Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

“No,” said Quest. “Children do not crush cities. Children learn, if a lesson is repeated often enough. The greater gods forgot what we told them, again and again, and every time it was harder to make them understand.

  “Sometimes we failed. The Dawn Sister occasionally slaughtered whole fishing fleets and left dozens of eyeless heads bobbing in the surf. The Silver Cataract caused a tidal wave that drowned half the population of Hullbrake. Graymantle would crawl ashore and murder people by the hundred every ten years or so. We always had to come up with excuses for these ‘punishments.’

  “We lived in dread of them growing so large that they could no longer understand us at all. If we could not reason with them, we had no way to stop them killing us. Their size had to be controlled by any means. Believe me, you have not experienced fear until you have descended forty fathoms to convince a shadowy colossus to let you prune it. It took all our persuasion to make the gods realize that it was for their own good. Even then, you could never predict what they would do—sometimes they forgot why we were carving pieces off them. Sometimes they simply changed their minds.

  “Dolor occasionally let us pull off one of her legs, though that was unpleasant—the bones were hollow and filled with tiny, luminous beetle-like creatures that swam and bit. Kalmaddoth gave us spare eyes, like fat, pearly melons. The Armored Prince would shudder, until one of its pincers shrugged off the hard case of its shell and was left slick and pink—”

  “I get the idea,” Hark interrupted sharply. He did not want to think of the greater gods surrendering their relics with a terrible meekness, barely understanding why.

  “Most of all,” Quest continued. “The priesthood worked to keep the big gods away from each other. If two gods sensed each other’s heartbeats, their instincts conquered their reason completely. They flung themselves at each other and fought until one was dead and in the other’s gullet. The victor would then be twice its original size, a blind hulk of hungry instinct beyond our control. We had to train each of them into a sense of territory, give them an island that was ‘theirs.’”

  “You gave them islands?” Hark asked sharply.

  “If a beast has a good feeding ground, it stays within it to defend it.” Quest seemed to recede within himself a little, become more cold and distant. “We made sure that the waters around each island were particularly rich with fear so that the ‘patron’ god would not stray. That was why the priesthood decided there had to be sacrifices.”

  “The priesthood decided?” asked Hark, taken aback. “But . . . I thought the gods demanded the sacrifices! I thought they ate them!”

  “I dare say some probably were eaten by passing gods,” Quest remarked coolly. “But that was not the reason it was done. We killed a handful of people each year, chosen from all walks of life and without hope of appeal so that everyone else would be frightened all the time.”

  “You murdered people to keep everyone scared?” Hark didn’t know why this was worse than feeding them to hungry gods, but somehow it was.

  “We kept everyone scared to keep nearly everyone alive,” Quest answered levelly.

  “There must have been a better way to protect everyone!” protested Hark.

  “The priesthood only knew what had worked for hundreds of years,” said Quest. “Put yourself in their shoes. You could try a new strategy, and maybe it would save lives, or maybe a lamprey-faced leviathan the size of an armada would crawl up into the shallows and start taking bites out of harbor villages. Would you really want to take the risk? Do you understand what I am saying? I am telling you that we priests risked our lives and sanities for centuries, and we never had the situation under control. Everyone on the Myriad was always one divine whim away from annihilation.”

  Hark stared down at the heart. It felt heavier than before. Could it really have a god furled up inside it, like an oak inside an acorn?

  “There is one more thing that you must know,” added Quest. “Something I learned from the Hidden Lady.

  “As I say, she was . . . special. She had managed not to become too large, so her wits stayed sharp, but she paid a price for that. Can you imagine anything lonelier than being the only intelligent being in that abysmal darkness? By the time I knew her, the weight of her loneliness was crushing her. The craving to devour, grow, and become numb was gradually overwhelming her. That was why she was so willing to talk to me. I was not a god, but I was better than nothing, and it gave her a chance to pass on her stories so that they would not be lost even if she forgot them.

  “She recounted even her very oldest memories. They were in pieces by that point, washed smooth and shapeless like pebbles. She couldn’t even understand the emotions attached to them anymore.

