As he stumbled and jarred his back, he realised that his walk towards the ship’s stern was a walk downward. The ship was listing and soon he saw why. The contraption contained more metal than he’d ever seen in one place, a huge round sphere of it, no doubt worth more than the ship its weight pressed down. There were glass portholes lining its sides and chains attached to winches above. Sang Ki very much feared he knew what this was.
‘A subaqueous sphere,’ he guessed. ‘The Wanderer Afra Silversdochter wrote of this in her journal.’
Little Cousin beamed. ‘Yes, yes, yes – I knew you’d know. I have the volume myself, copied from Afra’s original.’
‘Hmm …’ Sang Ki circled the sphere, running his fingers along the sun-warmed metal. ‘Afra designed devices she never intended to make or test. And, of course, she was entirely insane.’
‘Pah, only the Moon Forest folk would say so, afraid of a woman’s wisdom. You don’t need to fret. I’ve tested it already, though not here. No, in this you and I will be jointly the first. But I took it a hundred paces down the Misa’s Mouth, and lived to tell you about it. I’m telling you about it now!’
Sang Ki made another slow circuit of the device before asking, ‘And it truly holds in the air as she claimed it would?’
‘Well …’ Little Cousin took his arm and pulled him to one side, where he saw a collection of leather bladders lined up on the deck. ‘The air’s held in but it’s … squashed. It would be, wouldn’t it, all that weight of water above? It feels the way I would if you sat on me! But we’ll bring more air down to fill it out. All will be well, I promise. And we’ll see what no person’s seen in a thousand years. What do you say to that?’
Sang Ki’s eyes scanned the deck until they found the burnt woman. She was watching him. He thought she might be smiling, but her mutilated face made it hard to tell.
‘Your woman can come too,’ Little Cousin said, following the direction of his gaze. ‘There’s room enough for three.’
Sang Ki thought of protesting that she wasn’t his woman, but he saw no reason she shouldn’t share his danger. He beckoned her forward and she joined him by the subaqueous sphere without hesitation. Perhaps such bravery was admirable. Or perhaps there was little to fear in death for a woman who had suffered – no doubt was still suffering – as she did.
Little Cousin gestured to a gaggle of his men standing by the winch that held the sphere’s chains. They clattered and tightened as the winch was turned and then, with a pained groan, began to raise its great weight from the deck. When the sphere was high enough, Sang Ki stooped beneath it with Little Cousin and the burnt woman. He closed his eyes as it was lowered over them. It seemed far smaller from the inside and he could feel the heat of the others’ bodies, pressed close against him. He could smell unwashed flesh and feared it was his own.
‘Sit, sit!’ Little Cousin said. There was a platform ringing the sphere’s interior, which Sang Ki realised must be intended as a bench. It was too narrow for his bulk but he squeezed himself on as best he could. He shut his eyes when the sphere began to rise and squeezed them tighter as it descended. They flew open when his feet were suddenly plunged into water, an icy shock that shivered up his spine.
The burnt woman was watching him. She reached out a hand, tentatively. Perhaps she meant it for comfort but he ignored her. ‘And now the test begins,’ he said to Little Cousin, clamping his mouth shut when he heard how his voice shook.
‘The test is already done,’ the Ahn man said, politely oblivious to Sang Ki’s fear. ‘Now the exploration begins. History, fat man, in a land so much without.’
But for a while there was nothing except water. It was very clear and fish hung suspended in it, jewel-bright. Sang Ki watched as a larger approached a smaller, gaped its jaws and swallowed it whole. Free-floating plants drifted past, their leaves like green ribbons.
‘It’s beautiful,’ the burnt woman said.
Little Cousin paused from hauling in fresh air bladders to look at her. ‘We’re not there yet.’
‘She means the fish,’ Sang Ki said, eyeing a little purple school of them. ‘She’s right – I’ve never seen their like before.’ It came to him suddenly that he was here, scores of feet below the water’s surface breathing air, and he laughed in delight.
