Out of the Drowing Deep E-Book

A.C. Wise

• Herausgeber: Titan Books
• Kategorie: Fantasy und Science-Fiction
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024

Seitenzahl: 200

Beschreibung

In a future where mortals mingle with the gods in deep space, an out-of-date automaton, a recovering addict, and an angel try to solve the pope's murder. Dreamy, beautifully written science-fantasy with a devastating queer love-story at its heart, for fans of Becky Chambers, Gideon the Ninth, and This is How You Lose the Time War. Scribe IV is an obsolete automaton, peacefully whiling away his years on the Bastion, a secluded monastery in an abandoned corner of the galaxy. But when the visiting Pope is found murdered, Scribe IV knows he has very little time before the terrifying Sisters of the Drowned Deep rise up to punish the Bastion's residents for their crime. Quin, a recovering drug addict turned private investigator, picks up a scrambled signal from the Bastion and agrees to take the case. Traumatized by a bizarre experience in his childhood, Quin repeatedly feeds his memories to his lover, the angel Murmuration. But fragmented glimpses of an otherworldly horror he calls the crawling dark continue to haunt his dreams. Meanwhile in Heaven, an angel named Angel hears Scribe IV's prayer. Intrigued by the idea of solving a crime with mortals, xe descends to offer xer divine assistance (whether those mortals want it or not). With the Drowned Sisters closing in around the Bastion, Scribe IV, Quin, and Angel race to find out who really murdered the Pope, and why. Quin's missing memories may hold the key to the case—but is remembering worth the price?

Leseprobe

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Leave us a Review

Copyright

Dedication

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

18

19

Acknowledgements

About the Author

Also by A. C. Wise and available from Titan Books

Wendy, DarlingHooked

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Out of the Drowning Deep

Print edition ISBN: 9781803369822

E-book edition ISBN: 9781803369839

Published by Titan Books

A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

www.titanbooks.com

First edition: September 2024

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

© A. C. Wise 2024

A. C. Wise asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

For Scott Andrews. This book is inadvertently his fault.

1

The sky above the Bastion deepened into the green of an old bruise. One moon slashed a sickle-cut, another waxed full, the third crept up from the horizon, a chain of stars looping all three. Atop the most crumbling and unloved tower of the once-glorious Mecca, now broken open to the sky, Scribe IV tilted his head back and tried to guess where Heaven’s Ark Station stood in its orbit at that moment.

It would be easy to find out, satellite relays pinpointing the station with near-perfect accuracy. But when so many great questions had been answered – the nature of gods and angels, the shape of the universe – Scribe IV chose to find mystery wherever he could. However small. He craved wonder, and the possibility that at any moment he might experience uncertainty, be surprised.

It was like the aging shield that protected the open tower from the worst of the elements. It shuddered occasionally, making the sky beyond it seem to shimmer, but he chose to see beauty, rather than flawed technology that needed to be replaced. And in the same way, it was vastly preferable to guess every now and then, rather than having every stray pondering answered in nanoseconds with the mere flick of his fingers.

“Sir?” A voice in the doorway; Scribe IV turned to the Page shifting from foot to foot on the threshold. “The Chatelaine reports all preparations are complete and ready for your final inspection, though she still doesn’t seem happy about it, sir.”

Dominic paused, waiting to see if Scribe IV would take the bait. He decided to indulge the boy. “Oh? Why do you say that?”

“I don’t think she approves of the Pope, sir,” Dominic said. “And I don’t think she’s happy about the conclave.”

“That may be,” Scribe IV said, “but even if so, that is none of our business, is it?”

The gentle reprimand appeared to leave Dominic a little crestfallen. He’d clearly been prepared to gossip, but Scribe IV always endeavored to model good manners for the boy when he could. Whether the Chatelaine did or did not like the Pope – much like Scribe IV’s own opinions on the Chatelaine – was not an appropriate topic for discussion.

“Please proceed with your report,” Scribe IV prompted.

Dominic brightened. He took pride in his duties, which Scribe IV appreciated.

“His Holiness is settled in. The Bastion is ready to welcome the rest of the conclave.”

