Full Fathom Five (2 page)

The next time the idol clawed in her direction, Kai caught one of the lightning-wires that formed her wrist.

Her shoulders jerked in their sockets as the idol’s arm dragged her along. She rushed through empty space, and its hidden edges tore her flesh and mind. Around her in the black, paper-thin mouths peeled back lips to bare white fangs. Hungry ghosts, ready to descend. The idol’s death called scavengers to whom a soul wrapped in flesh was a chocolate wrapped in foil.

Kai could not get Seven Alpha’s attention this way. She was a gnat, a flitting nuisance. She needed perspective.

She held a piece of the idol’s wrist, but that piece moved with the rest of the wrist, and so by holding it she held the wrist itself, and if she held the wrist her hand had to be large enough to hold it, and if her hand was large, then, since the rest of her felt proportional to her hand, the rest of her was also large. Mountainous in fact, and strong, but still struggling against the whirlwind of Seven Alpha’s death.

Never, ever (Kai’s mother’d told her when she was four and emerged dripping from the water with a half-drowned boy in tow) grab a drowning man. Death’s approach lends strength even to the weak. A drowner, crazed, will pull you with him. Hold back, find a rope or plank or life preserver, and let the poor bastard save himself. Herself. Itself.

Seven Alpha kicked Kai in the side and she felt her rib break. The idol cut her, and burned her, as she pulled her into an embrace. Up so close, the idol’s face was all geometry, perfect planes and curves. She spasmed in Kai’s grip, transformed to fire, to thorn, to stinging jellyfish, to billion-armed insect, and back to woman, final form no less painful than the rest. Goat legs sliced Kai’s calves and thighs to the bone. Blood seeped into the water.

The idol buried her teeth in Kai’s left shoulder. A scream bubbled from Kai’s mouth and bloomed, rising. The god-realm’s darkness rushed into her lungs. She gagged and felt her body start to die.

The idol withdrew her teeth and pressed Kai in flaying embrace as they fell. Worlds’ weight crushed them together.

No time to waste. Kai kissed Seven Alpha on the mouth.

Cold tangled her tongue. Hunger caught her. Desperation pulled at her soul. She let it. She gave, and gave, and sank. Her soul surged into the idol’s mouth, torn from her by need, an insignificant scrap against Seven Alpha’s vast hunger.

The idol took Kai’s soul, and pulled for more, but there was no more to give. They fell, dying, bound by flesh and spirit. The idol sagged. Anger gave way to loss.

Perfect.

Kai crafted a contract in her mind, and offered it to the idol. A simple trade: a seven million thaum line of credit, enough to save them both for a while, provided Seven Alpha return as collateral her only asset, Kai’s stolen soul. Jace may have forbidden Mara from using the Order’s funds to save this idol, but he’d said no such thing to Kai.

Seven Alpha was about to die. She had no choice but to accept, and save them both. Simple self-preservation.

Any minute now.

Thought came slow to Kai at such depth, weighed down by dream and deep time. They’d fallen so far even acceptance might not save them. Too late, too deep. Stupid. Her spinning mind shuddered, slowed, and soon would stop.

Her spinning mind shuddered, slowed, and soon

Her spinning mind shuddered,

Her spinning mind

Her

Yes.

A key turned in the lock of the world.

Kai’s eyes snapped open. Power flooded from her, and her soul flowed back along the contract that now bound her to the idol. Light broke through her skin. Seven Alpha spread her wings, pulled from their kiss, smiled a spring morning. The idol’s tarnished heart began to heal, to shine.

Kai shook with joy.

Then everything went wrong.

Arms seized Kai from behind: human arms, fleshy, strong. They pried her from the idol, pulled her back and up. Seven Alpha tried to follow, but slow, too weak to resist the not-water’s weight. Kai fought, but the arms did not give. She knew her betrayers by their grip. Mara, slender and corded with muscle, fingernails biting Kai’s wrists. Gavin, an immense weight of skin and meat. Jace, too, their master. He was the one who held her neck.

“Get off!” She yanked at their fingers. “Let me go!” They did not.

Seven Alpha fell as Kai rose. The contract that bound them stretched, frayed. Star eyes beneath curling horns stared up at Kai in dumb hope. The idol did not begin to scream until the cord snapped, and water closed in to crush her.

