Deeplight

by FrancesHardinge

‘Hmm.’ Quest smiled wryly. ‘I hope your generation’s chapter of the great story has more hope and joy than ours.’ He sighed. ‘I had promised to tell you about the Hidden Lady, had I not? Do we have time now?’

  ‘They won’t look for me for a while,’ said Hark. ‘They know I’m changing the bandage on your leg.’ He tried not to fidget with impatience.

  ‘You go first, then,’ said Quest, picking up his spoon. ‘Tell your tale while I eat. I will tell mine afterwards as you attend to the bandage.’

  It always had to be a trade. A story for a story. Hark liked telling stories, but not the sort that revealed too much about himself or his own life. However, it turned out that these were exactly the kind of anecdotes Quest wanted to hear. Hark had the feeling that the old priest regarded him as a puzzle to be solved, and was gradually piecing him together.

  They had reached a wary bargain with each other, and now exchanged stories like hostages. Hark had secrets he needed to keep, and he suspected Quest had his own, as well. Sometimes it felt like a game in which you tried to find out as much as you could, while revealing enough, but not too much, about yourself.

  ‘What do you want to hear?’ asked Hark.

  Quest narrowed his eyes in thought.

  ‘My first encounter with the Hidden Lady was almost the end of me,’ he said. ‘Tell me of a time that you nearly died, and I will tell you how I met the Lady.’

  CHAPTER 5

  ‘I told you about the Shelter where I grew up, didn’t I?’ Hark began after a few moments’ thought.

  Quest nodded, and gave him a quick, sympathetic glance.

  ‘It’s all right,’ Hark said quickly, realizing that he didn’t want Quest to pity him. ‘I was about three when my parents died, and I don’t remember them. Not really. I think there was a gull that used to come in through the window. A big gull that scared me. And our rug was red, really red. Sometimes I remember that rug and feel sad. But my parents are just names. I tried mourning for them when I was younger, but I just . . . kept . . . thinking about something else.’

  He gave Quest a lopsided grin, and shrugged.

  ‘The Shelter wasn’t too bad. Somebody in the governor’s pay always came each evening to count us, check us for sores, and give us each a bowl of soup. Some of ’em even taught us a few things – rope-making, reed-weaving, sailor’s knots, and shell-cutting for jewellery. But you never knew who you’d get.’

  ‘The governor arranged that?’ Quest sounded amused. ‘He must have softened since I knew him. Or perhaps he thought you’d steal less that way.’

  ‘The Shelter isn’t all one happy family,’ Hark went on. ‘You get some vipers. Real vipers. But that just means that when you do make friends, you stick tight as barnacles. You look out for each other all your lives.

  ‘There was a girl I knew who left the Shelter and joined a beach-scavenger gang. One day someone saw her by the harbour with her face covered in bruises. Some traders from the western continent had cornered her on the cliff-path while she was bringing the gang’s goods to market, and had forced her to ‘sell’ everything for a quarter of its worth. So the gang thought she’d been ripping them off, and had knocked her about as a warning, because you can’t have that sort of thing going on.

  ‘Well, she’d always stuck by us. And it doesn’t do if folks start thinking Shelter kids make easy targets. So a friend of mine said we had to do something about it. We found out where the continenters were anchored, then three of us rowed out there by starlight.

  ‘From a distance we could see the traders’ big old boat, with all of them sitting around a yellow whale-oil lantern at the prow, getting drunk. We couldn’t risk rowing too close, though, in case they heard the oars.

  ‘So I swam over to their boat and climbed up on the stern, phantom-like. They didn’t hear a thing. Sitting on the deck was a box, just the right size to be our friend’s goods. I grabbed it, and took an old barrel lid to use as a raft. While those traders were laughing and drinking, I was swimming back to our boat, pushing the box on that lid ahead of me.

  ‘I thought I’d made it without being spotted. But then I heard yelling behind me. Next moment, something hit me in the back of the head.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘I still don’t know. One of the traders must have thrown something heavy. Whatever it was knocked me out cold.’

  ‘What happened?’

  ‘I sank.’ Hark swallowed. ‘That’s what my friends told me. I was just . . . gone. Nothing but black water, and that box bobbing around on the barrel lid. Then those drunk idiot traders knocked over their own lantern, so everything was dark.

