Deeplight

  Kly had told Hark that his neck was on the line. Hark needed more information – something that would satisfy Vyne and save him from her sudden, icy anger. Probing Pale Soul for information was starting to turn his stomach, though. He felt like he really was squeezing the juice out of the weak old man.

  I don’t have a choice, Hark told himself fiercely. He’s dying anyway, it won’t make any difference to him in the long run . . .

  ‘This . . . is as it should be, is it not?’ The nervous wariness and distress was creeping back into Pale Soul’s gaze. ‘I can tell you this now? Is it . . . is it . . . is it time?’

  It was the old question that he always asked, and which Hark had always answered in the same calming way. No, not yet. This time, for some reason, Hark could not force out the usual words. If it was not ‘time’ now, it never would be. Pale Soul would have waited meekly for something that never came, on Hark’s assurance that it would. It would feel like breaking a promise.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, on impulse, then regretted it as he saw panicky urgency blossom in his companion’s eyes. ‘I mean, you don’t have to do anything! It was “time” a while ago, and . . . you were ready for it. You did everything you needed to do.’

  ‘I did?’ Pale Soul asked faintly.

  ‘Yes,’ faltered Hark. ‘It’s all done now. It’s over. You . . . can be very proud.’

  Pale Soul let out a breath, and it was as though some weight had been lifted from him.

  ‘Anila was proud of me,’ he said quietly, as his trembling slowly faded. ‘She always was. She said so.’

  Hark watched Pale Soul recede from him again, through scores of years, beyond his reach. A kind sisterly hand was waiting, and a patchwork sea. This was Hark’s last chance to force Pale Soul to recall his priestly days.

  ‘What was she like?’ he heard himself ask instead.

  ‘Anila?’ Pale Soul smiled. ‘She was fair, but not white-haired like me. She had a scar on her hand from cracking open nuts.’ He laughed. ‘She used to bring some with us when we went up to the cliffs. Most of them were too hard. We had to smash them with rocks . . .’

  The old priest’s eyes lowered and closed. His breathing became more rhythmic, and there was a slack peace in his face. Perhaps he had slid into a dream of that happy time, before tragedy, disillusionment and despair.

  ‘Sir?’ Hark put out a hesitant hand and prodded him a bit. There was a hiccup and a small moan, then more gentle snores.

  What do I do? Wake him up again?

  Hark could shake the dying man’s frail shoulder and force him back into his adult memories. He could yank him out of his last sleep, away from the warmth of the clifftop, the bright sky and the pink sails . . .

  Well, I can’t. I can’t do that, I guess.

  It was stupid, but there it was. He couldn’t. As soon as he knew that, everything was simpler, which was a bit of a relief somehow.

  Hark would just have to hope that the description of the archive was enough to appease Dr Vyne. She would probably have little interest in the story the old priest had most wanted to tell. As it turned out, his most treasured possession had been a vision of two children on a sunset clifftop, wishing oblivious ships on their way.

  CHAPTER 21

  Hark had to bang on the museum door several times before Vyne answered it. She looked less than pleased to see him.

  ‘Why aren’t you with Pale Soul?’ Her brow slowly cleared. ‘Oh, no. Already? Tell me you got him to talk!’

  ‘I did!’ Hark said quickly. ‘But there wasn’t long—’

  ‘Did he say anything about the archive?’

  ‘Yes . . .’

  ‘Well, come in – don’t stand there like you’re selling spoons.’

  The doctor led Hark up to her study. By the time she dropped into her chair and grabbed a pen, Hark’s insides were playing leapfrog. He quickly rattled through as much of the archive’s inventory as he could remember, while the doctor made notes.

  ‘There’s a catch, isn’t there?’ Vyne said abruptly. ‘I can see it from your expression.’ Her eyes widened accusingly. ‘He never told you where it was, did he?’

  ‘Yes, he did . . .’ Hark trailed off, looking for a way to soften the news.

  ‘But?’

  ‘He said it was under the lighthouse on Gimlet Point.’

  Vyne stared at him for a few seconds, then threw her pen across the room.

