Full Fathom Five (41 page)

“Shit,” she said. “That stings.” She shook her arm as if burned; light dripped from her fingers.

“Teo.”

“See? It’s not so hard to lose the ’Ms.’” She nodded to Kai, and to Izza and Mako behind her. “Glad you made it. I didn’t expect them to grab you, too.”

“Teo, what the hell did you just do?”

“Some day maybe I’ll tell you about Quechal priests and the scars they leave. Trust me, it hurts more than it looks.” Behind her, the fallen Penitents struggled to stand, prisoners screaming as the cracks in their shells healed. Up the ridge, searchlight eyes woke and scanned the beach. “We need to leave.” She bit her lip. “Can you swim?”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s a simple question.”

“I want answers.”

“Me first. Can. You. Swim.”

“Yes.”

“Okay then. You, kid. You swim?” Kai glanced back to see Izza nod, once. She was looking at Teo with a mixture of awe and fear. Mostly awe. “Old guy. Damn.”

“Don’t worry about me.”

“Hells we won’t, Mako. Those things are coming after us.”

“I do not fear them.”

“You should. You were afraid of hers a second ago.” Kai pointed toward the statue Teo had broken.

“I was afraid for you. Not of them. I know these things, and they know me. I’ll meet you back at the Rest, if you make it. Go.”

“Okay,” Teo said. “Fine.”

“We’re not leaving him!”

“I am. And so are you, unless you want to explain what just happened to those guys up the ridge.”

“Mako, I—”

He shook his head. “Kai. Go.”

“Follow me. Close as you can.” And before Kai could object, the Quechal woman ran into the ocean. Waves broke around her ankles, knees, hips, and falling forward she swam.

Penitent gazes swept the night; some pinned Kai where she stood slack jawed. She might have remained there forever had Izza not pulled her after, into the waves. Once she took her first step, the second was easy.

“You stink at running away,” Izza called over her shoulder, laughing almost, or else hysterical.

Kai fell into waves and water.

After the initial wet shock, the sea took her in. She swam, following Teo’s head as the Quechal woman slipped through and disappeared behind ocean swells. Izza cut the water like a knife, the kind of speed Kai’d had when young. Kai dipped below the surface. Salt stung her eyes, and the Penitents’ light lit the sea blue and green, chiseled silhouettes of coral and darting fish from the black. A hundred yards from shore Kai rolled onto her back, risking a moment’s lost sight of Teo for a glimpse of the beach. Penitents swarmed there, and in their midst Mako stood, alone and as yet unharmed.

How had he freed her? That burst of unearthly light, of overwhelming force, was no Craft Kai knew.

She rolled onto her stomach, and after a panicked moment saw Teo and Izza. During her retrospection they had pulled ahead, and she’d drifted west. She adjusted course to follow.

Night swimming resembled daytime swimming as little as an ocean resembled a pool. Daytime, you knew where you were, relative to where you had been. After sunset, the coast was a confusion of light, and only texture separated the dark above from the dark below.

They drew even with the docks and factories of East Claw, and pressed south. Kavekana receded. Ahead, Kai saw only the skyspires miles distant. Surely Teo didn’t plan to swim all the way there. Long before they reached the spires, they’d pass the harbor wards, and then nothing would stand between them and the ocean’s hunger.

“Familiarity breeds contempt” was a saying Kai’d heard at school. The saying did not apply to Archipelagic ocean. In waters beset by star kraken, sentient storms, and sunken cities where alien monsters lived, familiarity bred terror and, failing that, death.

When Kai next looked for Teo, she was gone.

A second before, the woman had been swimming steadily ahead of them. The next, she vanished.

Kai knew better than to panic. Aching, she still wasted strength treading high in the water for a better view. She saw nothing: only Izza pressing doggedly forward. She called the girl’s name, softly: sound carried over the open ocean, and she did not know who else might be listening.

Izza turned toward Kai. Her eyes widened—and she too disappeared.

Kai swam alone, far from shore.

“Izza!” She made for the spot where the girl had sunk. She heard her father’s voice chant the litany of beasts that preyed on unwary sailors, and the remedy for each. Kraken be craven, shark-teeth blunt, gallowglass sail clear, scissorfish hunt. Even as a kid she’d thought the rhyme’s suggestions impractical. Oh, yes, when the shark comes for me, I’ll blunt its teeth.

