We Shall Sing a Song into the Deep

by Andrew Kelly Stewart

Two of the missile tube access ports have blown at the far end of the compartment. Frothing, boiling water floods, washing away the wooden dais. Electronics sparking, components hissing angry steam.

  “Hold on!” I say, anchoring myself and Lazlo against one of the missile tubes. Ephraim does the same. When the first rush of seawater gushes forward, it almost sweeps us away.

  But this is the direction we must go. And fast.

  “Come!” I shout, letting go my handhold, trying not to be sucked through the hatch. Bracing the edges of the entryway, I duck through, then swing around to catch Lazlo as he shoots in. Then Ephraim.

  “We should seal the compartment!” Ephraim shouts.

  But the force of the water is too great. I’ve lost my grip. The jetting current carries us down the corridor, past mission control, past the radio room, into the mess hall, where flailing bodies and debris have been pushed by the current. The hatchway to the balneary is just ahead, through the chaos of screams and choking and coughing. The water is up to our waists and rising.

  I look back to find Lazlo still behind me, and Ephraim.

  Lazlo’s hand is thin, slippery in the cold water, but still I pull him along, not letting go, grabbing pipes, cables, anything along the ceiling to grab to keep our heads above the fast-rising water.

  “Follow us,” I shout, seeing Brother Dumas’s face in the near darkness. “A way out.”

  But he doesn’t seem to hear. He is swimming aft, in the opposite direction, toward the ladder to the upper deck.

  The Leviathan groans, squeals. A fresh influx of water tells me there’s been another hull breach.

  We’re almost to the balneary hatchway when I hear Lazlo shriek behind me.

  I spin around to find that he’s being pulled under, being pulled back. I struggle to keep my grip on his hand. It’s Marston, face bloodied. He’s latched onto Lazlo, is forcing his head beneath the water.

  “I told you what I would do!” the old man spits, his chin only just above the rising, frothing seawater.

  I fling myself at him, the tall man, trying to pull at his arm, grappling, scratching. But his grip is strong and his reach so long. He is both able to hold Lazlo under and keep me at a distance.

  “Let him go!” I hear Ephraim shout. He’s tackled the caplain as well, has wrapped his arms around the older man’s neck.

  This has surprised Marston. He loosens his grip. Lazlo surfaces, sputtering, gasping, blinded by the salty water. I reach out, pull him away from the caplain’s reach, push him through the hatchway to the balneary.

  I see Ephraim still struggling with Marston, unable to overtake the man. The caplain is able to keep his nose and mouth just above the surface of the water, while Ephraim is not.

  “Let him go!” I shout, about to swim into the fray once more when a sound like the tolling of the hammer against the hull but louder, deeper, rings out. The water level suddenly recedes. The Leviathan’s position on the sea floor must be shifting, sliding. Marston and Ephraim are swept backward, downward. I cling to a pipe on the ceiling and reach out. Ephraim reaches for me but does not find my hand before he is sucked away.

  The lights go completely out now. Batteries blown. Total darkness.

  Chaos. Cacophony and darkness.

  “Remy!” Lazlo calls out.

  “Here,” I say, turning. If we’re going to survive, we have to leave now. I know it.

  I hate it, but I know it.

  The water level, momentarily lowered, is rising again, the torrent of cold seawater still spilling in through the breaches on this level, and now from above.

  Into the balneary. I see two bodies floating, both facedown in the water. Both with shorn heads. Matching robes. They could be anyone. Any of the brothers.

  Something else is floating in the rising water. The inflatable life raft from the Janus. New life vests, also pillaged from Adolphine’s ship.

  “Climb!” I say, forcing Lazlo up the ladder first, into the open hatch of the escape trunk. I follow behind him with the uninflated life raft in hand, seal the hatch behind me.

  Inside the tight compartment, an auxiliary light still glows. Casts us both in lurid red.

  I think back to the lessons that Brother Calvert taught me—how to escape. How to equalize the pressure in the hatch in order to make the water level rise to the level of the escape hatch at the top of the compartment.

  I turn the red valve that controls the pressure. There’s a hissing, and water begins flooding the compartment.

  “Remy!” Lazlo says, fearful.

  “We have to flood the chamber if we want to escape,” I say, trying to calm him.

  All the while, the boat continues to shift beneath us, groans, pops, hisses—the water line tilts.

  “I . . . I can’t swim,” he says, gasping.

  “Neither can I. Here,” I say, fitting a life vest over his head, fastening it around his middle before securing my own. “Remember what Brother Calvert told us. These will keep us afloat. These will send us to the surface. We’ll shoot right up!”

  He stares at the rising water, breathing fast.

  “Just remember to blow out . . .” I say, panting myself. “Blow out all the way up. You’ll have more than enough air in your lungs.”

  He isn’t hearing me. Isn’t hearing anything, his eyes hollow and pale, shaking. In shock.

  “It’s time,” I say, taking his face in both my hands, forcing him to acknowledge my words.

