Deepwater King

by Claire McKenna

  Then they were back into the crowd, their route wending through the tangle of tents and tables, up a flight of worn steps laid in by a civilization so ancient even the stone had forgotten the carvings it had once held, to a road away from the mole dock, and into the walled city of Burden Town.

  5

  Inside the town boundaries

  Inside the town boundaries, the air changed, became heavy and stale. The constant stink of raw petrolactum brought with it an uneasy vertigo. A fine mist veiled the close-walled, foetid streets. The buildings were tall in this crowded, dense city; at least twenty chaotic levels high apiece. A foul-smelling rain dripped down through the tangled wires that connected one edifice to another.

  Twisted, gaunt faces loomed out of the darkness as if they were reflections through smeared glass. Doorways were illuminated in flickering sodium reds. Shadows lolled there, watching them pass. Everyone they passed appeared lean with starvation, their expressions hollowed.

  Arden tripped over her own feet like a drunkard. Chalice ran to help her up.

  ‘Darling?’

  Arden waved Chalice away and got up. ‘Just a little dizziness,’ she said, brushing her tender knees. ‘It’s quite airless here, isn’t it?’

  Her excuse to Chalice earned her narrowed eyes, a glance at Arden’s hands, and a low disbelieving murmur.

  ‘I’m sure it is dizziness. We’d better get going. There are already eyes upon us. There’s people here who’ll take advantage of any innocent within these walls.’

  Despite it being midwinter, the Islands benefitted from the hot-water currents from the south and the climate was mild, if dreary, with an ever-threatening shower. Waves of rockblood fumes buffeted them in between sharp, rain-scented air. The road from the harbour soon crossed a stone-lined drain that might have once been a river or an aqueduct before finding final purpose as an open sewer.

  Chalice’s map led into a quarter of Burden Town that was mostly suspended above the water upon stilts. Ragged men in their iron coracles paddled through muck and murk. One fisherman dragged up a net writhing with eyeless horrors, a species of white fleshy blob-fish with sharp crystal teeth.

  One of the stilt houses was larger than the other huts. It was a literal hut-mansion, three storeys high with a wide veranda all around, and broad eaves to protect it from the constant rain. At its roof was a bush of gaudy plastic scales that fluttered in the hot petroleum-laden wind. Above the large doorway lintel, carved into the wood, a single word: Abaddon.

  Chalice knocked upon the iron-banded door until a peephole opened to a pair of gaunt male faces looking out.

  ‘What is it?’ gruffed one of them. His head was missing a tooth. Like other Equus locals, they were both thin and underfed, and they wore the same kind of flat caps and poorly cured leather coats as the men who had prowled the docks. There were similar men in the worst parts of Clay City, private armies and mercenaries who could be hired out for a few copper coins, and who would murder anyone for a pair of rag-paper bank notes.

  Chalice raised her chin. ‘I have come to see Lord Abaddon. Ask him if he cannot help a Widow’s Son.’

  ‘The what?’

  ‘Just go get him and repeat my words, sir,’ she huffed.

  The militiamen at the door were not altogether happy. Two women, a scholarly man and a youth were clearly not Lord Abaddon’s regular callers. They discussed this at length, before letting them in.

  Chalice clasped Arden’s hand, as if ready for any kind of malfeasance. Inside, the house opened to a small, dim and greasy foyer decorated with a jumble of decadent Clay carvings and utilitarian Fiction furniture. One corner was entirely given over to candlesticks, cutlery, plates and empty gilt picture frames, piled with thieves’ bounty. Upon any surfaces angled flat, a dark patina of oil beaded and smeared.

  ‘I hope you still have a blood-letting knife, dear,’ Chalice whispered out of the side of her mouth. ‘The lord of this house belongs to us but I don’t know about the hired assistants.’

  Arden put her free hand at her bodice where the plesiosaur ivory handle poked out unassumingly.

  ‘Did you say this collector is a lord?’

  Chalice rolled her eyes. ‘An entirely self-styled one. With enough money and power he could call himself King Abaddon if he wanted to.’

