You kicked off your shoes and left them, as you were still drunk enough to find that reasonable. Most of the alcohol was already in your bloodstream, but quite a lot of it was racketing around in your small intestine. As you walked in silence down the tiled hallways, past the pillars of tendon- and plex-wrapped wire, you focused on working it out of your capillaries and then out through your pores until you were running wet with sweat. Easier to move ethanol through water membranes than anywhere else. The fog in your brain and body burnt away, and you peeled two long strands of articular cartilage and hard calcium from your exoskeleton. These you melded and worked between your hands like clay, until you had a smooth greyish globe of bone.

There was no question of proceeding by stealth. Stealth required advance preparation, scouting, mapping, and you had not been given time for any of those. You had not known until ten minutes before dinner that your target would be in the training room. You had been forced to come up with tactics that would work on any battlefield. The buzz of adrenaline and remnant alcohol sang through you and made you feel prickly and overwarm, despite the fact that you were as soaked with cooling sweat as though you had stood in a spray of blood. You had been the subject of attempted murder more times than you had fingers and toes. You had sat through a long, agonising dinner culminating in two elderly Lyctors getting their tongues on God. Your mouth had been very nearly kissed. The calm that came over you as you went to murder Ortus the First was the weary calm of someone who had already been tried within an inch of her fucking life.

You stood before the autodoor of the training room, bowered over the black lintel with rainbow-coloured bunting and tessellated butterflies of pelvises and spines. There was nothing to sense within, but you would never have been able to sense him. You pressed the obsidian tab that opened the doors; you rolled your ball through with a swift underhand movement; you shut the doors again before they’d had the chance to part fully.

You had thought this through in detail. The Saint of Duty was a thanergy void. This you understood. Send a skeleton construct in, and within a few seconds it would be an inert pile of bone upon the floor. You had wondered about trying to build some complex mechanism with multiple layers—interlocking tiers of thanergy-rich bone, freshly grown from your own body, forcing him to waste time chewing through it all—but then you had remembered the ease with which he had crumbled bone even as it sprouted from your wrists, and realised the risk was too great. You did not know how fast he could work, and you could not base your whole plan on a guess.