She did not, until that moment, realize the rhyme’s purpose: not to advise, but to fill the mind in the face of danger. Chants might not deter sea monsters, but they were marginally better than the alternative litanies Kai would have composed of all the ways she was about to die.

She thought she had reached the spot where Izza sank; she saw nothing, felt no leviathan underwater. She drew a deep breath, and dove.

She opened her eyes. Water lay beneath, only water, down to the mirror coral–crusted sea floor a hundred feet below. No Izza. No Teo. No sharks or gallowglasses. The water carried sound: clicks of tiny shrimp, ship wakes and propellers, and beneath all that, far away, so deep she heard it more in her blood than in her ears, music. Long notes rose and fell, glissando and trill. Praise song.

Salt water burned her eyes. She sought, and did not find.

She raised her arms above her head and swept them down to her sides like wings.

As she rose, she scanned the sea floor one last time for her—what were they? Not quite friends. Izza, maybe, though they’d barely known each other. And Teo, she’d never known Teo at all.

She’d almost breached the surface when something struck her in the head.

Twisting in the water she choked and clawed at her assailant. In the confusion she saw nothing, but her fingernails scraped a slick curved surface. She kicked and pummeled this thing she could not see. One out-flung hand breached the water’s surface, and struck something long and thin and hard. She grabbed it and pulled down, hard as she could, but instead of pulling whatever it was into the water she pulled herself up, and rose sputtering and cursing into air.

She held an oar draped over the side of a black shallow-drafted boat. Teo and Izza braced the oar’s other end. Izza wheezed, bent over. The oar must have caught her in the stomach as Kai thrashed.

“What the hells,” was all she could say at first.

“Here.” Teo held out her left hand. The light had mostly faded from her skin, but the scars still glowed. She saw Kai’s expression, and offered her other hand instead. “It’s not much, but it’s all I have.”

Kai pulled herself into the boat. Water slopped from her shirt and pants and thin sandals. She’d lost her jacket, shrugged it off for speed. Sea breeze on wet skin set her shivering. She sat and hugged herself and breathed.

The boat was Kavekana make, shallow draft for crossing shoals and sandbanks, a vessel for short distances. An anchor chain ran over the side, though she’d seen no anchor in the water. Teo sat on the bench. Izza leaned against the stern, watching them both. All shivered.

“This boat wasn’t here before,” Kai said.

Teo pointed to the prow. A charm hung there, a shark’s tooth marked with foreign glyphwork, glowing green.

“That means nothing to me.”

“Keeps people from noticing the boat. For a little while.”

“Cool, right?” Izza said.

“Who are you really?”

Teo shrugged. “Does it matter?”

“You got us both stuffed inside Penitents. You owe me.”

“I’ve been thinking about that,” Teo said. “Had a long time to think inside that thing. I thought at first you might have been punished because of me. But then I realized how hard you tried to get me into the mountain, into the pool. Profit wasn’t your goal: you brushed me off twice, easy. When your boss showed up, he treated me like a routine nuisance, but you—you were special. It’s a bit excessive to lock a prospective client inside a Penitent without trial, isn’t it?”

“But you’re not a client, are you? You never were.”

“No,” she said at last.

57

In the boat’s stern, Izza cleared her throat. Both women turned to face her. “I don’t know you,” she said.

Kai’s laugh was dry and sharp. “Izza, permit me to introduce Teo Batan, a client of mine. Or she pretended to be a client at least. Come to think of it, I’m not even sure that’s her real name.”

The Quechal woman shrugged, resigned. “I didn’t lie about that. Or my credentials. The Two Serpents Group did send me to open an account on your island. I just had another goal I didn’t mention.” She held out her hand to Izza.

Her palm was soft, but the handshake strong.

“Nice to meet you, Teo,” Izza said. “I’m Izza. So, you’re a thief?”

One corner of Teo’s mouth turned up in a slight smile. “I wish. If I was, I’d be better at all this. No, I’m just a saleslady who got in over her head.”

“Look,” Kai said. “I don’t know what your deal is, and I don’t care. I need to get back to shore.”

“Then you’re welcome to swim.” Teo pointed over the side of the boat. “If you can make it that far.”

“I’m a strong swimmer. Even if I haven’t been training for this like you have.”

