‘Are you not forgetting the pearl?’ Stefan reminded her gently.
‘That started out as an irritation.’
‘Bel, cheer up. It’s only a few years, not long at all. Who else but me would keep you out of trouble?’
Without warning she lunged over and hugged him tight. She laid her head on his sternum. ‘Promise you’ll come back, promise with all your chest else die from it!’
‘I promise. Bel, what’s got in to you?’
He could smell her skin pressed against his own, a hot smell like burnt rock, or raw petralactose. He shifted away with discomfort. His body wasn’t reacting with desire to her. Something else. A complication to her, a veil covering her true intentions. Although she was his friend, there had never been anything attractive about Bellis Harrow to him, and she knew it. It was clear that frustrated her but perhaps that was why their friendship had lasted.
‘I am always safe with you, Stefan Beacon. You are not like Vernon Justinian, who looks at me with lust in his heart, and I don’t have to watch after you in worry the way I do Jonah. You are my shelter and my anchor, and I am afraid of what will happen when those things are gone.’
Suddenly her need … whatever it was … became cavernous and he was falling into it, a voice in his head like a bell chiming, I will stay, I will stay …
With a gasp Stefan pulled out of Bellis’ small hands. He could hardly bear to look at her. It was her voice he’d heard in his head. Bellis’ voice, commanding, making him forget himself.
She looked at him guilelessly. ‘What’s wrong?’
‘The Rivens are still waiting for the tide,’ he said, uncertain and confused about what had just happened. ‘I think I’ll see if they’ll take me as a passenger.’
‘Will I see you again before you go?’
‘I’ll try. I might not see you before the Lyonne ship comes, though. My father wants me to do all the chores before Saturn’s day.’
Bellis gave a wry smile. ‘Go then, my friend, and serve God well.’
He nodded, and left, and told himself his haste was only to reach Sehnsucht before the tide pulled her away from the pier, and not because for a second Bellis’ commands had risen up as if to choke him, like a fist at the back of his throat.
Stefan presented himself to the Rivens upon the docks, and though he received a glower from Zachariah’s son, the patriarch guffawed benevolently at his neighbour’s flustered request for passage home. He let Stefan on board.
Not long after the waters rose and Sehnsucht floated free of the harbour mud. Stefan stood at the bow and hung on to the guy ropes. The ghostwood hunting-boat thundered through the leaden water towards the promontory at the other side of Vigil Bay. Each time a rogue wave bucked the bow up higher, the guy rope knocked him in the back like a disapproving arm. The local boats ran on both propeller screw and side wheels, a quirk of the weed-fouled waters, but heavy water could catch the paddles and make the boat kick.
They’d barely made it out of the harbour before he was wet through with sea-spray, and miserable from the chill.
‘I couldn’t speak to you at the funeral. It was forbidden.’
He startled out of his preoccupations. From both the wildness of voice and accent he could not be sure if it was Jonah or Jeremiah Riven that had come up behind him.
Stefan turned about as best he could without releasing his grip on the guy ropes. It was little Jonah. The boy had pulled a threadbare wool sweater over his thin shoulders. The scoop of unravelling stitches at his neck exposed a delicate filigree of squid-ink tattoos. Shorefolk grieving marks, probably put on by a drunken hand through a haze of tears. Jonah’s expression was wary, like a pale crow that at any moment might take fright.
‘Well, it was really my da was invited, I just came along.’ Realizing that he might sound abrupt Stefan added. ‘I’m sorry about Ishmael. He sounded like a good man.’
Jonah perched up on the bow, and drew up his bare feet while his expression remained inscrutable. His hands brushed over that fresh tattoo scab at his collar, and he nodded absently. ‘Yes, he was, and I am too. Sorry. That he died.’
‘Your ma’s still young, right? She can get married again?’
Jonah gave Stefan a look that was both affronted and withering. ‘No, she can’t,’ Jonah said with the aggrieved patience of a teacher talking to a particularly obtuse student. ‘She made the promise to the Deepwater King and she stays married until she dies. No man can touch her now.’
Stefan nodded, and remembered his father’s warning not to show judgment upon his face. ‘Oh, yes. I forgot. My apologies.’
