Deeplight

  The bundle was Dr Vyne.

  CHAPTER 35

  ‘Is he dead?’ asked Dr Vyne.

  ‘I think so,’ said Hark, managing to keep his voice steady.

  ‘I’ve never killed anyone before,’ the doctor remarked. ‘We surprise ourselves with the things we can do.’ Her face was haunted-looking and very pale.

  ‘You’re hurt,’ Hark blurted out, not knowing how to feel. He could now see the ugly rent in the coat from which the blood was spilling. It looked like a stab wound. ‘Who did that?’

  ‘The Vigilance League captain,’ Vyne said, with a shadow of her usual wry smile.

  Selphin ran up to join Hark. Evidently she had stopped to pick up the dead man’s musket. Now she stood scanning the village and the hill behind, looking for the next threat, the gun levelled and ready. It looked very long and unwieldy in her hands.

  ‘There are more Leaguers in the camp somewhere,’ Selphin said in a quiet, urgent tone. ‘We need to get off this jetty.’

  She was right. Here they were exposed and likely to get cornered if their enemies reached the waterfront. Even as Hark thought this, though, his gaze was drawn back to Vyne’s blood-soaked flank.

  He dropped to his knees and scrabbled in his belt pouch for bandages. He forced a pad of clean dressing into her hand and held it against her wound.

  ‘Press that as hard as you can,’ he growled. ‘Can you stand?’

  ‘What are you doing?’ exclaimed Vyne in surprise. ‘There’s no time for that!’ She gripped his sleeve and stared up into his face. ‘Hark. You need to get out of here right now while you can! You need to get word to the governor somehow – tell him that those maniacs are taking the god-project to the Undersea! Thousands of people will be in danger if he doesn’t do something!’

  Hark’s heart sank like a stone. The League weren’t just moving their god to another base. They were taking it to the very place where it could grow in strength and become unstoppable.

  ‘Why do you care?’ he snapped. ‘That’s what you wanted too, isn’t it?’

  ‘Of course not!’ Vyne actually looked shocked. ‘It was never supposed to be let loose! That would be insane!’

  ‘I can see more Leaguers behind the bellows house!’ said Selphin, crouching down next to Hark. ‘Some of them have muskets. They’re moving along behind the buildings – they’re cutting us off!’

  Hark glimpsed one of the Leaguers sprinting from behind one building to the next. Once they had a decent sniper point, they could shoot at the jetty and reload, shoot and reload. Selphin, on the other hand, only had one shot.

  ‘Hark,’ said Vyne firmly. ‘You need to run now. That’s an order!’

  She was right. If he and Selphin fled straight away, maybe they could escape through the village before they were cut off. Lady’s Crave had taught him all he needed to know about running.

  The last four months, however, had trained new instincts into Hark. Every graze he’d washed, every sore he’d soothed with ointment, every swelling he’d packed with ice had left a tiny, indelible mark on his mind. Without him even noticing it, other people’s injuries had become his problem. They called to him like an itch or niggling pain.

  ‘I don’t follow your orders any more,’ he said.

  There was only one other escape from the jetty. Hark caught Selphin’s eye, jerked his head towards the boat, and gave her a questioning look. She scowled, then gave a curt, unhappy nod.

  ‘Can you help me lift her?’ he asked Selphin.

  Vyne looked startled as they heaved her unsteadily on to her feet. They had to support most of her weight as she hobbled towards the fishing boat, stumbling and gasping.

  There was a crack – a full, loud musket-crack this time – and a nearby jetty board jumped in its socket, spitting a little shower of splinters.

  Another crack stung the surface of the water, with a tiny flash of white foam.

  ‘Quick! Into the boat!’

  Hark guided Vyne up the gangplank, wincing each time her feet slithered. As soon as she was aboard, she collapsed on to the deck. Selphin followed and took up a crouched position, aiming her musket at the shoreline to discourage attack. Hark untied the moorings, then leaped aboard as well. He pulled up the gangplank, then hurried to loose the mainsheet.

  As Hark hauled on the halyard, he could hear the Leaguers on the shore yelling in anger and dismay. Another musket fired, and Hark flinched, his skin tingling apprehensively.

  ‘Something’s happening!’ Selphin called out suddenly. ‘They’re not shooting at us!’ A moment later: ‘There! On the hill!’

