Deeplight

  ‘There must have been a better way to protect the people!’ protested Hark.

  ‘The priesthood only knew what had worked for hundreds of years,’ said Quest. ‘Put yourself in their shoes. You could try a new strategy, and maybe it would save lives, or maybe a lamprey-faced leviathan the size of an armada would crawl up into the shallows and start taking bites out of harbour villages. Would you really want to take the risk? Do you understand what I am saying? I am telling you that we priests risked our lives and sanities for centuries, and we never had the situation under control. Everyone on the Myriad was always one divine whim away from annihilation.’

  Hark stared down at the heart, still in his hands. It felt heavier than before. Could it really have a god furled up inside it, like an oak inside an acorn?

  ‘There is one more thing that you must know,’ added Quest. ‘Something I learned from the Hidden Lady.

  ‘As I say, she was . . . special. She had managed not to become too large, so her wits stayed sharp, but she paid a price for that. Can you imagine anything lonelier than being the only intelligent being in that abysmal darkness? By the time I knew her, the weight of her loneliness was crushing her. The craving to devour, grow, and become numb was gradually overwhelming her. That was why she was so willing to talk to me. I was not a god, but I was better than nothing, and it gave her a chance to pass on her stories so that they would not be lost, even if she forgot them.

  ‘She recounted even her very oldest memories. They were in pieces by that point, washed smooth and shapeless like pebbles. She couldn’t understand the emotions attached to them any more.

  ‘She remembered a pool beneath a waterfall on a bright day. There was somebody else there. Perhaps he was her lover. Or perhaps she was drowning him. Or maybe she just saw him once and remembered him afterwards. All she could really recall was brown skin and gleaming water and the sound of one of them laughing.

  ‘She remembered a thorn that got lodged in her big toe for so long that the skin became swollen and yellow. She asked me whether it had ever hatched, but of course I had no answer. She remembered seeing an albatross smash into a cliff, or perhaps a cliff smash into an albatross. She wondered later which of them had been angry and why.’

  ‘But that doesn’t make sense!’ exclaimed Hark, trying to disentangle the garbled memories. When would the Hidden Lady have encountered freshwater pools or sunlight? How could thorns ever have pierced her armoured, crab-like feet? ‘None of that could have happened! Those sound like . . . human memories!’

  ‘Yes,’ said Quest. ‘That’s exactly what they were.’

  ‘What?’ Hark stared.

  ‘She was human, Hark,’ said the old priest. ‘Once, a very long time ago. All the gods were. At the centre of each of them was a twisted core that was once human, and the groaning, maddened remains of a human soul.’

  No, no – that couldn’t be right. The gods were the gods were the gods . . .

  ‘The Lady could not remember clearly how she found herself in the Undersea,’ Quest continued. ‘She said she “rained” into it alongside other sinking human bodies, so I suppose there might have been a shipwreck. When she sank down into the Undersea, she stopped drowning and started changing shape. Some of the other bodies warped and moved for a bit, but their hearts gave out one by one, strained beyond endurance by their new strangeness.

  ‘She did not die, because her heart transformed faster than theirs. She felt it harden, shift and contort. It was a time of anguish beyond pain, but the heart became strong enough to keep beating. As it did so, she tasted the fear in the water and drew it in, her gills gaping to suck life from the sea. Each throb strengthened her and healed her injuries. Each throb honed her, brought her closer to her god-shape, and allowed her to pull new matter into herself.’

  As if in response to the words, the heart in Hark’s hand suddenly pulsed. Quest flinched, but continued staring hard at Hark’s face.

  ‘Do you understand what I am telling you?’ he demanded. ‘I am saying that in those fearful days gone by, any drowner who sank into the Undersea had a small chance of becoming a god. Do you know why it has not happened again in the thirty years since the Cataclysm? It can only be because people are less frightened, and the Undersea is less rich with fear. Even now, in these unstable times, drowners simply drown. They do not become gods.

  ‘But if one god were to rise, and everyone collapsed back into their ancient, superstitious terror, then the Undersea would coruscate with fear as it did in the old days. Drowners swept down into the Undersea might start to transform. More gods would rise. And more. And ever more. The cycle would begin again, and we would never escape it. Is that what you want?’

