Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

  Hark brought the sub up to a depth of ten feet. Here the water was still bright with slices of dancing sapphire. The swell tugged at her, but she was slippery and sliced through the will of the water the way the fish did. Hark started to feel that odd giddy excitement the Butterfly had given him before.

  By gently tweaking the controls, Hark found ways to change the scream so that it increased the ripple of the wings. The sub skimmed along faster, and then faster. He couldn’t make it dart and swoop the way Vyne had, but at least it wasn’t tilting, plummeting, or jerking its wings like a convulsing gull.

  For now, there was no sign of Jelt, but Hark didn’t believe for a moment that he had given up his pursuit. He would certainly have heard the Butterfly leave and perhaps even seen its glassy shape skimming away underwater.

  The seafloor was slowly dropping away beneath them, rugged with shadowy crags and ravines. Mackerel exploded in silver from behind the timbers of a shattered rowing boat. Bream and glum-faced groupers darted for cover as the Butterfly’s shadow skimmed over them. The sea was five fathoms deep, then six, then seven, the bottom growing murkier.

  Hark glanced at Selphin. Her jaw was clenched again, her breathing shaky and shallow.

  Sorry, he signed discreetly, so that Quest couldn’t see. I know you didn’t want this.

  Selphin gave a lopsided grimace.

  I told you, I don’t want a stupid death, she signed back, her motions a bit nervous and jerky. I don’t want to drown for no good reason. But saving the Myriad isn’t stupid.

  Even in clear water on a good day, there is only so far ahead you can see. A fine mist in the water fogs everything distant. There are tiny particles of things that have lived and things that have not, all on their own individual voyage.

  So it was that the great net of the Entreaty Barrier approached the Screaming Sea Butterfly by stealth, like an enormous predator. At first it was only an indistinct hint of darkness somewhere ahead. Gradually the huge, shadowy net of chains became visible in the distance, blurry with the marine mist. Hark slowed the Butterfly as they approached.

  Seen from a distance, the net seemed to hang still, like the web of a vast spider. As the sub grew closer, however, Hark could see that the whole momentous net was swaying slowly seaward, then snapping back with surprising force. It looked graceful, like the billowing of weed in a swell, but Hark knew the lashing of the great chains could knock you unconscious or smash in the side of a diving bell.

  The square holes in the mesh were five feet wide. The links were a span broad, and their metal all but invisible, choked and shaggy with life. Limpets and barnacles clustered next to pink sea squirts and anemones.

  Sway and snap, sway and snap. The net extended to the left and right, no end in sight in either direction. Hark turned the sub to the left, to follow the net south.

  The air had been growing stuffy, and Hark noticed himself feeling groggy, so he released a little air from one of the copper bottles in the rack. He let out a little more as they skimmed parallel to the net, trying to stay out of its way.

  A few minutes later they found where the net ended in a rocky spire that rose up to break the surface. Hark navigated around this island. There was no sign of the Abysmal Child’s passing.

  Hark turned off the lights.

  The darkness was a shock, even though he could still see a reasonable distance in the blue-gray twilight. It was the disappearance of the submarine that was startling. When Hark couldn’t see the cockpit or his friends, he could imagine for a moment that he was quite alone in the deeps, drowning without feeling it.

  There was still no sign of a luminescent trail, not even the slightest gleam.

  Hark’s heart plunged. Of course, the search for such a trail had been a long shot, but if they couldn’t find it, there was no backup plan. He scanned the darkness until his eyes ached, then reluctantly put on the lights again.

  As he did so, Selphin suddenly tapped his arm and pointed ahead.

  Almost beyond the reach of the sub’s lights floated a great, indistinct cloud of jellyfish, like spectral parasols. Halfway down its bulk was a darker patch where only mangled, ghostly shreds floated. Something large appeared to have carved through the middle of the fluther, tearing their soft, translucent pulp and leaving a great gash in the cloud.

  Hark exchanged an excited glance with Selphin. The gash was of the right size to have been caused by the Abysmal Child.

