Chapter Text
The most frightening thing about the fight was not the ancient demigod. It was not how she’d worn Dulcinea’s identity—how he’d missed that, chalked her aloof avoidance up to some awkwardness around his proposal and his letters, which might have seemed sweet and naive when they would never meet but cloying and overeager when faced with him in person. That had been self-centered of him. Dulcinea had never been aloof in her life. But the false face of the changeling walking among them, and how she’d breezed past all his defenses, was not the most frightening thing about fighting her.
No, it was the fact that Cam was bleeding. She’d been bleeding. She’d been picked up by one of the hulking bone construct’s tendrils and whipped hard against a wall. Her leg was thoroughly broken now. Even before that, she’d been off balance, and it had cost all three of them dearly. She hadn’t had time to recover from the duel with the Second, a fact for which Pal would curse them until the end of his life.
Which, judging by the fact that Cam was bleeding, would probably come in less than fifteen minutes.
It would have been less than ten, had it not been for Gideon Nav. The Ninth cavalier was poetry with a blade; someone a great deal more skilled with words than Palamedes might have written epics about her. She was blood-spattered and broken, knee shattered, but the expression on her face was as steel as her sword. This was more than anyone could have expected of her, and it was a great deal more than Palamedes could have asked, given that she was grieving.
It would have been less than five, had it not been for the Reverend Daughter. She had been incredible—to force a cancer of the blood into the bones, to accelerate it, to warp and weaken the very structure on which the Lyctor was built, was both a stroke of genius and a feat of incredible necromantic power. It had burst every blood vessel in her brain, and she had collapsed on the spot. Or so Cam had told it, and Cam could be counted on for honesty and accuracy.
Now the Ninth held her own against the Lyctor for long enough that he could find Cam. She was lying in a pile of rubble, and she looked like hell. Palamedes didn’t want to look at her leg. He looked anyway; there was no point in denial. It seemed now to have three knee joints. Something smaller, more manageable: on the back of her hand, there was a long gouge, red with fresh blood, and sweat had plastered her hair to her forehead and the back of her neck.
“We don’t have a lot of time,” Palamedes said, trying for calm and missing the mark somewhat. “Harrow did some incredible work that I think I can build on, but I can’t get close enough to work. I know your leg’s fucked, but if you and Gideon can—distract her somehow, keep her from moving too much…?”
Cam looked at him. Her eyes were somehow both shining and dull; there was adrenaline pouring out of her glands and into her bloodstream, keeping her going, and she was resolute as ever, but it looked like—well, it looked like she was losing faith. By God, he hoped she wasn’t. If she gave up, having fifteen minutes to live would be a long-forgotten dream. All three of them would be completely, instantaneously and irreparably fucked.
“You want me to stop her moving,” she said, with only mild reproach. It was the sort of friendly scorn he tended to receive when he’d badly misunderstood how knives were supposed to work, or something like that. “Long enough for you to get in close?”
“Unrealistic?”
“Little bit.”
“I see.” Palamedes crouched beside her, taking her hand in his, smoothing his thumb over the cut to seal it up. It was superficial—he had neither the time nor the reserves to heal her properly—but it was something. The leg was more pressing, but it was beyond him. It would have to wait. In the not-too-distant distance, he could hear Gideon’s sword clanging and scratching against the bones of the Lyctor’s construct. “I won’t lie to you, Cam, I’m running low on ideas.”
Cam closed her eyes. “If you could get in close,” she asked, voice low, “what would you do?”
“Accelerate the blood and bone cancer further, finish what Harrow started,” Palamedes said immediately. With a touch, he would know what to look for, and how to exploit it. He’d spent his life learning how a necromancer might fight against the disease. Now he would fight with it. “Exhaust her resources to keep her from healing herself fully—she’d need to be spending her energy fighting back the cancer, when a large chunk of her energy will have just been forcefully diverted to generating new cancerous cells. Try to wear her out.” He hesitated. “Her Lyctoral abilities have kept her body from degenerating. I know all— most— many of the shortcuts she may be using. If I can reverse them, her condition will worsen.”
“And then we fight?”
“I’ll help however I can,” he promised.
“And you have the juice left for this?”
Pal bit his cheek. As a rule, he and Cam did not lie to each other. Also as a rule, he tried not to be defeatist. “I’ll help however I can.”
“Right,” said Cam, and her expression was flat and resigned. Somehow he was losing her. “Then we have no choice. You’ll get us out of this.”
“I hope so.” He clutched at her hand, wishing not for the first time that healing could be as simple as a necromancer’s touch. He didn’t like the stony set of her eyes; she was driving at something that he could not quite grasp, which was not a sensation he was used to.
“You’ll get us out of this, Warden,” she repeated more firmly, and he understood that it wasn’t a request. Cam opened her eyes, pulled her bloodied hand free of his grip and brought it up to cup his cheek, smearing his face with gore. With a manner somewhere in between clinical and tender, she slipped her thumb between his lips, and he tasted the rusty tang of her blood. “You know the theorems.”
And before he could react, Camilla Hect drew her left-hand blade across her throat, and sliced it through.
