Full Fathom Five

by Max Gladstone

  She guided Mako along the beach. Though shorter than the rest, Kai’s Penitent was a mountain still, flanked by mountains. Starlight caught in ruby eyes; night robbed of color, the paint’s slick surface was almost blood.

  Izza turned the old man’s shoulders until he faced the Penitent. “Here she is.”

  He pressed his stick into the sand, and folded both hands atop it. A breeze blew his loose gray hair and ragged clothes. She released his wrist and retreated a step, not knowing why. He looked taller, and older, than she had thought.

  Kai’s Penitent groaned. Or Kai groaned. Izza recognized the sound: the nameless animal terror that came when you woke to find a knife at your throat.

  Kai was awake. Which meant the Penitent was, too.

  “What now?” she whispered. The old man seemed carved out of the same rock as the sentinels. She didn’t expect an answer.

  “Bring me closer,” he said. “I need to touch her.”

  * * *

  Kai heard the approaching footfalls with dim sympathy. She hoped these interlopers would leave. She’d found a grip on the crystal brain and its laws. Without distraction, with only stars and rolling ocean to occupy her mind, she might carve herself some space, some minor freedom.

  Unless even this slight victory was only the Penitent sinking deeper into her mind as her resistance flagged.

  No sense thinking that way. You had to trust yourself. Some parts of you, at least. There was nothing else.

  Then the newcomers spoke, and she recognized their voices.

  Izza. Mako.

  Gods.

  She tried to suppress the realization, her certainty as to what they’d come to do, or try; too slow. The old man and the thief were here to rescue her.

  Here to stop her from guarding Makawe’s people. Misguided. Illegal. Traitors.

  Her fingers twitched, and she almost reached for them.

  No.

  She broke the statue’s certainty on a wall of will. Too many voices had told her who to be, what to think. And they were so often wrong. Wrong to say they knew her; wrong to say what she should do, or be, or become.

  Izza and Mako shuffled into view. She wanted to warn them away, but wire cut her and fire burned her and she knew her righteous facade was false. She ignored her friends’ faults rather than helping them grow.

  They stood before her, Mako with hands crossed on his walking stick, Izza staring up at the Penitent—at Kai—with horror, and a clear expression of guilt.

  Mako said: “I need to touch her.”

  She recognized his voice.

  Of course she recognized his voice. He was her friend. Seize him now. Anything less was to fail the cause of justice, to abandon the island’s defense.

  Or not.

  They were here to help her. They were working for Kavekana, the real Kavekana, ever changing, not the image burned into the Penitent’s crystal mind. To stop them was to betray the island.

  The Penitent demanded, but the judgment belonged to Kai.

  She did not raise her arm.

  And so she suffered.

  * * *

  Izza led Mako to the Penitent. Her whole body was cold iron, and moving broke it rather than bent. She’d snuck into back-room offices while old women and potbellied men snored on their lunch break, and stolen fragments of their dreams. But she never felt this way before: like trying to walk over frost without melting it.

  The Penitent stood strong and stiff. Izza wondered what battles Kai fought within its shell.

  Five steps left. Four. Three.

  Too close to run, now.

  Idiot. You’ve always been too close to run.

  Kai screamed.

  Izza saw herself reflected in the paint on the Penitent’s chest, and in the facets of its eyes.

  “Here.”

  Mako extended his hand. His fingers shook.

  The Penitent moved.

  * * *

  Kai wrestled with an angel, and she was losing. She’d hurt before, in Jace’s office, as the Penitent taught her how to move, and she thought that was pain. In the intervening hours the crystal had studied the courses of her mind, tangled itself into her thoughts. It crushed her and burned her and cut her and froze her and broke her and re-formed her only to break again. She fought back, tearing, wild, a cyclone of agony. It hurt her because it knew her, and because it knew her it could fade away before she struck.

  She fought herself—the self the Penitent wanted her to be.

  Her anger flagged, and in that moment her arm shot out. One hand caught Mako’s skull between thumb and forefinger, and began to squeeze. He gasped. She pressed harder: the Penitent knew the precise breaking tension of human bone, could stop before it shattered. He would not speak again with that too-familiar voice.

