Sunker's Deep

by Lian Tanner

  ‘You’ll join us, won’t you?’ asked Poddy. ‘Soon as you can get away?’

  ‘Course I will. Keep your eyes open and you’ll see me skipping along behind you, glad to be getting back to the Undersea.’ He yawned. ‘I’m a bit short of sleep, Pod. It’s still daylight out there, and I don’t reckon they’ll come for me till tonight some time.’

  And when they do, he thought, I’ll kick up such a fuss that Poddy’ll be out of here and away before they even notice she’s gone. And once that’s done—

  But he didn’t want to think about what was going to happen after that. He wanted to think about Claw, and the Undersea, and maybe a couple of dolphins swimming past the porthole.

  And freedom.

  The Devouts weren’t taking any chances with their dangerous new prisoners. Once they’d marched the Sunkers back to the re-education camp, they trussed Petrel, Fin, Krill and the captain to the whipping posts in the middle of the quarry, and surrounded them with armed guards.

  Petrel had tried to count the guards several times, but there were too many. A group of them was hammering away at something behind her, but the rest were watching her and her friends. If she so much as twitched, scores of eyes focused on her, glaring and suspicious, as if she was an army of warriors rather than one small, dusty girl.

  It might have been funny if it wasn’t so terrible.

  Krill had regained consciousness some time ago, and glared back at the guards with such ferocity that Petrel half expected to see smoke rising from them. Fin had retreated to somewhere deep inside himself, and the captain – the poor broken captain – slumped in his ropes as if he would never move again.

  He found his Song, thought Petrel, but it didn’t do him any good. And again she thought of that mysterious someone reaching out from the past and moving things around to suit themselves. Bet they didn’t expect things to end up like this.

  She knew that Sharkey had been captured and that Rain had betrayed him. The guards had taken great pleasure in telling them so. She knew, too, that she and Krill and Fin were to be hanged tomorrow morning, right here in the quarry, and that the captain was to be burned on the hottest possible fire, to destroy the poison miasma.

  She licked her parched lips and tried to think, but hunger, thirst, and the fear of what was coming made it almost impossible.

  Got to get us out of here.

  As darkness fell, the Devouts fetched dozens of flaming torches and set them in a ring around the whipping posts, so that the prisoners were lit almost as brightly as day. There were shadows, of course, which danced and moved with the movement of the flames, and the hammering continued behind Petrel’s back. But the rest of the guards still watched so keenly that she couldn’t even blink the quarry dust out of her eyes without attracting their attention.

  Got to make ’em look away, she thought. Got to make ’em think I’m so useless there’s no reason to watch me any more.

  She knew how to do it. Up until a few months ago, it had been her only weapon against the crew that had rejected her. She hadn’t dared do it since then because she’d been afraid of losing everything she’d gained.

  But now there was nothing left to lose.

  Slowly – infinitesimally slowly – she let her head droop. She thought of defeat and misery and loss. She hunched her shoulders and made her eyes blank and stupid.

  It shouldn’t have worked. After all, some of the guards had heard her talk, and seen her fight. They knew she wasn’t stupid.

  But as Petrel’s face grew dull, the men nearest to her began to shuffle their feet as if they’d lost interest in her, as if Krill, Fin and the captain were the real threat, and Petrel was just someone who’d been swept up in the excitement. They’d still hang her, of course, but there was no reason to watch her so closely.

  It wasn’t long before Krill caught on to what Petrel was doing, and turned his ferocious gaze upon her. ‘This is your fault, witless girl,’ he hissed, just loud enough for the guards to hear. ‘If you had half a brain we’d never have been caught. We should’ve known better than to let you tag along.’

  His words shouldn’t have hurt – after all, he was pretending, just like Petrel. But they did hurt a little, and so did the sniggering from the guards. For a moment Petrel felt dreadfully alone—

  She glanced sideways at Fin and saw his eye close in a barely perceptible wink. He HASN’T retreated inside himself, she realised. He’s pretending too!

  That gave her courage. She wasn’t alone. She was with her friends, her fierce, clever friends.