  “She remembered a pool beneath a waterfall, on a bright day. There was somebody else there. Perhaps he was her lover. Or perhaps she was drowning him. Or maybe she just saw him once and remembered him afterward. All she could really recall was brown skin and gleaming water and the sound of one of them laughing.

  “She remembered a thorn that got lodged in her big toe for so long that the skin became swollen and yellow. She asked me whether it had ever hatched, but of course I had no answer. She remembered seeing an albatross smash into a cliff, or perhaps a cliff smash into an albatross. She wondered later which of them had been angry, and why.”

  “But that doesn’t make sense!” exclaimed Hark, trying to disentangle the garbled memories. When would the Hidden Lady have encountered freshwater pools or sunlight? How could thorns ever have pierced her armored, crab-like feet? “None of that could have happened! Those sound like . . . human memories!”

  “Yes,” said Quest. “That’s exactly what they were.”

  “What?” Hark stared.

  “She was human, Hark,” said the old priest. “Once, a very long time ago. All the gods were. At the center of each of them was a twisted core that was once human and the groaning, maddened remains of a human soul.”

  No, no, that couldn’t be right. The gods were the gods were the gods . . .

  “The Lady could not remember clearly how she found herself in the Undersea,” Quest continued. “She said she ‘rained’ into it alongside other sinking human bodies, so I suppose there might have been a shipwreck. When she sank down into the Undersea she stopped drowning and started changing shape. Some of the other bodies warped and moved for a bit, but their hearts gave out one by one, strained beyond endurance by their new strangeness.

  “She did not die, because her heart transformed faster than theirs. She felt it harden, shift, and contort. It was a time of anguish beyond pain, but the heart became strong enough to keep beating. As it did so, she tasted the fear in the water and drew it in, her gills gaping to suck life from the sea. Each throb strengthened her and healed her injuries. Each throb honed her, brought her closer to her god-shape, and allowed her to pull new matter into herself.”

  As if in response to the words, the heart in Hark’s hand suddenly pulsed. Quest flinched but continued staring hard at Hark’s face.

  “Do you understand what I am telling you?” he demanded. “I am saying that in those fearful days gone by, any drowner who sank into the Undersea had a small chance of becoming a god. Do you know why it has not happened again in the thirty years since the Cataclysm? It can only be because people are less frightened, and the Undersea is less rich with fear. Even now, in these unstable times, drowners simply drown. They do not become gods.

  “But if one god were to rise, and everyone collapsed back into their ancient, superstitious terror, then the Undersea would coruscate with fear as it did in the old days. Drowners swept down into the Undersea might start to transform. More gods would rise. And more. And ever more. The cycle would begin again, and we would never escape it. Is that what you want?”

  Hark stared down at the heart in his hand. None of this was fair. Why was he stuck with this decision?

  His limbs tingled as he imagined wrapping the heart back in its sling, dropping it on the floor, and stamping on
it. He wouldn’t have to see the fragile, ornate perforations break. He wouldn’t have to think about exquisite ivory chambers shattering, the Hidden Lady’s mysterious, lonely heart trampled to powder . . .

  But it would not be her heart that he was really stamping on. It would be Jelt’s. It would be Hark’s own heart, too—his past, some vital thing knotted into the core of him too densely to be tugged out.

  “No,” said Hark quietly. “I don’t want the gods to come back. I will destroy it, all right? But . . . not yet. I need to keep my friend alive a bit longer, so I can find some other way to save him, and change him back—”

  “Every moment it exists, the future of the Myriad is in danger!” interrupted Quest.

  “I’m sorry!” said Hark, feeling conflicted and ragged. “I can’t let him die. I . . . just . . . can’t.”

  “Not even if it means the ruin of everything?” asked Quest.

  “He’d risk that for me,” said Hark wearily. “Quest . . . you’re clever, and you know about gods. Help me help my friend, so we can put him back the way he was! When he doesn’t need the heart anymore, I’ll destroy it. I promise!”

