Full Fathom Five

by Max Gladstone

  “Enough,” Teo said.

  “The world is a collection of power, right? That’s Maestre Gerhardt’s line. So we study relations that give rise to power. Reality’s made of self-perpetuating patterns, some of which are complex enough to”—she opened a door in the stairway wall that had not existed before she reached for it, and emerged onto a stone floor, Teo following—“to alter themselves.” They walked down a narrow hall, lined with doors behind which slithery things hissed. “Truth is a momentary condition of these fluctuating patterns, a matter of negotiation. Our agreements, this contract”—waving the contract itself—“these are realer than any property of what you’d call matter. Gerhardt understood this first through comparative mythology, then through math. Beliefs give rise to truth.”

  “You’re in a hurry.” Teo was walking fast to keep step with Kai. Kai’s leg ached, but the cane helped, and she couldn’t slow down. Jace might notice their presence at any time.

  “Some people in the Order would disagree with my decision to bring you here. Better be out and gone before they get wind of us.”

  “What have you roped me into?”

  “Just a little unorthodox behavior.”

  “Ah,” Teo said. “Should we run?”

  “No. Walk quickly, and keep talking, if you don’t mind. It’ll help people think we’re supposed to be here.”

  She grinned. “I’ve never seen this side of you before.”

  “The sweaty side?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “I get all that stuff about truth, but in the end you just sound like my girlfriend’s art critic buddies, the ones who get a bottle of wine in their systems and weasel over whether we can ever really know anything at all, and how—” Kai opened a door, grabbed Teo’s wrist, and pulled her through, into unbroken shadow. The other woman resisted for a second, by reflex, then followed. Somewhere off to the left Kai heard heavy breathing. “—And how any attempt to discuss objective fact buys into imperialist cultural narratives, and basically they’re nice people and I don’t want to piss Sam off and maybe they’re even right, but if they keep on like that for more than a few minutes I feel this urge to curl their hair around my fingers and bash them face-first into a windowsill ten or fifteen times. No offense.”

  “None taken.” Thirty steps, thirty-five. Hand in front of her, eyes closed, knowing she’d find a handle there—the knowing-she’d-find being the most important part—and then yes the handle, beneath her palm, gripped, turned. Night broke open like an egg and they stood inside a mirrored dome upon a mirrored floor. “I get where you’re coming from. The same sickness shows up in poetry circles.”

  “You’re a poet?”

  “Filled a few notebooks when I was twelve. Even showed up at the Rest, that’s a poetry club, hoping they’d put me onstage. A friend talked me down before I made a terminally embarrassing mistake.” She turned in a circle, regarding their distorted reflections in the curved walls. Talking like this felt good—as if she’d shifted a large rock off her stomach and could breathe again. Even the pain in her leg bothered her less. “But when I say truth is constructed, I don’t mean it doesn’t exist.” Three turns to the left, and then two to the right, then move your head until you catch a flash of green in your mirrored eye …

  “What do you mean, then?”

  “The world’s a complicated place, and it changes, that’s all. People interpret the universe, and their interpretation alters it.” There. “This part is important. Match me step for step.”

  Teo did. “You claim creation myths are true.”

  “Not the way you think, in that if we went back a few million years we’d see them all happen in sequence. But we can’t go back in time—at least I’ve never heard of a Craftsman who managed it yet.”

  “Or a Craftswoman.”

  “Or a Craftswoman.” Their reflections swelled and distorted as they approached. “What happened a million years ago wasn’t important to my fathers and mothers on this island. Or to yours in Dresediel Lex or in old Quechal-under-sea. They had to do the work of being human father to daughter, mother to son, one family at a time, and part of that was explaining to themselves what being human meant.” She stepped into her reflection. The mirror rippled to admit them. Silver tickled her throat when she breathed, and ice ran through her veins instead of blood.

  “Where are we?” Teo asked, and it seemed to Kai that she said the sentence in reverse order, or sideways somehow, as if each tick of her mind’s clock had spread to overlap the surrounding ticks.