“Thank you, Dominic,” Scribe IV said. “You’ve done very well.”

He inclined his head to the boy. As the youngest member of the Bastion’s sparse staff, Scribe IV too often saw Dominic treated with dismissive impatience, as if his age made him a burden, always underfoot. He did whatever he could to counterbalance that – extending patience, kindness, and the same level of courtesy he accorded to the rest of the staff, whether or not they deserved it.

“And the tea service was brought to His Holiness’s room exactly an hour after his supper, as he requested?” Scribe IV asked.

“Yes, sir.” Scribe IV saw the boy suppress an urge to fidget. “I heard Johanna, I mean the Chatelaine, say she wanted to put the tray together herself while I was in the kitchen. Seb was just about to give me an extra shortbread but she yelled at me for being in the way even though I was trying to help.”

Dominic looked regretful over the lost shortbread, and resentful over his treatment. Scribe IV couldn’t blame the boy. There were times he wished he’d been programmed for less politeness, so he could tell the Chatelaine exactly what he thought of her and the way she treated those she saw as her inferiors.

The best he could do was take an occasional, bitter pleasure in sending her and the other members of staff he considered rude on errands through the network of tunnels winding under the Bastion. While he never sent them anywhere truly dangerous, into the collapsed lower sections for instance, the storage areas were bad enough. Even those who didn’t believe the tunnels were god-haunted had to contend with the dark and the damp. Since so many members of the human staff were determined to dislike him, Scribe IV felt he might as well give them a reason. The tunnels were just one of their battlegrounds.

Dominic, on the other hand, was always thrilled to run errands in the tunnels. They were the perfect place for a boy his age to burn off energy, not to mention the most exciting thing about the Bastion, as far as the Page was concerned.

Even though they complained, Scribe IV knew both the Chatelaine and the Head Butler often left small shrines and prayers down in the dark. He found keys left behind like offerings, as if the Chatelaine’s god would hear her more clearly in a place that had once been so holy, that echoed with so much faith.

“Will there be anything else, sir?” Dominic asked.

Naked hope, barely disguised, turned the boy into a coiled spring. Since Johanna had shooed him away from making himself useful in the kitchen earlier, Scribe IV saw no reason not to let Dominic entertain himself or watch the rest of the preparations as he chose. While he’d never been young, Scribe IV had been new once and could recall the thrill that came with the prospect of a day unlike any other, a break from routine. The Bastion – part fortress, part library, part cathedral – was an all-but-forgotten waystation these days, a relic like Scribe IV himself. A pilgrim might spend the night, or a scholar visit to consult an obscure tome in person, but otherwise there was nothing here but the watchful moons, the endless boom of the tide, and the slow, inevitable march of entropy.

“Thank you, Dominic. Nothing further. You are free for the rest of the day,” Scribe IV said.

Scribe IV’s features had not been designed to convey warmth or fondness. His expression was now as it had been nearly a century ago, hammered into copper as serene, neutral and unchanging. The best he could do was incline his head again.

“Thank you, sir!”

Like a loosed arrow, the boy shot from the doorway, turning long enough to flash him a quicksilver grin before clattering down the stairs just ahead of gravity and dashing off through the Bastion’s maze of passages. Off to snatch gossip like a bird carried crumb – not to mention snatching a few actual crumbs as well, including the shortbread he’d been chased away from earlier. Seb would have kept it aside for him. The Cook had taken a shine to Dominic, even teaching him a few basic kitchen skills when he could convince the boy to stay still long enough.

Scribe IV listened to Dominic’s footsteps until he could no longer hear them. Had he ever lived that fast and bright? Unlikely, but once upon a time he’d wished to, longing for a blood-beating heart and breath in place of gears, to choose his destiny instead of being purpose-built. It was there in his name: Scribe IV – amanuensis, designed to copy holy books, to record prayers, and nothing more.

In his own way, he was as trapped as the Bastion’s human staff, though very few of them saw it that way. Scribe IV found peace and comfort in the Bastion, yet he might have sympathized with the staff, living their lives in a dying, crumbling ruin. Most had nowhere else they could go.

