Full Fathom Five

by Max Gladstone

  No.

  The space was not like skin. The space was skin.

  An enormous face overshadowed them all, a planet-devouring mouth fixed in an expression not quite smile or grimace or sneer. Features skewed and strange, as if sculpted by someone who had only ever felt faces before, not seen them. Points of sharp teeth showed between lips.

  Eyes opened, and light flowed out.

  Not gods. Goddess.

  The largest idol in the pool had a few hundred believers at most. But there were thousands of idols, millions. And as they connected, the web’s complexity soared. That network, idols bound to idols bound to idols, a great tangle of power and traded soulstuff, evolving over time, was more complex than any single god.

  She’d thought the idols were alive. She was wrong.

  No one idol was alive.

  All of them were.

  Alive, and alone. Trapped. A single mind, trying to express itself through a succession of voices. Donning idols like masks as she, as She, reached out and down into the mortal world. Going mad in eons of deep time, without anyone to talk to, without worshippers to call her name.

  Whenever she tried to speak, her mouthpiece died. And each death, torture.

  “Who are you?” Kai shouted.

  The smile widened. Kai could not tell if it was gentle, or cruel. Massive lips parted, and Kai braced her soul against the coming Voice.

  Her eyes burned like suns.

  They glanced up, to the surface of the pool.

  Kai followed the goddess’s gaze, and saw Teo there.

  What was she doing?

  The Quechal woman had worked the bracelet off her wrist, and held it above the pool. Sunlight caught silver.

  Teo dropped the bracelet.

  Kai did not swim so much as fly up through the black. Cold bit her limbs and entered her lungs.

  The bracelet spun as it fell, and spinning, it glowed from within.

  Kai burst from the pool. The million subtle constraints of physical law closed around her like the jaws of an enormous beast. Her fingers caught the falling bracelet—and bracelet flowed through them, silver sifting like sand. She grabbed for it again, and again her hand passed through as the wire hoop sank into unreal depths, a solid disk now, a moon shining within the pool, and gone.

  The sky above turned red. The ground shook.

  Pebbles trembled on the broken rock beach. Stone ground against stone.

  Around them boulders shivered and stood, long-dormant legs and arms shattering free of hunched shells. Ten Penitents towered on the beach. Ruby eyes glowed in slab faces. Fingers flexed. Dust rained from joints of knuckle and wrist.

  This was bad.

  Kai didn’t know what Teo had done, or why. No time to care. Silhouettes appeared at the windows overlooking the caldera, priests drawn by the alarm and the crimson sky. They saw her.

  Teo sprinted for the shelter of the cave, but Kai, diving, caught her leg, and they both fell hard onto rock. Teo kicked Kai’s hand, scrambled to her feet again, too late. These Penitents might have slept for years, but once woken they moved as fast as any that patrolled Kavekana’s streets. One caught Teo in its fist and lifted. Her shoulders strained, but she couldn’t shake the statue’s grip.

  Kai tried to run, too. Rocks and pebbles cut her feet.

  These Penitents lacked prisoners: slow crystal brains, that was all, urges and instincts without room for reason. If she was fast enough, she could cross the water, retreat into the cave, find an exit before the mountain locked down.

  Two more feet to the water—

  A stone hand caught her from behind.

  She’d seen Izza struggle in a Penitent’s grip, and Teo just now, and wondered why they tried to fight. Muscle could not break stone. Now, she understood. The body fought on its own—the animal yanked and tugged and jerked to free itself. Proof in a way of Teo’s argument for evolution: the muscles remembered being a small mouselike creature in the claw of some prehistoric lizard. Trapped in the Penitent’s fist, lifted off the ground, Kai strained against the rock that held her. Her arms and shoulders and ribs and back burned. She could not breathe.

  Groans of broken and shifting stone settled into silence. She glanced left, and saw Teo, also caught.

  “Sorry,” Teo said, with a rueful grin. A bruise purpled her left cheek. “I didn’t expect that to happen.”

  “What in the hells were you doing?”

  She did not answer.

  “A question,” said a voice from the cave ahead, “I might ask you both.”

