Full Fathom Five

by Max Gladstone

  “You ever think about taking a room on the ground floor? Or moving out of the Rest?”

  He stepped off the ladder, touched a glyph on its side, and nodded in satisfaction as the ladder shuddered and rose, retreating back into the ceiling hatch. “Eve would kill me. You have any idea how much she spent putting that thing in?”

  “More than you’re worth.”

  “Hah.” A dirty brown earthworm scrunched over Mako’s bare foot. He plucked it up and threw it underhanded onto the sand. “Maybe so. To what do I owe the pleasure of your interruption?”

  “I’d like your advice. In private.” She glanced down the beach toward the Penitents standing guard. They weren’t looking her way, but they listened well.

  “I know a spot.” He groped, found the corner of a table, and used the graffiti carved there to orient himself toward the bar. From beneath the locked liquor shelf, he retrieved his crooked stick, leather handled and brass shod. “Follow me.” She walked with one hand around his arm, the other on her own cane. His skin felt dry and loose beneath her palm. He’d been larger, once.

  Mako guided them away from the beach, north three blocks, and west down an alley of shuttered laundries and closed convenience stores, most long since taken over as outbuildings for the great gleaming coastal hotels.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?” Kai asked.

  “Another block down, at the corner, on the left.”

  There, true to Mako’s word, they found a small diner, a grimy place with plush booths upholstered in green fake leather. When Kai opened the door a smell of cigarettes and bacon wafted out; stepping inside, she noticed the lack of ashtrays and the NO SMOKING sign. Behind the counter, a round cook slid plates through a slit window and called an order number. No one looked up.

  Mako lowered himself into an empty booth. His bent knees cracked and popped, and when he sat they pressed against the underside of the table. Kai ordered a cup of coffee and dry toast when the waitress came. Mako ordered coffee, too, black.

  “This,” he said after the waitress left, “was the first place I ate when I came home from the Wars.”

  How to answer that? “Because you knew it?”

  “No. Any place I knew would remind me how much the island changed since I left.” He rapped his forehead with a knuckle. “Or how much I had. I wanted somewhere it wouldn’t feel strange to be a stranger.” The waitress returned with coffees. Mako drank all his in a gulp, then grabbed Kai’s, drank half, and set the mug back down in front of her. Steam rose from the black liquid. “Course, even someplace new gets the old familiar stain in time.”

  She grabbed her coffee in both hands. Still too hot for her to drink, but safe at least from further theft. “Why come back, if it hurt you to be here?”

  “Firstways, didn’t know it would hurt so much. Secondways, you can’t escape yourself, and you’re the only thing that hurts you in the long run.”

  “That and rocks.”

  He laughed. “And rocks. And knives and swords. Lighting, thorn, paper cuts, fire, acid, teeth, claws, ice, drowning. Well. Drowning only sort of hurts.” He banged his empty mug on the table, and the waitress looked over. Her sallow, up-all-night expression made her seem ten minutes’ hassle short of serial murder, and with Mako she was counting down the seconds. “What do you want from me, Kai?”

  She removed the red book from her purse, and untied the binding ribbon. The vellum sheets crackled when she unfolded them. For the hundredth time this morning she read the list of names, hoping they had changed. No such luck. “What can you tell me,” she said, “about Edmond Margot?”

  “You talked with him at the open reading a few weeks back.”

  “I talked with him. But I don’t know him, and you do, and I’m buying breakfast.”

  “He came to the island a few seasons ago, after the rains. Lives alone. No lovers Eve’s figured. Good voice. Reminds me of some Iskari I knew back in the Wars. Ones as fought in the deltas, or in Southern Kath, when they came back from the jungle they were only echoes of what they’d been up-country.”

  “He was a soldier?”

  “No. He had that same aftermath feel though, an echo looking for the noise that made it. He found the noise here.” Mako grunted thanks as the waitress filled his coffee. She rolled her eyes and strutted off.

  “What do you mean, found the noise?”

