Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

  Nowadays Selphin never confided in Rigg when she was upset. Sometimes she went to Rigg’s second-in-command, Sage, whose harsh features and cold voice had seemed so alarming when Selphin was younger. Now that Selphin’s signing was fast and fluent for them to chat naturally, she had come to know a different Sage. The older woman’s sharp face came to life when she signed, and her wit tumbled out, brash and cutthroat. She didn’t often tell you everything would be fine, so when she did, you believed her. Most sea-kissed in the gang still had some hearing in one ear or both, but Sage was like Selphin and knew how it was to hear nothing but the “bees.”

  Rigg must have noticed that Sage was replacing her as Selphin’s confidante, but she never said anything. She never admitted to her own wounds, fatigue, or illnesses. If she felt sadness at the estrangement, she hid that, too.

  · · · · ·

  Selphin kept volunteering to forage for the Sanctuary boy while he was on healing duty. It allowed her to steer clear of the healing sessions.

  I know my way around Nest better than anyone else, she had pointed out. I was following the Sanctuary boy around for days, wasn’t I? I know his best foraging spots. She was the one who had tailed Hark until he met up with Jelt, allowing the gang to surround them in the shack. She now wished she hadn’t managed it quite so successfully.

  Selphin heard all about the healing sessions from gang gossip. Each time, there were more patients, arriving with agues, cuts, scurvy, and age-stiffened joints. Word had spread fast. Soon the patients had to visit the healers in batches. By the end of the second week, there were visitors from islands a day’s travel away.

  Not all of the patients were ill or injured, Sage told Selphin one evening by the campfire.

  What do you mean? demanded Selphin.

  A group of four turned up and said they wanted to be made “better”, answered Sage. They didn’t explain what “better” meant, though.

  What happened? asked Selphin.

  They spent ten minutes with the healers, Sage explained wryly. When they came out, a woman was crying with happiness, because her nostrils had closed up. Smooth as an egg, not a hole in sight. All the others were congratulating her. A sign, they called it. Apparently she was “chosen.” Chosen to have no sense of smell, anyway.

  Sage was one of the few gang members who showed some skepticism about the healers. She seemed to find the whole racket amusing rather than worrying, though.

  However, this was not the last visit of the strange group seeking to be made “better.” They were back two days later with five friends, all equally keen on self-improvement. The group emerged from their healing session apparently unaltered, but one of them claimed that his eyes had been changed in ways he couldn’t describe, so that he saw the world anew.

  A few days later, they returned again in greater numbers. This time they brought tents and blankets and refused to leave. All they wanted was to attend upon the healers, they explained, and be close to them. They were willing to pay for the privilege, so Rigg shrugged and took their money. Most of Rigg’s gang treated them like a joke at first and nicknamed them the “grovelers.”

  They’re creepy, Selphin commented, peering across at the huddle of figures seated between their tents. What do they want? Do they even know?

  “They’re not so bad when you talk to them,” insisted Coram.

  Coram talked to them a lot. Afterward he usually sat alone, staring raptly at his scar as if it were unfathomably beautiful. Ever since his healing, he had seemed heavy, like he was drugged. Selphin had seen him like this before, and it was always a bad sign. When he was lumpish and distracted, it meant a big thought was forming in his head. It usually took much longer to get the thought out of his head again.

  After a while, other members of the gang began chatting with the grovelers, as well. Selphin’s friends came back from these conversations looking dazzled and talking of signs, omens, and changing times.

  “I’m not saying I agree with them,” they said, “but it makes you think . . .”

  “I’ve never been one for goddish stuff,” they said, “but it’s like the Leaguers say . . .”

  “I don’t say those healer boys are a message from the Undersea,” they said, “but . . .”

  The older members of the gang were the most easily infected by these ideas. Those were the people who remembered the time of the gods. Now they walked around with a look of fearful eagerness on their faces.