  Hark looked over his shoulder in time to see a dark shape racing down the hillside towards the village. He knew it instantly by the way it moved, leaping ten feet at a time. It was the thing that had been his friend.

  Another musket was fired, smoke drifting on the wind, as the yells grew shrill with panic. Hark saw the Jelt-thing jerk, a little cloud of dry stuff bursting from its shoulder like thistledown. It changed course and leaped into the cover of the crags.

  As well as the Leaguer’s frantic yells, Hark could hear a deeper voice roaring the same word again and again. The voice was so guttural and grating, Hark barely recognized the word as his own name.

  As Hark pushed across the boom and saw the sails swell, it felt like air in his own lungs. The first stealthy motion of the boat towards the sea was slow, and he willed it, begged it to go faster. Then the creep became a glide and gathered momentum. The jetty was skimming past them, then receding behind them. The edges of the harbour fell back on either side. Looking back, Hark could see the Leaguers’ village shrinking with distance, out of musket range.

  For now, the Leaguers and the Jelt-thing were busy with each other, but soon one side would triumph. Whoever won would want to pursue the stolen fishing boat, he had no doubt of that.

  He cast a quick glance across at Selphin, who had put down the musket and was working the ropes with fierce competence. Her jaw was clenched, and Hark wondered how much willpower her composure was costing her. Hark was also finding it hard to concentrate. His hands performed their tasks mechanically, but whenever he thought about the Abysmal Child, moving unstoppably through ever darker seas, his mind filled with a deathly numbness.

  Hark and his companions were not safe. Nobody was safe.

  The escapees skirted the north-west corner of the island in their stolen boat, and then ran due south along the coast, with the wind behind them. They picked up pace quickly, and for now there was no sign of pursuit. Hark bandaged Vyne’s wound, and Selphin found some bread, cheese and ship’s biscuits stored below deck. Hark ate half of his share ravenously, then saved the rest to give to Quest later.

  That was your friend again, attacking the camp, signed Selphin during a quieter moment. Why didn’t he attack earlier?

  Hark had also thought it strange. A wistful part of him still wondered if Jelt had attacked to save Hark when he was cornered by enemies. But Jelt hadn’t broken cover while Hark was being shot at on the jetty, or when the Leaguers were closing in. He’d only charged down the hillside when . . .

  He saw me get on a boat, signed Hark, his heart sinking. Maybe he thought I was leaving the island, and panicked. I’ve escaped him by boat before.

  You’re sure he can’t follow us? asked Selphin.

  Jelt had escaped from Wildman’s Hammer somehow. Now Hark thought of the Marks he had glimpsed, so much like Vyne’s dragonfish sketches.

  No, he admitted. I’m not sure.

  They both threw a brief glance back the way they had come, where the gleaming lace of their wake streaked the freshening sea.

  Where are we going, anyway? signed Selphin, with her usual bluntness.

  I don’t know, Hark replied. The doctor wants us to get word to the governor on Lady’s Crave.

  Good, Selphin responded promptly, her brow clearing. We’ll go to Lady’s Crave. I want to tell Rigg about the League and warn the gang.

  Hark’s gaze crept to Dr Vyne
again. Her eyes were closed now, her face drawn into a continual wince.

  Travelling to Lady’s Crave would take hours, he signed. The doctor might die on the way.

  Selphin gave a conflicted grimace.

  You like saving terrible people, don’t you? she signed. Her large eyes were not unsympathetic, though. Will the message to the governor stop the League?

  I don’t know, admitted Hark. He needed to prevent a new age of gods, and he wanted to save Vyne from bleeding to death. He really hoped he wouldn’t have to choose between the two.

  Talk to your crazy murder-doctor, answered Selphin. Find out what she knows, then we’ll decide what to do. I’ll take care of the boat and keep lookout.

  Hark had to call the doctor’s name several times before she opened her eyes.

  ‘Hark.’ She blinked, and her eyes seemed to come into focus. ‘You must take a message to the governor, for everyone’s sake. He’s the only one who might be able to stop a live god slaughtering innocent people. I can make it worth your while. I’ve got a notebook and pencil – I’ll write him a letter and tell him that I’m setting you at liberty for the rest of your indenture.’

