was smiling. “You were party to the miracle, Harrowhark. Your emphasis was almost perfect.”
“He smiles grimly at least twenty times in that act alone, Nigenad,” she snapped. “Find a new collocation.”
It turned out that a relatively small amount of thanergy was all she needed to stanch the blood from his wound. His major organ function was stable enough—whatever that meant, exactly, where a ghost was concerned—and she didn’t want to mess around with complex tissue repair in these circumstances. Harrow’s early training had taken place in freezing, poorly lit crypts, and still this particular crypt seemed unhelpfully dark and unmanageably cold. Having propped Ortus against a wall a safe distance from the action, she turned to see what had happened to the others.
The surviving necromancers and cavaliers, whom she had to remind herself were here precisely because they had not survived, were arranged silently around the room’s perimeter. Abigail was sitting on the floor, still a coruscating blue flame, and her husband had his arm around her and was leaning heavily into her with a face taut with pain: neither of them watched with any particular joy, but with a hungry intent, a cold anticipation. Dulcinea and Protesilaus had crawled to each other, leaving long snail trails of blood behind them, to meet exhausted at a point in the middle. Only the lieutenant had managed to stand, with the stiff-backed and impassive precision of a woman on a parade ground watching a drill. She looked as though at any moment she might blow a whistle for halt.
Harrow suspected a whistle would not be enough to halt this particular duel. It was like nothing she had ever seen at Canaan House, nor even like the practice bouts on the Mithraeum, which had been inhumanly fast and skilful but somehow bloodless, more dances than fights. These were two people who had spent their lives doing nothing but fighting, now freed from the shackles of flesh and time, focusing their entire selves on the business of murdering each other.
If Gideon had been there—no, if Gideon had been there, Harrow still couldn’t have hoped for a running commentary. Griddle didn’t know how to do running commentary. She would suck her breath through her teeth, or mutter in ecstasy words that meant nothing to anyone who wasn’t her, things like, “right foot,” in tones that suggested that if she died on the spot, that right foot would have somehow been the apex of her existence. Nor could she ever explain a fight after the fact in terms that Harrow could understand. But if her cavalier had been there, Harrow was fairly sure that she would have sucked her molars out of their sockets from sheer intensity of feeling.
Gideon, watching this single combat, might have better appreciated the anonymous monster called the Sleeper for what she truly was. In life she must have had few, if any, equals. Her people—whoever they had been—must have cherished her as their finest champion. She was a prodigious fighter: fast, brutal, ruthless in exploiting advantages, terrifying in her force and aggression. She had gained a wicked-looking knife with a serrated edge in her left hand, balancing the baton in her right, and she struck with it at eyes, groin, or anywhere else she could reach. The heavy haz suit did not seem to slow her at all, and she had a catlike agility in keeping with her earlier handspring; she kept swerving her body away from strikes and mixing elbow jabs, knee strikes, and even kicks into her overall assault. There was no trace in her of the beribboned show fighter: she fought like she wanted to kill you and she hoped it would hurt.
And her opponent was Matthias Nonius.
A thousand years ago, Drearburh had produced Matthias Nonius. He had not become cavalier primary until very late—more correctly he should have been Matthias the Ninth, but Harrowhark had never heard anyone refer to him that way. He had never been described to her as anything other than the greatest swordsman of our House. He was rather short of stature—arms averagely long—neither of those was correct, surely. Ortus had always given the impression he was perhaps seven feet tall and three feet wide. Nonius’s ghost had emerged from the fog of legend looking more like a meek priest than a warrior.
But with the sword in his hand—a black prayer-wreathed blade of her House—and his offhand knife in the other—the type of simple black blade carried by chaplains, or nuns—he was a