A burning curiosity came over her, greater than the desire to wait until morning and escape this place. She wanted to see the man who could make Bellis Harrow scared. She needed to know what boundaries the murderous Queen could not cross, what frightened her the most, how a man could have prevailed over her when Jonah couldn’t.
‘Then I will come with you,’ she said vehemently. ‘To this Deepwater King summoning, and speak to Miah Anguis myself.’
‘But aren’t you intending to leave in the morning? Whatever will your Madame Lion say when she finds you missing?’
‘She can wait for me. Allow me to get my coat.’
The long, narrow punt bobbed in the sewer, and going by the extended groan from a distant horn, the time had just clocked two hours past midnight. The woman steering the boat knew Malachi and had been waiting for him, but she glared at Arden’s krakenskin as if Arden were a thief who did not deserve such finery. The coat’s crusted kraken-rings glowed blue in the dark. Arden realized, passing under a small gas lamp, that her bronze coat was, in the moonlight, the same colour as Malachi’s hair.
‘What is your name, kind sailorwoman?’
The boatwoman merely pursed her lips, and continued to stare with eyes milky with both age and superstition. ‘Lys,’ she said at last through a rasped throat, then dipped the hood of her rockblood-fibre jacket down to signal that she was not interested in talking.
Malachi nodded sympathetically at Arden’s flustered dismissal. ‘Best way to get by in Burden Town is by keeping people at arm’s distance. It’s not customary to ask a name.’
‘I didn’t realize. I should have. I’m sorry.’
‘A person’s worth is only in what they can pay. Have a penny ready for the boatwoman, Mx Beacon, and Lys will think kindly of you.’
Lys didn’t seem to have any opinion on the matter, and wordlessly steered the chattering boat through the ancient canal, past glacial crusts of refuse, floating mortuaries picked over by men in stilts and carrion-feeder’s helmets. Even in the deep night people worked with desperate haste.
At least the air had cleared and Arden could finally breathe properly, for a fresh night breeze came from the western ocean, away from the pumps and refineries. A signaller’s lantern on the bow of Lys’ boat outlined small islands of congealed muck that would occasionally bump alarmingly against the hull as the craft passed.
‘Don’t fall in,’ Malachi cautioned with a wink, as Arden peered over the side. ‘There’s beasts in these waters that will devour flesh, dead or alive.’
She withdrew, fastened her coat tighter about her, and suffered Malachi’s laughter.
In time Burden Town and the city’s scab of human habitation sloughed away, and the punt slid into a slimed watercourse that ran through the open rockblood fields. The moonlight confirmed what Arden had seen from the boat. The land had been scoured flat, and not even a blade of grass grew from the muck. Trundling steam and petralactose machines worked in their constant pierce and overturn of the soil, having forever cleared and smoothed the ground for two centuries. Just as with the ghost ships that brought the rockblood to the mainland, there were no human operators inside.
‘The iron folk,’ Malachi said with a grin. ‘When I was a child the elders would talk about a great machine inland, a great copper devil who might come past the mangroves and steal us from our beds if we were not careful to keep Him away.’
Her hands stopped itching and started burning. She tucked them under her armpits. Her body longed to join and strengthen the forces at work. If her evalescendi was reacting so strongly now, after centuries, imagine what it must have been like when the instructions were freshly cast?
The river turned into a canal again, and belonged to another river system, for they cleared an uplift in the land through a suspended aqueduct and a creaking, leaky water lock, before they came upon a harbour utterly different from the one they’d left in Burden Town.
There were no stilt houses here, no fishermen and wailing horns or milling people along the riverside. No town or evidence of a chaotic, desperate life. Only the bleak grey ships of the rockblood refineries moved through the locks, twin ships to the one that had passed Saudade in the previous night.
A pair of grey boats waited against a corroding skirt of rubber to receive rockblood into their tanks through a tangle of pipes, as if a child had arranged the ships like toys in a row. Another pipe was broken at the valve and disgorged rockblood into the water, oblivious to there being no boat to receive the liquor.
Lys had brought them to their journey’s end. She slowed her boat down at a small pier on the other side of the harbour. The pier had been lashed together with hand-sawn pressure-pipes and metal, and was the first structure since Burden Town that had not been bloodworked into shape.