  Quest said nothing, but he seemed to subside inward. He looked very old and very, very tired.

  Chapter 30

  Quest knew of some ways to remove Marks, but none of them seemed promising. In the old days, he explained, the priests had sometimes rid themselves of mild Marks through several months of thrice-daily baths in clean water mixed with sulfur and plant oils. This would be useless in the case of somebody as Marked as Jelt.

  “That would take too long, anyway,” muttered Hark. “We need something much faster.” Every moment the heart was in Hark’s possession was a disaster waiting to happen. Even if nobody else discovered it, very soon Jelt would come looking for it. Hark had a nightmare image of Jelt breaking down the doors of Sanctuary and slashing his way through the guards, the unarmed attendants, the old priests, anything that stood between him and his goal . . .

  “I fear I do not know enough about the mechanics of Marks themselves,” admitted Quest.

  Hark knew somebody who did.

  “Quest . . . you can read, can’t you? If I brought you some books or scrolls, you could read them to me, couldn’t you?” After four months of reading lessons, Hark could recognize some words, but he knew this would not be enough.

  “What do you have in mind?”

  “Dr. Vyne has the Sanctuary archive,” Hark said bluntly, and watched Quest’s eyebrows climb up his forehead. “There are scrolls on the gods, with pictures and labels. There are documents on Marks, too. She’s been making notes on them.” He remembered her tapping a gray moleskin book as she talked about them. Perhaps that book held her research notes.

  “And . . . you can gain access to these?” asked Quest.

  The walls of the keep were impenetrable, and Vyne had the only keys to the two solid doors. But Hark had had four months to come up with ways of breaking into the museum, with its precious store of godware.

  “I think so,” he said.

  Hark emerged from the treatment room with trepidation, but thankfully the corridor outside was empty. The little group of priests that had followed him had apparently moved on elsewhere. He sprinted away down the darkened passages, mentally begging the god-heart not to pulse, until he reached the dining room, where he found Kly giving hasty orders to a few of the other attendants.

  “It’s chaos,” said Kly, looking wild-eyed and distracted. “Something sent half of them frantic—I’ve never seen them as bad as this! We’ve had to lock eight of them in their rooms, and Moonmaid tried to maim someone with a spoon.”

  “Do you want me to run down to the museum and tell Dr. Vyne?” asked Hark, trying not to sound too eager.

  “I don’t know if she’s there at the moment,” said Kly uncertainly, raking his fingers through his hair. “Go on, run down and see if you can find her. Come straight back afterward.”

  Hark was sprinting away before Kly had finished the last sentence.

  Outside Sanctuary, Hark used a dry streambed to head downhill, instead of the open, grassy road. Jelt knew where he lived and might be looking out for him. Rigg was probably on the warpath, too. She would have returned to Wildman’s Hammer to find Jelt and Hark missing, Jelt’s bodyguards sprawled unconscious, and the islet littered with unfamiliar corpses.

  Then there were the mysterious people who had demanded the heart and been slaughtered by the Jelt-thing. Who had they been? Were there more of them? And how had they known that he and Jelt were hiding a relic anyway?

  That was a very good question, and Hark had not thought about it before. How could these strangers possibly have found out about the relic? Nobody knew about it, apart from Hark, Jelt, and . . .

  Hark stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth falling open.

  And Selphin. She was the only other person who knew of the heart’s existence. The armed attackers could only have found out about it from her.

  He remembered Selphin’s grimly desperate warnings and threats. Nobody had listened to her. So perhaps she had tipped off some other group about a juicy piece of godware and told them where to find it. He remembered the bewildering care with which the mysterious attackers had disabled Jelt’s bodyguards without drawing their blades. Perhaps they had promised to do so as part of their deal with her.

  “She’s insane!” muttered Hark under his breath, genuinely aghast. Whatever her reasons, this was a serious betrayal of her family and crew. It went far beyond drawing a blade on a crewmate.

  It’s not Rigg you should be worrying about, Selphin had told him. It’s me.

