Darkest Light Read online

  Darkest Light

  ALSO BY HIROMI GOTO

  Half World

  Chorus of Mushrooms

  The Kappa Child

  The Water of Possibility

  Hopeful Monsters

  Darkest Light

  Hiromi Goto

  Illustrations by Jillian Tamaki

  RAZORBILL

  an imprint of Penguin Canada

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario, Canada M4P 2Y3 (a division of Pearson Canada Inc.)

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

  Penguin Books Ltd, 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  Penguin Ireland, 25 St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd)

  Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty Ltd)

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  Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty) Ltd, 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

  Penguin Books Ltd, Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

  First published 2012

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 (RRD)

  Copyright © Hiromi Goto, 2012

  Illustrations copyright © Jillian Tamaki, 2012

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

  Publisher’s note: This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Manufactured in the U.S.A.

  * * *

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Goto, Hiromi, 1966–

  Darkest light / Hiromi Goto.

  ISBN 978-0-670-06527-1

  I. Title.

  PS8563.O8383D37 2012 jC813’.54 C2011-906595-9

  * * *

  Visit the Penguin Canada website at www.penguin.ca

  Special and corporate bulk purchase rates available; please see

  www.penguin.ca/corporatesales or call 1-800-810-3104, ext. 2477.

  * * *

  To Koji Tongu;

  you shine.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Introduction

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Prologue

  Long, long, long ago, before mortals began to inscribe mortal religions onto stone tablets and parchment, there were Three Realms: the Realm of Flesh, the Realm of Spirit and Half World.

  For aeons it was a time of wholeness and balance; Life, After Life and Half Life were as natural as awake, asleep and dreaming. All living things died only to awaken in the dream land of Half World. There, mortals arose to the moment of the greatest trauma they had experienced in the Realm of Flesh. In Half World they relived Half Lives, until through trial and tribulation they worked through their worst suffering. Wrongdoings, doubts, fears, terror, pain, hatred, spite, all the ills of mortality had to be integrated and resolved before they could rise from physical fetters into light and Spirit. Once in the Realm of Spirit, all material cares disappeared. Spirits existed freely, unbounded by mortality and pain, untroubled by Flesh, in a state pure and holy. Until eventually their light began to grow dim, and they were called back into the Realm of Flesh once more. For without connections to Life, Spirit too passes away.

  Thus, the cycles were in balance.

  There is no account left of what led to the severing of the Realms. No one knows if it was the work of Spirits who grew aloof and righteous, if it was a trapped Half Worlder maddened into perpetual pain with no hope left of light. Perhaps it was a mortal who dreamt of becoming a Spirit without ever leaving Flesh. But the Three Realms that had been balanced and entwined were ripped asunder and locked into isolation.

  Mortals, trapped in perpetual mortality, died only to be born again into Flesh. Trapped in this unchanging cycle, they grew bleak and despairing. Violence, wars, environmental destruction accreted as time passed. When the mortals died, their Half Spirits could not move on to Half World. Instead they were born back into Flesh without ever transcending their suffering. With no Half World to work through their troubles and no Spirit to raise them, mortals descended ever deeper into turmoil. Atrocities proliferated and hope began to fade.

  Half World, locked into perpetual psychic suffering, spiralled into madness. No Life ever to be born, unable to die, the Half Lives cycled through eternal nightmares. The great transformative powers of Half World, meant to bring redemption after suffering, instead began to form monsters.

  The Spirits, cut off from mortality and Flesh, began losing all memory, all knowledge of the other Realms. Growing cooler and more distant, they forgot they were part of a greater pattern.

  Their lights were fading, slowly, one by one…. So little was left of them they cared not of their own demise.

  The Three Realms were in great peril. The Realms were very close to dissolution.

  Who stepped forward to answer the call? What brought forth the hero?

  At this most needful time a young mortal girl bravely crossed into the nightmare Realm of Half World. The girl sought only to save her mother, lost and broken. The child, ignorant that she had been miraculously born of Half World parents, knew not that her actions determined the continued existence or dissolution of the Three Realms….

  The monstrosities of Half World: the maimed and the twisted, the hopeless and the lost, the creatures turned to evil…. The girl of flesh faced them all. She met evil and overcame evil without destroying her own Spirit.

  She became more than she had been. She saved the Three Realms and the ancient unbinding was rewoven once more.

  But prices are paid, whether deserved or not. Life is bound with pain and grief, even as it is bound with joy and pleasure. The young girl’s beloved mother could not return to the Realm of Flesh. And though she wished the burden be passed on to another, the young girl carried back into the Realm of Flesh a Half World infant born to Life….

