Deeplight

by FrancesHardinge

  ‘I’ll look for you here the day after tomorrow,’ said Jelt, pushing on when Hark tried to protest. ‘You need to get that morning free. I’ll have picked a crane by then, one that we can use. You can at least come and look at the machinery for me, can’t you? Check it over and make sure it’s got all the wheels and reels.’

  ‘You don’t need me for that,’ said Hark, but he knew that he was losing ground. ‘I’ve told you everything I know!’

  ‘But you’ve got a better head than me for things like this.’ Jelt rarely admitted to an inferior understanding of anything. Whenever he did, it was to give himself an advantage in an argument. ‘I’m not asking much, am I? A couple of hours. Just row out there, have a look.’

  ‘And if I tell you it’s a death trap, you won’t go down?’ As soon as the words were out, Hark could have kicked himself. They would be taken as agreement.

  ‘You’re the expert.’ Jelt grinned. ‘See you next time.’

  ‘I can’t make promises—’ Hark said quickly, but it was too late.

  ‘You need to do this for me.’ Jelt’s smile faded, as if Hark had already made and broken a promise. ‘For yourself too. I’m keeping you wild, Hark. You should be thanking me.’

  CHAPTER 9

  There are two golden rules, Dr Vyne had told Hark the day she bought him. You can lie to anybody else, as long as you never, ever lie to me. And you must stay away from your old contacts. If one of them turns up in your life, tell me straight away.

  Hark knocked on the door of the keep, his arm feeling heavy as lead. For three months, he had managed not to break Vyne’s rules. When Jelt was around, everything broke sooner or later.

  ‘Ah, there you are!’ Dr Vyne opened the door looking excited but harassed. ‘Come in! We have a lot to do this evening.’ She did not appear to notice anything odd in his manner.

  The chaos in her study was even more dramatic than usual. The stacks of papers she kept on her second-best chair had been dumped on the floor, and table space had been hastily cleared for a great wooden crate.

  ‘Where did that come from?’ asked Hark.

  ‘Our friend from the League just dropped it off,’ said Dr Vyne.

  ‘Captain Grim-Breeches?’ asked Hark.

  ‘The very same.’

  The so-called Vigilance League was a sprawling movement with members on dozens of islands, which claimed to be defending the Myriad from outside attack. It wasn’t an official armed force, or an official anything for that matter, but liked to act as though it were. On Lady’s Crave, Hark had seen Leaguers ranting on street corners in their blue hats and sashes, and they had always seemed like a bit of a joke.

  The League had built a little outpost on the very northern tip of Nest. Although Vyne technically worked for the governor, she had long since reached an arrangement with the local Leaguers as well.

  ‘They’re tedious fanatics.’ She sighed. ‘But they keep giving me money and godware, which is an immensely redeeming quality.’ The doctor moved aside the lid of the crate, to reveal hundreds of small, smooth, translucent nuggets.

  ‘Are those all god-glass?’ Hark gasped, forgetting his own worries. Good-quality god-glass was harder than diamond and extremely valuable.

  ‘All of them? No.’ Dr Vyne snorted. ‘The League seem to have bought everything on the black market that people claimed was god-glass. I’ll warrant nine-tenths of it is just glass. They want the good sorted from the dross by tomorrow morning.’

  ‘That’s what you get for being a genius,’ Hark said deftly. Dr Vyne had made her name as the foremost expert in god-glass, and was understandably proud of it. She had designed the famous crystal bells of Hullbrake, and had invented a mirror that clouded before a storm. Even the round skylight above her study was glazed with exquisitely moulded god-glass.

  Dr Vyne laughed.

  ‘No, this is what you get for being an indentured servant.’ She threw him a pair of gloves. ‘Do you have your tuning fork? Good! Start sorting.’

  Hark donned the gloves, sat down beside the crate, and began numbly picking the nuggets out of the box one at a time.

  ‘Why do they need so much god-glass?’ he muttered.

  ‘Oh, they’re probably making another experimental submarine to “defend all our liberties”,’ Vyne answered vaguely. God-glass was perfect for windows in submersibles. ‘They should ask me to design it for them, but they’re so painfully secretive.’