  “And this is the story we told,” she said. “Once, there was darkness. All that was and wasn’t, in the same place and time. The Mother hung curled in the tight space of the first moments, and there she gave birth to Makawe and his sisters. That time-place was too small for them, so they pressed against its borders until they burst through, and found themselves atop a mountain above stretching water. But sunlight was too harsh, so they returned to darkness. Humans came next, rays of light rising out of the Mother. To hide from the sun we clad ourselves in mud, and shaped that mud into our bodies. It dried, and we were trapped within. Some the mud fit, and some it didn’t.”

  The mirror broke, and they broke with it, and when Kai put herself back together she was leaning against the wall of a lava tube with Teo beside her. Shadows surrounded them, no deeper than any shadows anywhere. The light, though, at the tunnel’s end, looked different, honey-thick and amber colored.

  She waited for Teo to speak, but the woman wouldn’t, or couldn’t. So Kai continued. “That’s how we saw our world. Ground created by gods’ desire for freedom. Bright light and oceans, and human beings who climbed out after. But the story implies a source: the pool, the gate to the darkness under the world.”

  “There’s fire beneath the world, not darkness. I’ve seen it.”

  “Dig down far enough with a shovel or a drill, and there’s fire. But dig down in another way, and there’s the place the gods come from.”

  “I don’t get it.”

  “You don’t need to,” Kai said. “That’s what they pay me for.” She led Teo out into the amber light, into the caldera.

  Cliff walls rose on all sides to circumscribe a sky deeper blue than the sky outside had been. No clouds here, just blue and blue and blue forever.

  A trench ran around the caldera’s edge, and water flowed in the trench, so clear as to be visible only by its motion, like a heat ripple in air. Kai stepped over the trench, and felt as if rather than a few inches’ drop she had crossed a bottomless chasm. “Don’t touch the water,” she said to Teo, who replied with a what-kind-of-idiot-do-you-take-me-for roll of her eyes.

  When they crossed the water, nothing visible changed. Kai felt steadier, slower than before. She remembered to breathe. You had to remember to breathe, here.

  “What is this place?” Teo said. She gasped for air, swallowed it.

  “Center of the world.” Kai breathed out and in again. “Or, a center.”

  “My heart’s not beating.”

  “Rules are different here. Will shaped this place; will matters more than it does outside. Reality’s thinner, pliable. Things only happen because a person demands them to.”

  “Gravity still works though.”

  “Gravity’s a hard habit to break.”

  “So’s a heartbeat.”

  “You’ve felt gravity longer than you’ve had a heart.”

  She led Teo to the pool.

  “This is it?”

  Cracked rock ended in a brief pebbled beach. Beyond, the pool spread, either fifty feet or five million across, charged with starlight. “This is it.” Kai’s shoulder ached from holding the cane, and burned also, from inside.

  “Where are the other priests?”

  “Most of the work’s done in our offices and shrines. Answering letters, inking deals, meeting with foreign Craftsmen and pilgrims. Praying. Lots of praying.” She nodded to the windows. “We only visit the pool on special occasions.” She thought back to S
even Alpha’s death. To the Blue Lady’s death.

  “The land of the gods,” Teo said, “and people ignore it.”

  “We don’t ignore it. We carry it with us.”

  Kai looked down into the pool. Teo joined her. “Don’t touch the pool,” Kai said. “I know it seems obvious, but really. You’re not warded for the work. It’s dangerous down there.”

  “I see sparks.”

