poem. He was absurdly still, which she thought was against the rules of all rapier swordplay; he stood lightly in place, feet positioned hip’s width apart, and the Sleeper would pummel at him—take that black cosh and whip it cruelly at his ribs, gouge that long knife upward toward his inner thigh—and no blow would land. Nonius calmly parried them away as though he’d studied a list of the moves to come. It did not even seem to take him effort to block the lightning action of the knife, or of the club, or of the kick: he just stood there with the black candleflame gleaming off ebony steel and made himself a barricade.
And then he would move. He had lift Harrowhark had never seen in a human being: as though gravity changed its rules for him. His movements were never hasty or choppy. He would give all he had to one beautiful fall of the sword, and the Sleeper would begin to bleed. There were fully half a dozen slits torn in her suit now, and all of them were smeared with red.
But she neither stopped nor slowed, and gradually it was wearing him down. Nonius always did wear down, in long fights. From Books One to Four he was matchless—his enemies died if he looked at them—but later Ortus had seen fit to add long specific duels between his god and a few named and honourable rivals. If a foe got a hit in on Nonius, it was a good indicator that they would be present for at least the next ten pages, even if half of that was talking.
The Sleeper smashed her baton down at Nonius’s skull with enough force to stave it in. Nonius stepped clear and kicked her in the outside of the knee, sending her stumbling for balance, and took the opportunity to lash a clean line down her thigh with his rapier’s tip. Blood spattered the floor. As he slid back into guard, Harrow saw that her clothes had changed. The bright orange haz suit had somehow become a suit of fibre duelling armour much like Nonius’s own, with a padded cuirass sporting several bloodstained gashes and a set of plex-amalgam greaves. The ensemble was still the same warning orange colour, which produced a very strange effect. The blank hood with its face plate was now a peculiar curved mask of what looked like deep gold, wrought in stylised likeness of a proud face with a beaked nose and slitted holes for eyes. Only the knife and baton remained unaltered.
Bewildered, she looked up to the find the room was changing too. The nine-sided structure was the same—doorways in every wall and the great coffin at the centre—but the doorways were now arched and ceremonial, rather than squared off and industrial. The dark metal panels had become dark stone blocks of a familiar type—although the floor, with its ring of candles and the remains of its diagram, was still of metal tile patched with frost. Some of the fleshy webbing clung on the walls, but in places it had vanished along with the signs it had covered. In the corner between two arches there now hung a single ragged black banner, emblazoned in white with the Jawless Skull. It was no specific hall on Drearburh that Harrow had ever set foot in, but it was unmistakably a room of the Ninth House.
By our very presence in the River, we briefly exert space on non-space.
The struggle for control backstage is leaking over into the action out front …
She had been, once again, so slow. The Sleeper had found herself unable to use her firearms because there weren’t any firearms in the Noniad. Ortus disdained them: even the nameless enemy soldiers Nonius faced were always described as wielding spears or clubs. Just as the force of the Sleeper’s hatred had translated into unreasonable strength against Harrow’s necromancy—the power to smash through solid walls and turn constructs into dust with her bare hands—now the force of Nonius’s devotion to the Ninth, refracted through the prism of Ortus’s accursed poem, was overwriting the Sleeper’s rules. Even the wounds, she realised with a start, were correct. Whenever Nonius faced a serious opponent, both parties always ended up running with blood from a series of largely cosmetic wounds. In one pivotal duel in Book Nine, Nonius and a rival cavalier fought for a full hour, both bleeding heavily the entire time, and at the end simply shook hands and exchanged