Deepwater King

by Claire McKenna

  And their waiting.

  Jonah, closest to the entrance, was outlined in moonlight. The steam from his breath surrounded him like a mist.

  ‘Jonah? Are you all right? We cannot have the captain of our ship distracted.’ Beyond their hiding place, the hard, full moon in the west cast white peaks on the waters. They had chosen the worst of all times to go. They had no dark cover.

  Riven only asked, ‘Have your people arrived?’

  ‘We are here,’ said a voice in the gloom.

  ‘All of you, Mr Abel?’ Wren asked.

  ‘As many as we could. Maybe all.’

  The man who had spoken came into view from the other end of the cave. He wasn’t much more than Wren in age, less than eighteen. One of the older children. He beheld Jonah in silence. Wren knew what he was thinking – is this him? The Deepwater King who will lead us from captivity?

  Had they enough time Wren would have counted the arrivals off, made certain they were not missing a guard or a child. She was still her mother’s daughter, and in the matriarchal line of Libro the responsibility for escape became her burden. Why, even in the days of the Redeemer it had been a woman who ordered the Clay Messiah tied to a rock and left for the high tide.

  They should have done the same when Bellis came, Wren thought. Not welcomed her with arms wide open.

  Hiding a crowd – fully two-thirds of them under-age – in a stoopy tunnel was no easy feat. They would not stay hidden for long, not with the carousing town puffed up with liquor and stir-crazed men looking for fights.

  From their vantage point Sehnsucht berthed no more than a hundred paces away. She wallowed pale and fat with only five fellows watching her. Behind Wren, the breaths of all the refugees echoed loudly in the culvert.

  Riven stayed so quiet beside her. He had the quality of an ossuary about him, a collection of bones, lifeless, beyond waiting.

  ‘What’s wrong?’ Wren asked him quietly. ‘Speak to me, Jonah.’

  ‘There’s too much light.’

  ‘I thought the same thing.’

  ‘We can’t make it to the ship. Not without being spotted. Everyone is awake.’

  The night had brought the carnival to full boil. Phosphor rockets sizzled into the sky, exploded their hot, crimson innards. A child cried and was hushed.

  ‘Deepwater King,’ said a child’s voice, and they were hushed too. Jonah Riven’s expression was one of fear and pain. Bellis would soon stir and wake, and then every eye in the town would turn towards her. Their only hope was to be a thousand miles away, so when she woke, she woke alone and powerless.

  Or at the bottom of the sea.

  ‘What can we do?’ Abel asked. ‘We can’t go back into town.’

  Riven stood up outside of the tunnel mouth. ‘I can distract them.’

  Wren caught his arm ‘How?’

  ‘I stay here, you go.’

  ‘Jonah?’

  He passed Sehnsucht’s priming handle to Wren, pressed it into her palm. In his face … An ending there. She’d seen the same in suicidal men. She tried to push the handle back.

  ‘Jonah, no. Think about your woman on Equus.’

  He tucked his hands behind his waist, and his face softened in sympathy. ‘I am thinking of her, Wren. I wanted to be the sort of man worthy of her love. I wanted to earn it. But the Deepwater King requires his sacrifices.’

  She swallowed, sensing in the solemn way he spoke that he had already made his mind up what he was going to do.

  He looked over at his rescuees, sought out every face. ‘Wren Libro knows the route out of here as well as any sailor,’ he said loud enough for them all to hear. ‘Those of you with navigational skill, set the course to Libro beneath the storm wall of the Tempest.’ He gave Mr Lindsay a cool, baleful stare. ‘And have Mr Lindsay deposited somewhere distant with his package. Somewhere he can be recovered. Or not. It makes no difference to me.’

  Riven turned to Wren. ‘You have my permission to drop both of them over the side if they cause trouble.’

  Overcome with gratitude for him, she stood on tiptoes so she might bring his jaw down to her, kissed him on his hard cheek. ‘My love always, my brother.’

  He seemed so confused and young with the affection she had shown him, her cold little heart skipped a beat.

  ‘Stay safe, Jonah. God lives below you and above you.’

