Deeplight

by Frances Hardinge

  He kicked hard and lunged for it. His fingers closed around it . . .

  . . . and then something large and dark hit him like a runaway horse, shoving him aside and knocking the wind out of him. He gasped, then rallied and righted himself. To his horror, he saw that the heart was gone. It had been ripped away, leaving the soft, fleshy pipes ravaged and floating free.

  Before he could recover, Hark was grappled from behind and wrestled down onto the soft seabed on his back. A wind-gun was pointed in his face. A metal-suited Leaguer was leaning over Hark, shouting something at him in an angry, panicky way. All around him, other Leaguers appeared to be getting up. Why weren’t they incapacitated anymore?

  The nearest man snatched the helmet off Hark’s head and sound returned to Hark’s world.

  “I said, don’t try anything!” the Leaguer with the gun shouted again, his voice echoing inside the metal shell. The face behind the suit’s glass plate looked as startled and frightened as Hark felt, which wasn’t reassuring. Frightened people sometimes panicked and killed.

  Now Hark could tell why the Leaguers were recovering. The Butterfly’s scream had waned to a faint gurgle. Why weren’t Hark’s friends pumping the bellows?

  Then he noticed that the rest of the Leaguers were paying Hark no attention at all. Instead, they were staring upward.

  Twenty feet above them was a single floating figure. Hark’s heart sank as he saw the round, colorless eyes, the long-hinged jaw, the preposterous clustering of teeth.

  It was Jelt. In his hands, he gripped the heart of the Hidden Lady.

  “Give that to us!” called out one of the Leaguers. The top of his diving suit was unscrewed, exposing his face to the water. It was the captain who had stabbed Vyne.

  Jelt looked mangled, half his chest badly dented like a rotten fruit. His flesh was gray and ravaged-looking, scattered with dark, leprous-looking scales. A chunk of his shoulder was missing, and there was a deep, round wound in one hip.

  As Hark watched, Jelt placed the heart against his own chest. He began forcing it into his own flesh, with a rictus of effort and pain. There were cracking and popping sounds.

  “Jelt, don’t!” shouted Hark, the water tickling the inside of his throat as he did so. His voice sounded unusually loud.

  The world shuddered and shimmered as the god-heart beat. Jelt’s scaly flesh crept over the heart and closed around it. The relic had found its home.

  Chapter 42

  Jelt. Of course it was Jelt.

  Hark would never be rid of him. However hard Hark tried, however high he climbed, Jelt would always be there to pull him down. Even if Hark gave in to desperation and plunged down to the greatest depths, the depths beneath the depths, Jelt would find him there, too.

  The heart beat again and again. Each pulse sent a great ripple through the dark-light. Hark felt it pull at his bones and blood.

  Jelt convulsed. The hole in his shoulder was closing, fine dark scales sliding over the new flesh like silk. The wound in his hip was healing, too, and filling with gray, misshapen pearls.

  “Don’t fire at it!” yelled the captain. “You might hit the heart!”

  The captain looked around frantically, then noticed Hark on the seafloor with a gun trained on his head. The man did a double take, then recovered.

  “You up there!” he shouted hoarsely at Jelt. “Look! We have one of your friends!” At a gesture from the captain, the Leaguer with the gun dragged Hark upright so that Jelt could see him better.

  “Friends?” It was Hark’s turn to be confused. Then he started to understand. The captain had seen Jelt swoop down and rip the heart out of the construct, right after the Butterfly had rammed it. No wonder he thought Jelt was working with the Butterfly’s crew.

  The Jelt-thing stopped jerking and looked down at Hark. Its pale, dull eyes were like coins worn slick and meaningless by the waves.

  “Hey, Hark.” Somehow the Jelt-thing sounded close, as if speaking next to Hark’s ear. “Didn’t see you there. Thought you’d be waiting for me by the cairn on Nest about now. Isn’t that what you promised?” The voice had a fluttering rasp, like something eating a live moth. Yet the bitter mockery was still unmistakably Jelt.

  “You need to take that thing out of your chest!” bellowed Hark. “It’ll kill your mind!”

