Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

  Chapter 24

  The next day, Hark set about his duties with a brisk cheeriness that sounded hollow to him. Nobody saw through it. He caught himself wishing that somebody would.

  Quest was asleep. This felt like a betrayal. Hark came back and checked on him repeatedly, but his thin, almost inaudible snores sawed on. Only after several hours did Hark drop in to find Quest finally awake, blinking slowly at the world as if surprised to find it still there.

  “Everyone else has eaten,” Hark said, as he brought over Quest’s tray. “I put yours aside.”

  “You’re too bright,” said the old priest, narrowing his eyes as though his words were literally true. “Something is troubling you again. What is it today?”

  Hark felt an unexpected wave of gratitude, and for an embarrassing moment his eyes stung. He sat down next to Quest.

  “Do you think I’ve changed since I’ve been here?” he asked impulsively.

  “Yes,” said Quest, after a moment’s thought. He raised his eyebrows as Hark’s shoulders sagged. “That was not what you wanted to hear?”

  “How am I different?” Hark asked, fidgeting.

  “When you arrived here, you had smiles for everyone,” answered Quest. “Nearly all those smiles were false coin. There was no malice in it; you simply did not want to spend real feelings on anyone here. Why should you? Why care about people when they might kick you in the teeth tomorrow?

  “I do not think that is true anymore. You have been stuck with all of us for a while now, have you not? You cannot con us with a smile, then run away to charm someone else. Instead, you must deal with the same people day after day. You have started to care what we think and how we feel. You sat with Pale Soul when he was dying, and when he was gone, it upset you. I do not think it would have when you first arrived. You would have looked solemn for form’s sake and said all the right things, but his passing would not have got under your skin.”

  Quest was right. Never demanding, mildly uncomplaining, the thought of Pale Soul had been following Hark from room to room while he was about his duties. He felt a pang every time he saw the pale priest’s favorite chair or thought of the frail word-threads that had trailed between them without quite becoming conversations.

  “But I’m not . . . That’s just . . .” Hark didn’t even know what he wanted to say. How could he explain what he meant without explaining what he meant?

  “Why does that idea distress you?” Quest raised an eyebrow. “Why would you want to stay the same forever?”

  “But . . . what if I change so much I turn into somebody else?” Hark blurted out. “Then I’m not me anymore, am I?”

  “A very philosophical question for someone who has just woken up!” retorted Quest. There was an intrigued glint in his eye, however. “Perhaps you need to work out which parts of yourself are essential to your nature. Who are you? What aspects of yourself would you fight to protect, as if you were fighting for your life?”

  Hark’s mind went blank. What could he say about himself?

  Hark is Shelter-bred. Hark tells stories. Hark lies. Hark can haggle in fifteen languages. Hark is Jelt’s best friend, closer than blood. Hark holds the Shelter record for the longest time holding a racing crab with bare hands . . . None of these sounded right. They were true, but they didn’t describe the heart of him.

  “I don’t know,” he said. Suddenly he felt like the soft, glassy jellyfish that Selphin had accused him of being. There was nothing solid inside him.

  “You are still young,” Quest said phlegmatically. “You will find out who you are when your choices test you. In the end, we are what we do and what we allow to be done.”

  What we allow to be done. Hark thought about Selphin’s desperate face as she was dragged in to be “healed.” What did that make him, then?

  “What if . . .” Hark took a deep breath and let it out again slowly. “What if something else is changing me?”

  “What do you mean?” asked the old man, frowning slightly.

  “I don’t know!” Hark said sullenly, swerving in despair from the secrets he could not share. “This place, maybe . . . Sanctuary . . . all the goddery and worship and oldness, and the Undersea water in the baths.” He was babbling now, but he pushed on. “What if . . . what if living near all of that could change you? Not just your body, but who you are inside?”

  For a few seconds Quest watched him in silence. He no longer seemed to find Hark’s comments merely diverting or intellectually stimulating.