  There it was again, Kai thought, drowning. She knew Mako. Knew his voice. Had since childhood.

  And yet she recognized his voice in some other way—like a song she’d long forgotten.

  That confused rifling through her mind for a fact she’d never known she knew, that wasn’t hers. That was the Penitent.

  That was something she could hold, and hit.

  Swift as a sea storm she followed that feeling back, destroying as she came.

  The Penitent, stunned, released its grip. Mako set his hand on the Penitent’s chest. He stared into the crystals of her eyes.

  Then his true eyes opened, and light poured forth.

  * * *

  Izza pried at the Penitent’s fingers with all her strength and no success. When the grip gave, she sprawled back on the beach. Mako swayed, but remained upright. He touched the Penitent.

  And his eyes opened.

  They were already open, but he seemed to have another pair of eyelids, opening sideways. Light shone from him. No. “Shone” wasn’t the right verb. There was a word in Talbeg her mother used when telling old stories in which people saw something they weren’t supposed to see and the sight burned through them, and they died or else wandered as blind oracles for the rest of their lives, scraping the edges of the truth they’d glimpsed. That word meant “shine” the way “torrent” meant “stream” or “batter” meant “push.”

  So.

  His eyes opened, and there was light, brief, blinding.

  Through the raw red-pink afterimage, Izza saw Mako stagger. She caught him as he fell.

  Behind, she heard a crash of stone, and tensed herself to die.

  No killing blow came.

  She turned to look.

  The Penitent opened like a stone flower. Crystals lined the inside, glistening wet. Kai stood within. Thorns retreated from her skin. A long cut across her cheek, a drop of blood on her neck and at her wrist, suit torn and tattered, hair a black tangle, but Kai nonetheless. Izza’s pearl hung around her neck.

  The Penitent opened for her, or flowed open around her. Her first foot touched the sand. Her second.

  She wobbled, but did not fall.

  Izza stared into her eyes. Had she changed already? And if so, how much?

  Then Kai hugged Mako, and the old man hugged her, and laughed, and she tried to laugh, too, but coughed and said, gravelly as a twenty-year smoker: “What the hell was that?” And, hearing her own wrecked voice: “Sorry. I’ve been, um. Screaming.”

  Mako’s chest heaved, and he took a long time to speak. Whatever he had done all but shattered him. “The girl dragged me here. Dared me to come.”

  Kai turned to Izza. “Thank you.”

  Which Izza knew she was supposed to answer, but instead she pointed, and Kai looked behind her, to the next Penitent: the big modern model that had escorted her down from the mountain. It opened floodlight eyes, and turned toward them with a sound of grinding rock. Down the beach, two more came to life.

  Kai swallowed. “Mako? Any chance you can do whatever that was again?”

  The old man tried to stand, but could not.

  Kai turned to Izza then. “I don’t suppose you have any ideas.”

  Izza
shook her head.

  “Fair enough,” she said, and advanced to meet the Penitents.

  56

  Kai had no plan, no powers, no miracle hidden up her sleeve, no gods to answer the prayers she didn’t make.

  She had Ms. Kevarian’s business card in her pocket. And she was out of options.

  The stars were too bright. Thinking hurt. An Iskari experimental painter had come to the Kavekana Museum once when she was a kid, and the school took them all to see. The man painted canvasses solid colors that did not exist before he invented them: blues that tugged the eyes, greens that melted the air and lingered in nightmares long after you looked away.

  After Penance, freedom felt like that.

  The advancing Penitents mounted toward the sky, Teo’s nearest, and behind hers two more. Kai wished she could stand straighter, walk steadier to meet them. Her legs quaked. Her shoulders and back would not obey. She didn’t limp, though: every part of her hurt equally for once.

  Teo was inside that front-most statue, trapped as Kai had been. What had it done to her mind in these few hours?

