Nona the Ninth, page 35
She tried another jab, this time with a hint of petulance. It went clang, not ching, because Camilla hit the Prince’s sword hard with one of her knives; the tip of the sword swung wide and Camilla lunged with the other knife aimed at the Prince’s belly. The Prince seemed to flex to the side, making her body flat, and simultaneously snapped her sword-hand inward so it caught Camilla in the side of the head. Camilla staggered and backed hurriedly away as the sword-tip came slicing down past her shoulder. She kept stepping back until there were several paces between the two of them. Nona understood innately that this was not a good sign.
“You’ve got better,” said Camilla. “You’ve been training with someone who knew what they were doing.”
“You’ve gone to pieces,” said Prince Ianthe Naberius. “Oh me, oh my. The locals not much good for sparring?”
Nona squeezed her eyes shut and tried to control her breathing, tried to ignore the horrible glove clamped over her mouth. She wished she could get one good deep lungful of air that didn’t smell awful. She felt as though if she could stay calm, that would somehow make Camilla calm, and if Camilla could stay calm everything could still be okay. There was another ching, another clang, then a scuffle of steps on carpet and a huff of breath that sounded like Camilla’s. Nona’s eyes flicked open: they were still facing each other, closer now, Camilla crouching a little with her knives crossed, the Prince regarding her with that same dead-cat analytical gaze.
“No,” the Prince said, “no, this is a bore, I’m afraid … a disappointment all round. How like the Sixth to take the fun out of suicide.”
Camilla flipped the knife in her left hand so she was holding it backward, which under normal circumstances Nona would have found enormously exciting and cool. She slashed upward with the other knife, and as the Prince stepped back disdainfully, Camilla rose up to her full height and swung her right arm back over her shoulder like she was going to try to chop something in two pieces. The arm whipped forward: there was a blur of confused motion and a wet thud as a knife grew out of the chest of a dead soldier; the Prince had moved rapidly to the side so the knife didn’t hit her, and Camilla had ducked the same way and was driving inward and upward, left hand first, blade flashing back round into a normal grip as she came.
For a moment Nona could see the shape of it, like the shape a mouth made right before the sound came out. Camilla had put herself behind the Prince’s sword, so there was no way the Prince could get the blade round into a position where it could hit her; her hand was swinging round toward the small of the Prince’s back, and the knife-flip meant that her arm was going to end up longer than the Prince would be expecting. It wasn’t quite clear how Cam was going to get the handkerchief, but presumably she could think about that once the knife was safely stuck in the Prince’s body.
Then the Prince did some sort of complicated dance-step back, bringing her sword in close against her chest, and she kicked out with her front leg. Not like when Honesty tried to kick a tin can off a fence post, just a little sharp shove with her foot, down low, like she was scaring off a stray cat. Camilla’s leg folded and her lunge collapsed in on itself: she dropped to her knees and started to roll backward, landing awkwardly on her left arm, still holding the knife. She braced one foot against the floor to push herself off and up, and the Prince simply turned to follow her motion, flicked the sword up, and struck decisively downward.
Nona stared. Camilla sprawled on the carpet. Her empty right hand was grasped round the Prince’s right wrist; the Prince’s right wrist turned into the Prince’s right hand and then into the Prince’s lovely thin sword, which ran all the way down into Camilla’s belly. The point was somewhere quite far inside Camilla, and Nona couldn’t see it anymore.
“You really don’t know when to throw those things, do you,” said the Prince a little sadly.
Camilla said, “Match to the Sixth.”
Ianthe said, “What?” and then her eyes rolled backward in her head and she fell.
24
EVERY ZOMBIE SOLDIER IN the room crumpled up like Kevin had tipped them out of the soft play box onto the classroom floor. Nona fell with hers and suffered the incredibly disagreeable experience of two big, dead people landing very hard on top of her, and in no way becoming less heavy or less dead.
Nobody came to help her—everyone ran to Camilla. Nona didn’t mind at all, except that she wanted to run to Camilla herself. Camilla had risen to her knees, the sword driven through her midsection like a kebab with just one thing on it, and she was grimly—solidly—holding the hilt steady, her dark hair sticking on her sweat-stained face. Crown had tumbled next to her in a handsome heap and was trying to hold the sword steady from the other end, with the presence of mind to wrap her hands in her dress so she didn’t cut herself to ribbons. She kept saying, “Stay with me, Camilla. Stay with me,” until Cam murmured, wetly and thickly—
“Not going anywhere.”
