Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

  The whipcord around Hark’s middle tightened again, until he thought his ribs would break. It pulled with new intensity, and now the boulder against which Hark braced started to move, grinding along the base of the cleft toward the god.

  Quest gave Selphin a piercing look of entreaty.

  The wrench, please! he signed urgently. Quickly! He held out his hand.

  Selphin suddenly realized why he had come with her. He had never believed shooting a dart would work. He was planning to lunge right into the mouth and smash at the heart with his dying strength . . .

  There had to be a better plan, but there was no time to think of one. The god would attack at any moment. Selphin stared helplessly at the wind-gun, now a deadweight in her hands.

  No. She was thinking about everything wrong. She hurriedly unscrewed the copper bottle from the barrel.

  She wasn’t holding deadweight. She was holding a heavy stick and a bomb.

  Plunging forward dangerously, she launched the heavy bottle toward the gaping maw. The mouth lunged outward, bit down on the copper bottle, and pulled back. She saw the copper buckle under the pressure of the sharp teeth. Then the metal punctured, and Selphin shielded her face from the shock wave as the bottle exploded, its compressed air escaping in a great eruption of bubbles.

  When she looked again, the conical mouth was mangled and torn. There was a hole at the back of the throat. Through it, Selphin could see a tangle of soft, fleshy-looking tubes, connected to something round and white.

  It was the heart.

  Selphin launched herself forward, jamming the gun barrel lengthways into the gaping, mangled mouth to prop it open. She shoved her free hand deep into the hole, feeling sick at the clammy contact with her shoulder. Her fingers closed around something cold and round. She felt the perforations bite into her hand. It welcomed her skin. It wanted her bones. It had plans for her flesh.

  She felt it move beneath her fingers as she tightened her grip.

  “You never cared about me!” roared the Jelt-god. His voice was changing, the vowels becoming longer and more groaning, the consonants a distorted buzz. A human mind was guttering and going dark.

  The rage was still there, but now what Hark heard most clearly was the pain.

  “I always cared, Jelt!” yelled Hark with all his might, even as the whipcord threatened to cut him in two. “Even when I hated you, I cared!” The sides of the cleft scraped him as he was pulled helplessly along. “I always will care, as long as I live! But you should have let me go, Jelt! For both our sakes!”

  As those words tore from his throat, Hark felt something change. Later he could not say what. The roaring ebbed and ceased.

  The whipcord stopped dragging him through the cleft. It was still wound tightly around him, but its grip gradually became less vicious. At last it was exerting only a gentle pressure, like an arm wrapped around him.

  Very slowly and deliberately it released him. Then it went slack, and the light in its tip dulled. Hark lay there dazed, staring at it.

  “Hark?” A different voice echoed down the cleft. It sounded like Quest.

  Hark painfully wriggled all the way out of the cleft, feeling like he had been peeled.

  Sprawled against the side of the outcrop was the body of the god. The great bulk was a thing of patches and tatters again, moving with the sway of the water and nothing else. There was nothing in it Hark could recognize as Jelt, no body to bury or mourn over. All that remained of Jelt was carried in Hark’s head, in his trove of stories, precious as gold and bitter as hemlock.

  Amid the ruins of the body, he found Quest and Selphin, both looking muddy and exhausted.

  In Selphin’s hands rested a battered and cracked-looking god-heart with a few thin tubes winding off it.

  “Is it dead?” Hark croaked.

  “I think so,” said Selphin grimly, “but I’m going to make sure.” With shaking hands, she laid the pale, beautiful heart on a boulder and smashed it repeatedly with the butt of her gun until it fell into shards.

  The Abysmal Child had gone. Unless the unpredictable terrain had swallowed the great sub, it looked like enough Leaguers had survived to crew her and depart.

  Hark couldn’t blame them. The Undersea, never docile, was becoming downright excitable. Some of the rocky spires were changing their angle and leaning dangerously. Crevasses opened in the seafloor, then closed again with a shudder. Perhaps the Undersea didn’t like it when people killed its brand-new god.

