Full Fathom Five (Craft Sequence, #3)

by Max Gladstone

water opened before her, and closed behind her. 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. What might such a freed shadow feel, tumbling through spaces of greater dimension than its own?

“Back before the God Wars,” she said, “priests entered the pool during initiation—they met gods there, learned secrets, changed. Inside, spirit and matter flow more easily from shape to shape. Now the gods are gone, but we still go down. The first time priests dive, we change—we fix the broken bodies we inhabit. These days most changes are small: one priest I know corrected her eyesight; another cleaned up a port wine stain on her cheek. In the past more priests went further, like I did. That’s where the tradition came from, after all. These days full initiates aren’t as common, but there are a few of us.” “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,” she said.

She pulled at the ring with her body and with her soul, making it theirs, this bit of gold, this shared moment in the dark. To steal a man’s wallet from his front pocket you pressed against his thigh in place of the wallet’s weight. To steal a man’s soul, you pressed against him with your dreams and visions, so he wouldn’t notice when his own lost color.

The island is our prison. Bullshit. Kavekana didn’t trap anyone. People took care of that themselves.

Was this what they called depression? Probably not. Drunkenness. Adulthood. She’d imagined standing here as a kid: her own house, free of family and the stink of the working harbor. Standing in skin that fit her soul. The skin felt good, and the body, but the rest of her life, she wasn’t sure.

She stopped beside the Penitent to his left, sat down, and leaned against its calf. The stone was warm. “I hear it hurts the mind more than the body. These things make you move the way they want, think the way they think. And the way they think isn’t human.” Mako swung, and missed the ball by a foot. He frowned. “Lots of things force folk to think in ways that aren’t human. Try joining an army someday, if there’s ever a war for you to fight. Hells, I bet you thought at least five inhuman thoughts before work this morning.”

“I don’t think a massage counts as revenge.” “You haven’t been with my masseuse.” He laughed, and coughed, and spit. His spit landed with a solid fleshy sound in the sand, startling up a seven-legged sand-colored beetle that reared, bared sickle mandibles in protest, then scurried away. “She’s from those jungles south of the Shining Empire. Girls there are born with chisels for fingers and pistons for arms. Every other Thirdday she avenges each acre of forest I burned in the God Wars.” “She know you talk about her this way?” “Hells, I talk about her this way to her face. She only really opens up on the back when she wants to hurt me.”

The problem was the last act, when the bride received a letter announcing that her husband was dead or remarried or something—Izza didn’t know enough Descended Telomeri, especially when sung at high volume with poor intonation, to follow the fine points of the plot—and committed suicide. Izza bought the suicide. The bride’s acceptance of the letter was a stretch. A real person would put more work into self-deception. But the singers sang beautifully despite the occasional dropped consonant. After the bride plunged her knife into her neck and the orchestra crescendoed its last crescendo, Izza only stole a little from the hat they passed around for donations.

He chuckled, meanly. “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.”

“Priests stand between worlds. When I was young I thought that meant building idols, praying to them; after a while, I realized that no matter how I prayed, the idols didn’t answer. I was worshipping my own reflection. Not healthy. In this role I stand between Kavekana and the mainland—and the mainland talks back. Every day I wrestle with gods, like the desert prophets of ancient Sind.” “But everything happens up the mountain.” “Everything,” Twilling said, “and nothing. The gods’ power used to flow down from Kavekana’ai, out over the waves. Now, power flows in the opposite direction.

“There is no death where love lives.” “You don’t know death well,” she said, “if you think that.”

“What do you have against creation myths?” Teo shifted in her seat. “Outside of the fact that they’re wrong?” “Creation stories are key to mythology. They show us who people think they are. And they’re so interesting. Some Old World cultures say people are made from earth and spit. Orthodox Apophitans claim one of their sun gods, you know. Jacked off onto some sand, and then shaped the sand.”

“And this is the story we told,” she said. “Once, there was darkness. All that was and wasn’t, in the same place and time. The Mother hung curled in the tight space of the first moments, and there she gave birth to Makawe and his sisters. That time-place was too small for them, so they pressed against its borders until they burst through, and found themselves atop a mountain above stretching water. But sunlight was too harsh, so they returned to darkness. Humans came next, rays of light rising out of the Mother. To hide from the sun we clad ourselves in mud, and shaped that mud into our bodies. It dried, and we were trapped within. Some the mud fit, and some it didn’t.”