‘We can fix that. A woman doesn’t need hands to—
It happened so quickly Arden was not certain of the order in which it came, only that there was a shout as one of the men was knocked down by a rock flung from an unknown source, then another from a startling angle. A body fell out of the pergola rafters to tackle him. For all his surprise, Miah caught the blows, came out swinging against the half-naked wraith. He flung his attacker sideways so powerfully they both fell against the pergola rails.
The weight of two men made the rails give a loud and audible crack like a musket’s report.
Jonah moved quicker than the older man, dodged the blows to his face, and caught a couple to his bare midriff before yanking up Miah’s arm in compliance. Wedged his hip into Miah’s own. Arden heard Miah’s shoulder joint creak before the deepwater man, red-faced, gave an animal howl of pain and bobbed on agony-weak knees.
‘No closer,’ Jonah Riven barked at Miah’s escort. ‘There will be no more serpent hunting if he loses an arm.’
‘You little shit, Jonah,’ Miah foamed through enraged spittle. ‘There’s no upper hand here!’
‘Except over you, cousin.’
‘Must have felt good, cousin, when I took your lover into my bed,’ Miah hissed through his pain. ‘A throb in your pretty, uncut cock?’
He screamed once more as Jonah yanked his arm back harder. ‘I said no closer!’
Jonah had seen the danger before Arden did, and even then too late. One of the deepfolk creeping up with a hefty switch of mangrove wood. Before Jonah could move, fouled up in Miah’s arms, the switch cracked across Jonah’s head, breaking the wood.
Not enough to stun him. But enough for Miah to slip out and shove Jonah prone upon the ground.
Arden let out her own shout of fury. ‘Enough! Enough! I will not be made a pawn or a trophy or a reason for anyone’s own bedevilled problems!’
‘Get back here!’
Before anyone could prevent her escape she had turned from them and fled through the fogwood forest, twigs and cobwebs festooning her hair, ivy tangling through her legs. She could not pull herself up, anger and anguish and guilt an inexorable flood rushing through her veins. The evalescendi there, burning harsher than ignis ever had …
Then there it was, the end of the island, the Darkling Sea bleak and infinite beyond this last outcrop on the end of the world. The cliff face roared and threw up its own gush of wind, sea-spray like a thousand tears, soaking her utterly.
Arden pulled up at the last second, and teetered on the edge.
Behind her Miah had stopped too, his face pale and grimacing.
‘The fall will kill you from this height, Beacon.’
‘Maybe I would prefer to die this way!’
‘And leave me bereft, and grieving?’
‘Do I care for your grief?’
‘Your cousin Stefan might care. Mine own might care too, a great deal, were I to take my grief out upon him. Why, I might even blame Jonah for your death, and a shame that would be.’
He had come closer. The wildness in his face was tempered with the panic he might lose her. The sea beckoned.
‘Imagine the fall, your limbs cracked and broken, your body tossed upon those rocks,’ Miah crooned. ‘Imagine it.’
She imagined it, and imagined what else could happen with her leaving.
Then she swallowed, and stepped back. Gravity smothered her as utterly as a sanguis pondus making her weigh ten tons, and she fell, only to have Miah catch her in his rough arms. With a grunt of effort he hauled her over his shoulder, and walked with his burden back to the chapel.
What if you had jumped.
What if.
She jumped. She had enough sense to point her toes and tuck in her chin, and were it not for the froth on the waves, she’d have broken both legs upon entry, sacrificed herself to a watery grave. The world tuned white, and she torpedoed through the slosh and into a blue-black purgatory of water, the Deepwater King’s realm.
Her descent slowed just in time; the rocky bottom of the cliff face bruised her bare soles.
I will stay here forever, she thought. I will not rise. The world will cease to spin. Time will stop.
She would stay and be at peace. The sky was gone from her, the water’s surface was the sky, her life would be measured in seconds, but that would be a full life, and her own. Her symmetries thudded through her water-chilled veins. She was alone. Evalescendi meant nothing here.
