and clanged to the floor. She stepped in close, drew her head back, and smashed her golden mask into his unprotected face with a dreadful crunch. He reeled backward and half-fell against the empty coffin, his newly free hand coming up to his eyes. The Sleeper advanced, her mask’s impassive gaze twisted into a sneer by fresh blood.
“Fancy footwork, shitbird,” she said, and raised the knife.
Matthias Nonius came off the coffin like the Emperor’s wrath. He crashed into her bodily, driving her back, and then swung his knife at her exposed side. She blocked it with the baton and he kneed her in the gut, grabbed the back of her head in his empty hand, and kneed her again in the throat. They grappled—Harrow could hear her coughing wetly through the mask—and she managed to shoulder him away, but he came straight back in with a knife slash that nearly unstitched her guts. Harrow caught a glimpse of his face, now mostly blood: his nose was broken, and his lips and chin were wet with gore. There was blood in his eyes and under his hair, and his expression was one of cold and perfect murder. It was as though losing the rapier had snapped some invisible shackle. He didn’t even look angry; he looked like an ending given human form.
The Sleeper struck out with the baton. He grabbed her arm, twisted, and brought his elbow’s point down hard. The arm snapped wetly. Then he caught her by the back of the neck like he was pulling her in for a kiss, and jammed his dagger into her belly.
She dropped her knife, which joined her baton on the tiles, and seized his throat with both hands. He drove her all the way back against the wall, and they wrestled there for a second. Then he broke free of her hold and stumbled clear, leaving the black dagger’s hilt protruding obscenely from the orange fabric at her gut.
As she grasped it with her hand and tried to pull it free, Protesilaus the Seventh left his doorway and came forward a few steps; he had detached his sheathed sword from its belt, and he flung out his arm and sailed the whole thing through the air. Nonius caught the exquisitely patterned scabbard in one bloodied hand. He drew the lovely sword of the Rose Unblown, and as the Sleeper dragged herself off the wall, brandishing the dagger, which steamed with her blood, he ran his blade through her heart.
He skewered the Sleeper up to the hilt; and as she fell, jerking, he slid down to the ground with her, supporting her with his other arm. Only when the Sleeper stopped moving did he withdraw the sword with a silken wet whisper.
The candles flared with a last burst of black flame, and then sank to a glimmer. All around them, there were sounds like sausages flung from a height as the draped tubes and ligaments fell to the ground, bouncing damply before dissolving into pinkish powder. The icicles fell, one by one, slush before they hit the tiles. There was a humming noise and a plink, and the electric lights in the ceiling came suddenly on, pouring down blank white light: the unkindness of hot filament. Harrowhark crossed over and crouched down next to the ghost swordsman of her House as he gently prised the mask from the Sleeper’s face.
The features were slack now. They were smeared with blood from nose and mouth, but not otherwise obscured by damage. A bound-back mass of hair had been tucked into the collar, but some strands and wisps had escaped and plastered themselves in red whorls on the forehead and cheeks. That dead, proud, unforgiving face beheld them all until Nonius closed the sightless eyes, and Harrowhark was bewildered; she did not understand.
The blue flames no longer licked at Abigail’s palms and skirts. She kneeled on the hard metal grille, careless of discomfort, and she asked: “Harrow, do you know her?”
The Sleeper had the unmistakable face of the portrait in the shuttle, on the planet she had killed. The woman plastered behind Corona and Judith—the familiar woman with the pitiless eyes—had fought to usurp Harrowhark’s soul.
“Not at all,” she said.
Nonius pushed himself to stand. He wiped the borrowed sword on his thigh, turning the blade this way and that, then presented it to Protesilaus, who was either supporting Dulcie or being supported by her; it wasn’t clear, and it was ridiculous either way.
“’Tis dirtier than it