Deeplight

  A few days later they returned again in greater numbers. This time they brought tents and blankets and refused to leave. All they wanted was to attend upon the healers, they explained, and be close to them. They were willing to pay for the privilege, so Rigg shrugged and took their money. Most of Rigg’s gang treated them like a joke at first, and nicknamed them the ‘grovellers’.

  They’re creepy, Selphin commented, peering across at the huddle of figures seated between their tents. What do they want? Do they even know?

  ‘They’re not so bad when you talk to them,’ insisted Coram.

  Coram talked to them a lot. Afterwards he usually sat alone, staring raptly at his scar as if it were unfathomably beautiful. Ever since his healing, he had seemed heavy, like one drugged. Selphin had seen him like this before, and it was always a bad sign. When he was lumpish and distracted, it meant a big thought was forming in his head. It usually took much longer to get the thought out of his head again.

  After a while, other members of the gang began chatting to the grovellers as well. Selphin’s friends came back from these conversations looking dazzled and talking of signs, omens and changing times.

  ‘I’m not saying I agree with them,’ they said, ‘but it makes you think . . .’

  ‘I’ve never been one for goddish stuff,’ they said, ‘but it’s like the Leaguers say . . .’

  ‘I don’t say those healer boys are a message from the Undersea,’ they said, ‘but . . .’

  The older members of the gang were the most easily infected by these ideas. Those were the people who remembered the time of the gods. Now they walked around with a look of fearful eagerness on their faces.

  The ‘healing cave’ looked different now. There was a dark brown canvas tent around it, over which long, frayed mooring ropes dangled like ornamental tassels. Faint frills of crusted salt had been left at the edges of dried-out damp patches, but this just made it seem more mysterious, as if the sea had hand-embroidered the weather-beaten canvas.

  The presence of the tent affected people. Within a week of its arrival, the ground around it was littered with shells, pieces of agate, painted bird shells and grey coral beads. Nobody had asked the patients to bring them, but they all intuitively understood that when visiting such a shrine, money was not enough. An offering was needed.

  Selphin always kept a distrustful distance from the tent, so it was a while before she realized that some of her crewmates were secretly leaving offerings too. They also stopped talking and signing when they were close to the tent and would walk past reverently.

  Why are you all being so respectful? Selphin wanted to slap them. We’re Rigg’s gang! We don’t crawl to anyone!

  But this no longer appeared to be true.

  Deep down, Selphin had hoped that the base on Wildman’s Hammer couldn’t last. The gang would get restless, as they always did. They would miss Lady’s Crave and begin to grumble about the lack of taverns. Besides, the gang had deals to attend to, goods to supply, ships to meet. Day by day, Selphin expected Rigg to change course in her blunt, unapologetic way, and declare that they were all going back home . . .

  Instead, Selphin visited Wildman’s Hammer one day to discover two changes. Most of Rigg’s gang were absent, and the grovellers were now armed.

  What’s going on? she asked her mother. Why are you letting them bring weapons here? The grovellers were equipped with knives, coshes and axes, and now defended the narrow rock-walled path that led to the healing tent.

  ‘We can’t keep our people here all the time,’ said Rigg. ‘The Pelican is due in a few days, isn’t she?’ Foreign ships like the Pelican sometimes dodged the heavy taxes, customs duties and mooring charges by trading offshore with smugglers’ skimmers instead of docking at an island. This was completely illegal, but it was profitable if you could get away with it. ‘So we’ll be getting those grovellers to guard the healers and the base while our people are on Lady’s Crave. Why not make use of them if they’re here anyway?’

  Selphin had a nightmare feeling that the world was slowly inverting to stand on its head.

  What are you talking about? she demanded. We have guards here to stop the healers running away, not to keep them safe! The grovellers aren’t our people, they’re loyal to the healers!

  ‘It won’t be a problem,’ said Rigg. ‘Coram’s vouched for them – they’re friends of his.’

  And who tells Coram what to say? signed Selphin furiously. He goes into that healing tent to talk, and he comes out with new opinions that don’t sound like him! He’s taking orders, and not from you! And he’s not the only one!

  ‘You’re talking nonsense!’ said Rigg.

  This isn’t your base any more! Selphin told her. And if you don’t watch out, this won’t even be your gang!

