The squirming pile of skeletons exploded outward, and so did the floor. Bricks and tiles and splinters of wood scythed across the atrium like shrapnel. Gideon threw herself behind the fountain, Camilla dived behind an old sofa and Harrow wrapped herself in a hard white cocoon. Skeletons tumbled through the air like morbid rag dolls, bone shrapnel pinging off every surface. Cytherea the First emerged from the clusterf**k, coughing into the back of her hand, looking rumpled but entirely whole.
From the hole emerged one long, overjointed leg, then another. And another. A fretwork of bones, a net, a lace of them—long stingers of teeth, a nesting body, a construct so big that it turned one’s bowels into an icebox. The hulking construct that had killed Isaac Tettares filled the room behind its mistress, stretching itself out and expanding, pulverising a wall and a staircase as it emerged. Its great bone head lolled and loomed above them, masklike, with its hideous moulded lips and squinted-shut eyes.
But now this benighted vision stood before its natural predator, the Reverend Daughter of the Ninth House. As yet more skeletons jerked and clambered upward from their fallen comrades, Gideon got up, dusted herself off, and found Harrow standing in a pool of osseous dust and facing the construct with a hot-eyed, half-delighted anticipation. Without even thinking about it, her body moved to take her rightful place: in front of her necromancer, sword held ready.
Gideon the Ninth - Act Four, Chapter Thirty-Six
