Full Fathom Five

by Max Gladstone

  She reached the Order’s building, brushed through glass doors into the lobby, and tried and failed to catch the lift. She pressed the up button, crossed her arms, and waited, frowning at her reflection.

  “Kai?”

  A touch on her shoulder. She tried to turn, but her leg betrayed her and she tripped. A strong hand caught her arm before she fell.

  “I’m sorry,” Teo Batan said. “I called your name, and you didn’t hear me.” The Quechal woman looked rested, happy, and innocent. She braced Kai’s weight and helped her right herself. “I thought we got off on the wrong foot yesterday.” Was that only yesterday? “Are you okay?”

  Kai checked her skirt, her blouse, her hair, all in place. “I’m fine. Ms. Batan.”

  “Teo.”

  “Teo. I didn’t expect to see you again.”

  “Surprise.” And again she deployed that wide, easy saleswoman’s smile, the smile of a person who’d practiced being personable. “I thought about what you said, and I’d like to keep talking. I don’t blame you for bristling at me. I’m curious. I pry into things that don’t bear prying. Stubborn. That’s what my girlfriend says.”

  “Ah,” Kai said, and to cover surprise, “I’m sorry. I wasn’t offended.”

  “Great.” She was growing to hate that grin. “What’s the next step?”

  Faint chimes rang as the elevator descended. “I think my next step is to recommend you to another priest.”

  “Why not you?”

  Because I have more on my mind today than some mainlander pilgrim who wants to save her boss’s soul. “I don’t think I’m the best guide for your pilgrimage. For this to work, we must be partners. I need to know your inner needs. I spoiled our first meeting for reasons that have nothing to do with you. I hope you’ll accept my apology.” Four bells. Lifts arrived too fast, except when you wanted them to. “But don’t worry. I’ll find someone more compatible.”

  “You fought back when I pushed you. Stood up for yourself. That makes us compatible in my book.”

  Finally the doors rolled open, and Kai escaped into the lift. She spread her arms to stop Teo from following. “I have enough battles to fight already. I’m sorry. I will find someone to help you. Someone else.”

  The doors shut on Teo’s answer. Kai leaned against them, and found them cold.

  32

  Kai trained all morning: chanted the acronym litanies once more, recited the steps to a relationship sale, joined yet another role-playing exercise. (“What are you looking for from a god?” The putative pilgrim hems and haws and finally says: “I’m worried about my children’s future. We live in unstable times. I want to know they’ll be taken care of when I’m gone.” “I hear that you’re interested in security and grace. Is that right?” “I suppose.” “I think we can help. I’ll describe some myths for you. Listen, and at the end you can tell me which ones most resonated with your situation. Which spoke to you. How does that sound?”) She emerged less settled than before.

  Eleven was late enough to clock out for lunch, so she left a note on her cubicle desk, donned her coat, took her cane, and descended to the street. She squinted against the sun, and began to sweat. Back before the Wars, Kavekana had been an island of loose light clothing, bright patterns, and bare skin, even for priests and high officials. Not for the first time, Kai wished it had remained so. Wool suits weren’t designed for tropical heat.

  She walked north two blocks to Epiphyte, then west, circling the bay. Across the water East Claw sprawled, its hills a warren of warehouses, flophouses, and docks.

  West Claw’s streets, by contrast, ran straight and broad between boxy pastel houses. Pale Iskari and Camlaanders strolled along the sidewalks here, tourists and expats wearing straw hats, loose shirts, and shorts that bared skinny sunburned legs. Hotels rose near the shore, fewer facing the bay than on West Claw’s sunset side, but hotels nonetheless, with white verandas and stretches of private beach and rooftop decks and pools warmed by Craft and sun.

  Kai hadn’t come this way since her injury, and she was shocked as always by how fast the commercial landscape shifted. Locals owned half the stores here, but the rest belonged to mainlander émigrés, who came to Kavekana as pilgrims only to find they liked island life better than the rule of gods and Deathless Kings. They opened shops to pass the time on an island that ignored time’s passage, and these flourished and died quickly as jungle flowers, devoured by the earth.

