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Tentacles of teeth lashed down. The decrepit corpse of Canaan House, hastened to its demise by the wrath of a Lyctor, was crumbling in messy and sharp-edged chunks. Everything Gideon stepped on crunched, either bone or glass, and her kneecap crunched too at every step, which was definitely bone but felt like jagged shards of glass all writhing around between her femur and fibula and grating their edges together in a mad dance of splinters. Her arms were a coruscating blaze of pain. Her lungs had done their absolute best, poor sad sacks, but they were down to tattered sieves now, straining for even one more molecule of oxygen to keep her muscles pumping for another half a second. And there were still. More. Bones.
Gideon Nav had been sick of bones since age three. She wished she could talk to that three-year-old now, and tell her, “Suck it up, kid, it’s nothing but bones from here on out, you will spend your life and your death being boned, and not even once in the fun way.” And also maybe she would say, “Don’t get so hung up on chasing older women, it’ll all end in tears. And bones. Always so many goddamned bones.”
She was losing the thread.
She twisted to avoid a lashing lathe of vertebrae. Her knee twisted the opposite direction with a malicious squuirrccch. Starlight burst before her eyes. She heard a short, sharp gasp that was almost her name, and then she went blind.
“Nav?” A voice, very close by. Harrowhark. Gideon hadn’t gone blind, she’d been enclosed under a shell of bone to fend off the next tentacles that she hadn’t seen coming because she’d been dizzied by the Glorious Patellar Uprising.
“Nav, answer me! Are you all right?”
“Fuck,” Gideon wheezed. “Yeah. I’m good. I’m fan-fucking-tastic. Let me out of here and I’ll give that lying Lyctoral bitch something to write the Emperor about. Ow.”
“Your patella’s in five pieces,” Harrow said calmly. It was dark and hot inside the bone, but her voice was cool as the draft from the bottom of the pit back in Drearburh. It practically eased the sweat of Gideon’s fevered brow. “Hold still,” Harrow said, and then a small hand touched the side of Gideon’s knee. A hot spike of agony went through her thigh like it had been driven in with a sledgehammer. She yelped.
“The tendon is beyond me,” said the Ninth House necromancer who was maintaining a stupid amount of constructs, holding a Lyctor-made monster at bay, and also now spending what last drops of energy she could possibly have on this tiny bone shell to keep her idiot cavalier alive for all of three more minutes. “But I can fuse the pieces and give you an osseous anchor. It’ll hurt, but it should hold.”
“Fuck, Harrow, don’t waste your juice on me,” Gideon panted.
“It is not a waste,” Harrow said, and then did something to Gideon’s leg that hurt enormously. Gideon made several extremely embarrassing noises, but then it was over, and what had been grating, nauseating pain was now merely a dull, exhausted throb. “When I drop the shield, go left,” Harrow said.
Gideon couldn’t see her, but she didn’t need to. Harrow’s voice only sounded like that, with that absolutely uncrackable iron steadiness, when she was holding herself back from the brink by sheer force of bloody-minded refusal to submit. She probably looked like gore-spattered garbage. She was nothing but a wrung-out sponge of chewed-up bone. She had been magnificent, a font of triumph after impossible necromantic triumph, but it wasn’t enough. Gideon knew it wasn’t enough.
She couldn’t give Harrow more bone juice. She couldn’t give Harrow anything, she never could, except her ability to smash stuff with a sharpened bar of steel, and even that was starting to go. Even with her knee spit-patched into mobility, she was tired, and it was the sort of tired that she wasn’t going to bounce back from. She needed a jolt, if she was going to be of any use to Harrow as anything except an extremely sexy pincushion. She needed a push.
Before she could think about it enough to regret it, Gideon blurted, “Nonagesimus. Tell me I’m good at hitting things with a sword.”
There was a measured silence, during which Gideon died ten thousand red-hot humiliated deaths. She would have given every single bone out of her body in that moment for Harrow to just say “No,” and drop the protective shell and let Cytherea pincushion her. She would have wept tears of gratitude and relief.
Her lips were forming around the words Never mind, forget I said anything, I’m such a moron, ha ha, when Harrow said, “Gideon Nav,” and then, “I know nothing about the practice or technique of swordfighting. I only know what I felt in your mind, down in the facility, and what I’ve seen. You are a genius with that blade. I don’t know how you came by it — certainly Aiglamene could never have trained you to such a standard. You are innately gifted. You’re clever and strong and fast, and I have thought before that you have an intuitive understanding of the stresses and forces of the body that I lack.”
Yeah cause you don’t have any muscles, babbled the last remnant of Gideon’s brain that wasn’t shut down in a white glare of shock. But Harrow was still talking:
“I have been the Ninth House my whole life, Griddle, but I don’t think I’ve ever been proud to be the Ninth House until I realized your true value as its cavalier.”
“Okay. Stop,” Gideon said hoarsely. “God, Harrow, you have got to learn how to half-ass things. That’s enough.” The flinching, spasming awkwardness she'd felt the first time Harrow had ever said something nice to her was lessened, but not gone. The sensation that her insides were melting into a treacly golden morass was, if anything, worse. She felt like she could crush Cytherea’s black immortal heart with her bare hands and bring the ground-up sludge home to Harrow to use as triumphant sacramental skull paint. She was too hot and everything still hurt but it seemed to be hurting very far away, and instead of the pain her head was filled with a kind of high buzzing whine and she was ready to fight, she’d never been more ready to fight in her goddamn life. “Okay,” she said, “okay, open it up, we’re doing this.”
“Go left,” Harrow said. “I’ll cover you,” and the Ninth House threw itself back into the jaws of death.