  Hark stared down at the heart in his hand. None of this was fair. Why was he stuck with this decision?

  His limbs tingled as he imagined wrapping the heart back in its sling, dropping it on the floor and stamping on it. He wouldn’t have to see the fragile, ornate perforations break. He wouldn’t have to think about exquisite ivory chambers shattering, the Hidden Lady’s mysterious, lonely heart trampled to powder . . .

  But it would not be her heart that he was really stamping upon. It would be Jelt’s. It would be Hark’s own heart, too – his past, some vital thing knotted into the core of him too densely to be tugged out.

  ‘No,’ said Hark quietly. ‘I don’t want the gods to come back. I will destroy it, all right? But . . . not yet. I need to keep my friend alive a bit longer, so I can find some other way to save him and change him back—’

  ‘Every moment it exists, the future of the Myriad is in danger!’ interrupted Quest.

  ‘I’m sorry!’ said Hark, feeling conflicted and ragged. ‘I can’t let him die. I . . . just . . . can’t.’

  ‘Not even if it means the ruin of everything?’ asked Quest.

  ‘He’d risk that for me,’ said Hark wearily. ‘Quest . . . you’re clever, and you know about gods. Help me help my friend, so we can put him back the way he was! When he doesn’t need the heart any more, I’ll destroy it. I promise!’

  Quest said nothing, but he seemed to subside inwards. He looked very old, and very, very tired.

  CHAPTER 30

  Quest knew of some ways to remove Marks, but none of them seemed promising. In the old days, he explained, the priests had sometimes rid themselves of mild Marks through several months of thrice-daily baths in clean water mixed with sulphur and plant oils. This would be useless in the case of somebody as Marked as Jelt.

  ‘That would take too long, anyway,’ muttered Hark. ‘We need something much faster.’ Every moment the heart was in Hark’s possession was a disaster waiting to happen. Even if nobody else discovered it, very soon Jelt would come looking for it. Hark had a nightmare image of Jelt breaking down the doors of Sanctuary and slashing his way through the guards, the unarmed attendants, the old priests – anything that stood between him and his goal . . .

  ‘I fear I do not know enough about the mechanics of Marks themselves,’ admitted Quest.

  Hark knew somebody who did.

  ‘Quest . . . you can read, can’t you? If I brought you some books or scrolls, you could read them to me, couldn’t you?’ After four months of reading lessons, Hark could recognize some words, but he knew this would not be enough.

  ‘What do you have in mind?’

  ‘Dr Vyne has the Sanctuary archive,’ Hark said bluntly, and watched Quest’s eyebrows climb up his forehead. ‘There are scrolls on the gods, with pictures and labels. There are documents on Marks, too. She’s been making notes on them.’ He remembered her tapping a grey moleskin book as she talked about them. Perhaps that book held her research notes.

  ‘And . . . you can gain access to these?’ asked Quest.

  The walls of the keep were impenetrable, and Vyne had the only keys to the two solid doors. But Hark had had four months to come up with ways of breaking into the museum, with its precious store of godware.

  ‘I think so,’ he said.

 
Hark emerged from the treatment room with trepidation, but thankfully the corridor outside was empty. The little group of priests that had followed him had apparently moved on elsewhere. He sprinted away down the darkened passages, mentally begging the god-heart not to pulse, until he reached the dining room, where he found Kly giving hasty orders to a few of the other attendants.

  ‘It’s chaos,’ said Kly, looking wild-eyed and distracted. ‘Something sent half of them frantic – I’ve never seen them as bad as this! We’ve had to lock eight of them in their rooms, and Moonmaid tried to maim someone with a spoon.’

  ‘Do you want me to run down to the museum and tell Dr Vyne?’ asked Hark, trying not to sound too eager.

  ‘I don’t know if she’s there at the moment,’ said Kly uncertainly, raking his fingers through his hair. ‘Go on, run down and see if you can find her. Come straight back afterwards.’

  Hark was sprinting away before Kly had finished the last sentence.

