Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

He’s my friend! signed Hark in frustration, then realized that this was a poor argument, given his past record with friendships. And he’s right! We need someone who knows about the Undersea!

  That just means he can send us off course or get us killed! signed Selphin fiercely.

  He warned me about the gods! Hark protested. He tried to break the heart!

  How did he know it belonged to the Hidden Lady? Selphin returned to her earlier question, her signs expansive and exasperated. He knows something about all of this that he’s not telling you! Why are you so stupid?

  “Quest,” Hark said slowly, “how did you recognize the Hidden Lady’s heart?”

  “There is no time for this!” Quest’s face was contorted with anxiety.

  How many times had Quest sidestepped or deflected questions? Quest was like a dry rose, a tightly folded knot of old secrets. Every papery petal you pulled away revealed more. Even now, Hark knew that there were more layers. He couldn’t say how many or what lay at their heart.

  Hark needed to know, before they went into the dark together. Selphin was right.

  “I want to trust you, Quest,” Hark said quietly. “But I can’t just follow people blindly anymore. How did you know it was hers?”

  There was a pause, during which Quest breathed deeply and raggedly. Then he gave Hark a haggard, complicated smile. It was the smile of one who sees that a long game is over and who realizes that he is very tired of playing it.

  “I knew,” said Quest, “because the Hidden Lady showed me her heart. And because I tore that heart from her when I killed her.”

  Chapter 38

  “You . . . killed her?” Hark repeated stupidly.

  You couldn’t! signed Selphin, looking flabbergasted. She was a god!

  The Lady with her drowned-looking beauty and her impossibly long spider-crab legs, hidden in a forest of her own snaking, weed-like tresses. The Lady with her mysteries, and secrets, and otherworldly cleverness. The mistress of Lady’s Crave, a teller of tales older than the oaks . . .

  Quest turned to Selphin.

  May I explain in speech? he asked. My sign is slow and not good enough.

  Selphin gave a little frowning shrug and turned up the scare-lamp to full brightness. Quest blinked as the purple light shone onto his face.

  “The Hidden Lady was a lonely god,” he began. “That was her weakness. She told me her secrets. She had found a way to move her heart out of her core, up her neck and into her hair. She even showed me. It took a long time, and it hurt her, but she could push her heart to the end of a hair tendril—like a ball in a stocking.”

  Why would she put her heart in her hair? demanded Selphin.

  “She was lonely,” said Quest again. “She was desperate. We priests spoke with her, but our lives were too small, warm, and brief. She wanted to talk to her own kind, who had seen and breathed the abyss long enough to understand her. But she did not dare get too close to them.”

  Hark noticed Selphin looking uncertain and hastened to explain.

  Heartbeats, he signed. The gods felt each other’s heartbeats from a distance. It made them go crazy and forced them to fight each other to the death.

  “When she was still a young god,” continued Quest, “the Hidden Lady heard the Gathergeist singing in the deep. She realized it was another young, clever god and wanted to talk to it, but she could not risk feeling its heartbeat or letting it feel hers. She knew that would overwhelm their reason and force them to fight.

  “So she learned to move her heart.

  “With the heart at the end of a hair strand, she could hold it at distance from her body. Holding her heart out behind her, she approached the Gathergeist, close enough to call out to it. The Lady told it what she had done, so it imitated her and moved the chain containing its heart farther away from her. They could speak that way, without sensing each other’s hearts.

  “They did not talk often. It was dangerous to be so close and to leave their hearts so vulnerable. Sometimes years would pass without them speaking, but it was enough to hold off their madness.”

  “They were . . . friends?” Hark knew immediately that this was the wrong term.

  “No,” said Quest. “They were each other’s . . . storykeepers. However, after the Gathergeist ate the Swallower and doubled in size, it felt its mind dulling.”

  Big gods lose their minds, Hark explained to Selphin.

