Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

“There’s nowhere to run.” Hark felt his smile wobble. He needed to seem normal, but he was unexpectedly grateful to Quest for seeing through his act. It made him feel slightly less alone. “I’m . . . on a tightrope all the time. I can’t put a foot wrong, I can’t see my old friends, or Dr. Vyne will sell me to the galleys.” He was sailing as close to the truth as he dared. It was a relief to say even this much.

  “You miss your friends,” said Quest gently.

  “I’m worried about one friend of mine,” admitted Hark. “He might be in trouble without me.” He had been trying not to think about what Rigg would do to Jelt if Coram died after all. Worse still, the healing relic was still hidden under Dunlin’s hut. If the smugglers dragged Jelt away, could he survive without its healing pulses?

  “He needs your guidance?” asked Quest, and Hark could not help laughing out loud.

  “He never listens to it,” he muttered.

  “Then you probably could not help him anyway,” suggested Quest. “Has this friend tried to contact you recently?”

  Too close, too close to the wind. Hark could have kicked himself for saying so much.

  “Nest is the end of the world.” Hark dodged the question. “Who would come here?”

  “It is the relic of a world that has ended,” Quest agreed wryly. “That much is true.”

  The word “relic” brought Hark’s mind full circle, back to the pale god-ball under Dunlin’s shack.

  “Quest,” Hark asked slowly, “did you ever hear of a relic that . . . moved?”

  “Moved?” Quest’s brow furrowed deeply.

  “Someone once told me they’d seen something like that,” Hark added, trying to sound unconcerned. “He said it clenched and sent out an . . . invisible ripple.”

  “When and where did your friend see this?” asked Quest, his frown now quite alarming.

  “It was years ago!” Hark improvised. “I don’t remember!”

  “A shame,” Quest said grimly. “I would like to know who has the object now. Should you ever find out, I do hope you will tell me, Hark.”

  Hark was taken aback by the intensity of Quest’s interest. Perhaps the priest had heard of such a relic before. Although Hark didn’t like to think about it, he knew that Quest’s health was failing. It would be natural for a sick man to want to track down healing godware.

  “Do you know what it might be?” Hark asked, trying not to sound too eager.

  “I have a suspicion,” said Quest.

  Hark waited for him to explain and then realized that the old man had no intention of doing so. Quest often retreated into maddening reticence when the conversation strayed into sensitive territory. Hark vented his frustration in a sigh.

  “Sometimes I think you’re playing games with me,” he said, letting his tone sound sulky. “Throwing out hints like bait to get me curious, then laughing at me when I bite.”

  “Perhaps I do.” Quest rubbed at the tiny flecks of gray stubble on his reddened cheeks. “At my age, there are few greater fears than discovering that one has become dull.”

  Hark got up and took down one of the cloths that hung from a hook. The walls were always clammy with condensation and grew moldy if left unattended. But for now, scrubbing the wall was an excuse to look away and let the pause lengthen. Yes, he could let himself seem bratty and offended and leave it up to Quest whether to break the silence.

  I am young and easily bored. Perhaps I will get tired of talking to you altogether.

  After a while, he heard Quest sigh sadly.

  “I can give you your answer and a story,” said Quest, “but I think it is your turn first.”

  Hark racked his brains in search of a good story, but they were swamped with his worries. All the memories that rose to mind were full of Jelt. Growing up with Jelt, Jelt’s fist in his cheek, Jelt unbreathing on the wet rock, Jelt with a smuggler’s knife to his throat . . .

  “I can’t think of any,” he said helplessly.

  “What is the worst thing you have ever done?”

  It was a brutal question, an unfair question, but the sheer weight of it made Hark realize that he was asking Quest for no ordinary secret. This was what Quest felt was an equal trade. If Hark made something up, he suspected that Quest would notice. Their conversations would end forever, and Hark would have lost something important.

  What’s the worst thing I ever did?

  Hark’s mind flashed back to the bright air over the water at the Strides, the chain hissing off the wooden reel of the winch, then the infinite peace afterward, the cool of the puddles against his feet as he stood there, and stood there . . .

