Deepwater King

by Claire McKenna

  As the sky turned pale grey, the folk who remained upon the killing shore quickly set about their task of butchering the serpent. Their work-songs floated eerily through the sea-mist. The burnt smell of wet flares still lingered about the sodden beach to mix with the musky cryptidness of the serpent.

  Past the dunes, the island’s limestone protruded in slabs and shales, and a rude encampment of flax-canvas tents and flat-bed wagons chaotically occupied a large sandy clearing in the land. The tents were somewhat sheltered by the mangroves from the worst of the coastal weather. Some tough-looking ponies grazed on the scrub nearby, their long wet tails flicking streaks of mud along their shaggy flanks. The smell of ash and petroleum lay strong over the salt.

  Arden looked over a small uplift of land and almost cried out. Anchored a little way out from a corroding pier floated a familiar black mangrove boat.

  It took her all her effort to hold her ferocious tongue. They’d taken Saudade from the dock and either sailed or dragged her to the other side of the island. Is this what the priest had meant, when he said the Deepwater King would steal the love from her?

  Oblivious to her silent outrage, Mr Cleave and his entourage escorted Arden past an ad hoc tangle of copper plumbing set apart from the encampment that provided the most rudimentary of washing facilities. A pressure container rested over a bed of wood coals, and hot water bubbled from a whistle-cock.

  Nearby, a motley assortment of naked, bloodied people waited to stand under the flow, rinse the sticky serpent ichor from their faces and scissor-shorn hair, launder the muck from their clothes at the same time.

  Arden noticed Miah Anguis-Riven in the wash line with the other deepwater hunters, coarse and muscular, slab-like pectorals glistening where the wiry hairs of his chest curled, his waist thick with hard work. His terrible head pressed against one of the pipes and he’d fallen half-asleep under the streaming, lime-milky water. The bleeding cut in his thigh painted one leg scarlet. And she found herself observing that his male parts were intact, and he had not sacrificed himself to the ocean the way Malachi had done.

  Something in Arden’s concentration on him woke the man, and the Riven cousin beheld her with his cruel-sea eyes as she passed, and she suffered it again, that kick of synchronicity.

  You’re sanguis, she thought bitterly. But more than that … something else that I cannot speak of with a human tongue.

  It could be the only reason that she was feeling from him a thrill of recognition above and beyond his likeness to Jonah. It couldn’t be that the lines of his body were deeply familiar to her, or that she’d mistaken him for a Jonah Riven allowed to grow older and wild. This was the man Bellis found unbearable and frightening. Indeed, Arden decided, Bellis was not far wrong.

  Gently, Mr Cleave took her distracted elbow and guided her into the camp circle, where he approached the wax-stiff opening of the nearest tent.

  ‘In here,’ he said.

  ‘Mr Cleave,’ she started, then stopped, and blinked into the dim cavern.

  She was not solely among strangers. Another figure was in this tent with her.

  Sean Ironcup gave a bashful, panicked smile.

  ‘Hello, Mx Beacon.’

  9

  Oh devilment

  ‘Oh devilment, Sean. So much for looking after our boat, then.’

  He was clearly ashamed to have Arden see him like this. They’d never had the best of relationships in the first place, and he was proving all her doubts to be very true.

  ‘They outnumbered me,’ he explained churlishly. ‘One even had a musket. And how was I supposed to know she was a stolen boat?’

  ‘Saudade’s not stolen, Sean. She’s legally David’s boat, not theirs.’

  ‘They said she was theirs!’

  Such was the confidence of Mr Cleave that he’d let them speak alone briefly, but Arden knew there would be ears outside, listening. A stray wind heaved against the damp tent canvas.

  ‘All right. Let’s start with how this matter happened, then we can work out how to get out of it.’

  Sean apologetically launched into the tale of a boarding by several men not more than an hour after their arrival, followed by a difficult and extended confession about Saudade’s provenance and ownership, and of being rudely tossed below decks while she was towed to the northern beaches. Along the way the deepwater folk had questioned the Hillsider lad thoroughly, from his missing family, to David Modhi, to Arden and yes, Jonah Riven.

  It became quite obvious Sean Ironcup was the source of Mr Cleave’s expedited information about Arden and all her trials to get to Equus.

