The only time anyone spoke during the journey was when Pyrrha suddenly said—
“Fucking dark in here.”
“Yes,” said Paul, as if this was something intriguing that Pyrrha had been clever to notice.
“Ninth House ambiance, you reckon?”
“No.”
“Someone should’ve told Anastasia that a string of fairy lights wouldn’t have gone amiss. They could shape ’em like little skulls, stay on-brand. Then again, she always said the skull was the least interesting bone…”
As they walked farther, Nona felt the twinge getting stronger, and she felt something else: something at once familiar and unpleasant, squirming far off in the darkness. She strained her thoughts toward it. Many things—small things—things she’d seen before, once, but didn’t feel up to seeing again. Grey shapes swam in front of her eyes in the darkness—she thought she saw the side of Pyrrha’s face—she did see the side of Pyrrha’s face, because it was getting lighter. They were walking toward a light: a cold white glow somewhere ahead of them, down a tunnel, getting closer and closer.
They arrived in a room. It was a big circular room with dark stone walls: there were arched niches in the walls, and each one held a seated skeleton in a dark shapeless robe. Nona could see all of this because there was a powerful electric lantern, rather like one of the truck’s headlights, placed on the floor throwing long spiked shadows out in all directions. The corpse prince, Kiriona Gaia, was standing in the middle of the room with her drawn sword turned wet and red partway up the blade. There were crumpled dead bodies discarded around her—six or seven that Nona could see, all bundled up in black fabric like the skeletons were wearing. At the back of the room was a rectangular cage, taller than a man and made of wrought iron like the park fences. Slumped against the outside of this cage was a large person in strange, battered metal armour, tangled in his own black robes. He was quite simply the oldest person Nona had ever seen, and Nona had always collected old people in much the same way as she collected dogs: the old people at the dairy and the old men at the fishmonger’s and the old women who worked at the car repair place. He was older than any of them. His whole face looked like it was trying to escape its skeleton. Dark red blood had spread out around him in a pool.
His antique head rolled sideways to look past Kiriona at Pyrrha—at Nona—and he said, in a voice that creaked with agonised, reverential awe—
“My lady … my lady, you have come home to us … at last.”
Paul dropped to the ancient man’s side and started looking him over—pulling away the tangled black cloth from the body, revealing a series of livid gashes down the neck, a puncture mark through the chest. The old man raised a hoary-looking fist and, without saying a word, boxed Paul soundly around the ears.
“Leave me,” he wheezed sharply. “Interloper. Stranger. Fool … Do nothing for me. Touch me not.”
“Leave him,” said the corpse prince.
Paul said, “No. I can save him easily. It’s only shock and blood loss.”
Kiriona wiped her sword clean on one of the black-shrouded bodies. Then she kicked it over with her beautiful polished boot. “Look at that,” she said, “and trust me on this one.”
Beneath the light of the powerful lamp, the dead person’s face was startling. The eyelids hung slack, and there were rows of dark purple pinpricks above and below them—like something fine and sharp had come through. Hanging out of the eyelids—Nona at first did not know what she was looking at—was a shrivelled object, wet and red, like a slug. Like a muscle. The tongue hanging out of the mouth was a lot longer than a normal tongue—and pointed, triangular, deep blue in death. For some reason, the sight started a shudder at Nona’s feet that carried on all the way up to the top of her head. The awful pain tightened in her chest, and nearly shuddered her out of her body. The back of her neck itched so badly it felt as though it were bleeding.
Pyrrha said a word so terrible under her breath that it startled Nona back into the middle ground of her thoughts. She rebuked, “Pyrrha,” and then— “No, I’m sorry, you’re allowed to say whatever you like at this point.”
Paul was crouched, staring thoughtfully at the dead, empty-eyed face in a way that would have been strange for either Palamedes or Camilla. Nona thought Camilla would have looked with eyes like stone and given away nothing, and that Palamedes would have reached out to touch. Paul did not reach out to touch, and Paul looked as though it were interesting.