  Hark gaped at her, knocked off balance. It wasn’t fair of her to dangle a hope like that in front of him.

  ‘I don’t believe you!’ he blurted out. ‘How can I believe anything you say? You would have let the League kill us! You helped them build a god! Why? And why do you suddenly want to stop them? How can I trust you?’

  ‘I told you, I never expected it to be released!’ protested Vyne. ‘As far as I knew, the plan was to keep the construct restrained and mindless forever! We would give it a supply of Undersea water, and feed it materials so it could absorb them, and then trim off new growths. It would be an endless supply of godware, with no need for people to risk their lives in deep-sea salvage subs!’

  ‘That’s all right, then,’ said Hark bitterly. ‘Nobody could object to that, could they? In fact, I can’t imagine why you all hid the project away on a cursed island, and decided to kill anybody who found out about it.’

  Vyne grimaced a little, and not just from the pain. Hark had made his point. She had made hers as well, though. Hark could see why Dr Vyne would be tempted by an infinite supply of the most precious stuff in the Myriad.

  Hark glanced across to Selphin, hoping that she was able to lip-read some of their conversation, but she was not even looking his way. The boat seemed to be demanding all of her attention. He would just have to tell her everything later.

  ‘I didn’t want the governor to find out what we were doing,’ Vyne admitted. ‘I thought he might be angry enough to take my museum away from me. But I failed to realize quite how insane the League were. That only became clear to me last night.

  ‘After you . . . after our last conversation, I spent hours trying to get the construct to animate sustainably. It jerked whenever the reverberator pulsed, then fell back dead, every time. By the early hours, I suspected that there wasn’t enough fear for it to breathe. My suggested solution was that we acquire much bigger tanks of higher quality Undersea water and try again. The captain’s suggestion was that we pack the god into the Abysmal Child and take it down to the Undersea.

  ‘I told him it was a mad idea. The whole point of our plan was to make sure that our god-construct remained safely confined and under our control. At about this moment I realized that this wasn’t the point of their plan at all. They had no intention of farming the god. They wanted to bring it to life and release it in the Undersea. That’s why they had the Abysmal Child waiting in the harbour.’

  ‘Why?’ asked Hark, though he already had some suspicions.

  ‘They think it’s for the good of Myriad.’ Dr Vyne sighed. ‘They think the time of the gods was a golden age, when we Myriddens were great.’ She gave a wan smile. ‘They say we were the monarchs of the seas. They’re terrified of foreign ships, and they think the return of the gods will keep us . . . safe.’

  ‘Safe,’ Hark echoed hollowly.

  ‘The gods may have been vast, terrifying abominations, but at least they were local.’ Vyne gave an incredulous shrug. ‘So . . . the captain and I had a disagreement . . .’

  ‘. . . in which he stabbed you,’ completed Hark.

  ‘Not straight away. I realized that I was alone in a nest of fanatics, so I pretended they’d talked me round. They seemed to believe me, but afterwards they watched me very closely whenever I was near the god-construct. They didn’t stop me wandering near the Abysmal Child, though.’

  Vyne reached into her pocket and pulled out another tuning fork from her collection, slightly smaller than the one in Hark’s pocket.

  ‘I was trying to make a hole in one of the portholes,’ she said. ‘If the sub sank in the harbour, then at least it wouldn’t reach the deeps. Unfortunately, the porthole was rather well designed, with two layers of god-glass tempered differently so that no single note could soften both of them. I developed that technology myself.’ She grimaced. ‘Irony. Anyway, they caught me pushing my hand into the glass.’ She glanced down at her bandages ruefully. ‘So they made a hole in me instead.’

  ‘If we did get a message through to the governor, what could he do?’ asked Hark, trying not to panic.

  ‘He can get his subs and ships ready and armed,’ Vyne said with quiet ferocity. ‘He can prime the cannons on the coasts. If our project does come to life in the Undersea and rise up, he can be ready to blow it to pieces before it gets too large.

  ‘Otherwise, it will get large, Hark. Quite quickly, I’m afraid.’ She sighed and looked embarrassed.

  ‘You might say I built it to be hungry,’ she continued. ‘I wanted it to be an abundant source of godware, so I augmented everything that would allow it to eat, absorb and grow. If we let it start devouring ships and subs, it will soon be too big and strong to face. But right now, I know its weaknesses. If I can warn the governor, he can destroy it as soon as it rises!’