  It looks like they went that way! he signed.

  They are taking the old route over the . . . ! Quest signed. The last sign was not one used on Lady’s Crave, and the priest seemed to notice his companions’ confusion.

  West, he simply signed instead.

  The Butterfly left behind the Entreaty Barrier and its momentous net, and Hark set a course west.

  Through the glass, Hark could see the sub’s lights carving out pale scoops in the dim water. Ahead, the seafloor dropped steeply, in a thirty-foot cliff. At the cliff’s base extended a broad, deep plateau. It was barren-looking, too low for kelp or weed, and yet it held a forest of sorts. The light from the Butterfly glinted on jostling turrets, upward-jutting oars, broken hulls, and skewed propellers.

  It was a submarine graveyard, extending beyond the reach of the light.

  Little barrel-shaped skimmers bared their timber bones, their leather long since eaten away. Vast salvage vessels slumbered half buried, never to wake. Diving bells lay on their sides, shelter for dark, darting shoals.

  All these vessels had dared the sea, full of ambition, warmth, greed, and camaraderie. The Embrace had chewed them up and spat them out again on its doorstep, as a contemptuous warning. Hark wondered how many of the broken subs had come here to salvage from this very disaster-scape. He remembered what Selphin had said about “stupid deaths.”

  Gazing ahead and below them, Hark could see a great, double-peaked pillar of rock rising out of the submarine graveyard. It was two houses wide and taller than Sanctuary.

  To the pillar, Quest signed.

  As Hark guided the sub downward, he started to see the plain of wreckage differently. From a distance, it had looked frozen, its stillness eerie. Now he became aware of countless flickers of motion. Red scales flashed behind a porthole as some bigeyes flinched away from the light. A large spider crab crept over the debris slowly with its long, brittle-looking legs. On every turret and hull, thousands of soft polyps and wispy feelers would be feeding off the current.

  Hark loved that about the sea. It was always dangerous, as the plain of wreckage proved, but life always found a foothold, or sucker-hold, or roothold, on anything it could.

  Quest winced and stretched, turning his head this way and that to work out the stiffness in his neck.

  Are you all right? Hark could not help asking, at a moment when he felt safe releasing the controls. Quest might be the mastermind of the Cataclysm, but he was also a frail, unwell friend who appeared to be in pain.

  Quest froze where he was, staring backward through the glass ceiling.

  There is something behind us, he signed.

  Hark twisted to look back but could see nothing in the darkness behind, apart from a brownish school of large cod. Selphin peered back as well, then met his eye and shook her head.

  Was it him? she asked Quest. Hark could guess who she meant.

  It is hard to be certain, signed Quest. It fled the light.

  Down here, the press of the water would surely crush the life out of any creature not suited to such depths. Yet Hark couldn’t shake the dread that it was Jelt out there, still chasing Hark to recover the god-heart. Jelt didn’t know that the heart was now embedded in a god-construct and entombed in the hold of a completely different submarine.

  He could still be there, just beyond the light, suggested Selphin, reassuringly. He could be following in the dark.

  Chapter 40

  The great pillar approached, until Hark could make out the crevices in its red rock and the rubble around its base. He slowed the sub a
nd turned off the lamp again.

  The darkness was denser than it had been before.

  After a second or two, however, Hark’s sight adjusted, and what he noticed was the livid blueness of the darkness. He had heard deep-sea salvage mariners tell him of the strange brightness of the light in the depths. The rock pillar ahead was still indistinctly visible.

  A rapid double tap on his arm. Hark turned the light back on.

  Port side! Selphin signed. Halfway up!

  Hark turned off the light again and saw what Selphin had already seen. Adrift in the water, on the port side of the pillar, was the tiniest wisp of floating light.

  Hope hammered painfully in Hark’s chest. He flicked the lamp on again to steer around the pillar, then turned it off once more. Selphin’s sharp eyes quickly spotted another drifting strand of glow, already fraying. It was to the west-southwest and slightly downward. Dr. Vyne had been right—there was a trail they could follow.