  He was starting to think that she might be right.

  At the museum door, he knocked, just to make sure Vyne was out. There was no answer.

  He looked around, feeling exposed in the broad daylight. There were a couple of boats tethered in the little harbor, but no sign of anyone about.

  Dr. Vyne had said that keeps kept things in and people out. It had been a military base, designed to hold out against intruders. Most of the windows were too narrow to squeeze through.

  There was just one window that might be wide enough.

  Hark hastened around the building to the back and began to climb. The stone blocks were large, so he had to stretch to reach each new foothold, but thankfully the mortar between them had started to crumble, leaving narrow crevices.

  At the top, he pulled himself up onto the roof, sending a disgruntled coterie of pigeons into the sky. He cast a nervous glance at the steep hill that rose behind the fort. He would be obvious to anyone on the higher slopes, but for the moment he could see nobody.

  It was windier on the roof, though the blocky crenellations shielded Hark a little. The flagstones all around were streaked with bird droppings, and there were a few grimy puddles. In the very middle of the roof was a circular hole a foot wide, filled with a shallow dome of gleaming glass. It was Dr. Vyne’s god-glass window. It wasn’t large, but someone skinny might be able to wriggle through it, if they could get the glass out of the way.

  Hark hurried over to it and laid a hand upon the cold, hard god-glass. It left his fingertips feeling slightly numb. He tried to rattle the dome in its metal rim, but it was snug in its seal.

  With his free hand, he took out his tuning fork and rapped its tines hard against the stone floor. As its hum became a clear, pure note, he held the fork close to the domed glass.

  The surface of the glass softened under his hand. Instead of the glass dome slipping out of its socket, however, his right hand sank into the glass. A moment later it had hardened around his fingers, imprisoning them in diamond-hard glass.

  “Oh, great,” he muttered.

  The gulls’ chorus changed, becoming shriller and more unsettled. Hark looked up to see what had disturbed them, and froze. In the far distance, near the top of the hill, something was zigzagging down the slope in leaps. It was man-size and too far away to see clearly, but it was drawing closer rapidly. It
was a thing of nightmare, coming after Hark despite the daylight . . .

  In panic, Hark tried to yank his hand free. The god-glass held it fast, and he only succeeded in cutting his knuckles.

  Hark rapped the fork again and held it against the glass with a shaking hand. The dome abruptly fell away from its rim, releasing his fingers. There was a deafening clatter below. Without hesitation, Hark swung his feet in through the gap, and wriggled through. He dropped into the darkened study, landing in an awkward crouch.

  There was a rustling thud on the roof overhead. Half winded, Hark looked up. Above him, he could see the round, bright hole of sky where the glass had been. Then a silhouette leaned into that bright hole and blocked out most of the light.

  “Don’t you come down here!” shouted Hark, struggling to his feet. “Stay away from me, Jelt!”

  The thing put an arm down the hole, then gave a faint hiss of frustration. Perhaps it was too large to fit through.

  “I’ll break this!” Hark fumbled the heart out of its sling. “If you come any closer, I’ll smash it!”

  The buzzing and scrabbling above ceased, and there was a long, cold pause.

  “If you do that, I’ll kill you.” It still sounded like Jelt, even with the grating rasp that made Hark’s ears tingle.

  “I know,” said Hark, his mouth dry. “But I mean it. Stay away, or I’ll do it!” Not an hour before, Hark had been desperately protecting the heart, but now fear was singing in his veins.

  “You left me to die,” came the voice from above, and Hark felt the cold bitterness of those words close around his heart like a vice.

  I didn’t, he wanted to say. It wasn’t like that. I always intended to save you. And I kept the heart safe for you, didn’t I? But trying to defend yourself to Jelt was always a pit trap. You fell, and fell, and there was no bottom to the shaft.

  “I’m going to find a way to fix things, Jelt,” Hark said instead, trying to stop his teeth chattering. “Then you won’t need that heart.”

  “Just. Give it. To. Me.”