“I’m holding you to that,” said the body of Ianthe Naberius.
It sat up all of a sudden, like Nona getting woken up by the sponge, only all at once instead of in stages. It jackknifed in two. Pyrrha had rushed to retrieve her gun the moment all the soldiers started toppling like dolls; now she walked forward holding it in both hands and released the safety, her aim on Ianthe. Then she saw something that Nona couldn’t. She lowered the gun. She said—
“You fucking legend.”
Ianthe’s body ignored her. It grasped the hilt of the blade that was buried in Camilla’s body. Camilla did not look up, but only said, to Pyrrha: “It’s missed the pelvis. Take it out.”
“It’s still a gut wound,” said Ianthe’s body. “You’ll be out of commission.”
Curiously, Cam kept addressing all her remarks sideways, as though she could not bear to look at or address the dead body. She said, “I’ll cope.”
Nona was horrified—she could not tear her eyes away—as Ianthe’s body grasped that hilt, supported itself on its knees, and pulled.
The body unsheathed the sword—all that slim metal came flashing out—Camilla’s chin snapped upward, then back, and she stared at the ceiling, and she did not make any more sound than an unready exhalation. The body flung the sword away—it spun over the tiles, splattering Cam’s blood as it went. Ianthe’s body tugged off its right glove, and Pyrrha dropped down on the other side, unfolding Cam’s shirt. Cam was really a mess now. Crown said, “I’ll get bandages,” and left Cam propped up by Pyrrha and Ianthe’s body.
Camilla didn’t like this. She said roughly, “Give me space. I’ve had worse.” Pyrrha moved away, wiping her hands on her trousers, but Ianthe’s body didn’t. It placed its arms over the flooding wound in Camilla’s side, and Cam’s chin lolled on her chest. Her breathing was wet—then still and quiet.
Ianthe’s body said—
“Won’t you look at me, Camilla Hect?”
Camilla murmured something that Nona could not hear. The body said, “I died, and you carried me. I gambled, and you covered my bet. You kept the faith, and were the instrument of both my vengeance and my grace. And now I have fought through time, and the River, and Ianthe the First—fought and bested Ianthe the First, and I hope I never fight her ever again … Will you not look at me now, Cam, and know me?”
Camilla raised her chin. She looked at the dead face. She said quietly—
“Yes, Warden, I will always know you.”
Their foreheads touched. Camilla reached out with her slippery hand, and Palamedes clasped it with Ianthe Naberius’s cold, gloveless one. Because both of their hands were very messy it made an embarrassing squelch, but neither of them appeared to notice or care. Nona had to look away.
She heard Palamedes say, in the voice of Ianthe Naberius—“Pyrrha, I can barely do anything. I’m only the hand in a sock puppet. I don’t think I could unpick a single ward, and I can’t do a damn thing for Cam’s bleeding—thank God nothing’s protruding.”
Cam said, without opening her eyes, “Don’t worry about me, Warden. I’ll walk it off.”
“Yes, thanks for your input,” said Palamedes pleasantly. “I’ve taken it under advisement and will add it to the next agenda.”
Camilla smiled that wonderful hot-metal smile that Nona had loved as long as she had been alive.
“Jackass,” she said.
“Don’t try anything thalergetic, Sextus,” Pyrrha said. “Focus on the big picture, we don’t need fine-tuning. All you need to do is read the body you’re in—it would have touched the corpse. Discounting this room, there shouldn’t be any other remains. Where’d she stash it?”
Palamedes took off the other glove on Ianthe Naberius’s dead hand. He blindly grasped about, trying not to dislodge Camilla, and put that hand on the tiles. He had to think about it, but then he said— “I can’t get fine details. There’s some kind of corpse stashed in a downstairs annex room. Two lefts will bring you to a corridor with Ianthe’s fingerprints all over it—then there’s remains, and that’s the only corpse sig for two hundred metres, which doesn’t really account for—”
“Sextus, I was in the military, that’s not fine details, it’s a full intelligence briefing,” said Pyrrha.