Fighting and clawing and biting and bleeding, Kai heard sense inside that shriek. There were words amid the fury and the fear, senseless and mad, impossible words, but words nonetheless.

Howl, bound world,
Kai heard as the idol fell, as she died.

Kai cried out in answer, in frustration, in rage. Still they pulled her up, as Seven Alpha dwindled to a distant ship on fire, a cinder, a spark, a star, then gone.

Kai’s friends dragged her to shore. She screamed them back and lay curled on sharp stone, bleeding, coughing, vomiting dreams. Warmth returned, the shadow bound once again to its wall. Traitor hands wrapped her in a sheet and lifted. Jace held her. His chest pressed through the sheet against the wound the idol’s teeth left in her shoulder. Bloody fabric rasped over her wrecked skin.

She tried to tear free, but lacked the strength. They carried her from the pool: glass-flat, undisturbed by the idol’s death.

“It’s okay.” Jace’s voice, strong, level, sad, so unlike her father’s. “It’s okay. You’re safe.”

“No,” was all she said.

2

Izza went to the Godsdistrikt to buy incense for the funeral. She found the shopkeep snoring.

The old man slept with bare warty feet propped up on the glass counter of his coffin-sized store. His head lolled back against his chair. One long wiry arm swung loose from his shoulder, and at the bottom of each swing the tip of his middle finger grazed the ground.

He wasn’t losing customers. The distrikt dreamed through the day around him. Foreign sailors and dockworkers stayed away ’til sunset, and no Kavekana native would risk trafficking with gods in broad daylight. Still not prudent, though, to nap.

Izza slipped through the shop’s front door without ringing the bell. The man’s mouth slacked open as the door shut. His snort covered the hinge’s creak. Izza waited, awash in smoke and scent. Her fingers itched. She could steal half his stock and leave before he noticed. Could swipe the dreams right out of his head.

She could. She didn’t.

That was the point.

She walked to the counter and rang the bell. The old man snarled awake and staggered to his feet, machete suddenly in one hand. Izza strangled her urge to flee. Her reflection stared back from the machete blade, and from the glass incense cases. Ripped and dirty clothes, lean and hungry face.

Neither of them spoke. The old man’s chest heaved. Heavy gray brows cast shadows across his bloodshot eyes. Incense smoke weighed on the sweltering air of a Kavekana afternoon.

“I’m here to buy,” she said.

“Get out, kid. Your kind don’t buy.”

She wondered whether he meant street kids, or Gleblanders, or refugees, or poor people in general. All of the above, most likely.

She reached for her pocket.

“I’ll cut your hand off and call the watch.” The machete trembled. “You want to test me?”

“I’m here to buy incense.” She pronounced the words with care, suppressing her accent as much as she could. “I want to show you my coin.”

He neither moved nor spoke.

She took from her pocket a thin beaten disk of silver, with an Iskari squid god stamped on one face and a two-spired tower on the other. She sank a piece of her soul into the coin, twenty thaums and some change, and tried to stop herself from swaying as the shop grayed out. Running low. Running dangerous.

The old man’s eyes glittered. He set the machete down. “What do you want?”

“Something nice,” she said. Forming words took effort. She didn’t like spending soul, not straight like this. She didn’t have much to go around.

“Twenty thaums gets you nice.” His head bobbed. His neck was freakishly long, and spotted like a giraffe’s. “What kind of nice? We have Dhisthran sandalwood here all the way from the other side of the Tablelands, send men into rutting elephants’ heat.” Her face must have twisted, because he laughed, creaking like a rusty dock chain. “Smells for all occasions. Murder, sacrifice, passion, betrayal.”

“I need incense,” she said, “to mourn a god.”

He lowered his chin and watched her through the bushes of his eyebrows. This was why Izza’d come herself, rather than sending one of the other kids: enough refugees had flowed through from the Gleb at one point or another that the request might not seem strange.

“Old festival coming up?” he asked. “Some god dead in your wars?”

“Give me the stuff.” She didn’t want her voice to shake. It shook all the same.

“Which one are you mourning? Or would I know its name?”

“A god that doesn’t talk much.”

He shrugged, and stepped into the back room, taking the machete with him. Thin trails of smoke rose from smoldering joss sticks, twisting in and out of light. Izza’s head hurt from the soul loss. She hoped that was the reason. Maybe the old man had drugged her with smoke. He might be out the back door now, running to call for the watch, for the Penitents. She had done nothing wrong, but that didn’t matter much.

