Full Fathom Five (39 page)

Izza approached down the beach, and listened. “I don’t want to show things as they are,” the kid said. “Kid” also wasn’t right—he was at least ten years older than Izza. But he sounded like a kid. “What’s the use of showing them how they are if we don’t talk about how they could be?”

The old man laughed, a crumbling sound. “Don’t be an ass. I don’t blame you for writing damn fool love poetry. I said you shouldn’t write about riding horses unless you’ve ridden a horse. Especially not if you want to write lines like ’surging bone-white sides / and dew-sparked flanks at dawn.’”

“Would you tell Cathbart not to write about colors because he was blind? Or not to write about angelic battles because he’d never fought in one.”

“Cathbart fought in the Tyranomachia, back in Camlaan, and angels never made so grand a war. And he’d seen for forty years before he lost his sight. You think we forget how these work once we lose the use of them?” The old man’s hand shot out faster than Izza could follow or the poet could flinch, and rapped the kid’s skull.

“Oh. No. Gods, Mako. That’s not—”

He bared broken yellow teeth. “I’m telling you this for your own good.”

“You’ll let me perform?”

“Perform on the street if you want, I can’t stop you. And if you show up to the open stage, Eve won’t turn you away. But go up there with these and you’ll deserve all the rotten fruit they throw.”

The kid closed his book. “I need to think.”

“Go. Think. Tell me when you’re ready to
do
. Or, better yet, don’t tell me. Do first, and I’ll hear.”

The kid stormed off without sparing Izza a glance. The old man shrugged, and turned back to the surf. Izza crept closer.

“Not a bad poem,” Mako said to no one in particular. “All things considered. Needs a few more passes, tighter imagery. Not to mention he thinks he’s the only person on the planet ever thought of alliteration. But if we threw out every kid who thought they were god’s gift to whatever, we’d be short geniuses in a decade or so. So what are we to do?”

Izza decided to go. She’d hoped this Mako might be a fierce operator, but here he leaned on his stick, talking to waves.

She’d send him a note, explaining what happened. Then leave the island with Cat, if Cat would take her.

“I said, what are we to do?”

Mako was looking at her.

“Ah,” she said. “I don’t know.”

“What’d you sneak up on us for, if not to listen? Why listen, if not to form an opinion?”

She swallowed hard. “I. Um. You’re Mako.”

He nodded, once, and smiled. They weren’t shark’s teeth, but some were sharp, and others gone. Hard hands gripped the stick that propped him up. His fingers had been broken several times, and healed crooked.

She recognized him, then, a feeling like being dropped from a height into a cold pool. “I’ve seen you before.”

“I get around,” he said. “I try to know what happens in my bar. Well.” He jerked a jagged thumb back toward the Rest. “Eve’s bar, but I live there and it’s mine by residence at least. And when someone stalks my poets, I try to learn their name.”

“I’m Izza,” she said. The words slipped out before she could catch them.

“Of course you are,” he said. “You don’t have anything to fear from me.”

“You’re a friend of Kai’s.”

“Few enough of us. You know her?”

“I—she works for me.”

Mako laughed, an unpleasant phlegmy sound.

“Kai said I should come find you. If something went wrong.” Not precisely the truth, but he did not need to know that.

“And something’s gone wrong,” he said. “You want a drink?”

He swung his stick behind him, and it struck the Penitent’s leg with a dull thud.

Izza took his meaning, said, “Sure,” and followed him to the bar. On the beach, the old man moved like cats moved in dark rooms, feeling his way. When they reached the Rest’s hard stone floor, he stepped quick, winding between busboys and waiters. Izza followed.

A bartender in a low-cut blouse passed Mako a glass of amber liquid. She glanced a question at Izza, who shook her head.

Mako sipped his drink. “What’s happened to Kai that you didn’t want to tell me?”

“I want to tell you.”

“But you tried to sneak away before I noticed you. So you want to tell me, but you also don’t. What is it?”

The bartender swished off to cut lemons for the night’s drinks. Chair legs clacked and tables ground against the floor. Ghostlamps in the rafters sent follow spots wheeling over the empty house. The sun began to set. Mako drank liquid gold.

“Kai’s been taken by a Penitent.”

