Your claws turfed up the meat of his hips and pelvis, but you would come to learn that Ortus the First did not respond to pain. He moved—you were dragged with him, off your stool, away from your blood-spattered soup—and you let his rapier go, dilating the bone so that he stumbled backward and you went forward, rolling over the countertop, spilling your bowl, dislodging pots and pans, and causing a hell of a noise.

A chip of bone floated near where the rapier had clipped your rib. You popped it out of yourself and from that almost-living bone sprang femurs, melted on either side into patella, into pelvis, into a skeleton seething with regrowing ash. You tore one of your construct’s ribs from its cage before it hurled itself at the necrosaint, and the rib you wrenched free had enormous and generous give: the bubbly innards separated from the strong, compact cortex as though created for that very purpose. The centre for shape, the outside for strength. The whole crumbled in your palms when you squeezed. You were borne up by a current of bone, twenty sets of arms sprung from tubercles you had made sticky and thrust into the ground, enfolding you in an armoured nest of skeletal limbs.

You marvelled at how easy it was. You barely had to think of it and it would be done, at a cost you considered negligible. But your blood was pouring out fast, and something bad had happened to some relatively important muscles, and you had no time to do anything but cut the flow and save the damage for later.

At that point, you took your first opportunity to really look at him. This was a fool’s move: why didn’t you run? You chose to watch, as though you could learn anything? A less critical party might’ve pointed out that you’d had a surprise gift of twelve inches of steel through the chest and made your pecs sproing the blade back out with your own ribcage, but you had never been party to excuses. You were startled by him all over again: by this ramshackle, burnt-out Lyctor, by the skin that clung to the skull, by that point-blank, stretched-thin face. Ortus the First did not look as though he needed meat or even water. There was a strangely burnt look to his dark brown skin, a burnt or otherwise oxidised look, not assisted by that shaven cap of rust-coloured hair. You hung, poised, for a moment not sure if you were hallucinating the whole thing. That hesitation cost.