Deepwater King

by Claire McKenna

  Chalice released her to find the polished silver mirror on one wall, and tried to pat her riotous red hair in place so it might fit back under the Sou’wester hat she’d been using as the bulk of her disguise.

  ‘Let’s just say my heels had cooled somewhat in Morningvale when I first caught word of Saudade’s flight. Took me all the powers of persuasion to get on the last boats allowed out of the harbour before the coast shut down.’

  Then she left her image alone, and turned about.

  ‘And you know why I’m here.’

  Arden had known the Order’s command would reach her, one way or another. Wasn’t it Chalice’s first statement when stepping in this room?

  ‘Ah, Chalice, of all people I thought you would understand why I had to leave.’

  ‘I’m sorry, darling, but that is what it is. The Order would not allow me out of the country without my at least trying to bring you back.’

  ‘Then what about Sean and David? Sean’s a wanted criminal in Lyonne, and David won’t go anywhere without him. If they end up on Equus … Chalice, you know what that place is like. They won’t last six months and I’ll never forgive myself if I lose two more lives. Destroying one was enough.’

  She couldn’t stop the twist of pain showing on her face, and turned about so Chalice could not see her. Behind her Chalice let out a small hmm of consideration.

  ‘Where did you intend to take them before you were waylaid?’

  ‘Libro,’ Arden said. ‘It’s the only place they could be safe.’

  Chalice shook her head. ‘No.’

  ‘Yes, Chalice! It’s the perfect place.’

  ‘No! Remember the locket Mr Absalom gave me, before we left Sehnsucht?’

  ‘The one with his secrets—?’

  ‘There was a thread code embedded in the silk. A catalogue of all the nonsense our Queen Bellis has been up to since she started her orientine gallivant about the Sainted Isles. The girl in the yellow dress on board Bellis’ ship, she was the lone Libro prisoner.’

  ‘Persephone.’

  ‘Wren, her real name is. Wren Halcyon Libro, maybe she’ll be the last of her people.’

  ‘I don’t understand, Chalice. The last?’

  ‘The last, darling. There are none of her kind left. Three years ago Bellis Harrow killed every Libros adult her army could find, then dropped the children into the sea. Libro is no more.’

  Even if the ground had fallen out from beneath her feet, Arden would not have felt so weightless as she did then.

  ‘But nobody else knows the old ways except the people on that island. David and Sean were going to live with them, and I was going to ask about …’ She trailed off.

  Chalice gently guided Arden to the daybed and took her hand. Arden did not fight her. Her hope had drained away as utterly as if a knife had nicked every vein.

  ‘Why don’t the Lions stop Bellis?’ Arden asked hollowly. ‘If the Order is so aware of her brutality?’

  ‘I suspect the Lyonne Order is happier having our Queen monstering a few fishermen and assorted farmers rather than turning her sights towards Clay City. They prefer her out here and away from anywhere of importance.’

  Without warning Chalice grabbed Arden’s wrist. She pushed the bandage off the wax-stoppered coins and pressed hard on one silver disc with her thumb.

  Arden pulled her hand free. ‘Ow! That hurt.’

  ‘They shouldn’t hurt.’

  ‘They won’t hurt if they’re not poked!’

  ‘Darling, a sanguinem can’t stay out here forever roaming the islands like a wailing, lovelorn spirit. Those coins need replacing each year, else your body will begin to corrode about them.’

  Annoyed, Arden yanked the bandage back into place. ‘I’ve already had this conversation with David Modhi, Chalice. Why do you think I’m being driven like I’ve got demons with pitchforks chasing me? Time is not on my side.’

  ‘Which is why I want to help.’ At Arden’s frown Chalice continued. ‘I also heard what Jonah said before we jumped off the back of Sehnsucht. You’re not out here just to find the boys a home, are you, darling? If your lost man needs a deepwater prayer to rest his errant ghost, then let me put my significant skills to effecting those words.’

  Arden was confused by this helpful Chalice. ‘So this is not a Lion with a switch telling me to turn the boat around right now?’

