Deepwater King

by Claire McKenna

  Bellis went to her favoured window, the one that faced out towards the barrack town and the armada of uneven boats, dark shapes on a glitter-sea. The risen moon danced on the horizon. Her stiletto dug into the windowsill, quicksilver in the moonlight.

  ‘To accept false witnesses would mean accepting that people lie to me.’

  ‘They—’

  The stiletto whipped about so fast it would have impaled Wren at once were Bellis not so laden with dress-beads and lace.

  Wren grabbed the small bony wrist and hung on grimly. Her chin wedged into Bellis’ bony shoulder as the woman tried to bear her weight into her weapon, pierce her flesh, drive the spike into Wren’s belly.

  ‘Slut. Whore,’ Bellis gasped. ‘You fuck my husband? You wish to bear a Riven child!’

  ‘I don’t, my Queen! Stop!’

  ‘How many times has he spilled inside you, my little Libran harlot? He rises easy enough at your hand. Yet it was not enough! Are you gravid yet? Is that little womb poisoned with snakes?’

  By sheer force of effort Wren managed to kick herself free. A tea set came crashing down as Bellis collided with her desk. The sound of delicate porcelain shattered across the iron floor as loud as a scream. Wren paused for barely a second, terror flooding her bones, before wailing in feigned ecstasy, ‘Oh my Queen, oh yes, yes!’

  Let the guards think the crashing was vigorous love play and not a fight. Bellis skipped to her feet, stiletto held out.

  ‘No need for deceptions, my sweet, I’m not calling in reinforcements and ruining this moment between us.’ She kicked aside the crown that had fallen from her head. ‘I’m halfway of a mind to let you live, grow big, to watch you suffer.’

  ‘Oh, please tell me what sufferings are in store for me,’ Wren mocked back, her slippers testing the lay of the floor. The Queen would lunge again, and Wren must not fall, for if she did it would be the end of her.

  Bellis’ grin grew huge and yellow, her incisors as sharp as thorns. ‘There was a mansion in the town where I lived, the house of the Justinians, our wealthy custodians. They kept a jar in one room, filled with a creature that never lived but might have done – a thing grotesque and misshapen, tentacles of human flesh. A twin birthed with a live child.’

  ‘An interesting nostalgia,’ Wren returned breathlessly, her smile equally grimaced.

  ‘My husband’s twin, birthed the moment he was birthed. It is what is inside you, growing. It is what will kill you, day by day. I should keep you in my offices, so I might watch.’

  Wren showed the Queen her teeth. ‘Indeed, that should bring pleasure enough.’

  ‘Or I might cut it out and have my own creature in a bottle!’

  And Bellis darted forward again. This time she did not come from the front but the side, and Wren barely caught the stiletto as it grazed past her neck. Held it tight, tight, and Bellis flecked spittle upon her face.

  Wren took a breath for a final wail of dying, and to her surprise the killing blow never came. Bellis gasped, looked up, and above the pair of them loomed Riven, scarred and terrible, his bleak blue eyes hating the both of them utterly.

  As fast as a snake he snatched Bellis’ neck up in the crook of his arm and squeezed hard. Bellis’ eyes rolled into the back of her head, and her body fell on top of Wren as if she were a spent lover.

  15

  Devilment

  ‘By the abyssal gods, I thought I was gone for certain …’ Wren said.

  ‘Will she stay asleep with your potion?’ he interrupted. ‘We have a long way to go with her.’

  Wren nodded. ‘She won’t wake for hours now. The tincture is strong.’ She pulled the gold needle off the glass tube and let both fall back into a vase of rock-spirit. A flower of blood bloomed from the tip of the needle. If Riven had kept the chokehold on Bellis, the Queen would have stopped breathing completely. His act was a move to win a second’s reprieve in a bar-room brawl, not to incapacitate a powerful sanguis who could be as damaging dead as she was alive.

  Then Gregor Tallwater, impatient, spoke over the top of them. ‘Must we bring her?’ He gestured impatiently at Bellis. ‘I don’t care how little she is, dragging that weight will only be a burden.’