  He nodded, and accepted from Gregor Tallwater a knife that gleamed thin and sharp. Bellis’ stiletto.

  Then he was gone into the night, half-loping like a beast who could not be held in captivity.

  Wren did not smell the blood in the air so much as sense it. Sanguis blood, the thick, cloying secrets that it held. Even Bellis, on the edge of unconsciousness, murmured at the recognition. A summoning smell. Wren remembered an old ritual from her father’s death. The blood on the waters. A Deepwater Rite.

  A sound in the darkness. A cry in the distance. A man’s scream. Something was coming, whatever it was Riven had called. Coming in multitudes and as one.

  The rockets in the town fired off twice more, and then a silence followed, an awful undertow of anticipation. Four of Sehnsucht’s keepers left the ship and ran towards the town.

  ‘Now,’ a voice cried, and they were all in a dash down the pier towards Sehnsucht. The remaining guard made an attempt to stop them, and Mr Abel, weighted down with his cargo of Bellis in a sack, barrelled through him as if he were a twist of fog.

  They needed no instruction to board the white boat, and the children crowded across the deck, mouths open at a town burning, the flames reflecting off the battlement walls of the Marian caldera. Silhouettes of shapes dark and massive writhed in the inferno. The old King of the deep, the canyons of the sea.

  Before Wren could climb into the wheelhouse, she needed to look around. Jonah could not have gone far in that restless dark. She could not leave him so easily.

  Mr Abel whistled shrilly from the gangplank to get her attention. ‘Look sharp, the men are coming back.’

  She exhaled, and let Jonah go. ‘Untie us, Abel, we’re leaving.’

  Mr Tawfik had always kept Sehnsucht in the same fine condition in which Bellis had first acquired it. It took Wren next to no time to pump the petralactose into the engine and ignite the pistons. Sehnsucht’s side wheels bit into the black water, and the screw-propellers stirred up a froth.

  Goodbye, Jonah Riven, she thought to herself. I hope you find your way back … from wherever this night will take you.

  She opened the fuel pumps on the ghost ship, felt the engine thunder beneath her feet. Sehnsucht’s bow rose and bobbed. Freedom, and her return home with the children as she had promised. She’d heard tell that some survivors had hidden deep in the Libran forests. Wren hoped they would recognize her after all this time.

  Book Three: Anguis

  AFTER THE STORM

  17

  Arden, come back

  Arden, come back.

  Chalice’s cry still echoed in her head as she stumbled away from the Burden Town docks, away from Mr Absalom and his iron ship, away from transport back to Lyonne and forward to …

  To something. To nothing. She had chased a dead man to this island. More ghost than ever now. All those wasted weeks and he had been alive. Now he was something else. Neither alive nor dead, and she had not the resources to help in any way. Mr Absalom and the Order would not have helped her even if she’d asked. They’d have taken her back to Clay, reinserted her into the machinery of a sanguis bloodworker, and kept eyes upon her always. By the time she could have slipped away she would be old bones and Jonah would long be dust.

  Time slowed and stopped, and Arden Beacon followed the river channel out of the river mouth and into the pipelands where men could not go. The rusted flood walls of the aqueduct, overbrimming with rain, gave way to the natural banks of the original watercourse. It became as if she were walking through eternities and seeing the collapse of civilization in the span of minutes. She existed as a creature outside of time. Th
e stars circled overhead, wheeled and shone bright, then died upon each footstep.

  And still she fled along the river’s way, out of Burden Town, away from the Lyonne Order, from her failure.

  The cement and basalt of the old pagan city’s foundations stuttered out to reveal the bedrock beneath her feet. Night fell, rockblood clouds obscured the moon, too dark to see. She shuffled in a stoop through the driving rain, listened for the sound of the aqueduct so she might not fall into the murk and drown.

  Water sopped at her calves and ankles.

  All night she walked by the glow of the dimly phosphorescent water, guided by the methane fires along the muddy banks and the moonlight high and distant. A murky morning came over the horizon, and she walked all day driven by her poisoned blood and duty and regret and all the weight of her longings turned bitter beneath her skin. At that second day a traveller walked with her a little while, and when he turned to her he had Jonah’s face and he said, do you know me?