  Kai recognized the voice.

  “Jace.”

  He emerged from cave into light, black clad, hands in his pockets, shoulders slumped. Thin lips pressed together. He spared Teo a glance, dismissed her, and turned to Kai. Behind his glasses, his eyes were thoughtful, as if pondering the meaning of a long forgotten dream. He blinked, removed his glasses, and pinched the bridge of his nose. When he looked up, his eyes had not changed.

  “Kai. We need to talk.” He waved to a Penitent, who stomped over to the beach and gathered her discarded clothes. Suit and shoes seemed doll-sized in the monster’s hands. “Come on. You can dress in my office.”

  “I’ll dress here. Have this guy put me down.”

  “I don’t think so,” Jace said.

  “I’m not on her side.”

  “I know,” he said. “But we need to talk, don’t we?”

  She couldn’t lie to him. “Yes. We do.”

  51

  The failing sun lit Jace’s office. Streams of shadow ran east from desk and chair over the bare floor. The four unfinished statues stood guard against the walls.

  Kai’s Penitent released her, set down her clothes, and left. Jace closed the door after it. “You have questions,” he said. “You deserve answers.” He sounded as if he hadn’t slept in a week. Longer. Years.

  He retreated to his desk, and drew a ribbon-bound scroll and a pen from a drawer. “Sign this nondisclosure agreement. We have secrets to discuss, and I don’t want them to leave this room. Even in your memory.”

  “I won’t sign anything. If you want to be honest, be honest. If not, I’ll walk out this door and tell the Journal everything I know.”

  “Don’t be so sure.”

  “You think the Penitents will stop me? Fine. Drag me to court. I’ll talk to a judge as happily as to a reporter.”

  “Kai. I don’t know what you think is happening here, but I’m sure you have it wrong.” He left the scroll and pen on his desk. “Let’s talk. Though maybe you’d rather dress first.”

  She stood firm for a minute, watching Jace, but gooseflesh prickled her arms. She pulled on her pants, buttoned and zipped them. “Our idols are waking up.” How much did he know already? Stick to the basics. Don’t mention the meta-goddess unless he does. “One at a time they’ve become conscious, and one at a time they’ve died.” The shirt next. She skipped a few buttons, and donned the jacket over. Stepped into her shoes.

  “Yes.” He looked so young beneath his age. How easy to imagine him as a boy, eager and idealistic, all the great globe’s glories in his future. She saw them crumbling.

  “How long have you known?” She approached the desk. There was no wind in this room with the door closed.

  The corners of his mouth twitched up, a reflex rather than a smile. “We found the first one through an audit, if you believe it. Two years back. Junior priest combing through transaction data.” He held one hand in front of his face, thumb and finger so close that from Kai’s angle they seemed to be touching. “So small a thing. I saw it move, in the pool, one night. I’d never imagined one of our idols could look like that.”

  “What did you do?”

  “What could I do? What would you have done?”

  “Told people,” she said.

  “Who?”

  “Other priests. Pilgrims. The Hidden Schools. Someone. I mean. We created sentient life. Right? That’s what this is. We built idols, and they woke into gods.”


  “And what happens then?” He crossed his arms over his chest. His clothes melded with the shadows, with the wall. “Pilgrims don’t come to us because they’re looking for gods. They come because they want the appearance of worship without the responsibility. They come to hide. They want safety, protection.” He looked up, and she saw real hope in his face, or an echo of hope, long disappointed. “Tell me I’m wrong.”

  She couldn’t.

  “And what if they learn our idols don’t work the way we said? You’ve seen other god havens fall. Soulstuff will flee to lands that make the same promises we can’t keep. Back then, understand, we had one god awake. Thousands sleeping. No sense whether this was a miracle or an inevitable product of our system. If we should expect idols to wake once a decade, or every hundred years, every million. What do you do?”

  “Talk to the god.”

  He did laugh, this time, sadly. “How? Pray? Oh, dear Lord, or Lady, forgive me this most grievous fault of creating you bound in chains. The mind reels. And even if we could communicate, what could we say when it asked for freedom? What if it tried to communicate with its faithful? Do we let one accident, one freak, destroy our way of life?”