“Good. Go and get Gideon’s body. Take Nona—poor Nona, dig her out before she’s squashed any more.”
“Thanks,” said Nona.
“But you’re—”
“Pyrrha, we have no time. Ianthe’s still alive and kicking—up here.” Palamedes tapped his perfectly coiffed head. Crown had emerged from a side door clutching a hard-shell plastic box, crossing over to join them. When Palamedes said, “Alive,” she nearly dropped the box. Her expression was terrible.
Pyrrha said, “Sextus, that wasn’t wise.”
“Probably not,” said Palamedes. “But I fought Ianthe Tridentarius within an inch of our lives inside her head, for … for a long, long time. How long did it take out here?”
“Four, maybe five seconds,” said Crown, ashen-faced.
“Lucky you. To me, it was a little longer,” said Palamedes with a slight smile. “It would have been a disgrace to kill her … No, Cam, I mean it. I currently have more respect for Ianthe than she ever won from me previously. I’m going to hold her back as long as I can, but if I hold her for more than an hour I’ll be astonished. Your Highness, go and get Captain Deuteros, then meet us back here.”
Crown kept fingering the package of bandages. Her eyes were huge and purple and glimmering, like pools of violet water. She said quietly, “You are a good man, Sextus.”
“No. If I didn’t think it was safer to trap Ianthe than to let her retreat back to her body, out there in deep space somewhere, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have killed her … Just because I feel good about not killing her doesn’t mean I wouldn’t have. It wasn’t mercy, Princess.”
“I don’t care. Thank you—thank you for not … not hurting her. Let me help Cam, I know how to dress a field injury…”
“I’m without resources,” said Palamedes with dignity, “but I think I can still bandage my cavalier’s abdominal wound. Can you carry Judith Deuteros?”
“Of course, but the guards—”
“Unconscious or locked up,” said Pyrrha. “I clonked half of them on the head, and the other ones are in the mess. Deuteros’s door should be unlocked, but don’t move her without sedating her. Nona—you’re with me.”
Crown dropped the scraps of her dress. When she looked at Palamedes, Nona was suddenly struck by the idea that Crown wasn’t happy at all, or grateful—and yet she obviously was, hungrily and thirstily grateful; she put Nona in mind of Noodle, suddenly, wanting to go out but wanting to stay in the basket, wanting to run around outside but wanting to come back. Then Crown deflated like a beautiful balloon and fled.
Nona felt wobbly and unreal. Her body was able to walk and move and hold itself upright, but she still felt very light-headed, disconnected from herself. As Pyrrha steered her out of the room, Nona kept looking back over her shoulder at Camilla and the body Palamedes was inhabiting, still kneeling on the floor, bloody and bent. Palamedes looked as though he were talking quietly to her—but Pyrrha closed the door behind them.
Once they were out of the room, Pyrrha took Nona by the shoulders and said, “You all right?”
Nona’s eyes kept crossing and uncrossing. “I’m not sure,” she confessed. “I feel strange.”
“Did those corpses falling on you hit a nerve?”
“No, I only feel funny.”
“You want me to pinch you, kiddie?”
That was so banal and unwelcome that Nona shook back into her body out of pure disgust.
“No. I don’t want to be pinched. Why do you always offer to pinch me? I never want to be pinched.”
“Just proving I’m me. Look at you—not sure I like the couture. Who did your eyes? It’s all coming off. Here, use my sleeve, not yours.” Nona obligingly used the sleeve, and quite a lot of white, gummy stuff came off on it. “Smart way of hiding it though. I should’ve thought of that. Good to go?”
“I can do it.”
“Okay. Shake a leg,” said Pyrrha.
The barracks had not got any less foetid or dark—in fact, Nona balked at the dark flight of stairs as they smelled so bad, and had to hold her breath as Pyrrha escorted her down—and there was so much rubbish, so many strange things laid out in strange places, that at one point they had to pick their way over piles and piles of boxes in order to pass. “This place is a maze. I never would have found her myself,” said Pyrrha, lifting Nona over a busted-up bedframe.
“Pyrrha—you’re not really a Lyctor again, are you? You’re you, not your other self?”
“No. I was only pretending, like you were only pretending. You can check my eyes,” said Pyrrha.