‘This way,’ Malachi said, scrambling over a ridge of sandy ground past the pier’s base. He waved an unlit lantern. ‘Light?’
‘No, I’m all right,’ Arden said. ‘I’m from a sanguis ignis family, I see well in the dark.’ She glanced back at Lys, to find the boatwoman had already put her feet up on a seat-board and slid her hat down over her face, settling in for a long nap. ‘Or at least I did. It’s a little different here.’
As she returned to follow Malachi, Arden felt the sand beneath her boots become interrupted by a knitted carpet of vegetation, the first greenery she’d come across since arriving in Equus.
When she reached the top of the ridge, a flat scrubby coastal plain spread out before her. This was wilderness, sere and salt-scored. This was the other side of Equus, a place where the machines had not touched. Several miles away a natural barrier of swampland and black mangrove wood had most likely stopped the earth-moving machines from encroaching onto this side of the land.
With inexplicable timing the clouds parted, and the sullen moon gave off a hard, clear light. Equus’ true land’s end was a long, straight black-sand coast with a border of white phosphorescence.
With an instinct well suited to observe the maritime environment, Arden noted the perfect lines of waves rolling in to shore, the white spume glowing with almost unnatural brightness in the midwinter moonlight. The borderland was lit by a row of bonfires along the beach, barrels of half-distilled petralactose. Unrefined rockblood wasn’t rich enough in vapours to explode, but volatile enough to keep a steady, smoky fire.
Figures moved from barrel to barrel, setting more alight. Fifty at least that she could see, milling about in restless motion. Pre-laid rope coils made silver shadow-gashes in the deep black sand. They were preparing for something, to bind something up, drag something ashore. The wind came in strong gusts fresh from the endless ocean, stinking of ozone and electrical energy.
‘The bait is already out,’ Malachi said. ‘Let’s hurry down, before it comes.’
‘It?’ Arden asked, trying hard to navigate the slope without falling. ‘The Deepwater King is out there?’
Malachi laughed good-naturedly, before reaching up and taking her hand, and helping her onto more level ground.
‘More than that. We’re bringing Him ashore. He who has tasted my flesh, and has meat aplenty to return to us.’
It has to be a monster, she thought. Arden knew little about hunting monstrum mare apart from the Vigil krakens that had made up the bulk of the Riven industries, and even then Mr Riven had taken pains to tell her the creatures would be halfway dead before coming aboard Saudade.
But this air, ringing with electric tension, this sea so black and white, was nothing less than alive. The heightened feeling about her was elemental, fecund and terrible, and she could almost taste it, the vertiginous lurch towards slaughter, for no creature would ground itself voluntarily. Had this been what Jonah had felt as a boy, when he summoned the creatures that would go on to kill his family?
‘What kind of large sea-monster could breach land, though? I’ve seen pictures in my father’s books. Nearly every species is huge, and they can’t be dragged past the shallows.’
‘Ho
pefully it’ll beach itself,’ Malachi said with a wink. ‘With the right bait.’
A knot of men and women waited at the base of the dune, with hard, weather-scored faces and eyes like grey iron in the closest boat-burning firelight. They wore coats cut the same way as Arden’s own, and she realized with a thrill of recognition that some of the men had chevrons at their collars and the women bore serpentine whorls behind their ears, black as the night ocean.
One said to Malachi, ‘’Tis ’bout time you showed up, lad. What kept yeh?’
‘Offerings,’ said Malachi, patting his satchel of stolen goods. ‘And guests.’ Malachi stepped aside, and showed them Arden. A painful silence greeted her. One man took his pipe to his mouth and sucked smoke from the end. The salt wind blustered about them, skittish and mocking. They looked mostly at her coat, a garment she did not properly own.
‘Malachi,’ a man gruffed, shaking his head. ‘What is this? Bringing a stranger on fucking Deepwater Night of all days.’
‘There’s no time for reprimands, Gareb,’ replied a woman’s voice from further back. She sounded older and husky from either smoke, drink or giving commands. ‘Malachi – just get the visitor to the watchtower. Anguis and the others have already gone out into the dark. If he comes back empty-handed, there will be questions put forth to answer.’
