The glow in her palm wavered as she pushed the door open. Cast little light. The smell of salt water up strong. The slosh of the ocean sounded in a chthonic depth just out of her hearing. Her fragile illumination caught cobwebs moving in the corners, the edge of a funerary vase bristling with sticks. A miasma filled the air, made the space bow and flux.
‘Devilment—’ she managed to say at the instant her foot bore weight upon a marble tile and felt it crumble. ‘Devil—’
And then the floor gave way as if it were made of dust and she fell …
28
Instinctively she fought
Instinctively she fought the hands upon her body, flailed her fists until the same two hands caught her and bore her down upon warm sand—
but so dark
—until she could fight no more.
‘Quiet!’ hissed the man’s voice, ragged and unfamiliar. ‘Quiet.’
Arden did not so much relax as give up entirely. She could still feel the throb at her wrists where his hands had needed to grip hard. When she finally recovered enough to lift her head, her vision sparkled with a thousand points of blue and silver.
The cave was warm as blood, darkness scattered with the same luminescence that had led her here. A hundred bodies writhed in the back reaches of the great stone gallery, most of them turning nose-less, lip-less faces towards her. Their cold glassy eyes reflected the blue light from a million points of worm-light.
‘My—’
The hand was on her mouth, muffling her. ‘Shh, they’ll not hurt us if we are quiet.’
She stilled, nodded, and then Jonah released her. More merfolk than she could count lolled on the opposite side of the grotto. A slimed horde of pale bodies, wide-set yellow-silver eyes, mouths filled with crystal teeth.
The fin-folk, merrows, homo marini. Up close, one would be hard-pressed to explain the erotic legends of fair maidens upon rocks with seashell combs. They were like people starved down to bone before being daubed in silver silk and ragfish slime. Their eyes were large discs of silver on either side of their heads. Long crystal teeth erupted from their jaws. Their cheeks sunk, fleshless.
One of their cadre stood up. Membranes as thin as a slime’s meniscus spanned the sharp spikes upon his back. They glistened as he turned to glare cold yellow eyes at Arden. He, she decided, had a man’s body with no genitalia, only a vent between his legs.
Jonah stood protectively between them. Arden pressed close behind, terrified to lose him again. He gave a soft, low warning hiss. For several heartbeats the two creatures of the sea glared at each other with naked antipathy before the merrow decided the human man not worth his time.
Without asking, Jonah reached down to pull Arden to her feet. He wore the same leather breeches from when he had first rescued her, ripped at the knees, otherwise he might have been one of the naked merfolk for all the clothes he wore. But he was not at full strength despite the oddly forced musculature of him. His skin had sunk into the crevices, puckered at the scars.
‘Should have made a better hiding place,’ he said wryly. ‘Made certain I had no worm-glow on me.’
She had not noticed it much on the night, but noticed it now. An odd rasp roughened his voice, causing him some difficulty speaking.
‘I’d have followed you off a cliff if it were the only way.’
He searched her eyes, her face as if she were a puzzle. Nodded. ‘Yes, you would have.’
He took her hands and turned them up so she could see the damage her fall had brought. She had to restrain herself from grasping at him. But she felt so jangly and nervous now, excited at his return but well aware he was very much damaged by all he had done.
In the luminous blue half-light her hands were covered in bloody scratches from dropping through the mausoleum floor. Above her the web of tree roots and dark vines had caught her body, arrested a drop that might have otherwise killed her.
‘It’s not bad,’ she whispered. ‘My hands don’t hurt. I’m not feeling pain.’
As soon as she spoke, his face told her everything she had wanted to hide. Jonah had been a neighbour to Jorgen Beacon for years. He knew what numb hands in a coin-implanted sanguinem meant.
‘It was the payment the Deepwater King required,’ she said to his unspoken question. ‘Jonah, I sacrificed so much to get back to you.’
He released a breath, and nodded. ‘I know the King’s ransoms. Still, if only …’
‘Was mine to choose, Jonah.’
There was a breath, a half-second when she thought he might kiss her, but it passed and she did not chase the moment. To have done so would have broken whatever spell had brought her here.
