Minutes passed. Longer than a man could survive, even one so attached to the sea.
Arden said his name. Softer now. The wind took her voice away. Stefan’s boat had burned hot, and as the fuel exhausted, it split into two pieces, one half sinking with a smoky sigh of extinguished flame. The other floated as a large fading ember for a long while, caught by a rip in the tide. The half-moon waned overhead.
The waves rolled in, stirring up the plankton in the water, making the breakers glow with disturbed shoals of light. Blood in the air. Something was out there in the dark ocean, bigger than the serpent maris anguis, bigger than the bull kraken of Saudade’s near-capsizing in the storm wall a season ago. The merfolk wailed their terrible song. Arden clutched the silk at her sternum and the very air beleaguered her.
Merrow song loud in the breakers, loud entreaty in throats meant for deep water. Merrow backs heaped with the labour of the unforgiving air, the weight of the atmosphere. Merrows crawling out of the ocean, their crystalline teeth long and sharp, as delicate as fish-bones.
Arden stood up as they came in a clumsy phalanx towards her.
The entourage fell away to reveal a man staggering among them, as ungainly as if he had just been born.
‘Oh Jonah, you’re alive!’
Her exclamation came before she could think it. Before she knew how alive he was.
The merrows retreated and Jonah made his way further up the beach. The man came back to her. Wet, he stumbled up to Arden, and she flung her arms about his chilly neck.
‘How did you survive? You were under for so long.’
His breath in her ear was too fast and agitated for comfort. She pulled away.
‘Jonah, what’s wrong?’
He pointed at his mouth. Opened and shut his jaw.
It came upon her what was wrong. She took his wet head in between her hands. ‘Can you talk? Jonah, your voice …?’
I know his ransoms.
Jonah shook his head. He dragged from his deepest memories the most common hand-sign in a trader city.
Exchange.
Snatched Arden’s hands and pressed them briefly to his eye sockets, and grimaced again.
‘No,’ she said vehemently. ‘Maybe I didn’t see you properly. You did not drown.’
He moved back on his haunches. His expression was not exactly impatient, but would broach no more fussing. Arden stood up.
‘Let’s go back to the chapel grounds,’ she said. Her voice came out tremulous, and unsure. ‘Somewhere warm.’
She led him in silence back up the trail, sensed him behind her but could not bear to look. How many strange stories had she read of lovers led from underworlds, only to disappear at the last minute by an ill-timed glance?
Arden could hear his footstep, yet her feeling was of an absence. A departure. As if with every step he were walking the other way.
At the top of the hill she made her decision, and led him to her sleeping room. The lamps cast golden glows across the darkwood floors.
Once there she turned to face Jonah. He was pale in the lamplight, otherworldly almost, with his skin translucent from chill and the merrow slime still upon him. His expression had changed again. Now it was serene, perhaps slightly curious. Almost … almost as if someone else was behind his eyes.
Alarmed and seeking comfort she raised herself on tiptoes, pressed her lips to his cold ones, and Jonah Riven returned the kiss with the hesitant welcome of a foreigner who knows nothing of such customs.
It was as if she had kissed a stranger.
‘Your eyes …?’
They appeared to have taken on a bioluminescent hue in the dark. She thought to herself that she might be imagining it, for there was still a half-slice of moon left. Plenty of places to catch the light.
Jonah pulled back the blankets at the pallet, and motioned that she should get in, sandy-footed and damp. He did not follow. Instead he sat on the floor cross-legged, became circumspect and distant in the golden light, a frown creasing his brow.
‘Is it even you?’ Arden asked him with a frown. ‘Or are you something else in disguise?’
One of her hands poked out from the blanket, and he took it gently, though her skin had lost all feeling. She opened her mouth to speak, could find no protest.
‘I’m not going anywhere without you, Jonah,’ she said firmly, trying to replace her confusion with certainty. ‘Not until you get better.’
He pressed his mouth upon her hand and she returned with a kiss to his water-dark head.
