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Now here I was, alone, holding your body hostage, in a space station at the bottom of the River and getting sucked into some kind of heinous underworld that only opened for the undead souls of monstrous planets. I had the choice of shooting myself, being crushed by the water, or waiting to get squashed by tonnes of falling metal. Or I had the choice of living to get pulled down into Hell.
I wish I could say I was thinking about you. Harrowhark, there was so much I wanted to tell you. I wish that on the edge of an ending bigger than I understood, that I was thinking about you, that the last word on your lips would be me saying your name, taken down to the dark heart of some world beyond.
But my whole life and death had come crashing down around me. It turned out I was the child of God—hey, suck it, Marshal—but also nothing more than a stick of dynamite. I was nothing but a chess move in a thousand-year game.
I mean, yeah, I was thinking about you too; if I could’ve turned that off I would’ve turned it off years ago, but more importantly—I was absolutely fucking out of my mind Ninth House big pissed off.
As I dithered, Pyrrha sandblasted me with the calm, “Your mother would’ve picked the bullet.”
“Yes, well, jail for Mother,” I said.
And taking a leaf out of your book, I thrust my sword into the whimpering plex.
It gave. Both of us got knocked back flat on our asses by the gush of foaming, filthy, hideous water—I had to hit the deck—and that whole corridor deformed: it was like a popped balloon. The world went dark. I went under before I could take a breath. We bounced off about twenty surfaces, and as water closed up over our heads, the both of us made for the hole in the side of the ship. We squeezed through a narrowing, breaking tunnel and pushed through, and then we were out.
I couldn’t swim, but never fucking mind. I couldn’t even tell if Pyrrha had been right about the breathing. It was like I had Crux standing on my chest. Something hideous happened in your ears. We tumbled over and over and over in the water, and I thought for the first moment that it was really the end. I thought your eyeballs were about to burst in your head.
But they didn’t, and so I saw what happened as we rose from the wrecked body of that dying space station. High above the nest of tongues, Ianthe was poised as though flying—fluttering white flimsy in the heart of that vortex—as God and Augustine thrashed together. The tongues had retracted almost to the rim of the mouth, and God was not winning. Those demoniacal tongues had him almost entirely in their grip as Augustine pinned him down. The tongues seemed more interested in the Emperor than in Augustine, though they weren’t uninterested in Augustine. God’s desperation, even in your darkening eyeballs, was clear.
If Augustine wanted to free himself and get clear, he’d need to stop fighting. Or he could keep fighting, make sure the stoma took the Emperor, and be taken himself in the process. Above them both the third option floated like a panicking butterfly. Ianthe could make the difference. If Augustine gave God a last good shove down into Hell, and then Ianthe pulled him free of the tongues, they could probably both escape.
I watched, dimly, as Ianthe lifted her hands. The current parted—the water flumed around her in thick, opaque curls, red with blood—the tongues lashed out all at once.
I watched Ianthe dart down, rip the tongues from the Emperor of the Nine Houses, and wrestle him clear. The tongues entwined in a bower to bear Augustine silently down to that ravenous mouth, to the Hell where only demons went.
Which was Tridentarius all over. She got one choice, and not only did she blow it, but she blew it in such a huge fucking spectacular way that you would’ve been impressed had you not hated her for it. Ianthe, throwing in her lot with the guy who had lied to everyone about everything. Ianthe, backstabbing her own cavalier all over again. Ianthe, with the world in the balance, reaching her hand out and pressing down on the weight marked BAD. She surged out of sight, covered and hidden by a blast of water. The tongues retracted and the teeth folded up, to close that chewing great void.
Then the pressure closed its hands around your wrists, and your chest pounded inward.
* * *
Harrowhark, did you know that if you die by drowning, apparently your whole life flashes in front of your eyes? I didn’t know, as I died and took you along with me—having kept you alive for what, a whole two hours?—whether it was going to show me both. Like, at the end of everything, if it was going to be you and me, layered over each other as we always were. A final blurring of the edges between us, like water spilt over ink outlines. Melted steel. Mingled blood. Harrowhark-and-Gideon, Gideon-and-Harrowhark at last.
But as everything went black and I died the second time round, I didn’t see you. I didn’t even see me. The final thing I saw was a great sunshiny light: a blurred figure, hazing in and out around the edges. At first it looked to me like a woman—a grey-faced, dead-eyed woman, with a face so beautiful it almost went out the other side and became repellent; a woman with my eyes, dimmed dark yellow in death, whose hair fell in wet leaden hanks. I realised with exhausted indignation that, at the end of everything—after all I had been through—after the last word, the last strike, the last drop of blood in the water—your bullshit dead girlfriend had come to claim you.
And she said in the wrong voice twice removed: “Chest compressions. I know her sternum’s shattered; ignore it. We need that heart pumping. On my mark.”
Hands pressed. We died.
53
HALF AN HOUR AGO
“YOU’RE SURE,” HARROWHARK SAID.
“Of course I’m not sure,” said Dulcie Septimus. “But I’m a necromancer of the Seventh House—or I was, when I was alive. Abigail couldn’t have felt what I felt, when we both looked outside. I’m not an expert with revenant spirits, but I know a little something about puppeting. And your body’s not being puppeted, Harrow—something is moving it around, and not a fragment. It’s not the ghost either, because it didn’t feel anything like the Sleeper.”
Those blue eyes watched her very carefully as she stared, unseeing, at the facility walls: at them buckling beneath the enormous pressure from above, the whole castle doing a neat controlled demolition on itself. Folding up and changing, as though caught in the grip of a giant fist.
The rips at the side—the huge rents of wall and partition—had begun to alter in a way she had seen before. They no longer looked out into darkness; they looked out into the same white, hard absence of place and time that she had seen within another bubble. A tintless, abyssal wound; her mind’s contraction; her limits within the River.
“It may mean nothing,” said Dulcie.
Harrowhark heard herself asking distantly, “Why did you tell me?”
That rueful smile again, like the shadow of old joy.
“Because I wanted you to know all the truth,” said the dead daughter of the Seventh. “The whole, unpackaged, slipshod truth. Truth unvarnished and truth unclean. Pal and I were always zealots, in that line. I got told so many lies over my life, Harrowhark, and I didn’t want to go back into the River having myself committed the murder of the white lie. Please understand, I’m being selfish. But I wanted you to know.”
When she looked into Harrow’s face again, and how it had changed, she said simply: “I’m sorry.”
“There’s a difference between keeping a shred of dance card,” said Harrow Nonagesimus, “and saving the last dance.”
Another corridor clenched in on itself. SANITISER’S entrance deformed, and the ceiling suddenly sloped downward at an arresting angle, sending things shrieking overhead. The roof opened like a cloudburst; a huge flank of tile fell down over their heads. Harrowhark backed up against the coffin, and the wasted, hot-eyed wraith before her blew her a dry-mouthed kiss and disappeared under a cloud of rubble, smashing metal, and a soft shimmer of blue.
Harrow’s heart was beating as though it never had before. She thought it could not beat in truth; she was her own dream, and her heart’s whirring simply another fantasy of the subconscious. But nevertheless, it hammered, hard.
She said aloud, “No. I’m getting out of here.”
She stood before the coffin of the Sleeper, and gathered those white, soft, solid rips in her hands, and she popped the bubble, and the River came rushing in.
It came down around her in shreds, as light and insubstantial as drifts of spiderweb. The water sprayed through white holes, rushing in with a pounding roar: that brackish, bloodied water that only existed within the River. She was buoyed up by a spray of ice water and filth—but she wasn’t; she seemed to be walking down her long black corridor again—