Malachi waved off the criticism. ‘He’ll not come back without a catch, Mrs Seaworthy. He’ll put blood into the ocean, you can be sure of it.’
After he handed over the satchel to the woman, Arden was obliged to stumble after Malachi Abaddon into the sand when he left without proper introductions. She did not feel comfortable standing with these people she didn’t know. As she walked her own shadow appeared on the sand, and Arden took anxious note of the sky. She had known instinctively it was winter, and the moon full, but was too used to following a Lyonnian mathematical calendar rather than a Fiction lunar one. Jonah Riven had asked for a prayer on Deepwater Night, but Arden been so intent on finding a priest to say the words that she’d neglected the date that Mr Riven had implored of her. The prayer of that last full moon before the days grew long again. It was tonight.
‘… don’t mind them,’ Malachi was saying. ‘It will be Miah Anguis who you will want to meet.’
She welcomed any subject that diverted her attention from her despair. ‘So this Miah Anguis – he is your clan leader, or whatever it’s called?’
‘No. He’s got blood talent for monster-calling and has made enough applications, but there’s more to being our leader than a few lucky catches. A man needs to be born here, and Miah is an outsider, unwedded in the eyes of the King. No, the person who chiefly administrates our group and affairs is Mr Cleave up yonder.’
Mr Cleave. It sounded a familiar family name, as familiar as Riven. Was he a relation of Ishmael Cleave, Jonah’s stepfather?
She wanted to ask more about why a man powerful enough to turn away Bellis Riven was not leader of the deepwater people, but the wind rose up and lashed them ferociously and quite took her voice away. They waded through the loose, stinging sand until they reached the watchtower, a small raised platform of iron pipe welded together inside a puddle of firelight. Human welding she could see from the rough seams, not bloodwork.
A high red lantern gave off a small, intense light through air thick with smoke from the burning petroleum in the barrels. A lone, bearded man on the watch-platform nodded at Malachi and tossed down a straight-razor which Malachi caught and opened. The blade had been sharpened so many times the almost paper-thin edge was ragged from the whetstone.
‘You here? Get into the water, lad. Help bring Him home.’
Malachi Abaddon hesitated, his attention swinging between Arden and the man on the platform. He nodded then, took a handful of his hair, opened the razor and sliced a handful away. ‘We’ll eat tonight, Amos!’
‘We’d better. You’re the last one to go in.’
Malachi turned and loped for the water line. Arden had to stop herself from calling out, and begging him to stay with her. Instead she found herself left alone with this man haloed in blood-red light, this stranger she did not know. He wore krakenskin too, from a minor part of the beast. A flank or arm, she thought, torn between anxiety and excitement. A monster-hunter’s garment. She couldn’t get much of a clear view of his face, only that he was not young. Not very old either, perhaps sixty years on him. His head was shorn down to the scalp and his full beard – once dark blond or auburn – streaked with grey.
He did not look at Arden when he said, ‘Don’t stay down there if you don’t intend to help.’
She clambered up to join him. As she reached the top platform a chant started up from the dunes behind the beach. An old Fictish chorus in rising and falling harmony, the sound of empty petroleum barrels struck in strange syncopation. Fin-folk sounds. A man cried out in the darkness. The metal of the platform hummed under her hands. Her breath caught and released.
Mr Cleave glanced at her, and nodded as if he knew exactly what she was experiencing.
‘Has the weight of the hunt fallen upon your brow?’ he asked. He did not take his hooded eyes off the unseen horizon. ‘The dark places of this world are full of the habitations of violence. The beast comes, drawn by sacrifice and burning rockblood. They are out there, summoning the King to shore.’
Arden nodded mutely. There was a weight upon her, the same potential as when she drew blood, the orientis and mandatum, but fresh and potent. ‘Ishmael Cleave,’ she asked breathlessly. ‘The one who lived on the Vigil promontory twenty years ago, did you know him …?’
