Arden shook her head. ‘No. No, you can say all the words, but nobody saw Jonah die, there’s still a chance—’
Chalice, fretting, stepped as close as she could. ‘It’s too late now, darling, think of your own life.’
Arden recoiled from her touch.
‘Get away from me. Maybe I couldn’t have rescued him myself. But you Lions could have! All this time, you could have!’
Chalice retreated, wrapped her arms about herself. Enoch grabbed Arden’s arms from behind, and would not let her go.
‘Come, Mx Beacon, there is no time for despair,’ Mr Absalom said over the storm, his voice warm with an infinite, grotesque kindness. ‘Even the Lyonne Order could never have helped him then, or now. Where would we find men immune to Bellis’ powers here, or boats fast enough to outrun her Sehnsucht? This place is death. Come back to life, my child. When you are well and if revenge still haunts you, find a powerful enough patron to fight a Queen and her army. Hire mercenaries with the money you earn in Lyonne. Conduct your business of retaliation. Raze Maris into the ocean, if need be. By God, raze all the islands if you must. Right now there is only—’
Before Mr Absalom could finish his speech, a flash of silver barged into Arden, sending both her and her captor sprawling across the slimed basalt cobblestones.
‘Argh! Devilment, get it off!’
Enoch writhed on the ground as the devilfish savaged him. Arden threw up her arms uselessly against the flailing fin-feet as they clawed their way over her prone body to get to Enoch. Somewhere, Chalice shrieked. A rifle fired, once, twice, stopped with another scream.
Flood-monsters. They would eat her. Any second, and those teeth would sink into an arm, a shoulder. Any second …
One of the monster-fish peeled a ribbon of skin off the screaming Enoch, then slithered over to Arden as she curled on the slimy stones with only a pair of krakenskin coats for protection.
Her heart stopped beating, or at least, what else could she feel other than this high, singing paralysis, her blood crowding in her veins like so much cement? The monster-fish’s jaw was so close to her face she could see the bloodless fronds of human meat between its crystal teeth.
The flat, dished head swayed from side to side, smelling, smelling. Enoch’s skin slapped crimson upon the kraken bronze.
But not seeing. Just like the impaled fish in Lord Abaddon’s foyer, the creature was oblivious to krakenskin. The fish-monsters could not see past the leather. She might have been a hole in the centre of the world as far as the creature was concerned.
A million miles away someone called her name.
The rain was back again, sleets upon sleets. The boat fretted against the dock. The sanguis captain screamed for them to get back on board. A wave of broken aqueduct holdings fanned out muddy water across the docks.
When you are well and if revenge still haunts you, find a powerful enough patron to fight a Queen and her army.
When she was well. She would never be well. They would keep her in a state of grieving forever if they could.
In the watery world more of the ghastly menagerie of the aqueduct crawled their way onto the wharf, hungry for meat. The petrochemical stink rose up, choking her. She pulled herself up from the slimy puddle, Mr Riven’s coat wrapped about her like a caul of invisibility.
Chalice was crying out in the rain. ‘Arden. Arden, oh my darling, come back!’
Behind Arden lay darkness. She had imagined grief a pain. It was only an absence. As if her chest had been hollowed out. The aequor profundum in her blood bound her to no-one and nothing.
She turned away from the harbour and walked into the rain, out of the dock streets and towards the ancient boulevard that followed the flooded river, her dress tattered, her coat sodden with a man’s blood.
Mr Absalom shouted behind her, ‘There’s nothing out there, Arden Beacon! Nothing! You walk into the wastelands and you’ll be bones come out the other side …’
It didn’t matter where her orient was. Only an instinct that the long river would lead through the calamitous settlement and out of Burden Town. The thread of her blood sang to her, a hot scarlet thread intermingled with poison, pulling her towards Jonah Riven, ghost and demon. The ties that bound her wended their way down into the underworld and into the ocean, and it was where she must go, yes, she thought, yes, to the northern ocean at the edge of the world, and his funeral. His. Her own.
This place is death.
In the background a song that she would close off in her eyes and heart.
