“You always say no,” answered his friend. “But you’ll thank me for it later.”
Jelt wasn’t asking permission. The realization hit Hark like a brick. He opened his mouth to protest, but there was no breath in his lungs.
In that moment of silence, there came a tumult of yells from outside, and the whistle of slingshots.
“What the scourge—” rasped the Jelt-shadow.
“I’ll go!” gasped Hark, and scrambled out of the tent into the firelit night. For a moment, he felt grateful for the excuse to leave.
That moment ended quickly. The bodyguards were in disarray, crouching and shielding their faces as stones whistled down toward them. Beyond them he could hear rapid footsteps, then saw a torrent of dark figures running in with weapons raised—belaying pins, knuckledusters, blackjacks with thick rope.
The bodyguards who had seemed so intimidating jerked, reeled, and twisted as they took blow after blow. They moved too slowly and groggily to dodge. Their swings missed. Their clumsy blades struck sparks off the cliff. Hark’s drug had been all too effective.
The campfire was kicked apart, the embers quickly dulling in the damp breeze and losing their light. Bodyguard after bodyguard was knocked to the ground, their weapons kicked from their grasp. Warning boots were placed against the backs of their necks to keep them down.
Hark darted behind a boulder. Nothing would persuade him to run back into the tent. There was no obvious escape route. The “shrine” had been placed somewhere with only one easy approach, so it could be defended. On either side rose steep walls of rock, difficult to climb quickly in the dark.
There seemed to be about a dozen attackers, their faces muffled with scarves. Well organized. Good boots. Good knives in their belts, too, though for some reason they hadn’t drawn them. To judge by the sounds, the fight was now over. Hark held his breath and stayed in hiding.
“Hey!” shouted an unfamiliar male voice. “We know you’re in there, boy. Be smart and come out. We’re only here for the relic.”
The relic? How do they know there’s a relic?
Hark stayed still and silent. If they were calling for someone to come out of the tent, they probably hadn’t spotted him ducking behind his rock.
“Just hand it over and we’ll go. Then you can get on with your singsong.”
Hark saw a glimmer of desperate hope. Perhaps these enemies were the answer to his problems. He couldn’t force Jelt to part with the god-heart, but they probably could. They’d take it by force if necessary. Surely he could make Jelt see that fighting them was useless.
“We’re willing to talk!” Hark called out quickly, standing up. “Just don’t hurt any—”
That was as far as his negotiation went, because something exploded from the front of the tent, with a sound of ripping canvas.
The figure was of Jelt’s height. It turned to him, and he was glad that the light of the dying fire was behind it so that he could not see its face—only two pools of paleness where its eyes should be. It grabbed his wrist in a cold, slick grip and slapped something round and hard into his hand. Hark recognized the god-heart from its weight and pitted surface.
“Don’t lose it, or I’ll kill you!” hissed the figure. Then it raced away toward the waiting attackers.
“Stop!” yelled Hark. “You can’t! We need to talk to them!”
It turned out that Jelt didn’t need to talk. He didn’t need to do anything.
He didn’t need to avoid the embers, his bare feet kicking showers of sparks as he sprinted. He didn’t need light to guide his footing. He didn’t need to run like a person. His legs didn’t need to bend in just the usual ways.
He didn’t need to draw a blade. Something long lashed out from the direction of his throat, like a pale cord two yards long. It struck a man in the face with a sickly spasm of pale yellow light, so that he reeled away, screaming. Then, as Jelt came within reach of the stranger, he flung out one arm in a sideways slashing motion, and . . .
. . . and something happened in the dark brawl like a black explosion, dark blood detonating almost silently. The man’s torso was falling one way, his legs the other . . .
Now there was a lot of screaming and yelling, but Hark could only stand where he was and stare.
There’s only one of him. They’ll cut him down. Hark no longer knew if this was a fear or a hope.
