As could ignis, made stronger by the catalyst of evalescendi.
Could those talents work together even if they weren’t all in the same body, or if their portions were separated by time? Arden slid the coin-knife from her bodice stays, felt it scrape against the soft ribs of fabric as if she were sliding it out from under her own skin.
Was there already pressure enough in this air, and all the fire needed was a little kick?
Arden stepped towards the ladder.
Mr Cleave was not ignorant. He knew what a hidden knife in the hands of a woman wearing fingerless gloves meant. He stood in front of her.
‘And where do you think you’re going?’
‘Let me help,’ she said in a small voice.
‘If Mr Stone gives any more blood, he’ll die,’ the deepwater man growled in warning.
‘He doesn’t need to give any more. I can do it now.’
The moment stretched on, as Mr Cleave wrestled with his caution, then nodded. ‘Go.’
Compelled by a desperate self-belief she climbed down the ladder and onto the dark, damp sand.
A hundred paces away the pitiful remains of one extinguished barrel of rockblood in a shallow trench gave off the last scraps of heat. She could sense the boy’s blood-tithing, the work he’d attempted by the way she struggled to breathe as she came closer, by the weight in her head and her throat.
Arden closed her eyes and pulled off one glove. The small coin in the side of her hand was numb; she barely felt her knife pierce the skin. Again she felt herself falling into the memory of the last time she’d called on evalescendi, when she and Chalice were in the salt water of the Darkling Sea, choosing either this … or death …
Lost in her little oblivion Arden almost missed the blue eye of flame forming in the centre of the barrel, a circle radiating outwards.
With an exclamation of warning she fell back and scrambled to her feet.
‘Tell them all to get away,’ she wailed at Mr Cleave, who had in his curiosity climbed down after her. ‘As far away from the trench as possible.’
His attention fell upon her bare, bloodied hands and her silver coins. The delay lasted only a second, and then Mr Cleave was shouting to the others, get away, get away, we’re going to have light …
No telling how far she got when even the world seemed to take a deep breath, and a brilliant white pillar of vapour-driven coldflame shot into the sky.
8
The shock hit her
The shock hit her with the power of a fist, knocked Arden face first into the sand. White flame behind her, crackling upwards, like a whirlwind inside a storm.
From the size and strength, it was a man who hauled Arden into an upright position.
She clung to him, heaving breaths. She met Mr Cleave’s startled, rain-dripping face. He still puffed from exertion, but was, in the whiffling white firelight, overjoyed.
‘A nice trick,’ he shouted, smacking her shoulders enthusiastically. ‘A nice trick indeed.’
‘Is there enough light?’
‘Should be adequate,’ Mr Cleave said with a wry grin. ‘That eruption – why, they’d have seen it all the way to Libro! Quick, girl, back to the watchtower, we can’t abandon our posts.’
He supported her over the black sand. Arden’s shadow cast long and dark before her, a giant’s silhouette.
‘You wear the gloves of a sanguis ignis.’ Mr Cleave helped her up onto the platform and followed close behind. ‘Though I’ve never seen a lone ignis shepherd such a blaze.’
‘It’s really Mr Stone’s talents. I just made them stronger,’ Arden said, trying to talk and climb at the same time. ‘Maybe a little of my ignis was in there, all mixed together.’
‘That can be done?’ Mr Cleave asked once they had returned to the safety of the watch-platform. ‘Two separate people making one talent?’
‘Yes, I’ve managed it before.’ She petered off as the dark-breaking foam of the ocean began to congeal and writhe, taking on a shape that was not the action of wave on shore.
Encouraged by the new light, the drumming of the oil barrels along the beach became a furore that echoed into the night. A bullroarer wailed out, and its high-pitched sibling replied from behind the dunes. Some of the singers stopped their chant, and ran across the sandy expanse, hooks in hands and flares billowing orange phosphorus smoke behind them.
‘Light and sound!’ Mr Cleave sucked in a great breath. ‘Light to guide them, sound by which we shall bring them home. Watch now!’