  “The Gathergeist was able to tell the Lady of that last fight, but after that its mind guttered and went out. The Lady hid from the Gathergeist as it swam toward Siren. Afterward, she was alone again. She asked me to help her . . .” Quest was trembling slightly. “She asked me to find another intelligent god and lead them close enough to talk to her. I lied. I told her I had arranged it. She moved her heart to a hair tip, waiting to hear the new god approach. I cut the heart away. Fled with it. Left her to die.”

  Quest’s brutal frankness was too much for Hark.

  “Why?” he blurted out, feeling an ache like grief. “Why did you do it?”

  Despite all Quest’s bitter words about the gods, he had seemed to respect the Hidden Lady. Hark had sensed a strange intimacy—not the physical closeness of lovers, nor even a romantic friendship, but a meeting of souls nonetheless.

  “She had to be destroyed,” answered Quest. “Her mind was dying, leaving only a monster. And I needed her heart.”

  “What for?” asked Hark, then immediately felt that he knew the answer. “You needed to heal someone!”

  “Not someone, no,” answered Quest. “I needed her heart so I could heal the Myriad from an ancient sickness. I needed it so that I could kill the gods. All of them.”

  Hark and Selphin stared at the old man before them.

  The Cataclysm. Quest was talking about the Cataclysm. The event that had reshaped the Myriad, left hundreds of orphans, wiped ports off shorelines, and scarred a million minds. Everyone over thirty-five remembered where they had been when the Cataclysm happened.

  Now Quest stood there calmly, face livid in the purple light, and told them that he had planned it.

  “I joined the priesthood to be near a woman who did not love me,” Quest went on. “But I stayed in the priesthood to find a way that the gods might be destroyed. I watched them for twenty years, to discover whether they could die.

  “I learned they fell apart without enough fear to breathe. If a god was too far from the Myriad for too long, its heart failed and it died. A god called the Fourfaced was swept by storm far out to sea, then chased a pod of whales a hundred miles. It died, and whalers from the continent found its body. The priests kept it secret.

  “At first I thought I could lure the gods away from the Myriad to their deaths, one by one,” Quest went on. “Some gods could be lured a little distance. The Cardinal followed bright lights. Dolor liked colored boards. Wanderer would chase a dead whale dragged behind a boat. But they would turn back when their bodies started to fail.

  “Then the Lady showed me her heart. I realized that if I could cut it away still beating, I had something no god could resist. Gods would chase another god’s heartbeat even to their deaths.

  “It would take too long to lead each of them out to sea with the heart, one by one. There were more than forty gods, scattered over a thousand miles. If I took too long, the priesthood would catch me or new gods would rise.

  “I needed a much quicker way of killing them, and I found it.”

  In Hark’s head, the pieces started to come together.

  “You led them to each other!” he said accusingly. “You used the heart to bring them together, so they would fight and eat each other!”

  “Yes,” confirmed Quest. “A group of us in a fast ship dragged the heart in the water. We made the gods fight, then led the winner to the next god, and the next. When a god had eaten many others, and grown so vast it was causing tidal waves, we led it far out to sea to die. Then we returned, went to another part of Myriad, and did it all again, and again.”

  The a
pocalyptic sea battles, still recounted in taverns or whispered of on deathbeds, had all been part of a carefully constructed plan. Kalmaddoth’s battle with the Red Forlorn, the Silver Cataract’s ravaging of the Dawn Sister, the shrieking rampage of the Gathergeist . . .

  People died! Selphin signed sharply. Hundreds of people died from the waves and the gods going crazy!

  “Yes,” replied Quest. “Maybe even thousands in the end. The friends who helped me all died, too, during our mission. The last god to die was the Gathergeist, and it dragged down our ship with its last strength. My comrades were lost, and so was the heart.”

  Hark felt shattered and shaky. Quest, his wise, secretive ally and confidant, had deliberately triggered the Cataclysm. The answer to the greatest secret of the age had been curled in his frail fist for thirty years.

  “You look angry and upset,” said Quest, watching Hark in his usual shrewd way. “Are you grieving for the innocents lost? Or are you still thinking of the Lady? She killed thousands, mostly on whims. The island of Twice is so named because she rose up on two different occasions to devour all its inhabitants. Was she more tragic than they were?”

