right, away from Harrow. The Sleeper had kept her gun trained on him the whole time, cautiously, as though waiting to see what he would do. Now she fired, and Nonius moved. In one long liquid evolution, he seemed to flatten and extend himself; his whole body became a single smooth device for deploying his rapier’s blade, like a needle flicking out of a spring housing. The point bit into one orange flank, and the Sleeper stumbled backward. From this new tear, Harrow saw dark liquid trickle.
Nonius’s body folded back into place somehow, his rapier held with the hilt low and the tip pointing up at his opponent’s face. He resumed his slow circular drift.
“A tool for a killer of beasts,” he said. “What warrior wields such a weapon in honourable service of combat? Has dignity wholly departed the Houses since I saw the starlight, or are you some raider or cutthroat?”
“You’re just a ghost like the rest of them,” said the Sleeper, but this time the flat voice that emanated from the haz mask carried a tinge of disbelief. “You don’t get special rules.”
“In life I was only a man,” the ghost agreed. “But the Ninth House granted me honour, and made me, unworthy, its servant. I speak with the voice of the Tomb, and my strength is the strength of the Black Gate—why am I talking in meter?”
The Sleeper fired twice, but the sword flicked up diagonally across Nonius’s body, hilt at his face, before Harrow had even heard the shots. One bullet ricocheted off into the darkness; the other seemed to hit the armour, and Nonius jerked slightly with the impact, but again the blade shot out so fast and sure that the movement hardly made sense to the eye. The Sleeper sounded a muffled curse through the face mask and dropped her weapon, which clattered on the tiles. Then she snatched back her hand and brought it out from behind her back holding a significantly longer and fatter gun. This one had a blunt, squat barrel that even to Harrow’s untrained eye looked like bad news. The Sleeper braced it in both hands against her shoulder, pointed at Nonius’s face.
“Go back to Hell,” she said, and pulled the trigger.
There was a flat metallic snap, and nothing happened. She pulled again: nothing. She threw the gun to the side, and before it had even hit the floor it had been replaced with a long, elegant rifle. This yielded a hollow clunk, and a distinct lack of anything else.
The Sleeper backed away a few more steps, her plex mask as impassive as ever. Nonius followed, not closing the distance but matching it, echoing her movements.
“You ought to look after them better,” he suggested.
“I killed wizard’s filth like you all my life,” snarled the Sleeper. This time the object that appeared in her hand was not a gun: it was some sort of fat cylinder. She flicked it downward and a slim black baton, perhaps three feet in length, telescoped suddenly outward with a noise like a bolt going home. “I killed them with guns, and bombs, and knives, and gas, and when I didn’t have any of those I just got in real close and put my thumbs through their fucking eyes. You can flick that little skewer around all you like, boy. I’ll choke you with it.”
“I certainly hope you’re a fighter,” said Nonius, and raised his dagger-hand. “God knows you’re not a debater.”
They both lunged forward at once. As the first crack of plex on metal sounded, Harrow dropped next to Ortus. She grasped him with her hands and with a pair of skeletal arms for good measure, and started to haul him to safety.
He did not help. He was too busy watching. Much like Abigail, he was transported; not to some kind of ancestral state of primaeval ghost worship, but to a wide-eyed heaven only he understood. She had never seen Ortus look triumphant. She had never seen Ortus in the eye of any storm of his own making.
She said urgently, “What did you do?”
“Oh, I did nothing,” he said breathlessly. “Pent … Pent is a marvel. I will write songs for Pent.”
“Write them later, and hurry up now—”
“If I die my final death here,” he said, “I will die knowing the only happiness that I have ever known.”
“Oh, shut up and move,” she said desperately. If all of her cavaliers were this excited for death, she was definitely the problem.