He joined her on the seat. ‘Then why would Mr Le Shen say that they aren’t real? A homage, he said. Was he lying to us?’
Arden shook her head. ‘Most of the time tattoos like that are false. Not all of Mr Riven’s ink was genuine either.’ She flicked her eyes towards the gap in the curtain. ‘But his are real.’
‘How can you tell?’
‘Jonah got a lot of his adult work finished off in the Harbinger Bay prison hulks. Oyster blue dye, not kraken-ink. I could feel it under my hands when …’ She trailed off before she could say, when I made love to him. ‘I could feel the difference between the Riven marks made by shell and those scored by a needle by a Harbinger Bay tattooist. The shell leaves deeper scars, not like a prison tattoo, which feels flatter. I felt the difference just now on that boy. His marks are genuine. He’s the real thing. The real thing.’
She rubbed her cramping palms. The thought of young Mr Riven in a Harbinger Bay hulk, paying a prison tattooist to complete his dead family’s marks, made her want to cry for the child he’d been, and what he’d lost.
From the boudoir came the creak of a phonograph cranking up, and the whir of a cylinder before scratchy operatic music played loudly and forlornly through the adjoining rooms.
Through a gap in the curtain Arden watched Chalice return and look about for them. Nearby, Malachi was draped over the chaise longue like an intoxicated forest sylph that had been unceremoniously dragged out of a gutter.
Arden leaned in close to David’s ear. ‘Say nothing to Chalice about the ink on Malachi. I don’t want her curious about it. It’s too much of a complication right now.’
‘But wouldn’t she want to know—?’
‘The Lions know everything. We cannot spend any more than a day here. Once my business is finished, my priority is you and Sean, Mr Modhi. I need you off this island as soon as possible, all right?’
David nodded, his lips pressed together with promise. ‘I’ll keep quiet.’
‘Oh, there you are,’ Chalice said when they emerged from the dressing room. ‘Looks like we have our passports to walk safely through the streets of Burden Town.’ She held up two white ribbons on the end of dress-pins. ‘Our marks of protection. But first we need to join our host for dinner.’
6
After a supper of slimy kelp
After a supper of slimy kelp and dried meats that Arden declined to touch – mostly because both Malachi and Chalice had both shaken their heads at her when she gave a forkful a cautious sniff – came a dessert of stale dried fruits and crystallized honey. The menservants stood watch at the doorway and glared at the three guests and their appetites – politely minimal as they were – with hungry, baleful expressions.
Lord Abaddon’s attention was fixed upon Chalice and her bosom. His previous ill-feeling towards Chalice’s arrival had clearly been forgotten. Malachi and his tatty, thin feminine aesthetics were ignored. Arden could clearly see the boy was not at all jealous of being spared the attention.
The only time Malachi seemed less than in a half-dead doldrums of a rockblood-spirit hangover was when David asked Lord Abaddon timidly if he had heard of a Miah Anguis, who was rumoured to live upon Equus and was a man of some standing.
Malachi looked up from his boiled seaweed briefly and frowned at David, before returning to his hunched-over position.
‘Never heard of him,’ Lord Abaddon harrumphed. ‘Go into Burden Town if you must, and ask around. There are a great many ruffians and touts who will call themselves men of standing. Why do you ask?’
‘Oh, all right. I just thought you might know Mr Anguis. We were thinking he could help us with a problem.’
‘Any problems are best solved by going through the proper way,’ Lord Abaddon said. He indicated himself with a thumb. ‘By going through me. I don’t take kindly to competition on this island, which is why I have none.’
Chalice maintained a friendly professionalism, even though the slightest bump would have sent Lord Abaddon’s face tumbling into her generous cleavage. ‘That’s exactly what I said to Mr Modhi,’ she said, and glared at David. ‘When he first brought the matter up.’
When their meal was finished Chalice at last announced that as much she enjoyed the lord’s company they needed to go into town for important Order business.
‘Make sure you wear my ribbons,’ Lord Abaddon said. ‘They’ll be a warning to anyone who wishes to do you an unkindness.’