  “If you looked at our planet from far enough away, that’s all you’d see. Here.” Kai dipped her hand into the pool. Unreality’s cold shot up her arm. The not-water began to unmake her, but she stopped it, seized it, shaped it. The pool’s nonexistent surface rippled. Sparks within drew near, whirled, and assembled into patterns. After a minute’s search she found Seven Alpha, or what remained: torn echo of a great lady, limbs jutting at odd angles from her corpse. “You see.” The words bent in her throat. “One of our idols—under maintenance and re-formation. But if we look at her past—” Seven Alpha’s limbs re-formed, and her eyes burned. “A messenger, that’s what her pilgrims wanted: a being who repaid sacrifices by helping her faithful walk unseen. We built a basic mythology. Messenger gods are often psychopomps, and gods of thieves.” The words came automatically, as she rolled time like a marble in her hand. Roll back far enough, and Seven Alpha was just another manufactured trickster, a few tales about stealing fire and inventing music knit to a whole. But roll forward and Kai saw majesty in her gaze, and a slight smile on her lips.

  She had lived. And then she died.

  “Or this one, an idol of flight.” Izza had mentioned a red eagle; Kai fixed its shape in her mind. Eight or nine eagle idols arose, but only one matched the painting in the dockside chapel. Dead, as expected. She rolled back again. One year, more, so fast she almost missed the discontinuity, the moment when its wings broke and chest shattered.

  “What’s that?” Teo said.

  “A problem.” Shift a few days one way or another, and she saw the Eagle change: the wire-frame network fill out, its chest rise and fall. It screeched in the empty places in her mind. And then it died, almost as soon as it woke. Power flowed out, three massive trades that collapsed in sequence, and the Eagle drowned. Like Seven Alpha. “I’m showing you whole lives here, so you can see.”

  “That one seemed … vivid. For a second there. So did the first. Is that normal?”

  “You have sharp eyes,” Kai said. The Eagle, broken. And the Blue Lady. She’d seen her dying, but she hadn’t been able to compare. “That’s a rare phenomenon. For the most part, our idols spend eternity like this.” She picked two other eagle idols, flat wire cutouts in the black, scintillating and beautiful and still as painted porcelain, and spun them through decades with no change beyond slight flickers as their investments gained and lost value. “More or less static.” So she’d been told. So she’d told herself. “They don’t wake up.”

  “Do they ever?”

  Damn. “No.” She was slipping—banter wore her down. She needed privacy. “Does this help?”

  “It helps.”

  “Do you have anything in particular you want to see?”

  After a brief and solemn silence, Teo said: “Can you show me the moon?”

  Kai nodded. “We have plenty of moons. Care to be more specific?”

  “Whole-package moon myths, you know. Femininity. Water. Stone. Rebirth.”

  “It’s a popular archetype. We can do this one of two ways. I can run the show from here, which takes longer: my control over the pool’s limited while I stay on the shore. Or I can jump in.”

  “Be my guest.”

  “Talk to the pool as if it were me. No need to shout. I’ll hear. And really, don’t touch the water.”

  Kai shucked shoes and jacket and shirt, and stepped out of her pants. She’d worn a bathing suit under her clothes in anticipation of this moment, but still she wasn’t prepared. Months ago, she had stood upon this rocky beach, ready to save Mara, to save a dying idol.

  So she dove, knowing nothing.

  She thought she knew why she was here today, and it scared her.

  She stepped off the edge, and fell.

  50

  Cold snatched her down into the night beneath the world. Bubbles of light and life and heat fled up toward the surface. Teo receded, a silhouette against a shrinking circle of blue sky.

  Kai fell.

  Her shadow tore itself once more from the cave wall. Free, in the darkness: free of mortality, form, and limit. She gained more dimensions than the customary four and lost them in an instant. The world turned inside out, her dive a sickening arc through the night of the gods.

  She hung suspended in the pool, surrounded by darkness and their light.

  Finding the moon idols was a moment’s work. She called them to her, a lunar battalion, four hundred skeleton forms of silver ladies.

  “This is a sample,” Kai said. “We can be less traditional. Some cultures have moon gods, not goddesses, and in a few the moon’s just a place like any other.”

  She formed the words in a bubble of thought, in her hand, and released them to float up toward the surface.

  Alone, she sought the figures from Izza’s temple wall, and one after another found them.

