And then … she was past them … and the track was wider … she was around the corner of the rocky spit and headed out of their sight. A vaulting excitement made Arden drunk on her own narrow escape. She held out her hand before her and burst out onto the far beach.
Snatches of half-moon silver winked through the clouds, casting her shadow long and dark across the clean white sand.
Arden was no more than a dozen paces into the beach when a thickly muscled figure flanked her, lunged at her and pulled her tight into tattooed arms scabbed by monster-calling.
‘No!’
She fought the arms that held her, hard, shrugged and contorted and suddenly Miah was standing in front of her where he’d been lying in wait, and where she would have stumbled if—
‘Cousin,’ Miah growled. ‘Let her go.’
What? Who’s holding me?
A rockblood fire ignited in a shallow trench. The waves roared behind him. Arden let her body grow still, and knowing. The arms around her were unfamiliar. Too heavy, too coarsened by work.
The heart which beat at her back lubbed with a rock-hammer’s strike.
Miah stood wearing the grey-blue leather of his moiety’s giant serpent over his bare chest. He had not bothered to chase her. Had lain in wait instead, ensconced himself within a circle of sharpened pipes concealed in the sand. The fire made their shadows jump and writhe like snakes.
Or maybe they did move. Mandatum instructions.
‘I don’t wish to fight you, Jeremiah,’ rumbled the voice at her back.
That voice. She felt the strength leave her. She sagged into the arms that held her. She knew this voice.
‘Why not? Would be nothing for a murderer to bring those dark things to the shore like you did the first time.’
‘I have paid my debt for that.’
‘Really? What happened to the last woman taken from us? Turned into a scourge worse than your monsters ever were. How fitting, that everything under your influence becomes an abomination. Oh, you’ll destroy this one too.’
The muscles tensed behind her. The rain began to fall again, sleeting lashes of pain. Her heartbeat pounded a name.
Jonah Riven.
Jonah Riven.
Jonah Riven.
Arden wanted to turn around. Look at Jonah’s face. Be certain it was him and not a ghost.
When Jonah did not reply Miah said, ‘Look down, cousin, she is injured.’
I’m not injured, she wanted to say but the distraction was enough and without warning Miah charged at the pair of them, his fists swinging.
In the time it took to heave a breath she was tossed aside. Someone shouted her name, the rain thundered upon them in a deluge. The fires were up. A pipe writhed near her face. The ground shook.
She clambered upright, her hair falling about her face so she could not see.
‘Get away,’ Jonah’s disembodied voice shouted in the rain. ‘Get out of here, Arden!’
‘No, I can’t lose you again!’
Out of the darkness, as if he were a creature rent in two, Miah loomed out and seized her ankle. Lightning illuminated his face, a rictus of rage and hunger.
‘Stay … here!’
He seized her and threw her onto the sand, before following with the weight of his body. For a terrible second she thought he might try to ravish her among the stakes and pipes, but instead he grabbed her hand, bearing down hard upon her coins so her fingers splayed in agony. His mouth enclosed her fingers, teeth bumping over her knuckles.
Was not his tongue that she felt, but a hard circlet of metal.
Arden yanked her hand free, but it was too late, the copper ring was already upon her, tightening.
Gasping, she kicked Miah away and stumbled into the storm, called up her weak, stuttering foxfire into her palm once again. Her sense of direction lost itself to the sideways sleeting rain, the howl of wind buffeting against the forest and the trees.
‘Too late!’ he screamed, laughing with maniacal hysteria. ‘You wear my fucking ring. Beacon! You belong to the fucking Deepwater King!’
A conflagration of air built behind her, same sense of massive weight and displacement as the storm that had brought the giant serpent a week before. Sanguis feeling, blood-called …
Then a screaming, a man on the beach, howling in rage … and agony … and she turned about, afraid of who it might be. The lightning flashes rimed what seemed … almost seemed …
A figure lumbered out from the rain, illuminated in fire, bleeding from a cut at his side, and Arden staggered from the relief and exhaustion of seeing him again.