  God-glass softened when the right musical note was struck, ordinary glass did not. Hark chimed his tuning fork over and over, squeezing each glassy blob in turn, and sorting them into two piles.

  ‘Dr Vyne,’ he said suddenly.

  ‘Mmm? What is it?’ Vyne looked up from her book.

  Someone turned up from my past. I told him to leave me alone, but I don’t think he will.

  If Hark wanted to tell her, it had to be now. Telling the truth was dangerous, though. You could never un-tell it, any more than you could un-break an egg. It was better to let things be. If Hark could persuade Jelt to leave, Vyne would never need to know anything.

  ‘I . . . was wondering how you discovered how to do this!’ He held up the tuning fork and a lump of god-glass. It seemed the easiest way to change the subject. Everyone liked talking about their greatest triumph.

  ‘Were you now?’ Dr Vyne regarded him with her usual feline scepticism. It did not stop her answering the question, though.

  ‘You like stories, don’t you?’ she said. ‘Everyone says that the gods used to breathe fear, but I think you breathe stories. Unless you’re telling them, or hearing them, you wither up and die. So I’ll tell you a story. You’ve heard of the Glass Cardinal, of course?’

  Hark nodded. He knew the tales, and had seen paintings of the great god, like a jellyfish of monstrous size, with barbed hooks at the end of its translucent tentacles.

  ‘They say his dome rippled like silk, shot with a thousand colours,’ continued Vyne. ‘They say he had a scream so beautiful, it broke people’s minds. Though that doesn’t make much sense, if you think about it. Who was un-broken enough to report it?

  ‘A whaler ship once fired a harpoon at a whale on a foggy day, missed, and accidentally hit the Cardinal’s dome instead. He surfaced, and those on the ship saw a great ragged tear left by the metal barb. They fled, and the Cardinal pursued, screaming. When they looked back, they saw that the gash had healed completely.’

  ‘Did they get away?’ asked Hark, already knowing the answer. Most of the stories about the Cardinal seemed to involve the slaughter of entire ship crews.

  ‘Of course not. A great hook ripped the belly out of the boat. As it sank, tentacles writhed up out of the water. One fellow stupidly tried to stab one using a whale-killing lance, but it bounced off with a chiming sound. The tentacles stung everyone to death except the fellow in the crow’s nest. He was able to swim to shore after the Glass Cardinal left. What lesson do you take from that story, Hark?’

  ‘Don’t shoot harpoons at gods?’ Hark hazarded.

  Vyne shook her head slowly. Hark sensed that she did not mind him getting the answer wrong. It allowed her to make a particular point.

  ‘That,’ she said, ‘is the problem with everybody. People listen to these stories, but all they hear is a legend of the terror of the gods. They’re still thinking of these creatures as beings we can’t ever understand and could only ever hope to survive. What does that story tell us about the Cardinal? It tells us that he could soften or harden his flesh at will. How did he do that? For a long time I had no idea. Then I listened to the stories again, and noticed how many of the translucent gods screamed like the Cardinal, or sang like the Gathergeist. They used sound – vibrations – to change their own bodies.’

  It crossed Hark’s mind that people could be softened the same way. You said the right thing, and struck the right chord, and then they were easier to manipulate. Bringing up Vyne’s great success seemed to have sounded the right note.

  ‘That is the trick of it
,’ remarked Vyne. ‘Listening to someone’s story, and hearing what lies behind it. People always tell you more than they realize.’

  Hark looked up and found the doctor watching him again, in her unnervingly acute way. No, she was not softened at all. Her gaze was hard and bright.

  ‘For example,’ she continued, ‘when I listened to your story at the Appraisal, what I heard you say was: “I am a liar. I believe I am cleverer than everyone else in the room. But I am not quite as clever as I think.” This evening, you seem very keen to flatter silly old Dr Vyne and put her in a good mood. Is there something you want, Hark?’

  Hark had blindly wandered back into another cat-and-mouse game. There was nowhere to retreat.

  ‘Can I have the morning off tomorrow?’ he blurted out.

  ‘Must it be tomorrow?’ asked Vyne.

  ‘It . . . looks like it will be fair weather,’ Hark said quickly, ‘and I was hoping to go swimming. Kly says I need your permission—’

  ‘Who are you meeting?’ interrupted the doctor.

