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One day the sisters of the Locked Tomb will brush the oss with your bristles.
One day your obedient bones will dust all places you disdain, and make the stones there shine with your fat.
You couldn’t spell obligation if I shoved the letters up your ass.” “I gotta say, I don’t think that would help,”
said Gideon. “God, I’m glad you didn’t teach me my spelling.”
Emperor every time she sneezed. “Nonagesimus,” she said slowly, “the only job I’d do for you would be if you wanted someone to hold the sword as you fell on it. The only job I’d do for you would be if you wanted your ass kicked so hard, the Locked Tomb opened and a parade came out to sing, ‘Lo! A destructed ass.’ The only job I’d do would be if you wanted me to spot you while you backflipped off the top tier into Drearburh.”
“She’ll have glory squirting out each orifice.
“Your heart is a party for five thousand nails,”
leaving Gideon lolling her head back against the frigid stone of the pillar and chewing the inside of her cheek.
“All you need to know is that you’ll do what I say, or I’ll mix bone meal in with your breakfast and punch my way through your gut.”
He said coolly: “Because I’m the greatest necromancer of my generation.” The unconscious figure sacked across Gideon’s shoulder muttered, “Like hell you are.” “Thought that would wake her up,” said Palamedes, with no small amount of satisfaction. “Well—I’m off. Like I said, liquids and rest. Good luck.”
It was a bone construct, she could tell that much. Grey tendons strapped a dozen weirdly malformed humeri to horribly abbreviated forearms. The rib cage was banded straps of thick, knobbly bone, spurred all around with sharp points, the skull—was it a skull?—a huge knobble of brainpan. Two great green lights foamed within the darkness there, like eyes. It had way too many legs and a spine like a load-bearing pillar, and it had to crouch forward on two of its heavyset arms, fledged all over with tibial spines. The exterior arms were thrust back high, and she could see now that they did not have
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If she had looked at him with interest, he looked at her with—well. He looked at her thin and filmy dress and her swell-jointed fingers, and at her curls and the crest of her jaw, until Gideon felt hell of embarrassed being anywhere near that expression. It was a very intense and focused curiosity—there wasn’t a hint of smoulder in it, not really, but it was a look that peeled skin and looked through flesh. His eyes were like lustrous grey stone; Gideon didn’t know if she could be as completely composed as Dulcinea under that same look.
This smile was unusual too: it betokened conspiracy, which
Her eyes glowed like coals with sheer collusion.
Then all of a sudden it wasn’t—drying up, parching, leaving her with a waterless and arid tongue. The pain moved down to her heart and massaged it, electrifying her left arm and her left fingers, her left leg and her left toes.
It was as though her insides were being sucked out through a gigantic straw.
Gideon was in the type of pain where consciousness disappeared and only the animal remained: bucking, yelping an idiot yelp, butting and bleating.
Her body had the soft, drunken feeling you got just before fainting away, and it was very hard to stay conscious.
her scabrously painted face, and lap at the tap like an animal. The mirror reflected a haggard girl whose blood probably resembled fruit juice, with anaemia all the way up to her ears.
her skeleton and her body had apparently tried to divorce.
“you are an intellectual cretin and a dog in a manger, but at least you’re consistent.
“I’m interested in the place between death and life … the place between release and disappearance. The place over the river. The displacement … where the soul goes when we knock it about … where the things are that eat us.”
May I be burnt one atom at a time in the most silent hole in the most lightless part of space, Lord—Kindly Prince—should I ever contemplate betraying the compact you appointed between him, and you, and me.”
Her skin sloughed off in papery threads.
gone. He now moved like there were six people inside him, and none of those six people had ever been inside a human being before.
One of the lightbulbs screamed, exploded, died in a shower of sparks.
There were lights beneath Colum the Eighth’s skin: things pushed and slithered along his muscles as he walked, heavy-footed, rocking from side to side.
The thing opened its mouth and opened its eyes, right up in her face. Its eyeballs were gone—Colum’s eyeballs were gone—and now the sockets were mouths ringed with teeth, with little tongues slithering out of them. The tongue in his original mouth extended out, down, wrapping itself around her neck—
The neck snapped. Her fingertips dipped inside the skin; the eye-mouths shrilled, and the tongue around Gideon’s neck flopped away, and both those mouths dissolved into brackish fluid. The body dropped to the floor— —and it was Colum again,
Then she stepped backward, into the puddled spray of Silas’s blood, and disappeared.
“She took Babs,” she said, which seemed fair enough. But then Corona started crying again, big tears leaking out of her eyes, her voice thick with misery and self-pity. “And who even cares about Babs? Babs! She could have taken me.”
THEY LEFT THE LONELY twin to her bitter, alien grief.
“Why was I born so attractive?” “Because everyone would have throttled you within the first five minutes
felt another presence slide into her mind like a knife into a pool of water.
impact, and Gideon’s forearms shuddered with it. Undeterred, Cytherea went for her numbed arm—sank the tip deep into the soft flesh above the bicep, met the bone, splintered something deep in there.
straight through the malignant thing in Cytherea’s chest: it bubbled and clawed out of her, a well of tumours, a cancer, and she seized up. It ran through her like a flame touched to oil, seething visibly beneath her skin, her veins, her bones. They bulged and buckled. Her skin tore; her heart strained, stretched, and, after ten thousand years’ poor service, gave out.
The lamps had been turned down to an irritatingly soothing glow, bathing the small room in soft, benevolent radiance. They shone down on her gurney, on the white walls, on the painfully clean white tiles of the floor.
The irises were dark and leadenly iridescent—a deep rainbow oil slick, ringed with white. The pupils were as glossy black as the sclera.
He had a bittersweet, scratchy voice, and it was infinitely gentle.
But there are things out there that even death cannot keep down. I have been fighting them since the Resurrection. I can’t fight them by myself.” Harrow said, “But you’re God.” And God said, “And I am not enough.”
it is the swordswoman who makes the necromancer’s art possible: thalergy planets reject the necromancer, and require fresher death than we do in the Nine Houses to
perform.
More warriors, and the necromancer would be hard-pressed to perform the feats that come with intimate knowledge of another’s thanergy; more necromancers, and the swordswoman’s burden to supply thanergy would multiply with each adept, to say nothing of the difficulty of protecting more than one person. Both
Our anxiety drives the expectant parent to arrange to give birth back home, or concern themselves with the baby’s proximity to grave dirt sourced from home.
If the cavalier and the necromancer do not take “one flesh, one end” as a maxim for their passion for each other, their bond is nonexistent. They must each take the other as their ideal. The necromancer must be a pure expression of their art to the cavalier. The cavalier must strive
for perfection in theirs, to gain the necromancer’s admiration
“Sword-marriages” wherein a necromancer and their cavalier married to one outside party as dual spouses were almost certainly the invention of the fiction writer, or more likely, the pornographer who cannot see anything beautiful without wanting to make it lewd.