  ‘As if my wilful friend would listen? Goodness, I’m not a monster.’ Chalice smiled and caressed Arden’s cheek. ‘If the Order investigations are correct, there is also an heretical Clay City priest on Equus who converted to the old island religion. After he performs a funeral ceremony, we can leave Equus and find a place in South Lyonne for the two boys to slip away. Much of the land south of Harbinger Bay is lousy with rebels and swampland secessionists. The Order gets there as much as they do the Isles. See? Everything in its place, and your homecoming to boot.’

  After being buffeted by so many conflicting emotions in such a short time, Arden could barely say a coherent word. The only recognizable feeling in the tumult that flooded through her was relief.

  ‘I suppose it sounds achievable,’ she croaked breathlessly.

  ‘It is achievable. Cheer up. I’ll help you make those confessions and acts of contrition to whatever church of love exists upon Equus. And then, once we have done what you need to appease that guilt, let me take you home.’

  4

  They called it day

  They called it day, but was it daylight that they saw when they came into the harbour of Burden Town, the main township of Equus Island? A roil of smoke from a hundred fires coated the sky in bruised blacks and furious crimsons. A thousand boats in this curl of bay, and a stench beyond anything Arden had suffered before, even greater than the stink from the ghost ship. A sour-sweet miasma of salt and organic rot from poison waters mixed with effluent and bituminous rockblood.

  Beyond the harbour squatted an edifice that looked as if a dozen great slum dwellings had been built one on top of the other. A small city of a thousand rooms, each balanced precariously on the roof of one below, all enclosed by a low ragged wall of limestone like a great square tomb constructed piecemeal. Countless constellations of tiny electric lights scattered over the apartment-city’s surface, making the dark plains beyond the wall all the more grim.

  A place for work and working, not lives and living.

  The Equus morning showed blood-red on a horizon ragged with pumping-derricks. The pump-heads bobbed laboriously along the coast. Beyond the walled city, Arden could make out a landscape of uninhabited plains where not even trees grew. The wasteland was as open and featureless as if it had been graded flat. Anxious, she adjusted her gloves so that the stitches in the leather secured against her skin, and tried to still her quick, fretful mind.

  ‘You can feel it, yes?’ Chalice stood alongside her, having slipped back into her pilgrim disguise. She had previously promised Mrs Cordwain that she would keep watch on Saudade, for the pilgrim leader had quickly realized a hunting boat filled with kraken oil would be worth the price of docking in Burden Town. ‘The orientis and mandatum. It’s everywhere.’

  Arden nodded. She felt it sliding through her lungs with each breath. More than felt it. The old talents were suffocating in their strength here.

  Chalice took her hand and gave Arden a concerned look. ‘Your evalescendi’s playing up?’

  Arden stilled her urge to pull her hand away. Chalice had every right to worry. With her shadow talent of evalescendi Arden could take someone’s very small portion of talent and make them stronger, make them the opposite of small, make them exponential, make them uncontrollable. Chalice had experienced the runaway amplification of evalescendi well enough.

  But Arden shook her head and gestured to the oily water below them. ‘Those sanguinities feel strong, but they’re remote, somehow. Aged. Like the rope connecting to them has been cut.’ She gave Chalice a wan smile. ‘I’ll be all right.’

  Chalice stood up straighter an
d released Arden’s hand with a consoling pat. ‘Talking about cutting a rope, we need to take care of a much more present one. The harbour pilot is here.’

  Chalice sidled down the gunwale before leaning over the starboard deck. The pilot boat that had pulled up alongside Saudade was in possession of, thankfully, a live man inside the wheelhouse. His grimy coat gleamed a bilious yellow in the cold light of a chemical lantern. Chalice Quarry spoke with him, and offered coins from her purse.

  I will have to be careful with Chalice, Arden thought. Even if she does say she is helping me. I don’t know what the Order’s plans really are.

  The pilot was pleased with Chalice’s payment and recovered the tow-lines from Mrs Cordwain’s boat, much to the vexation of the widow who’d expected to secure several hundred Djennes from Saudade’s sale. Her indignant curses faded into the distance as the black mangrove ship was hauled away.

  Now with her fate fastened to the pilot craft, the harbour man towed Saudade a distance from the chaotic main wharf to a quieter section north of the dredged river mouth. A long, thin mole of rock and metal girders protruded into a less populous harbour. The docking fees must have been exorbitant, given the better class of boat also secured at the pier. Though Chalice might have been acting outside of Lion auspices, they had certainly given her the funds to dispose of as she saw fit.