Oh Arden, Arden, come back …
Book Two: Maris
THREE DAYS BEFORE THE STORM
12
Three Days Earlier
In her limestone office in the highest tower of Maris, Queen Bellis Harrow-Riven held a glass to her lips but did not drink. A tea-flower bloomed in the amber water, opening from a hard leafy knot to a thistle-bloom of violet and blue.
On the back of her pale, powdery neck was a black chevron, the shape of a fish scale, or a tooth. A marriage tattoo, the mark she’d been given when she aligned herself to Jonah Riven. The marriage which had saved her life.
Ozymandias Absalom stood behind her, rocked back on his heels and waited for instruction. The monarch of the Sainted Isles stood both shabby and resplendent in a seed-pearl and lace wedding dress. The musty dress was ten seasons old and at least three sizes too large for her, an engineering miracle puffed up with steel hoops and plesiosaur bone that was forever in danger of catastrophic collapse.
Over the Queen’s shoulder a bull’s-eye glass window let in some light but was impossible to see out of. Each insert was crazed from both the milky afternoon light and the constant acidic etch of the sulphurous atmosphere.
Maris Island, the southernmost of the Sainted archipelago, was the tip of a still-active volcano and on the constant verge of eruption. Like the Queen who had made the small steaming rock her home, it bubbled and complained but never quite boiled over.
That time was coming to an end, Absalom thought. There had been too many seismic rumblings from his monarch to ignore what was about to happen.
Only three inserts were missing in the window, enough to give Absalom a slice of sky and pale, dusty courtyard. Down in the fortress yard the prodigal husband swung a hammer upon an iron wedge into a slab of yellow rock the size of an ox-wagon.
From the moment she had brought Jonah Riven here, Bellis had put the man to work. Over the course of a season the sea had slipped from his lean body, the forced labour binding him in a casement of flesh and muscle, anchoring him to the yellow ash of Maris.
‘How many people are under my command now, Mr Absalom?’
‘By my latest census, just shy of two thousand, nine hundred and eighty souls, Your Majesty.’
‘Quite a lot, for this place.’
‘It is.’
‘Did you know when I first came to the islands, I could rouse barely a fifth of this army, and then only for a little while? I first went to Equus, such an industrious place. But my loving people on Equus soon lost their sense of direction. I could not hold them. They were lost to me. Then they turned on me.’
With a toss of her head she swallowed the boiling water, tea leaves and all.
‘Was the brute Miah Anguis who gave me this scar.’
Bellis pulled down the high neckline of her dress, showed Absalom where the pink jag across her throat ended, the scar puckered from stitches that had gone in hurriedly. Though Bellis had never spoken much of her first failed excursion to the Sainted Isles, it was oft whispered as to who had cast her out. A man on the northern beaches called Miah Anguis, a figure well known among the Libro Islanders and the fishermen. He had cut Bellis’ throat with a hunter’s precision – not deep enough to kill her, but enough to teach her a lesson about who was the true power on Equus.
As for the clumsy stitches, new-married Jonah Riven would have threaded her wound himself, not knowing how he’d chanced his own fate by keeping her alive. Still half
way in love with her even then.
‘Yes. During your first forays into magnificence, the deepwater folk abducted your royal person. Jonah came to the rescue, wedded you in the old ways so the folk could do no harm. Jonah took you home a Deepwater Bride. You owe him the life Miah Anguis was seconds off taking. Bellis, if I can suggest an opinion, I believe he doesn’t deserve this torment that you impress—’
Bellis whirled on him. ‘You call me Your Majesty! I’m the fucking Queen! Jonah was supposed to stay away. I’d almost made a proper legend out of him before he came back and scattered everything I’d built like a house of fucking cards!’
The room turned silent, save for the sound of water on windows. Bellis whirled back to the window and glared down into the courtyard.
‘That Lyonnian cunt. What did she do with him, do you think?’
No question of who Bellis meant. The woman. Arden Beacon. Her part remained a puzzle to Absalom. Last summer the Order had used a young woman to rile up Riven’s buried affections. She was attractive enough in an old-family Lyonnian way and Riven must have been a man desperately alone. Yet any pretty girl could have effected a seduction. The Order had instead sent along a sanguis evalescendi to grind Riven’s gears, thrown chaos into the mix. Such an action was more than just them rattling the bars of Bellis’ island cage. If the Order had brought two people together like that then they intended an outcome.