“No,” Palamedes said, numb with shock. “No, I won’t—”
“Then you’ll waste me.” Camilla’s voice was horrible; he could hear the air wheezing in the cut as she tried to breathe. He clutched at her neck, suddenly much, much more aware of the limits of his healing abilities.
“I’ll find another way— I’m so close to it, Cam, I’ve nearly worked it out—”
“Work it out later,” she said, which was the worst thing he’d ever heard. Her voice bubbled when she spoke. Every word was a titanic effort, and yet she forced them out. “Get the Ninth out. Sword through the heart. I’ll hold the blade for you so you don’t miss. But if you don’t do it now, I’ll die—and you’ll waste me, Warden.”
“You won’t die,” he promised, which was patently untrue no matter who won this argument. Even if he hadn’t exhausted the limits of his power, he could not knit together a cut throat with necromancy alone, and he was too far away from any sort of useful supplies. She was forcing his hand, and he was failing her. “I won’t let you.”
“You’ll get us—all out of this,” Camilla said again, her neck giving a horrible gush of blood at the effort, and once again she was saying something he couldn’t understand. She took her left-hand blade, already wet with her own blood, and placed the tip of it over her own heart, between her third and fourth ribs. Then she pressed it down, piercing a full half inch into the skin, and winced. “Do it now.”
“I— I—”
Another half inch. Camilla started to choke. She was dying, horrifically before his eyes, in great pain, and with every second he allowed her to suffer. “P— P’l—” Her mouth opened, but she had finally lost her speech, and she could not plead for mercy. Instead she let out a ghastly wet sob of a sound, something polysyllabic and unintelligible and spattering.
Palamedes raised his faltering hand towards the hilt of her knife. With her right hand, Camilla took his and guided him to the grip. Her left hand she maneuvered to join her right, so that somehow both hands cupped his, preventing him from dropping the blade.
He pushed, or perhaps she pulled. It didn’t matter, in the end. The result was the same.
Camilla was much, much calmer than she had any right to be. Palamedes would have resented it, except that resenting her seemed as though it would be a terribly cruel act, given what she had just done for him. “Set your feet further apart. Not that far. And bend your knees.”
“Cam,” he said, shaking, “I can’t.”
“You will. You have to.”
“But I really can’t—”
“Your muscles suck, but your form will be perfect,” she said, and he could feel her adjust the position of his feet for him. Gideon was distracting the Lyctor, as was Ianthe; she seemed to have lost track of Cam, and mostly written off Palamedes as a nonentity, as he’d exhausted all his reserves. Well, they weren’t exhausted anymore. “You have to try.”
“I—”
“Warden, I asked one thing of you.”
“I’ll try,” Palamedes said, “but I really don’t think—”
Gideon’s sword shattered something that sounded as though it had formerly been very dangerous. The Lyctor paused from where she held Ianthe, then ripped the princess’s arm off as though it were an afterthought and tossed both girl and limb aside. Ianthe howled, but she remained an afterthought. The Lyctor rounded on the Ninth cavalier.
“Hey, bitch,” said Gideon, barely glancing over the Lyctor’s shoulder towards Palamedes. She was keeping the Lyctor off him, distracted. She was far too noble to die here, and yet she probably would. “You ready to eat steel?”
“You really were wasted on her,” said the Lyctor, but she swept towards Gideon with her rapier in hand, looking like an angel of death.
“Now,” said Camilla, and Palamedes felt his feet take flight.
The battlefield was a wreckage of constructs, and he had to dodge and weave and bend in ways he’d never thought himself capable of. A ripping tentacle with spiky bone protrusions, thicker than a tree branch, swung at him, and without thinking he dived over it and found himself, inexplicably, in a cartwheel.
The cartwheel became something that he knew was called a roundoff back-handspring, though he would not have been able to put name to action two minutes ago. His glasses flew off his face, which was bad, because the world immediately became a blurry obstacle course without them at the best of times.
He’d have to get one of those spectacles chains, if he was going to keep this up. The thought made him mildly hysterical.
But he was close enough now, closing distance with the Lyctor, who had not noticed him in her fight with Gideon. Gideon was good, but even blurry, even mostly illiterate in the way of swords, Pal could tell that she was not winning. She’d get a good hit or so in, but the Lyctor was faster, and with her rapier moving needle-fast she was wearing Gideon down.
Something he could not make out slammed hard against his ankles, and Palamedes skidded, the rough stones ripping through his thin robes and shredding his chest. He scrambled, low, trying for whatever he could reach, and found himself holding the Lyctor’s calf.
It was enough. He could see what Harrow had done, and he poured energy into accelerating it nearly as hard as he could. He didn’t know what would happen if he fully committed to this sin, to burning the nigh-infinite energy that suddenly seemed to be fueling him, and so he refused to—but he toed the line as close as he dared, blood and bone cells splitting sickly, using up valuable resources and energy, ravaging her organs and shutting them down one by one—
The Lyctor looked down at him. He could see, vaguely, the sugar-brown curls; the delicate skin; the turquoise dress, now bloody and ruined. It wasn’t fair that she was still somehow so beautiful.
