They’re old, he told himself as he fled. They’re confused, they’re harmless. I just can’t afford to get caught up in a fuss, that’s all. People might start asking questions, and then someone might notice the heart . . .
That was not why he was running, however. It was the desperation on the old priests’ faces that filled him with panic and pity. It was like finding yourself surrounded by starving faces and suddenly realizing that you were made of bread.
He ran past the baths chamber, hearing a splash like someone hastily struggling out of the water. He didn’t look back, in case wet and naked figures were hobbling in his wake.
As he sprinted into a quieter corridor, he smelled woodsmoke and the bitter-sap smell of lebineck oil. Of course, Quest was being treated with oil and hot stones. Hark hadn’t intended to interrupt the old man’s treatment, but he was changing his mind quickly. After all, the treatment room could be secured for privacy.
Kly looked up in surprise as Hark barreled into the room. Quest was lying on a table nearby in only some loose white trousers. His bare back was glossy and golden with oil, a few polished black stones placed down his spine. Most of the light came from the little furnace set in the wall, its chimney disappearing into the ceiling.
“What’s going on?” Kly asked quickly. “Where’s all that yelling coming from?”
Hark was startled to find Kly there, but he recovered quickly.
“I don’t know what started it,” he lied. “But Moonmaid just lunged for me, and now a lot of the others are getting excitable. I thought I’d better find you.”
“Don’t tell me Moonmaid’s found something sharp again!” Kly groaned.
“I didn’t see her holding anything.” Hark fidgeted, wondering if he was imagining the sound of slow footsteps approaching outside. “But I don’t know.”
Kly hesitated, glancing at his patient.
“I can take care of things here,” Hark said quickly. “I’ve done the rocks before.”
“Fine,” muttered Kly, shaking his head. “I’ll go and deal with Moonmaid.”
As soon as Kly was out of the room, Hark bolted the door.
“What are you doing?” asked Quest, peering through a tangle of oil-beaded hair. “What’s going on out there?” There was now no mistaking the sounds of steps and murmurs outside. The door briefly rattled, then footsteps receded a little. Hark could hear the sounds of other doors being opened, furniture scraping. The blind, blundering search had moved away, but not far.
“Don’t worry,” said Hark. “I just . . . I wanted to talk to you privately. You don’t need to get up!”
It was too late. Quest had pushed himself up to a sitting position, letting the coin-sized stones slide off his back with a clatter.
“Never mind those,” the old priest said wryly. “The stones aren’t unpleasant, but they don’t do any good. The staff just put them on me because they want me to feel better about things. And I let them so that they can feel better about things. A harmless lie on both sides.”
“I’ve got something better than hot stones,” Hark said. Here it was, the moment of trust, and he didn’t feel ready for it. Quest might betray him. He might even start staggering toward the heart like the other priests, in a glazed and feverish trance. Apprehensively, Hark reached into the hidden sling and pulled out the heart.
Quest’s gaze fell upon it, and his expression stilled. Hark was not even sure he was breathing.
“They don’t know I have it,” whispered Hark. “Don’t tell anybody, please! If they find out, they’ll take it away, and a friend of mine needs it.”
“Where did you get it?” asked Quest, very quietly.
“It was in the sea, near the Entreaty Barrier.” Hark swallowed. “It heals. I . . . I thought it might heal you. But I need to know if it—”
As he was speaking, the heart suddenly flexed and sent a pulse through the room. Quest jerked as though he had been stung.
“That’s how it heals people,” Hark whispered. “It looks for things to fix. Only . . . sometimes it has a funny idea of ‘fixed.’” He was a little frightened by Quest’s pallor.
“Can I have a look at it?” asked Quest.
Nervously, Hark handed it over. Quest took it carefully, letting it rest on his fingertips as if trying to minimize skin contact. He walked over to the furnace where the light was better, inspecting the relic minutely by the reddish glow.
