Deeplight

  ‘Don’t bother with the runt!’ the female voice shouted again. ‘We’ve got our thief!’

  Hark dared a glance behind him. Sure enough, the man behind him had given up the chase, and was slithering back down the rocky slope instead.

  Hark’s night sight was returning now. He could see the blaze of the stars overhead, and the foam of the waves raking the beach, like a chain of white smiles. Down on the shore, he could see three dark figures pinning down a single person, who struggled and swore in a very familiar voice.

  They’ve got him. They’ve got Jelt.

  ‘Get that knife away from him!’ shouted the woman. Her voice was familiar too, Hark realized. A moment later she strode into view, and the lanternlight from the shack showed him her boxer’s build and the freckles that covered her face and shaven head. It was Dotta Rigg, the smuggler from Lady’s Crave.

  ‘Now, you little plague-sore!’ bellowed Rigg, aiming a kick at Jelt’s sprawled shape. ‘Where the abyss is my bathysphere?’

  Oh, Jelt. What have you done?

  ‘Rigg!’ yelled a panicky voice from near the shack. ‘Coram’s bleeding everywhere! That scum-leech must have slashed his belly open! I can’t stop the blood!’

  The smuggler leader looked up towards the shack, her face blank with surprise. It looked naked without her usual scowl. She hurried towards the source of the yell, and Hark could see her kneeling beside a prone shape.

  ‘Take this – press it against the wound!’ she growled, then turned her head to yell at Jelt again. ‘You little slug! If my boy dies, I’ll flay you! I’ll cut your eyes out! Do you hear me? You’ll be fishbait!’ Beneath the guttural rage was a hint of panic.

  They’ve all forgotten me, Hark realized. Nobody cares about me. I could climb this cliff now and go back to Sanctuary. I could leave them all to stew in their own juice.

  Hark clenched his eyes tightly shut and recited several of his favourite swear words. Then he took a deep breath.

  ‘Rigg!’ he yelled down to the beach. ‘We can stop your man dying!’

  ‘What?’ The smuggler stared up towards his voice, blinking in the lanternlight. ‘Is that the runt?’

  ‘I’m coming down!’ called Hark. ‘Just . . . don’t cut my head off!’ He scrambled and slithered back down the slope. ‘You need to get him into the hut so he’s near the light! Then me and Jelt can heal him—’

  ‘Shut up, Hark!’ yelled Jelt from under the pile of attackers.

  ‘What the scourge are you talking about?’ snarled Rigg.

  ‘I’m telling the truth!’ Hark came forward, hands raised to show they were empty. ‘I’ll explain later, but . . . but we have to do this now! Before he dies!’ Hark imagined lifeblood gushing out of severed veins with each passing second.

  Rigg scowled at the darkening cloth she was clamping to the wounded man’s side, then swore.

  ‘All right!’ she snapped. ‘Boys, help me carry Coram into the hut!’

  The wounded man was helped into the hut. Hark let himself be grabbed and manhandled in after him. A few moments later Jelt was dragged in, with his hands tied behind his back, and dropped on to the boards with a thud.

  Coram was youngish and unshaven, with a scrawling of grey scars over his forearms. Even in the muted purple light of the lantern, Hark could see that the whole of the man’s belly was dark and glossy with blood. His gaze mirrored Hark’s own panic. A familiar mottling of freckles covered Coram’s ashen face. My boy, Rigg had called him.

  Oh, billows’ shriek! thought Hark, horrified. Jelt’s gutted one of Rigg’s sons.

  ‘Go on then!’ thundered Rigg. ‘Help him!’

  Hark passed her the clean bandages that he had brought for Jelt, then rested his trembling hands on Coram’s shoulders. Beneath the boards on which he knelt, the strange god-ball was waiting unseen in its little hammock of net.

  Pulse, he begged it in his head. Please pulse! If you play dead now, we’ll be playing dead forever!

  ‘What are you doing?’ demanded Rigg. ‘What’s this play-acting?’

  ‘We need to concentrate!’ insisted Hark. ‘This . . . this isn’t easy!’ He couldn’t tell her about the healing relic. If he did, she would no longer have any reason to keep Hark and Jelt alive.

  Other smugglers were crowding into the doorway, brows furrowed, blinking in the light. He recognized the girl from the Appraisal among them, her large, dark eyes fixed on Coram, as if she thought she could heal him by concentrating.