  “He showed up at the Rest for the first time back after the rains, you know, with a sheaf full of poems, made a righteous thud when he set it down on the bar. Asked for, what’d he say, the right to perform. So I listened to some samples and I said no.”

  “I didn’t think he was that bad.”

  “You didn’t hear him then. His work had skin, but no bone, no marrow. All art, no.” He groped across the table, found Kai’s arm, squeezed hard. She grimaced and slapped his hand away. “You see.”

  “And you told him no.”

  “I’m not cruel. I told him start on the open stage, nobody likes some big shot they’ve never heard of coming in from abroad as if he’s gods’ gift to poesy. Perform with the others, quality will out, and they’ll clamor for Eve to give you a show.”

  “That’s not cruel?”

  “Maybe I was a little mean.” Mako scratched his head, and a moth flew out from his hair. “Anyway, he needed himself taken down a peg. Not his fault. Iskari don’t have natural rhythm. Comes from all the squid-goddery, you know. Worship something that doesn’t eat, sleep, screw like you do, do that for a few thousand years, and see if you don’t lose your rhythm. Even in bed they work funny: all straps and ties and games.”

  Kai’s hand hurt where he’d grabbed her. The waitress brought her toast, cold, and topped up her coffee. The toast crumbled in her mouth as if baked with sand instead of flour. “Margot didn’t do well on the open stage, is what you’re saying.”

  “First night, he was up against some Gleb boys, and a pair from Alt Selene that throw their lines back at each other. He stumbled through a sestina and got a weak hand off the stage. Come back next week, I said. And he did. Surprised the hells out of me. You know what happened then?”

  “Same thing?”

  He nodded. “Same thing. He barely got words out of his mouth that time. Doggerel about flowers or some shit like that. Even worse reaction from the crowd, but he grinned like an idiot at the end, as if he knew he’d gone bad along the way, and having someone tell him so was the highest order of compliment. Next week, same poor show, bigger smiles. The boys got fresh with him. You ever meet Cabe and them?”

  “No.”

  “Big fellows, work down dockside. Old-style Kavekana boys. You know.”

  Kai knew.

  “Time was, they’d all be off on a ship hauling rock or salt pork or oil or whatever cross the ocean, with a captain’s whip over their heads. Which would have been good for them.”

  “Because beatings make better men.”

  “Hells no. Just that bad times pull folk together. Mad captain, he builds a crew. Ocean does, too. And age—age’s harsher than a whip. Point is, if you’re a young man and you have nothing harder than a clock to fight against, ’fore long you make up things to do with your time. And one of those might be, you know, find a poet you don’t like and jump him in an alley while he’s drunk and taking a piss, and beat him until there’s a stain on his pants and he bleeds from the nose and mouth.”

  “Gods.”

  He raised his hands. “Well, yeah. I mean. I saw what was going to happen, too late, when Eve told me Cabe’d settled up their bill early. I walked out after, to stop them.”

  “You?” She tried to keep the surprise from her voice.

  “They aren’t bad kids, understand. Bored. Young. Angry. They wouldn’t jump an old vet.” He slapped his sagging left bicep with his right hand.

  “Awful lot of trust to put in thugs.”

  “Nobody’s a thug from birth. So out back I went, and found them.”

  “How bad was he?”

  “They we
re all bad.”

  “You mean Margot fought.”

  “No. Margot was beat up proper. Face swollen, lips busted. The kids, though, they were cringing. Scared. Most unconscious. One awake and babbling. I say pain can make a man: those boys got scars that night they’ll wear with pride one day, once the fear fades enough to let pride back in. That’s the last mugging they’ll ever try.”

  “Margot beat them up?”

  “Margot didn’t do nothing. No blood on his hands, nor under his nails, neither. When he came round, though, I heard rapture in his voice. Like I hadn’t since the war, you understand? Like he’d found something he never knew was lost. He thanked me. I took him back, cleaned him up with cheap rum, and he didn’t flinch when I poured it on his cuts. The Penitents came by to see if he could name his attackers, and he said no. So they left, and he left, and I thought that was the end.”

