She continued hastily, “—‘your power is great, o servant of masterful Canaan; nor may I hope to be counted your equal in skill, nor in craft, nor even in bodily vigour…’”
The Sleeper smashed a last skeleton into powder with a blow from her gloved fist that looked almost dismissive. “It’s over,” she said, and aimed the gun at Harrow’s head.
The candles burst forth in chrysanthemum flames of blue, fully six feet high. Time seemed to gel, and Harrow, hands outflung, watched the bones she had scattered pause in midair, like falling white stars. The fire wailed upward. She swept her gaze across the room—there lay Magnus and Dyas and Protesilaus, still where they had been felled; there was Dulcie Septimus, propping herself up in a doorway with wide and violent eyes; and there was—
Abigail Pent blazed like a flare from a blue and alien sun. Long prominences of light trailed from her fingers: it seemed as though she held in her hands a book, with all the pages fleshed from that same azure radiation. Amid that frantic cold, Harrow saw that Abigail was soaking wet, wreathed in hot mistlike shimmers by spirit magic—she had thrust off her jackets and her mittens and stood there in just a dress, and her robe, and bare arms. A reek hit Harrow like a faceful of snow: water, brine, blood. A multitude of voices lifted up in Abigail’s, and screamed.
Glutinous time unglued. There was a crack as the Sleeper fired, and a sharp metal spang, and nothing hit Harrow in the head. A shadow rose before her, and it was all the shadows of the room. The candles were no longer columns of great blue light, but had sunk to billowing black flames. She was frozen by the sound of a great bell: BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG … BLA-BLANG.
The First Bell of Drearburh, of the House of the Ninth, sounded loudly in that laboratory atrium. And a figure stood between Harrow and the Sleeper.
The figure wore a cuirass of black laminate that had not been favoured by the Cohort for years and years. Fibre armour, matte and unpolished, shadowy, rather than shining obsidian, with small overlapping plates layered across its surface. The rest of the armour was more timeless: black canvas breeches tucked into black greaves of leather and plex, and the stiff, unpretentious frieze hood of Drearburh, not worn up, but loose on the neck. Worn-out black polymer mitts, no more sophisticated than Griddle’s.
In one of those gloved hands was a rapier of lightless black metal with a plain guard and hilt; though from that hilt clanked delicate rows of knucklebone prayer beads, terminating in what was unmistakably, even by candlelight, a carving of the Jawless Skull. In the other hand was a simple black metal dagger, its blade thrust out horizontally a few feet in front of Harrow’s face, where it had blocked the Sleeper’s bullet midflight.
The new arrival turned its head to look from the Sleeper to Harrow. In those black and spitting flames, what she could see of the face was—quite ordinary. Dark Drearburh hair, cut fairly short but not sacramentally shorn. The skull paint was cursory in the extreme: a few lines painted along the bottom jaw and chin, the merest suggestion of teeth and mandible.
The flames guttered around Abigail Pent. She looked terrified, uplifted, and openly astonished; she looked faraway, as though she were no longer even truly with them. Her spectacles had slipped off her nose, and in that blazing blue corona her eyes were dark and liquid and—feral. The House of the Fifth always skinned itself over with such airs of civilisation, with so many manners and niceties, but they were spirit-talkers, and speakers to the dead. And the dead were savage.
The Sleeper stepped away and lowered her gun.
“Ninth was my name,” said the new arrival. “Ninth was my hearth, and my homeland. Here have I come at your calling. None may return from the River unless he be bidden by blood-rite; tell me, why have I been drawn here?”
And Abigail said: “I speak your name, Matthias Nonius, cavalier of the Ninth House. I charge you to protect the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, and to slay her enemies.”
“Waste not your breath,” said the ghost of Matthias Nonius. “Such was my task when I lived; why now in my death would I need a reminder?”
Harrowhark said, mostly to herself: “Oh, God.”
As the newcomer spoke, he had circled very slightly to the