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We’d reached another ring. The plex here was solid—the shutters had peeled up with the force of the drop, but the plex hadn’t given, not yet—and we were tilting so far forward that we were nearly walking on the window. The River stretched out before us: some light source from the station lit the water’s gloom like a spotlight.
We were falling fast, and deeper, and deeper. Sad crunchy noises kept going off overhead, as though we were a suit of armour squeezed between enormous hands. The featureless River almost made it feel as though we were hanging still—the only thing that gave context to our movement were the little figures in free dive outside.
Augustine and the Emperor—God—the man who’d contributed half of me, unknowing—wrestled as they sank, sucked down by some invisible slipstream. The water churned around them. Maybe it was some titanic necromantic battle, but up here, falling sidelong, the River water boiling away from their bodies, it just looked like they were punching each other. I saw the slim, trailing white ghost that must’ve been Ianthe, diving down after.
I said: “What do we do? Abandon ship? Swim to the top?”
“No,” said Gideon. “Augustine’s dropped us deep. I think we’re already all the way down to the barathron. That’s a long way from the surface.”
“I can hold my breath.”
“Funny. Breath’s not the problem … You don’t need to breathe in the River.”
“So let’s goddamn swim for it, I hate this—”
“Listen to the station. Hear that creaking? There’s pressure down here. It’s not water pressure, it’s the weight of … whatever the River is, we never really knew. It’ll get a normal person in seconds. You and I won’t last much longer. And then there’s the ghosts. Number Seven’s gone, so they’ll be back soon.”
The station listed again. I said, “Okay. You’re a necromancer. Are you going to do something, or what?”
“My necromancer is dead,” said Gideon.
He took my sunglasses off his craggy, blasted face, and he looked down at me with eyes that would’ve surprised me first thing if I’d bothered to look at your memory files. They were a deep brown, with a kind of red spark to them; the brown of fractured rock glass, all mixed in with dark pupil, eyes that gave very little away. They suited the face better than the scintillating green ones you’d last seen.
“He fought it alone for hours,” said the stranger. “Then with some ragtag cavalry led by that mad sweetheart Matthias. They almost had Number Seven … almost. Gideon never could walk away from a losing fight.” Before I could respond to this, they added, “He and your mother alike.”
“Why does it always come back to—my mother?” I said, my voice rising to a squeal like an emptying balloon. “Who are you? How the hell did you know my mother, who seemed like a real dick, by the way?”
“My name is Pyrrha Dve,” said the ghost in question. “Commander of the Second House, head of Trentham Special Intelligence, cavalier to a dead Lyctor. We compartmentalized from the Eightfold Word, just like you and your girl—though I’m an accident, and he took more from me than got taken from you. I was able to go underground, even from him. Two years before you were born, my necromancer started an affair with your mother … not knowing I’d also been doing the same thing, using his body.”
I said, “What the fuck.”
“She was the most dangerous woman I’d ever met who wasn’t me,” said Pyrrha Dve. “You’re right, though. She was a real dick.”
At this point I was beside myself and more or less demented, so I kind of just squawked: “But what do we do?!”
“No idea,” they—he—she said calmly. “I’d aim to get out of here alive, but our odds don’t look wonderful. If we stay put, we get squashed, or eaten. If we swim, we probably still get squashed or eaten. I heal quicker than a normal human being, but not that much quicker.”
Before I could just fundamentally lose my shit, Pyrrha suddenly sucked her breath in through her teeth, and said: “That’s your plan, Augustine?”
I pressed up to the plex. The River bumped into visual depth.
We were in a huge gyre, lit by the furious electric glow from the falling station. Outside—another kilometre down, maybe—was the pale belly of the River, studded with rocky promontories. And right at the bottom—the water was churning. The station tilted forward, and I could see clearly.
