outsidebones | 009. fight

You were in the bath when it happened. The Mithraeum’s quaint bathrooms had no sonic appliances. You could only bathe in water, which you had grown to accept. You bathed in a few centimetres of water somewhat below blood temperature, wrapped in your exoskeleton and behind your multiplicity of bone wards, and for some benighted reason you considered yourself safe.

The central ward in your bathroom was near the light fixture, where the protruding light made the ceiling tiles fragile and noncontiguous. You did not notice anything amiss until you saw fine grey grains in your bathwater, until you cupped this water in your palm, thinking it was soap, or that you were unusually dirty. Even when you saw the soft trickle of dying, pulverized bone drifting down from your ceiling ward, you still did not fully comprehend.

The milled bone lay in your hands, unresponsive and inert. Only when you tried to join it together did you realise it was dead, in the way only the oldest bones in the most historical part of the monument of Drearburh were dead: the bones whose remnant thanergy had trickled out of them over nearly ten thousand years, like water from a pinhole in a bucket, leaving behind calcium dust too far gone to answer a necromancer. If the bones interred in the Mithraeum had been subject to time’s full ravages, not stalled by the gentle touch of the Prince Undying, only their most ancient stratum would have resembled the specks in your hands. It took perhaps five seconds from speck, to trickle, to realisation: your wards had been destroyed.

And then you heard a crash from the foyer, and then your bathroom door exploded open. Your immediate reaction was to cocoon yourself in a thick shell of tendon-fused bone. This would have been a good trick if it had worked. Nothing responded. Your exoskeleton slid off your body as though embarrassed by you. The bone studs in your ears were numb. The bone chips you kept tucked in niches throughout the bathroom did not twitch as you pulled on them. Every bone in reach was dormant and immobile. You were far more naked than if you had simply taken off all your clothes, which you had in fact also done.

And the Saint of Duty stood in the doorway with his spear, and his sword, and his tender green eyes in his hard concrete face, as though your wards were nothing. He drew back his arm and hurled his spear at your heart. You flung yourself so violently to the right that the entire tub swayed and tipped onto its side, with an enormous porcelain crack and a rush of tepid water that sluiced across the tiles to lap against the toes of his boots. The sword you had balanced across the bath, its bone scabbard flaking away in chunks like the candied coating from a sweet, clattered onto the floor. You grabbed for it but he stepped forward and kicked it away.

You were grovelling in half a centimetre of soapy water and gritty skeletal residue at the feet of your assassin. The spear he had thrown, and the sword you could barely use, were out of your reach. Your layers of traps and contingency plans had been rendered abruptly useless. You were soaking wet, and you were naked.

It was probably desperation that saved your life. You had trained your whole necromantic career to move for space: to fight from a distance. The Lyctor must have anticipated that. He had seen you do it before. He did not anticipate you throwing yourself at him with the only biddable bone you had left, which was your own. Great spurs burst through the heels of your hands from your carpal bones, and you slashed, wildly, at his chest, at his face, at the arm holding the crimson-ribboned rapier. You had extended your curved, bloodied talons of trapezoid and capitate into him, through the fabric of his shabby shirt, into the meat of his pectoral muscles, before he bounced your head back against the doorjamb. The back of your skull smashed into the steel casing, but he was falling back, and he was taking you with him. As the Saint of Duty staggered over the threshold into the bedroom you had a split second’s perception of your broken wards lying in heaps and desiccated clumps by the door, your regenerating ash all dried up on the threshold like so many ancient clags.

He dropped his sword to wrench your claws out of his chest, and you understood what he had done. He took your bloody spurs between his fingers, and the blood fell away into powder as he stripped away the thanergy. He did not absorb it or try to turn it back on you; he simply undid it, with the dismissive ease of upending a jug of water over a drain. The spikes of living bone, freshly grown from your own body, faded in seconds into brittle twigs. They snapped off in his hands and he tossed them aside.

You were dazed. You were horrified. The sword was in his hand again, vaulted neatly back into his grip by the blood streaming down his arm. He was too close to bring the blade to bear, so he simply swung the butt hard into the side of your face. Your cheek staved in; you felt your jaw splinter, and a couple of teeth tumbled loose in your mouth like ragged little dice. You staggered away with the force of the blow. He stepped clear and sliced inward and down, opening you somewhere under the ribs, and you spat in his face. The blood sprayed feebly from your lips and spattered to the floor. The teeth, on the other hand, hung in the air for a moment, blossoming into perfect four-pronged flowers of sharp enamel, each one angled toward his eye. You shot those teeth forward like bullets. They flew as you fell sideways, your balance lost. You could feel the depression fracture at the back of your skull; you could feel your brachial arteries spraying, panicked.

Your collapse against the wall meant you did not see what happened next. Neither, however, did he. There was an unpleasant, wet sound as tooth met eye. The Saint of Duty did not cry out in pain. You might have respected that, once. He merely turned away, his sword in his hand and the spear dragging behind him, and exploded back out through your ravished front door, your untidy, ward-strewn foyer. You were left slick with bathwater, wet with blood, half-dead and dismayed on the floor outside your bathroom.

The injuries could be seen to. Arteries could be stanched, then snapped back together. Meat could be sewn up and skin made whole. Dentine was easily reconstructed, and so was enamel, though you might have to re-form your jaw a few times before your bite was correct. Nothing cracked in your skull had driven itself into your brain, and the bleeding could be corrected. But your peace was gone, forever.

The Saint of Duty could bypass your wards at any time. The Saint of Duty was a thanergy void. The Saint of Duty was the ultimate nemesis of a bone adept. You would never be able to sleep again.

It was at this point that someone, obviously drawn by the noise from down the corridor, tiptoed over the mess at your front door and peered inside. You did not have to feel her presence to know it was her: you knew the sound of her shoes.

“Harrow?” Ianthe ventured, from somewhere near the door. Then she obviously stopped and saw you naked, bloodied, flayed in your own anguish, with your insides still strewn all over the floor and soapsuds still on your feet.

You saw your probable future clearly. You had not until that point understood the danger. If Ianthe Tridentarius knelt beside you then, no matter with what sugary contempt or filigreed Third condescension, you would creep into her lap, shamelessly, and weep. You would crawl like a worm to whatever clinging scrap of solace she would give you. All your slithering, degraded desperation for condolence you would give to your sister Lyctor with a brazen thirst that you would never come back from.

So maybe it was for the best that after a pregnant pause the Princess of Ida said: “Wow! Not how I imagined this happening, at all,” and you heard her hasty footsteps retreat, away, back down the corridor whence she came. Then she was gone.