  Outside Sanctuary, Hark used a dry stream-bed to head downhill, instead of the open, grassy road. Jelt knew where he lived and might be looking out for him. Rigg was probably on the warpath too. She would have returned to Wildman’s Hammer to find Jelt and Hark missing, Jelt’s bodyguard sprawled unconscious, and the islet littered with unfamiliar corpses.

  Then there were the mysterious people who had demanded the heart and been slaughtered by the Jelt-thing. Who had they been? Were there more of them? And how had they known that he and Jelt were hiding a relic anyway?

  That was a very good question, and Hark had not had time to think about it properly before. How could these strangers possibly have found out about the relic? Nobody knew about it, apart from Hark, Jelt and . . .

  Hark stopped dead in his tracks, his mouth falling open.

  And Selphin. She was the only other person that knew of the heart’s existence. The armed attackers could only have found out about it from her.

  He remembered Selphin’s grimly desperate warnings and threats. Nobody had listened to her. So perhaps she had tipped off some other group about a juicy piece of godware, and told them where to find it. He remembered the bewildering care with which the mysterious attackers had disabled Jelt’s bodyguard without drawing their blades. Perhaps they had promised to do so as part of their deal with her.

  ‘She’s insane!’ muttered Hark under his breath, genuinely aghast. Whatever her reasons, this was a serious betrayal of her family and crew. It went far beyond drawing a blade on a crewmate.

  It’s not Rigg you should be worrying about, Selphin had told him. It’s me.

  He was starting to think that she might be right.

  At the museum door, he knocked, just to make sure Vyne was out. There was no answer.

  He looked around, feeling exposed in the broad daylight. There were a couple of boats tethered in the little harbour, but no sign of anyone about.

  Dr Vyne had said that keeps kept things in and people out. It had been a military base, designed to hold out against intruders. Most of the windows were too narrow to squeeze through.

  There was just one window that might be wide enough.

  Hark hastened round the building to the back and began to climb. The stone blocks were large, so he had to stretch to reach each new foothold, but thankfully the mortar between them had started to crumble, leaving narrow crevices.

  At the top he pulled himself up on to the roof, sending a disgruntled coterie of pigeons into the sky. He cast a nervous glance at the steep hill that rose behind the fort. He would be obvious to anyone on the higher slopes, but for the moment he could see nobody.

  It was windier on the roof, though the blocky crenellations shielded Hark a little. The stone flags all around were streaked with bird-droppings, and there were a few grimy puddles. In the very middle of the roof was a circular hole a foot wide, filled with a shallow dome of gleaming glass. It was Dr Vyne’s god-glass window. It wasn’t large, but someone skinny might be able to wriggle through it, if they could get the glass out of the way.

  Hark hurried over to it and laid a hand upon the cold, hard god-glass. It left his fingertips feeling slightly numb. He tried to rattle the dome in its metal rim, but it was snug in its seal.

  With his free hand, he took out his tuning fork and rapped its tines hard against the stone floor. As its hum became a clear, pure note, he held the fork close to the domed glass.

  The surface of the glass softened under his hand. Instead of the glass dome slipping out of its socket, however, his right hand sank into the glass. A moment later it had hardened around his fingers, imprisoning them in diamond-hard glass.

  ‘Oh, great,’ he muttered.

  The gulls’ chorus changed, becoming shriller and more unsettled. Hark looked up to see what had disturbed them, and froze. In the far distance, near the top of the hill, something was zigzagging down the slope in leaps. It was man-sized, and too far away to see clearly, but drawing closer at speed. It was a thing of nightmare, coming after Hark despite the daylight . . .

  In panic, Hark tried to yank his hand free. The god-glass held it fast, and he only succeeded in cutting his knuckles.

  Hark rapped the fork again, and held it against the glass with a shaking hand. The dome abruptly fell away from its rim, releasing his fingers. There was a deafening clatter below. Without hesitation, Hark swung his feet in through the gap and wriggled through. He dropped into the darkened study, landing in an awkward crouch.

  There was a rustling thud on the roof overhead. Half winded, Hark looked up. Above him, he could see the round, bright hole of sky where the glass had been. Then a silhouette leaned into that bright hole and blocked out most of the light.

  ‘Don’t you come down here!’ shouted Hark, struggling to his feet. ‘Stay away from me, Jelt!’