  Rigg obviously didn’t believe her. She was too sure of her gang and her leadership of it. Crew were family, family were crew. How could somebody who was neither steal her family and crew away from her? It was unthinkable.

  Instead she looked at Selphin with a blank, angry, pained expression. She clearly thought that Selphin was broken-headed and delusional. She wanted to fight it and make Selphin better again.

  Selphin turned to Sage to back her up, but for once the older woman was not on her side.

  I know you don’t like the healers, Sage told her, but they’re doing us a lot of good. We’ve got spare money to repair the subs properly for the first time in a year. And even creepy healing is a lot better than a noose. She fingered the two newly mended notches in her ear. Anyway, your mother’s word is law. Sorry, but my first loyalty is to her.

  I’m loyal to her too! signed Selphin, outraged. But that doesn’t mean I do what she says when she’s wrong!

  The only other person who seemed to be miserable about the entire healing racket was the Sanctuary boy. Talking to him was like trying to grip an eel, though. Selphin always ended up threatening him and wanting to hit him with rocks.

  She didn’t even try talking to the older healer boy.

  There wasn’t much opportunity. She didn’t go near his healing tent, and he rarely ventured out of it now. Besides, an instinct told her that talking to him would be useless. She might as well try to persuade a shark to live off kelp.

  Even from a distance, Selphin could sense the vibrations from the unknown relic in the healer tent. She could imagine it pumping its dark energies through air, rock and flesh, rippling them as it did so. She visualized veins slowly blackening, minds twisting, bodies subtly melting and morphing. It was a poison none of her friends could taste or see, and it was changing them all, inch by inch.

  I’ll stop you, she promised in her head. I’ll make them listen to me.

  But none of them did.

  CHAPTER 20

  ‘There you are!’

  Hark jumped out of his skin. He had just returned from one of his ‘foraging expeditions’ and had barely slipped in through the Sanctuary entrance, his basket over his arm, and his head still full of patients.

  Dr Vyne was standing there just inside the entrance, hands on hips. Gone was her air of amused, lackadaisical menace. Today her eyes were white-rimmed, her voice a whiplash. Behind her stood Kly, looking uncomfortable and anxious.

  ‘In here!’ Vyne said curtly, hustling Hark and Kly into a small meditation room. For some reason she appeared to be really angry. Hark’s mind fizzed with panic. What had she found out? ‘Kly, talk him through our notes, and get him into that room as soon as you can. I don’t know how much time we have.’

  ‘What’s happened?’ asked Hark.

  ‘Pale Soul’s sick,’ answered Kly quietly. ‘We think he’s waning.’

  ‘I told you he was a priority, Hark!’ Dr Vyne erupted. ‘I told you to find out where he’d hidden that archive as soon as you could! I made that clear a month ago!

  Hark felt as though he were falling. Dr Vyne’s good humour had given way beneath him, like a pit trap. Of course he had known that Vyne wanted him to find out about the
library, but it hadn’t seemed urgent. There had been so many other things to worry about. Over the last month, his healing duties had left him distracted, exhausted and barely able to keep up with his chores.

  ‘If there is still a secret library,’ said Vyne, ‘this is our last chance to find out where it is! If you care about your future, Hark, find out everything you can! And do it fast!’

  Hark nodded, mouth dry.

  ‘I need to go,’ Vyne declared, her expression still stormy. She raked both her hands through her hair, gave a snort of annoyance, and marched out. Kly slowly exhaled.

  ‘Pale Soul wasn’t ill yesterday!’ exclaimed Hark. ‘Was he?’ He wondered whether he should have noticed that the gentle old priest was ailing.

  ‘Sometimes there’s a slow twilight,’ said Kly, dropping into a chair. ‘Sit down. The doctor wants you to know more about Pale Soul before you talk to him.’

  Hark listened to Kly’s hasty account of the old priest’s history. Before joining the priesthood and taking the name Pale Soul, he had been Karriter Thistle. His father had been a nightwatchman, his mother a seamstress, his stepfather a priest. Six siblings, a childhood on Siren. Acolyte at age ten, priest by sixteen. Ten years as a priest on Siren, occasionally speaking to the Gathergeist, then archivist on Nest.

