“Dead,” he said plainly. “I had to do it, Judith. He was crazy. God alone knows what he might have said or done. . ..” He put his arm towards her, “Will you help me? He damn near broke my nose.”
“I’ll take him,” Dowd said possessively. He stepped past her, fetching a handkerchief from his pocket to put to Oscar’s nose. It was waved away.
“I’ll survive,” Oscar said. “Let’s just get home.” They were out of the chapel now, and Oscar was eyeing the fire. “The voiders,” Dowd explained. Oscar threw a glance at Judith, “He made you pyre-watch with him?” he said. “I’m so sorry.” He looked back at Dowd, pained. ‘That’s no way to treat a lady,” he said. “We’re going to have to do better in future.” “What do you mean?”
“She’s coming to live with us. Aren’t you, Judith?” She hesitated a shamelessly short time; then she said, “Yes, I am.”
Satisfied, he went over to look at the pyre.
“Come back tomorrow,” she heard him tell Dowd. “Scatter the ashes and bury the bones. I’ve got a little prayer book Peccable gave me. We’ll find something appropriate in there.”
While he spoke she stared into the murk of the chapel, trying to imagine the journey that had been taken from here, and the city at the other end from which that tantalizing wind had blown. She would be there one day. She’d lost a husband in pursuit of passage, but from her present perspective that seemed like a negligible loss. There was a new order of feeling in her, founded at the sight of Oscar Godolphin. She didn’t yet know what he would come to mean to her, but perhaps she could persuade him to take her away with him, someday soon.
Eager as she was to create in her mind’s eye the mysteries that lay beyond the veil of the Fifth, Jude’s imagination, for all its fever, could never have conjured the reality of that journey. Inspired by a few clues from Dowd, she had imagined the In Ovo as a kind of wasteland, where voiders hung like drowned men in deep-sea trenches, and creatures the sun would never see crawled towards her, their paths lit by their own sickly luminescence. But the inhabitants of the In Ovo beggared the bizarreness of any ocean floor. They had forms and appetites that no book had ever set down. They had rages and frustrations that were centuries old.
And the scenes she’d imagined awaiting her on the other side of that prison were also very different from those she’d created. If she’d traveled on the Yzordderrexian Express she’d would not have been delivered into the middle of a summer city but into a dampish cellar, lined with the merchant Peccable’s forbidden cache of charms and petrifi-cations. In order to reach the open air, she would have had to climb the stairs and pass through the house itself. Once she’d reached the street, she’d have found some of her expectations satisfied at least. The air was warm and spicy there, and the sky was bright. But it was not a sun that blazed overhead, it was a comet, trailing its glory across the Second Dominion. And if she stared at it a moment, then looked down at the street, she’d have found its reflection glittering in a pool of blood. Here was the spot where the brawl between Oscar and Charlie had ended, and where the defeated brother had been left.
He had not remained there for very long. News of a man dressed in foreign garb and dumped in the gutter had soon spread, and before the last of his blood had drained from his body three individuals never before seen in this Kespa-rate had come to claim him. They were Dearthers, to judge by their tattoos, and had Jude been standing on Peccable’s step watching the scene, she would have been touched to see how reverently they treated their burden as they spirited it away. How they smiled down at that bruised and lolling face. How one of them wept. She might also have noticed—though in the flurry of the street this detail might have escaped her eye—that though the defeated man lay quite still in the cradle his bearers made of their limbs, his eyes closed, his arms trailing until they were folded across his chest, said chest was not entirely motionless.