Full Fathom Five

by Max Gladstone

As she rose, she scanned the sea floor one last time for her—what were they? Not quite friends. Izza, maybe, though they’d barely known each other. And Teo, she’d never known Teo at all.

  She’d almost breached the surface when something struck her in the head.

  Twisting in the water she choked and clawed at her assailant. In the confusion she saw nothing, but her fingernails scraped a slick curved surface. She kicked and pummeled this thing she could not see. One out-flung hand breached the water’s surface, and struck something long and thin and hard. She grabbed it and pulled down, hard as she could, but instead of pulling whatever it was into the water she pulled herself up, and rose sputtering and cursing into air.

  She held an oar draped over the side of a black shallow-drafted boat. Teo and Izza braced the oar’s other end. Izza wheezed, bent over. The oar must have caught her in the stomach as Kai thrashed.

  “What the hells,” was all she could say at first.

  “Here.” Teo held out her left hand. The light had mostly faded from her skin, but the scars still glowed. She saw Kai’s expression, and offered her other hand instead. “It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”

  Kai pulled herself into the boat. Water slopped from her shirt and pants and thin sandals. She’d lost her jacket, shrugged it off for speed. Sea breeze on wet skin set her shivering. She sat and hugged herself and breathed.

  The boat was Kavekana make, shallow draft for crossing shoals and sandbanks, a vessel for short distances. An anchor chain ran over the side, though she’d seen no anchor in the water. Teo sat on the bench. Izza leaned against the stern, watching them both. All shivered.

  “This boat wasn’t here before,” Kai said.

  Teo pointed to the prow. A charm hung there, a shark’s tooth marked with foreign glyphwork, glowing green.

  “That means nothing to me.”

  “Keeps people from noticing the boat. For a little while.”

  “Cool, right?” Izza said.

  “Who are you really?”

  Teo shrugged. “Does it matter?”

  “You got us both stuffed inside Penitents. You owe me.”

  “I’ve been thinking about that,” Teo said. “Had a long time to think inside that thing. I thought at first you might have been punished because of me. But then I realized how hard you tried to get me into the mountain, into the pool. Profit wasn’t your goal: you brushed me off twice, easy. When your boss showed up, he treated me like a routine nuisance, but you—you were special. It’s a bit excessive to lock a prospective client inside a Penitent without trial, isn’t it?”

  “But you’re not a client, are you? You never were.”

  “No,” she said at last.

  57

  In the boat’s stern, Izza cleared her throat. Both women turned to face her. “I don’t know you,” she said.

  Kai’s laugh was dry and sharp. “Izza, permit me to introduce Teo Batan, a client of mine. Or she pretended to be a client at least. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure that’s her real name.”

  The Quechal woman shrugged, resigned. “I didn’t lie about that. Or my credentials. The Two Serpents Group did send me to open an account on your island. I just had another goal I didn’t mention.” She held out her hand to Izza.

  Her palm was soft, but the handshake strong.

  “Nice to meet you, Teo,” Izza said. “I’m Izza. So, you’re a thief?”

  One corner of Teo’s mouth turned up in a slight smile. “I wish. If I was, I’d be better at all this. No, I’m just a saleslady who got in over her head.”

  “Look,” Kai said. “I don’t know what your deal is, and I don’t care. I need to get back to shore.”

  “Then you’re welcome to swim.” Teo pointed over the side of the boat. “If you can make it that far.”

  “I’m a strong swimmer. Even if I haven’t been training for this like you have.”

  “Oh, and don’t forget the Penitents waiting for you when you hit shore. Do you really want to go back to that? I had protection.” Teo patted her arm, the still-burning scars. “And I can still hear them in my head. Like every bad fight I ever had with my grandmother at once. Gods and demons. Why stay?”

  “That’s my home.”

  “It’s not been kind to you today, as far as I can tell.”

  “Homes aren’t always kind,” Kai said, and Teo nodded.

  “I guess not.”

  “What happened?” Izza asked. “Kai, how did they catch you?”

  “They didn’t catch me. They caught her.”

