“Leave your body to your body, Reverend Daughter,” said Abigail, rising shakily to stand, her teeth chattering. “If you were dead on the other side, we’d all be gone by now. If you die in here, your soul is gone forever. Right now, in this moment, you are alive—let us ensure that if your body survives, you will remain at the helm.”

Harrow fought to be heard over the screams of the wind. “But I was stabbed through the stomach! What’s happening out there?”

44

THAT SAME NIGHT BEFORE THE EMPEROR’S MURDER

THE BLADE OF THE rapier tangled in your skin. Big hanks of dermis kept wending their way up along the fuller, unsure where to head from there; as organs knitted together inside your abdomen—as interstitial meat threw itself against the invasive blade—the bloodied tip quivered, pushed this way and that by the regrowing tissue. You’d been stabbed from behind, and you’d collapsed backward onto the rapier’s hilt. Its foible pointed upward where it protruded from your torso.

And you’d gone and left me behind.

I arched up on your hands, rested your weight on your feet—the blade stayed stuck—and I pushed up against the corridor wall, and I got you to stand. Your legs were trembling. The only thing I could think of to do was to wad up your hands in the robe, give myself a count of three, and push the rapier tip backward as hard and as quick as I possibly could. The noise that resulted—I’m not doing it justice when I say it went SCHHHLIIIIICK, which also doesn’t describe the pain of a full foot of steel being pushed back through your innards and out the small of your back as carefully as I could do it, which wasn’t very. The sword fell to the tiles with a sad rattle, and I took a couple of moments, and by the time I reached down to get it you’d just—healed up. No more pain. No more stab wound.

The hilt was so hot and slippery with blood that it was hard to grasp. Your hands were bare. It took a few goes to get it. The grip was made of polished wood or plex, and your fingers didn’t close the way I expected them to, probably because they were shorter than mine.

We were in a narrow, sweaty corridor, dark, lit only by a thin rail of overhead red lighting. There was an alarm blaring somewhere, and a distant white-noise buzzing sound, like you’d get from a piece of malfunctioning machinery. You were soaked through with blood, and where you weren’t soaked through with blood you were soaked through with sweat. The air was shimmering with the heat. Standing in that hallway was like standing next to a bonfire, one that also made you wet.

Beneath you a bunch of blood was smeared playfully on the floor and lower walls, as though someone had rolled around in it, which I guess you had. But there wasn’t that much of it. It hadn’t been a fight. Whoever stuck you with your own rapier hadn’t let you get a shot off. You weren’t around to be furious, but if you had been, I would’ve told you not to bother; I planned on making them sorrier than they had ever been in all their fucking life.

Pool of blood: check. Air so hot: check. Surrounded by big and illicit bones: check. Looking at your hand to keep this tally—what hand there was, beneath the blood, and your fingers, and your small palms, and their absolute lack of thenar muscle—reality went through me. Kind of like a big iron railing, now that I think about it.

You were gone. You’d left me behind. Inside you.

“Fuck,” I said. It wasn’t my voice. “Fuck. Oh, shit. Oh, fucking hell. Help. Yuck. Aaaargh.”

In the darkness of that hot and bony corridor, something bumbled into view before you—us; me—which at least forestalled my full-on physical and emotional breakdown. It was a nightmarish nonsense of wasp, and bone, and meat, and it was alive, and when it saw me it stopped.

The thing’s bulk was set on a stretched-out, humanlike frame—like a person walking crab-fashion, feet planted flat and hands flat backward on the ground, abdomen thrust ecstatically up in midair. But when I say hands and feet, think of hands and feet fed through a shredder, and then all the exposed bone and flesh banded back together with black-flecked orange shell. This was topped with great shiny plates of thorax, a big diamond-shaped thing, and a tiny-waisted abdomen. At its highest point sat a huge skull of something that might’ve been anything, so long as that thing wasn’t human. Its lines were obscured by great slabs of pulsing, greenish, comb-chambered flesh, and here and there someone had slapped on long wicked hairs as thick as your fingers. Which weren’t that thick. I’m just amending here; your fingers are fine. Great serrated beetle jaws emerged from either side of the skull’s maw, dripping steaming liquid, and it snapped meditatively as it stood—hung, actually: transparent wings buoyed it up, moving so rapidly that what with the steam and the blood and the heat and the dark I hadn’t seen them to start with. And as I watched, little pinpoints spun within the black craters of the skull’s eye sockets, and then great wet black eyeballs emerged from those holes.

