Deepwater King
Page 1
DEEPWATER KING
BOOK TWO OF THE DEEPWATER TRILOGY
Claire McKenna
Copyright
HarperVoyager
An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd
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HarperCollinsPublishers
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First published in Great Britain by HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Copyright © Claire McKenna 2021
Cover design by Andrew Davis © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2021
Cover illustrations © Shutterstock.com
Claire McKenna asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.
Source ISBN: 9780008337179
Ebook Edition © July 2021 ISBN: 9780008337193
Version: 2021-05-04
Dedication
For Paul H
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Dedication
The Saint of the Islands
Before – The Deepwater Funeral
Stefan
Book One: Equus: Present Day
Chapter 1: Talk about fortunate
Chapter 2: The sea gods were malicious
Chapter 3: Arden knew
Chapter 4: They called it day
Chapter 5: Inside the town boundaries
Chapter 6: After a supper of slimy kelp
Chapter 7: Arden woke later in the true
Chapter 8: The shock hit her
Chapter 9: Oh devilment
Chapter 10: The fumes from the refineries
Chapter 11: You have made a journey indeed
Book Two: Maris: Three Days Before the Storm
Chapter 12: Three Days Earlier
Chapter 13: Twilight fell hard
Chapter 14: The guards forced Wren
Chapter 15: Devilment
Chapter 16: Jonah
Book Three: Anguis: After the Storm
Chapter 17: Arden, come back
Chapter 18: She did not sleep
Chapter 19: Drink
Chapter 20: Arden woke
Chapter 21: Don’t
Chapter 22: Thunderclouds massed upon the horizon
Chapter 23: In the pelting gloom
Chapter 24: I had to
Chapter 25: No
Chapter 26: Jonah did not return
Chapter 27: The two siblings
Chapter 28: Instinctively she fought
Chapter 29: Water
Chapter 30: The storm
Chapter 31: Jonah Riven
Chapter 32: He went into the ocean
Chapter 33: At first light
A Time For Endings
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Also by Claire McKenna
About the Publisher
The Saint of the Islands
The history goes like this. Two centuries ago a child came into the world with a vast and terrible ability. At the moment of her birth, the delivery-forceps at her crown recoiled into a tight rose of metal and crushed the unwashed fingers of a drunken surgeon just-returned from the dissection of a cadaver. At her cry the lenses in the midwife’s spectacles cracked in their frames.
In her fifth summer she touched a spoon with a licked finger, and it stood up on its end, danced a jig before knotting into a silver ball.
That day she destroyed most of the cutlery before her servant-girl mother found her on the kitchen floor, giggling among the ruins of their employer’s silverware.
At eight she tripped on the road and struck her chin upon a tram rail. Sixteen lengths of iron spun curlicues about her like a cocoon.
At twelve, she killed a man because he’d hissed a cat-call from an alley, tried to pull her into the damp shadows. A hot, unfamiliar spike of anger shot through her, and when she’d heaved a huge mouthful of spit into his face, he’d let her go, run headlong into the spinning leather belt of a steam-mill.
It was then that she realized she could move men as well as metal.
In ways both violent and uncanny she had made him lose his mind. Ostensibly this girl was sanguinem, a bloodworker, but far away from typical. The common sanguis of Lyonne were small cogs in the great machine of Lyonne’s economy, and their abilities were limited to small, individual things, brief moments, tiny movements. Theirs was not an inexhaustible talent. They would see sacrifice in blood loss, and would remain prudent in what they did.
However it was one thing to light a lamp, or move a weight. The girl could move metal and men with just a taste of her own blood.
Such a thing was dangerous. To a person. To her family. Every night she would pray before the icon of her father’s adopted church, take this burden from me, God, for I cannot bear it.
The Redeemer of Lyonne, forever bound upon His rock, merely gazed down at her in silent disapproval, too busy with His own stone sufferings. His marble eyes stayed blank milky cataracts. The stone mouth said no word, and even with her voice that could command metal she could not command it of Him.
Although the girl was born to parents from rural, backwater Fiction, she was a citizen of Clay City, the teeming northern capital of Lyonne. When it soon became publicly apparent what powers she obligated, the city masters were quick to act. The girl was taken into their care, and under watch of a platoon of musket-men they mapped out the margins of her power. Over the course of a week three men died, another five fell into madness, and she built a small steam-engine by whispering a song to copper leaves.
In the end the testers made their diagnosis: Sanguis Orientis – Direction of Mind – and Sanguis Mandatum – Instruction of Matter.
The orientis was useful enough. One could always find value in manipulating men. But it was the mandatum that complicated matters entirely. She could talk to metals and chemicals related to metals, sing them into assuming a joint, a connection, make them twist into a form. Prior to her, even the best sanguis bloodworkers of the age could barely compel a steel bar into a right angle.