  “Teo,” she said. She didn’t bother to speak loudly. The other woman could not help but hear. “Teo, I’m sorry.” She groped for words to bring the Quechal woman back to herself, but thought of nothing the Penitent wouldn’t use to its own advantage. She barely knew Teo, really: saleswoman, swimmer, smiler. Not enough to free her from the prison into which the Penitent sculpted her mind.

  Izza and Mako hadn’t run.

  They thought she knew what she was doing.

  More than one way to get yourself killed, she supposed.

  The two Penitents flanked Teo’s now.

  Kai put her hands into her pockets, and stepped forward.

  Teo’s Penitent moved.

  The wind of its passing fist blew Kai’s hair and the tatters of her jacket. Her jaw tightened, her stomach tensed, her legs locked—and the Penitent’s fist slammed into the face of the statue to its left. Rock buckled, crystal broke, and the Penitent fell. The third crouched and charged, striking Teo’s Penitent in the midsection. Stone arms circled around a stone chest. Teo’s Penitent crouched, sank low, wrapped its arms around the other statue’s back, and lifted. Light erupted from crystals at the joints of elbow and shoulder as its muscles shed waste heat. The third Penitent’s grip broke.

  Teo’s Penitent turned, spun, and let go. The other statue tumbled ten feet through the air, landed with a sound like a cliff collapsing, and lay still on the sand.

  The second Penitent, the one Teo had punched, was struggling to rise. Teo kicked it sharply in the side, and it collapsed with a scream and a crunch of broken rock.

  Kai watched, eyes wide, as Teo’s Penitent turned back to her. Her fingers tightened around the business card, but she did not tear it, not yet.

  The Penitent spasmed, and cracked. Dust rained from its joints; arms jerked and knees buckled and it sank to the sand. It screamed—the statue itself, not the woman within, a scream of dead material pressed to breaking and beyond. Pain and fear flickered through emerald eyes, quick as a bird crossing the moon.

  The Penitent’s chest cavity broke open.

  Two halves of the geode shell swung out so fast Kai had to jump back. One panel listed on a broken invisible hinge.

  Teo stood inside the Penitent. She wasn’t smiling. She stepped out from the crystal cage, and where Kai’s crystal had flowed open around her, Teo’s broke, shards disintegrating as they fell until a fine quartz dust painted the sand onto which she stepped.

  Teo looked like she’d fought her way up from hell. Vines of light wound her left arm: green, curved and sharp edged and elegant, a geometer’s drawing of fire save for the single savage scar that ran down the inside of her wrist. Kai had seen Craftwork glyphs before, and they didn’t look like this. These were harsher, and did not so much glow as eat surrounding light and make it theirs.

  In her hand, Teo held a thing without a name: a red spider with too many or too few legs, an anemic jellyfish, or a small, vicious octopus. She glanced down, as if surprised she held the thing, and tightened her grip.

  Kai heard a snap.

  The Penitent toppled. It took a long time to fall, and hit the beach with a heavy sound.

  Teo let go of the thing she held, and falling, it faded, until when it splashed against the sand it left only an odd gray stain.

  “Shit,” she said. “That stings.” She shook her arm as if burned; light dripped from her fingers.

  “Teo.”

  “See? It’s not so hard to lose the ’Ms.’” She nodded to Kai, and to Izza and Mako behind her. “Glad you made it. I didn’t expect them to grab you, too.”

  “Teo, what the hell did you just do?”

  “Some day maybe I’ll tell you about Quechal priests and the scars they leave. Trust me, it hurts more than it looks.” Behind her, the fallen Penitents struggled to stand, prisoners screaming as the cracks in their shells healed. Up the ridge, searchlight eyes woke and scanned the beach. “We need to leave.” She bit her lip. “Can you swim?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s a simple question.”

  “I want answers.”

  “Me first. Can. You. Swim.”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay then. You, kid. You swim?” Kai glanced back to see Izza nod, once. She was looking at Teo with a mixture of awe and fear. Mostly awe. “Old guy. Damn.”

  “Don’t worry about me.”

  “Hells we won’t, Mako. Those things are coming after us.”

  “I do not fear them.”

  “You should. You were afraid of hers a second ago.” Kai pointed toward the statue Teo had broken.