  “But he came back.”

  “He did. The next week, at the reading, he spoke thunder words with a hurricane voice. When he was done they screamed for more. Eve dragged him into the light. He had other poems he hadn’t finished yet; he said them, and the crowd roared. The next week we gave him his own gig, and he killed again. Two weeks later, folk came in raincloud masses.”

  “And I missed all this.”

  “That’s what you get working so hard, as if that’d save you from what soured twixt you and Claude.” He wound his broken fingers together, then unwound them as if scattering water drops on the table.

  “Thanks for the editorial,” she said. “I saw Margot a few weeks back. He was good. I wouldn’t say genius.”

  “I’m talking then, and you’re talking now. He’s had a bad run the last couple months. A curse broken. The voice took him up, and he wrote in its grip for two seasons, and it set him down as fast. Hurts, but hell, six months is more than most folks get out of love. I’ve known men who chased the line for decades after one night’s grasp of what Edmond Margot held for half a year. He doesn’t need your pity.”

  Six months. Kai frowned. “This started, what, eight months back?”

  “I can count. And I can feel the seasons change.” He opened his mouth wide, baring yellowed teeth. The point of his left incisor was missing, snapped off, casualty of some God Wars fight. “Eight months it was.”

  “Where does he live?”

  “Why do you care?” He drank his coffee again in one long gulp, wiped his mouth with the back of his wrist, and sighed, heavy and wet and sated.

  “I want to talk to Mister Margot,” she said, “about faith.”

  28

  The poet’s street looked no nicer by morning. Same stupid row houses, same slumping newsstand on the corner, same pox of printed tulips on every window’s curtains.

  Izza sat against the wall south of the newsstand, hands cupped in her lap. Once in a while she glanced up and down the road with the unfixed, vaguely hopeful expression she wore when begging. Traffic was light, but she got a sliver or two of soul before Cat bought a paper and sat down beside her, cross-legged, paging to the funnies.

  “We don’t have these where I’m from,” Cat said. “Surprises a lot of folks when they visit Alt Coulumb. You’d think, big city, big papers, but it ain’t necessarily so.” Her accent slipped into a drawl at the last, as if she were quoting something.

  “You’re spoiling my act.”

  “You’re not here for the act, kid.” Cat turned the page. “I like this one.”

  Izza looked. “It’s not funny.”

  “No, it is. It’s funny because their dog, see, it’s really big, so it eats more than the rest of the family.”

  “That’s not funny.”

  Cat chuckled. “Guess not.” She set down the comics and picked up another section. “Looks like Zolin’s out the next couple of games for giving Kasadoc a concussion. Unnecessary violence, which what that means in a game of ullamal I do not know. Also the Oxulhat police seem to have found three kilos’ worth of dreamdust in her luggage. Doesn’t look good for the Sea Lords. Gods, I love sports. All the excitement of real news, only it doesn’t matter so you don’t have to worry about it.”

  “What are you doing here?”

  “Getting a grip on current events. What are you doing here?”

  “Begging.”

  “On this sleepy street? Houses that way, apartments that way, residential for three blocks on both sides. And this part of town isn’t exactly high-rent. Most of the folks who live here leave for work before sunrise. Not a choice spot.”

  “I remember a month ago,” Izza said, but Cat interrupted her.

  “When I was flat on my back unconscious. Good times.”

  “When you couldn’t find your way around this island to save your life.”

  “I can learn, you know. Give a girl some credit.”

  “You’re not here for the paper.”

  “Well,” she said. “You’re not here to beg.”

  “You warned me to stay away from Margot last night.”

  “And you stormed out and didn’t come back to the warehouse afterward. I had to venture out to scrounge up my own supper.” She laughed. “I figured I struck a chord. Which meant you were as likely to be here as anywhere else.”

  “I spoke to him,” Izza said. “He recognized me. He asked about the Blue Lady. I told him the truth.”

  Cat nodded, that nod people gave when they had something to say but didn’t want to say it yet. “And?”