But so many of them took their bitterness, their disappointed faith, and turned it outward – resenting Scribe IV, seeing him as an object of disgust, or pity. A useless creation whose very existence mocked the gods.

As if he’d asked to be placed above them. Guardianship of the Bastion had fallen to him based merely on tenure. At the time he’d assumed oversight, the Bastion had been in the midst of its last great exodus; there’d been no one else to take the job. It wasn’t even an enviable position. The Bastion had been in decline for years; soon enough, Scribe IV would be guardian of nothing at all.

Which, on the surface, made it strange that His Holiness had chosen the Bastion, of all forsaken places, for a conclave of as many representatives of the fractured multitude of religions as he could convince to join him.

Scribe IV understood the symbolism. The Pope had chosen the Bastion for its history as much as its seclusion. It was on this spot, on the perilous cliffs above the sea, that the gods had first made themselves known. Definitive proof of angels and demons, of unnamed and eldritch horrors, of all the still-worshipped gods of Earth and all the forgotten ones – the animal-headed, the many-armed, the ineffable beings of light. They had all come together here for one brief, terrible, shining moment.

It should have ushered in a new age of peace – and it had briefly, before immediately unraveling again, humans being what they were. That was what the Pope sought again now. His conclave would take place in the Bastion’s Great Dining Hall, whose massive bronze doors and many stained-glass windows depicted that divine first meeting of the gods. Under all those watchful glass and bronze eyes, the Pope intended to propose the abolishment of all established religions.

He seemed to believe that the gathered clerics and priests, nuns and monks, mullahs and rabbis, would unanimously agree with him. That they would abdicate their roles, step aside and put religion directly back into the hands of the people. All churches, temples, synagogues and houses of worship would be left to rot. All holy offices, including the Pope’s own, would be dissolved.

It was an absurd idea. Scribe IV had experienced enough trouble simply getting the invited guests to agree on the inconsequential choice of a menu for the welcome dinner. Still, he admired the Pope’s sheer gall, his faith in the goodness of humanity, even if he fully expected the assembled priests, acolytes, vestal virgins and prophets to fall upon him for his words and tear him apart.

It wasn’t his job to question the Pope’s wisdom. His only job was to ensure the proceedings went as smoothly as possible – even if the success of the Pope’s plan, against all odds, would likely mean the end of the Bastion.

Scribe IV tried not to dwell on what would happen to those under his care then. As much as they resented him, he didn’t want to see the staff turned out into the universe’s uncaring cold. Many of them had never known any other life than this place, had been abandoned here as children – like Agnetta, like the former Head Chambermaid Justine, like Dominic. What else was there for them? Heaven’s Ark, like most stations, was highly selective about bringing new workers on board. The mining colonies around Ganymede would take anyone, as would the Junker ships salvaging scrap on an endless loop between the stars, but those were as good as a death sentence. At least in the Bastion, the staff were fed and clothed. If they were unhappy here, perhaps they had not closely considered their alternatives.

For his part, Scribe IV had found something like peace in his quiet and strange existence. He was obsolete, like the Bastion. Time had moved past him; he and this place were perfectly suited to each other. Under the green sky, above the booming surf, he could forget about the speed of technology, the speed of human life, and cling to the illusion that mysteries still existed. Most days, he could convince himself that he was content, that this crumbling existence was enough.

*   *   *

Precisely nine minutes and thirty-seven seconds after Scribe IV dismissed Dominic, a scream echoed through the Bastion.

Scribe IV levered himself up from his desk, away from the quills and ink pots, tools of his trade. One of his quirks – digital paper with its re-usable smart ink had replaced the need for the originals, but he preferred the old ways. He felt the weight of age in his finely wrought bones, in the gears and the wires of him, as he descended from his tower to see about the noise.

He nearly collided with the Chatelaine at the foot of the stairs.

“What happened?” he asked.

The Chatelaine shook her head, eyes wide, lips pressed into a thin line. Her fingers knotted in a complex pattern that drained the blood from them – a nervous gesture, or an arcane prayer. Keys chimed around her waist, every shape, every size, sewn all along her sleeves and stitched to every available scrap of her clothing.