  ‘The lighthouse on Gimlet Point? The one that was smashed into chunks during the Cataclysm? That lighthouse? Then this –’ she brandished the paper with the archive inventory – ‘is useless, isn’t it? All the books on this list are waterlogged or padding gannet nests by now!’

  It wasn’t Hark’s fault, but he had too much sense to point this out. People weren’t fair when they were angry. Vyne couldn’t punish the weather, or the fallen rubble, or her own bad luck, but she could lash out at him. If he annoyed her, she would lash out even harder.

  ‘Did you get anything useful out of him? Think!’ She listened with furrowed brow as Hark recounted all that he could remember. ‘“Take the crab dance” . . .? “One bottle will see you there and back” . . .? You can’t have heard that right. I wish you’d asked him to repeat it!’ She pressed her fingers against her temples.

  I should have done, thought Hark, his stomach hollow with dread. I should have pressed him. But I didn’t, and it’s too late.

  ‘Crab dance,’ Vyne was muttering. ‘What did he really say? It can’t have been “crab dance”. Crabs scuttle and run. They don’t dance!’

  Crab dance. When did I ever see a crab dance? Delicate as a moth, a thought settled on Hark’s mind.

  ‘Wait,’ he said slowly. ‘I’ve never seen a “crab dance”, but I’ve seen a Sharkdance. And a Marlinwaltz. And a Herringleap.’

  ‘What?’ Vyne looked up at him with confusion and irritation.

  ‘They’re boats,’ said Hark with growing excitement. ‘They’re the names of boats!’

  The doctor’s scowl was replaced by a look of hungry animation as she stared at her notes again.

  ‘He told you to “take the Crabdance” to check on the archive. He was asking you to travel by a particular boat?’

  ‘Maybe! No, wait, he told me one bottle would see me there and back—’

  ‘Air!’ exclaimed Vyne. ‘One bottle of compressed air!’

  ‘Not a boat – a sub!’ Hark eagerly finished the thought. ‘The Crabdance must have been a sub! So maybe there’s a hidden cave, and you need to travel underwater to get to it!’

  Dr Vyne’s eyes shone. She leaped to her feet.

  ‘We need to find that cave right now,’ she said. ‘Come with me.’

  ‘Do you have a sub?’ asked Hark, surprised.

  ‘Yes,’ said Vyne, with one of her less reassuring smiles. ‘After a fashion.’

  Once they were outside the fort, she led him round the headland to Dunlin’s beach. She ignored the lone shack, and instead walked up to the mysterious door in the cliff and unlocked it.

  Hark followed her through the door, into the dark, and down a set of stone steps to the left. Soon he could hear the lapping of water. The steps led to a passage, which widened out into a cave. A few feet ahead of him, the stone floor ended abruptly, and he could see the sinuous motion of dark water beyond. Vyne picked up a lantern and lit it. Hark felt the familiar tickle of chemical unease as the purple scare-light licked over the cavern.

  On the surface of the water lay something fifteen feet long, tethered with chains and suspended in a hammock of rope strands. As Vyne had promised, it was a sub ‘after a fashion’, but not after a particularly reassuring fashion.

  It appeared to be made of clouded glass, its glossy surface gleaming with a pearly iridescence. It was shaped like no other submersible he’d ever seen, with a sleek sphere in the middle, tapering wing-like flaps to either side, and a long tail ending in a propeller. The elegant, fluid outline resembled that of a gelatinous sea creature. It looked like it might slit
her under the touch.

  Inside the central glassy sphere, Hark could just make out a rounded metallic cage containing seats and a tangle of machinery. A long steel shaft ran like a spine inside the translucent tail, all the way to the rear propeller.

  ‘Is that made of god-glass?’ he asked, already knowing the answer.

  ‘My own invention,’ explained Dr Vyne with surprising warmth, turning a large wheel to lower the sub into the water. ‘I call her the Screaming Sea Butterfly. She’s a prototype.’

  ‘What does that mean?’ asked Hark.

  ‘It means that every voyage is a safety test, and it’ll be scientifically fascinating if we die in her,’ Vyne answered cheerfully.

  The Screaming Sea Butterfly wasn’t as slimy as it looked, but its glassy surface was still treacherously smooth. Vyne draped a knobbly waxed mat along one of the ‘wings’ so that they could crawl to the open hatch.