‘Thanks to you, Laurent,’ Chalice cooed, tickling the lord under his rotund chin, much to his delight, before snatching Arden’s hand and dragging her out into the oily corridor.
‘Laurent? I never took you for much of a seductress either,’ Arden said as they retreated to the washroom.
‘One does what one has to do,’ Chalice said with a shrug. ‘I needed to pay him off for the protection somehow. Let’s get some of the stink of travel off us before we go and visit our holy man.’
The outhouse was suspended perilously above the water with no more than a hole cut in the floor, and it took Arden a grim few minutes of indecision to lift her skirts and relieve herself, it being initially unconscionable that she pollute the water supply beneath her further still.
Chalice raised her head over the waist-high modesty divider that separated them and said, ‘Darling, as our host said, they use deep-well artesian water for drinking. This dreadful cloaca is a plain old open sewer, so don’t fuss about doing some business in it.’
Water splashed into the dim recesses of the crude sanitary as Chalice sluiced herself clean from a bucket nearby. The water had a peculiar smell to it, like rotten eggs. Limestone. The drinking and bathing water indeed came out hot from the pipes, clearly from deep bores.
The city of Burden Town might have been a despicable crust on the land, but Arden could sense old infrastructure here. Civilization even older than the Saint’s constant presence. Even the corroding stone walls spoke of a primeval city beneath the hurried settlement of rockblood prospectors.
As if Chalice knew what Arden was thinking she said, ‘The ancient Islanders did know their way around plumbing before they degraded into sea-shore savages ripe for conversion to the Clay Church.’
Arden finished cleaning herself and went to wash her hands in the carved jadeite bowls set out for the purpose. The soap slimed about her fingers from lard that had not been aged long enough. Something meaty was in the smell, and the uncured lye stung her hands.
‘It’s unpleasant here, is all. The lord is unpleasant. What he demands of Malachi is awful.’ She realized she had spoken the deepwater boy’s name and willed herself silent, else Chalice would turn her interest towards him.
‘Maybe he is awful, Arden. I’m certain there’s worse horrors found in the township proper. We aren’t going to stay long enough to get used to Burden Town or Lord Abaddon. Have you got your gloves on? It smells very flammable here.’
‘I’m not going to ignite anything,’ Arden replied defensively. ‘Besides, rockblood doesn’t burn naturally otherwise those foolish boys of ours wouldn’t have been planning a fire-sale with David’s bodily fluids.’
‘Hopefully they can plan a nice holiday in South Lyonne by the end of the week. Come on, put your big-girl clothes on and let’s get this funereal task over and done with.’
They left the House of Abaddon and walked along the fire-lit riverside, gasping petrolactum-scented breaths through their charcoal masks. The masks made the walk easier, and Arden’s head did not spin so much from the rockblood fumes. But the background ache of orientis and mandatum instructions still hummed all around her. If anyone stayed here in Burden Town long enough, the sanguis whispers would work their way into a person’s mind, create an awful obsession about the rockblood. The victims would constantly dream about fetching up the milky liquor from the ground, about joining the pumps and the derricks like living machines. They would forget friends and family, and forget eating, and sleeping. Eventually they would subsume themselves into the churned dirt of Equus, and
make room for more doomed prospectors.
‘Now,’ Chalice said, breaking Arden’s disquiet, ‘our holy fellow did not travel far. Mr Absalom’s map clearly showed the position of a church in the centre of town.’
Arden despaired at the chaos of camps and ramshackle apartments that lined the decayed boulevard. ‘Will we stand any chance of finding him in all that mess? I saw a bigger church down on the main docks when we were coming in.’
‘Which is exactly where a Clay priest thrown out on his ear would not go. He’d have a hidden church for sure, not that cattle-house on the dock for any pious Lyonnian newcomers to find.’
Chalice stepped around a large pothole and avoided a dribble of water from a high, dark pipe with the all the grace of an Equus native. ‘Ah, here it is – we are getting close.’
‘Are we?’ To Arden one alley in this town looked much the same as another. As befitted someone born to a lighthouse-keeping family, she was best with wide open spaces. Close spaces made her disoriented.
‘It’s what the map says.’ Chalice patted her pocket where her copied map was stored. ‘It’s been accurate so far.’