  The injured man’s breathing was shallow, his face pallid and shiny like wet sand. Hark was afraid that at any moment his breath would hiccup and halt, his eyes fix, and the tide of his life go out, never to return. For a long minute, Hark continued his masquerade of concentration, hearing the floorboards creak as the smugglers fidgeted and grew impatient.

  Then the pulse came, sending its invisible shock through the air. Hark felt it shudder in his core. Coram twitched and gasped, his eyes opening wide for a moment. The other smugglers flinched and reached for weapons.

  ‘What the purple deep was that?’ demanded Rigg.

  ‘It came from us!’ squeaked Hark, his throat tight with relief. ‘That . . . was a flood of healing. We had an accident, and . . . now we’re not the same as we used to be.’ Hark had been forging a story in his head. Now he just needed to sell it.

  ‘What kind of accident causes that?’ asked Rigg.

  ‘We tried to use your bathysphere—’ began Hark.

  ‘Hark, shut up! Right now!’ growled Jelt.

  ‘She knows we had it, Jelt!’ Hark interrupted. ‘She’s not stupid!’ He exhaled bitterly. ‘We borrowed an old winch-boat and took the sphere out over the Embrace. We had some smart idea about using it to spot wrecks, and selling the information to salvage crews.

  ‘Jelt went down in the sphere. I watched the chain lower it . . . but then something happened. The weight on the end got heavier all of the sudden, and I couldn’t haul it back up, and I realized it must have filled with water.’

  This was a plausible bundle of half-truths. Now for the big lie.

  ‘I dived down to pull Jelt out—’

  ‘I was already pulling myself out,’ growled Jelt.

  ‘Yes – I know you were.’ Hark felt a throb of relief and gratitude for Jelt’s interjection. His belligerent tone gave the tale a convincing roughness. ‘But then there was this . . . wave. We saw it coming out of the murk, a great, black, glossy wave of Undersea, rearing up into the normal sea like a tidal wave. It must have been twice as high as the cliffs here – higher maybe. And it came at us, fast as a clipper in full sail.’

  ‘I never heard of an Undersea wave that near the surface,’ said Rigg, sounding surly and unconvinced.

  ‘Undersea eats rules like shark eats fish,’ recited Jelt grimly. It was the old saying. The gods and the Undersea were bound by no rules. All you could do was hope to survive them.

  In truth, Hark doubted that anybody had heard of such an occurrence. The surface of the Undersea rose and fell in strange and unpredictable ways, and there were tales of great waves, but not of any mountainous enough to hit someone who had swum down from the surface.

  ‘I never saw anything like it either,’ he went on quickly, ‘and I hope I never do again. Huge. Slick like oil. All the fish were fleeing it, fast as darts, rushing past us on either side! But there was nothing we could do to escape. It caught us.’

  Hark tried to remember Quest’s descriptions of the Undersea. Weird details made a story seem more real.

  ‘It hit us, and we plunged into it. It was . . . dark inside, a purplish darkness, but light at the same time. It made my eyes hurt. And it was cold in a way that made your soul shiver. There was other stuff whirling about in that wave – loose weed, bits of timber, crab shells – all tumbling and spinning in the darkness.

  ‘Then it passed on, and we were back in good, salt water. Just drowning in the normal way, instead of whirling forever inside that wave. So we swam back up. But we weren’t the same an
y more. We were . . . Marked.’

  ‘Marked?’ Rigg stared at him, her eyebrows rising in superstitious unease. ‘So quickly?’

  ‘I don’t understand it either!’ Hark looked wide-eyed. ‘It feels like there’s a tide in our blood now. If we concentrate on it, we can change how it flows. And if we get the flow just right . . . we can heal people.’

  As if on cue, another pulse shivered the air of the hut. Two minutes later, the hidden relic pulsed again. Hark had no way of knowing if it was really helping, but at least Coram was still breathing, his eyes turning glossily to stare this way and that.

  Ten pulses later, the smuggler staunching the wound cleared his throat uncertainly.

  ‘The bleeding’s stopped.’

  ‘You’re sure?’ asked Rigg suspiciously.

  ‘Yeah. Whatever they did, it closed the wound.’