  “Yes,” he said simply at last. “I have seen this place change people. One must change to live, but . . . not all changes are good. Some warp the spirit. I have seen friends so changed that I no longer knew them.”

  “What happened?” Hark felt the hair rising on the back of his neck.

  “We joined the priesthood.” Quest gave a grim smile. “We were told to think of it as a rebirth, of course. We were given fresh names and trained to treat the other neonates as our only family, but that was only the beginning of the change.

  “In order to do what we did in those days, we needed to believe in our own holiness. However, if you believe that you are holier than other people, then I think after a while you lose something. Humility. Warmth. Humor. Many of us agonized over the sacrifices at first, but habit deadens you. The scars build up on your soul.”

  Hark stared at him. He did not want to think of Quest gazing on, dead-eyed, as sacrifices walked trembling to their doom.

  “Oh, I could feel the calluses growing on my soul, too,” insisted Quest with quiet ruthlessness. “If I altered less than most, it was because my situation was different. Most of my fellows joined the priesthood because of a sense of vocation or because their family had raised them from birth for that destiny. My reason, however, was entirely stupid. I was following a girl.”

  “A girl?” Hark stared at him, startled and embarrassed. It seemed too personal a confession, coming from someone as old and dignified as Quest.

  “Her name was Ailodie,” said Quest. “She was the daughter of a priest, from a long line of priests. Her elder brother became an acolyte when he was very young, in the usual way, but died not long after his initiation. She was the next child and agreed to take his place so that none of her younger siblings would have to do so. She was kind, you see, and honorable.

  “Since there were no rules against priests having lovers, I saw no reason to stop courting her . . . but she told me that she intended to be celibate. She was afraid that if she fell in love it would lead to children. She had watched her father become distant and Marked over the years, and she did not want any child of hers to watch the same thing happen to her.

  “I thought that if I became an acolyte alongside her, I could win her over. She would realize how important she was to me and would be overwhelmed by my romantic gesture. Instead, she thought I was an idiot. She was right.

  “We became priests and took on new names. At first hers hung loose on her, and we kept forgetting to use it. Slowly she grew into it. She was changing and deadening inside, becoming somebody who she did not like and did not want to be. It was as though this new priest-self was killing Ailodie, inch by inch, and taking over her body.”

  “Did she notice that she was changing?” Hark could not help asking.

  “I suspect so,” Quest said, and sighed. “But she was not changed by visiting the gods, or the Undersea waters, or handling divine relics. We changed her, just as we changed each other and ourselves. We are all squeezed into new shapes by the people around us. If we are paying attention, though, we always have some say in how we are altered. The priesthood corroded Ailodie because she was resigned to it.”

  “And you weren’t?” From the start, Hark had been puzzled by Quest and his curious detachment from the other priests.

  “Oh, Sanctuary changed me in a completely different way,” said Quest, smiling as though something were darkly funny.

  Hark sensed that confidences were over.

  “If you saw me be
coming somebody else . . . the way Ailodie did . . . you’d tell me, wouldn’t you?” Hark felt miserably pathetic asking the question. It was like a small child asking a parent to check the shadows of the eaves for monsters.

  “If I see signs that your soul is drying out and deadening, then I will be sure to mention it,” said Quest. “But at present I do not think you have anything to worry about.”

  Quest’s words were interrupted by a heaving, gasping, coughing fit that shook him for nearly a minute. At last the coughs subsided, and the old priest breathed carefully for a little while, wiping tears from his eyes with one knuckle.

  “Do you need some medicine or something?” asked Hark, but the old man shook his head.

  “It will not help, I fear. I suffered a bad case of Riser’s Bane during the Cataclysm, and my lungs have never quite forgiven me.”

  Riser’s Bane was the sea’s punishment for rising from the depths too fast or in the wrong way. It ravaged your soft and tender inner workings, such as your eardrums, the fine veins of your eyes, or the frail florets of your lungs.