“Oh, and don’t forget the Penitents waiting for you when you hit shore. Do you really want to go back to that? I had protection.” Teo patted her arm, the still-burning scars. “And I can still hear them in my head. Like every bad fight I ever had with my grandmother at once. Gods and demons. Why stay?”

“That’s my home.”

“It’s not been kind to you today, as far as I can tell.”

“Homes aren’t always kind,” Kai said, and Teo nodded.

“I guess not.”

“What happened?” Izza asked. “Kai, how did they catch you?”

“They didn’t catch me. They caught her.”

“I don’t think that’s fair,” Teo said. “I dropped a bracelet into the pool on accident, and your people stuffed me in a brainwash golem for my trouble. I think whatever their problem was, it had more to do with you than me.”

“That wasn’t an ordinary bracelet,” Kai said. “It flowed through my fingers. And if your purpose here is so innocent, why do you have an invisible getaway boat?”

“I never said it was an ordinary bracelet.” Teo didn’t meet Izza’s eyes, or Kai’s, either. She hunched over on the rowing bench. “And I never said my purpose here was innocent, either. Izza wasn’t far off the mark. I’m the scout, not the second-story man. Or woman, as the case may be.”

“You were trying to steal from the mountain.” Izza heard a note of wonder in her own voice.

“Is it still stealing when you’re working for a goddess?”

“Yes.”

“Fair enough,” Teo said. “Stealing it is.”

“I thought you worked for Deathless Kings,” Kai said. “You and your Two Serpents Group. Heal the world one crisis at a time.”

“That’s the idea. Most of what I told you was true. We are trying to expand abroad. But our sponsors, all those Deathless Kings, they made their names with deicide. Understandably hard to convince Old World gods that we come in peace. So I went to Alt Coulumb, where gods and Craftsmen get along okay.”

“Seril,” Kai said. “The moon goddess.”

“Right. The one who died and got better. One of our main sponsors killed her, back in the God Wars. We figured if she signed on with us, that would get a lot of attention. I made the pitch, and I’m good at my job, current circumstances notwithstanding. The idea intrigued her. But she made a counter-offer.”

Teo stopped, as if looking for the right words. Kai seemed to know this part of the story already—or to be reading it off notes somewhere up in the stars.

“You’re here for the goddess-shard.”

“Basically.”

Izza shook her head. “I’m lost.”

Teo inhaled, and let out the breath slowly. “Look, I only know what I was told. This goddess, Seril, died back during the God Wars—mostly. Her city thought she was dead, anyway. They hired Craftsmen to come resurrect her, only during the resurrection process some of her body went missing. They think Denovo—one of the Craftsmen—they think he carved off a bit to study. Fragments of memory, that sort of thing. But where he stored it, they didn’t know.”

“Jace—my boss, you remember—”

“Turtleneck, bad attitude.” Teo nodded.

“He mentioned that Seril’s priests kept bothering the Order to return a stolen piece of her. But they couldn’t prove we had it in the first place.”

“Margot’s poems were the proof,” Teo said. “Not exactly admissible in a Court of Craft.”

Izza blinked. “Does everyone on the planet know Edmond Margot’s poetry?”

“Just the gargoyles,” Teo said.

“What?”

“Seril’s creatures. Living stone police officers, sort of. Turns out they’re poetry freaks. Songs sung at midnight, odes carved on the sides of buildings, that sort of stuff. They read journals, chapbooks, everything. And they found poems by this bard from a major god haven, which were written in their own style. Gargoyle poetry. They figured the stolen pieces of their goddess must be here—Seril’s influence seeping out into the world.”

“It isn’t Seril,” Kai said.

“Margot’s poems came from the Blue Lady,” Izza added. “Not some half-dead moon goddess.”

“I don’t know anything about a Blue Lady.”

“It’s possible we’re both right,” Kai said. “If a pierce of Seril’s in the pool, then maybe the Blue Lady … maybe the idols found it. Learned her language. Absorbed her memories. Discovered how to reach out into the world. That would explain why they only made contact a couple years ago, when Seril returned.”

“The poems were gargoyle poetry, which meant the shard was here. In your pool, safe outside the world.” Teo turned to Kai. “Seril wanted me to plant a beacon her people could use to break in and steal the shard back. That was the bracelet. I seem to have messed up some master scheme of yours, and for that I’m sorry, but this is the end of the line for me. My duty’s done. Now I wait for my ride, and leave.”