Though what that outcome was, Absalom was at a loss to figure out.
Under Bellis’ acid stare, Absalom shrugged helplessly. ‘I’m not sure I can speak of their suggested intimacies without causing offence …’
‘Then just say it, fool. I see you talk to him in the yard. Does he talk about the slut who rutted and fornicated with my husband? Were they clothed, or unclothed, fucking like animals? How many times? Did he spend himself inside her? Does he think of her in the night and pleasure himself when he does?’
Absalom rocked back on his heels again.
‘I would not presume to know what your husband thinks of her. My desires have never included the female kind.’
‘Can you not guess, you pompous shit? I’ve had you among the work-crews for long enough. Or must I shackle you in the barracks so you have your ear next to Jonah’s adulterous mouth?’ She turned back to him, a small blood-bright flush appearing in her pale, waxy cheeks. ‘Oh, that would be pleasing, wouldn’t it? I see the way you look at my husband, the lust unbridled upon your high-born face.’
Bellis was working herself up for something outrageous. With a survivor’s instincts Absalom could sense her escalation. His hand went automatically to his side, where once he had kept a gold pocket-watch in his vest, which he liked to rub for good luck. The watch had long gone, a barter for the small, sharp axe head that had taken its place. His insurance policy, if things with Bellis became too complicated.
Under the Lyonne Order’s instruction, Ozymandias Absalom had been Bellis’ sergeant-at-arms for the better part of four years. He doubted he would see a fifth.
‘Those creatures down in the work yard,’ Bellis went on. ‘They are aware, are they not, of how my husband so easily discarded our marriage vows? And if our vows can be discarded, then their vows to me can be discarded!’
It is not vows that keep them tied, but your orientis illusions, Absalom considered saying, then wisely considered otherwise.
‘That woman. She’s behind this, I can feel her presence like an itch that won’t go away, Absalom! She should be dead and I can feel her!’
He stood at attention as Bellis paced the room, voiced more discontent, about the weather, about the slovenliness of the guards, about the dreams that had risen and extinguished upon the day of her test moot, eighteen years ago, when the testers had spotted something – rockblood, they said – then discarded her back upon the shores of Vigil instead of taking her into the bosom of Clay Capital.
The sequins on her wedding dress fell off piecemeal, left fish-scale flecks on the grey stone. The two other servants in the stone office apart from Absalom cringed by the doorway.
And then she stopped abruptly in front of the bull’s-eye window.
Down in the court, Riven had stood up from smashing a block of stone down into component dust, ignoring an overseer’s yell. His back gleamed with sweat in the intermittent slices of afternoon sun, work-swelled musculature ridged and corrugated under his tattooed skin. It did not suit him, to appear so land-locked. On his arrival here he had for a few days even refused to eat – until Bellis made the guards force-feed him as one would a goose bound for the dinner table.
Her breath steamed against the glass. ‘Does my husband seem tired?’
Absalom let out a relieved breath. He would not experience Bellis’ anger today. That ire belonged to Riven.
‘Yes, my Queen. The man appears weary.’
‘I wish to spend time with him.’
Before Absalom could respond, Bellis whirled out of the room in a storm of tatty white lace, her scuttling servants trailing her the way woodlice might move after the shade given by a rock.
He had barely made to follow when a brief whistle interrupted him. One of the war-tapestries moved slightly.
Absalom paused, stepped back. The tapestries had been ‘liberated’ from Libro Island, when Bellis had first come upon them with her nascent army. They hung in her offices as testament to her power, though the drapes were old and decorated with old-time deeds. He looked a little closer. One frayed manticore fighting with a unicorn had a definite human shape behind it.
Absalom laughed without humour.
‘Best get moving, Wren. Bellis will be wanting her assistant in wifely duties or else someone’s face will be cut to match the other side.’