  There was a long silence. Coram’s expression of alarm dimmed into a look of exhaustion and pain. The other smugglers all looked at Rigg.

  ‘You two,’ she said, ‘are the luckiest little weevils that ever lived. You should be rolling around the deep, feeding fish, and instead look at you . . .’ She tailed off, shook her head, and then frowned. ‘So, where is my bathysphere, then?’

  ‘Ah. It . . . got swept away by that great wave.’ Hark swallowed, feeling the atmosphere become arctic again.

  ‘We can pay you back for it,’ Jelt said suddenly. ‘I’ve got a business proposition. Sit me up, will you? It’s hard to talk with a mouthful of someone’s knee.’

  Rigg gave a nod, and Jelt was heaved up into a sitting position. He was looking more like his confident, brash self now.

  ‘Better,’ he said. ‘I was thinking . . . people will pay for healing, won’t they? Wounds sealed up tight, no stitches, no questions asked. Hark and me, we could use a partner. Someone to bring us customers. You’d get your share of the fees. And we’d heal your people for free.’

  Rigg frowned, and nodded to herself very slightly. Hark couldn’t tell if she was agreeing or just taking in his words. However, she wasn’t decapitating anyone, which he took as a good sign.

  ‘We could just keep ’em both in a cave,’ suggested a smuggler.

  ‘We can’t keep the runt,’ answered Rigg. ‘He’s indentured to Sanctuary, remember? If he goes missing, there will be a search. The governor might even start poking around. No, the little whelp needs to go home before he’s missed.’

  For a moment, Hark was surprised that Rigg knew he was indentured to Sanctuary. Then he remembered the presence of the freckled girl during his Appraisal. She would have been able to tell the gang who had bought him. An uncomfortable suspicion started to form in his mind. Perhaps the gang had been keeping an eye on Hark in the hope that he would lead them to Jelt. Perhaps tonight he had done exactly that.

  ‘All right, bright boy.’ Rigg stared down at Jelt. ‘Come with us so we can talk about this proposition of yours. As for you –’ she turned to Hark – ‘you can run home for now, but don’t get any funny ideas. You’re fond of your friend, right? You’d probably like him to keep his face. So you’ll keep your mouth shut, and you’ll come back here when we tell you.’

  ‘Yes, ma’am,’ Hark said quickly, trying to ignore the numb ache in his mind. His past was spilling into his future, his hopes and dreams quietly dying.

  After the Sanctuary boy had gone, Rigg’s gang argued late into the night. The freckled girl was the most forceful opponent to her mother’s new plan, but others objected too. Most of the crew had been looking forward to going home to Lady’s Crave, and didn’t like the idea of a temporary base near Nest.

  Why were they going into business with somebody who had betrayed them? And why did they need a base, anyway? It would make them easier to find!

  When tiny, glutinous tendrils were found embedded in Coram’s long, sealed wound, protests became more determined, and the freckled girl thought she had carried her point. Then someone noticed that Coram’s clipped ears had also been healed. The crew’s mutters became approving and speculative. Some in the gang already had two notches cut out of their ears by the governor’s men, and a couple were triple-clipped and in continual danger of the gallows. Healing these notches could remove the threat hanging over them.

  I don’t like this healing! Rigg’s daughter argued, over and over. There’s something wrong with it!

  ‘It just came with Marks, Selphin,’ said Coram, reaching up weakly to ruffle his half-sister’s hair. ‘Anyway, I like my scar. It’s . . . special. Those two boys, with their healing – they’re special too. The way they were Marked, that great Undersea wave . . . I think it’s a sign. A blessing.’ Something about his entranced, lethargic smile made her blood run cold.

  Since Selphin’s birth, her half-brother had been there, bear-like, protective, and big enough to pick her up. When she let him hug her, it felt like being sheltered by a mountain.

  He was six years older than her, but sometimes she was very aware that she was cleverer than him.

  CHAPTER 15

  ‘What is eating at you?’ Quest asked the next morning. The question caught Hark by surprise.

  ‘I slept badly last night.’ This was true enough. After sneaking back into Sanctuary, Hark had only managed three hours’ sleep. He had compensated by being relentlessly chipper. This had apparently fooled everyone but Quest.

  ‘You have not been yourself for several days,’ the old priest said quietly, as Hark emptied the top-up bucket of hot water into his bath.