Then, without warning, Quest flung the heart into the blazing embers of the furnace. He snatched up a poker and used it to aim stab after stab at the heart.
“Hey!” Hark rushed forward and wrestled the poker out of Quest’s hands. “Stop it!” He pushed the old priest away, harder than intended, so that Quest fell back against the wall. The heart was nestling between embers. Golden flames licked its underside. Hark snatched at the relic and felt a searing pain as he knocked it back toward himself. It fell out of the furnace, hitting the floor with a crack.
As Hark snatched the heart up, Quest’s poker cracked down on the floor where it had been, a split second too slow.
“What are you doing?” Hark backed away from Quest, the relic cradled in the crook of his arm. With his unsinged hand, he wiped the heart, looking for damage. It seemed uncracked, and the soot came off to show no charring underneath, but he didn’t know whether its delicate inner workings were damaged.
“You need to give that to me,” said Quest. He was still holding the poker, drawn back ready to swing. Hark felt angry despair at the sight. This always happened. You trusted people and they turned on you. “You don’t know what it is.”
“It’s the heart of a god,” Hark retorted. This did seem to give Quest pause.
“So you do know what it is,” the old man conceded. “Do you know which god’s heart?”
“Do you?” countered Hark, startled by Quest’s question. Quest did not answer, and that was answer enough. “You know what this is! You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”
Hark wondered why he had ever thought Quest was frail. Seeing him now, Hark sensed a will like steel wire. The priest wasn’t frenzied or enraged. He was frighteningly calm.
“You are holding the heart of the Hidden Lady,” said Quest. “Now put it on the ground, please. We need to break it apart.”
The Hidden Lady.
Hark’s face grew hot. He had known that the relic was the heart of a god, but he really hadn’t wondered which one. It was easier to think of it as a lump of godware if it didn’t have a name. Now he would never be able to look at it the same way.
He had felt the Lady’s heartbeat. The delicate perforations suddenly looked feminine, like a carved ivory fan. Guarding her heart now felt chivalrous, almost romantic.
“Why do you want to break it?” he blurted out. “You were the Lady’s . . .” He faltered, since “friend” was clearly not the right word. “She wound you in her hair and told you secrets! She trusted you!”
“I know what you are thinking,” said Quest gently, as though he really did, “but there is no Lady now. She is gone.” He took another careful step forward.
“Don’t!” Hark said miserably. “I don’t want to hurt you. But I can’t let you break this. My best friend says he’ll die without it!”
“And I don’t want to threaten you, either,” said Quest, in a quietly regretful tone. “I’m sorry about your friend. But if you don’t give me the heart, I will have to call for help and tell them what you have.” He nodded toward the bell rope provided for older patients to summon assistance when getting off the table.
Hark’s blood surged with terror, then subsided bitterly.
“No, you won’t,” he said, feeling bruised and betrayed. “If you did, they’d take the heart away and give it to Dr. Vyne, wouldn’t they? She definitely wouldn’t smash it. She’d use it to power a submarine or something. Then she’d sell me to someone else, as punishment for lying to her. I’d die in the galleys, and you’d die slowly here with nobody to talk to.”
“True
.” Quest slowly lowered his poker, acknowledging the impasse. “It was worth a try.” If he felt hurt by Hark’s words, he showed no sign of it. “Then I need to make you understand why the thing must be destroyed and why this matters even more than the life of your friend. Will you listen to me, if I tell you something that must never be repeated to another?”
Hark slowly nodded. He waited while the priest sat down on the treatment tables once again, golden trickles of oil running down his narrow arms.
“The gods,” said Quest, “were not what you think. And they must never, ever return.”
Chapter 29
“What do you mean?” asked Hark, knocked off-balance by Quest’s intensity. “Why would the gods return?”
“Every time that thing beats”—Quest nodded at the heart, his face still dangerously calm—“it changes the world around it just a little. Does it not?”
“It heals!” protested Hark, feeling all his doubts rising in his chest once more. “It saved my friend’s life, and he needs it! He gets sick without it!”