  Hark felt himself redden. It was true: Quest’s betrayal of the Lady still stung him to the core. He realized that he had been thinking as though her pain, loneliness, and death were somehow bigger and more important than anyone else’s. Hypnotic, Quest had called the gods. Even though Hark had never seen the Lady in life, he had been hypnotized by the sinuous allure of the stories. What was she, though, when you dissected the thought of her?

  “You must not love them,” said Quest gently. “It is easy to love power, because power tells you it is majesty and beauty and greatness. But the gods were monsters. Do not even love their memory. Hate me if you like for the human deaths I caused. I tried to avoid them, but I knew the risks. I am not a good man. But the gods are dead.”

  Hark looked at Selphin, who scowled heavily.

  If he’s telling the truth, he’s a monster, too, she signed.

  A monster who kills gods, Hark replied.

  The smuggler girl glared at him or at some thought beyond him.

  Let’s go, she signed suddenly and angrily. All of us. Let’s go now.

  By the scare-light Hark could see that her jaw was set, her face ashen pale.

  Are you sure? He signed back.

  Just open the hatch! She signed rapidly. Do it quickly!

  Do it quickly before I change my mind, said her expression.

  Chapter 39

  One by one, all three scrambled into the Butterfly. Hark and Selphin had to take the seats so they could operate the pedals. Hark didn’t like asking Quest to squeeze into the gap between the seats, but there was no choice.

  Hark quickly checked the air rack and breather boxes behind the seats. There were three full air-bottles. The soda ash was fresh and the soak powder dry. He pulled the hatch closed, and as before, the outside world was fogged by the faintest rainbow haze.

  There were only two helmets. Selphin watched her crewmates buckle them on with an acerbic eye.

  You both look like mushrooms, she signed. Hark noticed, however, that she was taking care to look only at her companions or at the ceiling of the cave. She was breathing quickly and keeping her gaze away from the dark water below and on either side.

  We’re going down, he signed, as best he could without elbowing Quest.

  She nodded curtly.

  He pulled a handle gently and hoped. The water enveloped them, plunging them into darkness. Too late, Hark realized why Vyne had put the front light on first.

  He remembered her lighting the lamp by turning a wheel. The first wheel his groping fingers found caused a shrieking, white-cold musical note to shudder the sub. The second made the sub lurch backward a foot so that it jolted against the stone ledge.

  Quest was trying to sign something. It was barely visible and was probably some variant of Are you sure you know how to drive this thing?

  Thankfully, the third wheel caused a glimmer to appear in the lamp.

  We have to pedal now, Hark signed, and then realized that Selphin had her eyes tightly closed and was gripping the sides of her seat. When he tapped her arm she opened her eyes, and he repeated the signs, but he wasn’t sure at first whether she had understood it. After a few seconds she gave an unsteady nod.

  He turned the pedals and felt them move with more ease once Selphin joined in.

  Now I just have to remember the rest of the controls, he thought. These steer left and right, I think—yes!

  One step at a time. One difficult and potentially fatal step at a time.

  The water grew lighter as they emerged from the cave. The underwater light was even more beautiful than before, dimly jeweled by the morning sun. Shocks of weed danced like green and amber flames.

  A dark shape swooped at the Butterfly from a distance, undulating with unbearable grace, and buffeted the glass sphere. Hark yelled aloud, and his was not the only scream. The next moment, his brain understood what he had seen: the whiskered face, the paw-like fins tucked against its body, the silvery glisten of its oily dark pelt.

  Selphin burst out laughing. Seal, she signed. Hunting a big glass fish.

  Hark laughed, too, his heart still banging. He couldn’t put things off anymore. The real Jelt might be noticing the disturbance in the water even now. Hark tucked the bellows under his arm, and gave it some experimental squeezes.

  I’m turning on the scream, he signed, so that the others could brace themselves.

  Hark turned what he thought was the screaming wheel, and the sub lurched backward again. A forward jet of water blasted a couple of anemones off their rock and made the pipefish scatter. Hark swore violently. He was now perspiring as much from embarrassment as effort.