“I hope you don’t mind being the last one to know,” said Nona, dusting herself off a bit self-consciously, “but I’m dying.”
This fell completely flat.
“’Course you are,” said Pyrrha.
“I mean it, Pyrrha.”
“Yeah. I suspected you were, though,” Pyrrha said cheerfully. “I didn’t make a big deal out of it. We’ve all got our secrets … but the soul longs for the body, Nona. Even a fucked-up soul … even a soul that’s been changed forever. It takes a lot to acclimate a soul to a body it wasn’t born in, if that original body’s around for it to miss.”
“But you’re not sad,” said Nona.
“Of course I’m not sad. You’re not dying on my watch. Kiddie, when you were yelling…”
Nona was still a little embarrassed about that.
“I took Cam a bit too literally.”
Pyrrha opened her mouth to say something, but then they rounded the second left and she shut her mouth.
The hallway corridors were made of good white interior bricks braced with concrete and metal struts—lots of buildings were; the white stone kept out the heat—but one short section of this particular corridor had been decorated in delicate blood filigree and squiggles: not only the walls, but the floor and even the ceiling. The squiggles were thickest in a square on one wall, like someone had wanted to mark off a door. Pyrrha glanced at the wall, and then she barked out a laugh.
“Is that writing?” said Nona.
“Sort of. It’s a ward—a mark meant to keep us out. Necromancy. That bit’s writing though, House.”
“What’s it say?”
Pyrrha pointed. “Don’t go through here.” And pointed again. “I mean it, idiot. You will disintegrate. A bit obvious … everything else was good and paranoid. These things are all over the barracks—her bedroom, the shipyard, the downstairs tunnel exits. Some of ’em were blinds though. She never trusted me fully. The corpse must be down here.”
“Okay. What’s the trap?”
Pyrrha took up a piece of trash from a box that had half-tumbled over—a piece of broken pipe—and tossed it, underhand, toward the door.
It shivered into bits before Nona’s eyes, and a fine patter of dust came out the other end and dribbled on the corridor floor.
“It’s a shit version of Mercymorn’s old entropy trap,” said Pyrrha. “Not half as good. Done entirely through wards—brilliant—but entirely reliant on wards—fucking ridiculous. Good at keeping people out though … and almost impossible for anyone but another Lyctor to break. See what it’s made out of? That’s blood. Blood wards age, and they burn out if you make them work too hard … And I’m sorry, No-No, but that’s where you come in.”
Nona didn’t understand. “If you want us to stand here chucking stuff at it we’ll be here all day.”
“Nona,” said Pyrrha, “your regeneration ability is a million times better than any normal Lyctor’s. None of them could regrow the way you do. I’m not sure you’ve got a limit … not with the kind of damage you’ve come back from. So I’m really sorry … we’re going to have to use you, and it’s going to hurt like fuck. I wouldn’t ask you to do this if it were not literally the most important thing in the world.”
Nona found herself giving a fluttery sigh. She felt a little bit envious, and a little bit weary. “What’s so special about this body we’re going after, anyway?”
“In general? She’s the key to a door that’s been kept locked for ten thousand years,” said Pyrrha. “Personally? She’s the last thing I have left of a woman I tried to trick into loving me, and got played myself. And for you? She might be you, kiddie.”
Nona found herself sighing again, like her body wanted to let out all its sound at once. One of her ears felt slightly blocked, and when she tilted her head and blew her nose and pulled at her earlobe a little trickle of water came out.
“What if I don’t like me?” she said.
But Pyrrha didn’t seem to understand.
“Well, you’ll probably start visiting clubs and trying to hit on the dancers, and going from relationship to relationship not really being able to commit.”
Nona was severe.
“You talk too much, Pyrrha.”
For a moment she could not decide what to put in—she considered the foot, on the understanding that the foot was the furthest away from the head so maybe it would take the pain longer to travel—but that would have messed with her shoe. Shoes never grew back. And she had never liked her hands. Nona reached out with her left one, trembling a little—she never minded pain as it happened, but she was a terrible baby anticipating—until she gasped, “Pyrrha, help, I can’t, I’m frightened,” and Pyrrha took mercy on her and grasped her by the elbow. She thrust Nona’s arm forward. The tips of her fingers breached some invisible barrier, and they dissolved.
