It’s a god! It’s alive! signed Selphin. How do we destroy the heart now?
We must, answered Quest. The god is still new. It will be stronger later.
Through the smeared glass, Hark could see that the underwater landscape was restless again. They passed a huge rock pillar that was pulling itself farther out of the seabed, like a claw sliding from its sheath. Its emergence sent a heap of rubble bouncing with lethal laziness through the water. The boulders idly chased the Butterfly for a bit.
Can we shoot the heart from a distance? asked Selphin.
Hark thought of feathered darts slowed by water. They would be very effective against ordinary human flesh at close range, but he doubted that they could get through Jelt’s god-hide if fired from afar.
He shook his head.
We need to get close, then, Selphin signed.
The last person who had tried to attack the Jelt-god at close quarters had ended up in two pieces. If they wanted any chance of striking at the heart, they had to do it by stealth.
Hark stopped pedaling, and Selphin followed suit, looking at him curiously. He took a deep breath.
I think I can distract him, Hark signed, gripped by cold certainty. If Jelt sees me swimming away, he’ll follow me.
Hark wasn’t an expert on gods like Quest was, but Hark knew Jelt. The roaring god out there wasn’t Jelt, but it was built from him. It had been made using a monster that had once been a murderer that had once been a boy called Jelt. Perhaps it still had some of his memories and instincts.
I’ll hide over there, signed Hark, and pointed at a rocky outcrop with a cleft down the middle. In that crack.
“But that is very dangerous,” Quest protested.
“I don’t know what else to do!” said Hark.
You’re sure he’ll follow you? asked Selphin.
If he still thinks like Jelt, he’ll want to eat me, explained Hark. It’s . . . been that kind of friendship for a while.
You are not allowed to choose your friends anymore, signed Selphin, and Hark couldn’t quite suppress a smile.
“Here—take these!” Hark handed Selphin the wind-gun and his wrench. They didn’t look like a particularly impressive god-killing armory. His hands were shaking, and hers weren’t much better. “I . . . I’d better leave the sub here.”
With every passing moment, the new god would be knitting itself together more strongly. It would also be attacking the Leaguers. That was the problem with working out what made people tick; sometimes you were left understanding them and not wanting them to die.
Hark flipped open the hatch. There didn’t seem to be anything more to say.
He did think of something a minute later. I think I’ve gotten a lot better at choosing friends—that would have been the right thing to have said. But by the time he thought of it, he was already swimming as fast as he could for the rocky outcrop, hoping to make progress before an angry god noticed him.
Chapter 43
Hark was nearing the outcrop when he heard a thunderous cry, as if a tempest were calling his name.
Twenty feet away. The crack looked narrower now. Was it too narrow? Fifteen feet . . . ten feet . . . five . . .
Hark reached the crevice and wriggled in sideways. It was barely more than a foot wide, its bottom choked with rubble. The two rock faces were bruisingly uneven, and he scraped and scratched his face and arms as he squirmed farther and farther into the cleft.
The whole outcrop shivered and shifted. Dust and fine rubble flowed hazily down past him, filling his mouth with the taste of sand. Somewhere outside the crevice, something roared Hark’s name so loudly that the rock vibrated against his back.
A long, black cord lashed out along the cleft toward Hark, its tip glowing yellow-white. It came within a foot of him, making him flinch, then withdrew. He crouched a little to make himself a smaller target. Hark was in the middle of the cleft and probably as inaccessible as he could make himself.
Looking back the way he had come, Hark could see a great shape obscuring his view out. Something large was pressed against the crack, staring in at him.
“I can see you, Hark,” said the Jelt-god.
· · · · ·
Through the smudged glass dome of the Butterfly, Selphin saw the outcrop approach. It did so slowly, because she was doing most of the pedaling. The sub wasn’t so much gliding as bouncing along the seafloor.