A hole had opened. It was big enough to swallow up the whole of Drearburh and have room to spare. It was a huge, hideous, dark expanse, and it had seething, weird edges; it took the lights pattering over them for me to see that the edges of the hole were enormous human teeth. Each one must’ve been six bodies high and two bodies wide, with the dainty scalloped edges of incisors. The teeth shivered and trembled, like the hole was slavering. And that hole had nothing in it; that hole was blacker than space, that hole was an eaten-away tunnel of reality.
And there—falling to its centre—wrestled the miniature figures of Augustine and the Emperor. Ianthe had separated from them somewhat, floating high above, though the nerve it must have taken to position herself above that tooth-serrated expanse forced me to reframe Ianthe Tridentarius in the wake of this absolutely galactic ballsiness.
“The stoma’s opened for John,” said Pyrrha, and she sounded—detached, rather than triumphant, rather than grief-stricken. “It must think he’s a Resurrection Beast.”
The Emperor was struggling. I would’ve thought he could have just dropped out of the River—done what he did to Mercy, and blown Augustine to smithereens—but some kind of current was whirling them around like dolls. It seemed like it was all he could do to keep his position. Augustine had lashed them together, somehow. He was wrestling the Emperor down, inexorably, toward that mouth. Overhead, the station crunched; the plex in front of us was making a little high-pitched squealing sound.
Over and over Augustine and God rolled in the water—and then the tongues emerged.
A blast from the hole. The water boiled upward in huge, bloody-looking bubbles. Streamerlike lingual tentacles emerged—the unassuming pink you got on normal, non-Hell-bound tongues—easily a thousand of them, jostling, questing, blindly thrusting up out of that mouth. Pyrrha flinched. They were writhing together, wild and excited—the current swirled in an agitated pandemonium—there was a massive sickening jolt, and the Mithraeum started to slide again, forward … tilting … sliding.
“We’re in the current now,” said Pyrrha calmly. “We’ll be pulled in, if the mouth doesn’t close.”
I said, “Does this not worry you? Shouldn’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, getting the fuck out?”
“I have been trapped in the back of a brain for ten thousand years, and my necromancer is dead,” said the other cavalier. “Emotions are difficult right now. I do have a loaded revolver.”
“So what—we each swallow a bullet?”
“It’s an option,” said Pyrrha. And: “Joke.” And: “Mostly.”
In the centre of that whirlpool, the tongues had breached—the two wrestling necromancers now faced each other and a panicked, delighted nest of wet pink tentacles. Spires of blood rose from the water as those grotesque, infernal muscles dissolved wholesale—sheared away—destroyed. But the Emperor was thrashing—one had wound around his leg—one of his hands was wrapped around Augustine’s wrist, and one of Augustine’s around his, as though in a parody of saving each other. Another tongue snaked upward toward Ianthe, and she sent a thin whiplike flicker of blood to cut through that water.
Augustine was gesturing. From this far away, it looked to me as though he were screaming, hopelessly, soundlessly—beyond speech—into the water; maybe Ianthe could understand it. A tongue jerked him downward. He kicked it away, but as they shrivelled more joined their place. As he struggled, he somehow pushed the Emperor into a waiting, frenzied bed of the things, which wrapped around his legs—and the stoma sucked down.
The Mithraeum went with it. I didn’t see what happened before everything rolled—pieces of the station broke off; I could see metal bouncing along the Riverbed, then whole sections of station, then garbage—panels and mechanisms, pieces of hull—twisting down to join it. The huge, encompassing weight of the ship was slowly ploughing forward, toward the hungry stoma.
It caught on some rock face. I heard rushing water, and snapping metal. That was enough.
“Fuck this,” I said.
Pyrrha said, “Bullets—water—or waiting?”
I’d had this choice before. The different deaths. The death of waiting; the death of optimism. Harrow, the last time I chose to die, I died with your face the last thing I ever looked at. Let me tell you a secret: it was easy to die thinking I wouldn’t have to see you go. It was so easy to check out before you did.