Those strangers unlucky enough to be at the front hastily drew their knives. They flailed desperately at Jelt and blundered backward into their confused comrades. A moment ago they had all looked invincible. Now they were backing away in panic from something that leaped, and darted, and slashed. With each slash there came a scream, the sort of scream that nobody gives twice.
“Back to the boats!” someone yelled, and all of the strangers turned tail and ran. The Jelt-shape leaped on the rearmost enemy, and a moment later a lone head was bouncing soddenly down the path.
“Wait!” called Hark. “Let them go! You don’t need to do that!”
Jelt didn’t need to chase them. But he did. He chased them as a fox chases chickens in a coop, killing them with a swift, pure pleasure that had nothing to do with need.
The screams continued, but they grew more distant. The attackers were fleeing back toward their own boats, but they would probably never get there. Their pursuer was faster than them and could see in the dark.
Hark suddenly felt the god-heart flex in his tight grip. The perforations grated harshly against his fingers. The pulse was like a punch.
He wondered if it could smell blood or detect conflict. Perhaps it just sensed that some nearby human bodies were marred in ways it could fix. With nausea, he imagined it “mending” its battered cultists in new and interesting ways, or even gluing together the mangled bodies along the path and stirring them into misshapen life . . .
Hark clenched his teeth and glared down at it.
“Oh, scab this!” he swore under his breath.
He stuffed the relic in his bag and gritted his teeth. Then he ran past the sprawled, half-stunned cultists and into the limb-strewn darkness of the rocky corridor. His feet slithered, and there were splatters on the stone floor like dark flowers, and there was a smell, and he tried not to think about it, any of it. His foot caught on something, and he went down, one knee and one hand hitting the ground and feeling its slickness.
Get up. Keep running. Don’t think about the wetness, or the shapes lying on the ground.
He had to be quick, because if Jelt came back, if it came back . . .
Hark ran out onto the craggy shore. The distant calls and screams were now coming from the other side of the island. He sprinted for the bodyguards’ boat. He had imagined Selphin escaping on it. It had never occurred to him that he might need to do so.
There she was, her dull brown sails tethered and her oars resting neatly in her belly. She was too big for one person, really, but she would have to do. He yanked her moorings loose and leaped aboard, staggering as his feet hit the boards. Using a paddle, he pushed off as hard as he could, then grabbed two oars and started heaving on them.
Away. Get away. Row out until I’m in the wind, then loose the sails and go somewhere, anywhere, as long as it’s not here.
He flinched as he heard a long, hoarse cry from the dark island.
“Hark!” it called, and then again, “Hark!”
Hark kept rowing, his hands shaking.
“Hark, where are you? It’s safe now. You can come out.” Another long pause, then the voice called again, more urgently. “Hark—come here! Bring it to me! I need it!”
Hark was cold. He didn’t think he’d ever been so cold. The chill bit his fingers and caught in his throat, but he kept rowing, even though it was hard to breathe. There were so many stars tonight, like a powdered-sugar accident. What was the point of them?
“Ha-a-a-ark!” The cry was more desperate now. “Hurry up, will you? I need it! I’ll die without it!”
The cry went through him like an arrow. Hark c
ouldn’t see straight. His fingers couldn’t grip the oars properly. The strength had gone out of him, and he couldn’t will himself to make the next pull.
Killing Jelt. I might be killing Jelt.
He looked over his shoulder at Wildman’s Hammer, its black mass eating the charcoal sky and stars. With a sick sense of inevitability, he saw that it was slowly moving toward him, like a great predator approaching by stealth. The current was undoing all his efforts. It was carrying him back to Jelt.
All his life, there had been a current dragging Hark back to Jelt, over and over. He had never been able to fight it. When Jelt needed him, Hark had always, always come running.
Tightening his grip on the oars again was the hardest thing Hark had ever done. Dragging them through the water felt like murder. But he did it, and did it again, and again, and again, gritting his teeth as the spray chilled his face.