The great, dark mass of the god was pressed against the edge of the crack. She hoped it was watching Hark and not digesting him. The god was all wrong, a malfunctioning mix of too many creatures. At the same time, a dark part of her mind knew that the god was exactly as it was meant to be. Its grotesque mosaic of gray flesh, glass, and metal was somehow inevitable.
It was also incomprehensible. Selphin didn’t know what she was looking at or whether it could look back at her.
“You’re the god-killer,” Selphin said aloud to Quest. “What are all those . . . bits?” She didn’t dare let go of the controls, even to sign one-handed. There were too many erupting pinnacles and playful boulders she might need to swerve around.
The old man signed answers to her in bits and pieces, whenever he saw her looking his way.
The red shell was impenetrable. The round hole on its back was an extra mouth. When the hairs around its edge sensed movement, the whole mouth would lunge out, drag in its prey, and bite. The only good news was that the god’s rear cluster of eyes had been split and damaged by the dead Leaguer’s axe. Quest suspected that these would heal soon, but for now the axe was still embedded in them.
“Can it still see us if we creep up behind?” Selphin wanted to know.
Probably less well now, suggested Quest.
“Where do you think the heart is?” asked Selphin.
When we are close, we can look for the shine of the heartbeat, signed Quest. Then we will know where it is.
The “we” was not lost on Selphin. She realized that the crazy old man was intending to come with her. Then again, why not? It was time to throw all stakes on the table.
The god had called to Hark by name, so it was still capable of speaking. There was still some of Jelt’s mind left.
“I really did mean to meet you at that cairn,” Hark called out.
“You mean all kinds of things,” the Jelt god rasped. “I don’t care how well you ‘mean,’ Hark. You stole the heart and left me to die!” The words ended in a roar.
Of course Hark could defend himself. But this would be his last conversation with Jelt, one way or the other. He wasn’t going to play the old games anymore.
“Yeah, I guess I did,” he admitted shakily. “I’m sorry things ended up this way.”
“You’re only sorry because you’re trapped in a crevice like a blob of clam meat!” the voice hissed ominously. The comparison made Hark sound worryingly edible.
“I can’t let you eat me, Jelt,” Hark said flatly.
“You’re supposed to be my friend!” Underneath the mind-shuddering rumble of the god-voice, something was reaching for the strings of Hark’s soul with the deftness of habit. “Do you know what this is like, Hark? I’m being stretched. I’m pulled so tight I think I’m going to snap. But it’ll be all right with two of us. We won’t have to stretch so far when there’s two.”
Hark had assumed that Jelt wanted to tear him into gobbets before eating him. Jelt’s actual plan seemed to involve swallowing Hark alive and letting the heart warp him into new shapes. This did not sound better.
“I don’t want to be twisted up and trapped in a god-body forever,” said Hark, loudly and firmly. “Why would I want that?”
“You owe me this!” thundered the shape. The rock faces shuddered again, dropping another fine cloud of dust and gravel around Hark.
“No!” Hark called back, even as grit stung his eyes. “I don’t! There are things you can’t owe anybody!”
Jelt had saved Hark’s life, but that didn’t mean Hark owed Jelt his life. Maybe you couldn’t ever owe somebo
dy your life, not really. You couldn’t let anyone else decide what you did with it. You had to live it yourself, as truly as you could.
“Don’t be an old coward!” persisted the Jelt-god. “I’m giving you the chance to be part of something big! You’re lucky I’m willing to let you join me!”
Hark was speechless for a moment, then snorted with uncontrollable laughter.
“I know!” he cackled helplessly. “It’s a promotion!”
“Don’t laugh at me!” snarled the god outside the cleft.
“Oh, why not?” Hark felt giddy with fear and sadness. “We used to laugh, didn’t we? For years your jokes have been like punches in the face! But you used to be funny. Life with you used to be . . . fun.”
“I grew up, Hark!” thundered the thing outside. “I found out life is war. Maybe I didn’t find everything so funny after that. You never want to know about that, though, do you, Hark? You run away when things get ugly. You dump friends when they’re no use to you anymore—when knowing them isn’t convenient, or fun.
