Full Fathom Five (Craft Sequence, #3)

by Max Gladstone

There are many worlds, and one. A shadow cast is real, and so’s the caster, though each is of a different order. Cast a shadow complex enough, and one day it will look up. One day it will tear free from the wall to seek the one who gave it form.

Kai fell through the realm of gods and idols, on which rock and light and living flesh float like a raft on a cave lake. Diving, she kicked. Bubbles of reality jellyfished up to the distant surface. She swam deeper. Idols drifted immense around her, sphinxes and chimeras, animals and men and women in lightning outline, planet-sized though they’d seemed small from shore. Every one was beautiful, and each terrifying. In their center, Seven Alpha flailed limbs of silver and samite. Sharp teeth glimmered in her open mouth.

“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.

“How did you remake yourself?” “I was born in a body that didn’t fit.” “Didn’t fit in what way?” “It was a man’s,”

A few years and forever ago, the two illuminated peninsulas cradling the harbor had welcomed her like her lost mother’s embrace. They’d turned, since, to teeth, and the black water to the fanged mouth’s inside.

“Important pilgrims.” “Dangerous pilgrims. They eat people.” “You’re speaking figuratively.” “I wish.

“Faith seems fun. So does leadership. Everyone listens to you. Then you realize that it means the bastards come for you first.”

“Mainlanders have a saying about good intentions.” “Road to hell’s paved with them?” “I’ve been there,” he said, “and it ain’t.

Once more Kai felt that foreign frission, the fear of being spotted. Old Quechal society had little room for people born in wrong-sexed bodies; they’d kicked out their priests and pantheon at the end of the God Wars, but ancient attitudes lingered. The subject wouldn’t come up, no reason for it, but the extra tickle of tension tightened Kai’s nerves, which needed no more tightening.

Most of our sponsors, they have a history. The King in Red broke the Quechal gods on his altar, and killed the moon in single combat; Ilyana Rakesblight and the Blade Queen seared the sky over Kho Katang. You don’t even want to know the outline of half the stories I’ve heard about Belladonna Albrecht.”

“Our gods rowed off to fight your sponsors in the Wars,” Kai said. “The greatest warriors and priests of the Archipelago went with them. They never came back. But people stayed, and kept faith. The priests of Kavekana took that faith and made new images, idols to watch over us with the gods gone. They weren’t alive, these idols, not like the gods were—they couldn’t speak, or guide, or love, or correct. Didn’t have the history, the complexity. But they helped, and later we learned that mainlanders found them useful.”

“She was a bird, and a shadow, and a friend.” She tossed the stone in the air and caught it twice, testing weight. “The noise to make a rich man look the other way while you reach for his pocket. The hand that catches you when your grip slips and you’re about to fall. Speed and silence.”

Hells, I bet you thought at least five inhuman thoughts before work this morning.”

Old-fashioned gods handled most operations themselves. “Makawe hears all prayers,” the old saying went, “and laughs at them.”

“Look at Dresediel Lex, ruled by hungry skeleton kings. Look at crumbling Alt Selene. Would you rather we be the butcher of a continent, like Shikaw, or a mechanical wasteland like King Clock’s country? Or I guess we could have sold ourselves to the Iskari, or to Camlaan. Played host to military bases and squid cathedrals. They’re worse than tourists, I hear.”

“No. He had that same aftermath feel though, an echo looking for the noise that made it. He found the noise here.”

Point is, if you’re a young man and you have nothing harder than a clock to fight against, ’fore long you make up things to do with your time.

Even money was on him being an Iskari spy.” “He’s a poet.” “Means nothing. Deathless Kings built a whole literary magazine in Chartegnon back during the God Wars as an intel front.”

“Never ask a poet to tell you the truth. We have ten different ways to describe a drink of water, and each is true and all lie.”

“Can I ask you a question, Twilling?” He beamed. “Of course.” “You remade yourself, like I did.” Not polite, but not a secret, either. “Why did you come down here afterward?”

Kai avoided nightmare communication unless strictly necessary. Too much waited beneath the surface of her mind. The Order used professional dreamers for the most part: asleep gagged and blindfolded in warm caves under Kavekana’ai, scribbling messages on automatically turning scrolls.

“This is your nightmare. I can do nothing here that does not come from your own mind.” “My mind scares me.” “You’re a wise woman,”

You think because my clients are strange and wicked people that I mean you ill. But my clients have never set foot on your island. They have not injured you and yours. Their murders and vices are strictly onshore. They are not the source of your misery.”

As Edmond Margot wrote, the stars went out. He did not need them. A page lay on his desk. His fingers held a pen. With these tools he built a world.

How did you kill someone in bed? Izza hadn’t done this sort of thing before. She’d fought. She’d lived through war. She could figure it out.

Justice is like math: anyone can think she knows the answer, but not every answer is right.

The mother (or nanny—their hair color was the same, and beyond that Kai had a hard time telling mainlanders apart)

The hardest part of the conversation had been to keep a straight face when Twilling’s verbiage swerved into the arcane and he began to invent new meanings for the word “leverage.”

“You believe metaphorically,” Teo said. “Metaphors are true.”

“The world is a collection of power, right? That’s Maestre Gerhardt’s line. So we study relations that give rise to power. Reality’s made of self-perpetuating patterns, some of which are complex enough to”—she opened a door in the stairway wall that had not existed before she reached for it, and emerged onto a stone floor, Teo following—“to alter themselves.” They walked down a narrow hall, lined with doors behind which slithery things hissed. “Truth is a momentary condition of these fluctuating patterns, a matter of negotiation. Our agreements, this contract”—waving the contract itself—“these are realer than any property of what you’d call matter. Gerhardt understood this first through comparative mythology, then through math. Beliefs give rise to truth.”

We created sentient life. Right? That’s what this is. We built idols, and they woke into gods.”

“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.”