Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

  “Look at this thing,” Jelt said, almost tenderly. “Crazy, isn’t it? Those holes are sharp, too. You can cut your fingers on them—particularly when everything moves.”

  As if in response, the ball stirred in Jelt’s hand. The whole thing seemed to contract very slightly, before expanding to its usual dimensions again. Hark still couldn’t see how it worked. There had to be invisible, overlapping edges, which slid over one another like scales.

  “It clenches,” said Jelt. He abruptly closed his free hand into a fist, then loosened it again, to illustrate. “Like that. Over and over. Did you ever hear of a bit of godware that moves by itself?”

  “No.” Hark had been wondering about that himself. “It must be some kind of machine. Maybe somebody carved it out of god-bone, and then a submarine crew took it with them out to sea . . .”

  It was a sensible conclusion, but even as he voiced it he felt uneasy. The orb’s flexing had reminded him of something very different, but he would have felt foolish saying it aloud.

  “We need to find out what it is, and how it works.” Jelt wrapped it up again and lowered it back through the hole under the floorboard. “That god-ball is healing me, isn’t it? Maybe we can heal other people. If we play things right, it could be a nice little earner . . .”

  “This is the bathysphere all over again!” erupted Hark, then took a deep breath and braced his will. “If you want to do that, go ahead,” he added more calmly. “You can have the god-ball. Do what you like with it.”

  “I can’t do much by myself right now, can I?” retorted Jelt. “I’m still sick some of the time. If I’m away from that god-ball for a while, it . . . gets bad. I can’t carry it around with me, either, or people would notice it pulsing. So I have to hide here with it till it’s finished healing me.

  “Besides, you’re the one who can find out about godware, aren’t you? You can ask your friends up on the hill! Never mind the money, I’d like to know what that thing’s doing to me! Is that too much to ask?”

  Hark took a deep breath. Until the words came out, he wasn’t sure what they would be.

  “Yes, Jelt,” he heard himself say, firmly and clearly. “Yes. It’s too much to ask.” Even as Jelt leaped to his feet, Hark yanked open the door and stepped out into the night.

  He froze in the doorway and felt Jelt collide with his back.

  There were three shadowy figures down on the beach at the base of the rocks, barely ten yards way. Their faces were upturned and staring at the shack. Each held something long and dark at the ready. Light from the hut’s lantern glinted on metal blades.

  Chapter 14

  “Run!” Jelt hissed, then charged past Hark into the darkness.

  “Grab ’em!” yelled a hoarse female voice from farther down the beach.

  Two of the dark figures below moved to intercept Jelt. He barreled right through them, knocking one down, and sprinted off down the beach to the right. The third stranger scrambled up the incline toward Hark, a long knife in one hand.

  Hark spun around, ran past the side of the shack and started clambering up the rocky incline behind it. This was the way Hark and Jelt had often dealt with trouble. Flee and scatter. Run in different directions. Meet up later.

  Hark’s night sight was still blotchy. Rocks slid and rolled under his feet. However, he was light and fast and had both his hands free for climbing. Behind him he could hear his pursuer panting and swearing, amid the rattle of dislodged rocks. Hark was outpacing him.

  “Don’t bother with the runt!” the female voice shouted again. “We’ve got our thief!”

  Hark dared a glance behind him. Sure enough, the man behind him had given up the chase and was slithering back down the rocky slope instead.

  Hark’s night sight was returning now. He could see the blaze of the stars overhead and the foam of the waves raking the beach, like a chain of white smiles. Down on the beach, he could see three dark figures pinning down a single person, who struggled and swore in a very familiar voice.

  They’ve got him. They’ve got Jelt.

  “Get that knife away from him!” shouted the woman. Her voice was familiar, too, Hark realized. A moment later she strode into view, and the lanternlight from the shack revealed her boxer’s build and the freckles that covered her face and shaven head. It was Dotta Rigg, the smuggler from Lady’s Crave.

  “Now, you little plague-sore!” bellowed Rigg, aiming a kick at Jelt’s sprawled shape. “Where the abyss is my bathysphere?”

  Oh, Jelt. What have you done?