  He nods once. I shut off the valve just after the rising water clears the hood for the hatch, leaving us a small pocket of air remaining at the very top of the compartment. Then I duck under and open the hatch, which swings down on its hinge. “Okay, you first,” I say after surfacing, wiping the water from my eyes.

  The boat groans, tilts even more to the port. The pocket of air shrinks.

  “Now!” I say.

  He takes a deep breath, then disappears beneath the hatch hood.

  I follow, first grabbing the life raft, then ducking under and out.

  I’m shooting up, rocketing through the water, blowing out the air in my lungs, even though that seems like the most unnatural thing to do.

  But my lungs do not deflate—no, there is more than enough to expel and still be full. The oddest feeling.

  Up and up—my eyes burn from the water, but I keep them open, looking down, beneath me—this ocean is nowhere near as black as I imagined—I see the dim shapes, retreating in the darkness—the Leviathan—the massive black vessel, bleeding bubbles—and what must be the missile—the Last Judgment, its white shell seeming to glow in the dimness, expelled from its missile tube upon impact. It did not launch. It did not reach the surface.

  I finally must close my eyes from the stinging, but even behind my eyelids, head now tilted upward, I see a light. A growing brightness. The water grows warmer on my skin. My ears pop—it feels as though my head may burst from the pressure, but, finally, finally, I breach the surface, splash into open air and open my eyes to daylight—the brightest light I have ever seen. My eyes, utterly blinded by it.

  It should be night, I realize.

  We had only just finished with Compline, the night prayer. But up here, it is day.

  I cough. Suck in a breath of clean air.

  A rush of wind upon my head, my cheeks.

  Finally, after I blink away the burning, my eyes take it in—a blue sea, a clear sky, a sun resting halfway to the distant, distant line that must be the horizon.

  “Lazlo!” I call out.

  And I hear a weak answer.

  Some twenty feet away, he bobs, gagging, panicking, thrashing in the water.

  Paddling to him, I embrace him again, and he clings onto my arm.

  I pull the release valve on the bundle still clutched in my hand. With a sudden burst and hiss, the raft inflates, exploding from the size of a small flat box to a vessel large enough to fit ten at least.

  Another violent splashing behind us.

  I turn to see a shape emerge from
the sudden geyser of bubbles—a figure, bursting to the surface, choking.

  Edwin. He is clinging to an empty jug.

  At least one of the Forgotten has survived.

  “Here!” I shout out. “Edwin!” I realize that he can’t see me. He’s still blinded by the sunlight.

  He paddles frantically, squinting. “Remy?”

  “Here!”

  Another splash. It’s Jarod, also from engineering.

  And another—a face I saw for the first time upon journeying into engineering. A tall, thin young man whose name I don’t know.

  “How ever did you escape?” I ask.

  “We were locked in our berthing, but that second explosion warped the door. Made it out the rear trunk,” Edwin says, coughing.

  I turn in the water to see a shape emerge from another geyser of bubbles.

  Ephraim.

  He’s clinging to a net float. Blinking, stunned, like all of us—looking upon this vast, bright world the way I imagine a newborn babe would.

  “Ephraim,” I shout, reaching for him. He finds my hand, and I pull him closer to the raft. “You made it.”

  “St. John—” he says, hacking, spitting up water. “He guided me out. Through the breached missile tube.”

  Another violent splashing behind us.

  St. John. His pate split and bleeding. He spins, thrashes in the water, among the growing slick of oil and fuel, the flotsam of the wreck of the Leviathan, clinging to an empty water tank for buoyancy.

  “Here,” I call out.

  And he turns, still squinting. A curtain of blood spilling into his eyes.

  “Here,” I say again.

  He finally spots us, splashes over, grips hold of the lines edging the life raft and pulls himself up and inside in one go.

  I fear, for a moment, that he might leave us here. Maybe he considers it to. But if so, it’s only for a moment. He helps me to get Lazlo into the raft, pulling him up by the tops of his life jacket.

  And then he helps to heave me aboard. Ephraim. Together, we help with Edwin and Jarod.

  After, we all gasp, breathing, sitting in silence in the raft, looking around us, at the cloudless sky, at the blue, blue sea.

  We wait, amidst the churning water, for others to rise.

  They do not.

  9

  THE GREAT SILENCE COMES when darkness fully falls. The hours that follow Compline. No speaking, of course. But also a time where every action should be made softly. Every movement. Every footstep. A time for rest, for prayer.

  I have no will in me for either.

  We have been spit from the belly of the beast. Not safely upon a shore, but alive. Seven of us. For a time.

  I must have done God’s will, in the end. The missile did not launch. It was thwarted. By divine intervention?

  Something inside stops me from believing that, reminds me of how dangerous it is to believe that.

  Little waves lap at the gunwales of the rubber raft, slap beneath us. They are not large. Do no more than rock us lightly, roll beneath. Night has almost fallen, and we all gaze above at the cloudless expanse of deepening sky, a bowl already blue and sprinkled with what must be stars. For I do not remember stars. Have only read about them.