  The “healing cave” looked different now. There was a dark brown canvas tent around it, over which long, frayed mooring ropes dangled like ornamental tassels. Faint frills of crusted salt had been left at the edges of dried-out damp patches, but this just made it seem more mysterious, as if the sea had hand-embroidered the weather-beaten canvas.

  The presence of the tent affected people. Within a week of its arrival, the ground around it was littered with shells, pieces of agate, painted bird eggs, and gray coral beads. Nobody had asked the patients to bring them, but they all intuitively understood that when visiting such a shrine, money was not enough. An offering was needed.

  Selphin always kept a distrustful distance from the tent, so it was a while before she realized that some of her crewmates were secretly leaving offerings, too. They also stopped talking and signing when they were close to the tent and walked past reverently.

  Why are you all being so respectful? Selphin wanted to slap them. We’re Rigg’s gang! We don’t crawl to anyone!

  But this no longer appeared to be true.

  Deep down, Selphin had hoped that the base on Wildman’s Hammer couldn’t last. The gang would get restless, as they always did. They would miss Lady’s Crave and grumble about the lack of taverns. Besides, the gang had deals to attend to, goods to supply, ships to meet. Day by day, Selphin expected Rigg to change course in her blunt, unapologetic way and declare that they were all going back home . . .

  Instead, Selphin visited Wildman’s Hammer one day to discover two changes. Most of Rigg’s gang were absent, and the grovelers were now armed.

  What’s going on? she asked her mother. Why are you letting them bring weapons here? The grovelers were equipped with knives, blackjacks, and axes and now defended the narrow rock-walled path that led to the healing tent.

  “We can’t keep our people here all the time,” said Rigg. “The Pelican is due in a few days, isn’t she?” Foreign ships like the Pelican sometimes dodged the heavy taxes, customs duties, and mooring charges by trading offshore with smugglers’ skimmers instead of docking at an island. This was completely illegal but was profitable if you could get away with it. “So we’ll be getting those grovelers to guard the healers and the base while our people are on Lady’s Crave. Why not make use of them, if they’re here anyway?”

  Selphin had a nightmare feeling that the world was slowly somersaulting to stand on its head.

  What are you talking about? she demanded. We have guards here to stop the healers running away, not to keep them safe! The grovelers aren’t our people! They’re loyal to the healers!

  “It won’t be a problem,” said Rigg. “Coram’s vouched for them—they’re friends of his.”

  And who tells Coram what to say? signed Selphin furiously. He goes into that healing tent to talk, and he comes out with new opinions that don’t sound like him! He’s taking orders, and not from you! And he’s not the only one!

  “You’re talking nonsense!” said Rigg.

  This isn’t your base anymore! Selphin told her. And if you don’t watch out, this won’t even be your gang!

  Rigg obviously didn’t believe her. She was too sure of her gang and her leadership of it. Crew were family, family were crew. How could somebody who was neither steal her family and crew away from her? It was unthinkable.

  Instead she glared at Selphin with a blank, angry, pained look. She clearly thought that Selphin was broken-headed and delusional. She wanted to fight it and make Selphin better again.

  Selphin turned to Sage to back her up, but for o
nce the older woman was not on her side.

  I know you don’t like the healers, Sage told her, but they’re doing us a lot of good. We’ve got spare money to repair the subs properly for the first time in a year. And even creepy healing is a lot better than a noose. She fingered the two newly mended notches in her ear. Anyway, your mother’s word is law. Sorry, but my first loyalty is to her.

  I’m loyal to her too! signed Selphin, outraged. But that doesn’t mean I do what she says when she’s wrong!

  The only other person who seemed to be miserable about the entire healing racket was the Sanctuary boy. Talking to him was like trying to grip an eel, though. Selphin always ended up threatening him and wanting to hit him with rocks.

  She didn’t even try talking to the older healer boy.

  There wasn’t much chance. She didn’t go near his healing tent, and he rarely ventured out of it now. Besides, an instinct told her that talking to him would be useless. She might as well try to persuade a shark to live off kelp.