“Oh,” she said, as though he’d knocked on her door unexpectedly and asked whether she’d like to join him for a cup of tea. “It’s you.”
And she pulled her free leg back and kicked him in the face.
His head snapped back. The world went black, and then red as blood flooded from his nose backwards up his face and into his eyes. It was probably a good thing he’d lost his spectacles already; if he hadn’t, they would have been reduced to shards of glass and gone straight into his eyes.
There had been a small mass on the Lyctor’s shoulder blade, grown from whatever the Reverend Daughter had done to her. He tried to find it, and to accelerate it, to make it bulging; he clung to the Lyctor’s leg for dear life, and she kicked him again, this time in the stomach.
This time he had to let go. He curled up, wheezing, and rolled out of the way of the bone tendrils she sent rocketing his way. He raised a hand, and they turned to powder and fell out of the sky.
Gideon took this moment to charge. She ran at the Lyctor with a suicidal fury, lunging for a blow that should have punctured her heart—but the Lyctor dodged quicker than lightning, and Gideon nearly overbalanced with her own momentum. She spun back to face the Lyctor, but she was slow; her opponent's rapier sliced a red stripe up the left side of her chest.
“Ninth!” Palamedes called, but his voice had broken with his heart and with his nose. The nose, at least, would heal.
The Ninth cavalier had made her stand, and with it she had retrieved the bulk of the Lyctor’s attention. But she was in a lot of trouble. At least Palamedes could somewhat see what the Lyctor was doing as she was doing it; Gideon could only react as wave after wave of bone and flesh broke upon her.
Something went click in Palamedes’ head. He was not a fighter, and never had been. Even now, with Camilla guiding his hands and feet, he was good enough only to survive. Perhaps if their positions had been reversed, and she had absorbed him, they would have had a chance to win— but it didn’t matter now. The answer was oddly straightforward all of a sudden.
He was not a fighter. Gideon was. He knew where to look to find a bulging mass of cancerous tissue, and Gideon did not.
She needed only to know where to hit.
He had performed this magic once before, with Cam, and he had been the subject of it at the hands of the Reverend Daughter. Now he reached out with his mind, and he slid himself into the senses of Gideon Nav.
Gideon was extraordinarily loud, made moreso by her alarm at the sudden intrusion, but Palamedes was a Lyctor now, and he could ignore the noise. He tried to push a general sense of apology upon the Ninth, and received nothing back – the connection was not voluntarily two-way. Her eyes were much, much better than his, which was good, because he badly needed clarity.
Through the Ninth’s eyes, he directed her focus to the way the Lyctor was fending her off, to how Gideon might find a way around her. A day ago—an hour ago—he would not have known how to look for holes in the Lyctor’s defenses, or how to recommend movements to a woman who had been fighting for her entire life. Now he did; Gideon parried a thrust from the Lyctor and fell into a slide past her, across the floor. She nearly hit a patch of bony spikes, but Palamedes melted them before she could. He reformed them smoothly, easily, into a flexible springboard. Gideon rolled to her feet, and before the Lyctor could turn to react, she sprinted for it, slammed herself onto it, and rocketed herself towards the Lyctor with her sword out. Palamedes directed all her attention towards the tumor, which had tripled in size under his influence and which was now no doubt robbing the Lyctor of a great deal of her thalergy in her attempts to combat it.
The two-hander sailed through the mass as though it was so much paper, splitting it in two and making the Lyctor howl in pain. Palamedes guided Gideon’s hands upward, not that he needed to do much, and Gideon took over as she braced her arms and forced her sword through the Lyctor’s spine. The bones, corrupted and weakened by the Reverend Daughter’s work, made a horrible crunch , and the Lyctor screamed again.
The momentum of the jump carried Gideon into the Lyctor, and the two fell together into a tangle on the floor. Palamedes excused himself from Gideon’s senses, and when he looked over, he could see them. There they lay, one exhausted and one dead, pinned to the floor like a butterfly under glass.
Gideon didn’t immediately pull her sword out of the body. Instead she rolled away and fell to her knees, pounding the floor in grief and rage. “Fuck, fuck, fuck!” she cried. “Fuck! No!” She screamed herself hoarse there, any vow of silence long forgotten, absolutely distraught.
Palamedes wanted to go to her. They’d both gotten some sort of vengeance—her for her necromancer, him for Dulcinea—but neither of them had gotten any justice, and Cam had died for them to do it. It would be a cold sort of comfort, to hug Gideon and to be hugged and to know what their lives had cost, but it would be a comfort.
But he couldn’t seem to get to his feet. He got as far as sitting before he had to give up and prop himself against rubble, wrap his arms around himself, and choke down sobs. He was tired, and he hurt all over. There was a furnace roaring somewhere deep inside him, and he did not know whether he ought to snuff it out, bank its embers, or let it roar. Even if he had known which to choose, he would not know how to accomplish any of them.
“The projection was a good trick,” said Cam from somewhere over his left shoulder. He didn’t turn. If he didn’t turn, he could pretend she was simply standing where she always stood: half a step behind him.