The little Libran moved out from her hiding place. Her oiled black hair and saffron dress were covered in cobwebs and moth-dust. Her broad, pretty face was marred only by a weal upon her right cheek, the same size and direction as one would have if given a backhanded slap from someone wearing the sharp steel wedding rings of a Deepwater Queen. The Libran girl had a cursed knack of appearing in the most advantageous and illicit places, catching her small flies of information, binding them up in her own secret webs. The Queen should have given her the name Ariadne, not Persephone, but Bellis never thought long about her re-namings.
‘Oh, it will take some time for the turnkeys to drag him out of the yard,’ Wren-not-Persephone said. ‘Jonah never lets himself get that tired.’
‘Oh, Jonah is it?’
‘We have a relationship, him and me,’ she said. ‘I am with him during his debasement, I watch him when he sleeps and cries out for his lost family, and for the woman.’ Wren stepped to one roughly hewn limestone shelf and pulled down a small, greasy jadeite chest. She tucked the box under her arm.
‘How long were you hidden in the curtains, anyway?’
She shrugged. ‘Most of the morning. Why?’
He sighed. ‘Can I ask your opinion and have you be honest about it? One penitent to another.’
‘As long as it won’t cost me my head, I shall be honest.’
Absalom touched his axe-head pocket, and noticed how Wren followed the movement with her eyes. Though he had never told her, he was under no illusion that she was unaware of his concealed blade.
‘Has Bellis been odd of late? Out of sorts?’
Wren tilted her head to the side. ‘Bellis is always preoccupied,’ she said. ‘Her orientine blood whispers to her like a dissatisfied lover. She knows she could do more with her endowments, but she’s trapped here. All she could conquer, she has conquered. There are no more cities to burn except the one in Burden Town, which she cannot attempt again.’
‘She’s made a grudging peace with that prohibition, I think. No, I’m talking about her mood since her husband has been back. Do you think it’s changed?’
Wren pressed her tongue against a chipped tooth. ‘Maybe. She hasn’t been visiting these offices so much. She stays in her rooms and sulks over books she cannot read.
Why?’
‘I’m hoping we need no more concern in our lives, that is all.’
Wren peered at Absalom. She knew Absalom never made small-talk. ‘Is there a problem, Ozzy? This behaviour isn’t like you either.’
She was right. Most of the time they existed in a semi-antagonistic relationship of odd mutual conveniences. Wren Halcyon Libro was a handmaid and a prisoner of war, whereas Absalom was here voluntarily, and a spy.
He decided to let out a little of his concern. ‘Sanguis orientis needs a mythology, a big idea to use as its influence. Bellis has been coasting on the sails of having a monstrous husband waiting in the wings and instilling a reign of terror since the day she was married. Now that he’s shown up all mortal, her illusion cannot hold. Therefore her reign cannot hold. I fear she might do something drastic to re-establish her authority.’
‘Like what?’
‘I’m not sure yet. Our Queen has never been the easiest of subjects to pin down.’
They were interrupted by one of the servants dashing back into the room, his face sweaty from running and anxiety. He saw Wren with a panting relief. ‘The Queen needs you, Persephone Libro.’
‘I will be there, friend. Go and tell her I am preparing.’ Wren moved to a stone shelf, and pulled down a small chest of acacia wood. She lifted the lid, and sniffed the opalescent grease inside it. Sea-serpent oil, a pungent mix of cryptid monster glands and soft paraffin.
Wren turned to Absalom once the servant had fled. ‘So, shall we be of erotic assistance to our beloved Majesty and her husband in the meantime, then? If she has a secret upset, then let neither you nor I be the cause of it.’
How proper Wren made this despicable ritual seem, while at the same time the distaste dripped from each word. Mr Absalom joined her in their moral dejection.
‘Let’s.’
He slid his hand through her thin, saffron elbow.
As they descended the tower, their view alternated between distant ocean and sinking prison yard. A few corpses rotted upon the old steam-shovel gears. The real entertainment was the successive views of Jonah Riven being set upon by Bellis’ guards, and him not going quietly. He gave a good fight, but in the end he was a lone man in chains, and there were four guards, and that was that.
Deepwater King Page 17