  ‘Have our visitors arrived, Harmal?’ a voice demanded from the camphorous recesses of the next room. Moments later a man walked into the foyer, resplendent in knee-high stockings and an untied gown of a shiny thread. He wore a wig of white judiciary curls, tattying as they fell below his shoulders. The gaping robe showed an affronting nakedness from neck to knee. He did not bother to conceal himself, only smiled broadly.

  Arden tried not to look but he was so contrary to the skinny citizens of Burden Town that she had to stare. The man’s body was pale and well-fed as a hog for slaughter, a physique purposefully meant to display his wealth and prestige – everything soft and rolled as bread dough, blond pubic hair and his manhood somewhat lost amid its gold mass. A blur of rouge upon his face. By its smear she guessed he had only acquired it second-hand.

  The strange lord-by-self-decree stopped speaking upon seeing his guests and his eyes folded into aggrieved slits. ‘These are not who I expected.’

  The moment was fraught. Chalice stepped forward.

  ‘I am Chalice Quarry.’ Chalice gave a hand signal that meant little to Arden. The Lord Abaddon knew that sign however, and he huffed with a barely disguised rage.

  ‘You are a Lion.’

  ‘My employers advised you that one of us would come eventually. Surely this agreement is well remembered when you accidentally procured the family of a very vexatious Parliamentarian? Oh, and these are my companions. Rex Le Shen from the Great Library. Lightmistress Arden Beacon of Clay Portside and David Modhi from Vigil.’

  The lord gave Arden a look of caustic disgust. She stood taller and returned the look to him, cool.

  With a yank he closed his robe shut and tied the ends together. ‘I didn’t believe a Lion would make it out here so soon, if at all.’

  ‘We have journeyed with pilgrims. Better us than the Parliamentarian’s own militia, who I hear always get their man.’

  ‘Huh.’

  Chalice eyed the man up and down. ‘I don’t think I need to remind Lord Abaddon of the oath he gave, when the Order saved his life.’

  ‘I have not forgotten my oath,’ Lord Abaddon sniffed, before stalking off through the dark oily corridor.

  ‘The Lions certainly pick these allies carefully,’ Arden said once out of earshot of the lord. She inspected the equally dark, greasy foyer. The mansion house occupied the footprint of a large Clay City apartment. With all the piecemeal and clearly ill-obtained bits of furniture, it was as cluttered as a bazaar.

  ‘I had little choice,’ Chalice replied sotto voce. ‘There aren’t infinite squares on this game board of ours, so we have to use him.’

  Arden noticed the mark of a Clay traders’ guild carved in one lintel under a garishly designed family crest of twin derricks, mid-bob. ‘How does he get so wealthy trading rockblood when everyone else is starving?’

  ‘Oh, it’s not rockblood he trades, it’s people. He has agents in Clay who will smuggle them here for every penny in their pockets and the food out of their children’s mouths. He makes quite a profit out of it.’

  Arden mouthed people, as the true horror of the lord’s profession became evident. Of course, that was how he came to the Order’s attention. He was a people-smuggler, a trader in human bodies. Such fiends started as pimps and touts from the lowliest Clay City gutter, but Equus had a way of uplifting the most undeserving.

  Chalice elbowed David, who had the baffled face of someone caught swimming well out of his depth. ‘Chin up, Mr Modhi, don’t look so guilty. You’ll make our host think we’re here to commit a crime.’

  Lord Abaddon, for all that his evil profits had turned him into a man of great standing, had very little in the way of domestic sta
ff apart from his manservant militia. He showed them to the guest rooms himself, flinging open the plastic-panelled doors to a ludicrously stocked library-turned-bedecked-boudoir. The floor was a riot of plush cushions and pink satins, velvets, muslins and sheer fabrics, all draped over the bookshelves. By the fug the room was not often aired out after its energetic use.

  He addressed the body gruffly within. ‘My sweet, we have company.’

  There was much in today that had Arden staring, so one more novelty should not have had her descend to such rudeness, but what she saw made her swallow and stare. A young man was sprawled across the central pillowy chaise, in much the same state of undress as the lord. Utterly naked, he had suffered a most grievous injury to the parts that made him male.

  Or at least he had a long time ago, for the puckering of pigmented skin between his legs suggested that when he had been emasculated – so terribly and completely – the wound had healed a long time ago.

  The most pressing concern, however, lay in his rolled-back eyes and his blue lips.