When he spoke, it was a sailor’s curtness. ‘Can you get an ignis lamp going? The light will make our houseguests behave.’
‘I think so.’
This grotto, or sea-cave, or whatever its purpose before Jonah had chosen to hide here, had provided sanctuary to others before. The cave angled up from the sea, which ebbed and retreated several feet below. High storm tides had brought sand into the upper reaches, along with other lost treasures.
Arden stumbled over the dry remains of a beached longboat to a scattered pile of random articles above the tideline. Broken crockery, silverware, an ornate chair missing a leg, a marble vase with silk flowers.
Among the discards were at least three brass storm-lanterns meant for a sanguis flame. She thumbed the sharpest needle and quelled the stab of worry that followed when she could not properly feel its bite.
The lantern gave out a feeble but steady glow from where Arden could take stock of the other salvages. Ship’s bells and compass roses, water-damaged barometers. A magpie hoard of shiny shipwreck things. A chest of drawers, a side table for a mansion’s hallway. Some scattered buttons, broken jewellery. Not collected by humans with an eye for usefulness.
Jonah invited Arden to sit upon one slab of marble she suspected had come from another cemetery collapse, then proceeded to gently bind up her hands with rag strips torn from a silk bed sheet.
‘I used to have a bedside table like that back in Clay,’ she said, her voice coming out high and dizzily frantic from finding Jonah again. ‘When I was a girl. Oh, and a locket like that one, when I was in the Clay Academy, my first year. I lost it in a canal not more than a month later.’
‘Take the locket if you want. The owners have long gone.’ Jonah gave a snort of dry acknowledgement before tearing out another strip from the sheet. ‘Other hand now.’
She examined his shoulders in silence, watched the muscles play under the lamplight with each movement of his arms. They’d travelled so long and so overwhelming a distance from the close, warm surrounds of Saudade’s hold. The evidence of welts and beatings appeared upon his back like ghastly tattoos over his old ones. He seemed almost flayed, as if he’d shed a skin during his time away from her and not yet grown a new one.
‘You cannot stay here,’ Jonah said once he had finished binding her wounds. ‘Not here and not with me.’
She snatched her hands back. ‘Jonah, what needed to be done to escape Maris was—’
‘Was a crime. I am a murderer. It’s what I am, and what I do. The Lions should have kept me in that damn Harbinger Bay prison.’
Jonah pulled away from her. He rubbed his face wearily, sat back on the high-tide beach and slung his hands over his knees. ‘I’m not Lyonnian, Arden. What morals your people have are not our morals. This—’ He motioned to the sea-cave, the surge of water below, the fin-folk on the opposite side. ‘This is all I have left after what I’ve done to those people on Maris. They were under Bellis’ control. They didn’t deserve what I did.’
‘They would never have been free of Bellis otherwise. She had hostages, didn’t she? You freed them too. And you have me now, Jonah.’
‘And you gave yourself to my damned cousin!’
Arden gasped at Jonah’s outburst. An arrow went through her heart. Jealousy was not something to be entertained, she should not allow it, sh
e should put him in his place and scold him.
‘I gave myself to Miah Anguis, the same way you made Bellis Harrow your damn wife!’ Arden returned hotly. ‘To save a friend. To save you.’
The man swallowed, and utter despondency blanketed him. Not even the martyred saints upon the church walls of Clay’s grand cathedral could have matched the agony in his face.
‘You gave too much.’
‘It’s not for you to decide what I should or should not give.’ When he did not respond she went to kneel in front of him. ‘Jonah Riven, you listen to me. There’s still time for us. Come back with me.’
‘I can’t go to the chapel.’
‘Not the chapel. To Lyonne, and Clay. I want to bring you home.’
He gave a half-hearted laugh of ridicule, and in the ignis lamps, his blue eyes were bloodshot and fierce with scorn. ‘Someone like me in Clay City? Displayed like a sideshow?’
‘It wouldn’t be like that.’
‘It would be like that.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll not be made an object of pity.’
