The Emperor was struggling. I would’ve thought he could have just dropped out of the River—done what he did to Mercy, and blown Augustine to smithereens—but some kind of current was whirling them around like dolls. It seemed like it was all he could do to keep his position. Augustine had lashed them together, somehow. He was wrestling the Emperor down, inexorably, toward that mouth. Overhead, the station crunched; the plex in front of us was making a little high-pitched squealing sound.

Over and over Augustine and God rolled in the water—and then the tongues emerged.

A blast from the hole. The water boiled upward in huge, bloody-looking bubbles. Streamerlike lingual tentacles emerged—the unassuming pink you got on normal, non-Hell-bound tongues—easily a thousand of them, jostling, questing, blindly thrusting up out of that mouth. Pyrrha flinched. They were writhing together, wild and excited—the current swirled in an agitated pandemonium—there was a massive sickening jolt, and the Mithraeum started to slide again, forward … tilting … sliding.

“We’re in the current now,” said Pyrrha calmly. “We’ll be pulled in, if the mouth doesn’t close.”

I said, “Does this not worry you? Shouldn’t we do something? Shouldn’t we be, I don’t know, getting the fuck out?”

“I have been trapped in the back of a brain for ten thousand years, and my necromancer is dead,” said the other cavalier. “Emotions are difficult right now. I do have a loaded revolver.”

“So what—we each swallow a bullet?”

“It’s an option,” said Pyrrha. And: “Joke.” And: “Mostly.”

In the centre of that whirlpool, the tongues had breached—the two wrestling necromancers now faced each other and a panicked, delighted nest of wet pink tentacles. Spires of blood rose from the water as those grotesque, infernal muscles dissolved wholesale—sheared away—destroyed. But the Emperor was thrashing—one had wound around his leg—one of his hands was wrapped around Augustine’s wrist, and one of Augustine’s around his, as though in a parody of saving each other. Another tongue snaked upward toward Ianthe, and she sent a thin whiplike flicker of blood to cut through that water.

Augustine was gesturing. From this far away, it looked to me as though he were screaming, hopelessly, soundlessly—beyond speech—into the water; maybe Ianthe could understand it. A tongue jerked him downward. He kicked it away, but as they shrivelled more joined their place. As he struggled, he somehow pushed the Emperor into a waiting, frenzied bed of the things, which wrapped around his legs—and the stoma sucked down.

The Mithraeum went with it. I didn’t see what happened before everything rolled—pieces of the station broke off; I could see metal bouncing along the Riverbed, then whole sections of station, then garbage—panels and mechanisms, pieces of hull—twisting down to join it. The huge, encompassing weight of the ship was slowly ploughing forward, toward the hungry stoma.

It caught on some rock face. I heard rushing water, and snapping metal. That was enough.

“Fuck this,” I said.

Pyrrha said, “Bullets—water—or waiting?”