“Show me,” Scribe IV said.

The Chatelaine ducked her head, not out of respect, but as if trying to escape being seen by something terrible. Had she been coming to find him, or had she been running away?

She led him back the way she’d come. Scribe IV’s steps – his feet molded in the approximation of human bones, but much less flexible – rang on the stone.

The Chatelaine stopped, gesturing to the Head Chambermaid, who sat on a narrow wooden chair someone had dragged into the hallway. The Head Butler stood beside her, one hand on the distraught woman’s shoulder, the barest tips of his fingers resting against the fabric of her uniform, as if he feared her distress might be contagious.

Johanna, the Chatelaine; Anna-Maria, the Head Chambermaid; and Marius, the Head Butler. Each had been at the Bastion for over fifteen years now, and all reported directly to Scribe IV. Only Anna-Maria had any staff left under her – Agnetta, the Chambermaid. Not that it stopped Johanna from issuing orders to everyone around her, as if the Bastion were hers to control.

Scribe IV wondered at the three of them, clustered together in this hallway. It made him uneasy. He assumed Anna-Maria had been the one to scream. Perhaps the other two had simply followed the sound, as he had.

“What happened?” Scribe IV repeated his question, crouching to bring his face level with Anna-Maria.

He recognized the room she sat outside. He wished he did not.

Anna-Maria didn’t look up. He set his fingers under her chin as gently as he could, giving her no choice but to look at him.

Her eyes widened. She had never liked him, found his presence, his guardianship of this place, profane.

“I thought the boy had stolen something, the way he ran,” Anna-Maria said.

The boy – she meant Dominic.

“I only went inside to see what he might’ve nicked. I thought the room must be empty and that’s why he was there – but then I saw the body.”

Unease became dread, ticking down each brass knob of Scribe IV’s spine.

“Nothing’s been touched,” Johanna interjected.

She took up a position at Anna-Maria’s other shoulder. There was something possessive and defensive in the gesture, meant to convey that the three of them were a united front against him.

Johanna held Scribe IV’s gaze, chin lifted. Metal shivered on metal, keys ringing along her sleeve. She made no offer to unlock the door for him, no move to hand over a key. Humans and their little games of power.

Scribe IV knew for a fact there weren’t enough doors in the Bastion for that many keys. The Chatelaine had made her station her own religion.

During the age of splintering, some dug harder into established religions, renewing their faith and devotion to their old gods. Others sought to raise up new gods, thinking if they could attach themselves even to something as simple as a key and imbue it with enough belief, that key would eventually become a god, and they would be favored in the new god’s eyes.

Scribe IV had seen the tail-end of that age. It wasn’t only inanimate objects that were raised, but people too. He’d seen mortal flesh and carven masks made divine, wicked men and empty vessels of blown glass elevated, seemingly without rhyme or reason. He’d seen the disastrous and tragic results of forced divinity. And he’d seen the glory when true divinity took hold.

Scribe IV wondered if the Chatelaine’s keys had ever answered her prayers; whether she, in fact, felt divine.

He straightened, joints slow to respond. “What happened to the boy?” he asked.

Johanna shook her head, lips pressed thin again. Anna-Maria also remained silent. Either she didn’t know, or didn’t believe he deserved an answer. Scribe IV rarely regretted his lack of breath, but the urge to sigh was almost overwhelming.

“The key, please.”

The Chatelaine hesitated a moment, then handed it over, managing to convey resentment with the gesture. Scribe IV unlocked the door, slipping the key into the pocket of his own robe rather than returning it – human pettiness had rubbed off on him – and stepped across the threshold. He closed the door behind him before any of the others could follow.

A body lay sprawled on the floor on the far side of the neatly made bed. The tea service still sat on the table against the wall, used, the cup replaced neatly on the tray. Agnetta, the Chambermaid, had not yet come to take it away.

Scribe IV crouched next to the body. A hooded robe covered the corpse’s face, made from simple, heavy wool of a brown deep enough to be almost black, belted with a rope. No blood pooled on the floor, the cause of death not immediately obvious.