In the raptures of her breath-deprived brain she saw all about herself, the kingdom rising in pearl battlements and salt-stone, kelp forests towering, great behemoths of the ocean flitting though their fronds. The drowned city beneath the waves, before the Sainted Islands were flooded.
A kraken bull swam past, shimmering copper, flashing blue, scarred and terrible. A ray swam overhead, so large that its shadow fell like night across the cathedral of the King.
The doors of His great chapel opened wide and He emerged, clothed in the skin of maris anguis, spiked harpoon in one hand, blade in the other, His face in shadow.
What have you sacrificed?
Everything.
She said.
What will you give me?
Everything.
The Deepwater King came close and cold, and His great strong arm encircled her dying body and His cold blue lips pressed to her own …
29
Water
Water.
She was choking, drowning. Spluttered and woke to liquid going down the wrong way. No King, only Stefan nursemaiding her.
She squinted into the gloom as her darksight made out his face. One eye swollen shut from the beating, and blood drying to a dark crust in his beard. A yellow brazier illuminated half his face, and threw the rest into shadow.
‘Oh, careful,’ he said in a dockworker’s Lyonnian. ‘Take small sips. Swallow it, don’t breathe it.’
Stefan sat back on his haunches. He looked about himself. A distant grumble resonated through the stones of the dark room. Thunder, somewhere overhead. ‘Storm’s up. Well. We’ve won a few hours’ grace at least. Deepwater folk have their superstitions about storms.’
‘Where are we? It’s so dusty in here.’ Arden blinked in the gloom and turned aside. A skull grinned back at her. ‘Oh, devilment! Oh, goodness gracious!’
She was lying next to a wall of skulls resting on a framework of leg bones. A pale mortar held the larger bones into the wall. Smaller bones had been rearranged into the clay in the order they’d been in when alive.
One skeletal hand still held a sanguis grommet like the brad in a bootlace hole. She reached out to touch it, and imagined she could still sense the wisps of power even in the calcified remains.
‘Easy, our friends won’t hurt us. They’ll only bear witness.’
Still dizzy from sleep, Arden turned away from the ossuary remains and took stock of her situation. She had been lying on a stone platform with her coat for a pillow. Her body ached so. ‘Stefan, how long has it been?’
‘Long enough. Been a little insensible for a while, and gladly so. We’re locked in one of the chapel crypts, courtesy of our guests.’ He held his hand up and closed his eyes. ‘The wind has changed in the caverns below. By the tide breeze, it has to be night.’
Arden sat up with effort and patted her head for injuries. ‘I don’t think I hit anything when I fell into the merfolk grotto earlier. At least I hope not.’
‘That, and the cave gas.’ He leaned close and spoke in the dockworker’s patois again. ‘Your husband is quite single-minded about you taking up the mantle of Deepwater Wife. Unnaturally so.’
‘Yes,’ she replied miserably. ‘He started halfway decent and it all went frightfully upside-down. The fault may not entirely be his, however.’ She rubbed her coins, then sniffed. ‘What’s that smell?’
Stefan gestured over his shoulder. The source of the bitter smell was a small brass apothecary’s kettle nestled in the coals. A similar cup nestled in his hands, and he offered i
t to Arden again.
‘They locked us up with a cup of tea?’
‘I have it sequestered about. They’ve not suspected what my brew actually is.’
She sniffed again. She knew that smell. Fennel and liquorice masking a bitterness beneath. ‘Tell me it’s not a morphium, Stefan? Why is there morphium tea in this room?’
‘You can sleep through this,’ he said. ‘You do not have to stay awake this night.’ He made the motion of drinking. ‘One sip of morphium tea can put you asleep for an hour. A cup of it … well, a cup could end your problems sooner. We Lyonnians do not have the same prohibitions against taking our lives as the deepwater folk have.’
Arden stared at Stefan. ‘Suicide? Are you mad as well?’ She shook her head and pushed his cup away. ‘We’re not that desperate.’
‘We could be.’
She gave him a withering glance.
‘A little then, to tide us through this night?’
‘No, I need my senses. If Miah’s locked us in here, then we need to find a way out of this room.’
‘There is none except the trapdoor.’