They had reached the walls of Burden Town, pressed through narrow streets and gaps between buildings impossible to navigate without tilting shoulders, through jungles of pipe and over cesspits brimming with their awful contents. Woozy with anxiety, Arden searched the close, foetid streets for anything that could remotely pass for a church. There were architectural hints in each gloomy passage of shop fronts and barber surgeons and portals to any imaginable sin, but no evidence of a sacred space.
A man lingered too long at one end of a blind, narrow boulevard looking at them, and Chalice pulled Arden down an even narrower alley, where they could not have easily stood two abreast.
Arden found herself pressed up against a crudely painted snake on one wet-slimed wall.
A snake in a circle. Frowning, Arden dug her hand into her coat pocket and pulled out the iron ring, the serpent-idol she had found on the Vigil beach near her lighthouse. She held it up to the mural.
A voice barked: ‘Where did you get that?’
Arden gasped, and jolted away from the wall, nearly knocking Chalice over in the process.
A gaunt face beheld her from a high gantry. Great, sorrowful lines bisected his cheeks, and small blue eyes squinted in the red sodium light of a nearby lintel. She could smell kraken-musk in the darkness, a heady spice.
‘I said,’ repeated the man through his thin lips, ‘where did you get that?’
He was pointing at her relic-find. Arden rubbed the rough iron nervously, before holding the snake ring up.
‘The Deepwater Rite,’ she said breathlessly. ‘I need someone who can say the prayer.’
‘The prayer,’ Chalice echoed, in a decidedly less enthusiastic tone. Her hand clasped Arden’s grimly.
The man sidled off his gantry-post and slid down an iron ladder. He wore familiar Clay Church robes of black and crimson underneath a grey fish-leather coat. ‘How is it a Lyonnian speaks of the Deepwater Rite?’
‘My friend,’ Chalice said before Arden could reply, ‘has to undertake a funeral promise made on a man’s death.’
Without a word the priest snatched the sea-serpent icon from Arden’s hand and examined it.
Arden had to add, ‘I picked this up from the beach at Dead Man’s Bay, near Vigil of Fiction. There are ruins there.’
‘I know those ruins.’ He squinted into Arden’s face, a hundred questions in his watery eyes. ‘Vigil? You came from there?’
‘Not more than five days ago.’
‘Follow me.’
It wasn’t quite what Arden would consider worshipful, this hot, low breezeway that smelled decidedly of sweat and urine and far too many bodies in close quarters. The strange holy man drew them through a mouldy door on the side of the alley into a small remnant hall, a church of plastic and iron. A half-dozen pews filled the floor in the Lyonnian style, tatty upholstery of various scavenged fabrics with scratches and a thousand fingernails dug agitatedly into soft wood.
One or two greasy-backed figures bent in prayer, as oblivious to the newcomers as if they were smoke-wisps from the votive candles.
The church could have been in any illicit meeting hall, if not for the spread-eagled figure wrought in scrap metal upon the far wall. Worn seashells dangled from the idol’s chin. Some ex-voto objects hung from the cable-tendons of the Redeemer-figure’s flesh, tiny boats, tools, and little person-figurines made of twisted wire. A candle-float burned upon a bowl of murky liquor at the icon’s feet. From this liquor came the smell of kraken-musk.
The priest placed the iron ring on the altar with the other icons, then turned to them.
‘You have both come a long way. A long way and bearing stories that do not belong to you.’
Arden released Chalice’s hand, to her stormbride’s dismay, nodded towards the door. ‘Wait for me outside, Chalice, I need to speak to him in private.’
‘Arden …’ Chalice protested.
‘Give me this, please.’
Grumbling, Chalice Quarry went to take up position in the rear pew, while the priest ushered Arden into the confessional box that stood at the far end of the room, beneath the figure on the wall.
She sat in the confined space with its walls of black mangrove, the rare wood that had once grown only upon the island of Equus. Saudade’s wood. An achingly familiar smell surrounded her, of kraken-musk, camphor and agarwood.