  In between his begrudging apologies Sean described someone who could only be Miah Anguis, the hunter interrogating Sean about Jonah’s life, his death, and mostly about the relationship with Bellis Harrow.

  Terrified, Sean had kept no secrets. Whatever he knew about Arden and Chalice and Jonah and Bellis, they knew now.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he finished. ‘I’m sorry!’

  Despite her exasperation, Arden deferred to her better self and gently patted the Hillsider’s scraggly corn-coloured sideburns and chin.

  ‘Nothing we are doing is with malice, Sean. Saudade does not belong to them. The rules of inheritance are clear. Mr Riven owned her and he passed her on to David before he died. She’s David’s boat to administer, not these people’s.’

  ‘I tried to tell them that. They didn’t really want to listen. The big Mr Riven-looking one became furious when I brought it up, so …’ He shrugged. ‘I kept my mouth shut about ownership afterwards.’

  So, he had noticed Miah Anguis’ familial appearance too. Malachi was not the only distant relation here.

  ‘We may have many more conversations about who owns what before this day is out,’ Arden said, not wanting to show Sean how worried she really was over Saudade’s contested ownership. ‘But my concern is getting both you and the boat back. Perhaps this Mr Cleave fellow can be open to discussion.’

  Sean looked aside then, and she wondered why he seemed so evasive. Did he not believe her?

  ‘How? Could we trade the kraken oil? We don’t have anything else.’

  Arden could still smell the dead serpent’s scent upon her skin, and gave him yet another of her tight smiles, despite her jaws aching from having clenched them for so long. ‘I suspect they don’t want much for anything cryptid. Let me see what I can find out.’

  Vexed by her new problem, Arden could do nothing else except take off her coat and found an inconspicuous corner to shake out the rain. The tent had a touch of a constant traveller’s dwelling about it, with hippocampi-hair rugs across the floor and wax-flax weavings insulating the walls. Not completely a prison. The iron stove in the centre of the tent, repurposed from a section of welded pipe, held a small flame in its belly. Arden held her hands before the glass window and put some feeling back into her chilled fingers. Too long indoors had taken her body’s natural capacity for warmth from her.

  To add to her misery, she was developing the thunderous ache behind her eyes that would grow into a full-blown bloodworker headache.

  Sean joined her. ‘And David? Is he all right?’

  Arden sighed at Sean’s priorities. ‘Much safer than us. He is with Chalice and Mr Le Shen in the library house of Lord Abaddon. He is the official here who is giving us shelter for now.’ She paused, as she gave the issue more thought. ‘Though how safe that shelter will remain depends on me getting back soon with Malachi Abaddon, who it appears is somewhat of a favoured pet.’

  Sean must have seen Malachi at some time this morning, as he gave a nod at his name.

  ‘The one with the craze-cut hair who brought me food before? He is handsome,’ Sean said, gruffly, having known at once where his jealous heart oriented. ‘I suppose David finds him handsome.’

  ‘It doesn’t matter what our fool companion thinks, we have to get Saudade back. I cannot allow her to be snatched from us. She’s ours, not theirs!’

  The canvas tent door flapped open
, letting in a gust of chilly salt wind. Mr Cleave stepped in, willing Arden to finish her conversation.

  ‘So. Seems our small privacy has expired,’ she said. ‘Good morning, Amos.’

  ‘Are you satisfied we have treated this sickly lad of yours well?’

  Sean butted in to reproach Mr Cleave for calling him sickly, and it took several seconds for Arden to calm him down.

  ‘I am pleased that my friend is being kept well,’ she said once Sean was behaving with a measure of resentful decorum. ‘But this is not a situation he can remain in, sir. We were supposed to leave Equus this morning.’

  ‘That may still happen. But Malachi tells me that you came here because of a curiosity about Miah Anguis. At the mention of our brother’s name, you cast all caution to the wind and came here at once.’

  If Arden could have gone back to scold her self of a half-dozen hours ago, she would have done so. She had given entirely far too much away to Malachi Abaddon.

  ‘I made a … rash decision. But I came concerning a mutual enemy of ours.’

  Mr Cleave’s eyes narrowed. ‘Ah. The Queen.’