  She made her face stupider than ever. She didn’t have a plan. She didn’t even have much hope, not if she was being honest with herself. But she couldn’t just stand there and wait for the end.

  And so, as the shadows from the torches flickered, and the guards turned their attention to Fin, Krill and the captain, Petrel began to work on the ropes that tied her wrists.

  ‘ARE WE FRIENDS, YOU AND ME?’

  When Poddy woke Sharkey, with a hand over his mouth, he knew the moment had come. He nodded to show he was properly awake, and sat up, his heart beating as fast and rackety as Claw’s pistons.

  At first he could hear nothing except the scurrying of rats. But then there came a sound from above them, a scraping noise, as if someone was trying to drag the wooden cover off the grating, and not quite managing it.

  Sharkey braced himself, ready to start shouting and hitting out at anyone who tried to grab him. I’ll give ’em a black eye or two, he promised himself. I’ll give ’em something to remember me by.

  There was a thunk, and fresh air wafted down to them from where the wooden cover had shifted a little. Another thunk. Sharkey had expected to see daylight, but the darkness of the punishment hole hardly changed.

  He gripped Poddy’s hand, his nails biting into her palm. ‘It’s night-time,’ he whispered. ‘I didn’t mean to sleep so long.You be ready to run.’

  She nodded.

  Bit by bit the wooden cover was dragged away from the grating. Sharkey couldn’t work out why it was taking so long. The men who had brought him here had picked it up with no trouble at all. Had Poosk sent a weakling to kill him? Or were they just teasing him, drawing out the moment so he’d suffer more?

  He tried to make himself relax, but he was wound too tight and couldn’t let any of it go.

  It seemed like forever before the cover was removed. Sharkey heard the bolt being dragged back, then someone leaned over the grating and whispered, ‘Poddy!’

  Before Sharkey could stop her, Pod replied,‘Bran?’

  ‘I cannot lift this by myself,’ said Bran.‘Can you and Sharkey help me?’

  Poddy was already on her feet, but Sharkey pulled her back. ‘No,’ he whispered.

  ‘But Sharkey, it’s Bran. He’s come to free us!’

  ‘It’s a trap,’ said Sharkey, knowing that this was the escape attempt, this was where he would be killed. ‘Bran might think he’s helping us. But he’s not alone up there.’

  ‘I can’t hear anyone else.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter,’ said Sharkey. ‘They’re there somewhere.’

  He knew he had to move. If he wanted to give Poddy a chance of getting away safely, he had to climb out of the hole. Had to distract whoever was waiting to kill him.Trouble was, he wasn’t sure he could do it. Life had never seemed more precious.

  ‘Poddy!’ whispered Bran again.

  ‘I’m coming,’ said Sharkey, raising his voice so the boy could hear him. ‘I’ll help you.’ To Poddy he whispered,‘Stay where you are until you hear shouting. Then run for your life.’

  ‘But Sharkey—’

  He could’ve snapped out an order, and she would’ve obeyed him. But he was sick of orders. And besides, he didn’t want her last memory of him to be a bad one. So instead he said,‘Are we friends, you and me, Pod?’

  ‘Friends?’ She sounded startled, as if she’d never even considered such a thing. But then she said, ‘Aye, Sharkey!’

  ‘Then o
ut of friendship, I’m asking you to do this.’ He nodded towards the grate. ‘It’s a trap, and I know how to deal with it. So I want you stay here till the shouting starts.Then run. Understand?’

  He could feel her staring at him in the darkness. But in the end she whispered,‘All right. But you be careful.’

  He squeezed her hand one last time, then crept towards the stone stairs.

  Going up them nearly broke his nerve. With every step, he expected to see Bran shoved to one side by half a dozen men. He wondered how his death would come. A knife? An arrow? A crack over the head with one of those cudgels?

  Don’t think about it, he told himself. Think about giving Poddy a chance.Think about causing as much trouble as I can before they get me.

  He reached the top of the stairs without anything bad happening, and crouched there, looking up at Bran through the bars of the grate. He couldn’t see the boy’s face, but he could hear his breath coming quick and shallow, as if he was frightened half to death.

  Me too, thought Sharkey.