  “Actually,” Jelt continued, in the same dangerously offhand tone. “I don’t think you can be Hark. The Hark I know wouldn’t run off and leave me to die, would he? So I guess these people can fill you with as many holes as they like. Save me the bother.”

  Hark could see a dart poking out of the wind-gun aimed at his face. He’d always liked those darts, he remembered. The feathers made them easy to spot when they washed up on the beach, and you could sell the metal. You just had to be careful with the sharp, sharp tips.

  There was more yelling and confusion from the direction of the Butterfly. Selphin was being dragged out of the sub by force. She was lashing out at her captor’s heads with a copper air-bottle, perhaps in the hope that it would rupture and explode. It was wrestled out of her hands, and a few moments later Quest was also ushered out of the sub at wind-gunpoint, without his helmet.

  “I know what you are!” the captain called out to Jelt. “You’re the monster from Wildman’s Hammer—the one that killed a dozen of my men. You’re ruthless, but I doubt you will sacrifice your allies.” His hair floated up to form a haze, showing a bald spot that had previously been hidden by his shiny hat. “You all came a long way to steal that heart. Braving the Undersea takes camaraderie.”

  “Camaraderie?” Jelt rasped out a bitter laugh. “That little snake stole the heart from me! I’ve been following him to get it back!” Hark could almost feel the gaze of the dull-penny eyes again. “Do you know what it was like swimming all that way, Hark? Do you know how cold and dark it was? Do you know how it feels when the water’s crushing you, and your ribs break, one by one?”

  The captain gaped at Jelt. Hark could almost see the man dismantling his wrong conclusions and putting them together in a different arrangement.

  “Swimming?” he repeated in hushed, incredulous tones. “You came here without a submersible?” Hark didn’t like the captain’s expression. Previously it had shown only a stern desperation. Now he was gazing at Jelt with fierce awe. “How did you become so strong? Was it the blessing of the heart?”

  “So what if it was?” retorted Jelt, with the same tone of sour nonchalance. He was regarding the captain with more interest, however.

  “We should never have been enemies,” the captain declared. “Stay with us. Work with us. Let us make you greater still.”

  “Didn’t you just say I killed a dozen of your men?” asked Jelt sardonically.

  “Of course you did,” the captain replied simply. “That is what gods do.”

  Even though Hark couldn’t see the other Leaguers’ faces, he could hear some of them muttering to each other in tinny consternation. This whiplash change of direction had taken them by surprise, and they didn’t sound happy about it.

  Jelt, on the other hand, now looked keenly interested, the snaking appendage under his chin flicking like a cat’s tail.

  “You people don’t seem to be kneeling,” said Jelt. It was almost an order.

  “You are born to be a god,” said the captain, holding his nerve, “but you are not one yet. After you don your mantle and assume your true might, everyone will kneel.”

  “Mantle?” asked Jelt.

  With a sense of inevitability, Hark saw the captain gesture toward the sprawled god-construct.

  “It is a body for a god,” the captain said. “Given life, it will have gills to draw strength from the souls of thousands, eyes that can see in the deepest darkness, and claws strong enough to cleave steel. I see now that you were always meant to wear it. We made it for you without even realizing it.”

  It was simple, horrible, and inspired. The god-construct had been torn in two, and the League no longer had Vyne on hand to reattach
everything skillfully. Adding Jelt would solve all those problems. Quest had told Hark that humans were the god-heart’s “favorite clay.” It would mold him into whatever it needed to bond the pieces.

  “Well, get it ready, then!” demanded the Jelt-thing. “And don’t let anyone point guns at me, or you’ll be losing more men!”

  The Leaguers shambled into clumsy, unwilling motion. A couple went to retrieve the claw from behind the Butterfly, pale starfish writhing under their boots. Other Leaguers fetched god-glue from the sub and knelt by the damaged god-construct.

  “What are you doing?” shouted Hark. “He killed your friends! He didn’t have to, he wanted to! I know, I was there! And now you want to give him god-powers?”

  “Don’t listen to him!” snapped the captain. “This moment is the greatest test of your courage and loyalty! Don’t falter now!”

  Hark exchanged a desperate glance with Selphin. Both had wind-guns pointed at their heads. There wasn’t much either of them could do without getting shot. Charging toward Jelt or the god-construct would be suicide.