  ‘Yes, I—’

  ‘Take your coat. You have your meeting with our man of the hour. He might like to know more about our mutual enemy.’

  She blinked, almost disbelieving him. ‘He agreed to talk?’

  ‘Don’t linger, he has a habit of changing his mind.’

  Arden quickly dressed for the weather and ran after Mr Cleave over the wet sandy duckboards of the dunes, struggling to catch up with his long strides.

  The pathway was rude and the boards were little more than ad hoc pieces of metal sheeting torn from old factory ruins. Fortunately the sand was too coarse to become mud. Her skirts and coat gained a few curious looks from the trouser-wearing inhabitants of the tents and caravans. Apart from staring, they kept their own counsel.

  One of the structures had been erected apart from the others, out of sight behind a mound of old machine parts and the rusted remains of a dinghy. Yellow flags snapped in the wind. At the opening, a bleached plesiosaur skull balanced on a stick. Jaundiced ribbons tied to a guy rope fluttered in warning.

  A quarantine tent, larger than the others. She heard a cough within, and another throat moaned.

  Not much light inside. The venom of a maris anguis tended people towards light-sensitivity. Clearly the hunt had come at a cost. She counted at least ten people here, bound up in stages of rigor and palsy upon their stretcher beds. Another four sat upright, limbs and torsos bandaged by an attendant in full plague-worker garb.

  The beak of herbs turned Arden’s way as she stepped inside, then went back to its corvid nursing.

  Mr Cleave was loath to enter, so only pointed Arden to a puddle of illumination in one corner.

  Miah Anguis had found something more important than tending to his own wounds, and that was in cutting the charms from his face with a pair of iron shears. He stood with his back to her and gave Arden no greeting. He wore the plain flax-linen shirt of the deepwater folk, the edges embroidered with protective signs, curlicues in a dark bronze sea-silk thread. A small brass mirror nailed to a nearby tent pole was his only guide, and he reflected one uninterested look at Arden before he went back to his business of removing the squid-beaks and shell-charms at his face.

  Once freed, each venerated object was cast into the small fire of a nearby brazier. He murmured words of prayer with each offering.

  She met his pale eyes through the mirror.

  ‘Drink the liquor,’ Miah said offhandedly, mid-clip. He tilted his head towards a green glass jar on a plank that had clearly spent a good portion of its life being rolled around in seawater, before being scavenged and repurposed. ‘Anyone who uses heavy blood nurses the mother of all headaches afterwards.’

  She made a bitter face. ‘I’d rather a sanguis malorum headache than a rockblood liquor one.’

  ‘Still, drink. It’s kelp spirit, not rockblood.’

  Miah was not wrong. When Arden pulled up the broad glass stopper and gave the contents a cautious sniff, only the clean, slightly greenish scent of high-proof kelp spirit and juniper came back at her.

  Not wanting to seem too fussy, she took two mouthfuls from the jar, and coughed each time. The liquor burned, but within seconds the lingering aches faded to a background hum, and the small clarity that the relief brought was welcome.

  With the last charm thrown in the fire and the greater part of his beard shorn by the sharp edge of the scissors, Miah Anguis turned to her.

  Bare-faced now except for shadows, Jonah’s features came and went with every flicker of lantern-light. Perhaps more so than Malachi Abaddon, this man was similar in looks to Jonah, but broader of face than Jonah had been and his profile was slabbed like the side of a granite outcrop. He cast more shadows, his brows were heavier, lips fuller, a front tooth crooked like Jonah’s, but of the left rather than the right. Everything in his appearance was only a suggestion of her dead lover. Miah Anguis’ semi-familiar facade teased her but never showed Arden an image of Jonah whole.

  She wondered why Malachi had called him an outsider before, when he was clearly one of these people. Easily forty or more years lay upon the man’s brow, and he suffered under the Fiction-pale complexion that made a person look older before their time. Oceanic deprivations and hard work had hewn his thick body into a hunter’s instrument. Apart from his tattoos, he was not so much a carbon copy of Jonah at all. Miah had none of Jonah’s lean nobility, though all, if not more, of the brute strength.

