Long Live the Queen (Book 5 of The Powder Trail)

Chapter Four: Here Comes a Candle

When he sank beneath the water again, he didn't know where he was swimming to. Without the axe, he had no light, and there had been too much thrashing and waterweed for him to form any coherent picture of where the lady's bower had been.

His guess was in the centre of the lake, the way the Minotaur had lived at the centre of the labyrinth, but he was really counting on her finding him, rather than the other way around.

He wasn't disappointed. She wanted to talk, just like Darwin had said. She wanted converts. And she'd had god-knew how many years down here alone, practising her arguments.

She wasn't coy this time. She didn't snake her tentacle round his ankle but hooked it round his neck, jerking him backwards and causing him to lose half the breath he'd come in with.

In her bower, lined with those dark red plants, she held him up by his neck and glared at him. Jack was still unable to decide whether he was in air or water. His feet dangled, but in a slow, drifting kind of way.

Dimly, he thought: how odd. Our roles have been reversed. Lily Hamilton is watching me dangle by the neck.

Not that he had ever watched her – he'd come to Oxford too late for that – but sometimes, when he'd been lying on her floorboards, he had sensed a kind of swaying presence above him. He realized now, with a sinking feeling, that she'd been preying on his imagination for a long time.

"I know what you seek," she said, a little less serene than before. "You might have had it if you hadn't come bearing this infernal light-stick." She waved the axe in one tentacle, but Jack tried hard not to look at it.

"Lily, can we talk?"

"And who is this Lily you keep referring to?" she asked, uncoiling her tentacle from his throat.

She didn't need him to answer, of course. Jack braced himself for the sequence of flashing, dissolving images as she riffled through his head to find the answer for herself.

There wasn't much to find. Just a tintype with an improbable blush, and the shockwaves of her death in Sam and Manda's lives. Still, it seemed to be enough. She let out a long, slow breath. He could see it, the way you could see streams of different densities in a mass of water.

"Yes," she said slowly. "I know her. I heard her sorrows."

"You didn't cause them?"

"Of course not. I'm the effect, not the cause. Their thoughts spun me into life."

"In the long ago?" Jack prompted.

"Longer ago than you could possibly comprehend. I've been here as long as there have been minds with the leisure to despair – not a force of nature, but a force of consciousness. I'm the inevitable consequence of having big brains. Your endless capacity for problem-solving comes at the price of knowing that you're alone, that you're going to die. That it's all for nought."

"But if it's all for nought," said Jack, "then so is despairing."

The lady licked her lips, as if tantalized. "You disapprove of this Lily? Of what she did?"

"She hurt my friends," said Jack, carefully refraining from answering the question.

"Yes," she said, in her slow, thoughtful, watery way. "Like you did. You identify with her."

Jack didn't bother to deny it. She would only go riffling through his head until she found confirmation of her theory.

"But tell me," she said, "was her life not her own? Who had the right to decide when it ended, if not her?"