She stayed. She needed this.

The man returned, machete in one hand and a slender black wood box in the other. He set the box on the counter and slid it across to her.

She reached for the box, but he placed the machete edge against the lid. His eyes were a lighter brown than Izza’s own.

She laid her coin on the glass beside. He snatched the coin, walked it down spidery fingers, up again, kissed the milled edge, then dropped it into one of his four shirt pockets.

She grabbed the box, but he pressed down with the machete and the blade bit into the wooden lid.

“How old are you?” he said.

“Fifteen.”

“Old for a street kid.”

“Old enough to take what I pay for.”

“You should be careful,” he said. “The Penitents start grabbing kids about your age.”

“I know.” If she could have burned him with her gaze, he would have been dust already.

He lifted the machete. She tucked the box into her belt, and ran into the street, trailing doorbell’s jingle and wafting incense and the old man’s laughter.

Soul-loss visions haunted her down the block. Recessed windows stared from plaster walls, the eye sockets of sun-blanched skulls. Bright sun glinted off broken glass in gutters. The alley stank of rotting mangoes, stale water, and sour wine. Her headache wouldn’t leave. She’d almost died of thirst once, in the desert, after her home burned, before she jumped ship for the Archipelago. Soul loss felt the same, only you couldn’t cure it by drinking.

She was so far gone that her shaking hands woke the man whose purse she slit minutes later, an Alt Coulumbite sailor drowsing on a couch outside a Godsdistrikt gambling den, long pipe propped on his stomach. He caught for her wrist, but she ducked, faster strung out than most sober, grabbed a handful of coins, and ran down the alley. Stumbling to his feet he called for the watch, for the Penitents, for his god’s curse upon her. Fortunately, neither watch nor Penitents were near, and foreign gods weren’t allowed on Kavekana Island.

She ran until she collapsed, beside a fountain in a palm-shaded courtyard, and drank the dregs of soul from the sailor’s coins. White returned to the walls of surrounding buildings, red to their tile roofs, joy to the fountain’s babble, heat to the air, and life to her body.

A single dull gray pearl hung from a worn leather string around her neck. She clutched it tight and waited for the pain to pass.

She wasn’t whole. She did not remember what whole felt like anymore. But she felt better, at least.

*   *   *

Izza met Nick at the corner of Epiphyte and Southern an hour and a half before sunset. He crouched by a lamppost, thin, bent, eyes downcast, scribbling in dust. He looked up when he heard her coming, and did not wave, or smile, or even speak. She often forgot he was younger than her. Keeping quiet made him seem smart.

Together they turned north, and walked up Southern toward the mountain.

They soon climbed out of the city. The bay emerged behind them, peeking over red roofs, and before long they could see the two Claws, East and West, curved peninsulas stretching south to shelter the harbor. They walked fast in the shade of overhanging palms, past large green lawns and sprawling houses. The mountain slopes weren’t priests’ sole property anymore, but real estate was expensive here, and the watch quick to sweep up loiterers.

When houses gave way to jungle, Izza and Nick left the road. Izza stepped lightly through the undergrowth, and only where she could see soil. Trapvines and poison ferns, ghosts and death’s head centipedes lived in these woods. Nick moved slowly through the foliage, and made more sound than Izza liked. Any sound was more sound than Izza liked. She walked softly until the trees gave way to solid rock, and the mountain’s roots rose from the earth.

She scampered up the stone, and held out a hand to help Nick after.

“I wish,” he said, breathing hard, as they climbed, “we could do this back at the docks.”

“The mountain’s holy,” she said. “There were gods here once, even if the priests build idols now. Where else should we hold the Lady’s funeral?”

He didn’t answer. He didn’t know what they were doing. Neither did she. No one had ever taught them how to pray: they made most of it up as they went along.

They cleared the trees and spidered up the scree, exposed to sky and sun. Izza fought her urge to hide. The mountain, Kavekana’ai, was a holy place, but it wasn’t hers. For all she knew the Order’s priests could feel them crawling flealike on the cliff face. Or a Penitent might see them exposed against the stone: their jeweled eyes were sharp as eagles’, and hungrier.