  Arden unscrewed Saudade’s priming pump handle from the ignition block, and took it below decks.

  ‘I need someone to stay and look after Saudade,’ she said to Sean Ironcup privately, once she had sent David off on the errand of keeping an eye on Chalice. ‘I can’t leave the boat alone while we look for Chalice’s supposed fraternity.’

  She tucked the handle into Sean’s palm then, after much deliberation, took out the Lyonne gold she’d meant to pay the Librans for the Rite. It was unlikely she would ever pay for their services now. She folded the coin pouch into the twists of his fingers, and pressed them tight against his chest.

  ‘What am I supposed to do with this money?’

  ‘Effect repairs on this boat. Hire some shipwrights. Fix her. Keep her safe while she’s docked here.’

  ‘How do I do that alone? We don’t have weapons apart from a flare-gun.’

  ‘Pay a local to stand guard. I saw some mercenaries patrolling the other ships. Offer half the money now and the rest later. It will ensure their loyalty.’

  ‘You pay them, Mx Beacon. I could help in Burden Town. I could come along. I might not be able to cover much ground with my walking staff, but I know about the Hillsiders who come here. I know these people.’ A sweat of alarm sprang out on his high forehead.

  Arden squeezed Sean’s shoulder. He clearly didn’t want to be alone. ‘David doesn’t realize it yet. He needs more than just a lover. He is sanguis, valuable in a land where he’s never had value before. If he decides on foolishness and wants to make his own way here, I cannot stop him from leaving us.’

  ‘He would never.’

  ‘Because his connections to Mr Sean Ironcup will keep his good sense about him?’

  Sean sucked on his cheeks. His palsied hand drew up tighter, and she knew his tells well enough to know him deeply worried.

  ‘Is Burden Town that dangerous of a city?’

  Arden met his eyes. ‘There’s no future in this place. There’s death all over. If you survive the year, the rockblood fumes will rot your brains, send you spare and shorten your years by half at least. This is no place to make a life.’

  ‘Then don’t take him too far, Lightmistress.’

  ‘I promise I’ll bring him back, Mr Ironcup.’

  Sean waited on the deck while the others loaded themselves with only their most essential luggage.

  David was talking animatedly to Chalice as Arden approached. ‘… saw a lich-ship pass us on the way here. Mandatum and orientis! Or at least, that’s what Mx Beacon says.’

  One of the pilgrims stood with them, a stout man with a neat moustache and a waistcoat of a marbled brocade that reminded Arden of the endpapers in a book. She recognized Mr Le Shen, one of the figures from the pilgrim ship who had boarded first.

  ‘Mx Beacon is correct,’ replied the man to David. ‘There was once a person who had both talents and they were exiled here for a convenient forgetting. They were much too powerful to keep in Lyonne—’

  Chalice cleared her throat upon seeing Arden. ‘Lady on deck.’

  Arden stepped forward. ‘Don’t stop on my account.’

  ‘Oh, Mr Modhi was regaling us with the encounter with one of the rockblood ghost ships,’ Chalice said. ‘Arden, this is Mr Rex Le Shen, from the Clay Capital library. He’ll be coming with us.’

  ‘Yes, we met earlier. You are a librarian, sir?’

  Mr Le Shen was average in height and solid, with a figure more suited to a street-brawler than a librarian. His face was smooth and broad with puffy bags under his eyes from long nights reading books in dark galleries. His hair silvered his temples with wings. He shook her hand and gave a quick, cautious nod, as if he were used to dealing with nobility but not ready yet to be obsequious to it. A golden key dangled from a leather cord about his neck, the gold bright and soft, like a ceremonial necklace. Something about him rang at her memory.

  The man bowed gently. ‘Lightmistress.’

  Arden inclined her head. ‘I find your face familiar, sir. Not just from yesterday. Have we met before?’

  ‘We may have crossed paths. The Clay City library was a favourite haunt of Portmaster Lucian Beacon and his children.’ He gestured politely to her.