  “I don’t think that’s fair,” Teo said. “I dropped a bracelet into the pool on accident, and your people stuffed me in a brainwash golem for my trouble. I think whatever their problem was, it had more to do with you than me.”

  “That wasn’t an ordinary bracelet,” Kai said. “It flowed through my fingers. And if your purpose here is so innocent, why do you have an invisible getaway boat?”

  “I never said it was an ordinary bracelet.” Teo didn’t meet Izza’s eyes, or Kai’s, either. She hunched over on the rowing bench. “And I never said my purpose here was innocent, either. Izza wasn’t far off the mark. I’m the scout, not the second-story man. Or woman, as the case may be.”

  “You were trying to steal from the mountain.” Izza heard a note of wonder in her own voice.

  “Is it still stealing when you’re working for a goddess?”

  “Yes.”

  “Fair enough,” Teo said. “Stealing it is.”

  “I thought you worked for Deathless Kings,” Kai said. “You and your Two Serpents Group. Heal the world one crisis at a time.”

  “That’s the idea. Most of what I told you was true. We are trying to expand abroad. But our sponsors, all those Deathless Kings, they made their names with deicide. Understandably hard to convince Old World gods that we come in peace. So I went to Alt Coulumb, where gods and Craftsmen get along okay.”

  “Seril,” Kai said. “The moon goddess.”

  “Right. The one who died and got better. One of our main sponsors killed her, back in the God Wars. We figured if she signed on with us, that would get a lot of attention. I made the pitch, and I’m good at my job, current circumstances notwithstanding. The idea intrigued her. But she made a counter-offer.”

  Teo stopped, as if looking for the right words. Kai seemed to know this part of the story already—or to be reading it off notes somewhere up in the stars.

  “You’re here for the goddess-shard.”

  “Basically.”

  Izza shook her head. “I’m lost.”

  Teo inhaled, and let out the breath slowly. “Look, I only know what I was told. This goddess, Seril, died back during the God Wars—mostly. Her city thought she was dead, anyway. They hired Craftsmen to come resurrect her, only during the resurrection process some of her body went missing. They think Denovo—one of the Craftsmen—they think he carved off a bit to study. Fragments of memory, that sort of thing. But where he stored it, they didn’t know.”

  “Jace—my boss, you remember—”

  “Turtleneck, bad attitude.” Teo nodded.

  “He mentioned that Seril’s priests kept bothering the Order to return a stolen piece of her. But they couldn’t prove we had it in the first place.”

  “Margot’s poems were the proof,” Teo said. “Not exactly admissible in a Court of Craft.”

  Izza blinked. “Does everyone on the planet know Edmond Margot’s poetry?”

  “Just the gargoyles,” Teo said.

  “What?”

  “Seril’s creatures. Living stone police officers, sort of. Turns out they’re poetry freaks. Songs sung at midnight, odes carved on the sides of buildings, that sort of stuff. They read journals, chapbooks, everything. And they found poems by this bard from a major god haven, which were written in their own style. Gargoyle poetry. They figured the stolen pieces of their goddess must be here—Seril’s influence seeping out into the world.”

  “It isn’t Seril,” Kai said.
r />   “Margot’s poems came from the Blue Lady,” Izza added. “Not some half-dead moon goddess.”

  “I don’t know anything about a Blue Lady.”

  “It’s possible we’re both right,” Kai said. “If a pierce of Seril’s in the pool, then maybe the Blue Lady … maybe the idols found it. Learned her language. Absorbed her memories. Discovered how to reach out into the world. That would explain why they only made contact a couple years ago, when Seril returned.”

  “The poems were gargoyle poetry, which meant the shard was here. In your pool, safe outside the world.” Teo turned to Kai. “Seril wanted me to plant a beacon her people could use to break in and steal the shard back. That was the bracelet. I seem to have messed up some master scheme of yours, and for that I’m sorry, but this is the end of the line for me. My duty’s done. Now I wait for my ride, and leave.”

  “That doesn’t make sense. You expected the Order to let you go? They have allies around the world who will hunt you down.”

  “I dropped a bracelet in a pool; they stuck me in a supposedly inescapable box that I then escaped. The only possible reason for their allies to come after me would be if your Order could prove I helped steal something they claim they don’t have from a vault they can’t afford to admit has been breached. I think it’s more likely we’ll all just chalk this one up as an embarrassing incident.”