  On this corner, a wizened man from northeast Telomere used to run a map store—though Kai could only charitably call it a store, since she’d never seen a customer inside. The maps he stocked were ancient, of Kathic lands before the Quechal wars split them in two, pre–God Wars charts of island empires long since sunk or broken, yellowed cracking parchments pressed between thin glass sheets, worlds lost to time and touch. She’d planned to take one of his maps home someday, hang it in her living room, close the curtains, and sip wine and ponder a vanished world. Now the shop itself was gone, replaced by a store that sold tart frozen yogurt with berries and crumbled sweet crackers on top. Kai bought a yogurt, turned right, and climbed the ridge.

  Buildings thinned a few blocks north of Epiphyte, and soon gave way to a slope of mown green grass. The families that once lived here departed decades past and left their homes to rot. Only the grass grew now, tended by the same Concern that trimmed the golf courses on Kavekana’s leeward northern shore. Old houses’ decaying remains rose amid the green: mossy wooden hillocks with stone foundations, skeletons of discarded lives.

  No one had forced these people to move, nor did the law stop locals or mainlanders from building on the slope. The Penitents’ screams were more effective than any rule.

  At the base of the ridge Kai couldn’t quite distinguish the screams from the wind. Climbing, she heard them better, moans and cracks and high faint whistles like the complaints of a forest in a storm. Soon they were too loud, too clear, to be anything but human voices in dissonant chorus, and in pain.

  About that time, she saw the Penitents.

  They stood at the crest of the ridge, half facing east, the other half west. Sunlight glinted off jewel eyes and sank into the rock of their faces, chests, arms, three-fingered hands. They scowled, gray sexless sentinels waiting for gods who never would return. The newly Penitent guarded the ridge for weeks as stone voices worked on their ears and stone wheels ground their bones, preparing them for duty. The first Penitents had been hewn from living rock here. The story ran that Makawe shaped them to guard for his return. The truth was more complex: Makawe carved a handful first, and after the wars the Order hired Craftsmen to copy and refine those models, make them bigger, stronger, faster.

  Penitents jutted from the ridge like jagged teeth from a green jaw.

  Kai climbed. She was not the only one who walked this road—watchmen and watchwomen and Penitents passed alongside her—but still she felt alone.

  Claude had described Penitence like this: The statue directed your mind. You saw what it believed you should see. You did what it believed you should do, until your will and the statue’s merged. Then, at last, it let you go.

  She shuddered, and pressed on.

  Watch houses squatted below the ridgeline: low structures with angled roofs, thick walls, and tall black-tinted windows. Kai’s path led to the largest building, which was dug back into the hill. Posted signs warned of dire fates for trespassers. A carved slab above the door read: West Claw Station House.

  Watchmen did not tend to be creative with their names. Penitence broke creativity out of them.

  Kai entered a dark lobby lined with dark plaques and dark furniture, and told the duty officer she wanted to see Claude. The officer looked up at her, blank, and Kai searched the woman’s haggard face for a sneer. She saw none, but that didn’t mean much. A sergeant dispatched into the station house returned a few clock-ticked minutes later. “Follow me, ma’am.”

  He ushered her down one long windowless hall, and, turning right, down another. Black wood
doors punctuated the hall at regular intervals; none bore name or number or any markings she could see.

  The sergeant stopped at a door like all the rest, stood aside, and waved her in. She stared into the matte, into her own shadow, and knocked.

  Claude opened the door. He did not seem surprised to see her—though, of course, the sergeant would have warned him. Kai hadn’t given her name, but his coworkers knew her face. That had been a good thing, once. He closed the door once she stepped inside.

  “New office,” she said.

  “Yes. You remember I was promoted.” He walked back to his desk.

  “It suits you.” Odd thing to say about an office, but the room did fit him, neither too large, as her living room seemed, nor too small, as his last office was, straining at his shoulders like an ill-tailored suit. The far wall was made of glass, and outside, on the ridge, Penitents watched the sea for their absent gods’ return.