  Wren tutted at Gregor Tallwater and his wife. Not seconds after Riven had shown up to rescue Wren from an impaling, the Hillsiders had arrived behind, dressed and packed for travel. Clearly these journeyfolk thought the archipelago underworld had chosen themselves a suitable guide, but from their expressions she could guess fair well they’d not agreed upon a detour into the Queen’s offices.

  ‘Bellis is too dangerous to leave here,’ Wren explained. ‘What if someone finds her like this and wakes her? The alarm would be raised across the islands.’

  She shoved Bellis’ body over to slide the coat underneath.

  ‘We would be halfway to Fiction waters by then,’ Gregor retorted. ‘Nobody will look in a locked trunk. Hell, kill her even. That witch deserves it enough. What does it matter?’

  ‘She has half the population under bloodwork enchantment and the other half ready to do what the first one does,’ Riven said, standing up and scouting the room.

  ‘Yes,’ Wren said, slapping the dust from the floor off her hands. ‘We have all been lucky that we are not under orientis command. Until tonight we’ve never challenged her to the point where she’s needed to expend the energy on turning us. She saves it for her most malcontent folk.’

  She winked at Riven. ‘Except you, Jonah, but she enjoyed seeing you writhe under her thumb.’

  ‘You’re her servant,’ Helena said warily. ‘How can we be certain she’s not used her ghastly powers on you during this scuffle and this escape will all fall apart?’

  Wren went to the window and looked out of a missing glass into the dark rather than let the Hillsider woman see the expression on her face. She was transported back three years, the day Bellis and her army had come to Libro.

  Wren might have been clever, but the others of the Libran Council were not so quick. It had taken a full day for orientis to take hold of them. A day where they went from fighting prisoners to mindless followers, placid as cows.

  Including her mother, who in the end could not recognize her daughter’s face.

  Walk into the water, Bellis had said that evening, and Wren’s mother had done so, walking obediently into the slate-coloured sea until the grey waves covered her head. Wren had said nothing, not even as Bellis watched her with cold amusement. Had said nothing about it for three years.

  She turned back. ‘Because orientis takes more than the span of a scuffle to take effect, and I have to keep my mind clear to assist the ten dozen people who will be travelling with us.’

  ‘Ten dozen?’ Helena Tallwater protested. ‘Sir, my husband gave his help for us, not ten dozen passengers.’

  Wincing, Gregor tried to bring peace. ‘We owe him, Helena. He saved our children too, remember? Back when we were shipwrecked in Vigil last summer.’

  ‘But the boat will be … why, there is hardly a boat in the harbour that can safely fit that many people!’ She gave Riven a mulish squint. ‘Leyland said a pyre has been readied, sir. That pyre will be waiting if we don’t travel quick and light.’

  Riven ignored them. They were beneath even the pretence of a reply. With all his strength he pushed a massive slab of carved wooden side table two feet to the right, revealing an equally formidable door.

  A door locked and immovable.

  It took both men’s efforts to conclude that their escape path might have well been solid concrete for all it gave, though Riven was the last to accept this, driving his shoulder into the wood and iron that for any smaller body might have broken bones.

  Wren put her hands on her hips and shook her head. She had seen how the outside of the hinges had rusted into orange lumps.

  ‘Wait,’ Wren said. She went to the stone cabinet and brought down the stone casket of serpent oil. ‘It needs something to loosen the hinges a little.’

  Jonah Rive
n had had enough experience with that particular ingredient that he visibly recoiled. ‘What is that supposed to do?’

  ‘Settle down, sailor, it gets more things unstuck than merely a man.’

  ‘Well hurry up about it,’ Gregor said. ‘The guards will be back from their watch, and my father with them.’

  Wren scooped out wads of the cold grease, nearly emptying the box, and squished it into the gap between the door and frame. The astringent smell wafted over, so intimate and so reminiscent of torture Wren could see from the corner of her eye Riven press his hand against the wall and clench his jaw in an effort not to vomit.

  Despite the bad memory, serpent oil and metal in combination had the rusted parts frothing mightily. At the end of a minute, Wren could easily shift the door a crack, and once the men were involved, had it pushed open wide enough to slide a torso through.

  Riven hoisted Bellis’ limp form onto his shoulder. Gregor had brought a storm lamp and followed close by, with Helena and Wren at the rear.

