The city healed quickly after the trial, the way that it always did.
Sela’s builders rebuilt the outer wall in four days, thicker than before, with a wide gap left in it for Cedar to walk through. The salt in the trench was slowly mixing with the fresh water above it. Every day, it was a little weaker. The young needlefish were born faster than ever. By the end of the week, the dens were as full as they had been before the first raid.
His vassals went home. Brann’s Manifestation came down from the island, taking his wolves back to their own World. Nell took her bats home. Ivo’s river ran out of the largest air hall for the last time, while his otters chased Twelve’s needlefish once more through the main street. Twelve didn’t chase them back this time. Mav thought that she might even miss them.
Tamsin stayed a little longer. Her moths’ new silk had changed everything for her, and she was happier than he had seen her in months. She spent two whole days on the island, testing it in the shallow water with her builders, writing on her slate until her hand hurt. When she finally went home, she left a roll of the hard silk at the door of Sela’s house, as a present. Sela pretended not to be pleased, but she put it somewhere safe.
For the first time in more than a month, nobody was trying to take anything from him.
Mav didn’t quite know what to do with that.
-----
A few nights later, Seven came to him. That was strange, because Seven never came to anyone.
She was the oldest beast in his army. Before the city existed, before Mav ever came to this World, she had lived at the bottom of the trench, blind, pale and alone, eating whatever fell into the dark. She had always spoken very little. Even now, she spoke only when it mattered, in that dry, cold voice that made the young fish go still.
Mav was sitting on the roof of his cabin. He felt her come up out of the trench and cross the city, slowly, until she hung in the water above the roof, long and white, with her blind face turned toward him.
"There is something that I want," she said.
Mav waited. Seven had never asked him for anything, and he felt a sudden curiosity.
"Below the trench," she went on, "there is the new sea. You know it. It opened when your World grew." She was silent for a moment. "Before it opened, I slept at the very bottom of the trench. It was mine. Nothing came there. But then the rock broke, the new sea opened under it, and something came up from below."
Mav remembered. In the days after the new depths opened, Seven had refused to sleep at the bottom anymore. She had lain at the top of the trench instead, with her face pointed down, listening.
"What is it?" he asked.
"I don’t know. It is very big, and older than me." Seven turned slowly in the water. "It sleeps at the far edge of the new sea, where the rock goes down again. I have heard it breathe, and once or twice, I have heard it move. It is rank C. I am sure of it."
Mav sat very still.
He knew what rank C felt like. There had been the captain’s rays, and the eel that had killed Five. In the sky World and in the arena, he had fought beasts of rank C, and every time, it had cost him.
"You want me to fight it," he said.
"I want it," Seven said. "I want it to be yours. Then it will be mine, too. And then I can go back to the bottom and sleep where I slept before."
It was the longest speech that he had ever heard her make. When she finished, she didn’t wait for an answer. She simply turned and went back down into the trench.
Mav sat there a while longer. He didn’t like what she was asking, but mostly, he was moved. In all the months that he had known her, Seven had never wanted anything for herself.
-----
He sent the scouts the next morning.
Two chose them himself: six of the oldest needlefish, the fastest and the most careful. Mav went with them, because he wanted to see the thing with his own eyes. He borrowed Lurk from the stalkers, so that nothing in the deep would notice him.
[You have borrowed a skill: Lurk.]
They had gone only a little way down into the new depths when the blue fish appeared.
The clever one came out of the dark below them as if it had been waiting. Mav knew it at once by its size and the bright spots along its sides. It had followed him around the city since the raids, but it wasn’t his, and he couldn’t feel it at all. Now it swam in front of the scouts, turned to look at them with one round black eye and set off downward.
"It wants us to follow," Two said. He sounded almost jealous.
’Then let’s follow it.’
The blue fish led them down and down.
The new depths were bigger than Mav had ever seen them. He had hunted in their upper parts for weeks, among the white lobsters and the glass-toothed eels, but he had never gone this far down. The light of the city faded behind them. The water grew colder and heavier. Soon, the only light was the faint green glow of One under his shirt, which only showed in the deepest dark.
Not once did the blue fish hesitate. It swam past cliffs and over long slopes of black sand, through a narrow gap between two rocks and out into open water, as if it had made this trip many times before.
How did a wild fish know the way to a place like this? The question made Mav uneasy. But he had a feeling that he already knew the answer, and he liked that even less. The blue fish had come up from here. Its kind had been born down here, near whatever was sleeping at the bottom.
-----
Mav felt the thing before he saw it.
The feeling came to him through the water, the way that Cedar’s footsteps had come up through the mud of the delta, slow and deep. Something very big was breathing very slowly, somewhere ahead. Each breath moved the water around him like a tide.
The blue fish stopped at the edge of a cliff. Mav waited, but it wouldn’t go any farther.
Mav went on alone, with Lurk wrapped around him, and looked over the edge.
Below him, the rock fell away into a wide, dark basin. Against its far wall lay something enormous. At first, he thought that it was a pile of rocks, but then one of the rocks moved, slowly, and he saw that it was an arm. It was longer than Cedar’s whole shell, thick and dark red, covered in pale round cups as big as plates. There were more arms, coiled over each other like sleeping snakes, eight of them. Between them, he could see the edge of a great soft body and a closed eye as big as a shield.
His heart beat hard and fast with excitement. He made himself breathe slowly, so that it wouldn’t hear him.
Then he saw the wall behind it.
Someone had cut into the stone. There were straight lines in it, too straight for any sea to have made, and a tall shape with square corners, twice as high as a man. Mav stared at it, and slowly, he understood what he was looking at.
A door.
The door was closed. The beast was lying right across the front of it, with its arms curled around the bottom of the frame.
It lay there like a dog guarding a house.