  It is said that the sacred cycle, renewed, is not yet wholly stable. That something is left undone…. The Half World infant, as is true for all mortal beings, has the potential for both good and evil.
<
br />   An infant grows from child to youth—and what will he wreak when he comes into power? The future is never fixed and the fate of the Realms is at stake. The choices of the Half World boy, who turns into a man, are the doom and hope of Half World.

  from The New Book of the Realms

  Introduction

  Ilanna and Karu walked in the eternal twilight of Half World. The onion domes and pagodas, skyscrapers, wooden huts, pyramids and cathedrals cast uneasy shadows upon them. The ground rumbled beneath their feet as a subway train roared to nameless destinations. The odd auto rickshaw put-putted past them in a cloud of black exhaust. People, creatures, they shambled along garbage-strewn streets, some slinking indoors while others crept under cardboard tents, settled into doorways.

  From the darkness light began to flicker; gas lamps, candles and open fires in rubbled alleys. The smell of rotten meat roasting was pungent and sour.

  Ilanna’s eels were hungry. They were always hungry…. They slid around her cool, wet, slender torso, twined around her pale neck and snapped their jaws beside her ears as she and Karu walked down a broken street.

  Ilanna was cold. The wet fabric of her dress clung to her icy flesh, seawater streaming down her body, leaving a wet trail behind her. Perpetually.

  Snick. Snick. Snick. Thankfully, the sound of the eels’ sharp little teeth made it difficult to hear what Karu was saying. He’d been yammering, off and on, for half an hour and Ilanna was bored and hungry along with her eels.

  The feathers on Karu’s head ruffled with agitation and his large curved beak clacked loudly with each word. “We don’t need him back. We’ve been doing fine without him since he was taken. What kind of leader can be overcome by a girl!”

  Ilanna raised one eyebrow, but Karu did not notice.

  Click, click. Rilla’s slender teeth were too close, too loud, by her right ear. Ilanna pushed the eel’s head away.

  “Retrieving him from the Realm of Flesh is a waste of time. I don’t know why you bring it up now. If the Three Realms were separated once before, it can be done again. And we will be the ones to do it, to rule Half World,” he yammered on and on.

  He had a nice human body—lean, smooth, dark. Ilanna could appreciate that. But she really couldn’t stand the words coming out of Karu’s bird-brain. She eyed his neat clean feathers, the reptilian quality of his eyes, his nervous head motions. No, she was not fond of his bird-brained thoughts, but she suspected that even if he had a human head she wouldn’t like those ideas any better.

  The little eel inside her mouth lashed about, scraping its tiny sharp teeth against the tender flesh of her inner cheeks.

  Ilanna stared down at the eels that had replaced her arms so very long ago. With their slick, tapered tails wedged into her gaping shoulder sockets, they kind of looked like arms from a distance. Graceful, fluid, eely arms….

  It had taken many Half Lives to train the eel that had replaced her tongue to do her bidding. But at least she could talk.

  There were benefits to having eels instead of arms, Ilanna thought. Monstrous men left her alone. No one imagined her easy prey.

  Hungry! Lilla, on the left, snapped too close to the side of Ilanna’s face.

  She shivered. Ilanna had grown to love her eels, she did, but she knew that if she didn’t feed them soon, they would, perhaps sorrowfully, consume her.

  The edges of her Half World wavered. A flicker between solid and immaterial. Ilanna shuddered. Clenched her will, seized it, and her world held solid once more.

  Her cycle was calling her back.

  Despite Karu’s bird-brained arguments, Ilanna knew that only Mr. Glueskin had the capacity to stretch the limitations of their Realm. He was the first to break out of his own Half World cycle, and he was the one who had plucked her from her torturous suffering. Mr. Glueskin had taught her how a Half Life could be extended—so that it could be stretched into something of her own. He had taught her how to eat. She owed him, for teaching her this.

  And she needed him….

  Something caught against her icy feet. Ilanna glanced down. Barnacles grew on her toenails, and a piece of newspaper had snagged on the rough edges. Angrily she kicked the rubbish away.

  Once, she had managed to tear herself out of her own cycle, without Mr. Glueskin, after he’d been stolen away from their Realm. But the wear of suffering, the pain and the torment when she was thrown back into her original pattern—she knew she didn’t have the capacity to free herself, over and over again, as Mr. Glueskin was capable of doing. He was so powerful, so wonderfully creative and sadistic. At least he had been, before that disgusting girl from the Realm of Flesh had plucked him away from her. Ilanna shivered. Rilla and Lilla twined around her midriff and squeezed. She would do anything to resist the nightmare of her cycle.

  “There are different ways to overcome the patterns of Half World,” Karu croaked. “Mr. Glueskin found one way. So there must be other means. Are you listening to me?” he snapped. He continued talking without waiting for Ilanna’s reply.