The ship hit a swell and a sheet of grey water splashed up from the bow. They were re-entering the shallows. The side wheels took over with a strained creaking. Jonah climbed off his perch as the boat sidled up to the long, thin pier. The other hunting ships, golden Sonder and dark Saudade, were tied off, not having moved since they’d arrived the afternoon before. A pair of shorefolk put the finishing touches to a decorative row of circles painted across each hull. The circles reminded Stefan of sucker-scars from a kraken attack. Superstitious wards of some kind. Both paint and cans looked awfully similar to the lighthouse whitewash, and Stefan suspected they’d helped themselves to the official paint.
Jonah Riven slid overboard and onto the pier with his hands full of rope, preparing to secure the ship onto the hawser cleats. Zachariah called to Stefan from the wheelhouse.
‘Don’t go yet. Walk with me, lad.’
Even though he’d known his father’s neighbours for as long as he could remember, Stefan still found Mr Zachariah Riven thoroughly intimidating, with his cryptid-skin coat and the scars of his hunting profession so evident on his skin. Some marks were flat and shiny, others were a deep keloid purple. In summer the shorefolk swam at a hot-water beach on the other side of the promontory, and Stefan knew there was hardly a place on him that was not similarly scrimshawed.
‘Jorgen tells me the Clay priesthood is about to gain a new novice.’
‘Yes, three years at the seminary, then three in service of the church. By God’s grace, I may then apply to be His priest.’
‘And you were not … how do they say it … sanguis?’
He pointed at Stefan’s hands. Stefan shook his head.
‘My father tested me at home, but I showed no talents.’ He put his hands in his pockets, for compared to Zachariah Riven’s they must have seemed so soft and sun-touched, not scarred and bleached by water. ‘Not even metal, or storm-calling.’
The man nodded. ‘Sometimes that is best. Now go fetch your father. Tell him I wish to see him.’
Stefan
Stefan Beacon woke up with a start.
Not just to silence. A low tolling in his head, the ringing aftermath of a cry in his dream, as if someone had called out to him at the moment he woke, and he could not be sure to which state he belonged.
Stefan lay in the semi-dark of the light-tower’s upper alcove, felt the baffles of the coldflame turn high above him. The grinding harmonic of the motor spinning the light seemed to have lost its comfortable familiarity. Something discordant in the sound, as if the world had moved just a little bit sideways and off-key. He sat up and looked around his room. It was a garret barely wide enough to stretch his full length, with the only light coming from a thin slice of opaline glass that had gone grey with dawn.
A feeling moved in him. Stormteller trouble, almost. Blood heavy in the air, and thick on his skin. He had been correct when he’d told Zachariah about his failed tests for sanguis talents, but just because he couldn’t enact sanguis bloodwork did not mean he could not sense its presence.
Stefan slid into his strides, padded downstairs. His boots stood by the door, but not his father’s. The bed was rumpled and cold and the pot-bellied stove had exhausted its fuel. A shy light filtered through the windows.
And a call on the wind. His father’s voice. Not shouting. Screaming.
Stefan shoved his feet into his boots and had barely o
pened the door to the cold day …
… when his father pushed him aside as if he weren’t there. In a flurry of rain and wind Jorgen ran for the telephone set on the equipment desk, wound the handle furiously, shrieked incoherent words into the handset.
Blood on his face and clothes. Bloody handprints over the desk, and the door.
‘Murder … massacre … all dead … dear God, Gertie, send help …’
An icy finger of apprehension touched him. Stefan stumbled into the day, and the air about him pressed as still as a cathedral’s void. Beyond the promontory, a blanket of smoke clung to the cliff edge. A man’s body lay on the slender path. By the trail of viscera Jorgen had dragged the corpse all the way from the promontory factories to the lighthouse.
With his heart in his mouth Stefan approached the corpse. The full damage turned out worse than he had imagined. The great barrelled chest hollowed out so that the spine showed through like a row of white flags. No legs beneath the knees. Kraken-sucker scars ribboning a shoulder.
Zachariah Riven, dead.