“Is that all it does?” said Quest. The sympathy in his gaze made everything worse. “How is your friend? Does he seem . . . different at all?”
Hark gritted his teeth and said nothing, feeling angry, stupid, and transparent.
“You say the heart heals,” Quest continued. “Yes, I am sure it does. I am sure it glues, reshapes, and makes things stronger. It is a thing of the Undersea. It transforms and warps, just as the Undersea transforms and warps. But the heart doesn’t care about your friend. It is the beating core of a god. All it wants—all it has ever wanted—is to devour, absorb, and grow. With every pulse it is trying to build itself a new body, piece by piece. Humans are its favorite clay.”
“A new body?” Hark stared. “You mean, a new god?”
“Yes,” said Quest. “It has probably been adapting your friend, inside and out—making him into a vessel that it can use.”
Hark remembered the Jelt-thing’s bloody rampage. And yet it was still Jelt—Jelt! Uncanny and frecht as it was, it still had Jelt’s surliness, Jelt’s humor, and all their shared memories.
“I won’t let it,” Hark declared fiercely. “I won’t let that heart take him over!”
“Then it will find something or someone else,” said Quest earnestly. “You cannot hide that thing forever! Its pulse will be felt. Its effects will be noticed. When others know it exists, they will want it. We must destroy it now, before someone else takes it from you!”
Quest’s animated speech was shaken by a burst of coughing. The old man was shivering now, in the after-ebb of the fight’s adrenalin. Hark wanted to pass him one of the warm robes hanging on the wall. But they were almost-enemies for now, and Quest had already surprised him once. Instead Hark watched, conflicted, as the old priest recovered his breath.
“If that abomination falls into unwise hands,” Quest went on, “it will find ways to build itself a body. Once it can move by itself, it will probably seek to return to its home in the Undersea.”
“Well, suppose it did?” exclaimed Hark. He remembered his angry yearning to throw the heart into the sea. “You want it gone, don’t you?”
“No! Listen to me, Hark! If the heart succeeds—if it gets back to the Undersea—then we have all lost our future.
“Once it is in the Undersea, it can become stronger. It can feed, build, and grow. It may be sluggish up here on land, but it will be another matter down there. All human fear runs down into the Undersea, just as streams and rivers run into the ocean. Human fear has a terrible power. It changes everything, distorts everything, maddens everything. Fear is the dark womb where monsters are born and thrive.
“The gods breathe fear. That is not a metaphor invented by the poets. They need it, just as we need air. The larger they are, the more of it they need. Without it, they weaken and fall into torpor. With enough of it, they can become colossal. The waters of the Undersea are dense with our fear. There a god could grow, and grow, and grow, in the silence of the deep, far beyond our reach.
“Ten or twenty years ago, I would not have worried. People were recovering from their centuries of terrified awe. They had become bold and curious, daring to seek their fortunes beneath the waves. A new, growing god would not have found enough fear in the Undersea to keep it alive. But now times are changing too fast, and people are learning to fear again. Have you noticed? There is a fear of foreigners and their big ships, a fear of change. Yes, a god could thrive in these times.
“So one day a vastness would surface offshore, like a glistening island. Harbor walls would crack, and great waves would crush our little houses like seedpods. The bays and beaches would stink with dead fish and dolphins, and the sky would be dark with flies, and another era of horror would be upon us. We would be slaves again.”
Hark blinked. The image Quest had painted was vivid and horrible before his mind’s eye.
“We wouldn’t,” Hark heard himself say. “We’re different now. Everything’s different now.”
“Is it?” asked Quest. “I would love to believe that, but I do not. I had hoped that younger generations would grow up without our craven god-fever, but I still see traces of it everywhere—even in you. There is an eagerness, a poisonous nostalgia. No, throughout the Myriad people would fall onto their faces and give in to their ancient superstitious terror.”
Hark’s palms were sweating. The heart felt cold in his grip.