“You know when I was drowning in that bathysphere? I was choking, knocked giddy, and trying to get out, but . . . I noticed this bubble. It was twinkling up away from me. Dancing. It was made of air—air that could keep me alive. But was it staying down there to help me? No, off it went, up to the sky, leaving me behind.
“You’re like that bubble, Hark. Shiny and full of nothing. Dancing on up and leaving me to drown.”
It wasn’t fair—nothing Jelt said was fair—but it made Hark’s heart ache. Was that really how Jelt had seen him all this time, as a maddening, bright thing that could keep him alive but that was always dancing farther away from him?
“I can’t save you, Jelt,” said Hark, his eyes stinging again. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. But it’s too late. You’re . . . you’re dead, Jelt. You died in the bathysphere. You drowned. I didn’t get there in time.” Hark had come too far to turn back. “When the winch broke and the chain ran out, I just . . . froze. I don’t know how long. I snapped out of it and dived down to save you, but when I got there . . . you were already dead.”
The whipcord came at Hark again, out of the dark. It wrapped around his chest, then dragged him off his feet. As it hauled him relentlessly back toward the god, Hark braced against the sides, scraping his hands and knees. His shoulder smacked into a large boulder. He wrapped his arms around it, twisting so as to wedge himself as best he could.
The cord yanked twice, trying to pull him loose. Hark could feel his skin stinging where the cord was tangled around him.
“You did this to me!” hissed the voice, becoming shapeless with rage. “This is all your fault!”
“I tried to save you!” shouted Hark, feeling raw and battered. “I thought I had! But your body was dead. The only thing keeping it moving was the heart. That’s why you got sick every time you went away from it. That’s why your Marks changed you so much. Now your mind’s dying, too, because you stuck yourself in a god. You’re talking to me at the moment . . . but it’s getting harder, isn’t it? Soon something will be swimming around, eating people—a big, dumb, hungry fish. But it won’t be you.
“So I can’t let you eat me, Jelt. Maybe I am a bubble, wanting to dance off and live my own life. But I don’t want you to vanish, either. You were my friend, my hero, my brother, and soon I’ll be the only person who really remembers you. Once I’m dead, you’re gone, too. Not even a memory left.
“I’m not your friend anymore, Jelt. I’m your storykeeper.”
“You don’t want to know the stories I could tell,” came the savage, guttural whisper.
“Yes,” said Hark. “I do.”
“Really?” rasped an inhuman throat, in a voice full of human scorn and pain. “You want to hear a story about what really happened that night on the Rattleguise mudflats? Do you want to know what I was being paid to do, while I was away from Lady’s Crave? What about that old scavenger from the shack on Nest? Do you want a nice story about what happened to him? No, you never wanted to hear! You don’t want to know anything that means you have to grow up!”
Hark rested his forehead against the rock wall. There was enough truth in those words to hurt.
“I want to know those stories,” he said. “Yes. Let’s start with those.”
The Butterfly’s bounces were stirring great billows of silt from the seafloor. Glancing over her shoulder, Selphin could see them drifting, obeying the pull of a slight current. She abruptly changed her course, aiming to the right of the outcrop, and then swung the sub into a few great zigzags.
When she stopped, panting for breath, Quest tapped her shoulder.
What are you doing? he signed.
We need all the cover we can get, answered Selphin, gesturing toward the great clouds of brown haze that were drifting to engulf the outcrop.
Selphin tied a cloth around her nose and mouth so she wouldn’t breathe the silt clouds. Quest donned one as well. Selphin slung the wind-gun over one shoulder.
All stakes. It helped that the coruscating waves above, the shivering plain, and the restless rock pillars didn’t seem real. It was a dreamscape. Selphin could tell herself that it wasn’t water they were drifting in, it was just . . . slow air. Then she wouldn’t have to think about the sheer, black, unimaginable weight of water above that flexing, purple divide, or the distance that separated her from real air.