33
At first light
At first light she dressed in the sturdiest clothes she could find in the priory’s stores, and headed to a small creek near the ruins. Took a deep breath and waved her hands in the muddy water of the riverbank.
Within a minute three leeches were on one hand, four upon the other.
Arden swallowed her disgust and tried to look away for the minutes they stuck to her swollen palms, but after they fell off, she had to admit she felt much better. The swelling at her coins had subsided to a mottle of blue.
She finished her ministrations to find Jonah watching her quizzically from nearby.
‘They’re medicinal,’ she said. ‘I hope. I’ve seen surgeons use leeches in Clay City. I suppose they can’t do much worse.’
Jonah didn’t give the sense of understanding her, or even responding. Since that morning he had been silent and withdrawn. Distant. More than distant. As if a man had gone into the water but something altogether different had come out.
It must be an oxygen injury, Arden thought anxiously to herself. He was underwater too long. That’s why he can’t speak and is so strange. The bridge-builders of Lyonne, the caisson workers who laboured in the pressurized pylon-bases, often suffered similar diseases.
Then he gave a small tilt of his head, so that she might follow. She did so, and ended up at the observation tower at the priory’s western end.
‘Is there something on the water?’
Jonah made no response, only gazed at her with a calm quietude that only made her worry for him more.
Still uncertain, Arden climbed the rickety wooden stairs and fended off several decades’ worth of cobwebs before arriving at the viewing platform. A copper spyglass spun on a fixed gimbal, the lenses long since milky with salt-scoring. The ground crunched underfoot, dried acorns having spilled from a small animal’s cache.
She didn’t need a glass. At once she saw what had made Jonah so worried. A big paddle-wheeled boat anchored in the sheltering bay. Arden grabbed the splintered wood of the balustrade and dug her fingernails in, hard.
Saudade? Was Miah back already?
Jonah joined her on the platform.
‘I’m not sure what boat she is,’ Arden said as calmly as she could. ‘It looks like Saudade, but the colour is wrong. It’s more bronze than black.’
Jonah knelt and picked up some pine cones, before laying three across the tower’s balcony. Three. As if even in the depths of his change he was urging her to remember words he’d told her a long time ago. Three pine cones. Three boats.
It’s Sonder, my grandfather’s missing boat.
The landing craft was a small propeller-dinghy obviously secured from another vessel. A name was written on the side that was certainly not Sonder.
Two men and a woman arrayed themselves haphazardly about the dinghy’s slightly overloaded ballast well. Arden stood upon the dock and suffered a prickly anxiousness as the shorecraft approached. Her heart settled in her mouth. Not the first time her fortunes had turned on such a meeting. Anything could happen. She was firmly placing her chances with the Fates by standing here to greet them, instead of hiding.
Once the dinghy beached itself, the men helped the woman out.
The woman, frowsy in a cabbage-tree hat and a raggedy petroleum-fabric coat, stared aghast at Jonah, then at Arden. Seeing Arden so glossily Lyonnian despite all her trials, in company with a Fiction man who looked more like a bleached whalebone scrimshawed by
a bored sailor, seemed completely beyond the woman’s understanding. She presented them with a most disapproving frown, as if she suspected them of having carnal relations and fornications in quite an ungodly manner.
‘I thought you were searching for your husband, Mrs Castile,’ the woman sniped. ‘Not looking for a replacement.’
It was then that the recollection came thundering back, and Arden let out a cry of surprise.
‘Mrs Cordwain,’ Arden exclaimed. ‘What happened to the Equus pilgrimage?’
One of the men, a stout, short fellow in a waistcoat over a barrel chest, took off his hat. ‘Yes, what did happen? Things never work out as one expects.’
It was not a man that spoke. Arden felt her lower lip quiver as she met the round – and now bearded – face of Chalice Quarry.
‘Would someone religious like Mrs Cordwain approve of a lady wearing a man’s garb?’ Arden said, her chest still a little fluttery from the shock of their reunion, and her eyes swollen from brief but fierce angry-crying. ‘Even a Lion spy.’