  Wren couldn’t help lingering a few heartbeats. This place had been her home for years, and now she was leaving.

  ‘Libro,’ Riven said. ‘Let’s go.’

  Gregor’s lamp cast its paltry illumination. The eternal stairs had survived a lahar flowing down from a previous eruption a hundred years ago, so where the treads had corroded away, stone remained. They descended through the shadows to the muddy beach outside the old cathedral wall.

  Wren took a breath, and even though it was the same sulphurous air she breathed up in the cloister-prison, it seemed fresher, cleaner. The rain had returned, needle-like splints of white in the full moon. Once the blush of freedom wore off, Wren wished she’d had the foresight to bring a coat, or better shoes. A gunky grey mud turned her slippers into stone clogs.

  Down by the bay, the cluster of hastily erected buildings that was Maris’ armada town was brightly lit for the night hours. Voices and song reached them on the wind.

  Everyone seemed up unusually late. Gregor and Helena paused, whispered to each other, and then looked at Riven sulkily. Wren did not have to ask where this opprobrium was coming from. It was glaringly obvious that Riven would stand out as a stranger in town. Not only were his clothes prisoner’s clothes, worn down to rags, but Bellis had fed him and worked him, so even physically he could not pass for a gaunt member of her army.

  A pair of figures strolled by, not more than a dozen paces away.

  Riven shuffled them all back into shadows of the stairwell. But the passers-by were shambled and drunk on rockblood spirit, and they wore crude masks of painted wood that showed them as being town revellers, not guards.

  Wren gave a little gasp of understanding. ‘Tonight is the Serpent night! It is a carnival for the King, and they all wear a costume.’ She pointed towards the lava blisters on the eastern curve of Maris, the pyre that was meant to have burned Riven and turned him into Bellis’ legend, the orientine image she would use to control her men.

  To their surprise Riven pulled off his shirt and scooped up the white mud at their feet. He began to slap it over himself, coating his torso in a shield of grey-white. Wren quickly went to do the same thing. Within heartbeats she had daubed her arms, her clavicle, and her face.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Helena Tallwater demanded.

  Wren tore off a length of yellow fabric from her dress. The silk was so worn from wear that her fingers easily pushed though for eyeholes.

  ‘Your mask.’

  Helena took her disguise with exasperation. Riven fastened his own around his head so that he became more maggot than man, white skin and featureless yellow face. A true monster.

  And then he was the first to move, his hated package secure over his shoulder.

  The town closed in, small mean streets that stank of sulphur and excrement. Once it hadn’t been much of a place for a few dozen to live, before the Queen came with her three thousand besotted men, now it had the air of a little hell permanently on the moment of ignition.

  Men bullied through the street with the malicious intent of those set on making trouble later. A sea-dragon of canvas and burlap over a skeleton of barrel hoops followed them. Ten figures danced inside its frame, beat iron-sheet drums. Riven urged them to keep moving.

  The gaslights glowed hot and bright in the house of ill repute. The Ivy House. Wren had had only two previous occasions to visit, both of them to refill the jadeite box of serpent oil the Queen required for her lovemaking.

  Riven barged through the door and confronted the madam at the foyer’s velvet table.

  ‘I want to see the Clay woman.’

  For all that Riven was a sight, the Matron of the Ivy House would not be cowed by any man.

  ‘She is busy. With a client.’

  Riven laughed, the first time Helena had seen a smile from him. Then he grabbed the Matron’s arm, pushed her towards the stairs.

  ‘The woman,’ he said again.

  ‘All right. Hold your horses.’

  Riven followed, not waiting for the invitation. When the Matron stopped at the uppermost room, he pushed the door open forcefully, would have closed it on their faces if Gregor hadn’t had his wits about him to quickly follow.

  No woman in here, only a small handsome fellow of middle years sitting neatly upon a brocaded chair, drinking tea from a chipped china cup. He wore a waistcoat of green-gold threads, and trousers of black wool, and his face was fine-featured enough that he could have passed for either man or woman had the occasion required it.

  ‘It’s all right, Irene,’ he called to the muffled pronouncements of Mr Lindsay, I tried to stop him of the Matron. ‘I was expecting these visitors.’ He turned to Wren. ‘Hello, dear Wren Libro. It is nice to make your acquaintance at last. Mr Absalom speaks most highly of the Queen’s handmaid.’