  Beyond the pillar was another precipice, falling away into darkness. The Butterfly’s little lamps could not penetrate to the bottom.

  The Embrace, signed Quest. Things will become . . . strange. We are still above the Undersea, but where the Undersea is high, the ordinary sea is mad. Creatures from the deeps are found higher. Light is lost sooner. All is treachery.

  They found another glowing trace, then another. To follow the luminous trail, they had no choice but to keep turning the light on and off.

  Hark realized that he was feeling sick and that his head ached. The first air-bottle was now light and empty, so he released a little air from the next in the rack.

  He hadn’t yet found a way to expel air from the sub. He’d heard of mariners who released a lot of air into airtight subs during a journey and then fell back with bleeding ears and eyes when they opened the hatch on the surface. However, he was more worried about the rate at which they were getting through their bottled air.

  It had been getting steadily colder. Now, when Hark touched the side of the vessel, the chill of the glass was almost painful. If it had not been for the soak-powder box, the walls would have been clouded with moisture.

  Selphin sat very still as they continued on and downward, the lamplight reflected in her large eyes. Her fingers picked and picked nervously at the leather of her seat.

  Are you all right? Hark signed to her discreetly, while Quest was looking elsewhere.

  I’m not going to panic, she signed defiantly. It was not exactly an answer.

  I know, Hark replied, feeling a twinge of respect. Selphin continued watching the darkness with wary, haunted eyes.

  The creatures they passed were stranger now. Once they were passed by dozens of tiny round blobs of translucence, bobbing through the darkness. They were snails, with delicate, see-through shells, flapping little fleshy wings to fly through the water.

  Sea butterflies, signed Quest. We are moving deeper. He looked grimly tense and seemed to be trying to analyze every shift in the Butterfly’s trajectory, like a soldier sensing an enemy’s movements in the dark.

  The Undersea is restless, he signed. Look out for . . . The last sign was unfamiliar, perhaps a term used only on Siren. Seeing their incomprehension, Quest tried a few other signs instead. Fountain . . . Plume . . . Shooting upward. If you see it, move away from it fast, or we will be sucked down.

  Soon we will see the Undersea’s surface, Quest added. Enter it fast and cleanly. Do not let the great waves catch us, or they will roll us. We would be half in the sea, half in the Undersea. That would be . . . bad.

  Would that kill us? asked Hark.

  Worse, signed Quest, but you do not want to know.

  It was getting harder to follow the trail of leaked lamp fluid. There were other gleams in the darkness now. One small, drifting hint of radiance suddenly turned around and showed its teeth, then winked out and was gone. Another undulated softly away, yellow and green light shimmering hypnotically in its jellied body.

  Selphin suddenly thumped Hark on the arm, hard, and pointed. A split second later the sub was swept backward as if an invisible wave had hit it. Staring where Selphin pointed, Hark could see what Quest meant by “plume.”

  In the distance, at the furthest range of the light, he could see a vast, cloudy column thrusting its way upward, up past the level of the sub and ever up. It billowed clouds of silt and shell fragments. Green and yellow lights flickered in it, like lightning in a storm cloud. Dark, oily-looking bubbles floated up amid the debris, slowly flexing and gleaming with a purple iridescence.

  Quest had told Hark to steer away from any plumes. But the sub was already being swept away from it, wasn’t it? Even now, the plume was vanishing from view as the Butterfly was driven helplessly backward. Hark felt panicky at the sight. They would lose the trail and be completely lost in the abyss. He needed to push forward, not back!

  He fought his instincts and overcame them. He had to trust Quest. Heart thumping, he grabbed the wheel he had initially triggered twice by accident, the one that had made the sub lurch backward. He pushed in the stops that were rippling the wings, and twisted the wheel hard. The sub jerked backward so fast it nearly threw him out of his seat.

  Something changed in the water. Their backward race slowed to a juddering putter, and then the water abruptly reversed its pull. The Butterfly was no longer racing with the current—it was fighting against it. It was losing. The relentless sweep of the water was pulling it forward, toward the unseen plume.