  “She has a point,” Izza said. “The best stuff to steal is stuff the target can’t admit is gone.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Kai said. “We need to get back into the mountain.”

  Izza frowned. “Why?”

  Kai didn’t answer at first

  Izza resisted the urge to squirm under the pressure of the woman’s stare. The few hours in the Penitent hadn’t broken her; refined her, maybe. Hardened her like forge-steel. “The Blue Lady’s dead.” Izza could say that now without weeping. Without even a hook of emotion in her voice. Just a fact. That’s what she told herself. “So is Margot. The Penitents’ trail is cold. The kids are safe. We could just leave. There’s a whole world out there.” Cat had said as much, and she was right. Why did Izza feel so dirty saying the same aloud?

  “You’re welcome to stay with me,” Teo said. “Plenty of water to last the three of us until pickup. We’re bound back to Alt Coulumb first, and then, well. Anywhere.”

  “Anywhere.” Izza liked the way that word felt in her mouth. They didn’t have Penitents in Anywhere. The sea rolled around them, endless toward freedom, rippling under starlight.

  Until Kai spoke.

  “The Lady isn’t dead.”

  Izza froze.

  “I don’t know what you are talking about,” Teo said.

  Kai ignored her. “The Blue Lady. The Red Eagle. The Great Squid. They’re all alive.”

  The words pressed into Izza’s ears like thorns. “That’s not true. I felt them die. I saw them die.”

  “They’re masks, Izza. Not masks: faces. The idols in the pool, the myths we make, they aren’t complicated enough to live on their own. But they’re all connected, and all of them together—they can dream. They can speak. Your gods and goddesses are different pieces of the same Lady. She’s still there. Stuck. And my boss will keep killing her forever if we don’t stop him.”

  Izza burned with fever, and a cool hand caressed her cheek. She lay on the mountainside beneath the stars, and a beautiful horned woman stepped out of the stone to join her. “The Lady’s alive?”

  “All of them. I saw, in the pool. It’s.” There were tears in Kai’s eyes, or else just ocean water. “I can’t describe it. It’s too big.”

  Izza remembered the blue bird with the broken neck, and incense that smelled of desert rain.

  This isn’t your fight.

  Except it was.

  This was her fight, and that, back there, that island swelling on the horizon, that was her home.

  They’ll keep killing her forever. The knife, always sliding across the priestess’s throat, and that eternal gasp echoing in Izza’s ears as she ran. The column of oily smoke that would never go away.

  “We need to go back,” Izza said. Five words. One syllable each. A door opened in her heart. And to Teo: “You can help us.”

  Teo shook her head. “I’m sorry. I can’t.”

  “Of course you can,” Kai said. “Turn the boat around. Your second-story man can get us into the pool. He, she, was going there anyway. I’ll do the rest. If I reach the pool, I can fix this.”

  “You’re talking about a revolution. Deposing your boss, and not in the cozy Craftwork sense. You literally want to kick out the head of your priesthood.”

  “What’s happening up that mountain is wrong,” Kai said. “I have to stop it.”

  “That’s not—” Teo raised her hands. “I can’t. This is too much. The Two Serpents Group solves problems. We don’t overthrow governments. We don’t start revolutions.”

  “Some problems,” Kai said, “can’t be solved without a revolution.”

  “Spoken like a woman who’s never been on the wrong side of a rebel knife.”

  “You’re the one who claims she wants to help the world. So what is it? Will you circle this entire planet saying you want to help people, but only really helping yourself, making your sponsors feel good, scratching some goddess’s back so she’ll scratch yours? Helping changes things. My island is living a lie. People are dead. My friend is inside a Penitent, suffering what we just suffered with no chance of release. My boss stabs over and over again at a goddess’ eyes in the darkness. How much will you sacrifice to preserve the status quo? To keep your hands clean?”

  At the mention of sacrifice, Teo stiffened. Her hand sought her wrist.