‘Jonah …’
He was bigger than she remembered, seemed older even though a full season separated them. His tattoos hard and black, like scars on his pale skin. An unfathomable weariness in his eyes. His face had harshened, his head shorn down to the root. In grief Arden had dreamt of seeing him again, of rushing into his arms.
But all that had happened between them made him remote as the storm.
She embraced him in the rain and pressed kisses to his mouth and he was alive and real and confused at her return so utterly that she had to let him go.
The elation of reunion was tempered by an almost unbearable sadness, and Jonah frowned at her wedding dress and the band on her finger.
‘You married him?’
At the shoreline, an incapacitated Miah was yelling, screaming Jonah’s name.
24
I had to
‘I had to, Jonah, there was no other way.’
The terror of losing him made her cling to Jonah’s wrecked and hard-scarred body as if he were a precipice she might fall from, and to her death. He had to peel her grasping hands off, wrap them up in his own.
‘We haven’t time,’ he shouted over the storm. ‘You have to move.’
This stranger-lover slung his bare arm about her torso. He was so cold, she feared him not real at all, a ghost, a revenant come back to life to help her for this one awful moment before fading back into the nothingness of death.
‘Hurry, the fin-folk won’t keep him occupied for long.’
Jonah grabbed her hand. More little insults to her pride followed, for she could barely walk in a straight line. Arden tripped over an exposed root, and he fell on top of her. She felt the bellows of his breath and knew then that he was drained too. However he had come back to her, he had not come back altogether healthy or whole.
They held on to each other in the darkness, panting for air as quietly as possible.
‘How are you here,’ she gasped once it was clear they were in nobody’s earshot. ‘How did you know I was here?’
‘Jeremiah knew I was here,’ Jonah said between breaths.
Arden knew the depths of Miah’s envy of Jonah, but the extent still made her gasp. ‘That devil. He did this on purpose.’
In the half-light his grip tightened. His breath was a hot tide on her forehead, the curious alcohol smell of starvation. Her fretful mind fell back to Mr Lindsay in the pipework cage. His talk of Jonah summoning the monsters of his childhood. It had to have left a mark on Jonah’s soul.
He pulled her upright, abruptly. ‘Can you walk?’
Nodded wordlessly, indicated she was fine.
‘Good. There’s shelter up ahead.’
They continued to climb through the sloppy mangrove forest, on a laddered path slippery with leaves. Even with her dark-sight freed from the veil of the saint’s powers, Arden struggled to see. The forest was so close, so tangled. The arms held her secure as stone and they came upon the great granite wall that stretched up into the clouds. Warmth surrounded them, for the granite radiated a fecund heat.
A tiny miner’s elevator-cage, barely wide enough for one person. At two people abreast, they could only stand in an embrace. Jonah held her close, and in the wet she heard the chatter of a chain running through a gear mechanism, the airy whoosh of descending counterweights, and their little iron platform began to rise.
As she embraced him, she
felt his muscles trembling with fatigue, and something else, a high, singing tension. Was it her causing this anxiousness or something else?
Their ascent slowed. The cage moved through a thin layer of cloud. The rain eased off into a fine mist. Lingering smell of sulphur in the air, a heat from the rock like a night-road after a hot summer day. Jonah tied off the ratchet chain so they could not be followed.
With her terrors far below her, Arden realized how fiercely she was shivering. They had come upon a courtyard of stone. All around her were the same undulating designs as in the city of Burden Town carved into the flagstones, balustrades and fire pits.
But unlike the worn, corroded stone of the Equus city, these carvings were preserved unmolested as if the compound had been frozen in time. Eternal blood-lamps flickered within stone lantern houses, gave the stones a slinking yellow glow in the fog.
Some kind of church or monastery gone to ruin, she decided, or a priory for a religious order, with a main building flanked by smaller ones.
Jonah tested a door, then leaned into it until the wooden lock gave way. Once in he tapped around in the gloom until he found the flint that could light the fire pit.
As the flames jumped, the carvings upon the walls shuddered and flexed. Men and sea-monsters, at sport and at war.