  The Butterfly lay not far from the rocky outcrop, its glass now heaped with fine mud and splatters of goo. It looked as exhausted as its crew felt.

  “She served us surprisingly well,” said Quest, looking at the little sub. “I take back what I said about her being an ‘error of judgment.’”

  By using the past tense, Quest had admitted what they all knew. The Butterfly had brought them to the Undersea, but without her scream she could not take them back.

  Good view, Selphin signed, gesturing curtly at the insane vista. Next time we’ll bring a picnic.

  The Undersea was spectacular. Not many people would see a view like that, and fewer would live to tell the tale. Hark suddenly couldn’t bear the thought that the three of them would not live to tell the tale.

  One more try, Hark signed, and opened the Butterfly’s hatch.

  Yes, signed Quest, without much sign of hope. Of course.

  Hark was exhausted. He was bruised, battered, scraped, squeezed, and stung by strange ichor. There was nothing he wanted more than to lie on the seafloor and just let himself go numb. But instead, he climbed into the sub and dropped down into the driving seat.

  He started pumping the bellows under one bruised, stiff arm and tweaking at the controls. There were more bubblings and sloshings, and the works spat out more bubbles.

  Selphin climbed in, too.

  You have a plan? she signed. She was wincing and frowning as if she had toothache, and Hark realized that she was trying very hard not to hope.

  “Not really,” he said. “You know me. I’m stupid. When something doesn’t work, I keep trying it, anyway.”

  His lungs hurt, and they seemed to keep shuddering weirdly. He thought about the dead god that didn’t look like Jelt, and his eyes stung.

  He sniffed hard and squeezed the bellows again. This time only one bubble came out of the machinery. One silver bubble, dancing callously upward. Hark thought of Jelt drowning, really drowning in the bathysphere. Spending his last seconds of life looking at a bubble and thinking of Hark abandoning him.

  Hark squeezed the bellows again, and there were no bubbles. None. Jelt, floating drowned in the water. Only a faint breathy sound from the bellows.

  The Undersea drank his tears, the way it drank everything it could. Hark heaved on the bellows again, one last useless time.

  A moment later he was reeling over, clutching his ears, and desperately scrabbling for a helmet. The timbre was different from the earlier screams but still very loud.

  “It’s working! Everyone, get in! The pipes can use Undersea water, they just couldn’t while there was still air in them!” Now Hark thought about it, lungs didn’t seem to cope well with a mix of air and Undersea water, either.

  Quest clambered in, and everyone hastily made ready. While their doom seemed inevitable, there had been a mood of numb calm. Now that there was a tiny chance of survival, everyone’s panicky sense of urgency returned. They still had no air in the sub to help them rise, but at least now they had propulsion. With luck, the Butterfly’s wing ripple could drive her upward, the way a bird’s flapping wings bore it into the sky.

  Hark set the wings to a ripple, adjusting for the new timbre of the scream, then guided the little sub off the seafloor. One of the wings was kinking slightly, making it harder to steer. He took the Butterfly up in an ascending spiral, watching the undulating “sky” above all the while.

  The waves and eddies were too wild this time for him to predict the pattern. All he could do was to aim for a flattish
patch, and hope.

  When the Butterfly flew screaming into the divide, it was grabbed and shaken like a rattle. Only Hark’s helmet prevented him from being knocked out against the glass wall. There was sudden inky blackness and a feeling that somebody had taken Hark’s mind and soul in a fist and squeezed them to the size of a raisin.

  Everything was spinning. Or was it? It was too dark to tell. Hark reached out a heavy arm and groped until he found the light.

  The sub was spinning. Hark leveled it out just in time to dodge a towering Undersea wave.

  The Butterfly tried to spiral upward, but another petulant current sent her rolling again through the blackness. Every time Hark worked out which way was up, a stray current grabbed them, twisted them, buffeted them. They were a wounded mouse in the mouth of a great, black cat. It was an angry black cat, with a mouth so large it could swallow cities.

  Then the cat got tired of the game. The Butterfly was sent tumbling and smashed against something so hard that Hark was flung up out of his seat, breaking his seat belt. As he floated back down again, he saw where they were.