It was his hunger talking, and the exhaustion, and the remorse for what he’d done. She took his hands in her own numb ones, skin on his knuckles still broken from the scuffle he’d had with Miah. Older injuries beneath. She turned them palm up, pressed her face into the hollow they made.
He murmured, resistant enough to not relax fully, but did not pull away. He stroked her cheeks with the calluses from the work he’d been forced into, the weight of old stone in his hands, guilt and fear and yes, hope too. Because he had loved her and lost her, and feared that place again.
‘Would only be pity,’ she said, ‘if I’d known you’d not survived.’ She glanced at him, trying to scry his emotions from his inscrutable face. ‘Miah wanted things from me, but there are places in my heart I let no man go.’ She pressed his hands between her own. ‘Unless I allow it.’
‘I have not told you exactly what happened on Maris,’ he said hesitantly, his breath loud as if he’d been winded. ‘Maybe you would think differently of me if you knew. Not just the people I killed. How I was greedy, and clung to life, and did everything Bellis asked. Even the dishonourable and shameful things.’
‘She tried to tear you apart, Jonah. But you conquered her.’
Arden raised her face to him, murmuring this wild man into her surrounds and her trust. Her lips had barely brushed over his wind-scored own when a tile fell from the root-bound ceiling and crashed upon rock.
Jonah jumped upright. ‘Someone’s up there.’
Across the grotto crevasse the merfolk hissed in agitation. A thin grey daylight cast through the looping vines of the mausoleum, and a voice called down most plaintively.
‘Arden?’
Arden took up an ignis lamp and held it before her face. ‘I’m here, Stefan! I’m all right.’ She stole a glance at Jonah. ‘We both are.’
Stefan’s face appeared in the gap she had made by falling through the mausoleum floor. His face shone in the glow of a magnesium lantern.
‘That’s good, but I don’t know how much time you have. There’s someone coming up the wall.’
‘What’s that mean?’
‘It means you’ve lost sanctuary. They’ve decided their immortal souls are less important than the boon they’ll get by invading—’
He slid away.
‘Stefan?’
A scuffle, another falling tile and silence. The fin-folk began to hiss like a thousand adders trapped in a stone. Jonah moved Arden behind him, before dashing the lantern out of Arden’s hands, plunging them into darkness.
Seconds later, a head appeared, outlined in a harsh chemical glare.
‘Hoy, is anyone in there?’
Another voice, muffled. ‘I swore he was talking to someone down there.’
‘It stinks of fin-folk. Get Anguis. The woman might be hiding.’
Jonah’s hand found Arden’s. They didn’t need to ask each other what had happened.
Miah had come back for her.
Miah glowered in his plesiosaur coat, still wearing marks on his face from the wedding night three days earlier. Mr Cleave did the talking.
Arden could barely hear them from behind the carved blinds of the anchorite’s passage that linked the church with the solitary retreats. Their figures were obscured by the morning fog. Jonah had not wanted Arden to go, but she couldn’t abandon Stefan to Miah’s wickedness. If the deepwater folk had sullied the holy ground of the Deepwater King’s chapel, they would have no hesitation in hurting its keeper. Stefan had sheltered Arden, and that made him vulnerable to Miah’s resentment.
And his anger.
Clearly upset by the turn of this morning, Mr Amos Cleave tried his best to maintain a semblance of politeness as he explained to the priest why they’d made such a trespass on such sacred grounds. He might have had the mantle of leader torn from him, but the old habits did not so easily break.
Miah Anguis shouted interruptions in coarse Fictish for every few words Mr Cleave managed to speak. In the middle of a belated apology the new leader lunged forward, struck Stefan down with a fist. Arden would have cried out if she had not jammed a knuckle in between her teeth. She pressed her cheek to the latticed grille meant to hide an anchorite from the pilgrim come to ask spiritual forgiveness, felt distress leap in her chest.
Mr Cleave and the other Equus Islander did cry out, in horror for such a sinful violation. They hauled themselves onto Miah and held him back.
‘He’s still a holy!’ Mr Cleave shouted. ‘God will know if you hurt him, Anguis.’