  Aloud, he said, ‘Have you got the bolt pulled right back?’

  ‘Y-yes,’ said Bran.

  Once unbolted, the grating wasn’t hard to lift, not for someone of Sharkey’s size and strength. He lowered it carefully to the ground.

  ‘Where is Poddy?’ whispered Bran. His breath was a cloud on the night air, and the pebbles at his feet were white with frost.

  ‘She’s coming in a minute,’ said Sharkey, and he made himself straighten up. ‘Thanks for helping us. You’d better run along now, back to your bed. Don’t want you to get into trouble.’

  Bran nodded. But before he went, he whispered, ‘Nearly everyone is at the quarry. Rain said there will be a diversion just before dawn.’ Then he turned and ran into the darkness.

  Sharkey stood there, waiting for death to arrive. Bran’s words lingered in his ears, but they made no sense. Every inch of his skin prickled with tension. He wished he was iron-clad and double-hulled. He wished there were two hundred feet of good clean seawater between him and the Devouts.

  Beside him, someone whispered,‘What’d he say?’

  Sharkey almost jumped out of his skin. ‘I told you to stay below!’

  ‘I did stay below.And now I’m here.What’d he say?’ asked Poddy.

  But Sharkey couldn’t answer, he was so afraid for her. ‘Get out of here, Pod,’ he whispered. ‘Right now. Run!’

  He pushed her, but she stood her ground. ‘We’re friends, that’s what you said. I’ll run when you run.’

  Sharkey could’ve screamed with frustration.‘Just go!’

  ‘Not without you.’

  Which meant that Sharkey had to grab her hand and drag her across the cobblestones towards the wall, all the time expecting someone to leap out and grab them – and how would he save Poddy then?

  But no one leapt at them. The night remained quiet – and Sharkey didn’t trust it, not one bit.

  It’s one of Poosk’s games, he thought. He wants us to think we’ve escaped.That’s when he’ll take us.

  To Poddy he whispered, ‘Same rules as before, Pod. If I start shouting, you run.’

  There was no point even trying the well-guarded gate.The two children crept along the base of the wall, keeping to the deep shadows and running their hands over the stone.

  ‘Here,’ breathed Sharkey.

  The cracks he had found were tiny, but they were enough for Poddy, who dug in her fingers and toes and scrambled right to the top, quick and silent, as if she was scaling a tier of bunks in the belly of old Rampart. Sharkey scanned the shadows one more time, then followed her, his fingers clutching at the crevices, his bad shoulder hurting all the way up and all the way down the other side.

  With the wall behind them, they crept onto the road that wound down the hill. The moon was up, which meant it must be past midnight. But it was still too low to give much light, and they made their way by instinct as much as anything.They slipped and skidded on patches of ice, and a couple of times they almost ran head first into one of those stinking hovels, but they caught themselves just in time.

  Sharkey’s skin prickled worse than ever, but they saw no one.And – as far as Sharkey could tell – no one saw them.

  They were at the bottom of the road before he remembered Bran’s words. Nearly everyone is at the quarry. Rain said there will be a diversion just before dawn.

  Sharkey didn’t want to think about Rain, who had been her uncle’s tool all along. But maybe she was telling the truth this time. Maybe nearly everyone was at the quarry. Maybe he was supposed to wait until just before dawn, for the diversion, then try to get the Sunkers out through the tunnel. Maybe that was the trap.

  It didn’t make sense. But then, nothing the Devouts did made sense, not to Sharkey. And Rain was a Devout, whatever she said.

  He peered south and saw a glow, like the beginnings of sunclimb, in the direction of the quarry. Petrel and Fin were down there somewhere, waiting for their deaths, and so were Krill and the silver child.

  I can’t help ’em, he reminded himself. I’ve got to get the Sunkers out. No distractions!

  ‘Pod,’ he whispered.‘The camp where you sleep, it’s just up the road from here, right?’

  ‘Aye, no more than a mile.’

  ‘And the guards bring you to the quarry an hour or so after sunclimb?’

  ‘That’s right.The rest of the time they’re patrolling outside – there’s always a dozen or more of ’em.With dogs.They go all the way down to the shore and back.’