  “Nothing,” he said.

  A moment later, he cursed himself for blurting it out. Did Quest think that he meant he had never done anything wrong? How childish that would have sounded!

  Quest did not mock or protest, however. He waited silently for Hark to continue.

  “Something happened,” Hark said numbly. “Somebody needed my help, and I did nothing. I don’t know why. They got hurt. Badly hurt. I go back to that moment, over and over. I don’t know what was wrong with me.”

  “Did they survive?” asked Quest quietly.

  Hark’s cloth had paused on the wall. He didn’t trust himself to face Quest.

  “Yes,” he muttered.

  “If nobody died, then most other things can be mended in time. Sometimes they are not quite the same as they were before they were broken, but nothing and nobody stays unchanged, anyway.”

  Hark knew that the words were meant to be comforting.

  If nobody died . . .

  Now Hark could not help thinking of another time when he had done nothing. It was the night he tried not to remember and could never ask Jelt about.

  On a pitch-black night a year before, Hark and Jelt had crept down the mudflats on Rattleguise. The flats had dips in them, like valleys, and after a wild storm these became pools, jumping with cod and eels. The friends knew the local scavenger gang would be hauling out the fish with nets and leaving them in big barrels before moving to the next pool. Jelt’s plan was to sneak down with buckets and scoop fish out of unattended barrels.

  Hark had stood lookout, ready to whistle if he saw the scavenger gang’s lanterns return. Then Hark had heard a cry echoing from farther down the mudflat. A solitary sound like a seabird.

  Hark had stood there where he had been told to wait, feeling a fine, cold mist of rain on his face. He stood there knowing that the cry had been human and that it had been cut short. Hark had done . . . nothing. He had waited until Jelt ran up out of breath with no buckets and a glare like fury.

  “Sometimes,” Hark said, wiping his cloth in vague, slow circles, “sometimes you tell yourself there’s nothing you can do. Maybe there’s nothing anybody can do. And maybe there’s nothing wrong, anyway. But if you asked—if you ever asked—then you’d know. So you never, ever ask.”

  One of the other islanders had gone missing that night. Not a scavenger gang enforcer, or a smuggler, or one of the governor’s men. Just a fisherman walking home from the tavern across the flats.

  Perhaps the sea took him, perhaps a scavenger gang killed him, perhaps he took a job on a merchantship . . .

  And Hark would never know, because he could never, ever ask Jelt.

  “Sorry,” muttered Hark. He stopped pretending to wipe the wall. “‘Nothing’ doesn’t make much of a story, does it? I’ll come back when I’ve got a better one.” He turned to leave, wanting to get away from the conversation so that he could push those memories down, down, out of the way where they belonged.

  “Wait,” said Quest, and Hark halted in his tracks. “Better a poor story than a false one. Bring that stool over—you don’t want to sit on the wet rock.” He waited while Hark brought over the small wooden stool and settled himself next to the pool.

  Quest frowned into the cloudy water, as though his words needed to be marshaled through intimidation.

  “The gods were not as we are,” he said at last. “They
did not have brains or lungs. Many did not even have bones. But all of them had a core, somewhere within them, that held their life. It sent out a tremor through the waters, one that could be felt even before the god was seen.”

  “Their life . . .” Hark felt his shadowy suspicions coalesce into solid form. From the very start, the god-ball had reminded him of something, but until now he had pushed away the idea as wild and fanciful.

  “I will tell you the story the Hidden Lady murmured to me in the deeps,” Quest continued. “It was told in confidence, but perhaps she would understand.

  “Did you ever hear of a god named the Swallower?” Quest seemed unsurprised when Hark shook his head. “No, I had not heard of him either until the Lady told me of him. He had other names—Devour-all, Father Gullet, Custodian of the Great Purse. But Swallower was his best-known name, and in his day, Swallowsbay was named after him.

  “The Swallower was, the Lady said, a thing of unending hunger and infinite bitterness. His body was like a black knife but longer than a galleon. His fins were ragged black leather. His narrow tail was forked, each tapering tip adorned by a gleaming green-blue light.