  Like Jace, Claude kept his office simple. Low three-shelved bookcase against one wall, empty save for five thick binders. Coat stand bearing two watchman’s jackets and two gray hats of identical make, one old and water stained, the other its crisp replacement. His desk, one corner occupied by a wire “in” box with a small stack of paper, and a wire “out” box with a larger stack. On the desk lay a plate of barbecue beef, cold, and a hardcover book, open. Claude retreated to the desk, and closed the book.

  “Velasquez?”

  He laughed. “No.”

  “One of your God Wars adventure novels, though.”

  “Cawleigh. Velasquez has dragons, pyrotechnics. This is kingship, politics, murder. Awful lot of murder. Especially at parties for some reason.” He held up the book so she could see the cover: brown leather embossed with a basket-hilted rapier, point down, flashed in silver. “But there’s a point to it, I think. Not a moral, but a reason to keep reading. You’d like it.”

  “I always liked your books.”

  “I mean, I wouldn’t recommend these editions, too expensive, but in Camlaan and Alt Selene they print flimsies, paperbound, fall apart after a read or two, but cheap.” He blinked. “Wait. You hate these books. I gave you Velasquez’s Burning City, and you panned the dialogue, the descriptions, the politics, the characters. You loathed it cover to cover.”

  “I didn’t like Velasquez,” she said. “Doesn’t sound like I’ll like this Cawleigh guy, either, but if you think he’s good, I’ll try him.”

  “Her, actually.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “He’s a she. Terry Cawleigh.” He held the leather volume with both hands, and squeezed, as if testing a fruit for ripeness. He smiled, briefly, and returned the book to the shelf. Its leather spine seemed out of place beside the binders with their steel rings and uneven pages. “Why say you like my books when you don’t?”

  She leaned against the room’s other seat, a sturdy old armchair of stuffed leather. She thought she remembered it from Claude’s father’s house, years ago. “Did you move this up from your dad’s place?”

  “After he moved into the home.”

  After the breakup. “How’d that go?”

  “As well as you can expect. He’s sad to be gone, happy to be surrounded by a bunch of folks old enough to know how to play cards. And his son visits sometimes. So there’s that.”

  “I don’t like the books,” she admitted.

  “That’s what I thought.”

  “I liked that you like them.”

  He turned his back on the bookshelf, but didn’t look at her. Didn’t look at anything.

  “I used to come home late,” Kai said, “and see lights flicker in my living room, and I’d know you were there, reading by candle. I’d walk to the door, and if you forgot to pull the curtains I could see you through the window, on the couch. Once I found you on the carpet with your feet resting on the cushions, holding the book open over your face.” His shoulders twitched, but he made no sound. “You smile as you read, you know that? Lost in those books. Velasquez, LeClerc, Probst, Evander. Lost, and happy. I tried to read Velasquez because I wanted to see what made you smile like that. I watched you, happy, as I stood on the porch, in the dark. I knew once I walked in the door that smile would break, and I’d be the reason.”

  “You weren’t,” he said, of course.

  “Oh, I know,” she lied.

  “I was messed up,” he said. “I’m still messed up. And hells, you remember what I was like before the Penitents. There are nine kinds of evil inside my head. None of that’s your fault.”

  “Still. It was nice to see that you could be happy, once in a while. After we split, when I came home late, I’d imagine you on the couch. As if the light was still on. It was on somewhere, I guess, just not near me.”

  “It wasn’t.”

  “Wasn’t?”

  “The light. Wasn’t on. I couldn’t read for a long time after we broke up. Whenever I opened a book the words swam.”

  One corner of her mouth quirked up, then down. “I sort of wish you hadn’t told me that.”

  “I wish a lot of things.”

  “I’m sorry about last night,” she said. More words rose to her tongue unbidden, and she closed her mouth to keep them in.

  “You didn’t come here to apologize.”

  “No.”

  “This is a business call.” That sentence should have been a question, but his voice didn’t rise at the end. He sat back behind the desk, frowned at his half-eaten lunch, and slid it aside.