Stefan’s breath stuttered. How could a monster-caller suffer monster injuries?
In a fugue of bewilderment he followed the trail of gore. More bodies, and these ones of people who’d tried to escape whatever had gone on here. Disturbed dirt, slithering gouges from legless, boneless things.
Out of all the people working in this compound how had not a one of them sounded an alarm?
The largest of the factory houses had been reduced to blackened ribs, still smouldering. They’d tried to use fire against the invasion. A slimy, suckered squid-arm lay hacked off and wetly on the ground in a death-grip around what was clearly a human limb. A woman’s hand marked with Riven chevrons, the upper arm scored with knife-cuts through the meat.
Someone had tried to use heavy sanguis blood to stop the beast, Stefan reasoned wildly. Tried and failed. What in God’s name had happened here? The scouring, heavy tracks had come up from over the beach-bluffs, tearing out the stone foundations from the old missionary ruins before heading towards the factories.
He stood in the centre of the compound, aware of Jorgen calling him, but he wasn’t ready to leave, not yet.
A sound made him startle.
He turned about, and Jonah Riven slumped shirtless near the tanning vats. At first glance Stefan thought Jonah was dead as well, before the thin ribcage flared with a breath.
‘Jonah?’
He reached out to touch a clammy, bony shoulder. Oddly there was no sign of sucker-marks on the boy, but the tops of his forearms were crusted with stripes of dried blood. He’d clearly tried to make the cuts shallow and vertical and at some point lost control of the knife.
Jonah had been crouched there a while. The blood had soaked into the crushed quartzite stones of the Riven compound. The boy rocked, eyes wide as he met Stefan’s own.
‘It wasn’t supposed to be this way.’
Stefan backed off. ‘Jonah, what happened here?’
The attention fixed on Stefan. A terrible, almost luminous blue beheld him, eyes that had no feeling behind them. For the briefest moment, something else lurked behind Jonah’s eyes, then it was gone.
‘I went into the water. I called Ishmael back.’
‘Jonah … Jonah, what?’
Defiance replaced the horror on Jonah’s face. ‘I called him back. I stood on the shore and demanded the Deepwater King give me back my father!’ Jonah heaved a breath. ‘And he came!’
Stefan swallowed. His words came out creaky.
‘You called the monsters out of the water?’
‘Not monsters! Ishmael! My sea-father in the name of the King!’ Jonah implored, his eyes begging him to understand. ‘It was Ishmael … at first.’
At first. Through the confusion came the glimmers of an awful understanding. The Deepwater Rite was a funeral rite, but the old sanguinities of monster-calling still ran in the shorefolk veins. Jonah had believed in a folk tale of bringing the dead back from the sea, resurrecting a man. Jonah had gone to the water and made the offerings.
Whatever he’d raised out of the ocean had not been Ishmael alone. The ocean had fathomless depths where the monsters of the permanent night lurked. Drawn to shore by the invitation, they’d massacred every living thing that had stepped in their way.
Someone had to have encouraged Jonah to such a foolhardy act. Someone he trusted completely. But nobody in his family, certainly not his mother, would have—
Bellis.
‘You evil—!’
As silent as a shadow, Jorgen had come up behind Stefan and with one great yank tore Jonah to his feet. Struck the child down with a fist.
Picked him up and struck him down again. Stunned, the boy didn’t even attempt to fight back.
‘Rotting little bastard!’ Jorgen shouted. ‘Filthy slut-born devil! You called the monstrosities out of the fucking deeps and killed your family! Your rotting carcass will rot in hell!’
Kicks to the ribs, and Jonah only reflexively rolled into a ball and let Jorgen punish him.
‘Da, stop!’ Stefan cried. He grabbed the older man and pulled him away. ‘Stop!’
‘I’ll kill it! I’ll kill the beast and hang its hide for the devils to find!’
‘If we kill him, it will only make it worse for us, Da, please! We’ll wait for the …’
He searched for the word, and the only one that came was Lions. The Lyonne Order would definitely come, the shadowy folk of the Lyonne government whose business was to control bloodworkers. The Lions would investigate Jonah, and Bellis. The Lions and their poisons and their accidents.