‘What is this place?’ she asked, teeth chattering. ‘A church? A temple?’
‘Holy ground.’ He stopped at the doorway boundary. ‘I can’t stay. I have to deal with my cousin.’ He paused, and in the firelight his face became older, and she saw Miah in him, and at once was both repelled and ashamed for feeling it.
The King’s cedar-carved face, wreathed in kelp leaves, gazed down at her from above the doorway lintel, sly and knowing.
Jonah saw her reaction, and saw it perhaps the wrong way. ‘I have to deal with my cousin. You’ll be safe here.’
‘Jonah—’
He slid out of her grasp and into the night. She attempted to run after him, and her courage failed her at once. Because they were high out of the rain, a wicked fog had swept in with the storm, made the world as blank as a cataract.
She retreated into the chapel, shivering too much to consider another attempt at following him. Closed the door to the chill. Pressed her cheek against the carved wood. Took a breath, let it become a sob. Leaned upon the door and wept.
For the relief. For the loss.
She stumbled in the sand and the Deepwater King was on her at once, Miah’s face looming above hers—
Arden jerked awake. The moment had been brief but she was certain she’d felt him here in this room, his hands on her skin.
But she was alone, and the terror drained out of her, leaving her wrung out. The damp wedding dress steamed on her body. Arden had come to sleep, or had been placed, close to a stone fire pit, the krakenskin coat bunched beneath her head to make a pillow.
She remembered the copper wedding band on her finger, and attempted to remove it again but to no avail. It had tightened beneath her knuckle. She could spin it, but the only way it was coming off was if her finger went with it. She was well and truly stuck with the evidence of her marriage.
A whispering in the high eaves caught her attention. Monstrosities up there in the dappled gloom, little flying devils, leathery and pale as death-doves. She moved closer to the fire, knowing that it was blood they liked best.
‘Jonah?’ she murmured.
‘He won’t come back here. It’s holy ground, and he has not yet been forgiven his sins.’
The voice startled her and she turned about, disoriented in the uneven light. The accent had been Lyonnian, and could not have belonged to Miah or one of his men.
‘Who are you? Show yourself.’
A wrinkle appeared in the darkness. Then a face moved from the shadows as if he were surfacing from a black lake.
That face. Her voice caught like a chain snagged on a gear. The word came out in a croak.
‘Father?’
25
No
No, no. Too young, by years, only the embracing dark had made him seem that way, the pepper in his beard. Not Lucian Beacon, with his stout sternness, but paler in his complexion, as if he’d never seen the sun. This man was younger and taller, with a Clay Portside common-blood cast to his features, and his black curling hair cut so short it was like a tight knitted cap upon his high forehead. He wore the simple robes of a minister, with a ceremonial brace of skeletonised albatross heads on each shoulder. His eye sockets were smeared with charcoal and nacre, making them seem as if twin abysses pierced his skull.
But a Beacon all the same.
‘I know your face. Have we met?’ the man asked hesitantly, his eyes reflecting the firelight as if his skin was merely an envelope for flame.
‘I’m Arden Beacon. Of Lyonne.’
‘Arden.’ His brow furrowed. ‘My cousin had that name. They used to say we looked alike, that we could be twins, even.’
Even in her despair she wanted to wail with relief, like the drowning man who finds a rope thrown to them. ‘I am your cousin! It is me! Your father and my father were full brothers. You’re Stefan Beacon, son of Jorgen, who worked the Vigil lighthouse. You are family!’
‘Family? You are Lucian’s daughter?’
She nodded, giddy with relief. ‘We met in Clay Portside, just as you arrived to study for the priesthood. You lived in Vigil, the town at Fiction’s end, you served as pastor for the land between Vigil and Garfish Point. They said you died, cousin, after Bellis Harrow disappeared. They said Jonah Riven was to blame … and he was not! Not at all!’
Stefan dipped his head, closed his eyes as if he were recalling an old, forgotten song. ‘Yes. I am from Vigil. And I did die, in a way. I am Pastor John Stefan now. Or I was. Then I came here. How is it that you know Jonah Riven?’