  ‘I cannot say the same for you,’ Wren replied with a frosty graciousness.

  ‘And Mr Gregor Tallwater, with his lovely wife Helena, still looking fresh as when I last met you in a Vigil alley, willing to take lives and pay blood money to get out to the Sainted Isles. Is your father Leyland about perhaps? The family unit?’

  The Tallwaters hunched in mute stubbornness.

  ‘Don’t talk to them,’ Riven said. He snibbed the lock shut, then dumped Bellis upon the chaise longue. Mr Lindsay attempted to not show surprise, but the tarnished silver spoon that stirred his tea paused with a chink of metal against porcelain.

  ‘She’s yours,’ Riven said.

  Mr Lindsay resumed stirring with some agitation.

  ‘Well. An odd gift. Would have rather she came to us under our reckoning and not this one.’

  ‘The Order has chased her for nearly twenty years,’ Riven gruffed. ‘I’m done. Her leash is tightened. You deal with her now.’

  ‘Now what might bring a man away from his matrimonial happiness, Jonah Riven? To me, and with such a gift?’

  Riven’s lips worked over his teeth. Then, ‘Our marriage is annulled. I surrender my oaths to her. We have no more business, you and I.’

  Wren noticed a furrow appear and withdraw upon the small man’s smooth forehead. ‘How interesting. I thought Deepwater marriages could not be annulled.’

  A look of disgust, then Riven went to close the window where a hot volcanic wind gusted in along with the clatter-noise of carnival cymbals. Gregor and Helena huddled together by the door, clearly wanting to flee this second imprisonment. Wren propped herself up on the vantage position of the huge four-poster bed.

  Riven leaned over Mr Lindsay and with a coarse expedience checked him for weapons. Mr Lindsay submitted graciously, and spread his arms.

  ‘Is Absalom collecting Arden Beacon off Equus?’ Riven asked mid-search.

  Mr Lindsay’s smile became thin. He tucked his shirt back into his strides. ‘Arden Beacon is complicated by many more things beyond missing a hard fuck by a savage and wanting more of it. She needs to go home and heal, resume her place beyond her people. What we do with our property does not concern o
thers.’

  Wren could feel the room heating up. Riven’s fists creaked. She jumped off the bed and in between them. ‘Calm, gentlemen, we still have a way to go tonight.’

  The small man scoffed. ‘You should have killed your wife, sir,’ Mr Lindsay said to Riven. ‘Look at me here, alone. She will annihilate me when she wakes and take this town with her.’

  ‘Then you both should come with us.’

  Helena gave a squeak of protest, hushed by Gregor, who laid his hand on the door handle, silently pleading for them to finish the conversation and move.

  ‘Go with you where? In what transport? The only spare boat that could steer out of these waters faster than the local Marians just left with my Order colleague this morning.’

  Wren saw Gregor Tallwater exchange glances with Riven, then heave a sigh. They had committed to this, and planned it well.

  ‘We have a boat.’ Gregor held up a white staff carved in a milky, opaline ghostwood. From his expression Mr Lindsay knew at once what the Hillsider man held, a priming handle for a white ship. Only one in the harbour.

  Riven took the handle, nodded at Gregor, before returning to Mr Lindsay, and only now did he allow the triumphant note to enter.

  ‘We’ll be taking our leave in a royal boat, you me, and ten dozen hostages. We are leaving in Sehnsucht.’

  16

  Jonah

  ‘Jonah?’

  Wren touched Riven’s painted shoulder and he jerked under her touch, before turning to face her. He had not been sleeping while they waited for the others to arrive. For a moment, though, he had been absent from them, as if his soul had grown wings and flown away.

  The air moved warm under Maris’ largest pier, which was built over a low, blind-end lava tube even Wren needed to stoop in. The sand radiated heat through Wren’s thin slippers. Same heat that would provide the warming currents through the Sainted Isles, draw the sea-monsters from their abyssal kingdoms to the hunting shallows. Gusts of sulphur and iron-scented air wafted from the black lava-tube cavity behind them. The stone cave was not particularly large or deep, but it provided cover from the cold night.