‘I managed to convince our Clay City sister that it is safer for her, and me, and all of us, if the golden ratio of gender remains weighted to the male. Besides, I needed a crew for that boat. It’s a floating junker and I’m not much of a sailor.’
Chalice picked the last of the gluey whiskers off her face with a wince, then sat down at the galley table. She reached out across the faded golden wood and cupped Arden’s hands in her own. ‘I worried so much, darling. Walking off into the night like that.’
‘Our paths needed to diverge for a while.’
‘Then I’m glad our paths have come back together.’
Arden rubbed the steam of her breath from the glass of the smeared porthole. A pair of legs passed by, ostensibly Mr Le Shen’s, for the librarian had also found what he was looking for and had joined Chalice for the return journey.
‘Yes, and I’m glad they did.’
‘Well, fortunately you had all the luck of an uncomplicated search for your fellow. God was certainly looking out for His favourites! My darling, even the Court of Gullibles would not believe all the fuss and bother I had to go through! I was quite in a state all week. Look at my skin! Dry as a mummy’s bandage.’
Arden smiled, and not uncharitably. She would allow Chalice her sufferings. Theirs was no competition after all.
Chalice returned with another plate of saurian stew, and a side of soda bread torn from the loaf.
‘I kept some aside. Your monster-caller has the appetite of a horse.’
‘He’s still, um … regaining his strength.’
‘Hmm-hmm. Still as unfriendly as ever though, I couldn’t get him to acknowledge me.’
Arden remembered the night before, the absence of him. ‘He is recovering,’ she said. ‘From an accident. He may be preoccupied.’
Chalice made a sceptical face and returned to her meal.
Over her second helping, Chalice told Arden her side of the story. Mr Absalom had not been able to stay in Burden Town. Aside from his stormcaller, all his crewmates had been lost to the deluge. He had no resources, no friends apart from those who’d known him under the auspices of Bellis Harrow. Of course he would leave post-haste.
But Chalice had refused to go with him. Since she’d done wrong by both Arden and David, her only recourse was to stay in the Abaddon Library and re-ingratiate herself with Mrs Cordwain’s group. See how to make things right. There had been something of a schism among the pilgrims, and Mrs Cordwain had found herself out on her ear with – as the tides of fortune would have it – the entire treasury of silver Djennes collected from the Hillsider congregation.
Together Chalice Quarry and a much-chastened Mrs Cordwain had journeyed to Libro with Mr Le Shen, and met with the locals there, very much in recovery from their terrible time as guests of Maris.
‘I met our young lady from Bellis’ army. The girl in the saffron dress. Wren Halcyon Libro, who Bellis called Persephone? She told me how Mr Riven had helped them escape.’
‘He did escape. But what made you come here and find me?’
‘Well, my good friend Ozymandias Absalom did mention a Church of the Deepwater King. Mr Le Shen is a helpful anthropologist. He suggested that a Fiction man under such a moral debt might pay it at the church of his forefathers, and I seem to recall Mr Riven’s mention of Bellis having been spirited away here, way back when we were chasing the Fine Breeze.’
‘That is clever of him, and cunning of you.’
‘Indeed. Our librarian will make a good Lion,’ Chalice said. ‘I’ll get some recruiter’s medal out of this whole debacle at least.’
‘And the boat. How did you come across Sonder? Everyone said she was lost.’
‘There’s the thing. The Librans had it, and they just gave it to us. As soon as I mentioned I needed to find your monster-calling fellow, they practically showered us with food and supplies they could barely spare themselves. Oh, he’s a hero among them, he certainly is.’
Arden pressed her cheek against the porthole glass. Jonah sat up on Sonder’s prow, seemingly buried in his own preoccupations.
‘Darling,’ Chalice said, and the timbre of her voice changed. ‘You spent several days among the deepwater folk.’
‘I did.’
‘Did you … look, I know it sounds foolish, but I must ask again. Did you really not see another Riven out there? A relative of Jonah’s perhaps?’
‘Oh, are we still going on about that?’