  ‘Can you see ’em from inside the camp?’

  ‘Nay. But sometimes we hear ’em. And we’ve been told they’re always out there. Always. A few of the older middies wanted to try the tunnel anyway, but the adm’ral wouldn’t let ’em. She says we’ll never get the chance to dig another one, if this one’s discovered. And the dogs’ve got noses so keen, they’d smell us as soon as we came out the other end.We’ve been trying to come up with a way of getting rid of ’em, and of knowing we’ve got rid of ’em.’

  ‘Well, tonight might be the night, Pod. Can you take us to this camp, nice and quiet?’

  ‘What about the dogs?’

  ‘We’ll stay downwind, just in case.’

  ‘Aye, Sharkey!’

  They set off again, with the wind in their faces. Poddy guided Sharkey off the road and across ploughed fields that were capped with white, like storm waves. Their bare feet made no sound, and they didn’t speak until they reached the camp.

  It was as dark as the rest of the countryside, except for a single fire. In its glow, Sharkey saw walls higher than those around the Citadel, and a gate that was bolted so firmly that it looked as if it would stand forever.

  ‘Can’t climb those walls,’ whispered Poddy.‘We tried, but there’s not a crack in ’em.’

  As the children crouched in the darkness, two men walked into the light of the fire. They stopped and talked briefly, then went in opposite directions.

  ‘What are we going to do?’ whispered Poddy.

  ‘Wait. Let’s see how many of ’em there are.’

  They waited for at least half an hour, clenching their teeth against the cold. In that time, the same men came back again, greeted each other in the light of the fire, and kept walking.The moon was a bulge of silver, halfway up the sky.

  ‘There’s only the two of ’em,’ whispered Poddy. ‘And no dogs!’

  ‘Aye.They must all be at the quarry. Adm’ral Deeps could bring everyone out now, and the Devouts’d be none the wiser.’

  ‘But she won’t know, Sharkey! She’s got no way of telling!’

  Sharkey chewed his thumbnail. Rain thinks I’m going to wait till just before dawn.All the more reason to do it now!

  ‘Where does this tunnel come out?’ he asked.

  ‘Near the shore. In a bunch of trees. I reckon I could find it.’

  ‘Let’s go and see.’

  They crept away from the camp as silently as they had come, and headed for the shore
. It was no more than three hundred yards away at that point, and Sharkey could hardly wait to get there, to smell the salt water and the seaweed, to hear the murmur of the waves.

  Still, he didn’t take any risks, and neither did Poddy. For the last hundred yards, they crawled on their bellies through the frosty grass, stopping frequently to listen for the sound of footsteps or voices. But they heard nothing.

  It took them another forty minutes or so to find the end of the tunnel, which was so well hidden that they crept past it a dozen times without seeing it. But at last Sharkey pulled a pile of brambles to one side, and there it was.

  Poddy’s eyes gleamed with excitement. ‘Are we going in?’

  ‘I am,’ said Sharkey.‘You’re going to wait here.’

  ‘Nay, Sharkey. You won’t be able to find your way around. It’s not just Sunkers in the camp, there’s other prisoners too. And Adm’ral Deeps reckons a couple of ’em aren’t really prisoners – they’re there to keep an eye on us and tell the guards what we’re up to. You wouldn’t believe the tricks we had to pull to stop ’em finding out about the tunnel.’

  Sharkey didn’t want to send Poddy back into danger, not now she was free. But he didn’t want to blunder around the camp and mess everything up, either.

  Besides, dawn was still some way off. If Poddy went into the camp, he could sneak back to the top of the quarry and search for the portable comm device.With that, they could signal Claw.

  ‘All right,’ he said.‘But you be extra careful, Pod!’

  ‘Aye, Sharkey!’ And she wriggled headfirst into the tunnel.

  Sharkey pulled the brambles across the entrance. Then, with a quick glance at the stars to make sure he was going in the right direction, he set off back towards the quarry.

  When the message came through, Dolph was down in Grease Alley. She had an iron rod in her left hand and a knife in her right, and Chief Engineer Albie was trying to kill her.