Most of all, she wouldn’t have to think about what the Butterfly’s broken scream meant. The little sub was flooded, so there was no air to fill the ballast tanks and help the Butterfly rise. Loss of the scream meant they couldn’t use the little sub’s rippling wing power to get home, either. It meant never seeing Lady’s Crave again. Or Coram, or Sage, or Rigg.
She would fight to save them all, though, even if they never knew she had.
Hark listened to the stories he had hoped never to hear.
He heard about the first clumsy, stupid murder two years before, after a drunken argument late at night on Jelt’s little boat. The other man split his head open on Jelt’s wildly swung boat hook and went into the water. He didn’t come up. Jelt threw the man’s belongings overboard, too, then returned to harbor and walked all night to get his head clear.
Jelt thought he’d gotten away with it. He tried to forget the whole thing. It was just one time, and not his fault, and an accident mostly. But the memory was always there, something rotten at the bottom of the barrel, tainting all his other thoughts.
The man he’d killed had been seen getting on his boat, and the rumor had reached dangerous people. It was all right, they told him. They knew who the witnesses were, and would make that problem go away for him. And in exchange they’d tell him which of their problems he should make go away.
He wasn’t a killer for hire; it was just an exchange of favors. Sometimes when he was in trouble, he just had to go away for a bit and do a few favors for some people so they’d deal with his trouble. It was just the way the world was, Jelt explained. You couldn’t ever be prey. You had to be one of the hunters.
Hark listened and started to understand.
Jelt couldn’t bear the thought that he had done something horribly wrong that could never be fixed. Of course he hadn’t, he was Jelt. So what he had done was fine, better than fine, a sign of his strength, strong will, and fitness to survive. He had to believe that, even if it meant twisting his whole character out of shape and plunging into a deeper darkness. He was a hunter, a hunter, and he had to prove that to himself, over and over. Beneath every word, Hark sensed Jelt’s despair, loneliness, and savage loathing for everything.
Hark should have been horrified, but he had used up all his horror. Instead he felt intense sadness.
He barely noticed the silt clouds drifting overhead.
Selphin swam through the haze of silt, the wind-gun slung over her shoulder. Grit got in her eyes, and the cloth nuzzled her mouth every time she breathed in. To her surprise, she was grateful for Quest’s frail grip on her arm. Without the contact,
they would have lost track of each other quickly.
She hated not being able to see very far. It made her feel helpless and disorientated. Of course, this was the result of her own plan working well.
Another pulse slammed into her, with a flash of mauve darkness.
Close now, signed Quest, his gestures just visible in the haze.
Soon Selphin could make out details of the god’s vast, indistinct bulk ahead, the pale smudges of pulpy sacs and the round hollow of the mouth. It was hard to think this close to the god. Selphin felt like it was sucking away her thoughts, the way a passing whale drags smaller things into its wake. The writhing dark-light around it made her eyes and mind ache.
The next pulse nearly stunned her. For a few seconds afterward she couldn’t remember where she was or what she had seen. But there were bright smudges on her retina. She had seen the flicker at the start of the shimmering ripple.
It’s behind the mouth! she signed.
The two swam toward it cautiously. The mouth’s long funnel was lined with tapering teeth. The curved bristles around the outside flexed slightly like grass in a breeze.
Selphin had only one dart. She needed it to go deep. Pulling out a bent coin, she flicked it forward through the water.
It floated toward the conical hollow . . . and then suddenly the entire mouth gaped wider and lunged forward toward the coin. The throat at the back of the mouth opened to show a dark tunnel, and Selphin fired down it.
The throat closed again. There was a swirling disturbance in the water, and the great mass in front of her jerked and shivered. Hairs bristled, scales tightened against each other, tiny stingers emerged.
Another pulse pummeled through the water. She had not destroyed the heart. And now the god knew they were there.
Hark was startled when Jelt broke off mid-account, with a roar of rage.
“You little snake! This was all an act! You were just waiting for your friends to attack me!”
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