  ‘Devils!’ Arden dropped her bag. ‘The boy is dying!’

  ‘Ah, the runted whelp,’ Abaddon cursed. ‘Johannes! Harmal! Come quick!’

  Chalice, the closest, darted forward and grabbed one limp arm and pulled him over sideways. Vomit spilled from the boy’s lips.

  Arden, still stumbling over the discarded pillows, saw at once the cause of his collapse. She picked up an empty slump-glass bottle that had rolled an arm-length away, and sniffed it. The rush of fumes that followed made her cough.

  ‘Devilment, he’s been drinking distilled rockblood spirit.’

  ‘Awful,’ Chalice said. ‘Come on, lad, cough it up, there’s years left in you yet.’ She turned to Lord Abaddon. ‘He’s made a bit of a mess. Hot water too, if it can be spared, or if this damned island even has it.’

  ‘Of course we have it,’ Lord Abaddon said from the doorway. ‘We have water on Equus. Good clean water with just a hint of healthful radon. Comes out hot and boiling! Not this river-muck. I will bring it personally.’

  Arden kicked the soiled rags that were either clothes or furnishings into the corner of the love-room. She raised one warped, etched window from the sill, but the hot waves of rockblood coming in from outside were just as bad as the smell within. Reluctantly, she pulled the frame down.

  She turned to David, still gawking uselessly at the scene.

  ‘Find a robe for the lad, Mr Modhi. Give him some decency.’

  ‘His … his …’ David pointed at his own crotch.

  Mr Le Shen answered.

  ‘It’s called a hunter’s scar. The result of the complete and desperate removal of genital organs to be cast in the water to draw up some foul devilfish from his abyssal lair.’ Mr Le Shen fished in his pocket and drew out a behemoth-leather notebook.

  Arden and David exchanged a meaningful glance. Only the night before they’d spoken of the rites that called things from the sea and the sailors with their missing hands.

  When Mr Le Shen frowned quizzically at their unspoken communication, Arden explained quickly before David could speak too much. ‘A woman I stayed with in Vigil – Mrs Sage – told me of exactly the same thing once.’ She frowned at the recollection, for it had occurred directly after the first time she had seen Jonah Riven. ‘I didn’t quite believe her then. It seemed so outrageous an idea.’

  ‘The tales of the terrible rites used to be somewhat true in days of antiquity. That self-mutilation, it’s borrowed straight from the old sea-monster worship. They did love pain, the old deepwater folk. Thought it made them stronger. And it attracted the beasts they hunted. I can guarantee there are similarities in the way sanguinem use blood to access their sympathies. Blood or body part, it’s all the same.’

  David couldn’t help himself. He blurted, ‘Does it mean he follows the Deepwater religion, sir?’

  ‘Appropriates the religion, most likely. He will be part of an homage, a watered-down local tribute movement or cult. Such fraternities grow like wildflowers here. The genuine belief died out a century ago when the saint brought the automata and rockblood drills to this island.’

  ‘It can’t be appropriation. This injury is too extreme for just homage.’

  ‘This is an extreme place. I studied these islands extensively for my Librarian Master’s Degree. Deepwater religion may have begun here, but now it is just a farcical folk tradition. Street theatre. An excuse for a carnival and an orgy at the end, to take the rockblood workers’ minds off the work that has them dying.’

  Chalice flicked her attention at Arden, her thoughts loud on her face. You still want to do this ritual for Mr Riven, then?

  Arden folded her arms.

  ‘All right, all right,’ Chalice said when met with Arden’s stone-faced stubbornness. ‘Let’s not stand here discussing our new friend’s choice of body modifications. David dear, don’t pay it all too much mind. People do what they can in Equus to take their mind off other sufferings. There’s a bathrobe on the stand. Pass it over, please.’

  David pulled down a gaudy wormsilk robe from the nearby hat stand and tossed it in Arden’s direction.

  As Arden prepared to throw the robe over the skinny back, the jags on the boy’s skin caught her eye. She had previously noticed that the youth was tattooed when they had first turned him over and not paid it much mind; such an expanse of skin was a common sailor’s canvas. Now, in this quiet time after the worst of the peril had passed, she took a proper look.

  Chevron scales, like the sea-dragon maris anguis.

