twitched in Magnus’s grip, but kept her footing. Dyas fired again, and again, and two more holes appeared, clustered close with the first. Harrow caught a glimpse of black beneath the bright fabric, but nothing wet or red, and the Sleeper was still struggling hard against Magnus’s arm-hold.
Dyas dropped the gun and ran forward instead, hand flashing to the hilt of the dagger she wore at her side. The Sleeper jerked her head back; she was about Magnus’s height, so this had the effect of smashing the back of her skull—whatever skull she had under that shapeless hood—into his face. He grunted but kept his arms locked tight. Dyas had almost closed the gap, dagger drawn and eyes narrowed, when the Sleeper lifted both legs off the ground, drew her knees up to her chest, and slammed her feet out hard.
Her boots struck Dyas in the chest as she came charging in. Magnus, unexpectedly left holding her whole weight, staggered and fell backward. All three of them went down together. Dyas and the Sleeper came back up again with almost equal speed, Dyas perhaps a fraction faster, the dagger still in her left hand. She slashed diagonally upward; the Sleeper blocked her arm with a bent elbow, then stepped in and kneed her in the gut. Harrow heard her wheeze out a surprised breath. The Sleeper stepped through, grabbed Dyas’s knife-arm in some complicated hold, and twisted. The dagger dropped to the chilly metal tiles with a musical clatter. Magnus was struggling to his feet, his mouth and chin scarlet with blood from his nose, reaching for his own rapier; the Sleeper dropped Dyas in a heap on the floor, flung out one arm, and shot him in the stomach. Harrow hadn’t even seen the gun appear in her hand.
Magnus crumpled; Abigail screamed. Dyas had hauled herself up onto hands and knees, but the Sleeper kicked her hard in the ribs, rolling her onto her back. She pointed the gun down at her face.
“Four,” she said.
The fallen bulk of Protesilaus the Seventh heaved itself abruptly off the ground, crashing bodily into the Sleeper as he rose, knocking her away from Dyas. She swung the gun up, but he was already too close. He smashed his bunched-up chain into the side of her head with enough force to shatter bone. It whipped the Sleeper’s face mask to the side, and she stumbled, the gun slipping from her fingers. Protesilaus loosed the chain and lunged with both arms, and at first Harrow thought he had tried to grab her the same way Magnus had. Then she understood: he had wrapped the chain around her throat from behind, like a garotte, and drawn it tight. Against his muscle, even the Sleeper’s bulky suit looked small. Blood was pouring freely from three dark, ragged holes in his back, running down his thighs and calves and dripping onto the floor.
“I have known one death,” he said hoarsely, “and I swear that I will not know its like again.”
“Smart boy,” rasped the Sleeper, her voice still strangely fuzzy, as if she were speaking through a communicator. “Figuring out the limits, are we? Doesn’t matter. My rules.”
Dyas was back on her feet now and had drawn her rapier, but she was hesitating: it looked as though she was waiting to see whether the Seventh’s garotte would have any more effect than her bullets had. The Sleeper flicked out her arms as though trying to straighten the cuffs of an invisible robe, and a gun appeared in each of her gloved hands. She reached back, tucked the snub-nosed barrel of the left-hand gun against the outside of Protesilaus’s knee, and fired. There was a dull pop; he roared in pain and collapsed to one side as though someone had kicked out a stick he’d been using to lean on. As his chain went slack, Dyas lunged, in a beautifully clean strike at the Sleeper’s heart. Her rapier’s point drove into the haz suit and bounced, juddering to the side as though she’d stabbed a solid iron pillar. The Sleeper knocked the blade clear with her arm and smashed the butt of her other gun into the cavalier’s jaw, dropping her to the floor like a sack of snow leeks dumped from the arms of a tottering Drearburh drone. Then she placed her steel-toed boot on Dyas’s throat.
Harrow seized her moment, stood up, and made a long, underhand throw—
And the Sleeper shot the clump of bone she was forming