Some distance below was a long, ragged slit of darkness amid the rocks. As the Butterfly descended toward it, the opening seemed to gape wider. It was no mere slit or hollow; it was a cavern some twenty-five feet across and fifteen feet high. Its upper lip dripped with weed that swayed in and out as though the cave were breathing.
Aided by the lantern at the front of the cockpit, Vyne steered into the widening cavern until a wall loomed ahead and then slowly brought the Butterfly into an ascent. At last she turned off the siren. The ensuing silence was almost shocking.
Vyne pulled her helmet off her head. When Hark followed suit, he could make out a faint plip, plap, plip of tiny wavelets stirring against the side of the sub.
“We’ve surfaced,” said Vyne. By the reflected light from the lantern, Hark could see that she was grinning.
“What . . .” Hark put out a hand to stroke the glassy inside of the Butterfly, all his questions shoving to be allowed out first. “How did you make this sub do that?”
Vyne’s explanation was quite brief, but it involved words like “tempered,” “extruded,” “composition,” and “differential,” so it didn’t really help. She soon seemed to realize that Hark was floundering.
“I found a way to tune different parts of the god-glass differently,” she elaborated. “At different notes, some parts soften, some remain hard, some expand, some contract. If you place and combine them correctly, you can orchestrate movement through sound manipulation. It’s a very great deal more complicated than it sounds. Even after I mastered the tempering process, the Butterfly took me six years to design and make.”
“It’s amazing!” exclaimed Hark. “Why isn’t it famous?”
Vyne looked slightly furtive.
“A lot of this god-glass was given to me by the governor,” she explained, “and he may be under the impression that I am using it to research better optical lenses. Years ago he told me that there was no place for a submarine that screamed all the time and that I should stop trying to develop one. I think he was worried that it might melt the portholes off other subs in the vicinity, even though I told him that was extremely unlikely.”
Hark could see why the governor might be worried. He could also see why Vyne kept the Butterfly a secret, if she had diverted a fortune’s worth of god-glass into a forbidden project.
“What if you made the wrong note and the bubble with us inside it went soft?” asked Hark.
“That won’t happen,” Vyne assured him. “My instruments can’t create notes of a high-enough pitch.”
“But what if something else made exactly that note?”
“Then the cockpit would collapse, the water would punch its way in, and we’d both die,” the doctor answered promptly. “Try not to whistle while on board,” she added as an afterthought. “And if you have to scream, keep it low-pitched.”
“Can I . . .” It was a stupid question, but Hark knew he would hate himself forever if he didn’t ask. “Can I drive it a little bit on the way back?”
“Not the slightest, flimsiest chance in a world of hells,” Vyne told him brightly. “It’s taken me two years to learn to use the controls this well, and they’re sensitive as baby skin. Even now it’s all too easy to get a key change slightly wrong and flip the Butterfly onto her back.”
By the light of the lantern, they could make out a series of metal rungs set into the cave wall opposite. These disappeared into an upward shaft. As soon as Vyne opened the hatch, Hark noticed a staleness in the air.
“Dr. Vyne? I don’t think we should stay here too long.”
Hark clambered out first, with a lantern slung around his neck, and crawled along the mat-covered wing, the doctor following close behind. He took a breath and jumped to the lower rungs. Rust crunched under his fingers as he climbed the “ladder.”
He emerged into a square-cornered room that had clearly been hand-carved. Threadlike, caramel-colored stalactites dangled from the ceiling and dripped sporadically. Damp blotches marred the serpentine mosaic that tiled the floor.
On the far side of the room was a cluster of heavy wooden boxes, some filled with sallow, grimy scroll cases. One huge chest of black oak towered over the rest.
“Oh,” said Vyne softly, as she climbed out of the shaft into the room. She approached the chest and knelt before it, her fingers running tenderly over its carvings. She loosened the cracked leather buckles that held it shut, then lifted the lid. Within lay a stack of great books bound in black leather. “Oh, there you are.”