“Why are you talking like this?” he said accusingly. “You were a priest! You served the gods!”
“Yes, I did. That is how I know what horrors they really were.” Quest leaned forward. “What do you think the gods were, Hark, in your heart of hearts? Do you secretly think that they were majestic? Terrible but just, in their own inscrutable way? Perhaps all their actions would make sense if our minds could only rise to a high enough state of being?”
Hark was shaking his head. No, no, that was the old, crazy way of thinking. He didn’t think like that; only old people thought like that. Nonetheless, he could feel his neck flushing.
“Of course you do,” said the old man, and shook his head bitterly. “Everyone does, deep down. That is our fault—the fault of the priests. It is a fantasy we sold to the people of the Myriad so that everyone’s oppression would be more bearable. We let everyone tell themselves that they were watched over by gods, rather than terrorized by monsters. And we reassured everyone that the priesthood had everything under control. We had treaties with the gods and knew how to negotiate with them.
“All of that was a lie. The gods had no great or benevolent plan for us. There were no treaties. We never truly learned to reason with them, because they were not reasonable. Even those whom we could talk with were all crazy, to some degree. And the biggest gods—the mightiest among them—had no more power of reason than beasts.”
Hark’s breath caught in his throat. Quest seemed to have run out of breath as well and sat with his eyes half closed, breathing carefully.
Gigantic, savage fish, Vyne had said.
Hark had never worshipped the gods, or so he had thought. He couldn’t explain why all of this made him feel ill and angry, as if something were being taken from him. He had always lived in a godless world, and yet . . . everyone he knew had grown up with a lurking pride in their island’s “patron” god. Their remembered might was yours, somehow. Even their horrific nature had a majesty that you could borrow. You got into drunken arguments with folks from other islands about whose god could have beaten the other in a straight fight.
“I don’t believe you!” said Hark. If he hadn’t been afraid of the other priests roaming the corridors, he would have stamped out of the room before Quest could say anything else.
“I did not take that news well, either,” said the old man, watching Hark sympathetically. “Acolytes and younger priests were not told the truth. Only when I was rising in the ranks did some elders take me aside to brief me in a small, dark room. They kept me in that room for four days afterward s
o that I had time to calm down.
“Then I was lowered into the deeps, and I saw the gods for myself. Those great, lightless eyes . . .”
“You’re lying!” Hark erupted. “What about your conversations with the Hidden Lady! She wasn’t just a . . . big fish!”
“No, she certainly was not,” Quest agreed. “The Hidden Lady was always an anomaly. She was clever. Understand me, it was not a human cleverness. She had a complex mind and could be reasoned with better than the others, but even her reason worked . . . differently. Talking to her was like accepting an invitation to someone else’s house, only to find that the walls are made of teeth and all the doors lead to the moon. You realize suddenly that you have not been talking about the same thing, and never could. It was the really large gods that became beastlike in their intellects. But even those were never just fish.”
Quest narrowed his eyes and squinted down the telescope of time.
“Those vast gods were mysterious. Hypnotic. Their strangeness, their sheer size . . .” He shook his head. “They left you stunned with awe. But I would have seen more warmth and kinship looking into the black eyes of a shark, and almost as much intelligence.
“Something happened to the gods as they became larger and more powerful. Their minds dulled. They started to forget things and forget themselves. They became more unpredictable and less able to communicate. On some level they knew it was happening to them. They could feel the light of their thoughts guttering and threatening to go out. But they did not know what to do about it.
“So the priesthood had to go down into those dark waters and try to remind these terrifying, ravenous mountains why they should not kill us all. We kept the messages simple. If they crawled up onto the islands and slaughtered everyone, no more fear would spill into the Undersea. If they devoured our ships and towns, they would grow too big and their minds would wink out. We had big, colored boards for communicating with Dolor, and a string of lights for distracting the Cardinal in emergencies.”
“Like talking to children,” Hark said bitterly.
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