Gideon the Ninth

The second time Harrow emerged to get the blow-by-blow, one nostril was bleeding. The third time, both nostrils. The fifth time—the floor of Response carpeted with the remains of twenty skeletons—she was wiping blood off her eyelashes and her shoulders were drooping. She had listened to each playback with numb, blank-eyed thoughtfulness, too distracted even to needle Gideon, but this time she balled her hands into fists and pressed them into her skull.

“My mother and my father and my grandmother together could not do what I do,” she said softly, not speaking to Gideon. “My mother and my father and my grandmother together … and I’ve advanced so far beyond them. One construct or fifty—and it simply slows it down … for all of half an hour.”

She shook away frustration like an animal with a wet pelt, shivering all over before fixing dead black eyes on Gideon. “Right,” she said. “Right. Again. Keep watching, Nav.”

She staggered back, door whipping shut behind her. Gideon Nav could only put up with so much. She took off her robe, folded it up, and put it on a hook in the foyer. She stood next to a skeleton whose arms were so full with bits of bone and lengths of tibia that it trailed chips like breadcrumbs. It was easy enough to stand beside it politely until the door opened, then to trip it up, then to step over it. She unsheathed her rapier with a silver whisper, slipping the knuckles of her left hand through the obsidian bands. The Response door breathed shut behind her.

“Harrow,” she said, “if you wanted a cavalier you could replace with skeletons, you should’ve kept Ortus.”

From whining speakers set in each corner, Harrow cried out. It wasn’t a noise of annoyance, or even really a noise of surprise—it was more like pain; Gideon found her legs buckling a little bit and she had to stagger, shift herself upright, shake her head to clear the brief bout of dizziness away. She held her rapier in a perfect line and waited.

“What?” The necromancer sounded dazed, almost. “What, seriously?”

The vents breathed out huge sighs of fog. Now that she was in the room, Gideon could see that they were blasting moisture and liquid into the air, stale-smelling stuff; from within this cloud the construct was rising—leg to horrifying leg, to broad plates of pelvis, to thick trunk of spine—to the green motes of light that swung around, searching, settling on Gideon. Her stance shifted. From Imaging Harrow grunted explosively, which nearly got her cavalier knocked ass-over-tits.

Air was displaced. The construct rushed her, and it was only just in time that she deflected two heavy overhand blows onto the naked black blade of her sword. Harrow let out a yelp as though she had touched her hand to a flame.

“Nonagesimus!”

Gideon considered the good news and the bad news. The good news: the blows that rained down on her were not as heavy as she had expected from something so enormous. They came down hard and fast, but no harder than the hand of Naberius Tern; lighter, for the lack of muscle. Osseous matter never weighed as much as blood and flesh, which was one of the problems with pure construct magic.

The bad news: she couldn’t do jack shit to it. Her light sword could barely deflect the blows. She had some small hope with her obsidian knuckle-knives—one good strong backhand bash and she had knocked out part of one arm, snapping the blade off near the tip—but then watched with a sickening weight in her gut as the blade reformed.

“Nonagesimus,” she hollered again between attacks, “this shit is regenerating!”

There was nothing from the speakers. Gideon wondered if Harrow could hear her. She leapt to the side as the construct fell forward, slashing heavily—it slammed into a pile of bone that had built up from Harrow’s previous failures, and a chip careered out like a bullet and nicked Gideon’s arm. From the speakers, the girl cried out again.

“Nonagesimus!” she said, alarmed now. The construct wallowed in its nest of victims, then reared up again. “Hey—Harrow!”

The speakers crackled. “Stop thinking!”

“What?”

“I can’t—it’s too—damn it!”

She was about to tell Harrow to take her hand off the damn pedestal, but she was charged again in a lurching flurry of blades. The construct bounded forward on its hands and feet like a lopsided predatory animal. Gideon charged too, and she sliced her sword straight through the interosseous membrane on the arm coming down to spear her. Arm and construct flailed independently, and with her offhand she punched it hard in the pelvis. Bone splintered out explosively as half the ilium came away. The monster fell and thrashed, trying to rise, as the pelvis and the top of one femur knit themselves back together with unsavoury speed. Gideon fell back in a hurry, pulling her sword free and wiping bone matter off her face.

The speakers sizzled with heavy breathing. “Nav. Close one eye.”