  Hark was used to subs and diving bells with windows, but it was different sitting in a vessel that was all window. On every side, he could see the undulating waterline licking against the side of the sub. Above it was dim, mauve-lit cavern; below it was dark water. The god-glass distorted everything, adding rainbow halos to outlines. Only the racks of air-bottles and breather boxes behind the seats were reassuringly familiar.

  In front of Vyne’s seat was an intriguing mechanical tangle, with three wooden wheels, great square bellows, assorted levers and jutting metal pipes like those in a musical organ. Each seat had a flimsy-looking safety-belt that buckled across the waist, and a set of bicycle-style pedals in front of it.

  Vyne pulled the hatch closed, its underside a mere inch above her head. Hark was impressed that the doctor had managed to create a craft that could make you feel exposed and claustrophobic at the same time.

  ‘Don’t worry!’ she said, as if reading his mind. ‘This won’t be more dangerous than any other sub you’ve been in. Skimmers, turtles, barracudas – they’re all death traps, most of them. Ten-year-old hand-me-down parts, stuck together with hope and watered-down god-glue. At least this one’s new, and I know what most of the dangers are!’

  She lit a little lantern in the front of the cockpit, and the murk under the water became cloudily visible. Grains of disturbed silt glittered as they swirled.

  Vyne pulled a handle, and something behind Hark gave a long mechanical squeal. The surface of the water climbed up the side of the Butterfly, until they were completely submerged.

  ‘We’ll have to pedal at first, until we’re out and clear,’ she said. ‘I’ll steer.’

  Hark fastened his belt, then slipped his feet into the little metal pedals with their leather stirrups. He followed Vyne’s cue and pedalled hard, while she wrestled a great wooden wheel. The sub turned itself around, by jerky, sullen degrees, to face away from the ledge. Soon Hark was out of breath, and his leg muscles were burning. He started to understand why Dr Vyne hadn’t wanted to pilot the sub alone.

  ‘Here we go!’ exclaimed the doctor.

  The sub eased itself forward, the surrounding water gradually growing lighter. The darkness above yielded suddenly as the sub emerged into the sea, the shimmering, sun-jewelled surface ten feet or so above their heads. Below them extended a green-gold underwater rockscape, sloping gently away towards the greater deeps.

  ‘Stop pedalling – I’ll take over now.’ Vyne dropped a rounded leather helmet with straps into Hark’s lap. ‘Put this on and fasten it as tight as you can. Quickly!’ She was donning a similar helmet but leaving the straps loose.

  Confused, Hark pulled on his helmet. It turned out to be heavily padded with cloth inside, and came all the way down to his eyebrows, covering his ears completely. It fitted with uncomfortable snugness, and he was pulling it off again to ask about this when the Butterfly screamed.

  The sound was deafening and agonizing. It sounded as though somebody had tortured a hundred seagulls for a small eternity, then forced their screams through a huge glass whistle. The undulating cacophony carved through his brain, ear-splitting, mind-splitting.

  Eyes clenched shut, Hark forced the helmet back on to his head again. When he had drawn the straps as tight as he could, the padding at last blunted the edge of the terrible sound. He could still feel the seat, the pedals, even his own teeth vibrating.

  A moment later, when he opened his eyes again, a second shock awaited him.

  The first thing he saw was Vyne, her face locked in a grimace as she adjusted one of the wheels, while squeezing the bellows under one arm. Then a motion beyond her caught his attention, and he realized what the Butterfly was doing.

  The sub’s great, tapering fins were no longer rigid. They were moving up and down with supple ease, rippling slightly as they did so. The motion reminded Hark a little of the grey-speckled eagle rays he had sometimes seen swimming with silent grace through the dappled shallows. The wings’ rise and fall matched the oscillations of the eerie screeching note produced by Vyne’s machine.

  Reflexively Hark reached out to touch the side of the cockpit bubble. To his relief, it was still cold and hard, not jelly-soft or quivering with life.

  Vyne flashed him a grin, then shouted something over the screams of her machine. He hoped it wasn’t important.