  Even from a distance, Selphin could sense the vibrations from the unknown relic in the healer tent. She could imagine it pumping its dark energies through air, rock, and flesh, rippling them as it did so. She visualized veins slowly blackening, minds twisting, bodies subtly melting and morphing. It was a poison none of her friends could taste or see, and it was changing them all, inch by inch.

  I’ll stop you, she promised it in her head. I’ll make them listen to me.

  But none of them did.

  Chapter 20

  “There you are!”

  Hark jumped out of his skin. He had just returned from one of his “foraging expeditions” and had barely slipped in through the Sanctuary entrance, his basket over his arm and his head still full of patients.

  Dr. Vyne was standing there just inside the entrance, hands on hips. Gone was her air of amused, lackadaisical menace. Today her eyes were white-rimmed, her voice a whiplash. Behind her stood Kly, looking uncomfortable and anxious.

  “In here!” Vyne said curtly, hustling Hark and Kly into a small meditation room. For some reason she appeared to be really angry. Hark’s mind fizzed with panic. What had she found out? “Kly, talk him through our notes, and get him into that room as soon as you can. I don’t know how much time we have.”

  “What’s happened?” asked Hark.

  “Pale Soul’s sick,” answered Kly quietly. “We think he’s waning.”

  “I told you he was a priority, Hark!” Dr. Vyne erupted. “I told you to find out where he’d hidden that archive as soon as you could! I made that clear a month ago!”

  Hark felt as though he were falling. Dr. Vyne’s good humor had given way beneath him like a trapdoor. Of course he had known that Vyne wanted him to find out about the library, but it hadn’t seemed urgent. There had been so many other things to worry about. Over the last month, his healing duties had left him distracted, exhausted, and barely able to keep up with his chores.

  “If there is still a secret library,” said Vyne, “this is our last chance to find out where it is! If you care about your future, Hark, find out everything you can! And do it fast!”

  Hark nodded, mouth dry.

  “I need to go,” Vyne declared, her expression still stormy. She raked both her hands through her hair, gave a snort of annoyance, and marched out. Kly slowly exhaled.

  “Pale Soul wasn’t ill yesterday!” exclaimed Hark. “Was he?” He wondered whether he should have noticed that the gentle old priest was ailing.

  “Sometimes there’s a slow twilight,” said Kly, dropping into a chair. “Sit down. The doctor wants you to know more about Pale Soul before you talk to him.”

  Hark listened to Kly’s hasty account of the old priest’s history. Before joining the priesthood and taking the name Pale Soul, he had been Karriter Thistle. His father had been a nightwatchman, his mother a seamstress, his stepfather a priest. Six siblings, a childhood on Siren. Acolyte at age ten, priest by sixteen. Ten years as a priest on Siren, occasionally speaking to the Gathergeist, then archivist on Nest.

  Hark had known very little of this, despite all his conversations with the old man, and this gave him a pang of self-reproach. Then again, these were dead facts, both personal and impersonal, like dry bones in a box.

  “Pale Soul’s calmer around you than he is with anyone else.” Kly rested his elbows on his knees, and stared down at his clasped hands. “I think your neck may be riding on this,” he added softly. “Be as kind as you can, but find the information the doctor wants, for goodness’ sake.”

  Pale Soul had been put in a room of his own, to avoid infecting others. It was lit only by the hearth and the dim, purple flame of a little lantern hanging from a hook on the wall. The old priest deserved his name more than ever before, his skin so pale it was deathly, like gray clay. Even in his exhaustion, though, Pale Soul seemed agitated and nervous. He twitched slightly as Hark sat down beside him.

  “It’s all right,” said Hark. “It’s me.” Nothing was all right, and he felt a sting of guilt as Pale Soul’s expression softened with recognition and trust.

  “It’s too quiet,” Pale Soul confided with quiet wretchedness. “I try to listen, but . . . the quiet gets in the way. There!” He raised a finger and looked entreatingly at Hark. “Can you hear? Music . . .”