  “Change is a lot more frightening when you are older,” Quest continued, conversationally. He did not look afraid. If anything, he seemed slightly wistful. “Gradually, gradually, your body lets you down. You reach a certain age . . . and almost every change is bad news. Bulletins from the front in a war you are losing. At your age, you are still asking yourself: Who should I be? I must ask myself: Did I manage to be the person I wanted to be, in the end? And how many chances do I have left to be that person?”

  Of course, Hark did have urgent reasons to be afraid of dying, but he understood that there was a difference. Hark was facing danger; Quest was facing inevitability, and facing it with his usual ironic, analytical smile.

  Chapter 25

  Three days later, Hark met Coram on the beach again.

  “Any news of Selphin?” Hark blurted out, before the tall man had even hailed him.

  The news was not good. Selphin had not returned. If she had reached shore, she was avoiding her mother’s gang and doing so more effectively than anybody had expected. Nobody voiced the other possibility in Rigg’s presence, of course. Selphin’s body had not been found, but the sea was hungry and mysterious and did not always give back its prey.

  The gang had chased a few clues that came to nothing. A fisherman thought he had seen her aboard a lugger, but this turned out to have been a different girl. There were stray reports of her on the island of Rattleguise, forty miles away, but that proved to be a red herring, too.

  Hark had hoped for news of her alive so that he could settle finally on anger—clean, uncomplicated anger—instead of his current mess of doubt, guilt, and dread.

  “Rigg thinks somebody’s hiding her,” said Coram. “Otherwise we’d have found her by now.”

  Maybe she’s run far away, thought Hark hopefully. She’s stubborn enough. If she worked passage to the far end of the Myriad, that would explain why we haven’t heard from her.

  He was not sure whether he believed it, however. She had been afraid of the god-heart’s effect on herself but also fiercely concerned about the way it was affecting her crewmates and friends. Would she really abandon them?

  They climbed into the submersible as usual, and Hark huddled under the table, absorbed in his own thoughts. It took him a while to notice that Coram kept darting glances at him as he rowed.

  “What’s wrong?” Hark asked, too tired to play guessing games.

  “Nothing,” said Coram. “I was just wondering something.” He cleared his throat. “I was wondering about that Undersea wave—the one that Marked you and your friend. I never heard of one that close to the surface. Do you reckon a wave like that is a . . . sign of something?”

  “What kind of something?” asked Hark.

  Coram puffed out his cheeks, then rowed for another few strokes without answering.

  “People are saying maybe the Undersea’s angry, or . . . trying to tell us something.”

  He looked at Hark again. By the light of the dim, purple lamps, his expression looked perplexed but slightly hopeful, as if he thought Hark might have answers for him.

  “Why would the Undersea be angry?” asked Hark in bewilderment.

  “Well . . . my wife’s uncle thinks it’s my fault. Our fault. Everyone doing deals with the continentals, letting their ships sail the Myriad. He knows we’re going out to trade with the Pelican tonight, and he doesn’t like it. ‘Opening the sluice gate,’ he calls it. He says the continentals will all pour in and never stop until they’ve taken over everything.”

  Hark had heard plenty of mutters of that sort in the marketplace growing up, but that was just the sort of thing old people said, or Leaguers. He was learning that a lot of other people felt that way, too.

  “Did you hear about what happened on Rattleguise?” Coram went on. “Some sailors from the east continent came ashore and started snooping around the docks, looking at the cannons on the parapet. So a crowd of lumpers and dockworkers strung the sailors up from a crane as spies, before the guards even got there. Then the ship trained its cannons on the harbor and wouldn’t leave till the warehouse owners banded together and gave them a lot of money.”

  “Bet it didn’t happen like that,” Hark said with stubborn nonchalance. “It was probably just a fistfight that got out of hand. Makes a good story, though, doesn’t it?” He didn’t want to believe that his fellow Myriddens were so frightened of continentals that they would murder them for walking along an artillery parapet. He didn’t want to believe that those vast merchant ships from the continent might start firing on harbor fronts and extorting money.