He rowed until he was far enough from the tiny islet to risk standing and letting out the sail, his fingers fumbling numbly against the lines. Even after Wildman’s Hammer had melted into the night behind him, Hark kept listening for that voice in the wind’s cry. He couldn’t stop shaking, and every lurch of the boat felt like a blow.
The sea had never looked so black.
Chapter 28
The god-heart lay in Hark’s pack, still as a stone. Only when he ran the boat aground on one of Nest’s shores and jumped into the knee-high water did he feel it give a small pulse. He had grazed his shin on a submerged rock, so perhaps the heart had sensed a chance to fix something.
Hark waded ashore, stumbling with exhaustion, then pulled the heart out of his pack. He drew his arm back, wanting to fling the heart into the waiting black mouth of the ocean. If he did, though, some visiting scavenger gang would find it, sure as winter. Even if he took the boat out again and hurled the thing overboard, it would wash up on a beach or be found by the divers searching for salvage.
Then it would be someone else’s problem. But Hark didn’t want to think about some unwitting person picking it up, then getting unexpectedly altered, or murdered by Jelt for having it.
“I can break you,” Hark growled, staring down at the ivory-like surface. “I can smash you with rocks.” It looked fragile. If he broke it, though, there was no going back.
I need it! I’ll die without it! Jelt had shouted.
Maybe it was just an addiction. Addicts sometimes talked like they were dying. Hark had seen drunks tapping and pleading at the locked door of the tavern and Old Besh’s customers desperately haggling for a twist of bilesmoke or arrowsnuff. I need it, I need it! they always said.
Then he remembered the way that Jelt had talked about getting sick every time he was away from the heart. He had said that even at the start, before he started hiding in shadows.
“I don’t understand!” snarled Hark, overcome with frustration and tiredness. “Why does he still need you? I saved him! Why doesn’t he stay saved, like Coram? And why is he . . .”
Hark closed his eyes tight, but he couldn’t shut out the pictures in his head. The Jelt-shape leaping and slashing at a dark mass that screamed with human voices . . .
That thing was Jelt. Hark felt a miserable horror at the memory, but as always there was the tug of their connection. Hark couldn’t destroy the heart if that might condemn Jelt to death. As Hark put it back into his pack, he felt thwarted and depressed, as though he had argued with the relic and lost.
Hark was nauseous and shaking by the time he reached Sanctuary. The sky was still very dark, with no hint of the coming dawn. Clambering up over the roofs took longer than usual because his knees kept trying to give way.
Hark was just closing the window behind him when he was caught in a purple light.
“Hey! What are you doing there?” Two of the night guards were standing at the end of the corridor. Hark hoped they hadn’t seen him climb in.
“I work here!” he answered quickly. “I help look after the priests!”
“Wait, I have seen him around,” said one of the guards. “What are you doing up here, then?”
Hark knew that he must look sweaty, shaky, and out of breath. Perhaps this could be turned to his advantage.
“I’m hot,” he said, a little tremulously. “I . . . don’t feel right. I was looking for somewhere cool.”
“Hot?” The first guard drew closer, holding up his lantern. “You look like death. We’d better put you in a quarantine room. I’ll let Kly know.”
Hark was led to a dusty little chamber where the straw mattress was flattened and moldy. He collapsed on it and didn’t care. Very soon he slid into an uneasy dream, in which a silent bell rang again and again, vibrating his bones. Eventually its thrum grew gentler, until it became the purr of a gigantic cat.
Hark was allowed to sleep late. When he awoke, he no longer felt weak or shaky. Perhaps the god-heart had given him a little burst of healing to win him over, like a stray dog groveling and whimpering to be allowed near a campfire.
It was midafternoon before Hark was allowed out of quarantine. There was a grueling interview with Kly, who didn’t believe that Hark had suddenly come down with a convenient fever and then just as conveniently shaken it off in a single night.