She was wide-awake alert now, and found the means to get to her feet. At once she knew that Stefan was right. Each wall appeared solid behind the carefully stacked bones. The crude entry stairs ended at a lone trapdoor. Had there been another way out Stefan would have not been so coy about it now.
‘The clarity of our situation will only hurt you,’ Stefan said. ‘Cousin, I thought there was a chance of survival with him, but I saw it in Jeremiah’s eyes. It was the same look as Bellis had before she fled me.’
Arden sought out his face in the gloom. ‘Mandatum is a bloodwork of physical objects. It’s the mind that moves to orientis. He should not be affected by his mind.’
Stefan sighed, and put the cup back among the coals. ‘Who knows what evalescendi does to other sanguinem. The talent a shadow mystery much as the other two, and had there been any more examples in nature, why, the Church would have put a prohibition on it as it did with mandatum and orientis.’
‘Oh Stefan. We have to do something.’
Stefan remained bleak. ‘If it’s true what you say, and Miah has mandatum, then the man is not giving up. Ever. You know as well as I do. Orientis might direct and suggest a dream for as long as the user wields it, but mandatum articulates the hard orders and it lasts forever, just like the eternal machines in Equus.’
Somewhere in the night, a man’s defiant, agonized shout lost to the storm. Arden stilled, and an odd, remote anger filled the places that were once empty with despair.
Stefan took the copper kettle off the coals. ‘Jonah has become acquainted with withstanding torture since leaving Bellis Harrow. That knowledge will prove its usefulness tonight.’
She regarded Stefan in distressed silence as he retrieved his cup and poured himself some of his bitter tea. Watched as he sipped it with trembling hands.
‘Stefan,’ she said. ‘Why would you have a numbing tea hidden in a crypt of all places?’ She frowned. ‘Tell me you’re not sick?’
He paused, and placed the cup on the hearth. A sheen of sweat lay on his brow. She had thought before that maybe he ran Beacon-hot, and now she was not so certain.
‘Was not through pure charity that the Clay Church allowed me to change my service to them, leave the mainland and come here.’
‘I don’t understand.’
His smile was sad. ‘I am an addict, cousin. I’m enslaved to this drink. I suppose the first priest to show me how the tea worked thought he was doing me a favour, to ease my own homesickness. The King requires extremes.’ He picked up the brass cup again, pressed it to his lips and closed his eyes. ‘If I don’t drink this, I die. If I drink too much I die. That’s why I know the tea works.’
Despite her promise to herself, Arden still struggled not to give in and accept a cup of that sweet oblivion. She knew what Stefan was saying. There was no escaping what was coming for her. She’d dreamt of choice, but now had none left.
Unless.
She stood up, a quiver of resolution in her heart. Went to Stefan, and hugged him, despite the awkwardness of their embrace.
‘I am glad to have met you, if only for a little while.’
‘What are you intending to do, cousin?’
Arden met his gaze, then touched his cheek. His skin was clammy and hot.
‘I will go to the extremes the King requires.’
Nobody came when she first yanked on the silver bell-rope with her numb hands. In the distance a bell gave an obstinate, unmusical clatter.
‘Hoy,’ she shouted. ‘I need to talk to Mr Anguis. Open this door!’
Nobody responded, and soon she grew tired of being ignored. It was just like Miah, she thought. Making certain she knew who responded to whom in this new arrangement of theirs.
She returned to the pallet and hugged her knees, rocked back and forth impatiently.
Stefan had at last an inkling of what she intended. He put down his cup and went to sit beside her, his brows knitted in concern.
‘You don’t need to surrender to him, Arden. If you didn’t want to before, you shouldn’t now.’
‘I appreciate the concern, cousin.’
‘Desire might not stay his hand if he’s even slightly aware what is going on.’
‘But I have to try. It’s not just about me. It’s about Jonah. And you.’
‘Are you certain it’s not your sanguis endowment making you feel so much to blame? We become analogous to our blood, there’s no escaping that fate.’
‘Was Bellis influenced by her blood?’
‘Very much so. Orientis personified becomes ambition.’