  Hark gaped at her, thrown entirely off balance. She knew. She had known all along. Now she had left an open trap before him so that he could damn himself with a word.

  ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake!’ Vyne’s steely look collapsed, and she erupted into unexpected laughter. ‘Are you being gentlemanly about this?’

  ‘I . . . I don’t . . .’ Hark now had no idea what she was talking about, or why she found it so funny.

  ‘Hark, if you want to hide the existence of your girlfriend, tell her not to follow you along the road.’ The doctor smirked. ‘I could see her from my window, watching you walk down to the harbour. It was very romantic.’

  These words gave Hark a shaky grasp on the situation. Dr Vyne had seen someone on the hillside behind Hark, and had jumped to conclusions. Had it been a visiting scavenger, a lost Leaguer or a trick of the light? Hark didn’t care. All that mattered was that his unpredictable owner was amused rather than angry.

  ‘I don’t know whether to be scandalized or impressed,’ said Vyne. ‘How did you manage to conjure a girlfriend on Nest of all places? Did you make yourself one out of seaweed and . . . squirrels?’ She narrowed her eyes. ‘This girl’s not one of your friends from Lady’s Crave, is she?’

  ‘It’s not like that!’ Hark protested, then allowed himself a morose shrug. ‘I . . . probably won’t see her after tomorrow, anyway.’ As far as he knew, both of these statements were true.

  ‘Star-crossed, are you? Alas.’ The doctor still seemed entertained rather than sympathetic. ‘All right, if you sort everything in that box tonight, I’ll give my permission. Be thorough, though, and don’t even think of stealing any god-glass.’

  Sorting the jumbled glass took hours, and before long, Hark’s hands were aching and tingling despite the protective gloves. Vyne was busy with her books, but occasionally she glanced at him and snickered again.

  Spying for Vyne had been fun sometimes. Hark liked reporting to her, and showing a clever person how clever he could be. He liked the way they shared barbed jokes about the people they knew, mocking the world like two crows on a gibbet.

  Now he had broken both her golden rules. There was an invisible crack in the ground between them, gaping further every second to become a perilous ravine.

  CHAPTER 10

  On Hark’s ‘morning off’, a searing white sun fought the film of white cloud. The wind was restless, and from the clifftop, Hark could see a fine frill of brilliant crests lining each wave on the dark silver sea.

  When he reached the cairn, Jelt was waiting.

  ‘You look sick,’ was his greeting. ‘Tell me you got the morning off!’

  ‘Three hours, that’s all.’

  Jelt grinned and ruffled Hark’s hair.

  ‘Knew you’d do it,’ he said. Hark’s heart leaped a little, even though he wasn’t sure if Jelt was congratulating Hark on his cleverness, or himself on being right.

  ‘It wasn’t easy,’ said Hark sharply, ‘and I can’t do it again.’ Even as he said the words, Hark knew that he would be asked to do it again. And again. And again. He had said that he couldn’t get the time free, and he’d been wrong, hadn’t he? Jelt would point that out. Not for the first time, Hark had made the mistake of achieving the impossible on demand.

  ‘We need to hurry,’ said Jelt. ‘The wind will be stronger later. We want to get out there and back before it does.’

  ‘You found a crane where we won’t be spotted?’ asked Hark. ‘You’re sure there won’t be anybody else there?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Jelt. ‘I wouldn’t have left the bathysphere there if I wasn’t sure. Come on – I’ll take you to the boat.’

  Jelt led him down to a little wedge-shaped inlet. On the narrow pebble beach rested Jelt’s old skiff, a lean, red streak of wickedness.

  They shoved the skiff out into the shallows, splashing barefoot, and scrambled aboard as the wave caught her. In spite of everything, Hark could not help feeling a little pang of joy at the icy, fizzing touch of the water, the suck of sand under his feet. He had missed this, the harsh glisten of the barnacle-covered rocks, and trusting himself to the dizzying tip and swell of the sea.

  Both of them grabbed paddles at once, matching their strokes with the ease of long practice, to fight against the shoreward push of the breaking waves. It was second nature, so easy and right. Hark’s muscles knew the motion well. He knew the worn dip in the seat where he always sat, and the best places to brace his feet without getting splinters. He blinked in the sun and salt-laden wind, and he realized that he was smiling.