Arden cried out a warning. A sinuous black shape that end to end could match a locomotive and ten carriages whipped from the water less than a quarter-mile from her perch on the observation platform. It scoured a great half-moon across the beach, leaving ploughed sand and a cresting wave as high as a house. At least five runners tumbled head over heels to avoid being crushed. The platform quivered as if in a strong gale.
‘Breach! Breach! Control the tail!’ Mr Cleave roared.
Small longboats were coming in behind the shape in the water. From her elevated position Arden found herself gripping the rail in dread and anticipation.
‘Maris anguis,’ someone screamed.
‘The King comes!’ Mr Cleave nodded at Arden, whooping with triumph. ‘Comes to face His death!’
‘How … how will they kill it?’
‘No man nor woman alive can kill such a bedevilled creature.’ He slapped Arden on the shoulder with a great, broad paw. ‘Eyes up and bear witness!’
The great barbed tail lashed sideways again, impaling a nearby man through the middle so absolutely that when the tail rose, he rose aloft with it, thrown skyward and screaming, his flare-marker rising at least twenty feet high.
And then Arden beheld the terrible body of maris anguis rising up out of the water, the image of their god, the Deepwater King.
Outlined in ignis flame and phosphorus flare, a thousand serrated ridges glistening wickedly in the night, each one like the tooth of a giant saw-blade nailed to a small mountain. Its head was a reptilian wedge dishing flat at the porcine snout, curved tusks erupting from a jutting lower jaw.
The beast might have been impervious to death, but it was certainly injured into fury, for it rolled towards the sand until the very earth shook and the platform swayed in its foundation.
Arden would have tumbled off if Mr Cleave had not caught her, held her firm. Now less than fifty yards away, in the glow of Arden’s blood-light the grim chevron scales of monstrum mare shone bright as polished opal; it lashed a head the size of a motor car and raised a frill of thorns. Several hunters fell beneath the scaled bulk, the others swerved sideways, pulling their ropes after them, executing a dance of smoke and distraction.
One runner stabbed his hooks onto the edge of the beast’s innumerable scales, scrambled up a moving mountain of bloodied armour. Another followed.
‘Secure it, quick!’ Mr Cleave shouted. ‘The head! The head!’
Enraged, the beast gave a great, whipping movement, enough to dislodge all annoyances save the one who had climbed first, a lone figure clinging to the rough crown. The second figure flopped on the end of a short length of rope. The platform swayed again at the thundering shock of the monster scraping a giant furrow through the sand in an effort to free itself of hunters. Arden held tight to the railing this time, made herself secure while she fought her own instincts to flee.
The man at the head had dragged a contraption up with him, a weapon that belched smoke. In a flailing, desperate moment Arden saw him alone and tied down, brass harpoon gun in his arms, driving a steam-powered spike through the serpent’s skull.
With a loud felling crack the head collapsed hard into the shallows, but the rear half continued to flail. Mr Cleave grabbed Arden’s wrist, made her watch the brutality, what cruelty survival required of them.
‘It comes! The end comes!’
The tail-spike, still bedecked with the flare-burning corpse, doubled back on itself, striking and striking, lashing and flaili
ng, until the entire sinuous horror of a monster-body had writhed halfway up the beach. She had not misjudged her senses when she had calculated the thing to be as long as a Lyonne express train, for it had to be longer, three times as long. Enough to roll and crush them all, were it to forget the man stuck to the largest of its head-spikes.
Literally half-dead, the giant beast raised its spiked tail and stabbed down, straight through the man and into its own stilled and sightless eye. The whump of its giant head hitting the sand sent a shudder through the watch-platform. The platform swayed alarmingly. For a moment there was no sound save for the metal singing through the guy-wires.
Arden let go of the copper platform rails and her hands hurt from how hard she had gripped the corroded pipes.
Mr Cleave said quietly, ‘It’s over now.’
With a final tremble, a miserable O of death, the entire creature slumped into the shoreline. Now it had turned from life to death, a monument of a thing, a great shadow from the water. The silence extended to encompass all that the hunt had cost them, before a throaty roar of victory came up from one bedraggled knot of hunters.