It took three trips in the Butterfly to transfer the whole archive from Gimlet Point back to Dunlin’s beach, and then another hour for Hark and the doctor to carry it all to the keep. When at last the new finds were safely installed in the fortified museum, Vyne carefully pried the great chest open once more. She pulled out one of the leather-bound books, opened it, and peered at the first densely written page.
“Priest script again,” she muttered. “How I hate priest script! These will take months to translate.” Nonetheless her eyes were bright, as if she were rather looking forward to the challenge. “Now, let’s look at you beauties.”
Very carefully, she pulled away the wax seal from the first scroll case and opened it. Her expression was almost painfully eager. Tipping the case, she let the curled parchment slide out into her hand. She laid it on the floor, then delicately unfurled it a little at a time.
It was a beautifully illuminated parchment, bordered with ornate black and green curlicues. In the center was a flawlessly detailed painting of something that might have been mistaken for a jellyfish, were it not swimming immediately below a galleon half its size.
“The Cardinal!” exclaimed Hark. The scroll contained other pictures of the gelatinous god, one showing it from above, and another revealing a tentacle-fringed darkness that Hark thought might be a mouth. The next scroll showed Kalmaddoth of the Pit. The next depicted the Swallower. The following three were devoted to the White Sentinel, Dolor, and the Fourfaced.
When Vyne unrolled the seventh, Hark saw a pale shape surrounded by a twisting forest of hair and realized that he was looking at the Hidden Lady.
He felt a jolt in his chest and for a moment wondered if somehow he had the god-heart with him. No, it was his own heart that had lurched at the sight. The painted figure’s skin was pallid, almost ugly, and the face was half masked by the water’s dappling. The eyes were gilded clots of dark and light, burning from within the dark hollows of the eye sockets. It was only paint, cunningly and carefully applied, but every stroke hinted at a dark majesty.
The scroll unwound further, and he saw an image of her back and shoulders, almost girlish until the skin yielded to the crablike armor-plating of her lower half. A sinuous black line snaked around the base of her spine like a tattoo.
“They’re beautiful,” Hark said, his throat tight. He meant “frecht,” and they both knew it.
“They’re labeled,” breathed Dr. Vyne, looking at the scrolls the way most people looked at babies. “Look at these!” She pointed to lines of green and silver squiggles that fizzed around the figure of the Lady like inquisitive fish. “These are for priests about to meet the gods! So they have notes, telling them which parts of the god you should look at to make eye contact, which parts listen, which are poisonous, which bite, which sometimes move with a life of their own . . .”
“Dr. Vyne.” Hark was still staring at the image of the Lady’s back, with its strange black marking. “Isn’t there something like this in the display case over there?”
Vyne looked stunned. Both of them scrambled to their feet, and hurried over to the glass case in which a slab of the Hidden Lady floated in pale yellow fluid. It was the case that Hark always touched in greeting. He knew it like a familiar face.
“You’re right,” whispered Vyne. Her fingertip resting on the glass, she traced the shape of the curling, sigil-like black slit that marred the gray flesh. “It’s the same!”
She ran back to the scroll, peering at the tiny, s
wirling text.
“It’s her gills,” she whispered. “I have the Hidden Lady’s gills!” She sounded almost tearful with excitement. “She must have used them to extract the fear from the Undersea water!”
“Gills?” Hark stared into the oblong, golden world where the Lady-fragment floated. “Like . . . like a fish?” Gills didn’t fit his idea of the Lady. They were so mechanical, so ordinary.
“Oh, Hark!” said Vyne, almost kindly. “Don’t look so distraught! You should think of the gods as fish. That’s what the continenters always say they were, isn’t it? Sea monsters. Gigantic, savage fish that we were determined to worship. We can’t keep thinking of them as gods, or we’ll always be groveling to them in our heads, even as we carve them up! We’ll never truly understand these . . . huge, preposterous animals!”
The doctor had never expressed this view so clearly and starkly before. Even though Hark had guessed her opinions, her words were still a shock.
As Vyne returned to her scroll, Hark remained with his forehead pressed against the glass of the case.
I don’t believe what the doctor said, he mentally told the floating fragment. She probably doesn’t believe it, either, Lady.