Mako choked. He set the glass on the bar, and ran one finger around the lip.

“Tell me.”

She tried to speak, but couldn’t. She’d sworn too many vows of silence, and broken them too often in the last few days.

“Assume,” Mako said, “for the sake of argument, that I know about the Blue Lady. And the Green Man, and all the rest.”

“What?”

“I may be blind. But I’m not deaf. Whatever else one might think of poets, they are excellent barometers for metaphysical shenanigans. Not as good as proper prophets, but these are fallen times.”

“Who told you?”

“Nobody. And I’ve told nobody. Wasn’t my place. The wars are done. I’m a private citizen. Margot himself barely understood what he was. I take it you know he died.”

“I was there,” she said. She hadn’t planned to, but the words slipped out, as if she were talking to empty air or to an ancient friend rather than someone she’d known for five minutes and didn’t trust.

“I’m sorry,” the old man said. “Now. Tell me about Kai. Quickly.”

“She thought the gods, my gods I mean, the ones that died—that they might have something to do with the Order. With Kavekana’ai. So she went in to investigate. She came out inside a Penitent. Screaming.”

“What will you do now?”

“I don’t know.”

“Do you want a drink?”

Yes. “No.”

“Fair.”

“If the Penitents took her,” Izza said, “they’ll know everything she knows soon. Which means I need to get out of here. On the one hand. But.” The next part took some preparation. “She trusted me when she had no reason to. She tried to help, and she ended up inside one of those things. I can’t leave her.”

Mako laughed as if she’d said something funny. “You’re young. Maybe this is the day you learn that some debts can’t be paid.”

She’d worn out inside herself already, talking. This last scrape burned, and she hated him for it. “Look. I don’t know you. I don’t know if Kai’s your friend, or your student, or your pet project, or whatever. I’d save her if I could, but I can’t. And I won’t sit here at a bar and drink self-pity until this world looks like the best possible. I won’t accept this. That kid on the beach might be an idiot, but at least he knows the way life is isn’t the way it ought to be.”

Mako stayed bent by the bar, an echo of something old and vicious and set in its ways.

She was about to leave when he spoke. Before, his voice had sounded as if filtered through cobwebs and dust and layers of mud. All that remained, and more: He had grown new depths, or accepted old ones. “Can you find her?”

“Yes.”

“Show me.”

55

The first stars shone at sunset. As blue gave way to black their comrades joined them, mockingly bright. Skyspires on the horizon ate starlight and moonlight and sea reflections alike.

Cool wind blew off the water.

Penitents watched, and waited.

Decades past, their master had left Kavekana for the God Wars, traveling with his sisters and the Archipelago’s finest men. Bound west to war, they stopped at every island, held tournaments, chose the best and brightest to join their number. They sang as they paddled, one man choosing a melody and others joining in as the fleet became a choir. They rowed to war, warrior-poets, sailors, and scholars. One day they would return, bearing riches won in hidden battles across and beneath the earth. A crown of light would ring Kavekana’ai. The world would break and change.

Meanwhile the Penitents stood watch, and kept faith. This was Kavekana’s duty, the duty of the whole Archipelago—but weak flesh forgot its promises. No matter. Stone endured. Stone watched. Stone reminded.

And if reminders failed, stone would punish.

*   *   *

“You sure this is the way?”

“Yes,” Izza said. “I can feel it.”

“I can feel my legs about to give.”

Near the tip of West Claw, stores and parks and boulevards ceased. Tall iron fences replaced them, guarding private property. Mansions stood here, owned by Old World magnates and New World entrepreneurs, inhabited one week a year if not less and warded so intensely even Craftless Izza could see them. She wondered if Mako had to close his eyes to see.

She decided not to ask.

All this private property complicated their pursuit of Kai. Rather than circle around the beach, Izza led the old man uphill to the fields below Penitent Ridge. No estates here. Maybe the screams made even Deathless Kings nervous.

She crept from moonshadow to moonshadow, and tried not to look up at the Penitents silhouetted against the night, matte black save for their gemstone eyes. “Hurry.” She’d taken this path before, trying to escape a gang of local kids—what it was she stole she’d forgotten, a knife or a favorite skipping stone—but that time she’d been able to run.

