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She dies on the operating table.
The assassin had not been neat. It was clearly a rush job. His sword had just missed the abdominal aorta. Had not been anywhere near the kidneys. Either of those, and the Empress would have bled out in seconds. Had he stabbed another inch or so upward, he would have hit her lungs, and she would have choked on her own blood in a matter of minutes. Any of these cases, and she would have probably died in Covo’s arms. It would have been quick, final, poetic; this is all a good deal messier.
Later there will be time for Sokolov to muse on the assassin’s identity, his mental state, quiz Corvo on the look in his eyes when he’d grabbed Emily and spirited her away. Now there is no time at all. Now there is only an empty room in the pumphouse with a battered old metal table that one of the guards had dragged up, the flesh of Jessamine’s belly that isn’t torn open darkening bruise-purple-black under Sokolov’s hands. There is blood spattering up to his elbows. Some of it is hers; some of it is hers and formerly Corvo’s.
(“That’s enough,” he’d snapped, yanking the syringe out of the man’s hand. “No. No. You’re white as a fish. You’re done. You can’t give her every drop in your veins. Go.”
The Lord Protector had merely stared at him. Sokolov could see straight through the empty dark depths of his eyes, see the way he needed to pick the words out of the air and reorder them for them to make sense. His voice creaked like a rusted hinge. “My job –“
“You failed. Go.”
He’d needed to shout at him about Emily to make the man’s face crumple and make him vanish out the door. He’d needed to shout that if the Empress died they’d need an Empress. That Emily needed her Lord Protector, out there in the city, with something more in his veins than guilt.)
Sokolov is alone. They will be sending others for blood transfusions, maids with soap-scrubbed hands to be his assistants, but for now it is just him and the Empress and his hands keeping pressure on a wound that is too great for pressure to be kept. The walls of the pumphouse are metal, and sound echoes. The thrum and crackle of the dynamos that power the great new artificial moat is deafening. He can’t hear her breathing. It’s shallow and quick and her lips are blue and he can’t hear it because -
She’s not.
There is no heartbeat under his fingertips.
Sokolov spits out a long stream of swineherd’s curses in Tyvian and removes his hands from her abdomen. Blood pulses out, but that is no longer important. Chest compressions, rapid, ribs cracking – nothing. The Empress is dead under his hands and her lips are as blue as the lips of the drowned and her daughter is lost in her assassin’s grasp somewhere in the city, her Lord Protector is empty of blood and of purpose, and her lips are blue as all the things he knows best –
Sokolov is alone, and this is a blessing.
The Academy would never approve of something like this; but then, he has never been one to care about what is accepted, or moral, or understood. He has no time to worry about theory. He has no time to worry about voltage. Sokolov is walking the knife-edge of a world with no Empress and he is an intelligent man, he can only imagine the madness this will cause; and his hands are steady and quick as he cracks open the control panel on the water pumps.
Jessamine has been clinically dead for one minute, two minutes by the time he rips the wiring from the wall. He spools a length of copper out, jabs the ragged end of it into the flesh above her heart. Flips the switch.
The room explodes in light.
The whale-oil tanks flare blue, one after another, and the room is bathed in a blaze of white-blue like light at the bottom of the sea. Unearthly and brilliant and blinding. The Empress arcs like a bow on the table – and breathes. Improbably, wonderfully. It is a great gasping breath that sounds more like wind than anything human, but she breathes.
He cuts the power. Races back to her. She continues to breath in unsteady, shallow spurts; her heart is arrythmic, weak and far too fast, but it is beating. He has pulled her out of death. The assassin was clumsy, rushed, missed her spine and her kindeys and her lungs; Sokolov needs just needs to keep enough blood in her, sew up what needs to be sewn up, pray she does not die from sepsis or the hundred other things he can think of.
She breathes. It sounds of wind. The dynamos thrum and thunder and the scent of blood is overpowering, salt and wet, made sharper by the electricity sent crackling through her body. There is a Lichtenberg tree spidering across her flesh from the point on her breast where he placed the wire, angry red scars on fish-white skin following the pattern of her nerves. In the still-bright whale-oil light, it seems to crackle. Seems to move.
Stress. Exhaustion. Sokolov shakes it off. He reaches down to begin stitching her up; and the blood that gushes out over his hands is cold.
Sokolov goes still.
It is seawater seeping from her wound, not blood.
And the slickness under his fingers is deep green instead of vibrant red. Coiled lengths of kelp. Seawater pulsing steadily from her, now, flecked with silver fish scales, and her breathing rattles her frame. Her broken ribs rise and fall. She is alive, and the room is bathed in shimmering light from the whale-oil tanks on the walls, and when the Empress opens her eyes they glow with that same shade of unearthly blue.
It is the color of the electricity that is scarred across her skin. It is the color that spills from whales when they die. It is the color, over and over, that he has used to paint the mad expanses of the Void. It shines blue from her eyes like fire.
“You wanted her alive,” Jessamine says, in her voice and not her voice. Water slops between the words. “For one brilliant, desperate moment, you wanted her alive more than you ever wanted fame or knowledge or me.” When she smiles, a tiny white crab scuttles between her teeth. “And isn’t that lovely?”