‘Yes, he is a distant relation. Amos Cleave is my name. My family were Islander-born since before the cataclysm of the rockblood machines. This nation was whole back in those days, and no bloodwork infected the metal.’ An odd accent to him, a lilt she’d heard in Jonah sometimes, when he was tired and dropped his flat Fictish vowels.
‘And this hunt, it’s also a ritual? One of the Deepwater rituals?’
‘A ritual that brings food to us folk surviving the wilderness? Yes, certainly. Call it a ritual.’ He took an unlit pipe from his pocket and jammed it between his teeth, flashed a grin at her. ‘My people tell me you were the one to sail Zachariah Riven’s boat into the harbour yesterday morning.’
‘I did come in on Saudade. But sir, I must make a correction. Saudade is his nephew’s boat, not Zachariah’s.’
Mr Cleave moved his pipe about. ‘How is it a Lyonnian woman came to know Jonah Riv …?’ Mr Cleave started, then stopped. A cold, hard gust of wind interrupted him. Though Arden could not see it, a downdraught had been exhaled from the massive clouds out to sea. The distant southern tempest and the hot northern currents whipped the climate into chaos. All the great mountains and valleys of air were at war.
Then, as if a great hand had shaded it, the moon disappeared. They were plunged into darkness. The barrel-islands of petralactose fires began to extinguish one by one along the length of the beach.
Mr Cleave leaned over the watchtower rails. ‘What’s going on?’ he shouted at an unseen figure below.
‘The fires are going out!’ a woman cried back. ‘How will they find their way ashore?’
Mr Cleave grabbed the red lantern from its hook and signalled wildly. ‘Gather the wood fuel!’ he shouted into the dark. ‘As much as you can! Keep the fires, go, go!’
With an odd, remote sense of alarm Arden counted a dozen figures scrambling through the darkness, all trying to build up a single blaze against the rising wind. But the wind was too strong and the fuel did not catch.
‘Where the watery hells is Mr Stone?’ Mr Cleave bellowed. ‘Where’s my stormcaller?’
In answer, three people stumbled out of the dark with a third, a bare youth slung between their arms, bleeding out from great gashes across his thighs.
‘What happened to him?’ Mr Cleave reproached.
‘He got carried away, Amos,’ the woman of the pair said, her voice between scold and sympathy. ‘His wound
s are bleeding too heavily. Mr Banks, come quick!’
A thin, bare-faced man came out from the murk with a satchel, unloaded it to bind up the young man’s wounds. Mr Stone had cut himself the way Mr Riven did, clumsy and deep, knowing only blood, and not subtleties of bloodwork. Mr Cleave looked on, shaking with frustration.
‘Devil’s abyss, how bad is he? I need some damned ball lightning or a St Elmo’s fire or something out of the wretch! We have no light.’
‘Is there no other way to get light? Arden said out of turn, needing to ask despite her being the stranger here. ‘This child shouldn’t have had a knife go near him, no matter what power he has!’
Mr Cleave turned about, his face expressionless except for the rivulets of reflected gasoline-fire across his cheek and forehead. After an uncomfortable moment of silence he spoke. ‘We need him. Crude rockblood won’t ignite on its own.’ He looked down at her hands and her little flame-embroidered gloves. A hope danced in his eyes. ‘You trammel fire?’
She dug her hands into her pockets and shook her head. ‘Coldfire,’ she said.
‘But still light?’
‘It could be.’
The evalescendi in her blood yearned towards the bleeding boy. They had propped him up against one of the platform pylons beneath them. Through the slats of the watch-platform she could see a medic approach and fuss. The yearning feeling was akin to disgust. She’d gotten very sick the last time she’d used evalescendi.
But she had been weak from a day adrift on the ocean then, and things were different now.
She spoke before thinking it through, but a thought was forming in her mind, an idea that repelled her and excited her at once. ‘What can the boy do, Mr Cleave?’
‘He can make the rockblood burn, for one thing. Don’t know how. He only calls storms, and yet …’
Of course, Arden thought with a lurching insight. She recalled her studies in the Clay Academy, her Portside education of the manifestations of climate, and weather. The boy called up storms, which meant pressure. The great mountains of air concentrated upon one small spot. And pressure could make the weak fumes from crude petralactose concentrated enough to be flammable.
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