  Arden quickly covered the young man up before anyone else might look further and come to the same conclusion. He had not quite so many tattoos as Mr Riven had had, merely a flare across his lower pelvis and some creeping up the spine, but they had the same keloid raise as the shell-and-squid ink of the traditionalists.

  Of the Rivens. Of the true deepwater people. This is more than a deepwater homage.

  Lord Abaddon came back then, a sulky manservant trailing behind with a bucket of steaming water and some rags. Under the lord’s watch, Arden bundled the soiled blankets into a sheet and bound it up, before helping the groggy boy wipe his face with a fresh cloth.

  ‘There is something of a nursemaid about you, as well as a sanguinem,’ Lord Abaddon grumped to Arden. ‘I thank you. I am no monster; I don’t wish my lover injured, much as they spend their life trying to cause me grievance. I trust you to take care of this precious thing that I own,’ the lord said.

  ‘Sir.’ Mr Le Shen stood up with the pencil still in his hand. ‘While my companions are caring for your friend, may I speak to you about the books in your keep? I hear you have collected many fine volumes. I too am a collector.’

  Lord Abaddon smiled broadly. ‘Of course, fellow collector. Come and see how many rare editions are gifted to me by many guests …’

  His voice faded out down the corridor as they left for another part of the house, leaving Chalice and Arden to their privacy with the wretched boy.

  ‘Own,’ Chalice scoffed. ‘This precious thing that I own. Like a dog. Like a pet.’ She paused. ‘Like a slave,’ she added.

  The owned creature only moaned and vomited wetly into the bucket, and Chalice patted the heaving back. ‘There, there, dear, better out than in.’

  The boyish face, framed by fallen copper hair, looked up at Arden with rheumy eyes. He had sensed her watching him with more than just a healer’s attention. From being almost half-dead, he had crawled back to some semblance of life.

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Hello back,’ Arden said, even as a hundred questions prepared to follow, and none of them safe to ask while Chalice was around.

  ‘I am Malachi Abaddon.’ He held out his bile-sopping hand as if he were a queen expecting a curtsey and kiss, realized that he was not and would get neither, before returning to the circumspection of his bucket.

  Who are you really, Arden wanted to say, and caution made common sense press an invisible finger to her lips. ‘U
m,’ Arden said gently. ‘By what address are you known?’

  ‘Mister,’ he replied in exhausted languor.

  Chalice nodded towards his waist. ‘So what brings your misadventure?’

  He tilted his chin up with defiant pride. ‘My injury shows the sacrifices I have given to maris anguis.’

  ‘Huh,’ Chalice said. ‘Well now, it seems the women of Vigil’s marketplace aren’t entirely talking out of their rears, when they gossip about the greater castration of the men of the Darkling Sea.’ She hung her coat up on the hat stand. ‘You sea-worshipping fundamentalists can do all the lopping and cutting you want; you’ll be wishing for your brain removed come next morning. This gut rot will bring on a dreadful headache. Whatever were you thinking drinking an entire bottle of spirit?’

  ‘Escape,’ he said with a sigh and a regretful hug of his bucket-idol. ‘My lord’s appetites can be fearsome, and … unusual.’ He grinned wickedly then, a handsome flirtatious boy even deep in suffering.

  He turned to David and flashed an angelic smile. David blinked and returned the smile, for despite Malachi’s wretched state, he still had an aura of enchantment about him.

  When Chalice went to slop out Malachi’s bucket, Arden dragged David aside and behind the curtain of the dressing room that winged off the ridiculous boudoir.

  ‘Don’t go having ideas, Mr Modhi,’ Arden scolded once they were alone, and batted aside an oily chiffon scarf hanging from a crossbar. ‘No feeling tenderly towards another broken boy, when the last one we fished from death’s maw is still sitting on a boat waiting for our return.’

  ‘I know he is,’ David said, blushing.

  ‘Then stop staring at Malachi like a fool. We don’t even know this person.’

  ‘I wasn’t staring! I mean, I thought Mr Malachi was unusual, that’s all. He reminded me of Mr Riven, with his tattoos and scars.’

  Arden felt her righteous strength leave her. He had made the same connection. Shakily she sat down upon a dressing-seat. ‘Yes. Yes they do remind me of him too.’