  Kai closed her mouth. She’d been shouting at the last, and the ocean echoed her voice. In the chapel Kai’d seemed uncertain, small, afraid. That was gone now. Maybe the Penitents broke it from her. Or maybe she’d learned something else inside.

  Teo didn’t look at Kai, didn’t look at Izza, either. She kept her gaze fixed on the water outside the boat, and the stars reflected there.

  Izza reached out and touched the woman on the arm. Teo didn’t brush her off. “We’ll go back ourselves,” Izza said. “If we have to. But it would be easier with your help. Please.”

  Teo took her hand, pressed it, held it. Izza forced herself not to pull away.

  Teo’s eyes were dark. “Okay,” she said. “Let’s go.”

  58

  They reached shore three hours later. Stars receded as they approached, repelled by city fire and ghostlight and Penitents’ searching eyes.

  Kai rowed at first, but soon exhaustion caught up with her. Izza took over the oars while the other woman slept in the stern, shaking from bad dreams. No wonder. Izza didn’t mind rowing. Returning to Kavekana under her own power felt right somehow.

  Teo sat at the prow, troubled.

  Rather than aiming for the well-lit center of the Palm, Izza angled the boat toward East Claw. Night never fell at the deepwater port by the claw’s tip, but farther north dark lengths of warehouse wharf brooded over the sea-lapped shore. She rowed to a decaying two-story wooden dock that appeared on the verge of collapse. A band of glory smugglers used this place to off-load joss the year before; the Watch rounded them up in a sting, and gangs abandoned the place after, out of a mix of prudence and superstition. But their hideout remained, its crow-pecked skeleton testifying to the bad ends of stupid crooks.

  Izza rowed into the dock’s lower level, under a wooden arch hung with broken planks and seaweed like wrecked teeth in a diseased mouth. The odor of rotted wood smothered them.

  Izza locked the oars, grabbed a moss-covered pylon, and pulled herself onto the dock. The boat disappeared when she left it; she groped above the water until Kai grabbed her hand and pulled herself ashore.

  Kai tried to stand, but winced and sat down slowly on the dock. “Shit,” she said. “Sorry.”

  Izza listened for footsteps, for breathing, for any human sound. Streetlamp l
ight filtered through gaps in the dock’s upper level. A flight of rickety stairs rose to the street.

  Teo lurched ashore, and stood unsteadily between Izza and Kai. “Okay. Here we are. What now?”

  “That,” said a voice from the shadows beneath the stairs, “is what I wanted to ask you.”

  Teo cursed and Kai recoiled. Izza alone didn’t move. She had expected the voice, as she had expected the woman who emerged from beneath the stairs. “Hi, Cat,” Izza said.

  The streetlight cast a ghostly wash over the woman’s pale skin and blond hair.

  Izza remembered her wounded, trembling from withdrawal. Remembered her cloaked in hophouse alley shadows, eyes hard and face fixed. That morning—gods, had it only been that morning?—she’d looked at Izza as if she lay at the bottom of a well, drowning.

  Izza couldn’t say how she looked now. Cold. Tense. Excited, even.

  But there was a bit of drowning there, too.

  “Guess you didn’t leave your goddess all that far behind,” Izza said.

  “Not so far.” Cat’s laugh was dry as the dock was damp. “You know that choice I kept saying you’d have to make?”

  “Yeah,” Izza said.

  “Well.” She slid her hands into her pockets. “I made the wrong one.”

  “I know how that feels.”

  “I didn’t lie. If it matters. I just left a few things out. My Goddess sent me away. Sent me here. I’ve been a cop all my life, and she asked me to steal for her. Because she trusts me. Because she loves me, and damn if I don’t love her back.” She slid her hands into her pockets. “What are you doing here, Izza?”

  “Giving you a chance.”

  “What’s that mean?”

  “You said you couldn’t help me this morning. But I think you can. I think you’re here to help me—I think that’s why you were sent in the first place.”

  “Cat,” Teo said, “you know this girl?”

  Cat’s mouth pressed into a thin line. Izza remembered her fighting Penitents bare-handed. “Stay out of this,” the woman said. “Wait here a few more hours, and we’ll leave together. We’re almost free. I go back to my life, and you can come with me, and go wherever after that.”