  All Hark could do for now was keep talking. He didn’t have much hope that Jelt or the captain would listen to him, but he had to try. Besides, they were not the only people present.

  “Listen to me!” he shouted. “If you don’t stop this, we’re all going to die!”

  He turned to the thing that had been his friend.

  “Jelt, do you know what happens if you do merge with that big heap of godware? The heart will glue you into that body, so you’ll never escape. It’ll bend you and melt you, till everything fits. And do you know what happens to a god when it grows? Its mind starts to die. It forgets everything and becomes a big, dumb fish. A big, hungry fish. If your mind dies, you die, Jelt!

  “Do the rest of you know what happens after that? Do you think you’ll still be making deals with him? You won’t, because he won’t understand you. And he’ll be eating you. Is that what you want?”

  A few of the Leaguers had halted in their tasks, listening to him.

  “It is all true,” said Quest, his voice carrying with steely clarity. His frailty had a certain majesty here, with his brown robes billowing and his blanket spreading like a cape. He looked like an ancient sage or prophet. “I was of the priesthood. I have talked with great gods and seen the mindlessness behind their eyes.”

  The Leaguers who had stopped to listen to Hark and Quest were clearly getting the sharp end of the captain’s tongue. They hesitated, looking daunted, then carried on reassembling the god, patching leaks and tears. They laid out the torn-off part of the god next to the rest, with a person-sized gap between them.

  “Oh, come on!” erupted Hark. “You can’t all be crazy! Some of you must want to live! Some of you must care about your dead friends!”

  The Leaguers all looked like automata, in their metal capsule bodies. But there were men underneath the suits, all with their own memories, hopes, mistakes, and triumphs.

  “Well, I’m just going to keep talking,” Hark said, “because maybe one of you is a little bit sane. One of you doesn’t want to die. Maybe there’s more than one of you thinking that way right now, and you don’t know it because you’re in those suits and can’t see each other’s faces.

  “You joined the League to be part of something that mattered. Saving the Myriad, right? You got secret missions, you were in this special band of brothers that knew things. Then you found out about the really secret plan, and it scared you, but by then you were in so deep you couldn’t back out. You just had to believe that you’d made the right choice.

  “Now you’re here. You’re in deeper than deep, every kind of deep, and you can’t see a way out. You think you can’t change your mind anymore. But you can. You always can. You have to, or we’re all going to die. All the people you’re trying to protect will die or live in terror forever. The gods were monsters, and they never cared about any of us!”

  “Carry on!” snapped the captain. “You over there—shoot that boy if he keeps talking!”

  Hark bit his tongue. The captain had silenced him too late. They’ve already heard me, Hark thought. They can’t un-hear me. My words are in their heads now.

  One of the Leaguers suddenly set down his flask of god-glue.

  “I don’t like this,” he declared abruptly, in a Lady’s Craver accent. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “This is what we came here to do!” blazed the captain. “Everything we’ve done for the last six months has been for this very moment! If you are losing your nerve, step away from the god.”

  “This wasn’t the plan!” protested the rogue Leaguer, as he was pushed away from the construct. “That thing”—he pointed at Jelt—“wasn’t in the plan. And you didn’t say anything about being eaten!” The louder his objections, the more clearly he seemed to be outlined by glistening light.

  “Enough!” the captain snapped. “The mantle is ready.”

  “Don’t try anything stupid,” warned Jelt, as he descended toward the god-construct. Other voices were being raised, however.

  “Hold up! What’s the hurry? Why can’t we hear what those people have to say?”

  “You didn’t say this was a suicide mission! I’ve got kids!”

  There were still four Leaguers standing by the captain, defending the construct as Jelt lowered himself down between the two halves. As the captain helped guide Jelt’s limbs into the works and attached soft, glutinous tubes to his skin, some of the others charged forward.

  “I said, stop what you’re doing!”

  “Get back—I’ll fire!”

  Metal suits collided and gonged as the Leaguers fought each other. Somebody yelled as a dart hit his leg. One of the rebels barged his way past the defenders, grabbed at a fistful of the construct’s tubular innards, and tried to yank them loose.