‘I took over your father’s lighthouse in the summertime. He still lived in the compound on the promontory. We … and then Bellis …’ she stammered, hardly able to breathe from the surprise of seeing her cousin again, here, when she thought him dead at Bellis’ hands. The pair had sailed away from Vigil together over four years ago. Arden had feared he’d become yet another one of Bellis Harrow’s disposable orientine-controlled servants. It would be difficult to survive such a condition.
‘I understand, if it involved Bellis. Now wait, I must finish my prayers.’ Her cousin fell back into the shadows. A door rattled in the dark, and she was once again alone.
‘Stefan …’ She followed him into the gloom, and the doors he must have gone through, and entered the cathedral.
For all its carvings and cavernous space, the fire-pit room had merely been an antechamber. This was the true gallery that opened up, a void both dark and expansive. Her breath echoed in her throat, then disappeared into the immensity.
As if at the end of a deep well, its bulk sunken into the rock, a massive cedar-wood icon overwhelmed the far apse-wall.
Instead of the Clay Church Redeemer spread helplessly and chained on His Libro rock, this icon was completely different. A sea-serpent tangle at war with a kraken, and a nude male figure entwined within them. The statue had cold abyssal eyes of jet, skin painted with the same oyster-shell nacre as on Pastor John Stefan’s eyes.
Arden couldn’t help but avert her eyes a little.
‘I have asked the King,’ he said on her approach, ‘what you are doing on my island sanctuary in a deepwater wedding dress, and He tells me that it is a question my cousin best answer herself.’
‘Stefan,’ she said with a click of impatience, disturbed by his presence and that big violent icon where the Redeemer of God should have been, ‘there’s a man on the beach who is trying to either kidnap or kill me or both! And where is Jonah? It’s not safe for him out there.’
‘Jonah can keep himself safe, if that is your concern.’ He gestured about himself. ‘And nobody is coming here, the chapel grounds are forbidden to the Equus folk. I assume that is what they are, for you wear a sea-silk wedding dress.’ Stef
an nodded up at the icon. ‘Now. Walk with me. It is not wise to gossip in front of the King.’
Nautical morning, when there was light enough to see by, not enough for the sky to court a sunrise. Stefan brought her to the pergola of a smaller temple, its overhanging roof writhed in carved kraken-symbols. Seaweed faces peered over the lintels.
The rain fell soft here, and a row of wooden time-clocks in a contemplative courtyard garden nearby bowed under the weight of water. They chimed against three hollow bellies of granite in succession.
‘Are you not missing morning prayers? Or do you not have them?’
‘The King can wait. Breakfast first, then we shall speak.’
Despite Arden’s anxious buzz, Stefan made her sit patiently as he rolled up the sleeves of his linen shirt and fetched two bowls of a slow-cooked fish stew left simmering from a previous night’s meal, cut pomegranates, tuber bread, goat’s cheese, a weak foamy mead to drink.
She’d thought herself too broken to eat, but as soon as the food was in front of her, Arden wolfed down her meal without pausing to speak. Yet even as she ate her first substantial meal in days, she stole careful glances at her cousin. What were they supposed to talk about? Stefan was a stranger to her, and as to his allegiances, he seemed far too given over to his kraken-wrestling god for comfort. A priest with a big Deepwater King idol in his main chapel, and who suffered impromptu weddings on the beach, couldn’t be entirely on her side.
In the end he initiated the conversation. ‘The dress becomes you, but is not quite suitable for the weather, even with a krakenskin coat.’
‘I wasn’t given much of a choice,’ she grumbled past a mouthful of stew. She paused to look around her. ‘Who is this church for? Is it to the Deepwater King or the Clay Redeemer?’
‘This little rock has been sacred to nearly every civilization that has crossed its path, and they all leave a mark on it one way or another.’
He pointed upwards. A map was carved on the pergola’s undersides. The Sainted archipelago. The three main islands were surrounded by a scatter of islets like a constellation of stars.
Deepwater King Page 27