  The old ritual baths were rocky, rough-hewn pools, all in the same high-vaulted hall. Once, these had been used by the priests to cleanse themselves after a descent into the Undersea, so as to avoid Marks. Now most of them, including the one in which Quest sat, were used for medicinal purposes.

  One solitary pool at the far end held darker water, which slipped and slopped in an oily fashion. This was an Undersea water bath, for those priests who now wanted to keep their Marks, not cleanse them away. They lost their gods, Kly had explained, so the Marks are all they’ve got left.

  Quest had been suffering pains in his chest, so he was reclining in a one-person pool of warm, chalky, fresh water that looked a bit like frothed milk. His head and angular neck jutted out of the bath, looking unusually ruddy, his hair damp and dishevelled. It made Hark realize how dignified Quest usually appeared. Hark felt uncomfortable seeing him so vulnerable.

  ‘Are you still feeling trapped here?’ asked Quest, looking genuinely concerned. ‘I hope you are not thinking of running away?’

  ‘There’s nowhere to run to.’ Hark felt his smile wobble. He needed to seem normal, but he was unexpectedly grateful to Quest for seeing through his act. It made him feel slightly less alone. ‘I’m . . . on a tightrope all the time. I can’t put a foot wrong. I can’t see my old friends, or Dr Vyne will sell me to the galleys.’ He was sailing as close to the truth as he dared. It was a relief to say even this much.

  ‘You miss your friends,’ said Quest gently.

  ‘I’m worried about one friend of mine,’ admitted Hark. ‘He might be in trouble without me.’ He had been trying not to think about what Rigg would do to Jelt if Coram died after all. Worse still, the healing relic was still hidden under Dunlin’s hut. If the smugglers dragged Jelt away, could he survive without its healing pulses?

  ‘He needs your guidance?’ asked Quest, and Hark could not help laughing out loud.

  ‘He never listens to it,’ he muttered.

  ‘Then you probably could not help him anyway,’ said Quest. ‘Has this friend tried to contact you recently?’

  Too close, too close to the wind. Hark could have kicked himself for saying so much.

  ‘Nest is the end of the world.’ Hark dodged the question. ‘Who would come here?’

  ‘It is the relic of a world that has ended,’ Quest agreed wryly. ‘That much is true.’

  The word ‘relic’ brought Hark’s mind full circle, back to the pale god-ball under Dunlin’s shack.

  ‘Qu
est,’ Hark said slowly, ‘did you ever hear of a relic that . . . moved?’

  ‘Moved?’ Quest’s brow furrowed deeply.

  ‘Someone once told me they’d seen something like that,’ Hark added, trying to sound unconcerned. ‘He said it clenched and sent out an . . . invisible ripple.’

  ‘When and where did your friend see this?’ asked Quest, his frown now quite alarming.

  ‘It was years ago!’ Hark improvised. ‘I don’t remember!’

  ‘A shame,’ Quest said grimly. ‘I would like to know who has the object now. Should you ever find out, I do hope you will tell me, Hark.’

  Hark was taken aback by the intensity of Quest’s interest. Perhaps the priest had heard of such a relic before. Although Hark didn’t like to think about it, he knew that Quest’s health was failing. It would be natural for a sick man to want to track down healing godware.

  ‘Do you know what it might be?’ Hark asked, trying not to sound too eager.

  ‘I have a suspicion,’ said Quest.

  Hark waited for him to explain, and then realized that the old man had no intention of doing so. Quest often retreated into maddening reticence when the conversation strayed into sensitive territory. Hark vented his frustration in a sigh.

  ‘Sometimes I think you’re playing games with me,’ he said, letting his tone sound sulky. ‘Throwing out hints like bait to get me curious, then laughing at me when I bite.’

  ‘Perhaps I am.’ Quest rubbed at the tiny flecks of grey stubble on his reddened cheeks. ‘At my age, there are few greater fears than discovering that one has become dull.’

  Hark got up, and took down one of the cloths that hung from a hook. The walls were always clammy with condensation and grew mouldy if left unattended. But for now, scrubbing the wall was an excuse to look away and let the pause lengthen. Yes, he could let himself seem bratty and offended, and leave it up to Quest whether to break the silence.

  I am young and easily bored. Perhaps I will get tired of talking to you altogether.