  “Think, Jace. We spent fifty years waiting for the gods to come back. And they did. Not from the direction we expected, not in the way we hoped, but there are gods on Kavekana again.”

  “They aren’t our gods, Kai. Our gods left us. They sailed off across the ocean, and no half-sentient ghost babbling in the pool at night can take their place.”

  “Not at first,” she said. “But one day.”

  “We’ll never make it that far.” He turned to the window, to Kavekana. “Look at us. Our pretty little lives. Beachside poetry readings. Cocktails with tiny umbrellas. The great and good flock to our shores and overpay for drinks. You know what it’s like out there, over the horizon. In the Gleb. In Southern Kath. The poor swarm Dresediel Lex and Alt Coulumb in hungry millions, yes, but the most miserable gap-toothed glory-addict quivering on a Coulumbite street corner stands on the backs of a hundred men in lands he can’t even name. Do you know what the great powers do to tiny nations with no armies to speak of, atrophied industry, warm climates? Empires may still stand on the coast of southern Kath, but the jungle’s burning. Zombie-worked plantations consume rain forest mile by mile. Northern Craftsmen and Iskari bishops and Shining Empire families trade the locals scraps of soul for the land their ancestors built. In the Southern Gleb, Deathless Kings rule the cities while hungry men and gods scrap over bloodstone mines. We survive because an accident of history made us valuable. And if our value fades, the masters of the world will demand something else from us. Build ships. Grow sugarcane. Bow before Iskari squid gods. Host a military base. Our value is the price of our independence.”

  “You talk as if there’s a war coming.”

  “Of course there is. You read the newspapers. Giant serpents over Dresediel Lex. A god killed in Alt Coulumb, and the outbreak there a year later. These aren’t accidents. There’s a story here. And it’s not just the big things, the sudden changes and grand tales. Koschei’s armies fence with the Golden Horde across the steppe—because they’re scared. The Shining Empire stretches its tentacles across the Pax, and Dhistran armies train in police actions for an invasion they know will come one day. The world’s smaller than ever, and you put too many big things in a small space and they eye one another wondering who’s biggest. We may be social animals, but our gods are not. They’re hungry, and bloody.”

  “You’ve given this speech before,” she said.

  His face had flushed red. As he recovered his breath the flush receded, like a flower closing. The old mask returned. “I have,” he said.

  “To whom?”

  “Monica, first. I don’t think you knew her well—she was a partner, managed the first idol that woke up. She was as scared as me. She knew something had to be done.”

  “You killed it. The idol. The goddess.”

  “It’s not as if it was murder,” he said. “Just. We’re in a position to hear a lot, you know. Some of the most influential Craftsmen and priests and decision-makers on the planet come to us to safeguard their souls against whatever coming doom they fear. We invested that idol’s soul in mining futures we knew were on the verge of collapse. She died. And so we saved the world. This world.” He rapped his desk with his knuckles. “Our world.”

  “Until another god came along.”

  “The second surprised us, but we knew what to do. Got the pilgrims to sign off on the trade, talked about exceptional risk and exceptional reward. So easy to convince people when they trust you.” He sat on the desk. The toes of his shoes scraped against the ground as his legs swung. “By the third time, we had a process in place. Not documented, of course. But a process.”

  “We’ve waited since the wars for the gods to come back,” she said, and was surprised the words sounded so flat. Stone walls and statues ate the echoes of her voice. “And you’ve been killing them for years.”

  “When you say it that way, it sounds bad.” He shook his head. “We’ve been saving the world. One death at a time.”

  “And whenever someone found out, you invited them out for coffee, explained the situation. Those who agreed with you got paid off. What happened to those who didn’t?”

  “Nobody disagreed.”

  “I can’t believe that.”

  “No one has. I present the choice, they weigh their options. Now, don’t mistake me: not everyone is happy. Monica, for example.” He sighed. “She couldn’t continue, after the third. She left—took a job at an Iskari soul haven. We decided—I decided, I guess, after that—to have the priests involved sign strict confidentiality agreements. Take their memories of what they’d been forced to do.”