  ‘You’re Jonah Riven,’ she said to him, but it was too late and he had put on another face, some gnarled visage with watery eyes and cheeks ruddy with rock-spirit poisoning.

  You don’t know me. You never did. I was only a dream you had, once.

  Her traveller did not stay long, for his path meandered away from her and into the muddy plain.

  Self-doubts crept in with the midday demons, and the land became black as a memento mori with marcasite outcrops and the brassy remnants of pipes, like the gold findings from a torn necklace. If she became weary she did not feel her body’s lament, so when her feet could no longer hold her she crouched in a huddle in the scoop of a broken steam-shovel’s bucket, pulled Jonah’s krakenskin coat up to her neck.

  The smell of blood tainted the leather and Jonah Riven came to her in that dream, burnt and burning upon Bellis’ funeral pyre, his face crumbled into ashes. Sanguis ignis, he said with a voice like a tolling bell, you will not burn when I touch you.

  But she did burn and she woke with a startle of anguish, found herself back in the bucket again, her cheek rough against a corroded metal tooth. The images took longer to fade. Such grotesque intimacies while she slept through the night.

  It took a great effort to climb out of her small shelter on the third day, for it seemed her legs had locked up overnight like rusted machine parts. A sea breeze had taken away most of the choking fumes, but what remained was not better. The blackened land showed no comfort or horizon. A bloodworked dredger laboured in the distance, hauled up bucketfuls of dirt only to dump its load behind its trundling wheels. Every rock and uplift of soil was chewed down to mud as far as she could see. The rain came in diagonal sheets, hard icy needles. If she were to leave the bucket, she’d be wet at once.

  I could stay here. I could stay here a day. I could stay forever.

  Such a strange, unbidden thought, and had Arden been in the mood for superstition she’d have thought an angel whispered in her ear.

  If not an angel, then one of the old sprites of Equus, toying with a lost mortal. The old copper devil of Malachi’s childhood.

  Through that lure of oblivion, Arden fought back with the last of her resilience. I do not wish to die here.

  She got up with effort, for her knee hurt, and her ankle had at some stage rolled within her boot. She was so cold her hands could only ball up and ache. Her coins were small portions of numbness in the pain.

  It took no more than a few paces for Arden to realize how her dress uniform weighed her down. She released the strings and let the skirt fall before once again committing herself to the terrible journey in only her coat, blouse and kidskin leggings. Jonah’s coat she rolled and placed over her shoulders.

  The rain stopped, and with it came a fresh wind, clearing the last skeins of noxious fog. For the rest of the day she trudged through fields of oily mud and twisted, useless pipework. The entrails of Equus. In all the blackened ground not one shred of green showed. The only trees were the pipes installed by malfunctioning automata, twists and roils of metal that went nowhere. The forests of the endless mechanical night.

  Later she came across another steam-shovel, long ago broken and still compelled by mandatum to keep working. Like the dredger it dragged its broken bucket through the oily slop.

  Mandatum, she intoned with each step. Mandatum and orientis, the powerful blood soaking itself into this soil, this rock, this island. Her own minuscule sanguis shadows were nothing against the immense power that had wrought the automata from the copper and steel, had commanded and compelled.

  Such dread obsessions that outlasted even the death of that one individual who had commanded them.

  The agony of her body dulled, and her mind became clear. She had reached in her mind a spiritual journey’s end, had found the answers she’d searched for. She needed nobody to help cure her moral injuries, no priest, no intermediary. The words of those sacred waters would be her own. She would give the proper graces. Give sacrifice, like they used to, in the days of the Deepwater King.

  Arden walked on through that third day until the pain in her limbs came back, and this time they overrode her discipline. Each borne weight jarred her joins as bone upon bone. Her feet dragged, caused her to fall, at first once a mile or so, and then she could barely make twenty paces without stumbling. Her throat became so parched she chanced a puddle-rut left behind by an ambling shovel. However it made her gag, so she decided that it would be best not to drink at all.