  ‘My friend jumped into the water. He couldn’t see me. He didn’t know where I was. But he swam down, hard as he could, clawing through the water till he found me. He grabbed me by the collar and didn’t let go. He dragged me back up to the surface.’

  Hark could still remember waking to an agonizing pain in his head, doubled over the side of the little boat so that he could vomit. Jelt had sat next to him all the way back to Lady’s Crave, gripping him so he couldn’t fall overboard, the pair of them icy, drenched and shivering.

  ‘A brave friend,’ said Quest.

  ‘He was always like that,’ said Hark. It had turned into a story about Jelt, but that couldn’t be helped. All of Hark’s near-death experiences were stories about Jelt. ‘I told you. At the Shelter you make friends like nowhere else.’

  ‘Did your friends also manage to retrieve the box from the barrel lid?’ asked Quest after a moment.

  ‘Of course!’ Hark grinned. ‘The next morning, our friend had goods to return to her gang. All square.’

  ‘Were they the right goods?’

  ‘Close enough. The gang didn’t complain.’ Hark shrugged under Quest’s quizzical glance. ‘It’s not stealing if you’re just taking back what’s already stolen.’

  ‘I wonder if the traders would have seen it that way.’

  ‘They must have done.’ Hark smirked. ‘They didn’t report a theft.’

  Quest laughed under his breath.

  ‘Good enough?’ asked Hark.

  ‘Yes, I think so.’ Quest pushed away his platter and sighed. ‘Very well. I shall tell you of my first meeting with the Hidden Lady.

  ‘It happened shortly after I became a full priest. Back then, I was still not used to my brown robes, or being regarded with awe and fear. The oldest priests still saw me as an upstart, of course. I would never quite be one of them. I had only become an acolyte in adulthood, you see. I hadn’t been raised in a priestly family and prepared for the vocation since birth.

  ‘I should not have been sent down that day. Diplomacy with those below was not a task for a novice. However, most of our senior priests were away on the island of Chaosim for a great conference. Thus none of them were available when the trouble began.

  ‘Does the Entreaty Barrier still exist? Back in my day, there was a vast net of metal chains, trailing deep into the water, strung between a line of towers that jutted from the sea. It was supposed to protect Nest from any gods coming from the Undersea to the west—’

  ‘The net’s still there!’ interjected Hark. He had begun quietly peeling the old bandage from Quest’s leg and dabbing ointment on to the graze beneath.

  ‘It hasn’t fallen down or been cleared away?’

  ‘Nobody wants it gone.’ Hark shrugged. ‘The shellfish gather on those big chains like a dream. You can fill your bucket with barnacles on a calm day.’ He had done so himself from time to time.

  ‘The great net turned barnacle farm,’ murmured Quest. The corners of his mouth puckered, but his expression was hard to read. After a moment he continued his story.

  ‘One day, that great net started to shake, snake, and whipcrack, almost pulling loose from its tethers. Fishermen reported seeing sick, yellow clouds of something under the water, too lurid to be sand. On the west shores of Lady’s Crave, fish leaped out of the surf on to the beach and lay there, twitching, rotten stumps w
here their heads should have been.

  ‘A god was close, then. And they were unhappy. Or perhaps curious. Or grateful. Or feeling playful. It was hard to be sure. What was clear was that somebody needed to go down to the Undersea and talk to them before anything worse happened. I volunteered, so they took me out in a boat, on to the Embrace.

  ‘Back then, nobody but priests would have dared cross the Embrace. Those were sacred waters, terrible waters. On that day it was worse than I have ever seen it. The sun was pale as a poached egg, and the swirls in the surface were greedily deep. Our great, heavy ship was tugged and turned until we were all sick.

  ‘I stepped into the bathysphere and strapped myself in. It was tiny, so I had to tuck my knees to my chest. The hatch closed, and I could hear the metal screws screaming as they were wound tight. The rock crystal of the windows was inches thick and foggy with scratches. I heard the creak of the crane. The bathysphere jerked and swayed, then started to descend in sickening jolts. The sound of the sea grew louder and louder, until I hit the water with a splash. Suddenly all I could see through the windows was dim water, glistening with bubbles. To tell you the truth . . . at that moment I felt sure that I would never see the sky again.’