  The Butterly moved out of the silt clouds into clearer water, and skimmed over the underwater rock pinnacles. A shoal of silvery mackerel parted before it and flowed past on either side. It slid over a stretch of rippled sand above its shadow, then ascended without effort, soaring above weed-furred crags like an underwater bird.

  Hark’s breath caught in his throat. He had been in many subs before, but none that moved with this speed, none that rippled as though they loved the water, and knew it, and were part of it. He could look all around him, as if he were the Butterfly, this supple, gleaming beast of the deep.

  For a single, mad moment, Hark was glad of everything. He was glad of his arrest, and his Sanctuary chores, and even the god-heart. He was glad of all that had resulted in him being there, right then, in that strange and beautiful craft. Just for one blissful, forgetful instant, he was in love.

  Then the craft tilted wildly to turn a corner, and Hark came perilously close to redecorating the cockpit with his breakfast. He realized that he was laughing helplessly.

  Ahead, Hark could see a place where the sea floor rose abruptly, only a little shallower than cliff. He knew that they must be close to Gimlet Point because the broken bricks of the wrecked lighthouse lay scattered down the steep slope before him. Vyne turned the sub to glide parallel to the slope, with the rise on the right.

  ‘There!’ Hark tugged Vyne’s sleeve to get her attention.

  Some distance below was a long, ragged slit of darkness amid the rocks. As the Butterfly descended towards it, the opening seemed to gape wider. It was no mere slit or hollow; it was a cavern some twenty-five feet across and fifteen high. Its upper lip dripped with weed that swayed in and out as though the cave were breathing.

  Aided by the lantern at the front of the cockpit, Vyne steered into the widening cavern until a wall loomed ahead, and then slowly brought the Butterfly into an ascent. At last she turned off the siren. The ensuing silence was almost shocking.

  Vyne pulled her helmet off her head. When Hark followed suit, he could make out a faint plip, plap, plip of tiny wavelets stirring against the side of the sub.

  ‘We’ve surfaced,’ said Vyne. By the reflected light from the lantern, Hark could see that she was grinning.

  ‘What . . .’ Hark put out a hand to stroke the glassy inside of the Butterfly, all his questions shoving to be allowed out first. ‘How did you make this sub do that?’

  Vyne’s explanation was quite brief, but it involved words like ‘tempered’, ‘extruded’, ‘composition’ and ‘differential’, so it didn’t really help. She soon seemed to realise that Hark was floundering.

  ‘I found a way to tune different parts of the god-glass differently,’ she elaborated. ‘At different notes, some parts soften, some
remain hard, some expand, some contract. If you place and combine them correctly, you can orchestrate movement through sound manipulation. It’s a very great deal more complicated than it sounds. Even after I mastered the tempering process, the Butterfly took me six years to design and make.’

  ‘It’s amazing!’ exclaimed Hark. ‘Why isn’t it famous?’

  Vyne looked slightly furtive.

  ‘A lot of this god-glass was given to me by the governor,’ she explained, ‘and he may be under the impression that I am using it to research better optical lenses. Years ago he told me that there was no place for a submarine that screamed all the time, and that I should stop trying to develop one. I think he was worried that it might melt the portholes off other subs in the vicinity, even though I told him that was extremely unlikely.’

  Hark could see why the governor might be worried. He could also see why Vyne kept the Butterfly a secret, if she had diverted a fortune’s worth of god-glass into a forbidden project.

  ‘What if you made the wrong note, and the bubble with us inside it went soft?’ asked Hark.

  ‘That won’t happen,’ Vyne assured him. ‘My instruments can’t create notes of a high enough pitch.’

  ‘But what if something else made exactly that note?’

  ‘Then the cockpit would collapse, the water would punch its way in, and we’d both die,’ the doctor answered promptly. ‘Try not to whistle while on board,’ she added as an afterthought. ‘And if you have to scream, keep it low-pitched.’

  ‘Can I . . .’ It was a stupid question, but Hark knew he would hate himself forever if he didn’t ask. ‘Can I drive it a little bit on the way back?’

  ‘Not the slightest, flimsiest chance in a world of hells,’ Vyne told him brightly. ‘It’s taken me two years to learn to use the controls this well, and they’re sensitive as baby skin. Even now, it’s all too easy to get a key change slightly wrong and flip the Butterfly on to her back.’