Then quite suddenly the witnesses of the Deepwater hunt erupted from their sheltering dunes and the beach was overrun by bodies, a hundred, maybe even two hundred people in the dark morning, converging and cheering as they rushed to the body of the beast.
‘Tonight we feast!’ Mr Amos Cleave screamed at the crowd from the platform. ‘Tonight we do not go hungry, your elders eat, your children eat, you wear the clothes of the leviathan’s hide!’
Still trembling from her exertions Arden remained with her bird’s-eye view and watched the wild victory celebrations spill out across the sand. It stunned her, the open outpouring of weeping and shouts of gratitude, as all the emotions of the hunt had risen not to the kill, but in this overwhelming crescendo. It was almost religious.
Or whatever this was. Arden’s thoughts found no purchase, for how could Clay Church with its old books and statues and morose dogmas have ever competed with this kind of celebration? The missionary churches on the Vigil promontory had long gone to stone ruin while the deepwater folk still dragged their gigantic gods from the sea.
Several of the faces were Lyonnian, so clearly they’d had no problem in attracting converts.
A rowdy song sprang up from one quarter, and quickly spread to the rest of the gathered celebrants. Among the group were children, and a dozen of them were passed overhead to the dead maris anguis, their small hands reaching out fearlessly to touch the scales of the sea-dragon. Even when lifted by the tallest man they could not stretch halfway up the creature’s flank.
Slightly apart from the others was Malachi, nose streaming blood, clutching at his wrist. He limped out of the crowd. With a belated exclamation Arden scrambled off the platform and ran clumsily for him over the sand.
‘Malachi! You’re all right!’
‘Did you see that?’ he asked, still too caught up in the collective hysteria to notice how truly hurt he was. ‘Rolled right over the top of me!’ He coughed, wincing and smiling at the same time. ‘I broke ribs! I gave pain to the water!’
‘I certainly did see, Malachi Abaddon,’ Arden said kindly, not wanting to begrudge the young man his victory. She felt quite out of breath and dazed herself, with a lingering ache from using evalescendi, but nothing so bad as the broken bones he may surely have suffered. ‘But you’d best go see your medical man about that arm of yours. I still need a guide back to Lord Abaddon’s house this morning.’
She found herself trailing off.
Before what, she thought. Leaving? That had been a decision made yesterday, before knowing about this place and these people. She had thought Equus a dead end, a place of forgotten memories, and all of a sudden it had exploded about her with possibility …
‘Riven,’ someone shouted, ‘Riven, Riven!’
Arden whirled about at the speaking of the name. Had she been on the platform she could have seen where the voice was coming from, but on the ground with the milling strangers in the cold darkness it seemed as though the name came from everywhere at once, as one person picked up the cry and repeated it. Riven, Riven!
‘Mr Riven?’ she said, half to herself. ‘Jonah?’ The old poison in her veins lurched. Could it be? Did he get away? Did he come home?
The blood in her ears roared as if from a long, endless tunnel. Arden left Malachi and fell into the dense press of the crowd nearer to the serpent’s head as she tried to follow the name. Her body was shoved and ground in between wet leathers and hot breaths.
Arden’s frantic attention moved to where everyone else’s was: the ichor-dripping wound in between the beast’s horns.
Two corpses there, one on the rope, one still holding grimly on to the brass steam-spike. The flares fizzled and went out.
Except the corpse at the steam-spike twitched and moved with purpose, began to yank himself free. His upper half was bulky and bare, with plesiosaur-leather breeches that ended at the knee. In the flare-light he stood, tall and grave, marked with monster-scale tattoos upon his flanks and belly, daubed in dark blood.
Her legs would have given way if not for the press of people about her. She keened out Jonah’s name and the man’s head turned to her in the darkness. The victor was oblivious to the crowd’s wild worship. He shook himself free of them, waded into the crush to seize up Arden in both his hands.
Frozen by memory, she let him lift her until her feet dangled.
‘What are you?’ he yelled over the exultant noise.
This man’s entire hide was a riot of tattoos across skin as pale as a nightmare. He was larger still than Jonah across the shoulders but not as tall. His nose was broader, an old split crooked one lip under a ragged beard woven with metal charms, like the ex-voto offerings pinned to the icon of a saint.