  “Rigg!” yelled a panicky voice from near the shack. “Coram’s bleeding everywhere! That scum-leech must have slashed his belly open! I can’t stop the blood!”

  The smuggler leader looked up toward the shack, her face blank with surprise. It looked naked without her usual scowl. She hurried toward the source of the yell, and Hark could see her kneeling beside a prone shape.

  “Take this—press it against the wound!” she growled, then turned her head to yell at Jelt again. “You little slug! If my boy dies, I’ll flay you! I’ll cut your eyes out! Do you hear me? You’ll be fishbait!” Beneath the guttural rage was a hint of panic.

  They’ve all forgotten me, Hark realized. Nobody cares about me. I could climb this cliff now and go back to Sanctuary. I could leave them all to stew in their own juice.

  Hark clenched his eyes tightly shut and recited several of his favorite swear words. Then he took a deep breath.

  “Rigg!” he yelled down to the beach. “We can stop your man dying!”

  “What?” The smuggler stared up toward his voice, blinking in the lanternlight. “Is that the runt?”

  “I’m coming down!” called Hark. “Just . . . don’t cut my head off!” He scrambled and slithered back down the slope. “You need to get him into the hut, so he’s near the light! Then me and Jelt can heal him—”

  “Shut up, Hark!” yelled Jelt, from under the pile of attackers.

  “What the scourge are you talking about?” snarled Rigg.

  “I’m telling the truth!” Hark came forward, hands raised to show they were empty. “I’ll explain later, but . . . but we have to do this now! Before he dies!” Hark imagined lifeblood gushing out of severed veins with each passing second.

  Rigg scowled at the darkening cloth she was clamping to the wounded man’s side, then swore.

  “All right!” she snapped. “Boys, help me carry Coram into the hut!”

  The wounded man was helped into the hut. Hark let himself be grabbed and manhandled in after him. A few moments later, Jelt was dragged in with his hands tied behind his back and dropped onto the boards with a thud.

  Coram was youngish and unshaven, with a scrawling of gray scars over his forearms. Even in the muted purple light of the lantern, Hark could see that the whole of the man’s belly was dark and glossy with blood. His gaze mirrored Hark’s own panic. A familiar mottling of freckles covered Coram’s ashen face. My boy, Rigg had called him.

  Oh, billows’ shriek! thought Hark, horrified. Jelt’s gutted one of Rigg’s sons.

  “Go on then!” thundered Rigg. “Help him!”

  Hark passed her the clean bandages that he had brought for Jelt, then rested his trembling hands on Coram’s shoulders. Beneath the boards on which he knelt, the strange god-ball was waiting unseen in its little hammock of net.

  Pulse, he begged it in his head, please pulse! If you play dead now, we’ll be playing dead forever!

  “What are you doing?” demanded Rigg. “What’s this playacting?”

  “We need to concentrate!” insisted Hark. “This . . . this isn’t easy!” He couldn’t tell her about the healing relic. If he did, she would no longer have any reason to keep Hark and Jelt alive.

  Other smugglers were crowding into the doorway, brows furrowed, blinking in the light. He recognized the girl from the Appraisal among them, her large, dark eyes fixed on Coram, as if she thought she could heal him by concentrating.

  The injured man’s breathing was sha
llow, his face pallid and shiny like wet sand. Hark was afraid that at any moment his breath would hiccup and halt, his eyes fix, and the tide of his life go out, never to return. For a long minute, Hark continued his masquerade of concentration, hearing the floorboards creak as the smugglers fidgeted and grew impatient.

  Then the pulse came, sending its invisible shock through the air. Hark felt it shudder in his core. Coram twitched and gasped, his eyes opening wide for a moment. The other smugglers flinched and reached for weapons.

  “What the purple deep was that?” demanded Rigg.

  “It came from us!” squeaked Hark, his throat tight with relief. “That . . . was a flood of healing. We had an accident, and . . . now we’re not the same as we used to be.” Hark had been forging a story in his head. Now he just needed to sell it.

  “What kind of accident causes that?” asked Rigg.

  “We tried to use your bathysphere—” began Hark.