  Her sad little end had happened so very, very long ago, Ilanna thought. Her lover had betrayed her. Had tied her to an anchor and thrown her into the sea, deep, deep into the icy green depths. The penetrating cold of death. The eels reached her first, to tear the flesh from her arms, to eat her tongue…. She had woken in the Half World sea, even the stripped bones of her arms gone, and in their place two large eels attached to her shoulders. Where she once had a tongue, a small eel was fixed to the root.

  She had still been tied to the anchor.

  There Ilanna remained, eaten half alive, eternally, by flounders, skates, eels and octopi. Giant-clawed crabs, the fury of shrimp, the snapping, ripping teeth of sleeper sharks.

  Ohhhhhh, they were never sleepy. She cycled through betrayal and death, betrayal and death, until she knew nothing else.

  Eels. She learned the language of eels.

  Snick, snick, snick. Lilla, the eel on her left, sliced tender cuts into her icy earlobe.

  Ilanna jerked her chin to the side. “Stop that,” she chided.

  “What?” Karu snapped.

  “Darling.” Ilanna’s voice was slick with cool affection. “Don’t be like that. Come here.”

  Karu, hissing, nonetheless stepped toward her. Too close. She could smell the powdery, musty smell of his feathers. He must be ready to moult. So messy. She had never liked his beak.

  Rilla and Lilla swirled once around his arms. Smooth, slide, wet. Karu shuddered. Ilanna could see the human skin on his arms pimpling with revulsion and longing. The ruffled feathers on Karu’s head began to flatten as he lowered his head to press his soft cheek on the top of her head.

  “We will lead Half World together.” His voice was fierce. Harsh.

  Why couldn’t his voice have been sweet, Ilanna wondered. Such a shame….

  “The two of us,” Karu rasped. “We will crush the Realm of Flesh and dissolve the Realm of Spirit. Half World will be the only world and we will hold dominion for eternity.”

  Ilanna slowly tilted her head from side to side. If one could get past the smell, his feathers felt so nice.

  If only he’d keep his beak shut.

  The eels shuddered. Ilanna could feel their tails writhing with excitement in her shoulder sockets where she once had arms.

  “That tickles,” she murmured.

  “What?” Karu went still.

  Ilanna sighed. He was such a coarse bird man, after all. She’d had to make do with him as her lover, but oh, how he paled in comparison to Mr. Glueskin.

  Karu broke away and strode on, debris crunching beneath his calloused bare feet. “If he were meant to lead us once more, he would have returned on his own. But where is he? He is not of us any longer.”

  Ilanna knew Karu was wrong. For a while now, she had felt something. Far off, so faint, barely noticeable. Lately the feeling had been growing stronger….

  He was calling her. She sensed it with her entire being. And just as she knew he was coming int
o his power, she knew her own was waning. She would be thrown back to the worst of her Half World cycle again. Back to the moment when she had been betrayed, thrown into the sea, where she first met her lovely eels….

  She was not going back.

  Ilanna’s large dewy eyes narrowed into slits. That human, Melanie, had ruined everything! Since she had come, Half Worlders were no longer trapped in their Half Lives. Those who cycled in suffering eventually turned to Spirit, turning into brilliant colourful spheres of light, to fly, fly away.

  Not her! This is my Half World, Ilanna thought. And no one will take it away from me! What did she want of Spirit? Give her Half Flesh to feast upon, give her Half Life to control. She wanted nothing of a cycle that promised only future death and future suffering. A future where nothing of hers was through choice. She could be born to a wretched family. She could choose a violent love. She had no faith in a better outcome. She’d chosen Half World and she wanted it back, the way it was, before that girl ruined everything. Only Mr. Glueskin had the strength, the evil, to lead Half World back to its glory. And she would bring him back.

  Karu clacked and clacked his curved beak with great agitation. Just like an octopus.

  She loathed octopi.

  A blast shook the ground, and Ilanna and Karu staggered. Bits of rock, cement, a cloud of dust raining down. Dogs began to howl, infants cried.

  The staccato burst of gunfire. The crump, crump of far-off grenades.

  Somewhere an enormous beast moaned, vibrating the dark skies, and a man screamed, frantic. A siren began to wail, warning of a blanket of bombs to come.

  People in buildings quickly turned out their lights. Closed shutters, dropped blinds, blew out smoky candles. The city grew darker still.

  Clop, clop, clop, clop.

  The sound grew nearer and louder, accompanied by the ringing jangle of metal.

  Ilanna shook her cold head, seawater flying from the tips of her hair. The sound was so friendly, she laughed aloud.

  Clop, clop, clop, clop.