  Hark swallowed. His imagination was too vivid, and he could feel his stomach tightening at the thought of being trapped in a little metal ball, at the mercy of the waves.

  ‘I recited the prayers of descent to keep myself calm,’ continued Quest, ‘so I wouldn’t use up too much air. The water outside grew darker and darker. And then, through the lower windows, I could see the surface of the Undersea approaching.

  ‘It is like the surface of a second sea. A rippling sea of living ink, with dull purple lights in it. Thankfully, its surface was calm that day. It is not always so.

  ‘As I dipped down below it, I found the water was clear. I could see much further than before, in spite of the darkness. That is the nature of the Undersea, but it was the first time I had experienced it. There is a light that is not light. That is the only way I can describe it.

  ‘And what I saw before me was a world full of weeds – or so I thought at first. Weeds tall as trees, glowing green-amber, snaking around each other in an endless dance. They seemed to go down, down, ever down into the darkness.

  ‘They were not weeds. The rippling ribbons brushed against the bathysphere, flinched, and then responded. They clustered around the sphere, grasping it like an anemone entangling its prey.

  ‘I tried calling out the ritual greetings, as I had been taught, but there was no response. After a while I heard a straining creak, and knew that the boat above was trying to haul up the bathysphere, but in vain. The tentacles held the sphere down with a terrible strength.

  ‘If I waited to be rescued, I would run out of air. So I tried desperate measures. I had been told that Undersea water was different from seawater. It might creep into your pores and change your very nature . . . but it would not crush you, the way other deep water would. And you could breathe it.

  ‘So I cranked the hatch loose, and opened it.’

  Quest took a few slow breaths, as if his lungs needed reassurance that they were surrounded by normal air.

  ‘I struggled to keep my nerve, as the water found its way into my lungs. Undersea water may be breathable, but it is full of fear.’

  ‘Fear?’

  ‘Yes, quite literally. Why do you think the fumes from scare-lamps leave us feeling haunted? Fear is an essence, as real as oil or blood. The gods breathed it – had you never heard that?’

  Hark had often heard the saying, but had assumed it was just a poetic turn of phrase.

  ‘I am not a god,’ Quest continued, ‘so breathing fear was . . . a shock to the system. When at last I recovered my wits, I unstrapped myself and clambered out, letting the tendrils run themselves over me and examine me.

  ‘She let me climb down into the depths, using those long tentacle-weeds to pull myself to her, hand over hand. It was her hair, her more-than-hair, floating in a living forest about her. I found her at the heart of it, the Hidden Lady. Above the waist she was a woman, or something like a woman, her skin blue-white like a bird’s egg. Below the waist she had the body and spindled, ridged legs of an enormous spider crab, so long that I could not see their ends.

  ‘The Lady pulled me close, swaddled me up to the neck in her writhing hair, and whispered in my ear. She did not need me to say anything, not that day. She wanted someone to listen to her.’

  ‘What did she say?’ Hark asked, rapt.

  ‘Not all of it was in words,’ Quest replied. ‘She wanted to tell me of a battle fought in the deeps, one that she had started to forget.’ He smiled uneasily. ‘I suppose it is natural. We do not want our memories to disappear. So while we still have them, we drop them into the ears of the young – willing or unwilling. Perhaps we hope that will stop our lives fading without trace.’

  ‘Then maybe you should tell me her story too?’ suggested Hark hopefully.

  Quest blinked, and his eyes came back into focus. He looked approvingly at the new bandage on his leg.

  ‘If we start another story, we will be interrupted,’ he said. ‘Perhaps another time.’

  CHAPTER 6

  A little before sunset, Hark left Sanctuary. Most of the time he worked there under Kly, but for two evenings a week, he had to report to Dr Vyne and serve as her assistant.

  ‘Have fun rock-weighing!’ one of the other Sanctuary attendants called from the door. Hark waved back at him and made a wry face. When asked, he always tried to make his time with Dr Vyne sound as boring as possible.

  She has me glueing broken seashells back together. And weighing her rock collection . . .