  Amid all this confusion, the god-heart pulsed. For a second it was the black-white center of everything, a hole and a tiny sun at once. Hark saw the Leaguers jerk and felt the beat like a kick in the chest.

  Jelt howled.

  Hark had guessed what would happen. He’d even described it. However, it was much worse than he’d imagined. Jelt’s limbs were sinking into the works of the construct, like soft wax sliding down a hot knife. The heart beat again, and again, and Hark saw Jelt’s limbs contort and stretch. Skin crept over metal and glass like a pale lichen.

  Pulse followed pulse followed pulse. The heart had been waiting for this chance to fashion a truly suitable vessel. It was strengthening sinews, locking plates of chitinous armor, sliding parts into place. The new god slowly reared up, a faint glisten slithering all over it. The god was the center of the world, a vortex of power and hunger, sucking everything else toward it. The seabed was shuddering, too, as though with excitement.

  One of the Leaguers leaped toward the new god, in one long, drifting bound. He swung an axe down into its back with a meaty thock!

  A great claw lashed out. Suddenly the axe-wielder was floating in two pieces, his body and metal suit neatly severed, blood blooming in the water like a giant rose.

  “I warned you!” It was recognizable as Jelt’s voice, but only just. The vowels were guttural and groaning, the consonants a deep, reverberating buzz. “You lied to me! You tricked me! You never told me it would feel . . .”

  The other Leaguers were yelling, backing away or turning to flee. The captain, inevitably, stood his ground.

  “I did not lie to you!” he shouted. “Everything I have done was to bring you into the world!” He dropped to one knee as he had promised. “Everyone kneel and show your fealty!” But the captain’s hold on his men had been broken. Most were fleeing back into the Abysmal Child.

  Jelt’s long, whiplike barbel lashed out at the captain’s head. It was an apt blessing from the new god. Hark flinched and looked away. He hadn’t liked the captain, but he hadn’t wanted to see him die.

  Because he had turned his head, Hark was looking in the right direction to see Selphin swimming
rapidly toward him. The man pointing a gun at Hark didn’t know she was there until she grabbed him from behind and slapped a fistful of mud across the window of his suit.

  Hark seized his moment and grabbed the wind-gun, wrestling it out of the man’s hand. Selphin shoved the man away, and he lost his balance and fell over sideways, arms windmilling as he floated down to the silt.

  “Thanks!” Hark said quickly, when Selphin’s eyes were on his face. He stooped to snatch his helmet.

  They swam over to Quest, who was sheltering under the wing of the Butterfly, also unguarded. The shuddering of the seafloor was shrugging silt and small stones onto the little sub’s wings. If they didn’t get it moving soon, there was a danger that it might get buried.

  Hark pulled himself in through the hatch and floated down into the driver’s seat. He put on his helmet and waited as the others piled in. Only then did he realize that Selphin was signing to him.

  No scream! she signed. The scream’s broken!

  Hark stared at her in bewilderment, so she reached over, grabbed the bellows, and squeezed them hard. Small bubbles erupted from the machinery, but there was no scream. He tugged off his helmet as Selphin squeezed the bellows again. They made a sloshing, rubbery, glugging noise, and nothing else. A fresh shoal of bubbles twitched and danced their way upward, mocking his panic.

  The Butterfly’s crew had all known that their lungs could use Undersea water instead of air. None of them had wondered whether the little sub’s pipe-organ innards could do the same.

  Pedals! Hark signed.

  Quest pulled the hatch shut, everyone crammed themselves into place, and Hark and Selphin began frantically pedaling. The Butterfly grated a little against the side of the Abysmal Child, then shuddered away from it. Hark could feel bumps and vibrations as the tail propeller dragged in the mud and bounced off rocks.

  For now, the Jelt-god was not following the Butterfly. Looking back toward the fight, Hark could see why. Somebody in the Abysmal Child had brought the great sub’s harpoon guns to bear on the god. As he watched, a harpoon sank into the monstrosity’s flank, then was tugged loose by a great claw. He didn’t know how long the rebel Leaguers could hold off the angry god like that, but at least they weren’t all kneeling in a neat line ready to be eaten.