When Ortus the First had dried up your wrist spikes, you had felt him do it. There had been an appreciable jolt, as of a switch being thrown. He had gripped the periosteum in his hands and made something happen. That meant it was a conscious action, not passive. That was only logical, since a necromancer who automatically dispersed the thanergy from his surroundings would be a desperate liability to his fellow adepts. If the drain was a conscious action, it required some measure of concentration. He needed to focus. You could not give him that chance.

Your bomb exploded into a myriad of bone shards. You felt their thanergy light up like an electrical impulse, through the walls. You made that training room a goddamn hailstorm. Each fragment was no longer than four centimetres; that was long enough to kill, given the pressure with which you shattered them outward. There was a muffled eruption of rattling—a vigorous THWACKETA-THWACKETA-THWACK as thousands of missiles hammered into the floor, the ceiling, the walls, the foot-thick plex window. You thumbed two studs out of your ears, dropped six full constructs behind you in a spirit of pure optimism, and slammed the pad open again.

The training room was a smoking ruin. The wooden floors were a jagged carpet of embedded bone caltrops. The electrical lights overhead were smoking, crackling bars of broken housing and tungsten fibre; your bones were cilia inside a cavity, bristling spines on a rose’s stem, fine hairs on the legs of an arachnid. Razor-sharp spikes powdered harmlessly beneath your tread as you ran into that destroyed room wearing little more than a scarf and your paint, with your collagen-coated hands clutching your two-handed sword; and you readied yourself.

The Saint of Duty wasn’t there.

You said, “Fuck.”

Then, more aggressively: “Fuck!”

The smothering caul of disappointment around your heart was an unhelpful distraction. You sheathed your sword to the back of your exoskeleton and—reminding yourself, yet again, that reliance on others was as taking a brute-force blow with your vulnerable lacrimal bone—you turned off the lights, and you covered the ends of the wires in a thick cap of cartilage, heading off the fire alarm. Then you removed yourself from that bone-strewn ruin, somewhat chastened, thoroughly aggrieved.

Ortus the First was not in the training room. Fine. He had surprised you before. There was one other place on the Mithraeum where you had found him, at a time like this, when he thought he might not be disturbed; and so it was on swift feet, and with rising determination, that you retraced your steps toward the outer ring and the habitation atrium, and the room where one last Lyctor lay in state.