The Lyonne Investigatory Order and Nomenclatures, that secret society whose business it was to manage such powers, burned many lamps dry on the long nights they discussed the girl. The Lyonne Order could see her future keenly in the entrails of their dead men. She had the means to kill them all. A girl who could pull iron foundations out of concrete with a breath could with a lone tantrum reduce the city to rubble.
But then the Order also knew all too well the economic value of someone who could spin metals and command both objects and men. The sanguis bloodlines were weakened from over-breeding. Even in the south country of Fiction, where the blood still ran wild in the old families, the talents were frail and undecided. For all that she was dangerous, there was still a use for her.
We shall send her away, they decided.
And if her companions in isolation survive our girl’s adolescence then … then we will see.
So it was in her thirteenth year that the Order found a place where the girl could grow up safe and isolated from civilization, in a distant archipelago in the cold south waters of Fiction. She was remanded to a religious order of anchoritic nuns upon the flat, broad island of Equus, the ancient country of her forefathers.
Apart from the nuns, the island was at that time mostly uninhabited.
In the winter it was visited by the nomadic leviathan-hunters of the old Deepwater religion. In the mild summer months the petralactose prospectors came from Lyonne and drilled for the rockblood layered in the limestone shale, which they stored in barrels on their rusty iron ships before transporting the crude rockblood to Clay.
‘We’ll come back for you,’ the Order promised the girl, even though they had no real hopes that she would survive her adolescence intact. ‘Once you learn to control that temper of yours. You must learn to be less a devil and more a saint.’
For a long time after, communications were few and far between. There would be brief letters to her family, her gifts of dried flowers pressed between torn book-leaves, a sea-serpent scale, a perfect shell, a limestone pebble with a hole worn in the centre.
She would write of the nuns, their lessons, and their daily prayers to the Redeemer. She wrote of the shy folk who visited the northern shores, the deepwater people that hunted the sea-serpents and kraken of the Darkling Sea. The Anchorage Mother provided positive reports, unremarkable in their brevity. Their charge was hard-working and kind, and there was little else they had to say.
The months became years, and old political orders moved aside for new ones. The Masters of Clay shifted oversight of the girl with her powers of mandatum and orientis to another department. The old Lions of the Order retired, clutching their redacted memoirs. A fire in an archive room destroyed the records of that miraculous week in the Tower. The young cubs that came after were more concerned with the government of present sanguinem than of the one exiled far away.
After the span of a decade, she was forgotten.
But industry is industry, and its expansion occurs in strange places. It came to the notice of the new guard of Order that the petralactose production out of Fiction, once so seasonal, had become reliably constant. Those businesses that needed such an elixir to power their iron smelters and illuminate their streets began to seek out the now plentiful southern petralactose rather than rely on local Shinlock shale. Venture capitalists sent ships of pig-iron and copper southwards, asking, and in return came inconceivable amounts of the precious liquor. New-minted thousandaires walked the streets in krakenskin coats, spoke of fortunes to be made in the southern Sainted Isles.
Twenty years had passed by the time Order investigators returned to Equus. They found, to their astonishment, a great row of derricks on the western shore, pumping petralactose out of deep wells. The roughnecks who worked the derricks called the liquor rockblood, preferring the old name. Their forgotten girl had taken the teachings of the anchorite nuns to heart: in holy service she had given her talents to help the prospectors, spun derricks for them out of scrap iron, commanded the pipes to drill deep into the ground, made reservoirs and barrels, and combustion chambers to fraction the petralactose into fuel.
This information was brought back to the Order offices. Puzzled and delighted, the Lyonne Order instructed that the investigators should wait without contact, and keep eyes upon her.
Over those remaining years they watched her build an industry among the rockblood prospectors. Just as she had done in the testing-yard she sung life into the copper cables, made tanker-ships that needed no captain. Sensing an opportunity for wealth, people had come from all parts of the world to prospect for rockblood from Equus. A city sprang up in Burden Town, a river mouth settlement that had not more than ten years earlier been a ruin of stone against which prospectors would pitch their tents.
The anchorites had given the girl a purpose. Driven both by the song in her blood and the nuns’ humble lessons, she served both Man and God, and found her life’s joy in both.
There are very few missives left from that time, and they are museum letters kept under glass. Reports from the Order investigators, by then already under her orientis spell.
The last letter ever sent tells how the prospectors worship the girl now, who seems ageless despite being a woman in her middle years. The local folk have built for her temples out of seashells and ichthyosaur bones. They call her the Saint of the Islands. She rules them like a benevolent god. As for the anchorite nuns, nobody remembers what happened to them. Perhaps they took residence elsewhere. Perhaps they grew weary with age and went into the potter’s ground. More likely though, they forgot who they once gave duty and prayers to, and turned their songs towards their blessed girl.
And then one day she is gone.
