“Don’t hold your breath,” I said, but that was silly. He couldn’t draw it, hold it, or let it out. He’d been dead even before the rats got to him. “Get out, traitor.”
He did, but Radar continued to growl. I followed her gaze and saw Petra in the shadows, grinning at me with her filed teeth.
Dora often slept in the antechamber, and she came running on her bowed legs when she heard my scream. She didn’t raise the gaslights, but held one of those torpedo-shaped lanterns. She asked if I was all right and if my heart was beating regular, because all the nurses had been told to watch out for any changes in its rhythm. I said I was, but she took my pulse anyway, and checked the latest poultice.
“Was it ghosties, maybe?”
I pointed to the corner.
Dora padded over there in her splendid canvas shoes and raised the lantern. No one was there, but I really didn’t need her to show me that, because Radar had gone back to sleep. Dora bent and kissed my cheek as well as her bent mouth would allow. “A’ right, a’ right, everything a’ right. Sleep now, Charlie. Sleep and heal.”
2
I also had visits from the living. Cammit and Quilly; then Stooks, swaggering in as if he owned the place. His slashed cheek had been sewn up in a dozen looping black stitches that made me think of a Frankenstein movie I’d watched on TCM with my dad.
“Gointer leave one hell of a scar,” he said, rubbing at the stitches. “I’ll never be pretty again.”
“Stooks, you were never pretty.”
Claudia came often, and then one day—around the time I thought that yes, I’d probably live—Doc Freed came with her. One of the nurses was pushing him in a wheelchair that must have belonged to some king or other, because the wheel-spokes looked like solid gold. My old nemesis Christopher Polley would have shit himself with envy.
Freed’s mangled and infected leg had been amputated, and he was clearly in great pain, but he had the look of a man who would live. I was delighted to see him. Claudia gently scraped away my current poultice and washed the wound. Then they bent over it with their heads almost touching.
“Healing,” Freed pronounced. “Wouldn’t you say?”
“YES!” Claudia shouted. She could really hear again—a little, anyway—but I thought she might end up speaking in that toneless blare for the rest of her life. “PINK FLESH! NO SMELL EXCEPT FROM THE WIDOW’S MOSS IN THE POULTICE!”
“Maybe the infection’s still there,” I said. “Maybe it’s gone deep.”
Claudia and Freed exchanged an astonished glance. The doc was in too much pain to laugh, so Claudia did it for him. “WHAT GAVE YOU A STUPID IDEA LIKE THAT?”
“No, huh?”
“Disease may hide, Prince Charlie,” Doc Freed said, “but infection is a show-off. It stinks and pustulates.” He turned to Claudia. “How much of the surrounding flesh did you have to take?”
“UP TO THE ELBOW AND ALMOST DOWN TO THE WRIST! A HATEFUL FUCKING GORE SHE GAVE HIM, AND IT WILL LEAVE A HOLLOW WHERE THE MUSCLE WON’T EVER COME BACK. YOUR DAYS OF PLAYING GAMES ARE PROBABLY OVER, SHARLIE.”
“But you’ll be able to pick your nose with both hands,” Freed said, which made me laugh. It felt good to laugh. I’d had plenty of nightmares since coming back from the Dark Well, but laughter had been in short supply.
“You should lie down and let someone give you some of that pain stuff they have,” I told the doc. “Little leaves you chew up. You look worse than I do.”
“I’m mending,” he said. “And Charlie… we owe you our lives.”
There was truth in that, but not the whole truth. They also owed the Snab, for instance. It had gone to wherever Snabs go, although it might turn up in time （it had a way of doing that）。 Percival, however, was a different matter. He didn’t come to see me on his own, so I asked that he be brought. He came into the room of the billowing curtains shyly, dressed in cooks’ whites and crushing a beret-type of hat to his chest. I suppose it was an Empisarian chef’s toque.
His bow was deep, his hand salute trembly. He was afraid to look at me until I offered him a chair and a glass of cold tea to drink. I thanked him for all he’d done and told him how happy I was to see him. That loosened his tongue, first a little and then a lot. He gave me news of Lilimar no one else had bothered to pass on. I think because he saw it from a workingman’s point of view.
The streets were being cleaned, the rubbish and rubble were being picked up. Hundreds of people who had come to the city to help overthrow Elden’s rotten reign had left for their towns and farms, but hundreds more had replaced them, come to do their duty for Queen Leah before returning to their homes in places like Seafront and Deesk. To me it sounded like the WPA projects I’d read about in school. Windows were being washed, gardens were being replanted, and someone wise in the ways of plumbing had gotten the fountains started, one by one. The dead, no longer restless, had been reburied. Some of the shops had been re-opened. More would follow. Percival’s voice was still slurred and garbled, sometimes hard to understand, but I’ll spare you that.