Chapter 22
A few days after the retrieval of the archive, Hark arrived on Wildman’s Hammer and sensed that something was different. He had been coming there for a month and had never before seen such flickering, apprehensive tension among Rigg’s people. Nobody would tell him what was going on, however.
As usual, Hark’s heart sank as he passed the seven so-called grovelers who now guarded the natural rocky alley that led to the healing tent. They knelt as he passed, pressing their foreheads to the bare stone. At first he had felt a guilty thrill at the power his healer act gave him, but these people made him deeply uneasy. In Sanctuary, he had seen too many friezes showing faceless humans kneeling in just this way before the terrible glory of the gods.
Whatever these people wanted, he probably couldn’t give it to them. Even if he could, his gut told him that he probably shouldn’t.
“Those guards of yours are pretty creepy, Jelt,” Hark said quietly, once he was inside the tent. “You know, sometimes a con goes too well? You get a mark who’s in too much of a hurry to believe you, like the world will fall apart if you’re not who you say you are? That sort really can’t handle disappointment.”
“We’re not going to disappoint them, stupid,” said Jelt, obviously enjoying the way his shrine echoed his gravelly tones. “We’re giving them what they want.”
Hark could hardly make out his friend in the smoky darkness of the tent. Only a few holes and tears in the canvas let in needle-shafts of light. He could just about make out the old cargo sacks strewn on the floor and the tall, shadowy outline that was Jelt. There was also an unpleasant reek in the tent that reminded Hark of a rotten seal carcass he had once found on a beach, gouged by gull beaks. It grew worse all the time, but Jelt always told Hark that he was getting soft and just couldn’t remember how the sea smelled.
“What they want is frecht,” Hark whispered, using the old word that he usually avoided. “They want something godlike. Something to fear.”
“And that’s what we’ll give them,” said Jelt calmly.
Jelt had his own mask now, carved from three different pieces of wood and glued together. One of his eyes glimmered through a hole cut in rugged bark while the other was lost in darkness. Over his decent new clothes he now wore a trailing cape of black ropes and frayed ribbons with rattles attached to the ends. Fine fishing net hung gauzily from his sleeves, like translucent fins.
He had a sense of theater. During the healings he was mostly silent, but on one occasion he had suddenly ordered everyone out in a deafening bellow. Even Hark had been shaken. It had not sounded like Jelt—within the voice there had been a low, buzzing hiss that tingled in the teeth. But echoes did that sometimes. Fissures in the rock maimed sound, winds blew through crevices like whistles.
The visitors loved it. Over time, Hark had realized that he was gradually and insidiously being demoted. During the healings, he talked and gestured more than Jelt, but he was only the master of ceremonies. The tall and sinister figure behind him was clearly the true source of power, the real master of the shrine. Hark had never really wanted to be the focus of creepy adulation, but even so there was something bittersweet in his feeling of relief. Even as a creature of supernatural power, he seemed to have become a sidekick.
“Relax,” snickered Jelt. “It’s going to be a good day. You’ll see.” Clearly he knew something that Hark didn’t but had no intention of warning him.
The two friends had just healed their last batch of patients for the day, and Hark was restlessly waiting for somebody to call him to the sub, when he heard the sound of raised voices.
One of the voices belonged to Rigg. She was yelling something with hoarse impatience, a couple of other voices calling answers. Most of the words were unintelligible, but he could hear a higher, younger voice shouting the same word over and over again. The word was “no.”
“What’s that?” whispered Hark. The voices were drawing closer.
“Sounds like they’ve found her,” was Jelt’s laconic reply.
“Found who?” asked Hark, but he already had an uncomfortable suspicion.
“About scabbing time!” Rigg was bellowing. “Where was she?”
“Hid herself in Ladismile Cave, Captain!” answered a male voice. “Then she led us a merry chase along the cliffs. Took us an hour to catch her.”
“One more patient for you!” Rigg called to Hark, as he emerged from the tent. Behind her, one of the larger smugglers appeared, carrying a struggling, flailing figure, arms pinned to her sides. Small and skinny, with an angular face and defiantly long hair. It was Selphin. “It’s that matter I told you about.”