  “Hark, shut up! Right now!” growled Jelt.

  “She knows we had it, Jelt!” Hark interrupted. “She’s not stupid!” He exhaled bitterly. “We borrowed an old winch-boat and took the sphere out over the Embrace. We had some smart idea about using it to spot wrecks and selling the information to salvage crews.

  “Jelt went down in the sphere. I watched the chain lower it . . . but then something happened. The weight on the end got heavier all of a sudden, and I couldn’t haul it back up, and I realized it must have filled with water.”

  This was a plausible bundle of half-truths. Now for the big lie.

  “I dived down to pull Jelt out—”

  “I was already pulling myself out,” growled Jelt.

  “Yes—I know you were.” Hark felt a throb of relief and gratitude for Jelt’s interjection. His belligerent tone gave the tale a convincing roughness. “But then there was this . . . wave. We saw it coming out of the murk, a great, black, glossy wave of Undersea, rearing up into the normal sea like a tidal wave. It must have been twice as high as the cliffs here—more maybe. And it came at us, fast as a clipper in full sail.”

  “I never heard of an Undersea wave that near the surface,” said Rigg, surly and unconvinced.

  “Undersea eats rules like shark eats fish,” recited Jelt grimly. It was the old saying. The gods and the Undersea were bound by no rules. All you could do was hope to survive them.

  In truth, Hark doubted that anybody had heard of such an occurrence. The surface of the Undersea rose and fell in strange and unpredictable ways, and there were tales of great waves, but none mountainous enough to hit someone who had swum down from the surface.

  “I never saw anything like it, either,” he went on quickly, “and I hope I never do again. Huge. Slick like oil. All the fish were fleeing it, fast as darts, rushing past us on either side! But there was nothing we could do to escape. It caught us.”

  Hark tried to remember Quest’s descriptions of the Undersea. Weird details made a story seem more real.

  “It hit us, and we plunged into it. It was . . . dark inside, a purplish darkness, but light at the same time. It made my eyes hurt. And it was cold, in a way that made your soul shiver. There was other stuff whirling about in that wave—loose weed, bits of timber, crab shells, all tumbling and spinning in the darkness.

  “Then it passed on, and we were back in good, salt water. Just drowning in the normal way, instead of whirling forever inside that wave. So we swam back up. But we weren’t the same anymore. We were . . . Marked.”

  “Marked?” Rigg stared at him, her eyebrows rising in superstitious unease. “So quickly?”

  “I don’t understand it either!” Hark looked wide-eyed. “It feels like there’s a tide in our blood now. If we concentrate on it, we can change how it flows. And if we get the flow just right . . . we can heal people.”

  As if on cue, another pulse shivered the air of the hut. Two minutes later, the hidden relic pulsed again. Hark had no way of knowing if it was really helping, but at least Coram was still breathing, his eyes turning glossily to stare this way and that.

  Ten pulses later, the smuggler staunching the wound cleared his throat uncertainly.

  “The bleeding’s stopped.”

  “You’re sure?” asked Rigg suspiciously.

  “Yeah. Whatever they did, it closed the wound.”

  There was a long silence. Coram’s expression of alarm dimmed into a look of exhaustion and pain. The other smugglers all looked at Rigg.

  “You two,” she said, “are the luckiest little weevils that ever lived. You should be rolling around the deep, feeding fish, and instead look at you . . .” She tailed off, shook her head, and then frowned. “So, where is my bathysphere, then?”

  “Ah. It . . . got swept away by that great wave.” Hark swallowed, feeling the atmosphere become arctic again.

  “We can pay you back for it,” Jelt said suddenly. “I’ve got a business proposition. Sit me up, will you? It’s hard to talk with a mouthful of someone’s knee.”

  Rigg gave a nod, and Jelt was heaved up into a sitting position. He was looking more like his confident, brash self now.

  “Better,” he said. “I was thinking . . . people will pay for healing, won’t they? Wounds sealed up tight, no stitches, no questions asked. Hark and me, we could use a partner. Someone to bring us customers. You’d get your share of the fees. And we’d heal your people for free.”

