The new arrival turned its head to look from the Sleeper to Harrow. In those black and spitting flames, what she could see of the face was—quite ordinary. Dark Drearburh hair, cut fairly short but not sacramentally shorn. The skull paint was cursory in the extreme: a few lines painted along the bottom jaw and chin, the merest suggestion of teeth and mandible.

The flames guttered around Abigail Pent. She looked terrified, uplifted, and openly astonished; she looked faraway, as though she were no longer even truly with them. Her spectacles had slipped off her nose, and in that blazing blue corona her eyes were dark and liquid and—feral. The House of the Fifth always skinned itself over with such airs of civilisation, with so many manners and niceties, but they were spirit-talkers, and speakers to the dead. And the dead were savage.

The Sleeper stepped away and lowered her gun.

“Ninth was my name,” said the new arrival. “Ninth was my hearth, and my homeland. Here have I come at your calling. None may return from the River unless he be bidden by blood-rite; tell me, why have I been drawn here?”

And Abigail said: “I speak your name, Matthias Nonius, cavalier of the Ninth House. I charge you to protect the Reverend Daughter of Drearburh, and to slay her enemies.”

“Waste not your breath,” said the ghost of Matthias Nonius. “Such was my task when I lived; why now in my death would I need a reminder?”

Harrowhark said, mostly to herself: “Oh, God.”

As the newcomer spoke, he had circled very slightly to the right, away from Harrow. The Sleeper had kept her gun trained on him the whole time, cautiously, as though waiting to see what he would do. Now she fired, and Nonius moved. In one long liquid evolution, he seemed to flatten and extend himself; his whole body became a single smooth device for deploying his rapier’s blade, like a needle flicking out of a spring housing. The point bit into one orange flank, and the Sleeper stumbled backward. From this new tear, Harrow saw dark liquid trickle.

Nonius’s body folded back into place somehow, his rapier held with the hilt low and the tip pointing up at his opponent’s face. He resumed his slow circular drift.

“A tool for a killer of beasts,” he said. “What warrior wields such a weapon in honourable service of combat? Has dignity wholly departed the Houses since I saw the starlight, or are you some raider or cutthroat?”

“You’re just a ghost like the rest of them,” said the Sleeper, but this time the flat voice that emanated from the haz mask carried a tinge of disbelief. “You don’t get special rules.”