Selphin had stopped screaming. There was no point in noise—nobody would be coming to her aid. Instead she fought with a silent, ferocious determination, digging her nails into the arms of her captor, kicking her heels hard into his kneecaps, trying to slam the back of her head into his nose.
“She’s got some crazy ideas into her head about this, that’s all.” Rigg gave her daughter an angry, weary frown. “Stop this cat scratching, Selph! You’re embarrassing yourself, and all of us. You’re too old for this nonsense!”
“Put up a good fight, though,” remarked the male smuggler respectfully, and Hark wondered whether he was trying to compliment Selphin or Rigg’s parenting.
“Can you fix her while we’re holding her?” Rigg asked, glancing at Hark and then Jelt.
Selphin glared straight at Hark, and there was no mistaking her meaning: Don’t you dare. Don’t you dare.
“I . . .” Hark swallowed. “Look, it works better if she’s willing—”
“We’ll manage,” Jelt interrupted sharply behind him. There was an edge of annoyance in Jelt’s voice, like a dig in the ribs. Hark could almost imagine his friend saying, What’s wrong with you? This is what we need to do, this is how we solve everything . . .
“Oh, pull yourself together, Selph!” barked Rigg. Perhaps it was a blow to her own pride to see her daughter fearful, let alone feeling a fear that Rigg herself could not understand. “Hey!” She waved to draw Selphin’s attention. Mother and daughter locked gazes, with a force like frigates colliding. “It’s not going to hurt you!”
“It’ll kill me!” hissed Selphin, her face red with effort and fury.
“Don’t be foolish!” snapped Rigg. “Lots of people have been healed by those two, and it didn’t do them any harm! Does Coram look dead to you? What about Maelick and Stone?”
Selphin kept staring straight into her mother’s face, her eyes so wide the whites could be seen around the irises.
“I won’t let you kill me,” she said through her teeth.
“I’ve had enough of this,” Rigg muttered. “You two! Come on! Get this over with!”
Hark edged forward, his face feeling hot un
der his mask. Rigg’s right, he told himself firmly. Using the heart isn’t going to hurt Selphin. Once she sees that, she’ll calm down.
Even as he was thinking this, the god-heart decided to stir into life. A pulse surged through the air, shimmering the shadows and sending a throb through Hark’s bones.
Selphin gave a scream of terror and rage. One of her hands snaked down and plucked her captor’s dagger from its belt-sheath. Before he could react, she slashed at the underside of his forearm. He swore violently and shifted his grip. The moment’s loosening was enough. Selphin clawed her way free and sprinted away, the dagger still in her hand.
“She used a knife on me!” The smuggler had clamped one hand to his wound and was staring at it in disbelief. “A knife.”
Hark was just as appalled. You didn’t use a blade on family, crewmates, or close friends—you didn’t use it on your own. You might use your fists or your feet, but not a blade, unless it was a duel everyone had agreed upon. Selphin had cut through more than skin.
“Not a word about that to anyone,” Rigg said in a cold and dangerous undertone. “Not yet, anyway. I’ll think about it and decide how Selphin pays for that.” She glanced at Hark and Jelt. “You two—heal my man’s wound. Keep it light on the limpets if you can. And you didn’t see anybody cut anyone, right?”
“Too busy being holy to see anything,” said Jelt, and Hark nodded.
“She’s not herself,” Rigg said quietly. “Just needs fixing, that’s all. We’ll bring her back.”
“Captain!” Hark couldn’t hold his tongue any longer. “Why don’t we leave it for another day? I need to be getting back, anyway.” He could buy Selphin a little more time to make her case.
“No.” Rigg scowled. “We get this done today. It’s been going on too long.” She marched off and could be heard shouting orders to coordinate the search.
The knife cut was shallow and closed quickly, leaving only a faint scar. The smuggler gave Hark a grateful clap on the shoulder, then ran off to join the chase.
Hark chewed his fingers. He had always hated waiting. This time he was waiting to see Selphin dragged into the alcove again, fierce and frantic with desperation . . .
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