  “Which brings us to Mara,” she said.

  “Of course, Mara. Delicate moral sensibilities, but a good soldier. Knew that what looked like a choice wasn’t. She wept, but she did the right thing. We let her choose the tools: her brother consults for the Shining Empire, you know, and he let the Helmsman’s plan slip. On the day the god was due to die, she stood watch poolside, knowing she’d soon forget it all. And then you jumped. Tried to undo the hardest choice of her life. I can’t imagine what she must have felt, watching you sink.”

  “I spoiled the plan.”

  For the first time, he hesitated. He held his hands palms up, balancing. “I suppose, if you look at it from a certain point of view. Your dive caught the Grimwalds’ attention. Which brought the Craftswoman down upon us. But I don’t blame you. I should have expected Mara’s friends to come mourn with her. I should have expected you to do something strange.”

  “I didn’t, though.” She felt a thrill as she said it. “There’s nothing strange about trying to save a murder victim. You told me I was mad, and sent me away. I wasn’t.”

  “You were idealistic,” he said. “Isolated. You didn’t feel the threat. I thought work with Twilling would prepare you for this conversation. A few months of seeing how little we really matter to our clients beyond the reward we offer them. I didn’t lie to you, Kai. I hope you can see that.”

  “The gods won’t stop waking up,” she said.

  “Then we’ll keep killing them.”

  “The island is changing, Jace. You’re trying to save a world that’s going away. We all have been, since the wars. Old Kavekana’s gone.” She felt a thrill as she said it, a breaking of thick ice. “Something new is about to happen.”

  “And if we let it, we’ll all pay. Mara understood that.”

  “Where is she? I want to hear all this from her.”

  “Ah,” he said. “Well. That part, I think, really is your fault.”

  Kai felt the room grow colder. “What do you mean?”

  “Your unexpected dive caused the lawsuit. The lawsuit allowed Ms. Kevarian to depose Mara. You remember your deposition.”

  Her mind stretched to violin strings and the Craftswoman’s will the bow. “Yes.”
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br />   “We Craft our memory blocks well, but Mara—I don’t know whether to blame her stubbornness or praise her perspicacity. The Craftswoman didn’t find anything, but Mara realized some of her own memories were missing.”

  I’ve been made partner. Their breakfast by the water, when Kai was so distracted by her frustrated pride—she’d missed Mara’s desperation. A woman groping among the jagged pieces of her mind for a truth she was afraid to feel.

  Jace would have asked Mara to edit the Blue Lady’s records herself—and she kept a single shred of evidence, the stigma of her crime. Unsettled by the deposition, she found the notebook. And once she realized what had happened, where would she turn for help?

  “In some ways we must all credit your persistence. Her meeting Ms. Kevarian inside the library dream was a stroke of brilliance; we might not have noticed had you not chosen that night to sneak into her crèche.”

  “Mara didn’t tell you I was there. You tracked me through my cane.”

  “Well, of course Mara didn’t, but the cane was strictly medical. Telemetry, that’s all. Gave us a vague sense of your location. I wouldn’t have known you were in the library if Gavin didn’t tell me.”

  “Gavin.”

  “What can I say? Your friends worry about you.”

  “You killed her,” she said. If she hadn’t used that word already in this conversation, she might not have been able to use it now. “Mara.”

  “Oh, gods, no.” The suggestion shocked him. “No, Kai. Don’t. I mean, how could you even. Mara was scared. So scared, when she realized what she’d done. We had to have our talk again, that’s all. I explained our duty, and hers.”

  “She never forgot her duty to our clients. To our future.”

  “She forgot her duty to this.” One arm thrown wide, he embraced the view beyond his window, the island in fullest green. “Makawe and his sisters left for the God Wars, and trusted us to watch their island for them. We swore to keep it safe.”

  “By destroying everything it stands for.”

  “What are half-formed gods next to the lives of men, and women? Next to the lives we’ve built here? Mara was confused, that’s all. She needed help. So I helped.”