A small arabesque screen separated her from the priest. Hers was not a confession, so he slid the panel open so they might speak face to face, albeit privately. Arden told the priest her name, her purpose. He listened in silence until she had finished her brief introductions. She hesitated on disclosing the full extent of her relationship with Mr Riven. Called him a neighbour and friend. Told him how they had been tricked into following some Hillsiders out into neutral waters, and had come across pirates. She had escaped, Arden hedged, but Jonah Riven had not.
‘He has no next of kin,’ she finished. ‘So I suppose the burden of a funeral is on me.’
The priest stared at her a long time before speaking.
‘The Deepwater Rite is a sacrament. A plea to send a soul into the court of the King. It is not for outsiders to appropriate for their …’ He made a face. ‘Posturing. I won’t disrespect the old ways just to make a Lyonnian feel better about themselves so they might go back unburdened and ready to forget.’
Something ferocious and painful nestled in the hollow beneath her heart. Jonah had echoed the same doubts about her affection for him. He’d thought she might tire of him, and discard him. ‘The Rite is not for me. I’m doing this for a deepwater man,’ she replied forcefully.
The priest paused. A stray facet of light gleamed in his eye as he looked at her, and she began to suspect that he fully understood their relationship now.
‘There have not been true deepwater people on Equus for a hundred years,’ he said flippantly, as if she had spoken nonsense. ‘They sailed away to Fiction and became Vigil shorefolk. They lost their old ways within a generation, converted to worship the Redeemer on His rock.’
‘Then why would he ask it of me with his dying breath, Your Reverence? I have read letters, official documents. They were still doing Deepwater Rites in Vigil for their dead not more than fifteen years ago.’
He waved her words aside dismissively. ‘Shorefolk were doing it. Symbolic, that is all. It pains me to say that you have come to the wrong place, Lightmistress Beacon. Seek out his shorefolk family in Vigil and ask them to say a prayer, for it is out of my remit.’
Arden dropped her hands out of his sight so he would not see her wring them together. ‘Your Reverence, like I said, my friend has no family left. They’re all gone. I need to do the funeral rite for him, even if it is just symbolic.’
‘You should have asked me for a simple Clay prayer, Mx Beacon. For all my knowledge, I have not the physical faculty for such a ritual.’
&n
bsp; ‘But I was told you knew the deepwater ways,’ Arden protested, feeling a flush of anger towards Chalice. ‘Unless your reputation is completely predicated on a lie.’
‘God gave me a longing for the ocean. The call of the King compelled me all the way to Equus, the furthest place the land could go. But as for talent? As for an ability to summon the old deepwater spirit from the sea? Not enough for your needs, Claywoman. I have some, but hardly more than a shadow of it.’
‘A shadow?’ She leaned towards him, unable to stop herself from grasping his bony forearm in urgency. ‘I have a talent that could increase that shadow of yours.’
‘I’m not sure—’
‘Sanguis evalescendi. I make stronger whatever was weak.’
The priest gave a short exhale as he digested her words. ‘Ah. One of the forgotten talents.’
‘If I could strengthen your physical facility enough to perform a Deepwater Rite, would it be possible then?’
He extricated his arm and straightened the sleeve of his fraying robe. ‘As much as my curiosity is piqued, my common sense says: no. Mx Beacon, there is something in you that makes me afraid. We are only meant to have what God gives us. Evalescendi could uncover a part of me I’ve long tried to keep hidden. I do not wish to walk that path.’
Had she been held up with hot air and not bones, a great rent in her side would not have deflated Arden faster. She fell back upon the hard chair in a half-daze.
‘Don’t say you won’t help. I’ve come so far. Please. Every time I find someone who could give my friend the Deepwater prayer, they are taken from me.’
‘I’m sorry,’ he said. The darkness had carved more hollows into his face, his eyes were set so far back she’d have imagined no eyes at all, just smudges like an extinguished candle wick.
He took the hand which still rested upon his arm, then raised her hand palm up. She allowed him to press his wizened finger where it fell soft upon the button in the heel of her hand.
His touch hurt her, but in a different sort of way, as if he were touching a deeply private place inside her. ‘I can see you are suffering. Once someone blessed you with aequor profundum, the holy waters.’
Deepwater King Page 9