‘Darling, have we not reached some measure of trust? Have I not proved myself enough? I knew you were keeping secrets from me, when you started asking all those questions back in Burden Town. Did I challenge you on them? No, I did not challenge you, even when the secret Riven causes such a stir among the Society and the Order. I left you alone with that secret out of love and respect for you.’
‘All right, there was another,’ Arden admitted, too weary to keep secrets.
Chalice slapped the table. ‘I knew it! But, darling, did you say was?’
Arden shrugged. Anything could have become of Miah once he’d left Stefan’s island. She did not know, and had convinced herself she did not care.
‘It doesn’t matter to us any more, Chalice. He and Mr Lindsay have made their acquaintance now, the Lions have their man. We can at last take our curtain calls and leave the stage.’
The sun settled on her left, the port side, a huge golden disc about to kiss the water. She supposed by dead reckoning, Garfish Point lay to the west, then the firth that separated the two countries of Fiction and Lyonne. Even the seawater had begun to change, from the grey-blue of the Darkling Sea to the cheery trade wind blue-green of the Lyonne Ocean.
Sonder tipped and yawed at the boundary, but she was well made despite her age and her run-down appearance, and they were soon into calmer waters.
Arden touched the scabs at the back of her neck, where the tattoo healed. Maybe she would find a place in Clay to have it removed. That, and the mandatum-set ring on her finger.
At once she sensed Jonah’s approach. Tipped her collar back up.
‘Oh hello,’ she said nervously over the hiss of sea-spray. ‘I wasn’t avoiding you. I just wanted to be outside when we crossed over. On the wharves the shoremen sing songs about this boundary. It’s quite legendary among Lyonnians.’
She hummed a few bars of a sea-shanty, then felt her cheeks flame. He stood a respectful distance away and his jaw seemed carved from stone.
‘Is it such a bad thing, leaving Fiction and the Islands?’ Arden asked.
Jonah said nothing, and his face remained expressionless save for a small, secret curiosity.
‘We will be a hundred miles off shore when we pass Harbinger Bay. Then I will take you home. Clay could be your home too. You needn’t worry.’
If only he could find his voice. If only he would be her lover again.
‘After my coins are removed, we could live in the port,’ she said. ‘The neck between the east and western oceans.
The water will not be far away.’
He took up position alongside Arden, looking out to sea. In the middle distance a pod of ichthyosaur breached the waters, chasing the schooling fish who flashed fire in the setting sun.
A Time For Endings
A time for endings.
Bellis Harrow upon her lonely islet, in a cave like a deepwater maiden. Bellis Harrow who had once been general and Queen, but was now exiled in the fashion of both. Left to die on a rock. Her blood muttering in her veins. Her resolve only strengthened by solitude.
A month here, her food stores running low. Water brackish, and intermittent. Time to consider how one might end it.
But she should not have doubted her darkling gods so.
One morning, a black ship arrived in the half-moon of the islet’s only shelter. A boat she knew from her childhood, and her marriage, built both for the sea and the snarling Sargasso shoals of monsters.
She watched from her stone outcropping as a small boat made its way to the rocky shore. Counted five men, a killing number although only two headed towards her shelter, and left the others on the beach.
She did not expect the first arrival. Her old enemy. He wore welder’s goggles over his eyes, had some discomfort in the broad daylight, and shaded his face until he reached the crude overhang of her lithic abode.
Even after years she still suffered the same lurch of discomfort around him. Her muttering sanguinities sensed wrongness, and there was something very wrong about Miah Anguis-Riven.
‘Jeremiah Riven,’ Bellis said bitterly. ‘Have you come to ravish me upon the rocks? Was always a threat of yours, if I recall.’
‘No,’ he said. Jeremiah Riven pushed the goggles onto his forehead and examined her stone apartments. His eyes had something ill about them. The pupils reflected, like a night-dwelling thing.
Bellis kept watch on her visitor, wondered if he might be considering a crude assault upon her, some tiresome act of revenge for a childhood slight.
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