  “Yes.” She’d rehearsed many versions of this conversation, but the strange start had skewed her. “I need to report something. Anonymously.”

  “Coming to me is hardly anonymous.”

  “No. But it’s my best alternative.”

  “Why not go to another officer?”

  “Come on, Claude. We dated for years. Bitter separation. Do you think there’s a watchman on the force who doesn’t know my name by now? I could feel their contempt from the bottom of the ridge. I doubt any of them like me, or trust me, which means I can’t trust them. Which leaves you.”

  “Or a Penitent.”

  “I’m in a delicate situation, and the Penitents are a blunt instrument. I’d rather talk to someone with a mind of his own.”

  “Penitents have minds.”

  “They possess minds. It’s not the same thing.”

  He balled his hands into a mound of bone, skin, and muscle. “The more you talk, the less this sounds like an anonymous tip, and the more like you coming to your ex-boyfriend for a favor.”

  She nodded.

  “I can only do so much for you. I only want to do so much for you.”

  “I need someone I can trust. That’s all.”

  “Tell me what’s happened, and I’ll say whether I can help.”

  “Can you keep this private?”

  “The door’s closed,” he said. “Those windows are double layered with empty space in the middle. The walls here are thick. No one will hear us.”

  “And you won’t tell anyone what I’ve told you here?”

  “If you ask me to do anything official, I have to tell someone.”

  “But you won’t say the information came from me.”

  He clenched his jaw, and relaxed. “Not unless I have to.”

  “I need more of a promise than that.”

  “I can’t give it.”

  She exhaled. “Okay.”

  “Are you sure you want to say whatever this is? Once you tell me something, you can’t untell it. I’m not in the job of ignoring crimes. They break that into us, too.”

  She remembered Edmond Margot’s desperate eyes. “I’m sure.”

  “What’s happened?”

  “A theft,” she said.

  He blinked. “I thought you said this wasn’t Penitent material.”

  “It’s not a normal theft.”

  “I’m sure,” he said. “What’s been stolen?”

  “Souls. From an idol.”

  Outside, the Penitents’ shadows shran
k as the sun reached noon. “Interesting.”

  “No one has ever drawn power from our idols without permission. It should be impossible. The pool is one of the most heavily warded places on the planet. The caldera of Kavekana’ai doesn’t even exist in this world anymore: fly over it and you’ll see only solid lava.”

  “But someone’s stolen from you.”

  “A poet. An Iskari named Edmond Margot.”

  “How?”

  “I don’t know how. Margot himself didn’t know he was a thief until this morning.”

  “He stole accidentally? What does that even mean?”

  “He went looking for inspiration, and in a moment of terror or genius or both he found an idol. He thought she was a muse, and he used her power to write poems. Took a crime and turned it into art.”

  “And you want me to arrest him for this.”

  “He’s in danger. The pilgrims he stole from are the kind of people who wander into your village and look around and say, This is an awfully nice entire population you have here, it’d be a shame if something were to, you know, happen to it. If they learn what Margot’s done, they’ll kill him. Or worse, study him to find how he broke into the pool. We need him alive, and in custody, so we can stop anyone else from following suit.”

  “This sounds like priestly business.”

  “It is.”

  “Then why are you here, not up the mountain?”

  She sighed. Always to the point with Claude. “Because Jace kicked me out. I’m going to tell him, but I need more answers first, and answers take time. Meanwhile, we can’t leave this guy walking around.”

  “Are you sure Jace doesn’t know already?”

  “If the priests knew, Margot wouldn’t be free. If the people he stole from knew, he’d be dead, or worse.”

  “And how did you learn this?”

  “I found some papers I wasn’t supposed to find. I recognized Margot’s name, and here we are.”

  “Okay.” He spread his hands on the desk. “What’s the hurry?”

  “The idol he stole from died awhile back. Its pilgrims hired a Craftswoman to resurrect it, and this woman knows her business. If she doesn’t know about Margot already, she will soon. She was close on the trail last night.”