  The next wheel did release the same pure, rending scream as before. Its note slowly waned to a dusky murmur, but when Hark squeezed the bellows under one arm, the note returned. This is just a giant pipe organ, Hark told himself, staring at all the stops, pulls, and levers. I just need to work out how to play it.

  He pulled out one of the stops, and the single note rose to a piercing wail that he could feel in his teeth. The wings on either side were now drooping, and the sub’s nose was dipping. The Butterfly was drifting downward toward the ragged rocks fifteen feet below.

  In a panic, he pushed the stop back in again, and the sound dropped to a bass rumble. The wings whipped up so sharply he was afraid that they might snap. He needed to make the wings flap, so if he pulled the stop in and out . . .

  The Butterfly yodeled sickeningly, as though he were torturing her. The wings jerked up and down, buckling weirdly as they did so and making the sub dip and rear. Hark felt sick. This wasn’t how Dr. Vyne had steered it at all! She had made the wings ripple like silk. How had she done it?

  He remembered the straps of her helmet hanging loose and the grimace of pained concentration on her face. She must have left it unfastened so that she could hear the notes a little better.

  Reluctantly, he pulled loose the buckle of his helmet. The pressure of the padding was released very slightly, and the Butterfly’s sound slid into his brain like a knife. He felt as though his skull was shuddering and shaking his brain to jelly. He released the bellows, but the note seemed to go on and on. It screamed the way the sea screamed, without reason or forgiveness. It was a white sound, everything was white, he was lost in the white . . .

  Something in the white darkness was shaking him by the collar. It slapped him twice, then shook him again.

  Hark gradually recovered his ability to think. The world was still a loud and painful place, but now the ululating scream had settled into a long, piercing trill that didn’t melt his brain. He groggily opened his eyes and found Selphin leaning across him so that she could get the bellows under one arm.

  Stop us from crashing! she signed frantically, hampered somewhat by the bellows.

  The glassy wings were rippling slightly now, propelling the sub forwa
rd. However, this was taking them directly toward a jagged-looking rock the size of a house. The Butterfly was also listing relentlessly to starboard.

  Hark grabbed the steering controls and turned sharply to port. Selphin dropped back into her own seat, and Hark tucked the bellows back under his own arm. The tilt started to right itself slightly, possibly because Selphin was no longer on Hark’s side of the sub.

  The Screaming Sea Butterfly wheeled slowly to the left, turning away from the rock face, but Hark could see that her starboard wing would pass perilously close to it. He could feel his stomach muscles tensing, as if that would help the wing flinch back. He didn’t want to see its supple curve torn to limp pulp like jellyfish flesh . . .

  The iridescent wing tip skimmed past the surface of the rock, so close that it broke off one pockmarked sponge. Its passing stirred little flurries of silt and strands of mossy weed. As the sub glided clear of the rock, Hark remembered how to breathe again.

  Hark looked at the controls. Several of them had been moved from their previous positions. Two of the stops, side by side, had been pulled out to an equal extent. Hark glanced again at the rippling wings. It was a feeble quiver, but it was a good start.

  How did you manage that? Hark signed to Selphin, who was also recovering her breath.

  She gave an expansive, bewildered shrug and pointed at the controls.

  I pulled things out and pushed them in! A lot! She put out one hand, and briefly stroked the glass wall of the sub. I could feel the vibrations, she explained, and shrugged again.

  There was a compass in front of Hark, making it possible to navigate the Butterfly. After a quick debate, they took a west-southwest course toward the edge of the Entreaty Barrier’s net.

  Even though the seating arrangement allowed all three of them to see each other’s hands, the cramped conditions made it harder to sign with full arm motions. Hark wasn’t used to having purely sign conversations this rapid with multiple people, and he struggled to follow the conversation. Selphin’s signs were clear, fluid, and expressive, but Quest’s were more stilted and limited, his face often creased in concentration rather than reflecting his meaning as it should. It didn’t help that Quest had clearly learned sign language on Siren, so some of the signs he did know differed from those used on Lady’s Crave.