‘Oh, fish,’ Little Cousin said dismissively. He released the air and the water beneath them, which had been threatening to soak their feet, dropped a little further. ‘I’ll eat them, I don’t want to stare at them. But ah – ah! Look!’
He paused in his hauling in of air bladders and the water rose as the sphere continued to sink, but Sang Ki barely noticed his wet feet. They were descending through the Lost City.
Neither time nor tide had worn away a single fragment of the original structures. Many buildings were cracked and some toppled, but whatever cataclysm had laid low the Lost City seemed also to have preserved it in the moment of its destruction. The sphere descended past tiled spires, their colours muted beneath the waves but the pattern of leaves painted on them still clear, though they belonged to no tree Sang Ki had ever seen.
He stared at an open tower, the bell within it swaying in the invisible current. A crab scuttled up its dark grey side and Sang Ki’s ears rang with a deep, throbbing note. For a wild moment he thought the bell had somehow pealed. But it was the sphere, rocking and shaking, and Sang Ki lurched forward, only stopped from falling by the desperate grasp of Little Cousin’s hand. The water below them sloshed from side to side and reached up white-tipped fingers to grab them, but after a few moments the motion stilled and Sang Ki saw what had caused it.
Peering in through one porthole of the sphere was a vast stone eyeball. The statue it belonged to stretched down into indigo shade, scores, maybe hundreds of feet below. The sphere scraped along the statue’s cheek as it descended but left no mark behind.
The face, seen only one small fragment at a time, was hard to discern. Sang Ki thought that it was narrow, high-cheekboned and not entirely human. He thought it might be the same face as that carved into hundreds of rocks scattered over the plain that held Winter’s Hammer. The moon’s face, or so he’d always been told. It wasn’t a kind one.
And then the ship above moved them away from the statue and they sank further still.
‘Are we too deep?’ Sang Ki asked Little Cousin. There had been no air bladders for some time and the air they breathed now felt stale and unnourishing.
‘Just a little further,’ Little Cousin said. His face was rapt as he gazed over the city whose lowest buildings were now sliding by to either side. These must be the homes of the city’s long-dead residents. They looked gloomy and forbidding. There were narrow, sickle-shaped windows in the walls, angled so that only the rising sun could penetrate them. Or, Sang Ki realised, the rising moon.
The walls were scribed with patterns whose form he didn’t understand. Was that one there, picked out in shimmering mother-of-pearl, meant to be a horse? But no man would ride a beast that snarled so viciously. It seemed to be a scene of battle. The sprays of gems were rubies, more valuable than he could ever fathom using for such profligate decoration. But he thought their profusion was meant to signify gouts of blood.
The bottom approached, illuminated by a green light whose source he couldn’t see – perhaps it was the water itself. There were figures below, arms outstretched as if to reach for him. Something many-tentacled rose from between them, thrashing up towards them and stirring the silt in which it had slept into a brown fog that defeated all attempts to see through it.
The creature’s many eyes peered in through the glass and its suckers clung as if it meant to squeeze the metal sphere until it popped. It seemed large and strong enough to do it, but in a flick of jointless limbs it was gone and the sphere jolted and stopped, finally at the end of its long rope.
For a long while there was nothing to see outside except the stirred-up sand and the occasional flash of fin as something half-hidden swam past. But imperceptibly the silt b
egan to settle and the water shaded back from yellow to a deep, clear blue. Forms hovered all around the sphere, half-seen and terrifying, and then sharper, more obviously human – and then, with startling abruptness, they were entirely clear.
The destruction of the city must have been instant, and for the first time Sang Ki truly entertained the idea that it had been the act of a god. Some force he could barely imagine had struck down not just the buildings but every person in them. Killed them and frozen them in the moment of death, jet-black statues that had once been people.
Not just people – children. There were a dozen of them, ranged around a grid that someone had scratched into the pavement, a collection of circles and squares in swirling line. One child was crouched in the middle square while around him his fellows leaned forward in encouragement or leaned back, mouths open in what must have been laughter but now looked like silent screams. Sang Ki knew the game they were playing: grasshopper. He’d played it himself with other children of the tribe when he was a boy.