  “I was afraid for you. Not of them. I know these things, and they know me. I’ll meet you back at the Rest, if you make it. Go.”

  “Okay,” Teo said. “Fine.”

  “We’re not leaving him!”

  “I am. And so are you, unless you want to explain what just happened to those guys up the ridge.”

  “Mako, I—”

  He shook his head. “Kai. Go.”

  “Follow me. Close as you can.” And before Kai could object, the Quechal woman ran into the ocean. Waves broke around her ankles, knees, hips, and falling forward she swam.

  Penitent gazes swept the night; some pinned Kai where she stood slack jawed. She might have remained there forever had Izza not pulled her after, into the waves. Once she took her first step, the second was easy.

  “You stink at running away,” Izza called over her shoulder, laughing almost, or else hysterical.

  Kai fell into waves and water.

  After the initial wet shock, the sea took her in. She swam, following Teo’s head as the Quechal woman slipped through and disappeared behind ocean swells. Izza cut the water like a knife, the kind of speed Kai’d had when young. Kai dipped below the surface. Salt stung her eyes, and the Penitents’ light lit the sea blue and green, chiseled silhouettes of coral and darting fish from the black. A hundred yards from shore Kai rolled onto her back, risking a moment’s lost sight of Teo for a glimpse of the beach. Penitents swarmed there, and in their midst Mako stood, alone and as yet unharmed.

  How had he freed her? That burst of unearthly light, of overwhelming force, was no Craft Kai knew.

  She rolled onto her stomach, and after a panicked moment saw Teo and Izza. During her retrospection they had pulled ahead, and she’d drifted west. She adjusted course to follow.

  Night swimming resembled daytime swimming as little as an ocean resembled a pool. Daytime, you knew where you were, relative to where you had been. After sunset, the coast was a confusion of light, and only texture separated the dark above from the dark below.

  They drew even with the docks and factories of East Claw, and pressed south. Kavekana receded. Ahead, Kai saw only the skyspires miles distant. Surely Teo didn’t plan to swim all the way there. Long before they reached the spires, they’d pass the harbor wards, and then nothing would stand between t
hem and the ocean’s hunger.

  “Familiarity breeds contempt” was a saying Kai’d heard at school. The saying did not apply to Archipelagic ocean. In waters beset by star kraken, sentient storms, and sunken cities where alien monsters lived, familiarity bred terror and, failing that, death.

  When Kai next looked for Teo, she was gone.

  A second before, the woman had been swimming steadily ahead of them. The next, she vanished.

  Kai knew better than to panic. Aching, she still wasted strength treading high in the water for a better view. She saw nothing: only Izza pressing doggedly forward. She called the girl’s name, softly: sound carried over the open ocean, and she did not know who else might be listening.

  Izza turned toward Kai. Her eyes widened—and she too disappeared.

  Kai swam alone, far from shore.

  “Izza!” She made for the spot where the girl had sunk. She heard her father’s voice chant the litany of beasts that preyed on unwary sailors, and the remedy for each. Kraken be craven, shark-teeth blunt, gallowglass sail clear, scissorfish hunt. Even as a kid she’d thought the rhyme’s suggestions impractical. Oh, yes, when the shark comes for me, I’ll blunt its teeth.

  She did not, until that moment, realize the rhyme’s purpose: not to advise, but to fill the mind in the face of danger. Chants might not deter sea monsters, but they were marginally better than the alternative litanies Kai would have composed of all the ways she was about to die.

  She thought she had reached the spot where Izza sank; she saw nothing, felt no leviathan underwater. She drew a deep breath, and dove.

  She opened her eyes. Water lay beneath, only water, down to the mirror coral–crusted sea floor a hundred feet below. No Izza. No Teo. No sharks or gallowglasses. The water carried sound: clicks of tiny shrimp, ship wakes and propellers, and beneath all that, far away, so deep she heard it more in her blood than in her ears, music. Long notes rose and fell, glissando and trill. Praise song.

  Salt water burned her eyes. She sought, and did not find.

  She raised her arms above her head and swept them down to her sides like wings.