bother trying to brush them off your arms. We were upright. That was the most important thing.
I’d just blinded one when the two-hander got seized in a pair of mandibles—you didn’t have the strength for me to tug it clear—and more were crowding the doorway. I was swearing, and yanking, and a skull mouth snapped in close to the hilt and the guard. I didn’t pull back. You weren’t wearing gloves. And it bit your damn thumb off.
Again, let me say: sorry. It was not my thumb to let them bite off. I admit completely that this was my bad, but these motherfuckers had a hunger that only thumbs could satisfy. It didn’t matter—I was yelling, and trying to grab the damn sword away anyway, and I saw it eat your thumb—these details are important, so keep up with me—and your thumb was back in the next half minute. I watched it grow. The gushing stump grew a full bone, and then the meat grew up around it in the next breath, and then it all closed over in fresh skin and thumbnail. I set it back around the hilt and it worked like it had not just been chewed up by a wasp ghoul.
So I braced us in the doorway and kept going. The best place to aim was at the junctures of bodies—thorax and abdomen—as the plates over their midsections were tough as steel. Some of the wasps who were all arms on the bottom liked to come at us with ramming speed: I sawed them through. Others had four legs, and they liked to jump, so I swept their feet off when they leapt. I had to kill the one that ate your thumb by staving in its skull with the butt of my pommel, over and over, until it stopped moving.
Once I thought I’d cleared out the wave coming for us in the bathroom, I left the doorframe—and we died the third time. One of the monsters had been waiting, and it reared up to try to drive that stinger into your brain, but I half-dodged and it just smashed your head against the wall.
Harrow, I heard it. It fractured your fucking skull. I was so terrified. I was undergoing the kind of shit that I had only undergone once in the happy knowledge that it was all going to be over soon. Child, that bee smashed you. A skull should not have made those sounds. The sound of it un-smashing was even worse—like an egg blowing back out again—but as it was saving your only skull, it was music to my ears. I cleaved that bee open from the thorax down, and it disgorged huge amounts of reeking guts and bones and green blood all over me and the carpet.
At the end, we were left in a sea of dead space bees, and you were impossibly okay. Your arms didn’t even hurt, not anymore. You didn’t have your original thumb and I’d touched your intestines, which is usually what, fourth date, but you were fine.
* * *
It was now obvious that the station was crawling with those things. You were gone, and I did not know where the fuck you were. Our only real options were to stay and fight, or go and fight: the place wasn’t getting any less filled up with wasps. And it was hotter all the time, especially in that room with the steaming piles of revenant bees.
You didn’t have any gloves. You didn’t have any armour. When I took off your robe, which was just puke rags by then, I found you were wearing a whole bunch of bones on your skin for no apparent reason. I was sorry to take them off in case they were any use at all, but whatever necromantic noise you’d used to fix them to yourself wasn’t working, and they were making it even harder to extend your arms. So I closed my eyes and I reached under your shirt and I peeled them all off, and I tied your hair back and took your sword and left. I didn’t look, and I barely touched you. Don’t get mad.
There were other sounds echoing down the halls by then. I know the clash of swords on bone when I hear it. There was that huge, murmurous buzzing of invading Heralds, and there were more of those baying, bleating screeches, but there was also the absolutely fucking unmistakable sound of rapier work. The alarm cawed overhead.