This would have been a terrific moment for you to come back. It would have been completely sweet. I don’t care how much of a hot badass I’m meant to be, I was in the wrong body clutching a sword I’d never used, and you didn’t have any muscles, and I absolutely did not feel well. I felt bad. I needed a time-out. But the monster screeched in a weird, double-throated bleating chitter, two sounds simultaneously and both of them shitty, and those eyeballs swivelled round and round and round.

I lined up your front foot with your back ankle, thumb wrapped low around the hilt of your sword, which proves that you can put the swordfighter into the necromancer but you can’t, wait, hang on.

And I said, “Goddamn it, I told you to lift weights.”

The creature skittered toward us at an incredible speed. What followed was an absolute shitshow.

For us. Not it. It was fine and dandy. Turned out that when it approached, its wings lifted it high enough to expose a fat, savage stinger on the end of that abdomen—the sawlike mouth shot a high-pressure squirt of transparent liquid directly into our eyes, which I narrowly dodged by swinging your blood-sodden arm across your face—fun times, because the liquid turned out to be insane monster acid. I heard the robe sizzling away on contact, then I heard your skin sizzle too—felt the strips fall away from your arm, first of cloth and then of actual dermal layer—and I took a couple of steps back and I bit about three holes through your tongue, but our pain receptors were still all fucked up. I’m not saying it didn’t hurt like a top-notch bitch, because it did, but when I shook the worst of the unholy insect spit off our mess of an arm I found your skin growing back as I watched. Hell of a party trick, Nonagesimus, I mean, damn.

I parried a smashing overhead blow from the stinger, which was beading more clear fluid from a tip that could’ve jerked our heart out, and my borrowed arm clanged my borrowed sword into the saw mouth. I kicked the stinger with your booted foot, which was like hitting a wall with a feather duster, ducked under another stream of acid, and then, sorry, turned and ran for your goddamn life.

I burst into the nearest room. The bedroom. I kind of knew the layout, but I’d never really been able to use your eyes. Living inside you—if I start I’ll never stop, so we have to move on—was like living in a well, and every time I bobbed to the surface I kind of got clotheslined back down to the bottom. I’m not complaining, I just want you to know. Even so, I knew enough to bust through your foyer and to the remnants of that ash barricade you were an idiot to make, heading for the thing I knew I would find right where you left it, with its thick white scabbard cracked into pieces all around.

The creature squirmed through after me, made that shitty bleating half-curdled chirrup, and spat another stream of evil saliva at us. I hit the floor, ditched the rapier, and grasped the hilt of my two-handed sword.

Which was, by the way, in fucking abominable condition. There is so much I should have told you. I just didn’t have time. I didn’t know. I didn’t know I’d have to say: A sword doesn’t hold an edge on its own, you sack of Ninth House garbage. I didn’t know I’d have to say, If you dip a sword into melty bone, the metal gets more pitted than an iron mine, you cross-patched necromantic shit.

I think the main thing I should have said was, You sawed open your skull rather than be beholden to someone. You turned your brain into soup to escape anything less than 100 percent freedom. You put me in a box and buried me rather than give up your own goddamned agenda.

Harrowhark, I gave you my whole life and you didn’t even want it.

Actually, scratch that, the main thing I should have said was, SQUATS ARE A START, OR A COUPLE OF STAR JUMPS, THEY’RE NOT DIFFICULT.