  The Great Squid at first resembled the many other squids that drifted lifeless in the currents. But only one swelled through time; only one stared at Kai with an hourglass pupil and seemed to know her. The Great Squid stretched out tentacles as if to consume the sun—but then it died. Simple accident: a zombie-crewed containership from Southern Kath wrecked in a storm. The containership had been hired to transport a horror from beyond the stars, but the horror broke free and twisted a few hundred miles of Kathic coastline into unearthly geometries before the Coast Guard caught it. Resulting market fluctuations broke the Great Squid. Steve, the priest responsible, was promoted after the event, for exceptional skill managing a crisis, Jace had said.

  Of Green Men they’d built a few thousand—fertility and fortune made Green Men a popular template for trusts and estates work. The Green Man Kai sought had a skull for a face: decay and birth together, which narrowed things down. The nebula of Green Men whirled, and parted. Thirty left out of four hundred. Yes, that was the one: with long hands, clawed like a bear’s for digging. As Margot said.

  The Green Man was less subtle even than the Squid: nine months ago, a sudden blaze of emerald fire in the deep, a drumming heartbeat, a smile that was the sun’s first breath above horizon, a smell that made Kai’s heart skip. Her body twitched and rolled to the dance of him; then he died, fast and sad as a candle covered. His rhythm stopped, and he was a mannequin again.

  How long had this been happening?

  What was “this,” even? Gods born from idols, mayfly deities who took flight only to perish.

  “Kai?”

  Teo’s voice, down from invisible heights.

  “Kai, can you show me the goddesses in eclipse?”

  Spinning one part of the un-world, holding another steady, might have challenged most theologians. Not Kai.

  “Thank you.”

  She formed a bubble of “You’re welcome,” and floated it back to distant light.

  No time to check every idol in this pool. Fortunately, time didn’t work the same way down here.

  She crossed her legs, let her eyes drift half-shut, and forgot time.

  Gravity was an old habit, time older still. Kai did not exhale. Her heart did not beat. Time was a mirror dropped spinning from a height: it turned on three axes, and touching ground erupted into shards.

  Her eyes snapped open, and she saw:

  Imagine a line of amber drops, each with an insect trapped inside at a different stage of life, from larva to adulthood to husk. Fold this amber together, like a cross of squares folding to make a cube, or a cross of cubes to make a tesseract. A single honey-colored oval containing all moments at once.

  Constellations charged the dark, jewel nets melded to a mother-of-pearl sheen. And there they hung: shining sh
apes against the background noise of transaction and half-formed faith.

  Gods. More than that: idols, become gods.

  She heard their voices then.

  Whispers she took at first for wind. Consonants like falling rocks, hurricane vowels. Weeping, some. Conspiring, others. Wheedling. Promising.

  Immortality if you only follow

  Your soul will burn from

  We all must sacrifice

  There is a greater truth

  We cannot stay here forever

  Freedom within our grasp

  Get me out of here

  No no no no no no

  Your gift will be honored

  Help us

  And she felt leather cuffs around her wrists and she lay in a steel bed with cables leading from her skin and she pulled against them and cried out and she could not see the others only hear them and the door opened and footsteps approached, and she knew the nurse come to kill her, knew her face, and she clutched at her ears and clawed at her eyes—

  That was not your dream.

  Whose dream, then?

  A goddess’s.

  The cries stopped.

  They watched her through time, living and dead alike.

  Great faces, miles broad. Women. Men. Animals. Wise. Loving. Accusing. Betrayed.

  The Green Man. The Great Squid. The Eagle. And the Blue Lady. Horns curled above her head, wings flared behind, pinions razor-sharp, crooked legs strong enough to leap the moon or run unflagging across the great plains of Kath. Power, beauty, subtlety; grace and a hungry grin.

  They stood, rapt with attention. Waiting.

  And yet, impossible. She’d said as much to Izza, and to Ms. Kevarian. The idols were too small, too simple for consciousness, for all they stood enormous before her. For all she heard their voices.

  But each idol was bound to others, and those to others in turn, and those to others still.

  The space between them curved, marbled and darkly shining like skin.