  “Half of his body was jaw. His great belly was supple as black silk. When he had not fed for a long time, his belly would be wrinkled and folded under him, like a bound-up sail. When he stretched his mouth and swallowed with that vast jaw, the stomach stretched and stretched to a colossal size and hung beneath the lean, knife-like body. As the Swallower zigzagged through the sea, its great, stretched belly swung and swayed under it. Through the translucent skin one could see the crushed shapes of swallowed galleons and frigates and even the faces of perishing sailors pressed against the terrible membrane.

  “Around Swallowsbay, the ships came and went above him. He saw the eyes painted on their underside, the same pleading eyes that the soft, skin-clad drowners wore when they came down to him with their lungs full of water. He knew those painted eyes meant fear, submission, worship. It meant that the flimsy things in their wooden vessel were his and knew it. For the most part, he would not swallow them if they kept to the routes he permitted them. Of course, he changed the allowed routes now and then and dragged ships to the bottom when they broke the new rules.

  “One day, a boat was driven off course by a storm and broke the rules. Instead of trying to turn back, the sailors panicked and fled toward the open ocean. The Swallower pursued them to devour them, leaving his usual territories behind.

  “The ship soon found itself in turbulent waters. A great whirlpool dragged the ship down, as though the very depths were drawing breath.

  “As the ship plummeted, leaving a trail of drowning sailors behind it, the Swallower pursued, because it was his. The light went out of the water as he dived. If it had not been for the Swallower’s great eyes of black glass and the radiance of his taillight, he would have been swimming blind. As it was, he could just see the glimmer of the ship’s pale sails.

  “Then, in the darkness and the deeps, the Swallower came upon the Gathergeist.”

  Quest hesitated and gave Hark a quick, wry glance.

  “You know that name at least,” he said, and Hark nodded.

  “It had no name in those days. No human eyes had ever seen it, nor godly eyes, either, perhaps. It drifted unsuspected for many years, in the depths beneath those fretful waters. Shipwrecks floated down to it, so it had not needed to hunt. It had simply hung there in the water. Waiting. Growing.”

  Hark knew of the Gathergeist from paintings and stories. It had been a tangle of long, translucent chains that slowly swayed and swirled and glimmered. Its luminous tendrils had trailed for miles, and its song had been sweet and terrible.

  “Is it true it had no head?” he asked. It was the thing that bothered him the most about it. You could watch something’s head to see what it was thinking, even if it had a weird head. That was the part that watched you back, and might listen if you were lucky.

  “Yes,” said Quest. “No head. No body. Only the chains. Once the Swallower and the Gathergeist had discovered each other, it was too late. Their fight was inevitable. You see, they had sensed the throb of each other’s life.”

  Hark remembered how strong the god-ball’s pulse had been underwater. He imagined the two vast monsters circling each other in the abyss, feeling each jolting tremor sent out by the other.

  “From that moment,” said the priest, “they could not bear each other’s existence. They were gripped by a madness and could think only of the other’s destruction.

  “Of the two, the fastest was the Swallower. While the Gathergeist swirled and drifted, slowly pulling in its coils to deal with the threat, the Swallower darted forward, trailing his bulbous stomach. He bit through the nearest chain as easily as if it were jelly. The viscous ooze covering it tasted of poison but did not affect him.

  “The Gathergeist convulsed slowly, and the Swallower attacked again, thinking that he would take his enemy apart, one tendril at a time. This time, however, the Gathergeist changed its song, and its glassy tendrils became cold and hard. The Swallower’s jaw was mighty, though, and the chain splintered under the force of his bite.

  “Still the thing of many chains lived. Growing impatient, the Swallower plunged forward toward the center of the writhing, glowing mass that was his enemy. All his ancient instincts told him that if he delved into the middle, he would find the Gathergeist’s core. But he could not see it. There was no trunk or body, only the long snaking chains, forking and arcing and entangling, and nothing, nothing else. Where did this strange creature keep its life?