  The way the ancients once navigated, finding patterns and trustworthiness in their constant positions.

  My mind doesn’t know what to do with it—this expanse of sky—these endless reaches. It feels as though I’m looking down instead of up, into a wholly different sea, about to fall in.

  I must close my eyes.

  Lazlo shivers in my arms.

  His thin body, a collection of sharp bones kept contained in bible-paper thin skin.

  The stars offer light enough to see his scrubby head mottled with sores, his angled cheekbones.

  “I did right,” he whispers softly.

  “What?”

  “I did right. I broke the reactor,” he says. His voice is little. It’s weak. “I loosened a coupler on the pressure line. I knew I had to do something . . . knew you must have been captured. The others . . . they helped, too.”

  Edwin is still awake, sitting up, watching in silence.

  Lazlo coughs. A wet sound.

  I look down to find glossy black sputum on my arm.

  “Yes,” I whisper. “You did good. You saved us. You might have saved the world. What’s left of it.”

  When I open my eyes again, it is fully night. Deep night. Stars blazing.

  Something in my body tells me that it is time to rise and sing. Matins.

  Time to praise the Lord, the very act of creation. Goodness and light.

  And, as though answering, a faint, ever-so-soft crying fills the air. It’s coming from under us. From beneath the waves.

  A sorrowful bellow.

  And then, an answer.

  A sonorous, distant response. They are together again. The two whales. The ones that have been apart for so long.

  “Listen,” I whisper to Lazlo.

  He does not answer.

  I feel his full weight on me. I lean in to him, listening for the soft hiss of breath. Find it. Alive.

  Only just.

  St. John is still awake. Watching us from the other side of the raft. I see his bruised face by the starlight, his gleaming eyes.

  “Does he know?” he asks. “The truth about you.”

  “No,” I say, wiping my salt-chapped cheeks. “It won’t matter to him, though.”

  This, I believe with all my heart. This, I have faith in.

  Sometime later, St. John begins singing. It’s a broken song, uttered by a broken voice.

  The Benedictus.

  Sung at Lauds, at the break of day.

  “Per viscera misericordiae Dei nostri, in quibus visitabit nos oriens ex alto,” he sings.

  In the tender compassion of our God the dawn from on high shall break upon us.

  I join in with him. I’m not sure why. “Illuminare his, qui in tenebris et in umbra mortis sedent.”

  To shine on those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

  Those of us who were former Choristers join in now. One last chorus. Our audience, the sea and sky. Lazlo stirs.

  “There,” St. John says suddenly, pointing to the horizon, sitting up, waking the others.

  Just at the pale orange line that must be the coming dawn, a small shadow crosses. And then a flashing light. A ship.

  In the raft, there is a kit. A bag labeled EMERGENCY FLARES. We can use them to signal this ship, whether it be friend or foe.

  If that distinction matters.

  St. John points one of the canisters to the sky, pulling the string at the end. The first does nothing. Neither do the following two. Duds. But the last one works. It spits a hot, brilliant, flaming bulb high into the sky. An arc of light that seems to take forever to finally fizzle and sink.

  Whether the ship sees us, we cannot know.

  So, we wait. Listening in great silence to the wind, to the lapping waves. To the leviathans.

  They move unseen, beneath us, in that vast darkness. Singing, calling out to one another, answering. Exalting nothing, or perhaps everything. Every mountain and trench and cavern and creature in the sea. Every soul lost to it, waiting there, for the inkling of light to finally come.

  Acknowledgments

  My deepest thanks go out to Diana M. Pho, who acquired this novella, and to Lee Harris and the rest of the Tordotcom team for carrying it over the finish line. Additional thanks go to my agent, John Silbersack, and to Nicole Budrovich, for her linguistic expertise. I’m also grateful to Alicia Upano, Tony Bonds, and Robert Penner for their keen critical insights. Finally, thanks to Mary Stewart, ever my first reader.

  About the Author

  ANDREW KELLY STEWART’s writing spans the literary, science fiction, fantasy, and supernatural genres. His short fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction and ZYZZYVA. He is a Clarion Workshop alum and holds an MFA in creative writing. This is his firs
t publication with Tordotcom Publishing. Stewart lives and writes in Southern California.

  Twitter: @MrAndySt

  andrewkellystewart.com

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  8

  9

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Copyright Page

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novella are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  WE SHALL SING A SONG INTO THE DEEP

  Copyright © 2021 by Andrew Kelly Stewart

  All rights reserved.

  Cover photographs © Getty Images

  Cover design by Christine Foltzer

  Edited by Diana M. Pho

  A Tordotcom Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates

  120 Broadway

  New York, NY 10271

  www.tor.com

  Tor® is a registered trademark of Macmillan Publishing Group, LLC.

  ISBN 978-1-250-79090-3 (ebook)

  ISBN 978-1-250-79087-3 (trade paperback)

  First Edition: March 2021

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