  “He wanted more, just like the kids. And I still want to get out of here.” She shot a hopeful glance at a passerby, a bearded man wearing boxer shorts, a bathrobe, sandals, and dark glasses. The man dug into his robe pocket, withdrew a folded slip of paper, and dropped it into her cupped hands. Izza said, “Thank you,” waited until he moved on, and looked at what he’d left: an expired library card.

  The man waved to Izza from the corner, grinning. She flipped him off in return.

  “What did you do when he asked?”

  Izza tore the library card into thin strips. “I left him.”

  “You’re here,” Cat said, “because you don’t know if you made the right choice.”

  Izza waited for the man to leave before she replied. “That’s part of it.”

  “What’s the rest?”

  “I told you Margot’s name, yesterday, while we talked. I never gave you his address.”

  Cat folded the sports section and laid it on top of the funnies. “Plenty of possible explanations for that.”

  “You recognized his name. You know where he lives. What’s going on here that I don’t know?”

  “Begging’s the wrong line of work for you. Should have been a cop. Or a spy.”

  “I never had a chance to choose.”

  Cat leaned back against the wall. Her skull met brick with a heavy sound. She closed her eyes, laced her fingers together, and squeezed. “Look. I came here because the local priests don’t let other powers near Kavekana’ai. If you’re on the run from gods and Deathless Kings, this is a great place to hide. That suited me fine: I could lie low, get clean, and leave. Thing is, my old … well. My people back onshore have a, let’s call it a professional interest in this island. There’s not much crime here by mainlander standards because of the Penitents, but the lack of gods and extradition treaties makes Kavekana a spa for all the better kinds of criminal. Those guys who live out on West Claw, puttering around in sandals and flower print shirts, drinking rum punch and playing bad golf—you ever wonder how they got the soulstuff to support that lifestyle?”

  “What does that have to do with Margot?”

  “He attracted our attention, back onshore. A bard like him, a nobody, a third-rate scrivener, moves to this island of all places and suddenly produces top-flight work. Inspired stuff. That’s a surprise, and surprises are suspicious. I recognized his name when you said it.”

  “And remembered his address.”

  “I’m good at my job.”

  “It doesn’t make sense,” Izza said. “He writes a
few poems, and gets the gods’ attention?”

  “Like I said. It’s hard for mainlanders to learn what happens here. The local priests are thorough, not to mention the Penitents, for proof of which see my ribs and shoulder. So we used to flag anything unusual that happened here, stuff that wouldn’t attract attention anywhere else. Even money was on him being an Iskari spy.”

  “He’s a poet.”

  “Means nothing. Deathless Kings built a whole literary magazine in Chartegnon back during the God Wars as an intel front.”

  “No,” Izza said. “I mean, you haven’t seen his room. I have. He’s a poet. And a hungry one.”

  “If you say so.” Cat stood, and Izza had to squint against the brightness of the sky behind her. This would be a hot day. “Yesterday you said I was afraid. You’re right. I’m hiding. I don’t want the kind of attention this guy attracts, and you don’t, either. If I were you, I’d draw the line here. I would have drawn it earlier.”

  “I owe him,” Izza said. “I tried to pay it off yesterday, but I only made things worse.”

  “I know the feeling. Just think about what your debts might cost you.” Her face twisted as if she’d just swallowed something foul. “I hate the way I sound. This cloak-and-dagger crap. One more reason to get out of the gods’ game while you can, kid.”

  “I’ll think about it.”

  “Being so close to this guy makes my skin crawl. Shouldn’t have come here. Wouldn’t have, but for you.”

  “Thanks,” Izza said.

  Cat glanced up and down the empty street. “I’ll see you back at home. Think about what I said, please. And watch out.”

  “Okay.”

  “You can keep the newspaper.” Cat looked as if she were about to say something more, then shook her head, hooked her thumbs through her belt loops, and walked away, shoulders slumped. She glanced back before she turned the corner. Izza thought she saw a flash of teeth between the woman’s lips—the hint of a smile, maybe, at the fact Izza was still watching. Or else a trick of distance and light.