  A little way out from the cove, Jelt gestured to Hark to stop paddling and let the current carry them for a while. The waves were not rough yet, but they continued to wear their ominous frill of white.

  ‘The Lady is lace-making,’ Hark said aloud, then gave a short, startled laugh under his breath. It was an old Lady’s Crave saying for those times when the waves were crested with foam. Sometimes old people still said it, reflexively echoing what they had heard as children, then halted in confusion when they remembered that there was no Hidden Lady any more.

  The phrase had been little more than a pattern of words to him, an old-person saying, like ‘tight as a merchant’s purse-knot’ or ‘the sly bird borrows the wind’. Now he imagined blue-white fingers wielding pins, or teasing out long loops of floating, snow-white thread . . .

  ‘Are you reciting nursery rhymes now?’ asked Jelt, looking over his shoulder.

  ‘Do you think people ever believed it when they said that?’ asked Hark on impulse. ‘I know they believed in her . . . but the lace-making?’ His mind flitted to other islands’ orphaned sayings. ‘What about “Gathergeist’s Washboard”? It’s just a scummy old sand flat, with oystercatchers paddling about on it. Did the Siren folks really think Gathergeist crept up on to it at night, with its laundry—’

  ‘Why do you care?’ asked Jelt, in a tone that suggested that he didn’t, and that Hark shouldn’t either. This was a cue for Hark to stop talking. Yet there was a contrary part of him that always wanted to share his thoughts with Jelt.

  ‘I don’t think they did believe it. Gods making lace? Washing socks?’ Hark narrowed his eyes. ‘I think . . . it was like a game of make-believe. They could pretend for a moment that the gods were just big, scary neighbours, with their own chores. Something they could understand. Something that might understand them.’

  Of course the gods hadn’t been doing anything homely or domestic. But then, what had they been doing, all those centuries in the lightless cold of the Undersea? How had they passed their days? Had they even noticed the days at all, or had they lived in an eternal night? Had they thought, planned, dreamed or talked? Or had they lived like sharks, swift and sinuous nightmares swimming in eternal search for food? It was a dark, cold thought, and as Hark stared down into it, he could see no bottom.

  An icy scoop of water splashed him in the face, shocking him out of his thoughts. Jelt watched Hark with a grin, the p
addle used for the splash still in his hands.

  ‘Back to reality, are you?’ he asked. ‘I saw you drifting away.’ He shook his head. ‘I knew I’d been gone too long. Whenever I leave you to yourself, you get like this. All these weird ideas push up in your head like weeds. Takes ages to pull ’em up so that you start making sense again.’

  For some reason, his words chilled Hark more than the shock of the water. The day no longer seemed so bright.

  They’re not weeds, Jelt. They’re thoughts. And they’re mine.

  Was it always this way? Did Hark start to get ideas of his own when Jelt was away? Ideas that Jelt took pains to kill as soon as he got back?

  As they took up their paddles again, Hark tried to smother an uneasy nagging resentment of Jelt. You’re not allowed to go places he can’t go, said a small voice in his head. You’re not allowed to have things he can’t have. You’re not even allowed to think things he can’t think.

  Ahead, Hark could see the long line of the Entreaty Barrier’s towers of brick and metal jutting out of the water. From this angle you could see how irregularly they were spaced, and how unequal their heights were, some raised up on little islands, some emerging from the water itself. There would be others that were now completely underwater, waiting to rake the bellies out of passing boats or submarines. Between them ran a faint ribbon of white foam, where the waves broke on the great, submerged chain from which the net was suspended.

  On the far side of the net was the Embrace.

  To the untrained eye, it simply looked like open sea. A Myridden like Hark, however, could recognize the danger signs – the dark, dull colour of the water, and the strange, coiling wisps of high cloud that spiralled instead of obeying the wind. In the distance, a glittering shoal of flying fish cleared the surface for a quick skim. They might be avoiding a predator, but they were more likely escaping some treacherous whim of the sea itself. These waters were not merely deep. The Undersea was unusually high here, and so the ordinary sea above it could not be trusted.