  “This is just the start,” said Coram, the purple light glinting in his earnest eyes. “That’s what everyone’s saying now. So maybe that’s why the Undersea’s angry. Maybe it sent that wave on purpose to Mark you. Maybe you and your friend are what the Myriad need right now.”

  Hark was starting to understand why Selphin had been worried about her half-brother. Coram was too young to remember the Cataclysm, but some young people still had an odd hole inside them, left by the deaths of the gods. He had always seemed rather levelheaded, but you couldn’t always tell with the quiet ones. Sometimes they got hold of a crazy idea and sat there in secret turning it over and over and over, like a dead kitten.

  At Wildman’s Hammer, Hark numbly went through the motions during the healing session. Jelt seemed to have forgotten about Selphin altogether, and Hark was rather happy about it, since he didn’t think he could bear any jokes on the subject. As he was waiting to be taken back to Nest, however, Coram ran over to him.

  “Hey! Just got word from the captain. You’re to come out again tonight. Be at the usual place by midnight.”

  “What?” Hark stared at him. “Why?”

  “Someone says they saw Selphin, down at the old docks at the Pales.” Coram seemed brighter and more cheerful than he had for a while. The Pales were a set of old dockyards on Twice, an island on the far side of Lady’s Crave. “She might have been living down there in one of the old warehouse cellars.”

  Of course she’s alive. Of course she was alive all the time. She was probably laughing at us all for thinking she might be dead.

  “The lucky thing is, the Pales is on a spit, so if we get half a dozen men down there, we can cut her off.” Coram rubbed his neck. “I hope six is enough,” he muttered.

  “Why only six?” asked Hark.

  “The Pelican’s hanging offshore tonight, so we’re sending out a boat to trade with them. Rigg needs most of the gang for that.”

  “So . . . you want me to help catch Selphin?” Hark’s spirits sank.

  “No,” said Coram. “We need you waiting here. If we set off for Twice now, we can catch Selphin and be back tonight. Rigg wants her healed as soon as we can get her to you. It ends tonight.”

  For the rest of the day, Hark stumbled through his chores, unable to think of anything but his conversation with Coram. Selphin was apparentl
y alive, but that very night she would probably be caught. Then he would be expected to “fix” her, the very thing she had risked her life to avoid.

  We are what we do and what we allow to be done, Quest had said.

  Even if Selphin was wrong about the god-heart rewriting her personality, it still meant forcing something on her that terrified her. What could he do, though? If Hark refused, or failed his appointment, Rigg would skin him alive at the first opportunity.

  Maybe I could help Selphin escape. The thought hit him while he was mopping the floors and brought him to a halt. His chest tightened. It was an insane idea, but for some reason it was also exhilarating, liberating.

  What could he do?

  Rigg had talked about having Selphin tied up. Hark could try to slip the smuggler girl something sharp so that she could cut through her bonds.

  She would still need to get off the island, of course. Hark pondered this as he pounded laundry in its bucket and hung up robe after robe on a roof terrace. Maybe Selphin could steal whatever vessel brought her to Wildman’s Hammer, or perhaps the boat belonging to Jelt’s pet bodyguards. Darkness would help her a little.

  Selphin would be heavily outnumbered. Jelt’s creepy followers guarded him throughout the night these days, so they would be there, as well as whichever members of her own gang brought her. There was nothing Hark could do about that—or was there? He couldn’t get rid of them, but perhaps he could make them less alert.

  Some of the cordials in the Sanctuary storeroom were sedatives. Quantities were recorded to discourage staff from selling the medicines on the black market. However, Hark had an understanding with the attendant who was doing exactly that, so he was sure he could divert a dose.

  “Have you seen Kly?” asked one of the other staff, as Hark returned to the dining hall. “I can’t find him anywhere.”

  “No—but I can have a look for him!” Hark offered eagerly. Now if he was spotted going into the storeroom, he could just claim he was making a thorough search.