It sounded as though she was going to burst into tears again. Gideon said, “That’s—a significant amount?”
“You need spares when you’re in the Fourth House,” said Jeannemary, sniffling. “I’ve got five sisters. Do you have a big family?”
“The Ninth doesn’t do big families. I think I’m an orphan.”
“Well, that’s pretty Fourth House too,” said the cav. “My mum jumped on a grenade during the Pioneer expedition, even though she wasn’t supposed to be out on post-colony planets beyond the rim. Isaac’s dad went out on a state visit to a hold planet and got blown up by insurgents.”
There was no more after that, not even tears. After a few minutes Gideon was not surprised to see that the poor bloodied girl had cried herself unconscious. She did not wake her. There would be time enough to wake her, and even a short rest would probably do her good. It sucked to be a teen, and it sucked more to be a teen whose best friend had just died in a horrible way, even if you were used to mothers jumping on grenades and fathers getting exploded. At least in the Ninth House, the way you usually went was pneumonia exacerbated by senility.
Gideon rested her head on the fat back of the armchair. She would not have said it was at all possible, but—watching the rise and fall of Jeannemary’s breath, a safe up-and-down rhythm, the drying tearstains on the sleeping teen’s cheeks—she promptly fell asleep.
* * *
It couldn’t have been long. Fifteen minutes at the very most. She startled awake with the sheer unconscious panic of someone realising they couldn’t afford to slip into deep REM, a haptic jerk flicking her awake. Her sword rattled off her knees and jangled to the floor. The only sound that could have woken her was a persistent drip she’d thought was coming from the tap.
Gideon did not understand what she was looking at when she awoke, and when she cleared her eyes and looked properly, she still didn’t understand.
Jeannemary was still lying prone in the old bed, arms and legs now flung wide, as if she had kicked off the blankets and sheets in a bad dream: this would have been fine, except for the huge shafts of bone spearing each shoulder to the mattress. Two more through the thighs. One straight through the very centre of her ribs. These spears of bone met Jeannemary’s body with haloes of red, splotching through her clothes, seeping into the bedspread.
“No,” said Gideon meditatively, “no, no, no, no, no.”
Jeannemary’s eyes were very slightly open. There was blood spattered in her curls, and there was blood spattered over the headboard. Gideon’s gaze followed the splatter upward. Written on the wall, in silky wet red, was:
SWEET DREAMS
ACT FOUR
26
SIDE BY SIDE, THE Fourth teens were laid to an uneasy sleep in the morgue, right next to the adults who had failed so terminally to look after them. Somebody had (how? It was a mystery) taken the cooling body from Gideon’s arms (who had plucked those spears from those terrible holes and carried Jeannemary back?) and a lot of people had spoken a lot of words to her, none of which had pierced her short-term memory. Teacher was there, in her mind’s eye, praying over the broken sieve of Isaac Tettares; and Harrowhark was in there somewhere too, and Palamedes, tweezering a big fragment of something out of the cooling corpse of Jeannemary the Fourth. These images were as jumbled-up and lacking in context as a dream.
She remembered one thing: Harrowhark saying you dullard—you imbecile—you fool, all the old contempt of the Ninth House nursery back and fresh as though she were there again. Harrow the architect, sweeping down the halls of Drearburh. Harrow the nemesis, flanked by Crux. It wasn’t clear what in particular Harrow was haranguing her for, but whatever the reason, she deserved it. Gideon had tuned out all the rest of the necromancer’s tirade, her head in her hands. And then Harrowhark had balled up her fists—breathed hard once through her nose—and gone away.
The only thing that had made sense was that she had ended up in the whitewashed room where they were keeping Dulcinea, sitting alone in an armchair, and there she had gritted tears out of her eyes for an hour. Someone had washed out all her cuts with reeking vermillion tarry stuff, and it smelled bad and hurt like hell whenever an errant drip of salt water touched the wounds. This made her feel sorry for herself, and feeling sorry for herself made her eyes even wetter.
Dulcinea Septimus was a good person to do this in front of. She did not say “You’ll be fine,” as Dulcinea lacked the lung capacity to spend on platitudes; she just sat propped up on about fifteen pillows and kept her thin hot hand on Gideon’s palm. She waited until Gideon had stopped her hard blinking, and then she said—
“There was nothing you could have done.”
“Bullshit there wasn’t anything I could have done,” said Gideon, “I’ve thought of everything I should’ve done. There’s about fifty things I could’ve done and didn’t.”
Dulcinea gave her a crooked smile. She looked terrible. It was a few hours before morning, and the early light was grey on her biscuit-coloured curls and blanched skin. The fine green veins at her throat and wrists seemed terribly prominent, like most of her epidermis had sloughed off already. When she breathed, it sounded like custard sloshing around an air conditioner. There was high colour in her cheeks, but it had the hectic brilliance of hot slag.
“Oh, could’ve … should’ve,” she said. “You can could have and should have yourself back into last week … back into the womb. I could have kept Pro by my side, or I should have gone with him. I can go back and make things happen perfectly if I just think about what I should have or could have done. But I didn’t … you didn’t … that’s the way it is.”
“I can’t bear it,” said Gideon honestly. “It’s just such crap.”
“Life is a tragedy,” said Dulcinea. “Left behind by those who pass away, not able to change anything at all. It’s the total lack of control … Once somebody dies, their spirit’s free forever, even if we snatch at it or try to stopper it or use the energy it creates. Oh, I know sometimes they come back … or we can call them, in the manner of the Fifth … but even that exception to the rule shows their mastery of us. They only come when we beg. Once someone dies, we can’t grasp at them anymore, thank God!—except for one person, and he’s very far from here, I think. Gideon, don’t be sorry for the dead. I think death must be an absolute triumph.”
Gideon could not get behind this. Jeannemary had died like a dog while Gideon napped, and Isaac had been made into a big teenage colander; she wanted to be sorry for them forever. But before she could say anything to this effect, a great cough that filled up about two and a half handkerchiefs tore at Dulcinea. The contents of these handkerchiefs made Gideon envy the dead, let alone Dulcinea.
“We’ll find your cav,” she said, trying to sound steady and failing so completely she set a record.
“I just want to know what happened,” said Dulcinea drearily. “That’s always the worst of it … not knowing what happened.”
Gideon didn’t know whether she could get behind this either. She would’ve been devoutly grateful to live not knowing exactly the things that had happened, in vivid red-and-purple wobbling intensity. Then again, her mind kept flaying itself over Magnus and Abigail, down there in the dark, alone—over the when, and the how; over whether Magnus had watched his wife be murdered like Jeannemary had watched Isaac. She thought: It is stupid for a cavalier to watch their necromancer die.