  “As he hesitated, all of the Gathergeist’s lights suddenly went out, leaving the Swallower alone in the deep blue-black. Somewhere in that blackness, the Gathergeist’s coils still floated, but now softly and silently, and the Swallower did not know where they were. He tried to flick his twin tails to bring his own lights to bear, but something clammy entangled them. Only the faintest glassy glint now and then showed him his foe’s sinuous, trailing form.

  “The Swallower lunged again, and once more his jaw closed upon his enemy’s tendrils. This time, however, a bundle of thick coils had been offered to his bite. Though he felt them crack and buckle, he could not fully snap his jaw shut. As he struggled to bite down, more and more of the chains forced their way into his mouth, wrenching it further open. He beat his fins of ragged leather, but more soft, clinging tendrils draped over him, gluing themselves to his black scales.

  “There are no days in the deep, nor nights, either, so nobody can say how long the Swallower struggled while the Gathergeist surged farther and farther into his maw. Up in the land of light, the sun may have skipped on its giddy orbit many times before the Swallower’s jaw joints finally cracked.

  “The Gathergeist then oozed into the Swallower at its leisure and began hollowing him. From inside his vast, translucent stomach, it patiently burrowed upward into his flesh. It had felt the tremor of his core, so it dug until it found it and broke it. Then there was no Swallower, only the Gathergeist.

  “After it had slowly consumed him, it changed. It no longer wanted to stay in its cautiously chosen feeding territory. Instead, it thought only of the islands and the flimsy, skin-clad things with hopeless eyes waiting to look on it with fear and love. So it changed the direction of its drift and moved slowly, relentlessly, from the black, to the blue-black, to the blue-gray, to the green. For the first time, men saw it and heard its song, and it took its place in the gallery of human nightmares . . .”

  The old man stirred his hand through the water. Beneath the milky surface, it looked misshapen, blurry. Only after a long silence did Hark realize that the story was over.

  “Where did the Gathergeist keep its life?” Hark asked.

  “In one of its tendrils. Given time, the Swallower would probably have found it, so the Gathergeist did not give him time.”

  Hark was struck by another puzzle.

  “How did the Hidden Lady know all this? She wasn’t there, was she?”

/>   “No, she was not,” Quest said, sounding unusually tired. “But I hope you do not expect me to unravel all the sea’s mysteries in one afternoon.”

  “Sorry,” Hark said, and meant it. He had been so caught up in the tale that he had not noticed how drained and pale the old man was looking. “Thank you for the story.”

  Hark went back to scrubbing the wall, barely able to digest what he had just learned. His wildest suspicions were true. He knew now what the relic was, and why it pulsed.

  It was the heart of a god, and it was beating.

  Chapter 16

  The next morning, Hark set off for his “foraging” errand even earlier than usual. Rigg’s people would be waiting for him on the beach at dawn, but he wanted to get there before they did.

  When Hark reached Dunlin’s beach, there was no sign of anyone around. He clambered quickly up the rocks to the shack and pushed open the door.

  Even in the predawn dimness, he could see that the scavenger’s possessions and tools were still there. In Lady’s Crave, most of them would have gone missing as soon as people heard that the shack was unattended. The absence of the scavenger still bothered Hark, but perhaps Jelt had just bullied him into leaving and claiming another beach instead. Hark could imagine that happening.

  Hark closed the door, pried up the loose floorboard, and reached down through the gap. To his relief, his fingers closed around a familiar, rounded shape, still hammocked in its netting. He pulled it out, staring with new fascination at its perforated surface.

  The heart of a god . . .

  A sudden sound made Hark jump, but it was only the rattle of a tumbling rock, somewhere behind the hut. The door did not open. He exhaled, then tucked the ball into a cloth bag he had brought with him and covered it with some rolls of bandages.

  Hark opened the door of the shack and stopped dead. Down on the beach stood the freckled girl from Rigg’s gang, staring right back at him. She watched him as he clambered down the rocks to the beach.

  By daylight, and at close proximity, the resemblance to Rigg was even clearer. Apart from the wind-browned freckles that covered her face and arms, her strongly defined brows and angular fierceness reminded him of the smuggler captain. The girl was, however, a good four inches shorter than Hark was.