  By the afternoon a blue smoke rolled across the pipe-fields, the first real evidence of life she had seen since leaving Burden. A bunker-thief town of rockblood bandits, a rude dwelling where iron barrels turned red-hot over fire pits and dribbled aromatics from rusted spigots.

  Arden stumbled into the middle of the thieves’ encampment for no other reason than it would take more effort to go around them. Hungry children’s faces daubed in rock-seep turned up to watch her go past. A sight she must have been, in her double-bronze and glowing blue rings, wrecked and bruised by her journey.

  Someone stood in her path, pushed a steel cup into her hand. ‘God, love, drink it.’

  A day without water made even this small offering cramp up her stomach, and Arden knelt and retched. When she finished, she noticed with a dull despondency that she had lost one of her gloves.

  The woman who had handed her the water cup tried to take her gloveless hand to help Arden to her feet, turning her palm up to see the coins buried in her inflamed flesh. ‘Sanguis,’ the woman breathed on seeing the coins.

  Arden shook her hand free, stood up by herself.

  ‘I’m all right. I must not be helped.’

  The woman’s face corrugated with wrinkles and sorrow. Her hair was equal parts white and stained black from rockblood. ‘Where do you go, little sister, so far from home?’

  The grey sky melted around them. The muddy ground slurped and shivered as if it were a living thing. ‘To the sea,’ Arden said. ‘To the sea.’

  Heard as if from a distance someone else say, don’t try to stop her, she is heading towards her dying, let her go.

  But the pipelands are that way …

  If they take her, they take her, said the woman, and they allowed Arden to pass by unmolested.

  Onwards. The pipelands rose up in their tangled copper thickets in clumps and tangles, replacing the vegetation that once grew in Equus. During one resting moment Arden watched a length of copper tube order itself upon a threaded joint, then flip, end over end, to join with another.

  She got up to move only when the living pipes came too close for comfort. She could sense the saint’s work in them like a sickly sweetness, the mandatum of their hard bodily commands, the orientis of their meaning and spirit. Those powers together had wrenched and sullied the order of the world, made the ships, the derricks, the dredgers.

  Eventually the ground she walked upon became sludgy and acidic. The exposed metal of pipes and cogs wore patinas of verdigris. Familiar shapes caught Arden’s attention. The great steel-lined po
ols of the canal locks, leaking water and rusting in the afternoon sun. The lich-ship harbour off to her left-hand side. Under her feet the sticky dirt became sand, black as diamond hearts in the low dusk light. The sharp, bladed sedge of the shore returned to form a carpet, the hard nubbins of beach succulents erupted from the heavy grains. It was the first greenery she had seen in days.

  Arden gasped a salty breath. She knew this place. Here was the rickety pier where she had come with Malachi, here was the ridge they’d climbed before looking over the hunting coast. Through instinct alone she’d followed the watercourse here, through fate and faith. Jonah’s people, his family, the only ones who remembered his name. This was the encampment of the deepwater folk.

  And they had Saudade, Jonah’s boat.

  ‘Oh,’ she panted. ‘Wait for me, I’m nearly here, wait …’

  Faint from hunger and hope she pulled herself up upon the high dune where the folk had camped and stood up on legs as weak as a new-born colt’s. The wind whipped oily strands of hair across her face, bit deep and hard.

  And disappointment crushed her.

  Nothing but an empty clearing. If there had been tents set up alongside that scorched circle of ground, they had long gone. Some broken boards and iron-scrap littered the edges of the clearing, not worth someone’s effort to move. The sand had already begun to obscure even these remnant remains. Given another day, the sand would drown the encampment completely.

  The old lookout platform, just visible above a crescent of grassed dune, was empty.

  ‘No …’ Arden said to the empty ground. ‘You can’t have gone. The serpent …’

  She understood how the serpent must have been small despite all the people it had taken to bring to shore, and the deepwater folk had made short work of butchering it. She waded through the remains of driftwood and rubble to the beach proper, and found vertebrae of the serpent in full cryptid decay, a fine crystal of opal bone that disintegrated at Arden’s touch.