  All around were ruined turrets, rusted portholes, the hulks of diving bells. The Embrace had chewed the Butterfly up and spat her out on the submarine graveyard. It had chewed hard. One wing had been torn off, and the other was a mangled rag of its former self. The rear propeller was bent at an angle. Neither Selphin nor Quest appeared to be conscious.

  Even as the hopelessness of the situation sank in, other bits of debris fell down around the Butterfly and started to bury it.

  Hark pumped the bellows again, and the Butterfly’s solitary scream rang out across the corpses of its fellow submarines. All he could do was send out a noise to get attention. It was a forlorn hope. Nobody was likely to be looking for them, and there was no reason for anybody to guess that the strange wailing was a cry for help.

  He heaved and heaved on the bellows, anyway. He didn’t know how long they had. Eventually the lamp would fail, and other debris would cover them, and then they would never be found.

  It was getting harder to stay awake. Perhaps the Undersea water they were breathing was losing its goodness, like air. Sometimes he found himself lying across his seat, not knowing how long he had been unconscious.

  Clink, clatter, clink! More debris falling on the sub. He opened his eyes.

  No, debris was being moved off the sub. Someone in a heavy diving suit was pulling pieces of metal off the Butterfly. They stared in, and with a sense of unreality, Hark recognized Rigg’s face glaring at him.

  You, she mouthed, pointing at him. Are. Dead. She emphasized this by drawing a line across her throat.

  It seemed like a long way to go just to threaten somebody. This was Hark’s last thought before he passed out.

  EPILOGUE

  As it turned out, the Butterfly was only found due to Vyne and Kly.

  When the junior attendant staggered into Sanctuary carrying the injured Vyne, he threw the whole building into confusion. Thankfully, a lot of Sanctuary’s staff had medical training. While they were attending to Vyne’s wound, she woke up and loudly shared a lot of explicit terms that she had certainly never learned during her doctorate.

  Meanwhile, the junior attendant remembered Hark’s words about Vyne’s letter and passed the doctor’s notebook on to Kly. As Hark had hoped, Kly realized that the scrawled, bloodied note addressed to the governor was very, very important.

  It also wasn’t signed. Kly realized that if he didn’t get Vyne to add her signature and seal, the governor might not believe it was from her, so he decided that he had to speak with the doctor before he left. It was very lucky that he did so.

  Dr. Vyne was, by this point, very worried. She had missed the keys from her belt and guessed that Hark must have taken them. Since she had already confessed her worst misdeeds in the letter anyway, Vyne told Kly about the imprisonment of Hark and Selphin, the escape from the Leaguers, and her fears that even now Hark might be trying to drive the Screaming Sea Butterfly without her.

  Alarmed for Hark’s safety and keen to find Quest, Kly ran down to the cove where Hark had last been seen. He found the abandoned boat and a cliff door that had been torn off its hinges. There was no sign of Hark, Quest, Selphin, or the submarine.

  He did, however, encounter what he believed to be a visiting scavenger gang from Lady’s Crave. Naturally, he asked whether they’d seen the fugitives and gave their names and descriptions. Since they were actually members of Rigg’s gang, the mention of both Hark and Selphin aroused their intense interest. Kly refused to explain why he was asking after them, so the smugglers bundled him into their boat and took him to Rigg.

  Kly spent the next hour being yelled at and threatened by an angry smuggler matriarch who wanted to know where her youngest daughter had gone. Once he realized that she was Selphin’s mother and not hell-bent on murdering the girl, he started answering her questions. He admitted that Selphin might be en route to the Embrace in a dangerous, screaming submarine.

  Rigg released Kly and let him head to the governor with Vyne’s note. By the time the governor had agreed to talk to Kly, Rigg was already readying her most durable submarine and attaching a salvage-dragging harness to it.

  Rigg and her crewmates heard the Butterfly’s scream long before they found the sub. It is hard to tell the direction of a sound underwater. However, one can sometimes work it out, with enough stubbornness, just by cruising around to find out where the noise gets louder.