  It stung her, that sudden upwell of homesickness. She managed a smile. ‘Oh, of course. My father took a membership wherever he could keep his ear close to the city.’

  ‘How goes Lucian?’

  ‘I’ve not seen him since springtime. But he was well when he last wrote.’

  ‘And his brother Jorgen? He was also my friend in our springtime days. We lost touch, to my eternal regret.’

  ‘He passed away last year,’ she said. ‘Blood poisoning.’

  Mr Le Shen smiled with genuine tenderness. ‘My condolences, Mx Beacon. I tried very much to maintain the friendship with Jorgen but Fiction was so very far away, and after his son – Stefan – died, he stopped corresponding altogether.’

  ‘His son’s death weighed hard on him.’

  ‘Stefan would have been your cousin, I presume? It puzzled me, how a healthy young man could have been lost. I was told it was a crime of passion.’

  ‘I’m not sure either. We were never close. I only met Stefan once or twice, as a child.’

  Arden decided not to tell Mr Rex Le Shen the full extent of her uncle’s tragedy, the loss of Stefan three years ago into the maw that was Bellis Harrow, Jorgen’s descent into despair. He did not need a day coloured by sadness, and she was not fully sure of this man.

  ‘So, what brings a librarian to Equus, Mr Le Shen?’ Arden asked, changing the subject. If he was a companion of Chalice, there had to be Order business afoot. ‘I’d expect the cultural artefacts of Clay City would be the first things discarded once anyone got here.’

  ‘Exactly, correct! I am chasing discards, a far different mission than that of Mrs Cordwain and her followers,’ he said with a nod towards the main harbour, and the path Mrs Cordwain had gone down. ‘When prospectors come here they’ll trade away priceless family relics. A penny for the Old Guy, as the saying goes. Books, the likes that have never been seen in Clay. Rare volumes, hundreds and thousands of them, all sinking into the private collection of a man I would like to meet.’

  ‘Also,’ Chalice interrupted, ‘this same fellow who has the private collection also has some Order debts he hasn’t quite paid off. So he owes us some favours, and today we are going to call them in.’

  Arden took Chalice aside. ‘We don’t have the time to socialize, Chalice. Aren’t we going to see this priest of yours?’

  ‘We have to secure safe haven first.’ She pulled a wad of damp folded papers out of her coat pocket
s and waved them at Arden. ‘But if we wander around here without a chaperone and the stink of powerful protection, we are sitting ducks on this polluted lake of rockblood thirst.’

  With that Chalice took the lead, as if she knew exactly where she was going.

  A line of shabby traders in rockblood-vinyl coats accosted them at the end of the pier, having seen the newcomers come in and be granted a most expensive berth. The smell of fish and sweat mingled with the esters of rockblood, and Arden found herself close to repulsed utterly by it all. Unlike Vigil’s marketplace, which had been rather staid and antiquarian, there was a riotous air in this dockside mall, as if the traders were snatching up minutes that did not belong to them.

  Not so far away a squad of men in patchworked fish-leathers and flat caps shoved a protesting fellow about his trestle table. The other traders began to pack up hurriedly. Chalice plucked at Arden’s elbow. ‘The militias are enthusiastic, I see. This way, let’s get out of this chaos.’

  Arden grabbed David’s hands and dragged him through the press of bony, starved bodies, afraid she would lose sight of Chalice. But Chalice was not about to go too far. She led them around to the side of a building ruin to a wall set behind the busy main street. Arden puffed some fresh air back into her lungs, only to find that without the reek of fish and half-dried seaweed, a more insidious smell of rockblood had replaced it.

  Chalice opened the paper wad carefully along its folds. ‘Now, let’s see where we are.’

  Arden caught a glance of hastily drawn lines, small icons, a compass rose. Chalice’s papers were a street map. Even with Chalice’s spidery hand, Arden’s memory twanged all at once. Mr Absalom had secretly given Chalice that silk map in a metal locket on Bellis’ Sehnsucht, before they had jumped overboard to save their hides. Of course Chalice hadn’t given it over to her Lion masters without making a personal copy first. She was much too cunning for that.

  ‘This way,’ Chalice said, orienting the map against the pier and pointing at one street. ‘This is where our book collector lives.’