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Gideon thought she had gotten pretty okay at killing Heralds. Maneuvering Harrow’s body still felt unnatural, but she was doing her best. Sure, her first attempts were bad. Sure, she had gotten Harrow killed (accidentally!) maybe three or four times now. But the killing didn’t stick, what with Harrow’s lyctoral healing finally waking up and doing it’s damn job, and Gideon was getting better and better. She was now killing the bees more or less before they killed her. Killed Harrow? Whatever.
It was weird navigating the Mithraeum for the first time with her own eyes. Ianthe was taking her somewhere – Gideon wasn’t sure where, because have the weird tangle of corridors memorized, but she thought she recognized the route to the Third House quarters. It wasn’t smooth sailing, but Gideon was starting to feel pretty confident dispatching the Heralds they came across.
Ianthe, though, for all of her queasy disposition, made Gideon look like a chump with a club. Even stricken with Herald-fear, something Gideon guessed she was immune to (cavs: 1, necros: 0), Ianthe laid into the horrible bee monsters like it’s what she was born to do, her gold Third House rapier the natural extension to the gold-shod bones of her sword arm as the radius and ulna danced around each other with ugly nakedness. The weird bone arm was pretty bad to look at, but compared to everything else in the hallway Gideon was almost happy to see it. She was of the Ninth House and the Ninth House knew bones. She could do bones. It was certainly a damn sight better than the bee monsters surrounding them.
Gideon had never actually seen a real bee in her life. She had seen a picture in the Ninth House library once and the thing had actually looked kind of cute. Gideon did not want to insult the honor of bees, because the Heralds were unimaginably worse. They mostly reminded her of bees around the ass end, with their many legs and fat thoraxes. But the messy, gorey lumps littering the floor around Ianthe no longer bore any similarity.
The sharp twisted arm-blade of the next ghastly creature snapped forward and Ianthe responded automatically, liquid smooth. She disengaged from the thrust, and Gideon could swear her rapier had a hole in it. She didn't even see the blade move; it just appeared suddenly on the other side where it drove home, spearing the bee through before slashing to the side, leaving the Herald dead in a spray of its own guts. The low emergency lights of the Mithraeum highlighted the sharp angle of Ianthe’s jaw and the hollow of her throat right where it joined the collar bones. Her pallid hair was streaked with gore of a color that could have never have come from a human being and her First House pearlescent robe was soaked in grime.
Gideon realized quite suddenly that Ianthe was beautiful.
Which was a horrible thing to think about.
Ianthe was a jumble of sticks wearing a translucent tent, and she was sporting some kind of filmy shirt with a deep plunging neckline that absolutely did not fit her, in aesthetic nor in measurement. Ianthe was some kind of evil weasel in a necromancer’s frame, and Gideon still did not forget the disgusting way she had sunk her teeth into her cavalier’s palm and torn away the flesh. It was difficult to reconcile these absolute objective facts as Ianthe stood before her with the perfect posture of a swordsman, rapier so slicked with blood Gideon couldn’t see the metal underneath. She was breathing a little harder than normal, and her robe was falling off one shoulder.
The entire picture made Gideon feel incredibly unwell.
Gideon tried to reason that this wasn't really Ianthe, just like it wasn’t really Ianthe’s rapier. It was Naberius Tern's jeweled Third House rapier, and Naberius Tern’s chewed up soul, pared down to his most essential working parts and put through the sieve of lyctorhood. Gideon didn’t know if that made whatever the fuck was going through her mind (and worse, her body) better or worse. She needed a lie down, but they didn't have time for that as more bees kept coming.
Gideon had not seen many people fight with a rapier. If she had grown up in one of the other houses, or had she joined the cohort, she would have been more acquainted. But most of her experience came from Aiglamanine, who was old as balls, plus the scant few bouts at Canaan House. Her duel with Magnus didn't really count – he was a swordsman by every definition, but he didn’t love the blade like Gideon did, like she knew Dyas and Camilla and Jeannemary did. Like Naberius did. And she had dueled Naberius, and he was terrible, every well-groomed line of him giving Gideon a deep itch of the kind that can only be relieved by an enormous eye roll. Like all the contempt the congregants of the Ninth had ever levied at her had been de-fanged and sprayed down with two buckets of hair gel.
But his rapier work was flawless. Even Gideon couldn't deny that.
Naberius' gorgeous lines of his sword arm, his perfect lunge, his parry and riposte. Her blood ran hot just remembering the bout, trying to track her own movements and his, trying to figure out how she could have beaten him. She thought, somewhat bitterly, that even if he had laid his playbook out for her, each move numbered and ordered, Gideon wouldn't have been able to do a thing about it.
It reminded her of every time she got her ass kicked by Aiglamene. Every time her sword master had slammed the blunted tip of the practice sword straight into Gideon's sternum, every time she had twisted under Gideon's blade or shattered her guard. Fighting Naberius had been like fighting Aiglamene, if Aiglamene was maybe one hundred years younger and had both her legs intact. Fighting Naberius had been like every lesson Aiglamanine had squeezed into those short three months before Gideon left for the House of the First all stuffed into one single duel.
It was so weird and fucked up, seeing all of this in Ianthe's body. Ianthe had half a head on him, and the textbook necromancer's build: all sinew over bone and wasted muscle. It should have looked wrong to see her holding a sword. But she held his rapier sure and steady with the grip of the master swordsman, and wrong was the farthest thing from Gideon’s mind.
That night back at Canaan House, before everything had gone to shit, Gideon had seen Coronabeth holding the training room rapier. She had gripped the blade like she was scared to let go of it, knuckles white around the hilt and elbow tucked a little too far inward. Coronabeth had been beautiful then, because Coronabeth could look beautiful doing anything, but she had also been terrified. Ianthe did not hold a sword like her sister had.
Then the next terrible Herald skittered into range, and Ianthe lunged.
What was it Aiglamene had tried to drill into Gideon's head?
"Stop lunging like that," Aiglamene had snapped, after Gideon had attacked and been disarmed for what felt like the millionth time that day. The rapier felt stupid light in her hand, and the muscle in between her thumb and forefinger was aching.
"I can see you coming a mile away with that," Aiglamene said. "Stop moving with your whole body at once, it’s ghastly. Stop throwing yourself forward like a grenade – this isn't your longsword, if you move like that you’re basically announcing your attack, and instructing your opponent nicely when to parry. You won't be fighting nameless insurgents. Most likely, your duels will be against other cavaliers, and they will see right through you. Stop holding your sword in the middle, it leaves you too open on either side. Stop gripping the hilt like it's insulted you.”
The rapier was tossed back to Gideon.
"Again"
Ianthe's lunge was perfect, like Aiglamene's lesson had taken human form. First, Naberius extended her sword arm, deliberate, and in a cascade everything else followed. Ianthe’s forefoot surged forward, her offhand whipped out behind her, and finally Naberius pushed all his power into extending her back knee. It drove the blade clean through the last Herald before the thing even had a chance to attack.
It was awful, seeing his perfect, gorgeous bladework in Ianthe's frame. And Ianthe was beautiful, like this, her right arm a tangle of bones and her sword faster than light.
The hallway was clear again and Ianthe retched, the Herald-fear back. Her right hand fumbled around the rapier’s hilt, no longer the master grip of the boy who was raised from the cradle to die for her. She sheathed his rapier, and her hand snaked out to once again grab Gideon’s wrist.
“Let’s keep moving.”
Gideon let Harrow’s body be dragged away, trying to make sense of the confusing and horrible feelings swirling around in her gut.