  Behind the relentless murmur of the wind outside and the muffled sounds of distant footsteps and door-slams, Hark heard a faint jumble of metallic notes, indistinct and haunting.

  “It’s just the wind chimes,” he said, recognizing the sound.

  “Yes,” said Pale Soul, deflating. “Of course. It will never come back. What was the point of it all?” His eyes forlornly begged Hark for an answer or perhaps a rope to cling to. “Did you ever hear the Gathergeist sing?”

  Hark shook his head, finding it hard to follow.

  “I did,” said Pale Soul, very faintly. “It made me think of birds. It didn’t sound like them, but it reminded me of the way that birds don’t care about us. They don’t. They don’t care whether they’re beautiful, they just are. I heard it once up on the cliffs when I was small, back on Siren. I knew the Undersea was rising because of the clouds. Sudden black clouds by themselves, like thumbprints above the horizon. Then the wind changed . . . and I heard the song.”

  “What was it like?” asked Hark. If Pale Soul wanted to talk about the gods, perhaps the conversation could be guided toward the archive.

  “It was not a tune you could sing.” Pale Soul cleared his throat, then tried a small eerie undulating mewl of sound. “No, it was not music . . . and yet it was. It . . . broke me, that sound.

  “I ran home and told my older sister, and she said I never needed to go up on the cliffs alone again. She would go with me. Anila. Only nine, but the eldest—she brought up the rest of us. I was her favorite.”

  Hark’s heart sank. These were childhood memories, then—too old to be useful. Somehow he needed to haul Pale Soul’s mind forward several decades.

  “We went up on the cliffs at sunset sometimes,” Pale Soul continued, his face looking more serene. “Sea so big—Anila called it a patchwork, because there were blotches . . . silver shimmers, cloud shadows, purple sometimes. Ships—they looked so huge back then. Sails pink in the sunset and puffed like peaches. We had lucky rhymes to stop them sinking, and when they reached the horizon safely, I thought we had done that. It felt . . . I felt useful . . . powerful . . .”

  Hark didn’t ask where Anila was now. If she was older than Pale Soul, she might well be dead.

  “Is that why you decided to be a priest?” he asked instead. “To protect people?”

  Pale Soul’s face slowly lost its pensive brightness, like a moon submerged in cloud.

  “We did protect people,” he said, and started to tremble. “They were so proud of us once. Now they’re ashamed of us. They do not want to remember how frightened they were and how much they needed us. But they did.” He stared at Hark in dazed fear, as though this boy in yellow robes were his
judge and executioner. “Everyone did. We did everything we could . . . everything . . . everything . . . and now . . . and now they come and . . .”

  Fear and confusion shook the old man, until it seemed they might tear him to pieces. Apparently Hark had succeeded in dragging Pale Soul back to the bitter present. The old man looked up at Hark with sudden surprise, as if the latter had appeared unexpectedly.

  “You!” Pale Soul looked aghast. “They sent you, didn’t they? They want you to squeeze information out of me!” One frail hand made a weak clenching motion, as if crushing the juice from an even frailer fruit.

  “No, no!” Hark told him soothingly, even as his conscience stung. Pale Soul was right. That was exactly why Hark was there. What choice did he have, though? “You remember me! I live here—we’ve talked lots of times. I’m Flint, one of the acolytes. They’re going to rename me Will of the Waves. Remember?” Pale Soul had often mistaken him for an acolyte long gone, and Hark hoped this would serve him well now.

  The old man blinked at him uncertainly, eyeing Hark’s yellow acolyte robes.

  Hark followed up his advantage. “I never heard the Gathergeist sing,” he said calmly, “but I saw the Glass Cardinal once, when I was young. My family was out in a little boat, and it passed us in the water.” He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the story Vyne had told him. “It moved like it was water itself. There was a cloudy rainbow on its skin that rippled. Its scream sounded the way moonlight looks.”