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“Who was your master in life? Whose banner and blade did you bear?” he asked. Nonius always displayed an unhealthy curiosity about the people trying to kill him. “What mission compels you to face me?”
“My master in life was revenge,” said the Sleeper. “My mission is one of— Goddamn it, I’m not going to start talking like this.”
“Enter the River with pride,” he said, and there was something genuinely sad in his voice. “Go back to its turbulent waters … Fain would I spare such a fighter.”
She rushed him, low and fast. The baton rang against his sword, and she struck upward with her knife, as if to impale his throat—but she flipped the blade somehow in her hand as it came, so his parry with the dagger caught empty air. The butt of her knife struck him under the chin, snapping his head back. A long, slender filigree of blood sprayed from his mouth and hung in the air for what seemed like half a second too long. Even as he fell back, his failed parry flexed in the space between them and flicked past her ribs, the dagger’s tip trailing a thin and perfect arc of red.
Across the room, beyond the duel, Harrow saw Dulcie Septimus trying to limp out the doorway. Her cavalier, who had propped himself upright against its frame, shot out an arm and pulled her back, sparking indignant outrage on her face. He glanced at Ortus, and they gave each other a grim, soldierly little nod of understanding.
Harrow murmured: “Septimus has the right idea. If I raise a construct now—close in on the Sleeper from behind—Dyas wasn’t badly hurt, and she still has her sword…”
“Nonius doesn’t fight in a crowd,” Ortus said tightly.
“Nigenad, you do realise this is not literally a poem.”
“You saw what happened to the guns,” he said. “Rules are everything here, Harrowhark; if we break them, I am certain we are lost.”
Harrow gnawed her lip. The more ragged and brutal the fight became, the more it seemed to favour the Sleeper. Nonius could not get the space to bring his rapier properly to bear; he was increasingly holding it against his body, using it more like a shield than the scalpel she knew it was meant to be. The floor between the fighters was one great smear of blood in which their feet skidded for purchase. As Harrow watched, Nonius did something clever with his dagger and one of the Sleeper’s strikes flew wide; she lost her footing for a moment and he took the opportunity to step back, free the sword, turn it for a thrust—
She brought the baton down on the inside of his elbow with all the graceless force of a butcher chopping meat. Nonius cried out, and the black rapier of Drearburh fell from nerveless fingers and clanged to the floor. She stepped in close, drew her head back, and smashed her golden mask into his unprotected face with a dreadful crunch. He reeled backward and half-fell against the empty coffin, his newly free hand coming up to his eyes. The Sleeper advanced, her mask’s impassive gaze twisted into a sneer by fresh blood.
“Fancy footwork, shitbird,” she said, and raised the knife.
Matthias Nonius came off the coffin like the Emperor’s wrath. He crashed into her bodily, driving her back, and then swung his knife at her exposed side. She blocked it with the baton and he kneed her in the gut, grabbed the back of her head in his empty hand, and kneed her again in the throat. They grappled—Harrow could hear her coughing wetly through the mask—and she managed to shoulder him away, but he came straight back in with a knife slash that nearly unstitched her guts. Harrow caught a glimpse of his face, now mostly blood: his nose was broken, and his lips and chin were wet with gore. There was blood in his eyes and under his hair, and his expression was one of cold and perfect murder. It was as though losing the rapier had snapped some invisible shackle. He didn’t even look angry; he looked like an ending given human form.
The Sleeper struck out with the baton. He grabbed her arm, twisted, and brought his elbow’s point down hard. The arm snapped wetly. Then he caught her by the back of the neck like he was pulling her in for a kiss, and jammed his dagger into her belly.
She dropped her knife, which joined her baton on the tiles, and seized his throat with both hands. He drove her all the way back against the wall, and they wrestled there for a second. Then he broke free of her hold and stumbled clear, leaving the black dagger’s hilt protruding obscenely from the orange fabric at her gut.
As she grasped it with her hand and tried to pull it free, Protesilaus the Seventh left his doorway and came forward a few steps; he had detached his sheathed sword from its belt, and he flung out his arm and sailed the whole thing through the air. Nonius caught the exquisitely patterned scabbard in one bloodied hand. He drew the lovely sword of the Rose Unblown, and as the Sleeper dragged herself off the wall, brandishing the dagger, which steamed with her blood, he ran his blade through her heart.
He skewered the Sleeper up to the hilt; and as she fell, jerking, he slid down to the ground with her, supporting her with his other arm. Only when the Sleeper stopped moving did he withdraw the sword with a silken wet whisper.
The candles flared with a last burst of black flame, and then sank to a glimmer. All around them, there were sounds like sausages flung from a height as the draped tubes and ligaments fell to the ground, bouncing damply before dissolving into pinkish powder. The icicles fell, one by one, slush before they hit the tiles. There was a humming noise and a plink, and the electric lights in the ceiling came suddenly on, pouring down blank white light: the unkindness of hot filament. Harrowhark crossed over and crouched down next to the ghost swordsman of her House as he gently prised the mask from the Sleeper’s face.
The features were slack now. They were smeared with blood from nose and mouth, but not otherwise obscured by damage. A bound-back mass of hair had been tucked into the collar, but some strands and wisps had escaped and plastered themselves in red whorls on the forehead and cheeks. That dead, proud, unforgiving face beheld them all until Nonius closed the sightless eyes, and Harrowhark was bewildered; she did not understand.
The blue flames no longer licked at Abigail’s palms and skirts. She kneeled on the hard metal grille, careless of discomfort, and she asked: “Harrow, do you know her?”
The Sleeper had the unmistakable face of the portrait in the shuttle, on the planet she had killed. The woman plastered behind Corona and Judith—the familiar woman with the pitiless eyes—had fought to usurp Harrowhark’s soul.
“Not at all,” she said.
Nonius pushed himself to stand. He wiped the borrowed sword on his thigh, turning the blade this way and that, then presented it to Protesilaus, who was either supporting Dulcie or being supported by her; it wasn’t clear, and it was ridiculous either way.
“’Tis dirtier than it deserves,” he said. “Such a blade would I sooner return with better than blood and my best thanks.”
Protesilaus said, “I wish that my whole House knew of my privilege. If I lived again, I would advise all the Seventh to travel to Drearburh if they sought instruction in the art. If I had but five minutes of life again, I would spend them praising you. I would speak of nothing but my reverence for you, and the Ninth House, and its nonpareil swordplay.”
“I’d call that a waste of five minutes,” muttered his necromancer, sotto voce. Harrowhark’s cavalier was smirking with barely concealed glee.
“My lady,” Nonius said.
He had turned toward her; he neatly bowed. She bowed back, and said, “I hope that your bones are blessed in the Anastasian, for your service.”
“My bones fell far from home,” said the cavalier, with a faint smile. “Never, I think, will a wanderer happen upon where they now lie, far though he travel. ’Tis blessing enough that I see such a Reverend Daughter and know that my House stands stalwart and dauntless, proud in the face of its foes. But I still don’t know why I’m talking in meter.”
Ortus was saying to Abigail, “Lady, it’s you who should be praised. Your act of necromancy should reverberate through the Nine Houses like—like the dying refrain of a song. I would that I were still alive, so that I could complete my great work and begin the next one afresh—and call it The Pentiad, and perhaps alternate between five-foot and nine-foot verses—a total departure from my first work, but reflective of it—I would make you the poem, Lady Abigail, that you already are.”
