He did not help. He was too busy watching. Much like Abigail, he was transported; not to some kind of ancestral state of primaeval ghost worship, but to a wide-eyed heaven only he understood. She had never seen Ortus look triumphant. She had never seen Ortus in the eye of any storm of his own making.

She said urgently, “What did you do?”

“Oh, I did nothing,” he said breathlessly. “Pent … Pent is a marvel. I will write songs for Pent.”

“Write them later, and hurry up now—”

“If I die my final death here,” he said, “I will die knowing the only happiness that I have ever known.”

“Oh, shut up and move,” she said desperately. If all of her cavaliers were this excited for death, she was definitely the problem.

He did not move. He was smiling. “You were party to the miracle, Harrowhark. Your emphasis was almost perfect.”

“He smiles grimly at least twenty times in that act alone, Nigenad,” she snapped. “Find a new collocation.”

It turned out that a relatively small amount of thanergy was all she needed to stanch the blood from his wound. His major organ function was stable enough—whatever that meant, exactly, where a ghost was concerned—and she didn’t want to mess around with complex tissue repair in these circumstances. Harrow’s early training had taken place in freezing, poorly lit crypts, and still this particular crypt seemed unhelpfully dark and unmanageably cold. Having propped Ortus against a wall a safe distance from the action, she turned to see what had happened to the others.

The surviving necromancers and cavaliers, whom she had to remind herself were here precisely because they had not survived, were arranged silently around the room’s perimeter. Abigail was sitting on the floor, still a coruscating blue flame, and her husband had his arm around her and was leaning heavily into her with a face taut with pain: neither of them watched with any particular joy, but with a hungry intent, a cold anticipation. Dulcinea and Protesilaus had crawled to each other, leaving long snail trails of blood behind them, to meet exhausted at a point in the middle. Only the lieutenant had managed to stand, with the stiff-backed and impassive precision of a woman on a parade ground watching a drill. She looked as though at any moment she might blow a whistle for halt.

Harrow suspected a whistle would not be enough to halt this particular duel. It was like nothing she had ever seen at Canaan House, nor even like the practice bouts on the Mithraeum, which had been inhumanly fast and skilful but somehow bloodless, more dances than fights. These were two people who had spent their lives doing nothing but fighting, now freed from the shackles of flesh and time, focusing their entire selves on the business of murdering each other.