  Onshore, Quest had mentioned “switchback currents.” Hark had heard the term before and seen submariners’ faces darken at the mention. Now he was battling one in the dark.

  He could see the dim, brown smudge of the great plume ahead now, but it was no longer really a plume. It was a huge, downward vortex, with a twist of darkness at its heart.

  Hark kept the wheel twisted to its full extent, but he could feel it losing its strength. Whatever emergency water jet had thrust them backward was apparently not infinite. The Butterfly was drawn closer and closer, until he could see the glitter of mangled fish whirling inside the pillar.

  Then the current slowly eased its terrible grip. The spiral of darkness faded, and the column of debris lost its shape and floated loose. The Butterfly drifted into a fog of silt, fish bits, and wood splinters.

  Quest was making approving signs, and Selphin was gingerly climbing back into her seat. Hark spent a few seconds gasping lungfuls of their precious air and staring out at the drifting debris. Then he remembered the controls, turned off the wheel, and got the wings’ ripple working again.

  We’ve lost the trail! exclaimed Selphin.

  The plume destroyed it anyway, answered Quest. No matter. We are close now. We must descend. Go carefully. Watch for the waves. They may be very, very large.

  Keeping the lamp on, Hark persuaded the Butterfly to descend. It started to give off unnerving ticks, audible even through the helmet. The god-glass sphere of the submarine was holding out against the pressure but was evidently not enjoying it.

  Below was blackness and more blackness. Above, the only hint of light was a twilight grayness, an ache in the eye rather than true light. The Butterfly carved itself a halo of radiance in the void, and that was all that really existed.

  Hark became aware that far down below, the darkness had a texture. There was something in motion, glistening and somehow blacker than the darkness. It was the surface of a second sea, moving with oily, implausible slowness, mauve lights gleaming on its smooth, gliding hummocks.

  The waves don’t look that big, thought Hark as they descended. The moment he became aware of the thought, he looked around himself apprehensively. He understood his own luck too well.

  He noticed a distant motion in the darkness, a glint. For a moment he thought it was another luminous flicker from a creature of the deeps. Then he realized that it was the light shining off something oily and black, a vast, monstrous wave two houses high . . .

  Hark frantically yanked at the controls, trying to rise,
then settled for crazily spiraling upward, like a buzzard riding a thermal. The great glossy mass rolled by, mere feet below them, and left the little sub seesawing in the turbulence behind it.

  The wave rolled out of view. A little later, another wave half its height glided past in an entirely different direction. Hark stared down, finding it hard to breathe.

  It was as if some unkind fate were punishing him for his stories. At the Appraisal, he had told a tale of trying to help a sick, confused, old woman, and he had found himself looking after sick, confused, old priests. He had lied to Rigg about being struck by a gigantic Undersea wave, and now . . .

  You’ll do it if you have to, said the insistent voice in his mind. It wasn’t Jelt’s voice anymore, though. Now it sounded more like Hark’s own, and the tone was different, more encouraging. You have to dive down without being caught by the waves, so you will. You will.

  Hark looked around for the next wave and saw it. His breath caught in his throat.

  Something was rolling in like a vast, glossy, purple-black wall. It was higher than a cliff, and Hark couldn’t even see its top. For a panicky moment, he wondered whether it even had one. He had to raise the Butterfly up—up! But they wouldn’t rise in time to avoid the wave, even if the sub spiraled so tightly that the wings fell off.

  No, said a mad little part of his brain. That isn’t how you do it.

  He had to enter the water quickly, cleanly. The wave itself was rippling and turbulent, but just ahead of it, the surface was as smooth as a seal’s back.

  Hark yanked at the controls, hearing them protest. He mangled them back into the misguided position he had managed at first. The piercing noise of the sub stopped undulating and changed to the terrible unbroken scream that made his teeth ache. The wings folded down, trembling, and the Butterfly rolled forward so it was pointing on a downward diagonal.