  Hark had known very little of this, despite all his conversations with the old man, and this gave him a pang of self-reproach. Then again, these were dead facts, both personal and impersonal, like dry bones in a box.

  ‘Pale Soul’s calmer around you than he is with anyone else.’ Kly rested his elbows on his knees and stared down at his clasped hands. ‘I think your neck may be riding on this,’ he added softly. ‘Be as kind as you can, but find the information the doctor wants, for goodness’ sake.’

  Pale Soul had been put in a room of his own to avoid infecting others. It was lit only by the hearth and the dim, purple flame of a little lantern hanging from a hook on the wall. The old priest deserved his name more than ever before, his skin so pale it was deathly, like grey clay. Even in his exhaustion, though, Pale Soul seemed agitated and nervous. He twitched slightly as Hark sat down beside him.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Hark. ‘It’s me.’ Nothing was all right, and he felt a sting of guilt as Pale Soul’s expression softened with recognition and trust.

  ‘It’s too quiet,’ Pale Soul confided with hushed wretchedness. ‘I try to listen, but . . . the quiet gets in the way. There!’ He raised a finger and looked entreatingly at Hark. ‘Can you hear? Music . . .’

  Behind the relentless murmur of the wind outside, and the muffled sounds of distant footsteps and door-slams, Hark heard a faint jumble of metallic notes, indistinct and haunting.

  ‘It’s just the wind chimes,’ he said, recognizing the sound.

  ‘Yes,’ said Pale Soul, deflating. ‘Of course. It will never come back. What was the point of it all?’ His eyes forlornly begged Hark for an answer, or perhaps a rope to cling to. ‘Did you ever hear the Gathergeist sing?’

  Hark shook his head, finding it hard to follow.

  ‘I did,’ said Pale Soul, very faintly. ‘It made me think of birds. It didn’t sound like them, but it reminded me of the way that birds don’t care about us. They don’t. They don’t care whether they’re beautiful, they just are. I heard it once up on the cliffs when I was small, back on Siren. I knew the Undersea was rising because of the clouds. Sudden black clouds by themselves, like thumbprints above the horizon. Then the wind changed . . . and I heard the song.’

  ‘What was it like?’ asked Hark. If Pale Soul wanted to talk about the gods, perhaps the conversation could be guided towards the archive.

  ‘It was not a tune you could sing.’ Pale Soul cleared his throat, then tried a small eerie undulating mewl of sound. ‘No, it was not music . . . and yet it was. It . . . broke me, that sound.

  ‘I ran home and told my older sister, and she said I never needed to go up on the cliffs alone again. She would go with me. Anila. Only nine, but the eldest – she brought up the rest of us. I was her favourite.’

  Hark’s heart sank. These were childhood memories, then – too old to be useful. Somehow he needed to haul Pale Soul’s mind forward several decades.

  ‘We went up on the cliffs at sunset sometimes,’ Pale Soul continued, his face looking more serene. ‘Sea so big – Anila called it a patchwork, because there were blotches . . . silver shimmers, cloud shadows, purple sometimes. Ships – they looked so huge back then. Sails pink in the sunset and puffed like peaches. We had lucky rhymes to stop them sinking, and when they reached the horizon safely, I thought we had done that. It felt . . . I felt useful . . . powerful . . .’

  Hark didn’t ask where Anila was now. If she was older than Pale Soul, she might well be dead.

  ‘Is that why you decided to be a priest?’ he asked instead. ‘To protect people?’

  Pale Soul’s face slowly lost its pensive brightness, like a moon submerged in cloud.

  ‘We did protect people,’ he said, and started to tremble. ‘They were so proud of us once. Now they’re ashamed of us. They do not want to remember how frightened they were, and how much they needed us. But they did.’ He stared at Hark in dazed fear, as though this boy in yellow robes were his judge and executioner. ‘Everyone did. We did everything we could . . . everything . . . everything . . . and now . . . and now they come and . . .’

  Fear and confusion shook the old man, until it seemed they might tear him to pieces. Apparently Hark had succeeded in dragging Pale Soul back to the bitter present. The old man looked up at Hark with sudden surprise, as if Hark had appeared unexpectedly.