And yet there were similarities, in the shape of their eyes, their face.
In her blood-drunken confusion she had not – for a moment too long for comfort – been able to tell the difference between her lost lover and this bloodied creature.
He let her go with an inhale of almost disgusted confusion. ‘You stink of aequor profundum. It’s everywhere.’
What had come over her? The man was not like Mr Riven at all, for he was much older, with the years making a face cragged and raw, chest winged with dark hair. Jonah’s hair had been lighter and not quite so bestial.
And yet, the familiar abyss in this one’s deep-set eyes …
Mr Cleave lurched out of his own knot of people to get in between Arden and the man. The crowd had begun to pay more attention to the prone sea-serpent now, for having established their victor was alive, they were more concerned with the spoil of the hunt, and Arden was now alone with Mr Cleave and this achingly familiar stranger.
‘Miah, this is Malachi’s friend from the city.’ Then remembering his manners he said belatedly, ‘Arden Beacon, this is Miah Anguis.’
‘Miah Anguis?’ she repeated.
‘Beacon?’ he said at the same time. ‘Like Jorgen Beacon, from Vigil?’
He glared at her fiercely and all she could think was, why do they call you Riven? Why is there a ghost in your face?
Mr Cleave continued, ‘She is sanguis ignis, she brought the light to us. And she brought Zachariah’s ship back to us as well.’
‘Wait a minute,’ Arden protested, ‘I didn’t bring her back …’
Miah Anguis spat blood out of his mouth before accepting a bucket of water thrust at him, drank deep. The blood on his face and neck made dark verticals down his broad throat as water dripped down.
He then stared in dismay at the breeches torn on the inside of his right thigh and grimaced. ‘Dirty horn got me right in the god-damn leg.’
‘Better there than in the other place, Miah,’ Mr Cleave said with a laugh.
Arden could stay silent no longer. ‘They called you Riven. Why did they call you by that name, sir?’
‘You heard wrong. I’m Miah Anguis,’ he
said dismissively as he turned to leave. ‘And strangers aren’t supposed to be here. Mr Banks – come with me. I have need of a steady hand and some thread.’
‘If you are a Riven, then it was one of your family who brought me here,’ she called out to Anguis’ back. ‘Jonah Riven, who saved my life when people tried to kill me. He called up a sea-devil itself himself to bring me back. It was him that put profundum in me.’
Miah stopped, but did not face her. A muscle jumped in his heavy shoulder, the way a horse might shiver off a fly. The moment stilled. He said something to Amos Cleave, and then limped on, as if he had not listened to a single word.
‘Where are you taking me?’ Arden found herself corralled down a foot-track through the black dunes behind the beachfront. ‘I know I shouldn’t have come here. I made a rash and foolish decision. I would quite like to go.’
‘Sorry,’ Mr Cleave said. ‘We’re not done yet.’
‘But my friend is waiting for me in Burden Town.’ Arden tried to stop and turn, only to have the group of Islanders firmly, if apologetically, block her path. She returned to Mr Cleave.
‘Sir, this is a kidnapping.’
‘Then burn us alive if this is such an imposition,’ Mr Cleave said. He took a pocket-watch out of his leather waistcoat and wound it casually as he walked. ‘I know you can do it. Otherwise it is an hour until full daybreak. If you have intruded upon one half of our night, then please exercise some respect and join us for the other. We are returning to camp, and will speak further out of this weather.’
She grumbled, and fastened her krakenskin coat to her neck in the sleety rain. The water pounded off the hood in crackles. The wet did not bother her for it was a lighthouse keeper’s climate after all, but the night had exhausted her, and made her hungry, and she was out of sorts for having had to attend to her bathroom needs earlier with little more than some spiky grass for privacy.
Added to that, in an hour Chalice would be wondering where Arden had gone, if she wasn’t already. Her departure from Lord Abaddon’s had been so sudden she had not thought to leave a note. In her rush of curiosity about Bellis’ enemy and the hidden deepwater folk, Arden had quite abandoned her good senses.
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