“Friendship bracelets,” she fairly shouted. “They’re wearing friendship bracelets.”
Ianthe grasped Kiriona’s wrist, and Kiriona pulled free of the sticky yellow muck as easily and as neatly as if it were dust. They stood there, hands clasping each other’s wrists, in their beautiful polished boots and their jewelled white swords—a matched pair of princes, one dead and one barely looking better. They tapped each other on the knuckles, did something complicated with their thumbs, and stood angled toward each other, easy and familiar, as though they had stood beside each other a million times.
Paul said quietly—
“Harrowhark’s body is nearly dead. Are you going to get us inside the Tomb, or not?”
Long straps of that sticky, taffy-textured fat snapped out and wrapped around Nona’s ankles. She was jerked out of Pyrrha’s arms, rolled up in a thick wad of it, and rolled over and over, nauseated and panicked, until she came to a stop right beside that polished boot. It shone so highly that Nona could see her face in it, and the distorted reflection looked terrible: a blue-lipped, haggard version of herself she had never known—the face of the other girl, maybe, not hers: a face distorted with fear. The fat dissolved, leaving nothing but a weird moist feeling on the insides of her wrists. Ianthe was saying— “I’m simply doing exactly what I think Harry would want me to do … Harry adores this ghastly old rock and its ghastly old inhabitant. Harry would be the first to say, ‘No. I’m not worth it. Leave it shut.’ Don’t you think, Ninth?”
“I try not to,” said Kiriona modestly.
Both Ianthe and Kiriona briefly fell about laughing. They slapped each other’s shoulders in what seemed to be genuine mirth. Nona rolled an eye desperately toward Pyrrha, and Paul, and the two ancients: Pyrrha and Paul were still as statues.
“Good to see you,” said Ianthe, quite kindly, to Kiriona.
“Yeah—same,” said Kiriona, with infectious good cheer. “Anyway—let’s open the Tomb and get out of here.”
For a moment Ianthe kept laughing, and then she said— “Wait. What?”
“That Tomb’s opening, now,” said Kiriona.
“You can’t possibly be— Ninth!”
For Kiriona had taken a few steps backward, away from Nona, in no danger of tripping over her, bathed in the yellow glow of the electric light reflecting off the fat. She drew her sword with an oily rattle, and Ianthe drew hers. Nona stared, transfixed, at the edges of their swords.
Ianthe said, “You little three-way double-crosser.”
“Haven’t double-crossed anybody, let alone three times,” said Kiriona.
“You’ve double-crossed God, for one—”
Kiriona said, “What? John sent me, you overgilded doorknob.”
Pyrrha said, “Like hell he did.”
“My sentiments exactly expressed,” said Ianthe.
“No. He did,” said the corpse prince. “I didn’t sneak onto that ship for my health. Don’t you see? This is my chance. We go in there, we open up the Tomb, I take down whatever’s inside—Alecto, Annabel, I don’t care, whatever her name is—boom, we’re done. Dad won’t be immortal anymore, but he says he doesn’t care about that, and I believe him, Tridentarius … I’ll be his cavalier. I’m the First. Hell, I’m his child and heir. Isn’t this the neatest way? Are you going to help me, or not?”
Ianthe had withdrawn. Even from below, Nona could see the horror and disgust writ large on her face: it had a lot to do with the chin.
“Oh my God,” she said softly. “You can’t believe that. You’re very stupid when you want to be, Gonad … but you can’t believe that.”
“You know he’s never recovered.”
“Yes,” said Ianthe. “Oh, I know.”
“If we weren’t around, I don’t know what he’d do.”
“I do,” said Ianthe. “Exactly the same thing he’s doing right now, without trying to hide it. Drowning his sorrows in whatever or whoever comes to hand … Do you know who I saw creeping out of his bedroom the other day? Grand Admiral Sarpedon, I shit you not.”
“Oh, God, yuck,” said Kiriona, looking highly diverted. “That’s sick—”
“—following a grand cavalcade of Cohort officials, ensigns, et cetera—”
“Yeah, but Sarpedon is old!”
“That’s your problem? Kiriona, you fat-headed wreck, John’s older than our recorded time,” said Ianthe.