It was such an ordinary scene. He’d expected … something else. These had been the moon’s people and the sun’s folk had done this to them. This was how the last war between sun and moon had ended, with children scorched into cinders as they played.
He stared at them as the water and weeds swirled about them. Water and something darker: a stain diffusing through it like smoke through air. The burnt woman groaned and he thought it was her reaction to the dead children until more of the dark substance spread and he realised that it was coming from them, from their sphere, and that it was blood.
The burnt woman groaned again, louder and more desperate. He wrenched his eyes from the blood in the water to see it pouring from between her legs. Her arms clasped her rounded stomach and she was sobbing without tears. Perhaps the fire had robbed those from her too.
‘She’s bleeding!’ he shouted, panicked. ‘There’s so much blood!’
‘It’s the baby,’ Little Cousin said, and as he spoke there was another jerk and then the sphere began to lift, but slowly, much too slowly.
‘Help me,’ the burnt woman begged. Her eyes were pleading but what could he do? He was no physician, certainly no midwife.
‘We need to get to the surface,’ he told Little Cousin.
‘We will.’
‘But faster!’
‘We have no way to tell them,’ the trader said.
‘Then find a way! If we send a bladder up – see, there’s one here. A message scratched in it—’
But Little Cousin was already shaking his head. ‘It’s no use, fat man. Even if I could tell them, I wouldn’t. It would kill us all, to rise too fast.’
‘You can’t know that! No one’s ever gone so deep before!’
‘I’m sorry,’ the Ahn man said with sad finality. Through the whole exchange the burnt woman groaned and whimpered.
Sang Ki awkwardly shuffled himself round the bench that ringed the interior of the sphere until he was near enough to reach her. Her rasping breath counterpointed his own gasps and the blood continued to fall, dripping into the water and leaving a trail that drew creatures he’d never dreamed lived beneath the waves, bug-eyed fish and razor-clawed, twig-limbed things that snapped and gobbled at the bloody water and circled round and round, waiting for the body itself to fall.
She might have fallen, if Sang Ki hadn’t kept hold of her. She was weakening fast, far faster than the sphere moved on its ponderous rise to the surface. Her skin was waxy and her eyes half-closed. Only her hands seemed to retain their strength, one gripped round his and the other round her stomach.
‘Hurry,’ Sang Ki said uselessly. He could only hold her hand and murmur soothing nonsense words as inch by inch they neared the surface.
Then, suddenly, bright sunlight struck them through the water and a moment later they broke the surface – and then it was almost too fast. As soon as his crew could hear him, Little Cousin yelled and they pulled the sphere aboard the ship. They held it hovering while sailors crawled beneath to lift the burnt woman down.
Sang Ki wanted to follow but knew he couldn’t ask the crew to bear his weight. He had to wait until a stall was brought and he slid down onto it and then on his knees beside the burnt woman and the small, red, horrible form that now lay between her legs.
‘The baby?’ Sang Ki asked, but he already knew the answer. He knew what that little, broken thing was.
‘Dead,’ his mother said. She must have been drawn on deck by the commotion and now she cradled the burnt woman’s head in her lap, almost as if she cared.
‘And her?’ Sang Ki asked, shocked to discover that the answer mattered to him.
His mother’s face was cold as she looked down at the woman in her arms, whose whole purpose and protection had perished with her unborn child. ‘Not dead yet.’
32
Krish felt the sea pulling at his feet. It wanted him to go deeper and he intended to oblige, but not quite yet. The water was calm today, the waves a light ripple on its surface, reflecting the sun in fragments. His people had crossed this ocean once, back when the tribes had been united and women had still ruled them all.
He’d filled his saddlebags with rocks. They hung from his neck, bowing him over, but he’d wanted to be sure they were heavy enough. He’d failed at so much; he couldn’t risk failing at this.