  Fortunately, Rigg was very, very stubborn.

  · · · · ·

  The crew of the Butterfly were submerged in Undersea water for eight hours altogether. By the time they were tipped out on a Nest beach like so many gasping fish, their skin was pale and their hands and feet wrinkly as walnuts.

  Quest terrified everyone by nearly dying on the spot. His lungs had been gently adapting to the Undersea water, and the change back to air was a brutal shock to his system. His convulsions convinced Rigg to take him and his crewmates to Sanctuary for treatment.

  Hark spent the next week only intermittently conscious. On the first day, somebody asked him a lot of questions. He answered them, in the hope they would go away. Later, he realized that the questioner had been Kly and that Kly had been kind and very patient.

  Hark felt unbelievably heavy whenever he tried to sit up. He couldn’t swim through the air, and he didn’t know why. Sounds were too raw and breathy, colors too bright. When he looked out of the window, the sky didn’t look quite real. He kept closing his eyes and opening them again, expecting to see a vast, billowing coverlet of purple, silver, and ink.

  Hark hadn’t believed that he would see the surface world again, and now he couldn’t believe that he was seeing it. His mind was still down in the deepest deeps.

  A month of the cleansing baths, special ointments, and a gruel-based diet gradually brought him back to himself. The mauve tint in his eyes faded, and his skin returned to its natural color. Better still, he recovered his curiosity about the world outside his own head.

  Dr. Vyne had been arrested, he discovered. The museum had been locked up, and Kly was running Sanctuary under the governor’s orders. The governor had apparently made it clear that Hark and his friends were to receive the best treatment but that they should be cloistered from contact with anybody else until they were well.

  “Don’t let them talk to anyone yet,” had been his exact phrasing.

  Hark also discovered that, even after all the baths, he and his crewmates had been left with some permanent Marks.

  Hark had a curving zigzag of pale skin that traveled across his scalp, from the peak of his forehead to the nape of his neck. It looked like a young snake, and the hair that grew from it was white.

  Gripping the Hidden Lady’s heart had left little dents in Selphin’s left hand, where the edges of the perforations had dug into her skin. They covered her palm and the underside of her fingers. The pattern looked a bit like lace.

  Quest had to keep breathi
ng the fumes from scare-lamps, or his lungs went into spasm. It altered his voice, which now left an uneasy residue on the mind like the scare-lamps themselves. He spoke less and less each day, however, and slept more and more.

  Hark knew that Quest was dying.

  “You can’t leave yet!” Hark blurted out one evening in the old priest’s sickroom.

  For a few days he’d had a desolate suspicion that Quest was quietly casting off his moorings and waiting for a wind to carry him away.

  “I see!” said the priest. “Thank you for telling me.”

  “I mean it!” said Hark. “You . . . you haven’t given me all your stories. You’re the only one that knows the Hidden Lady’s tales, and the ones she heard from the Gathergeist. You can’t go until you’ve passed them on. You’re their storykeeper.”

  “You have a point,” said Quest, sounding surprised. “I should tell you those tales. After all, you have already heard the worst of them—I have no reason to hide the rest.”

  So Quest did not die the next day, or the next, or the next week, or even the week after that. Hark came every day to hear the tales of the gods, and then the tales of the priests, and at last, simply the tales of Quest. Hark even started to hope that if he just kept asking questions, teasing out stories, then Quest would never leave at all. Stories would somehow keep Quest alive, but less horrifically than the heart had sustained Jelt . . .

  Hark wondered how lonely Quest had been all these years. He shared some common ground with the other priests, but beyond that lay his own private quicksand and hidden forests. He had been an infiltrator among them, his fellowship with them a lie.

  It took a while for Hark to understand the soft, cryptic smile that Quest wore when he talked of his past. These were boxes of memories he had not allowed himself to open for many years. Now at last he did, and he found their colors still fresh. He was looking at them one last time as he gave them away.

  As time went by, he talked more and more of Ailodie. Ailodie before she became an acolyte. Ailodie as a troubled young priest. Ailodie changing, becoming someone else . . .