  The thing put an arm down the hole, then gave a faint hiss of frustration. Perhaps it was too large to fit through.

  ‘I’ll break this!’ Hark fumbled the heart out of its sling. ‘If you come any closer, I’ll smash it!’

  The buzzing and scrabbling above ceased, and there was a long, cold pause.

  ‘If you do that, I’ll kill you.’ It still sounded like Jelt, even with the grating rasp that made Hark’s ears tingle.

  ‘I know,’ said Hark, his mouth dry. ‘But I mean it. Stay away, or I’ll do it!’ Not an hour before, Hark had been desperately protecting the heart, but now fear was singing in his veins.

  ‘You left me to die,’ came the voice from above, and Hark felt the cold bitterness of those words close around his heart like a vice.

  I didn’t, he wanted to say. It wasn’t like that. I always intended to save you. And I kept the heart safe for you, didn’t I? But trying to defend yourself to Jelt was always a pit trap. You fell, and fell, and there was no bottom to the shaft.

  ‘I’m going to find a way to fix things, Jelt,’ Hark said instead, trying to stop his teeth chattering. ‘Then you won’t need that heart.’

  ‘Just. Give it. To. Me.’

  ‘No.’

  There was a roar from above, a bruising gale of sound, with an angry, anguished human voice at its core. Hark gritted his teeth. He had said no to Jelt many times before, but somehow the ‘no’ had never stuck. This was different. There was nowhere left to back down.

  Hark took a deep breath, then held the heart up over his head.

  ‘This is close enough!’ he yelled over the roar. ‘You’re in its range. Stay there and wait till it pulses. That’ll keep you going for a bit.’

  Sure enough, after a few seconds, Hark felt the heart in his grip shift and clench. The pulse followed, like a jolt down his arm. It was as if the relic had sensed Jelt, his willingness, the clay of his flesh ready to mould and sculpt.

  The Jelt-thing on the roof grew quieter as the heart sent out pulse after silent pulse. It leaned its head in through the window, reaching down towards the heart, but made no attempt to writhe through. It was still a dark outline against the light, and Hark was glad he could not see its face.<
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  ‘You’ve damaged it,’ it whispered at last, in tones that made Hark’s blood curdle. ‘You’ve burned it! I can smell it.’

  Again Hark had to bite his tongue for a few moments so that he wouldn’t start defending himself.

  ‘I’ll see you again tomorrow,’ he said, his voice sounding thin and tremulous. ‘At the cairn. You can come near the heart again then. I’ll fix this, Jelt. I promise. But you need to go now, and stay away from me. If I see you when I’m not expecting to, I’ll smash the heart. I will, Jelt. I swear it.’

  ‘I kept you alive for years,’ hissed the voice, ‘and now you want me dead. You do, don’t you? That’s why you dropped me in that bathysphere, isn’t it?’

  ‘That’s not true, and you know it!’ exploded Hark, Jelt’s words twisting his heart like a damp cloth. He stopped himself and took a deep breath. ‘You’re not . . . yourself at the moment, Jelt. It’s not your fault. It’s the god-heart. It’s changing you.’

  ‘You’re the one who’s changed,’ said the familiar-unfamiliar voice. ‘I don’t know you any more. You’re not Hark. You’re nobody I know.’

  The shadowy head disappeared from the opening above, leaving an unbroken circle of sky once more. There was a rustle, and a scrabble and rattle of something scrambling back up the slope. Silence followed.

  The god-heart gave out one last throb, then lost enthusiasm. It took longer for Hark’s own heartbeat to come under control. He silently thanked the keep’s designers for its thick stone walls and the solidity of its stone-flagged roof.

  Remembering the urgency of his quest, he looked around the study. Immediately his stomach dropped away. There was no sign of the piled scrolls or books bound in black leather. The archive was gone. There was no sign of Dr Vyne’s grey moleskin notebook, either.

  Hark swore under his breath. He had known that the doctor was conducting her new research in the Leaguer base. It hadn’t occurred to him that she might take the archive and all her notes with her.

  Had she really taken everything? In desperation, he quickly flicked through the other notebooks and papers scattering her desk. A few had pictures that jumped out at him. He grabbed them and tucked them into his hidden sling next to the god-heart.