Fresh agents are sent to investigate an island without its saint, for in the interregnum between watchers the girl has slipped away. The pumps still bob, and the rockblood still flows and the ghost ships still move back and forth between island and Fiction coast, but they do so without her instruction. Nobody could say why the Saint of the Islands fled. She was in her fortieth year and not so old. She had no enemies, and had no reason to fear the Order attention. All anyone knew was that after twenty-five years of service the saint had abandoned her islands and left behind her pumping derricks and her ghost-captained ships and congregation of worshippers.
After a fruitless search the agents reported that she had gone for good. Whichever star had been her orient, whichever horizon had called her away, the journey was one without a return. She would not come back.
Those few who were in charge mourned openly in the dim corridors of power, but in secret, the Order was relieved. The Saint of the Islands had always been a case on the verge of calamity. She had been miraculous, yes, but dangerous, and like any avoidable occurence they thought it best they never chance another one like her again.
Before – The Deepwater Funeral
Stefan Beacon saw them first. The hunters returning in the afternoon on the tide-rise, six small black figures striding through the grey slosh of the sheltering bay. They dragged behind them a small, shallow shoreboat.
He’d been suspended halfway up the long column of his father’s lighthouse with a rag and bucket of soapy water to wash the salt-grimed windows when the seabirds started their aggrieved squawking. Down in the harbour one of the men fell to his knees once they cleared the breakers, rolled on his back. Another knelt beside him in the rocky sand, slid off his hat. More followed along the pier.
From his high position Stefan Beacon counted three ships in the small bay, all blowing the dark smoke of a death on the waters. Something had gone wrong with the hunt, for it was unusual that all three boats returned at once. Normally two monster-boats might stay out on the open ocean, while the third returned to process their cryptid catch.
Stefan put down the cleaning rag and released the counter-weighting gears of the bosun’s chair. The little platform brought him to ground level where he struggled free of the retaining ropes. It had been easier to haul a chair up and down the lighthouse as a child, but on approaching his seventeenth year, his body seemed to have grown an extra foot overnight. He would need to find more stones for the counterweight, he thought, but first his father would need to know what he had seen.
At his son’s call, Jorgen Beacon came stooped from the outhouse, braces hanging down below his hips. He squinted through the drowsy mist at the scooped land below the cliff. It was navigationer’s sight he used – that sharp vision all Beacon men were born with, sharp enough to make out a face from a mile away.
‘Missing a man,’ he said gruffly, and if any emotion moved him, Jorgen hid it under the shade of his dark brow. He rubbed his hands, and the fingerless gloves of his fire-sympathetic profession.
‘How do you know?’
‘Takes seven to run Sehnsucht,’ J
orgen said, indicating the largest monster-boat, a massive paddle wheeler as white as fog. ‘Someone’s gone to the King. They’ll be mourning him tonight.’
Stefan caught himself frowning. It was a Hewsday, and nowhere close to the Sabbath. The Clay Church had strong laws for when one might show grief, and Stefan knew that better than most, for in a few days he would head to Clay City and start his collegiate years in a seminary, and train for the priesthood.
His look of judgment earned a chastising glare from his father.
‘I didn’t say anything,’ Stefan protested.
‘Could see it. Those folks might visit a Clay Church on a Sunday morning Mass and give their prayers to the Redeemer of Lyonne, lad, but the nights belong to their abyssal gods. Don’t let them see any northern attitude from you, son.’
Stefan did not argue with his father. Something in Jorgen’s face had changed.
He sent Stefan back up the lighthouse tower to finish cleaning the windows. Stefan stayed up there until the sky became sullen with the encroaching evening. He only came down when the mist soaked through both his shirt and jacket and made him shiver.
The lighthouse had a base broad and stout, enough for a bed and a bathroom. He hesitated in the doorway at the solemn sight of his farther grooming his whiskers over a soapy basin.
‘You don’t think it could be Zachariah, Da? He usually takes out Sehnsucht.’
Jorgen tilted his lathered chin up. ‘If it were Zach, someone would have already come to bring the news. So clean up, boy. We have a funeral to attend.’
After hurrying his son in front of the wash basin to clean up, Jorgen loaned Stefan a dress uniform of navy broadcloth and red pipe. A Seamaster’s Guild uniform, unworn since Jorgen had left the hot wharves of Clay Portside to tend the last lighthouse on the Lyonnian navigation chain. The trousers ended above Stefan’s ankles. Once dressed they made the short walk into the Cleave-Riven compound with the sunset in their eyes.
Stefan fell behind his father’s sombre step. The leviathan-processing factories run by the Riven family and their dependants were a fifteen-minute stroll from the lighthouse, and the path to reach them traced along a narrow ridge of land that made up the promontory. To the left was Vigil Bay, where the Vigil township crabbed against the shore like barnacles to the pier, and to the right the broad shallow curve of Dead Man’s Bay. The mist had cleared off that side, and Stefan could see the rockblood refineries in the distance.