Gideon the Ninth

Ianthe squirmed. A thread of blood coiled in the air around her, uselessly, and then spattered to the ground. The ancient Lyctor said, “You aren’t completed, are you? I can feel him pushing … he’s not happy. Mine went willingly, and it hurt for centuries. If I’m old news … you’re fresh meat.”

She tightened her grip on Ianthe’s throat, and the dreadful, bone-deep suction of siphoning sent an icy ripple throughout the sheltered terrace. The trees and trellises shook. This was soul siphoning as Gideon had never felt it before. Colourless at the best of times, Ianthe was now as blank and tintless as a sheet. Her eyes rolled back and forth in her head, and then there was no eye to roll: she jerked and squealed, pupils gone, irises gone, as though Cytherea had somehow had the ability to suck them out of her skull.

“No,” cried Ianthe, “no, no, no—”

The great wound in Cytherea’s thigh was starting to weave itself back up: so too were the burn marks all over her arms and her neck. Her charred hair was growing back in—rippling out in pale brown waves from her skull—and she sighed with pleasure as she shook her head.

“Okay,” said Camilla in carefully neutral tones, “now she’s healing.”

The thigh wound closed up, leaving the skin smooth as alabaster. Cytherea dropped Ianthe dismissively to the ground in a crumpled-up heap.

“Now, little sister,” she told the grey-lipped Third princess, “don’t think this means I’m not impressed. You did become a Lyctor … and so you’ll get to live. For a while. But I don’t need your arms and your legs. So—”

She rested one delicate foot on Ianthe’s wrist, and Gideon rose to her feet. The sharp shank of bone extended from her knuckles, a long butcher’s blade with a wicked heft. Cytherea sliced down. Bright red blood sprayed in the sunshine as Ianthe’s right arm came off just above the elbow. Ianthe, too weak even to scream, made a keening sound.

By this point Gideon had already lurched forward two steps and regretted it. Her kneecap was absolutely not where it should have been. She tottered to the side, letting her sword drop one-handed, pressing her other over the knee and cursing the day she had been born with kneecaps. Cytherea was shifting to the other side, the other limb, judging the distance with her bloody spar—

“Duck,” called Camilla.

Camilla had somehow propped herself on the arm with the mangled shoulder wound, which was in no condition for propping. Her good arm was up behind her head, holding the blade of her knife. Gideon ducked. The knife whistled over the top of Gideon’s head in a flashing blur and buried itself in Cytherea’s upper back.

This time Cytherea screamed. She went stumbling away from Ianthe’s prone form, and Gideon saw what Camilla had been aiming at: a lump, a delicate swollen mass, right next to Cytherea’s shoulder blade. It bulged out only slightly, but once you saw it, it was impossible to unsee—especially with a long knife buried squarely in its centre. Cytherea fumbled one hand over her shoulder, bone appendage drifting into dust, groping for the knife. She found it—she pulled it out, drawing a spurt of appalling black-and-yellow liquid from the wound.

The Lyctor turned her head and coughed miserably into the crook of her elbow. Then she looked at the knife, wondering at it. She turned her head to look at Camilla and Harrow and Gideon. She sighed pensively and ran one hand through her curls again.

“Oh no,” she said, “heroics.”

She dropped the knife, fell gracefully to one knee beside Ianthe, and lifted a limp arm—the one that was still connected to her body—in a cruel mockery of hand holding. Gideon thought for a bad second she was going to pull the limb clean off, and wondered how far she could throw a longsword—except no, her longsword was never going to leave her hands again, thank you—but Cytherea was just siphoning. There was the deep-gut lurch as energy drained from the younger Lyctor to the older, knitting the gross knife wound back up again.

“An inadequate Lyctor,” said Cytherea, as though giving Gideon and Camilla a hot tip on stain removal, “still makes a perfect power source … an everlasting battery.”

She stood back up and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Then she began walking toward Gideon: calm, almost insolent in her lack of aggression. This was somehow much scarier than if she’d stalked forward with a hateful glare and a rill of mad laughter.

Gideon planted herself before Camilla and the unconscious body of her adept and held her sword aloft. They were alone in a back area of the courtyard: a little area not yet buried in rubble or tilled up by the titanic fight between two immortal sorcerers. Dead trees bowed overhead. Gideon stood behind the iron fence that had once protected some herbaceous border, as though its bent, bowed spikes would be good for anything other than throwing herself down on as one last fuck-you salute.