Voices in the Deep: The Black Seed Series Book 2

Voices in the Deep

The Black Seed Series — Book 2

Mia Multiplied

Prologue

In the beginning, before the world had learned to fear the sea, the One Father drew a daughter out of himself and gave her the water and the song.

She was the third of his eight, the singer, the mother of the deep, brown as the rich silt where rivers meet the ocean, bright-eyed as sun through shallow water, and when she opened her mouth to sing, the new sea itself leaned in to listen. From her came the merfolk: the children of the song, the keepers of the drowned places, set in the warm blue waters of the world the way her sisters’ children were set in the green forests and the cold mountains and the bright deserts. And the One Father gave her line the same charge he gave all his firstborn: tend your thread of the world, and keep it, and let the great things stay small, so that I may sleep, and the world may go on being made without my hands.

So the singers built their cities in the deep.

Not the shallow deep, where the surface-light still reaches and the surface-dwellers’ ships pass overhead. Down, down past the light, in the warm dark trenches between three points of land that the surface world would, over long ages, learn simply not to sail across; there the merfolk raised their drowned cities of pearl and coral and the pale singing-stone that only their voices could shape. Beautiful cities. Hidden cities. And over them, holding them, ran the one law that made the merfolk who they were:

All is song.

For the children of the singer did not speak as the surface-folk speak, in flat dead words that fall and are gone. They sang. Every merperson was born with a voice, and the voice was the soul of them, and a merperson’s whole life was the long unfolding of their own song. They sang their names. They sang their loves. They sang the cities into shape and the currents into order and the great old things of the deep into sleep. And they were ranked, gently, and without cruelty, but ranked all the same, by the song the One Father had set in each of them: the deep-voiced and the high, the singers of power and the singers of healing, the rare great voices that could shape stone and the commonest voices that could only carry a tune and a name. A merperson’s rank was their voice. Their voice was their self. To know what someone was, you had only to hear them sing.

This was the gift of the singer-mother, and the glory of her children, and, though none of them knew it yet, the exact shape of the wound that was coming for them.

For an age, the deep was at peace, the cities sang, and the singer-mother slept beside her Father in the root of the world, content.

But the deep has a bottom that even the merfolk do not go to.

Below their deepest cities, below the pale singing-stone and the warm trenches, there are places where the, water goes black and cold and old, the true deep, the lightless deep, the deep that was there before the singer-mother drew her first breath, before the One Father lay down to sleep, before the world had a name. The merfolk did not go there. Their oldest songs warned them not to. There is a thing in the under-deep, the warning-songs ran, sung low to frightened children for an age, a thing older than the Mother, older than the Father’s sleep, and it does not sing as we sing, and it must not be woken, and we do not go down.

And for an age, nothing went down, and nothing came up, and the warning-songs faded to lullabies, the way the truest terrors always do when enough peaceful years have passed.

But the world had begun to turn.

Far away, in a green forest at the top of another thread, a wolf-queen had just been made whole against everything the powerful could do, and the turning of that first great reckoning had sent a tremor down through the root of the world, and the root of the world had passed it on, thread to thread, the way one taut string passes its note to another. In the lightless under-deep, in the cold black places the merfolk did not go, the thing the warning-songs had warned of, the thing older than the Mother, felt the tremor reach it, and stirred, and after an age of silence, began, very low, to sing.

It was not a song the merfolk had words for. It rose up out of the under-deep through the warm trenches and into the drowned cities like a vibration felt in the bones of the singing-stone, a note too low to hear and too vast to ignore, and it did two things at once that no song had ever done together, and that broke every law the merfolk understood.

It threatened.There was a hunger in it, a cold patient ancient hunger, the sound of a thing that had been waiting in the dark since before the world and had just remembered it was hungry.

And it called. Under the hunger, woven into it, impossible, there was a summons, warm, and aching, yet somehow familiar, the sound of a thing calling its children home, calling them down, calling them back to something they had forgotten they came from.

Threat and call. Hunger and home. One note, two souls, and no merperson alive could say which it truly was. In a world where you knew what a thing was by how it sang, a song that was two things at once was the most frightening thing of all.

The currents began to run wrong. The great old creatures of the trenches, the ones the merfolk had sung to sleep an age ago, began to stir and rise toward the light. The warning-songs, half-forgotten, were suddenly, urgently, sung again. And in the deepest and oldest of the drowned cities, where the song-rank was strictest and the cities’ oldest secrets were kept, the singer-mother’s line felt the long peace of the deep begin, at last, to end.

She was young, the one it would come for first, a daughter of the deepest city, brown-skinned and bright-eyed, born to a station she did not yet understand and a voice she did not yet know the size of.

She had been having the dreams for a season, now. Dreams of the under-deep, the lightless places she had been warned of since she was small. Dreams of a voice rising out of the black, threat and call wound together, singing a song she almost, almost recognized, the way you almost recognize a face from before you can remember. She woke from them with her own throat aching, as if she had been trying, in her sleep, to sing back.

And on the night the song from the under-deep first reached the drowned cities in earnest, the night the currents turned and the old things rose and the warning-songs went up across the deep, she woke in her chamber of pearl and coral with the strange and certain knowledge that the peace of her whole life was ending, and that the voice in the dark was calling her, by a name she did not know she had.

She rose in the blue dark.

She swam up through her sleeping city, past the singing-stone towers and the dimmed coral lamps, up and up toward the one place the merfolk were forbidden to go; not down, into the under-deep where the song came from, because she was not ready for that, not yet, but up, toward the surface, the bright forbidden surface, drawn by some instinct she could not name to put her face into the dangerous light of the world above, as if the answer to the song below might somehow be found in the air above.

She did not know what she was. She did not know the size of her own voice, or the station she had been born to, or that far below the root of the world a sleeping Father had just felt her thread pull taut, or that an age-old thing in the under-deep had begun to sing her home, or that her story was the second of eight, with the first ending, against all the world’s cruelty, well.

She knew only the song, and the wrongness in the water, and the pull toward the forbidden light.

As she broke the surface of the warm dark sea, alone, under more stars than she had ever been allowed to see, the first of her people in an age to lift her face into the open air, the young merwoman opened her mouth, without deciding to, and answered the song from the deep with a single rising note of her own.

It was the most beautiful sound the night had ever heard.

And far below her, in the cold black under-deep, the thing older than the Mother heard the child of the singer answer it at last…

…and went, for the first time in an age, silent.

Listening.