She made her way through the diminishing tide of rats, hopping and crying out when they ran over her feet… but not a single one bit her, or any of us. Leah followed. Jaya hung back, then she came, too.
I got Iota under the arms. Eris took one leg, Leah the other. We carried him, trying not to trip over the last few rats, including one with no back legs but still pulling itself gamely along after its fellows.
“Sorry,” Iota said. His voice was guttural, coming from a throat that was rapidly closing up. Foam flew. “Sorry, wanted to see it through…”
“Shut up and save your breath.”
We laid him on the long blue sofa. He began to cough, spewing more curds of foam into Leah’s face as she knelt to brush his hair back from his sweating forehead. Jaya grabbed a doily or some such thing from the unicorn table and wiped away some of the mess. Leah didn’t seem to notice. Her eyes were fixed on Iota’s. What I saw in hers was kindness and pity and mercy.
He tried to smile at her, then looked at me. “It was on the blade of his knife. An old… trick.”
I nodded, thinking of how carelessly I’d shoved that knife into the concho belt. If I’d even nicked myself, Eye wouldn’t be the only one foaming at the mouth.
He looked back at Leah. He raised his arm very slowly, as if it weighed a hundred pounds, and touched the heel of his palm to his forehead. “My… Queen. When the time comes… do your duty.” His hand dropped.
So Iota—whom I’d first seen clinging to the bars of his cell like a monkey—passed away. After all he’d been through, and big man though he was, it took but one tiny cut on the shin to do for him.
His eyes were open. Leah closed them, bent, and pressed the scar of her mouth to one stubbly cheek. It was the best she could do for a kiss. Then she got up and pointed to the door. We followed, stepping around the corpses of a few rats that had died on the way out. She stopped before going into the corridor, looked back, and put her hands to her throat.
Iota spoke one last time, as Falada had spoken, and the Snab.
“The Queen of Empis will do her duty. This I swear.”
CHAPTER THIRTY One More Stop. The Dungeon. Resolute. Impossible Stars. The Dark Well. Gogmagog. The Bite.
1
We followed a trail of dead and wounded rats to the hole in the wainscoting; Eris actually helped one three-legged bruiser get inside, then grimaced and wiped her hands on her shirt （which couldn’t have done much good, covered in dirt and blood as it was）。 We came to the door giving on the spiral stairs, which I guessed might be some sort of emergency exit for the royalty, in case of fire. I tapped Leah on the shoulder.
“One more stop before we go after Flight Killer,” I said. “On the level of Deep Maleen and the torture chamber. Will you do that?”
She made no protest, only gave a weary nod. There was still a curd of bloody foam on her cheek. I reached out to wipe it away and this time she didn’t shrink back.
“Thank you. There may be someone there who helped us—”
She turned away before I could finish. Outside the palace, Woody and Claudia and their followers—by now they might be swelled to the size of a real army—had probably entered the city. If there was a barracks where the remaining night soldiers slept, the grayfolk could be slaughtering them even now, and hooray for that, but in here time was fleeting and there was no magic sundial to turn it back.
We went down the staircase—down and down, around and around. None of us spoke. The death of Iota sat on us like a weight. Even Radar felt it. She couldn’t stay beside me, the barrel we were descending was too narrow for that, but she walked with her nose touching my calf, ears down and tail drooping. The air got chillier. Water oozed from the lichen growing on stone blocks that had been placed here hundreds of years before. No, I thought, longer than that. Thousands, maybe.
Then I started to smell something, very faintly. “High gods,” Eris said, and laughed. There was nothing cheerful about it. “The wheel turns and here we are, back where we came from.”
We had passed several more doors on our way down, some large, some smaller. Leah stopped at a small one, pointed, then went down several more steps to give me room. I tried the door. It opened. I had to bend almost double to go through. I found myself in another kitchen, this one little more than a closet compared to the one we’d passed on our way in. Here there was only one stove, no oven, and a long low grill, probably powered by gas but now out. On it was a row of sausages, burned black.
Jaya made a sound between a cough and a retch. I suppose she was thinking of all the meals we’d taken in our cells, especially the ones before “playtime” and the first round of the Fair One. I had read about PTSD, but reading about something and understanding it are very different things.