“I thought I’d be calling you in today to praise you,” said the foreman at last, sounding tired rather than angry. It was the nearest he had come to mentioning the Moonmaid incident. “Then this happens. Understand, I can’t let you play fast and loose, or I’d be betraying the people who trust me. I don’t know where you went last night or what you took that left you looking so sick and sweaty, but this can’t happen again. I don’t want to know how you paid for whatever it was. If you stole anything, find a way to put it back before I notice it’s gone.”
He held up a hand to silence Hark’s protests and left.
Kly’s patience and discretion had been eked out one more time, but Hark guessed that they were probably at their limits. “This is your last warning” was something people might say several times, but there was always a last last warning, and Hark thought he might have reached it. It had a different sound, something you could feel in your bones.
Hark splashed water on his face and got ready for work. He wrapped the heart in a sling of cloth and tucked it under his robes so it hung down beneath one arm, hidden by the loose folds of cloth.
He still didn’t know much about it. He didn’t know whether it had its own thoughts, feelings, or schemes. He didn’t know why it was still alive, thirty years after the death of the gods.
But Quest might.
Deep down, Hark had been wanting to bring the god-heart to Quest for a while. The old man was slowly dying, and Hark wasn’t ready for Quest to die. He didn’t know how it had happened, but their conversations had become necessary to him. The medicines at Sanctuary couldn’t cure lungs mangled by Riser’s Bane, but perhaps the god-heart could.
As he entered the halls of Sanctuary, the smells, dim light, and gentle hum of conversation was almost comforting. Stealthily, all these things had become, if not home, then at least homely. He had started to feel safe there.
“Where’s Quest?” he asked.
“In the infirmary for lebineck oil and hot stones.”
This was worrying news. Treatments like lebineck-oil rubs and pressure from hot stones were what you tried when the usual medicines weren’t working. That was something to ask Quest about when he emerged from the treatment room.
Hark was picking up some empty bowls from the floor when he felt the god-heart stir against his side. It was the smallest throb, but one of the bowls slipped from his fingers and clattered on the floor. He picked it up and grinned ruefully at those who had been startled by the noise.
Most people returned their attention to whatever they had been doing before. A tiny, half-blind female priest called Seamist, however, continued staring at him. When he carried the bowls to the kitchens, he realized that she was slowly hobbling after him, her misty eyes fixed on him.
She had been
close enough to notice the throb. Hark kept walking and hoped that she would get distracted.
The second pulse came about a minute later, just as he was passing Moonmaid in the corridor. She halted in her tracks and slowly turned to look at him. In a nearby chamber he saw Wailwind struggling out of his chair, staring around him with a fearful alertness. Hark paced away from them as nonchalantly as he could and ducked into a cupboard, trying not to panic.
Why now? Hark wanted to ask the heart. Why are you beating now? He could already guess. He had brought it to a place of sickness, frail bones, failing eyes, and dimming memories.
It pulsed again, and Hark flinched. There were slow steps outside. The door of the cupboard rattled, first tentatively then furiously. Other steps were approaching now, some plodding, some dragging. Hark felt a rising bubble of panic. He was cornered and becoming more so by the moment.
Hark took a deep breath and burst out of the cupboard. He had to push past Moonmaid, dodging as she made a snatch at his arm, then ducked around Seamist and Wailwind a few yards behind her.
Halfstar was standing in a doorway as Hark sprinted past. As the heart pulsed again, Halfstar’s gaze became glassy, and his mouth dropped open, letting out a thin, breathy noise. He reached out one hand and clutched loosely at the air.
“You came back,” he whispered, his voice hollow with hope and a sort of despair. “Why did you go?” he called after Hark’s retreating figure. “I have been waiting so long . . .”
Another pulse. Call-of-the-Air flung her door open, her long gray hair wild and a bandage unfurling from one leg. She stared at Hark, and past him, and all around, as if looking for something that she needed and feared to find.
“Where is it?” she screamed.
Hark did not stop to answer. He kept running down corridor after corridor, hearing wails and hoarse cries behind him. He had to find somewhere to hide, away from everyone else.
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