Poison. Suffocation. Blunt force trauma, delivered in such a skillful way that it left no mark, all damage internal. A heart attack. Scribe IV catalogued the ways a human body might fail or be forced into failure. He was stalling. He knew whose room this was, whose body this must be, and he did not want it to be true. Until he drew the hood back, looked at the corpse’s face, there was still a sliver of a chance that everything hadn’t gone horribly wrong, that he didn’t have a disaster on his hands.

A curl of paper caught his eye, tucked into the corpse’s hand. He tugged it free – the death was recent enough that the fingers were not yet stiff, and it came away easily. Blank. He felt the urge to sigh again. Had he really expected it to be so easy, that the killer would leave a signed confession behind?

The paper reminded him of nothing so much as the scrolls he himself used to record prayers. It might be here by accident and mean nothing at all. Or it might mean everything. He tucked it away between the bones of his arm, copper-sheened, exposed as his maker had designed them, then readjusted his sleeve to cover it.

He could no longer avoid the body itself.

He moved the fabric hood as gently as possible. A deeply profane litany shot across his synapses, but at least he refrained from expressing it aloud.

Fuckthemostholygodsandalltheirangels.

The slim chance vanished. The disaster became real. The dead body was none other than His Holiness, the Pope.

*   *   *

As if Scribe IV’s confirmation were a swift flying from the ruined towers to spread the news, change fell over the Bastion. The air pressure and temperature dropped. The shades of the sky deepened from the dark purple of old blood to a sullen gray. Behind the piling clouds, the distant stars shivered.

The first bell tolled.

It was a sound felt as much as heard, resonating in Scribe IV’s bones.

He’d hoped never to hear that bell again. How by all that was holy and awful did they know, when he himself had only just learned? Had their cursed god spoken to them in dreams, prophesied the precise day and hour of this pope’s demise, so that they’d be ready to spring into action when the time came?

A second toll followed the first, then a third, going on and on. A clarion call to take heed; the Sisters of the Drowned Deep were coming.

That alone told Scribe IV that the Pope’s death had not been accidental or natural. He’d craved mystery in his life; now he had a murder on his hands.

Scribe IV rose from his crouch beside the dead Pope. Perhaps it was sacrilege, but he left the body where it was, relocking the door behind him. He made a point of letting Johanna see him holding onto the key.

“No one is to enter this room except by my express permission,” Scribe IV said. He waited for one of the three to challenge him, but none of them did. “That is all. You’re dismissed.”

They hesitated; again, Scribe IV expected defiance, but Marius helped Anna-Maria to stand, and he and Johanna led her away. Was he making a mistake letting them go? Any of them could have accessed the room, poisoned the tea, slipped in and murdered the Pope. He could imagine any number of motives – fear, devotion, greed. Someone could have paid one of them off to ensure the conclave never happened.

He could imagine, but he didn’t know. Scribe IV was in over his head; he needed help, and quickly. Things were about to get much worse.

The moment the Drowned Sisters completed their ascent, they would lock down the Bastion. They would take over the investigation, in all likelihood delivering a verdict they’d decided on long before their arrival. At best, he and the rest of the staff would be exiled. But he doubted they would be let off that lightly. The Sisters were merciless, relentless. Creatures of nightmare with methods of extracting information and meting out punishment best left to archaic depictions of hell.

It was far more likely that he and all the human inhabitants of the Bastion would be Drowned.

He needed to find Dominic and learn what he’d seen.

He needed to get a message out of the Bastion.

The stairs rang with his steps, spiraling upward. Scribe IV burst through the door to his room. Above the jagged edge of stone, against the faint shimmer of the shield protecting the Bastion, clouds swirled and purpled and thickened, a rising storm. Below, the waves lashed to a frenzy, white froth pounding against the cliff with righteous fury. And beneath those waves, a terrible thing made its way toward the surface. Behemoth. Leviathan. Monstrosity. The Drowned Sisters’ ship churning up from the deep, sloughing water, poised to burst forth and scream its presence to the sky.