‘We will wait for the Magistrate,’ Stefan finished. He shook Jorgen’s collar to agitate some sense into this weeping madman. ‘When they come, they can investigate properly, all right? We don’t really know what’s happened here. Monsters come to shore all the time. The sea is always hungry.’
It was a lie under God, but necessary now. Jorgen fought Stefan for his freedom, fought him savagely. Only by Stefan’s height and youth could he hold his father back. Wailed words. Killed him, killed him. Oh, Zach.
‘I know, Da, I know,’ Stefan soothed as Jorgen collapsed in his arms. ‘I know this feeling.’
He did not know, not really. Eros existed as a foreign emotion, and Stefan was well joyful to be immune from the trouble desire wrought. He did not know romantic love. Yet still, he knew pain.
And Jonah, more corpse than boy, lying in the dirt, left with the enormity of what he’d done.
All of a sudden Stefan had been crowned the lone, sane adult in this theatre of suffering. Stefan ordered his devastated father down to the pier, to await the arrival of the Vigil constabulary. Harbourmistress Gertrude Modhi would have already called them after receiving such an alarming communication on the rarely used short-wave.
Despite everything, Stefan found room to experience a twinge of pity for Jonah Riven. This disaster was not entirely the boy’s fault. If Bellis was behind the suggestion to work a rite of resurrection, then she had only suggested Jonah do the rite out of curiosity, maybe. Out of her misplaced sense of concern. How could she have known it would lead to this?
‘Best get up and into the house, Jonah. Bind up those wounds,’ Stefan said. ‘We can’t have another episode of devilfish coming ashore.’
Slowly, it dawned on Jonah that there would be more to face than just grieving. He had committed a terrible crime. He stared at Stefan. ‘What’ll happen to me?’
Stefan exhaled. He couldn’t get the stink of the day out of his lungs.
‘The Magistrate will have questions. If you’re lucky, maybe he’ll see it as a rogue monster attack, nothing more. He’ll see you’ve suffered enough, and let you go.’
Book One: Equus
PRESENT DAY
1
Talk about fortunate
‘Talk about fortunate they didn’t immediately hang him in the town square. That’s what Mother always said,’ David Modhi concluded with a sigh. ‘The townsfol
k were righteously angry, and scared.’
‘Would they have hanged someone so young?’
‘Fourteen is old enough in Fiction.’
Yes, people grew old before their time in the cold south waters. Arden Beacon, Lyonnian and niece of Jorgen Beacon of Vigil, peered at her shipmate. The half-light of the boat’s below decks made David Modhi of Vigil seem aged beyond his eighteen years. The mention of Jonah softened his expression. Arden could see his mother in the young man’s face, the Vigil Harbourmistress who had been a spy for the Lyonne Order.
Mx Gertrude Modhi had spent twenty years writing missives of the comings and goings of the townsfolk, the shorefolk, and the lighthouse keeper.
Twenty years of letters via the Postmaster of Vigil, Alasdair Harrow, whose cunning, curious daughter had made copies of them all.
Inside the hull, the black mangrove wood of the hunting ship Saudade swallowed up anything brighter than a candle flame, so the dark loomed in close and intimate. A time for secrets.
‘Mother said if Mr Riven’s tragedy happened a few months later, he would have received an adult’s trial, and an adult’s punishment. And murder in Fiction is punished by execution.’
‘But a child,’ Arden repeated, even though her heart broke a little from the speaking of such a thing. She smoothed out the waxy paper. Postmaster Harrow had owned a spirit duplicator, and his clever daughter had put it to good use, painstakingly taking her own copies of all the classified mail that went through his office.
At some point Bellis – a loving Bellis not yet drowned in malevolence – had gifted the more pertinent letters to Jonah, back in those first days after his return from the Harbinger Bay penitentiary. An offering of knowledge to a man who’d lost half his life. Tied them with a ribbon and wax seal, left them in Saudade’s map desk for him to find.
To Jonah, from Bellis.
But he had never found them. Or if he had, he’d declined to break the seal. They’d remained bound until Arden had found them this night.
Deepwater King Page 3