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—
Then Harrow was back drowning in salt water. Gideon’s arms were around her. They were in the pool of Canaan House, and she had just been ducked by her cavalier. She had held her breath instinctively, though she had been serene at the time; to drown, she thought, was softer death than she deserved, and back then to die in Gideon’s arms had seemed entirely correct. She could feel Gideon’s fingers digging into the small of her back, could feel her shirt billowing in the pool as they sank to the bottom in a tangle.
Harrow’s head broke the water. A thin skin of ice shivered apart as she emerged, panting for air, her skin burning with the cold. Her flailing sent ripples along those black, disturbed waters, but did not interrupt their gentle tidal lapping along the jagged shore. Above her head the rocky cathedral of the cave shone with a dismal heaven of luminescent worms, blinking softly on and off. They were all undead: revenant creatures and watchers, shifting restlessly forever on the rock of the Locked Tomb. Harrow was home.
Harrow floundered, not toward the shore, but to the island in the centre—to the black mausoleum of glass and ice, sitting silently and reflectively beneath that sea of dead worms. She hauled herself to shore and lay there, skin crawling, frozen half-solid, shivering and numb in that strange heat presaging hypothermic death. And yet Harrow felt no pain; she felt nothing, in fact, but a welcome sense of homecoming—the strange, tiny, pleased familiarity of finding an old book once beloved, or some other antique of childhood.
Eager now, she hauled her freezing meat to stand. She passed beneath those pillars as she had as a child, followed the pathway she still traced in dreams. She was exhausted more than cold; her head filled with the soft, heavy tiredness of too much waking and not enough sleep, of a long day on the job without rest or break. She walked into the mausoleum, and she approached the Tomb itself.
The chains in their great holes were snapped and broken. The ice crawled up