  For a moment Hark’s spirits were buoyed up by her words, but then they sank again.

  ‘That won’t happen,’ he said. ‘It won’t leave the Undersea till it’s bigger. Much bigger.’

  ‘I think the Leaguers will want their god on the surface as soon as possible,’ said Vyne.

  ‘That won’t matter!’ Hark’s conversations with Quest rushed back into his mind. ‘If the Leaguers animate a god, it won’t do what they say! It’ll be hungry, and it’ll be next to a big, crunchy submarine full of stupid people. So it’ll eat them all, and roam around the deep until it’s digested them and everything else it can find. By the time it rises up, it’ll be completely different, and huge.’

  He remembered Quest’s descriptions of the greatest gods, too vast to be reasoned with, blindly following their hunger and instincts. Now there was not even a priesthood ready to appease or distract the god and stop it sliding up on to land, devouring all in its path.

  ‘It’ll be unstoppable,’ he whispered. ‘Once there’s a living god loose in the Undersea, everything’s hopeless. We need to stop the League before they can release it!’

  ‘There’s simply not enough time!’ exclaimed Vyne miserably. ‘If the governor’s subs were closer, it might be possible. The Abysmal Child’s slow, and I have some idea which route she’s taking. The captain was talking of heading to the Embrace. The shortest route there is past the south end of the Entreaty Barrier. After that . . .’

  ‘After that there’s no way to tell which way they’ve gone,’ Hark finished despondently, and was surprised to see Vyne give a small, lopsided smile.

  ‘Ah,’ she said. ‘Well. Their sub might be leaving a few traces behind it. My tuning fork didn’t make a hole in the porthole, but I may have accidentally melted the god-glass cover of their front aurora lamp.’

  Aurora lamps were expensive cutting-edge technology, using fluids from phosphorescent deep-sea jellyfish, combined with a trace of luminous ichor from the glands of certain gods.

  ‘If I’m right, then that lamp is
leaking luminescence,’ said Vyne. ‘There might even be a trail.’

  It was the first glimmer of hope Hark had felt since the Abysmal Child had descended. It was so fragile that he was almost afraid of it. Hark could imagine the luminous trail left in the water, floating wisps of glow unravelled by every fin-flick, every surge in the swell . . .

  ‘How long would a trail like that last?’ he asked.

  ‘Not long enough,’ said Vyne with miserable bluntness. ‘It’ll take us hours to reach Lady’s Crave. Even if the governor believed us straight away, his subs wouldn’t be here before evening.’

  ‘There is one sub close enough, isn’t there?’ Hark said slowly. ‘A really fast sub . . .’

  Vyne was already shaking her head.

  ‘The Butterfly was exhausting to pilot, even when I was in full health! And now . . . Hark, I don’t know how long I’ll be conscious. I’m really rather cold. I’m not a medical doctor, as I’ve told you, but I know that’s not a good sign.’

  ‘I’ll come in the sub with you,’ said Hark. ‘I’ll help you.’ The words were out before he even had time to think.

  ‘That’s an unhinged idea!’ exclaimed Vyne. ‘Look, I’d probably pass out or . . . die . . . before we were even out of the cave! What would you do then?’

  ‘I’ve watched you drive her!’ Hark insisted, though he wasn’t sure how much this would help. ‘Anyway, what choice do we have? You’ll just have to . . . not die!’

  ‘Always my preferred option,’ murmured Vyne. She did not, however, look hopeful.

  CHAPTER 36

  Selphin stood at the front of the boat, the sea spray chilling her to the bone. She was very aware of the chop and thrash of the waves on either side. Every time the boat flew lightly off one wave and hit the next, she felt the impact like a fist in her gut. Once upon a time she would not even have noticed it.

  She wasn’t fooled by the waves – she knew what they were under their gleaming skin. She didn’t just remember her nightmare swim from Wildman’s Hammer, she could still feel it. She could feel the ruthless drag of the water, as wave after wave reared up to strike her gasping face, blocking her view on all sides. She could feel each icy crash that drove her under, so that she couldn’t see, couldn’t breathe, could only thrash while unseen rocks raked her limbs.