  Seen from the outside, Sanctuary was still vast and ominous, but one could see that it was also old and wounded. The snaking, abstract carvings around its windows were dingy and green-stained. The great double doors of the main entrance were boarded shut.

  The road downhill to the harbour had been paved once, but now grass and grey thistles pushed their way up between the stones. Hark’s steps were the only sounds except for the dry rasp of crickets. On either side, the earth humps of squirrel burrows jutted between the shaggy shrubs.

  Nest’s harbour was little more than a bare bay, curving like an empty melon rind. It had one long wooden quay for moorings, a bellows house, and a weathered-looking warehouse.

  On a rocky outcrop above the harbour, however, squatted a large, square fortress of black and grey stone, its parapets weather-darkened. Its windows were old-fashioned arrow-slits. A few tarnished cannons peeped out between the crenellations.

  Hark clattered the knocker at the door and heard echoing steps within. A key chain rattled, the lock clicked throatily, and the heavy door opened. Dr Vyne stared at him, holding a tuning fork in one hand. Her leather apron was stained with ichor and varnish.

  ‘You’re early,’ she said, but then frowned out through the door, clearly surprised to see that the sun was setting. She hated anyone else to be late, but sometimes lost track of time herself while working. ‘Never mind, come in.’ She took pains to lock and bolt the door again once he was inside.

  The building had once been a keep. It keeps things in and people out, Dr Vyne often said. Before the Cataclysm, it had been a base for armed troops protecting the priests. Now, however, it was a museum. Hark followed the doctor into the main hall, a long, colonnaded room, dimly illuminated by the light from the slitted windows. He stopped to stare, as he always did.

  Seven gods stared back.

  Their eyes were empty holes, filled with darkness and dust. Each great head was the size of a carriage, and rested unsupported on the red mosaic floor. Some had two eyeholes, some had three, others a scattering of sockets that punctured ridged cheeks and bulging brows. Long jaws, short jaws, mandibles, bladed sphincter-mouths. One was a filigree tangle of chitinous plates and tube-casings that still managed to look like a face.

  They were hollow, of course. Nothing but carapace
s, huge shell-masks. Nonetheless, their majesty caught him off guard every time. Hark felt a butterfly flutter in his knees and stomach, but tried to hide it.

  ‘That one’s new!’ he exclaimed quickly, pointing at the nearest hulking head. It had a flattened face like that of a crab, but with a wicked-looking grille where its mouth should be, filled with blade-thin vertical slats.

  ‘Do you want to have a look?’ asked Dr Vyne, sounding almost gentle. She was always strangely tolerant whenever he showed signs of sharing her curiosity. ‘The shell’s coated in thick resin so you can touch it safely. Stay away from those blades, though. They’re razor-sharp.’

  The shell was a dull, greenish off-white, like pus or tarnished silver. As Hark ran his fingertips over the resin’s smooth surface, he could see beneath it scratches and gouge-marks, and imagined salvage merchants scraping away every shred of saleable god-flesh, then boiling the great shells for glue, until there was no ichor left in them.

  Hark put his hand into one of the smaller eyeholes, and ran his fingers round the rough inside of the socket. The touch made him feel queasy, like a clifftop drop, and he could feel this moment squirming and burrowing into his imagination, ready to appear in a later nightmare. But that just made it all the more impossible not to do it.

  ‘Who is it?’ he asked.

  ‘Kalmaddoth of the Pit,’ the doctor answered in a brisker tone. ‘Otherwise known as the Grey Gentleman. I suspect it ate by drawing water in through its mouth with incredible suction. Any creatures drawn in would have been shredded by those blades. I’m still trying to understand how it digested them . . .’ She sighed, and clapped Hark on the back. ‘Come on now, work to do. Let’s go up to my study.’

  Vyne led him down the hall, past tapestries, display cases and big, cloudy tanks full of things covered in glutinous frills. Hark followed, but as he passed one tank, he discreetly ran a finger along its glass. He always did this, as a form of silent greeting.

  Hello, Lady. Within the lemon-yellow fluid floated a shapeless grey lump of matter, two feet wide. A deep, black crease weaved across its surface like a sigil. It was apparently a part of the Hidden Lady. He didn’t know which part, and it seemed rude to wonder too hard.