“Why?” Mako’s breath whistled through his throat and teeth. He held her hand; his skin was dry and loose, his bones thin twigs beneath. He stumbled, and she caught him, but when she tried to pull him forward he didn’t follow.

“Every minute we waste is one more that thing has to work.”

“It’s already worked.” The old man stayed curled over. A wail drifted down the green slope from Penitent Ridge, and he flinched. “People break differently than you think. It’s not that you hurt someone enough and one moment they snap. It happens by degrees. Small accommodations. Insinuations. She’s moving now, from shade to shade.”

“What can we do?”

“Little. This is her fight.”

“I thought you could help her. Get her out.”

“Maybe,” he said. “I know tricks. One or two, from way back. I’ve never tried them. They might not work.”

“Then why are we even doing this?”

“Because a girl came into my place of business and accused me of not caring for a woman I’ve known since she could barely sneak out of her mother’s house. The question is, what are you doing here?”

“I.” She said the word, but didn’t have anything to say after it. The wail stopped. Maybe the Penitent ran out of breath, or maybe he’d realized there was no point screaming. “Come on.”

She tugged his hand, and he followed.

*   *   *

Kai hung in star-spackled and surf-washed night.

She was a ghost lost in the dream corridors of her own mind. She watched the water. Any moment, Makawe would arrive. Any moment, the sky would open and gods sweep her up to glory. Any moment, the world would change.

She expected this, because expectation was expected of her. Morality was easy to impose in the face of eschaton.

Trapped inside this expectation, she fought her losing war.

She saw everything, and nothing. She heard surf and sea wind and the beat of flying shorebirds’ wings, and footsteps approaching in the distance, though crystal and stone closed her ears.

Her mind processed the Penitent’s sensation. But her eyes did not see, and her ears did not hear, and her skin felt only sharp wires and crystal spikes.

She was not the thing she was.

Paradox.

Good. That was the first battlefield. She was not the thing she was: who was she, then? A collection of physical parts? But she’d been born with one body, and discarded it for another. A name? Names were words, and words changed through time. Relationships? She’d once loved Claude. Young man, haunted look in his eye, sitting in Makawe’s Rest clutching a bottle of beer white-knuckled as he watched an Altai poet chant two-toned songs about his homeland steppe; she’d wanted him, he wanted her, and that was enough, was everything until it ended.

She was change. She was nothing. She was becoming. But what was it that changed? What was it that became?

Each part of her could be traced to another. Body given by mother and father, remade by her own will. Education received from parents, teachers, priests, from books and plays and music—ideas of others reacting to others’ ideas. Soul composed of contracts and deals: desire, need, and pledge.

She was an evolving network of matter and spirit. Good.

This was another stage of evolution. She was coming, finally, to appreciate the value of community, of stability. Jace had been right: the island was worth protecting. She could work with him to protect it.

Less good.

But what was she protecting? If she was an evolving system, a network of change, what was Kavekana?

Kavekana was five decades’ wait, watching the horizon, hungry for a faded world. A memory of gods and an ache in the center of the chest.

But Kavekana was poetry, too, chanted on a thrust stage by madmen from distant shores. Kavekana was a refugee girl who lived on an island Kai had never known existed, though she’d spent her entire life upon its shores. Kavekana was Eve radiant onstage, was Margot the seeker, transfigured in his need and rapture. Kavekana was Seven Alpha, was the Blue Lady, drowning in the pool, betrayed by her own priests. Kavekana was Kai’s leap to save her.

Kavekana was changing.

No. She mistook ephemera for fact. Kavekana was the shore, was the hunger of the horizon. Kavekana was fixed as stone.

And there, that certainty, that denial of the things she’d seen, the world she knew—that wasn’t her. That was reality imposed. That was what she was told to think. That was the Penitent.

She knew the truth and she was being convinced to ignore it, by voices too subtle to hear. She sank through a void that tried to rip her apart. And she had to put herself back together.

She’d played this game before.

Inside the knife-edged cradle, she began to work.

*   *   *

Izza led Mako down the slope to the beach where the Penitents waited. He tripped, but she helped him to his feet. They walked together; he leaned on her and on his stick.