  ‘Excuse me,’ he said, looking away from her as he dropped his wet leathers. She turned her face while he reached for a cloth to wrap about his hips. He gave a grunt of discomfort as he slumped upon a plank-chair made of driftwood. The gash in his leg had stopped bleeding, but the torn flesh gleamed wet in the half-light. ‘Mr Banks has to patch me up before I can go out.’

  The medic had been standing quiet in the shadows, with the patience of an eel. Then he slipped forward with a courtier’s diplomacy and knelt at Miah Anguis’ thigh, needle in hand.

  Miah looked her up and down while the camp doctor worked.

  ‘So. Arden Beacon, your ship guard said your name was. Woman out of Clay City, all the way from Lyonne. Wearing a coat given to you by Jonah Riven, who once lived on the Vigil promontory.’

  ‘Mr Ironcup spoke truthfully.’

  ‘And Jorgen Beacon’s … niece, am I right?’

  ‘Yes, he husbanded the flame at Vigil’s lighthouse. I took over from him when he died last year.’

  Miah shook his head, his expression distant. ‘I didn’t think Jorgen would last so long after Zach was killed. What brings a Lyonnian sanguis here, Beacon?’

  Disquieted, she put the kelp-spirit bottle aside and arranged her skirts beneath her coat. So many useless questions knocking into each other. So many important ones, so many too late.

  ‘Bellis Harrow. Once upon a time you chased her off his island and she never came back.’

  The deepwater man’s face tightened, and he gestured with the scissor blade to a nearby stool. ‘You have your audience. Sit.’

  She sat. Mr Banks’ needle darted into the bruised flesh of Miah’s thigh harder than it should. He grimaced, and in the half-light, exhausted and crudely shorn, he didn’t quite seem so intimidating, and Arden questioned her ridiculous earlier reaction upon the beach. She even began to question the reason she had come here. He was certainly physically commanding, but Bellis had bettered many big men. Had this all been a misunderstanding?

  Miah did not take his eyes off Arden. He tracked her in the way a carnivore will not ignore his wounded, captured prey, knowing it still dangerous.

  ‘We have had many dealings with that woman over these past years,’ Miah said guardedly. It did not escape Arden’s notice how he too did not use the petrochemical Queen’s married name. ‘Most of them unpleasant. She came to us once, seeking shelter, and exile. We did not allow it.’

  His words belied the truth
of Bellis’ first attempt to enchant these folk with orientis. Jonah had told Arden what had happened. Not allowed her to stay? They had attacked Bellis as if she were a witch, and only Jonah’s impromptu deepwater marriage had saved her. Marriage or not, these people had driven Bellis off Equus, for good.

  And this man had something to do with it.

  ‘Mr Anguis, she’s grown even more powerful than she must have been when she first came to Equus. But she never did come back for revenge. Why not? She speaks the name of Miah Anguis with genuine alarm. She’s afraid of you, sir. They say … I have heard that every island has fallen to her army, but she has never brought her wickedness to these shores.’

  ‘There has always been wickedness on these shores.’

  ‘But hers is kept away because you have an influence over her. Is it true? Did she really go to Libro and kill them all? Couldn’t they have stopped her in the way you and your people did? Even Jonah couldn’t stop her, in the end.’

  She had not meant to say the last, but it had come unbidden. A wrinkle of distress moved over his brow.

  ‘It is true what happened to the people of Libro Island, and I’ll tell you why she has not returned. We know too well what happens if you give evil shelter, permit it to set root in the guise of smallness, and innocence.

  ‘We saw clearly from the beginning,’ Miah continued. ‘Under that pretty little face was a monster. We mourn for the people of Libro Island, but we made sure Bellis Harrow learned a lesson she would not forget, not until the end of her days. It was not me alone who cast her out.’

  He returned to watching Mr Banks work upon his leg. A wounded hunter coughed on the other side of the spacious tent. A voice nearby murmured to the nurse for water.

  ‘I understand you acted quickly, but how? You must tell me!’

  Miah frowned. ‘This meeting of ours seems to have been arranged hastily and without thought. You ask me of Jonah Riven and Bellis Harrow in the same breath. Malachi says you conveniently invited yourself to our hunt. A Lyonnian woman is very curious about me when I have not made myself available to her. These things are suspect.’