  ‘You!’ Pale Soul looked aghast. ‘They sent you, didn’t they? They want you to squeeze information out of me!’ One frail hand made a weak clenching motion, as if crushing the juice from an even frailer fruit.

  ‘No, no!’ Hark told him soothingly, even as his conscience stung. Pale Soul was right. That was exactly why Hark was there. What choice did he have, though? ‘You remember me! I live here – we’ve talked lots of times. I’m Flint, one of the acolytes. They’re going to rename me Will of the Waves. Remember?’ Pale Soul had often mistaken him for an acolyte long gone, and Hark hoped this would serve him well now.

  The old man blinked at him uncertainly, eyeing Hark’s yellow acolyte robes.

  Hark followed up his advantage. ‘I never heard the Gathergeist sing,’ he said calmly, ‘but I saw the Glass Cardinal once, when I was young. My family was out in a little boat, and it passed us in the water.’ He closed his eyes for a moment, remembering the story Vyne had told him. ‘It moved like it was water itself. There was a cloudy rainbow on its skin that rippled. Its scream sounded the way moonlight looks.’

  Hark leaned forward, holding Pale Soul’s gaze.

  ‘That’s why I become an acolyte,’ he went on, in hushed, confidential tones. ‘So that I could protect people . . . and so that I could see beings like that again. They would never understand that, would they?’

  ‘You are right!’ The suspicion had melted from Pale Soul’s eyes. ‘The beauty and the terror – they could never understand. I . . . am sorry, Flint. My eyes are not so good today.’ The priest put out a hand and gently laid it on Hark’s arm. ‘Tell me, are they still in Sanctuary, asking questions?’

  ‘No,’ said Hark. ‘They’ve gone. They gave up.’ He didn’t know who ‘they’ were, but he had no intention of arguing with Pale Soul about it.

  ‘They’ll be back,’ said Pale Soul in an urgent whisper. ‘They want what we know, for their warships and bridges, and for medicines to change their bodies. They want to trick us. Nothing is sacred to them – they sell everything, they cut apart everything, they want to know everything. They do not understand that some secrets are dangerous! Why do they think we hid such things from the world?’

  There was enough truth in the old priest’s words to make Hark feel uneasy, but there was no turning back.

  ‘We hid everything well, though, didn’t we?’
said Hark. ‘I don’t think they found anything.’

  ‘You are sure?’ Pale Soul’s brow frowned uncertainly. ‘They . . . didn’t find it?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ answered Hark, his heart banging with excitement. Could ‘it’ be the secret library? ‘Do you want me to check? You’ll . . . need to tell me where to look.’

  ‘Yes . . . yes . . .’ Pale Soul beckoned Hark to lean closer, until Hark’s ear was next to his mouth. ‘Everything is under the lighthouse on the tip of Gimlet Point.’

  Hark’s spirits plunged again. He had walked past Gimlet Point many times and had seen the pile of rubble that had long ago been a lighthouse. Even the foundations had fallen in. If there had ever been a hidden cellar, by now its contents would probably be crushed by rockfall or destroyed by the weather.

  ‘You should take the crab dance,’ whispered Pale Soul clearly and carefully into his ear. ‘One bottle will see you there and back.’

  Hark bit his lip hard and tried not to panic. Apparently the old man had slid into nonsense. He waited, but apparently there was no more coming. He sat back in his seat.

  ‘The crab . . .’ Hark began, but Pale Soul furrowed his brow and put a hasty finger to his own lips.

  Hark tried to keep his face serene, even as he boiled over with frustration and alarm. If he asked more questions, he would probably make Pale Soul suspicious again. Evidently the old man thought he had been perfectly clear.

  ‘I’ll go and look later,’ he said instead, and saw the priest’s face relax a little. ‘How will I know if it’s all there?’

  ‘The archives . . . for four hundred years. Thirty-nine scrolls, in cases of ivory. Twenty books in a great chest of black oak. The great Volvelle calculating the Festivals of the Year. The four Knives Whetless . . .’ The list went on in a meticulous, careful drone, while Hark tried to remember everything he was told.

  The more he heard, the lower his spirits became. It sounded like most of it was paper. If these precious documents were buried in the lighthouse rubble, rain and time would have rotted them years ago.