  Rigg frowned and nodded to herself very slightly. Hark couldn’t tell if she was agreeing or just taking in his words. However, she wasn’t decapitating anyone, which he took as a good sign.

  “We could just keep ’em both in a cave,” suggested a smuggler.

  “We can’t keep the runt,” answered Rigg. “He’s indentured to Sanctuary, remember? If he goes missing, there will be a search. The governor might even start poking around. No, the little whelp needs to go home before he’s missed.”

  For a moment, Hark was surprised that Rigg knew he was indentured to Sanctuary. Then he remembered the presence of the freckled girl during his Appraisal. She would have been able to tell the gang who had bought him. An uncomfortable suspicion started to form in his mind. Perhaps the gang had been keeping an eye on Hark, in the hope that he would lead them to Jelt. Perhaps tonight he had done exactly that.

  “All right, bright boy.” Rigg stared down at Jelt. “Come with us, so we can talk about this proposition of yours. As for you”—she turned to Hark—“you can run home for now, but don’t get any funny ideas. You’re fond of your friend, right? You’d probably like him to keep his face. So you’ll keep your mouth shut, and you’ll come back here when we tell you.”

  “Yes, ma’am,” Hark said quickly, trying to ignore the numb ache in his mind. His past was spilling into his future, his hopes and dreams quietly dying.

  After the Sanctuary boy had gone, Rigg’s gang argued late into the night. The freckled girl was the most forceful opponent to her mother’s new plan, but others objected, too. Most of the crew had been looking forward to going home to Lady’s Crave and didn’t like the idea of a temporary base near Nest.

  Why were they going into business with somebody who had betrayed them? And why did they need a base, anyway? It would make them easier to find!

  When tiny, glutinous tendrils were found embedded in Coram’s long, sealed wound, protests became more determined, and the freckled girl thought she had carried her point. Then someone noticed that Coram’s clipped ears had also been healed. The crew’s mutters became approving and speculative. Some in the gang already had two notches cut out of their ears by the governor’s men, and a couple were triple-clipped and in continual danger of the gallows. Healing these notches could remove the threat hanging over them.

  I don’t like this healing! Rigg’s daughter argued, over and over. There’s something wrong with it!

  “It just came with Marks, Selphin,” said Coram, reaching up weakly to ruffle his half-sister’s hair. “Anyway, I like my scar. It’s . . . special. Those two boys, with their healing—they’
re special, too. The way they were Marked, that great Undersea wave . . . I think it’s a sign. A blessing.” Something about his entranced, lethargic smile made her blood run cold.

  Since Selphin’s birth, her half-brother had been there, bearlike, protective, and big enough to pick her up. When she let him hug her, it felt like being enveloped by a mountain.

  He was six years older than her, but sometimes she was very aware that she was cleverer than him.

  Chapter 15

  “What is eating at you?” Quest asked the next morning. The question caught Hark by surprise.

  “I slept badly last night.” This was true enough. After sneaking back into Sanctuary, Hark had managed only three hours’ sleep. He had compensated by being relentlessly chipper. This had apparently fooled everyone but Quest.

  “You have not been yourself for several days,” the old priest said quietly, as Hark emptied the replenishing bucket of hot water into his bath.

  The old ritual baths were rocky, rough-hewn pools, all in the same high-vaulted hall. Once, these had been used by the priests to cleanse themselves after a descent into the Undersea, so as to avoid Marks. Now most of them, including the one in which Quest sat, were used for medicinal purposes.

  One solitary pool at the far end held darker water, which slipped and slopped in an oily fashion. This was an Undersea water bath, for those priests who now wanted to keep their Marks, not cleanse them away. They lost their gods, Kly had explained, so the Marks are all they’ve got left.

  Quest had been suffering pains in his chest, so he was reclining in a one-person pool of warm, chalky, fresh water that looked a bit like frothed milk. His head and angular neck jutted out of the bath, looking unusually ruddy, his hair damp and disheveled. It made Hark realize how dignified Quest usually appeared. Hark felt uncomfortable seeing him so vulnerable.

  “Are you still feeling trapped here?” asked Quest, looking genuinely concerned. “I hope you are not thinking of running away?”