‘And mandatum becomes obsession?’ She lifted her chin. ‘Oh God and devils, why did it take me this long to work it out? If only I’d stopped and thought rationally about how I might affect Miah!’
‘It couldn’t be helped,’ Stefan said kindly. ‘Us Beacons always blazed too hot and burned out too quick, ignis or not.’
Arden squeezed her numb hands. Imagined evalescendi tilting her mercilessly towards symmetries greater than hers, making her blunder into trouble.
‘I want to be more than my blood, Stefan.’
Eventually curiosity got the better of her captor, and one of the deepwater folk lifted the crypt door. The wind and rain washed in, a cold breath of salt and iron.
‘He’ll see you now,’ gruffed the deepwater man.
Arden tipped up her head, haughtily, and threw a quick, covert glance at her cousin. ‘It will be all right,’ she said, and let the deepwater man close the trapdoor behind her.
The walk across the storm-drenched courtyard soaked her to her skin. In the centre, a post, and upon it a body slumped.
Jonah opened his eyes as she passed him. An incomprehensible emotion through his pain. He knew where she was going. An imperceptible shake of his head.
Too late, she thought. Well, we’ll see where this takes us.
The rest of Miah’s entourage had the hunched, beaten-down appearance of men under stubborn sufferance. She could tell by their bearing how in awe they were of Miah Anguis, how absolutely they’d defiled their own religion to follow their new leader. It was for this reason, Arden deduced, they had kept out of the consecrated grounds and had instead taken residence in the more secular storeroom.
She could not spot Mr Cleave among the men allowed out of the weather, but Miah took his comfort as his due, sat glowering at the end of a long table, the bones of a roasted mutton-bird on a plate before him. It was warm in here, and he’d divested himself of his coat and shirt. The crude tattoos on his broad, muscular body seemed hewn in, like violent injuries, scarred over but still showing.
He did not acknowledge Arden’s entry, only pondered upon a thick, smouldering twist of ghostweed he held in one hand. Made her stand for several minutes in the draught while he fought his own mandatum poisoning.
‘I am running out of goodwill, Beacon. Your coming here might have wasted yo
ur time,’ he at last said sulkily.
‘You hardly invited much goodwill to start with. Stefan was innocent in all this.’
He reached out to a candlestick with its stub of flame, and lit the end of his cigar. Puffed on it. ‘He kept you from me.’
‘He did not have the full story.’
Miah sucked in a lungful of ghostweed. ‘Come to offer a trade, hmm?’
‘I know there is yearning in you, Miah. Beyond being King of your people. But you must let Jonah and Stefan go unharmed.’
He gave her a look full of resentment. ‘I have sampled the goods you offer. I found them inadequate. You give me nothing more than any other shore-woman will do.’
The pronouncement was uttered harshly, and afterwards he seemed both exulted and terribly pleased with himself, for fighting his blood’s authority. ‘Besides, I’m getting pleasure enough seeing my cousin punished. Come the morning, he will have been given a thorough education in justice. You may keep the remains. Isn’t that what your heart wanted when you first darkened my door, Beacon? His burial? A deepwater funeral to commend him to the sea?’
A feeling was aroused in her. A rebellious, driven spirit. Miah could lie to himself and to her. But the truth could not be ignored. The mandatum preoccupation burned deep in him, in his eyes, the way his breath came hard as if he were struggling against an insurmountable weight. She knew its terrible source. She knew.
‘Tell your man to leave,’ she said.
Took another draw on the ghostweed cigar, stared fearsomely through the smoke. Flicked a glance at his companion. ‘Leave.’
Miah’s attendant was uncertain and hesitated. Miah waved him off. ‘She wants to offer a trade. She’ll not do anything foolish.’
The darkness licked the walls along with the flame. Miah pushed the chair back from the table.
‘Come here, then,’ he said.
Resentment at his casual command made her pause before she walked to him. His eyes upon her. The snake-carvings behind him moving, almost.
‘What do you want again? I didn’t quite catch it.’
‘Jonah’s life. And Stefan’s.’
Miah gave a forced, cruel laugh. ‘We’ve been here and the answer is no.’
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