It was over and everything was lost. He’d believed so fiercely in his god and his god had betrayed him. His god was nothing and so was he. And the things he’d done in his god’s name …
His memory was full of blood and screams. It sickened him to recall how much pleasure he’d taken in his victims’ fear. He’d known no fear himself until he saw his brothers die by their own hands. It was his fault. His presence brought death, and more death would follow as long as he remained. There was only one right thing left to do.
The cold of the water began to seep into his bones. Sometimes discomfort faded with time and sometimes it grew worse. Perhaps when the whole of him was in the water he’d be warm again, but whatever he felt, he wouldn’t feel for long.
The water lapped against his calves, his thighs; a wave came and drenched his chest, throwing salt into his eyes and mouth. He shut them and moved deeper as his clothes billowed around him, filled with air and moved by currents. The trapped air tried to lift him but the rocks in his satchel were heavier. They kept his feet pressed to the seabed as he walked on. There was sand beneath him at first and then stone and the soft give of unseen creatures crushed beneath his heels.
If he dropped the satchel, he could still rise to the surface. He could live. There was some part of him that wanted to: the boy who’d gown to adulthood among the tribe, who’d taken pleasure in the hunt and pride in his skill. But a stronger part felt otherwise. A part of him had grown up cold and hungry in the mountains, unwanted by his da, dismissed by his neighbours. That part knew that nothing he ever did could go right.
He opened his mouth and the waiting water rushed into his empty lungs. His body was heavy with the water he’d breathed and was still breathing. He thrashed in panic until movement became impossible and the peace and warmth he’d hoped for came. Then he lay back and let his body float to the rocky ocean floor as the life floated out of him.
It was said that in the last days of the old Empire, when the war was won and the cost of it was finally being counted, the mages of old had devoted themselves to pleasures of the flesh. They’d sensed what was coming and turned their backs on it to enjoy the time they had left.
Olufemi wasn’t precisely enjoying herself. The physical pleasure was there – it was mounting in intensity as Eniola’s mouth worked competently between her legs – but her mind was elsewhere. It drifted on the hot air wafted into motion but not coolness by slaves stationed beside the bed.
Eniola had been nothing but seeds in her parents and the lust that would one day unite them when Olufemi had last been in Mirror Town. Now she was a heavy-featured youth who had been happy to share Rah rice wine and then h
er body with the returned traveller. The Chukwu family always had been notorious gossips. No doubt Eniola hoped to wheedle a few titbits of Olufemi’s history out of her and share it with her kin over dinner. Olufemi would probably oblige. What did she have left either to hide or to lose?
Eniola swiped her tongue one more time and Olufemi’s body finally surrendered to her persistence, clenching with pleasure as she trapped the younger woman’s head between her thighs. When the climax was passed, Eniola leaned up on her elbows and grinned smugly, a very irritating expression.
Still, she’d done what was required and Olufemi pulled the other woman to her and kissed her. She could taste herself on Eniola’s mouth – it wasn’t unpleasant and she could enjoy this. She had to enjoy something, in whatever time she had left. She didn’t believe Krish would give himself up as she’d asked. She didn’t know what he’d do, but she doubted it would be anything she approved.
She didn’t want to think of him now. She looked into the brown eyes above her and lowered her hand to return the pleasure she’d been given. She looked into brown eyes and tried not to think of ones that were muddy green. Vordanna was dead or rotting in an Ashane prison, Olufemi’s ambitions were thwarted and her future dark. All she could have was this moment.
Eniola buried her face in Olufemi’s neck as her own pleasure crested. She bit, hard. Olufemi yelped and tried to pull away, and they were still tangled inelegantly together when the door opened and Vordanna walked in, almost as if Olufemi’s thoughts had summoned her.
She looked so out of place, framed in white marble in the one place she and Olufemi had never visited together, that Olufemi doubted her own eyes. Vordanna seemed frozen in place, staring at her lover and her lover’s lover.
It was the sudden anger in Vordanna’s expression that convinced Olufemi this was no hallucination. Vordanna was never angry; years on bliss pills had left her incapable of the emotion. And yet those narrowed eyes, pursed lips and flushed cheeks could mean little else.
The Hunter's Kind: Book II of The Hollow Gods Page 34