dead bushes. The sky, the sea, and the rest of the garden were cut off behind a smooth curved shell of what seemed to be solid, uninterrupted bone, like the hemisphere of a propped-up skull. Harrow swayed upright in the gloom as the beast tried to crack them open like a nut and looked at Camilla and Gideon through a face that was mostly blood. Not even blood sweat: just blood. Beneath her skin blood vessels had detonated like mines. It was coming through her pores. She’d figured out how to make perpetual bone, half-destroyed a giant dead spider from hell, and now she’d raised a solid wall six inches thick and was holding it up with sheer nerve.
The Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House smiled, tiny and triumphant. Then she keeled into Gideon’s arms.
Gideon stumbled, sick with terror, kneeling them both down to the ground as Harrow lay like a broken rag doll. She forgot her sword, forgot everything as she cradled her used-up adept. She forgot the wrecked ligaments in her sword arm, her messed-up knee, the cups of blood she’d lost, everything but that tiny, smouldering, victorious smile.
“Harrow, come on, I’m here,” she told her, howling to be heard above the thunder of the construct’s assault. “Siphon, damn it.”
“After what happened to the Eighth?” Harrow’s voice was surprisingly strong, considering she appeared to be all black robes and wounds. “Not ever again.”
“You can’t hold this shit forever, Harrow! You couldn’t hold this shit ten minutes ago!”
“I don’t have to hold it forever,” said the necromancer. She contemplatively spat out a clot of blood, rolled her tongue around inside her mouth. “Listen. Take the Sixth, get into a brace position, and I’ll break you through the wall. Bones float. It’s a long drop to the sea—”
“Nope—”
Harrow ignored her. “—but all you have to do is survive the fall. We know that the ships have been called. Get off the planet as soon as you can. I’ll distract her as long as possible: all you have to do is live.”
“Harrow,” said Gideon. “This plan is stupid, and you’re stupid. No.”
The Reverend Daughter reached up to take a fistful of Gideon’s shirt. Her eyes were dark and glassy through the pain and nausea; she smelled like sweat and fear and about nine tonnes of bone. She swabbed at her face again with her sleeve and said: “Griddle, you made me a promise. You agreed to go back to the Ninth. You agreed to do your duty by the Locked Tomb—”
“Don’t do this to me.”
“I owe you your life,” said Harrowhark, “I owe you everything.”
Harrow let go of her shirt and subsided to the floor. Her paint had all come off. She kept choking and sniffling on the thick rivulets of blood coming out her nose. Gideon tilted the wet, dark head so that her necromancer did not die untimely from drowning in her bloodied mucus, and tried desperately to think of a plan.
WHAM. One of the tentacles battered a crack in the shield: daylight streamed in from outside. Harrow looked even worse in the light. Camilla said steadily: “Let me out. I can provide the distraction.”
“Cram it already, Hect,” said Gideon, not looking away from her necromancer, who was painfully serene as even her eyebrows bled. “I’m not getting haunted by Palamedes Sextus’s crappy-ass revenant all telling me doctor facts for the rest of my life, just because I let you get disintegrated.”
“The other plan isn’t going to work,” said Camilla evenly. “If we could hold her off and wait on the shore, yes. But we can’t.”
Harrow sighed, stretched out on the floor.
“Then we hold her off as long as we can,” she said.
The crack knitted itself back together with painful, guttering slowness. Harrow snarled from the effort. They were plunged into darkness again, and the sounds from outside stopped, as though the construct was considering its next move.
Camilla closed her eyes and relaxed. Her long dark fringe fell over her face. It was that—Camilla in motion now Camilla at rest—that made the tiny voice inside Gideon’s head say, amazed: We really are going to die.
Gideon looked down at her necromancer. She had the heavy-lidded expression of someone who was concentrating in the knowledge that when they stopped concentrating, they would fall abruptly asleep. Harrow had gone unconscious once before: Gideon knew that the second time she let Harrow go under, there would probably not be any awakening. Harrow reached up—her hand was trembling—and tapped Gideon on the cheek.