stand against fully a hundred unworthy,” he said, which was exactly the kind of thing he was supposed to say.
“You’re good, but you’re just another fucking zombie,” she said, which wasn’t. The voice still sounded husky and blurred, even without the haz suit mouthpiece.
