From protoskeletal dust you conjured five full constructs: five constructs only as good as you were, tired and hungry. They scrambled like huge spiders across the counter and went for him. The Saint of Duty shouldered his goddamned spear. That first time you were absolutely affrighted: a spear, a spear for the offhand. He used the butt of his sword—it would be lying to say that you now regularly called it the pommel—to smash the first construct’s skull to powder. The force was enormous. You tried to prop the skeletons back together from within your net, reknobble the spine, mould it with ash as a second skull’s mandible got flicked off into the stovetop. A third construct was beheaded with the spear, swung through the cervical vertebra—it became a shrapnel of bones—and for the last two, your killer lost patience. He sucked the thanergy from their bones and it felt like a slap to your face. They disappeared into gritty puffs of bone smoke.

At this point you finally thought to run. More fool you. The nest of arms swung you around, prepared to be squeezed through the doorway. You shaped the net into a tight fretwork, springy, malleable. Although this was beautiful and worked a treat for mobility, you sacrificed resilience in the process. He threw his spear, almost casually, into this fretwork, and the net deformed fluidly on impact, and so it was through the bone that his spearpoint lodged into your large intestine. This sounded similar to a nail being rammed into a sausage. Your blood gushed like carbonated water. You tumbled through the doorway in a cascade of jostling, bouncing bits of bone, the scabbard jolting you roughly, rolling over and over until you lay bleeding at the feet of—

“Ortus!” said Mercymorn. She did not sound horrified, but deeply peeved. Your vision swam, and you smelled hot toast. “What are you doing??”

You curled on your side. The black haze was already starting to dim around your edges. You were not so apt with healing yourself, back then. You heard: “Is she dead?—Stay there, you idiot! Hands where I can see them! What were you thinking? Oh, he’s going to be furious! You egg!”

It seemed hateful to you that in death you should be treated like a prey animal some domestic predator had brought inside. You heard the Saint of Duty say in his flat, joyless voice: “I don’t answer to you.”

The spear was removed. You still remembered acutely what that felt like. In the midst of that sensation, quick, light fingertips tapped a symphony over your back, arresting the flow of blood, seizing your flesh, cutting off circulatory shock; it was only then that you really began to understand what Mercymorn could do. With another fingertip, she tapped above your eyebrow, and your pituitary gland spewed out a flood of neuropeptides that immediately replaced the adrenaline squirting through your system.