‘You don’t tell me what to do any more, Amos Cleave! Get your hands off me.’
Miah shook the older man off as if he weighed next to nothing, then dragged Stefan up by his collar. ‘You’re just as slippery as you were when you were a boy, Stefan Beacon. Where is my devils-damned wife?’
‘I won’t fight you, brother,’ Stefan murmured, dazed, and blood in his mouth.
‘You’re not my brother.’ Miah punched him to the ground again, and Stefan did not move.
Panicking, Arden searched about her wildly for Jonah. Where was he? He could not have fled, not with his friend being tortured like this …
When Miah kicked Stefan in the stomach, her cousin wailed with such agony Arden could not bear to witness any more. ‘Stop!’ she cried, and fell out of her hiding place. ‘Leave him alone!’
She stood on the pergola stairs, defiant. Miah forgot about Stefan completely. Anger and desire wrecked his face. Had she thought a few days apart might have broken whatever spinning absurdity made him imagine he was in love with her, it had only sharpened it.
Something had, at least. She felt the itch of evalescendi beneath her skin.
Miah looked like he’d not slept for days. His eyes were sunken and bruised, his lips chafed, his knuckles raw in the way only striking a fist repeatedly on a wooden wall would bring.
‘Miah, this is not you. Something’s making you not think straight.’
She pressed her numb hands together. Evalescendi, she thought wildly. Have I caused this in him the way I made Mr Stone light a fire from the rockblood? But shouldn’t it be physical objects he trammels, an unstable mind belongs to orientis …
Beside him, Stefan slowly tipped onto his hands and knees, his attention warily on the deepwater men and their new leader.
‘Remember when we first met?’ she said, trying to keep her voice as steady as possible. ‘Remember our agreement? You were not thinking of leadership then, Miah. You were even arranging to send me back to Burden Town. Nobody would rearrange their life and burn down their own people after three days without the cause being unnatural. Please think about it!’
‘Jonah had you two days, and you gave up everything for him,’ Miah said mulishly.
‘It’s not the same. Evalescendi is poisoning you. We cannot be together.’
He grimaced, as overcome with agony as if she’d plunged a spike of hot metal into his temple.
‘No! Si
nce I’ve been with you, all I can sense are the machines in the badlands, the mandatum grown strong like a fever! I must be rid of them, for Equus’ sake!’
‘I’m sorry, I should have thought more about my shadow talent, I never knew it could be so strong.’
‘But you only cared about Jonah Riven. Didn’t care about how you could hurt others with your sinful blood.’
She closed her eyes in despair at the word sinful.
Next to him Mr Cleave pleaded, ‘Brother, this is holy ground. Take the woman and leave the priest be.’
Miah was trembling, his fists clenched, but he did not take a step towards her. Arden panted, light-headed with terror. He could easily grab her and take her away but …
… he can’t act without my consent.
Stefan gasped a few more pained breaths, then, wretched and proud in his albatross coat, picked himself off the ground with an effort that almost destroyed him. ‘What if she does not wish to go?’ Stefan said between gasps. ‘She sought sanctuary with the King, and you must honour the true church.’
‘The true church? Look at this place,’ Miah raged. ‘These false carvings, these embarrassing rituals, all while our island starves and suffers. You have never been in the water with maris anguis, never fought it on sea and on land. The true church is at the bottom of the damn ocean in the drowned cathedral of the fucking Deepwater King.’
‘And to get there completely you must die,’ Stefan replied.
The words enraged Miah again. He shrugged Mr Cleave off and struck Stefan down once more. Blood spattered across the wood as Stefan’s nose made contact with the planks.
‘Stefan!’ Arden cried.
With deliberate slowness Miah walked to the pergola steps to the courtyard and towards Arden. The wood creaked under his boots. ‘Come with me and I won’t kill him.’
‘No. Kill him and I’ll burn you.’
‘Like flame on the beach? Barely a spark without a stormcaller around. There’s nothing sanguis here and you’re all used up, aren’t you? Feverish from blood poisoning and untrained in evalescendi.’
‘Then you know I have not long to live.’
Deepwater King Page 29