meat of his hips and pelvis, but you would come to learn that Ortus the First did not respond to pain. He moved—you were dragged with him, off your stool, away from your blood-spattered soup—and you let his rapier go, dilating the bone so that he stumbled backward and you went forward, rolling over the countertop, spilling your bowl, dislodging pots and pans, and causing a hell of a noise.
A chip of bone floated near where the rapier had clipped your rib. You popped it out of yourself and from that almost-living bone sprang femurs, melted on either side into patella, into pelvis, into a skeleton seething with regrowing ash. You tore one of your construct’s ribs from its cage before it hurled itself at the necrosaint, and the rib you wrenched free had enormous and generous give: the bubbly innards separated from the strong, compact cortex as though created for that very purpose. The centre for shape, the outside for strength. The whole crumbled in your palms when you squeezed. You were borne up by a current of bone, twenty sets of arms sprung from tubercles you had made sticky and thrust into the ground, enfolding you in an armoured nest of skeletal limbs.
You marvelled at how easy it was. You barely had to think of it and it would be done, at a cost you considered negligible. But your blood was pouring out fast, and something bad had happened to some relatively important muscles, and you had no time to do anything but cut the flow and save the damage for later.
At that point, you took your first opportunity to really look at him. This was a fool’s move: why didn’t you run? You chose to watch, as though you could learn anything? A less critical party might’ve pointed out that you’d had a surprise gift of twelve inches of steel through the chest and made your pecs sproing the blade back out with your own ribcage, but you had never been party to excuses. You were startled by him all over again: by this ramshackle, burnt-out Lyctor, by the skin that clung to the skull, by that point-blank, stretched-thin face. Ortus the First did not look as though he needed meat or even water. There was a strangely burnt look to his dark brown skin, a burnt or otherwise oxidised look, not assisted by that shaven cap of rust-coloured hair. You hung, poised, for a moment not sure if you were hallucinating the whole thing. That hesitation cost.
From protoskeletal dust you conjured five full constructs: five constructs only as good as you were, tired and hungry. They scrambled like huge spiders across the counter and went for him. The Saint of Duty shouldered his goddamned spear. That first time you were absolutely affrighted: a spear, a spear for the offhand. He used the butt of his sword—it would be lying to say that you now regularly called it the pommel—to smash the first construct’s skull to powder. The force was enormous. You tried to prop the skeletons back together from within your net, reknobble the spine, mould it with ash as a second skull’s mandible got flicked off into the stovetop. A third construct was beheaded with the spear, swung through the cervical vertebra—it became a shrapnel of bones—and for the last two, your killer lost patience. He sucked the thanergy from their bones and it felt like a slap to your face. They disappeared into gritty puffs of bone smoke.
At this point you finally thought to run. More fool you. The nest of arms swung you around, prepared to be squeezed through the doorway. You shaped the net into a tight fretwork, springy, malleable. Although this was beautiful and worked a treat for mobility, you sacrificed resilience in the process. He threw his spear, almost casually, into this fretwork, and the net deformed fluidly on impact, and so it was through the bone that his spearpoint lodged into your large intestine. This sounded similar to a nail being rammed into a sausage. Your blood gushed like carbonated water. You tumbled through the doorway in a cascade of jostling, bouncing bits of bone, the scabbard jolting you roughly, rolling over and over until you lay bleeding at the feet of—
“Ortus!” said Mercymorn. She did not sound horrified, but deeply peeved. Your vision swam, and you smelled hot toast. “What are you doing??”
You curled on your side. The black haze was already starting to dim around your edges.