Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  That Guild Ball was the last time she saw him. He left before dawn on his packet-ship to Vinland. Arden didn’t arrive in time to catch him, but had caught instead the girl coming out of his apartment, the one wearing Vinland pearl earrings and the rose-gold stag-brooch of the Castile family crest. Perhaps Richard had told her about Arden, for upon seeing a frantic sanguis marching in her direction the girl had blushed ferociously and ran off, dropping the silver-print in the gutter. Arden was about to call after her when she’d seen the face staring up from the cigarette butts and orange peels.

  Richard’s face.

  Thinking of you always – dr.

  The pain had been an assassin’s dagger, slid between her ribs. She had always wanted a picture of him, but Richard had constantly refused. Too risky, he said. If an Order agent found an image of a common-blood man in a sanguis trousseau, then he would be demoted, if not worse. Arden was a Beacon, that oldest and most ancestrally fortified of sanguine genealogies. She would need to wait for Richard to catch up. Until he was a Petty Officer. Flight Lieutenant. Captain. Or the god-damned King of Lyonne, it seemed. Ten years of waiting, with no end in sight.

  She snapped the opal box shut. No. He would never change his mind and she’d not lock the damn krakenskin coat away with her other failures. She would wear it, defiantly and proudly. She shared something with Mr Riven’s wife, after all. She too had been betrayed by someone she loved.

  Arden stood up from the steamer trunk, the photograph still in her hand. Walked woodenly to the fireplace and threw it in. The flame leapt green, the paper crisped black. His eyes, twinkling and knowing. Eyes saying, do what you like, lantern girl. It’s really because of me that you are out here.

  The eyes were the last to burn.

  4

  As was the custom

  As was the custom in the old aristocratic families, she changed clothes for the main meal. Wore a grey linen shirt with no ruffles, a narrow dress that finished in a fishtail at the top of her boots. Bound her hair in severe knots upon her head. She headed down the bare wooden stairs towards the shabby velvets of the Justinian dining room, quite prepared to continue the argument about her new coat. Despite Mrs Sage’s pronouncements and the Dowager’s warning, she was feeling combative.

  Mr Justinian arrived back from his Coastmaster meetings in the languid sort of mood that comes when one has had those meetings in the Black Rosette tavern over seaweed spirit cocktails, and in the presence of somebody generous with their affections.

  He took off his coat – a slate-grey plesiosaur leather he could still ill afford on both a Coastmaster stipend and the dregs of a faded title. He sat at the table with a flourish. Arden huffed an understated disapproval. Mr Justinian knew what he was doing. A war of garments. His coat was an affectation that in Lyonne would have been vulgar, like something a slumlord crime boss would wear to impress the poor tenants. The tanned material had the tough grain of a shark or a ray. Less unfinished versions tended to take away a layer of skin against the poor soul unfortunate enough to brush against it.

  Her fellow guests, a man and his wife from South Lyonne, glanced at the plesiosaur coat and kept their own counsel.

  To pay running costs, the old Manse ran as a guest house for other important merchants and businesspeople who might wish to make profit off the Darkling Sea. Perhaps it did not make as much of a profit as was required, for to save on fuel not every lamp was lit, so instead of bright, cheery galleries, the large rooms became crepuscular, full of shadows and damp. The old tablecloths, laundered to transparency, were held together by little more than browning claret stains. The silverware would have better been called mottled nickel with silver-plate patches, and a century of cigar smoke now blackened the plaster ceiling roses with a dour velvet. In more than one corner, water-rot frayed the plaster walls and caused a drooping of the faded stripe wallpaper. There were not quite enough glasses to fill the display cupboards, and none of the tableware arrangements ever quite made a full set.

  Altogether, a house in decline. The guests, already unsettled by the Baron’s mobster coat, glanced awkwardly at Arden’s fingerless gloves. She rubbed her hands. The bloodletting coins snagged in the oblique arches on the side of her palms. Twanged each time she closed her fist.

  ‘New gloves, Madame?’ the husband asked her quietly when Mr Justinian left the table in search of a better wine than the cloudy vinegar they’d been served.

  He showed her his Guild pin as he spoke, a railroad degree. Though he himself was not gifted with any endowments, the Permanent Way required many sanguis disciplines, from ferrum to pondus and vaporis. A genteel way of telling Arden that even though he was commonblooded he was familiar and sympathetic to her kind. It had been the reason the trade guilds had originated, to unite their labours into one brotherhood, a fraternity of workers despite their wildly different means.

  ‘I’ve had my coins about a month,’ Arden admitted. ‘I’m only now getting used to having them in my skin.’ She recalled the little Guildsman who had watched with a clear, genial gaze as the nervous phlebotomist inserted the tools of her new position into her hands. Mr Lindsay, his name was. He had been a small, delicate fellow in the tweedy suit of a clerk, and wore a golden pin in the shape of a rose. He’d also been the one to bring the orders to her father.

  For the railwayman’s benefit, and because she did not want to treat them as shameful or remarkable, she rolled her gloves up slightly and showed him the silver buttons set between the heart and the head lines. Her skin was still a little tender at the edges, and she suspected would not ever truly heal.

  ‘Why in the hands?’ asked his wife. ‘Isn’t it dreadfully more painful to cut your hands?’

  Arden nodded. ‘I suspect they want us to feel pain. To remind us that power doesn’t come without a cost. Hands … well they are symbolic in a way no other body part is.’

  ‘I could think of one other symbolic body part,’ the wife giggled, before hiccupping wine. Arden saw that in anticipation of another awkward dinner the woman had pre-emptively gotten rather drunk. ‘The body part they always mention in those funny little Deepwater rituals, ha! I had that strange Mrs. Sage tell me all the stories of what goes on among those deviant brutes …’

  The railroad man patted his wife’s hand and took the glass off her, before returning to Arden and attempting conversation again.

  ‘You must miss Clay Portside, Lightmistress. I’ve been there many a times, seen the air-harbours stretch out as far as the eye can see, sanguis zephyrim making the aerostats fly and the pondus who anchor them to the ground. Produce and trade from all over the world, the menagerie of animals, the babel of tongues! Of all those wonders, this place must seem like the colour has been taken from your eyes.’

  She nodded, relieved at the admission. She could have never said such a thing to her hosts. ‘I do miss home. One does whatever the Guild asks. Especially if you’re sanguis, and there’s duty involved.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, as if she had confirmed a suspicion. ‘I wondered why a grown sanguis woman should be getting such protection on her flesh when it’s the preserve of children. Isn’t eleven the most usual age?’

  She gave them both a tight smile. ‘My blood tithings never required much from me before.’ She slid up her dress-sleeve to show the calluses on the back of her arm. ‘A cut here would last the better part of a week, and I had no symbolic act required of me.’

  ‘But now your work requires more blood, I see. Hence the disks to protect your skin from the knife.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Did the Lions follow you here, Mx Beacon?’ he asked.

  A sudden question. His wife pretended to sip her thistledown wine, but Arden could feel her listening on with harp-string tension.

  ‘Lions?’

  In her mind she saw the little Guildsman Mr Lindsay smile. Arden took a swallow of her claret, to buy seconds and still the sudden shake of her hand.

  ‘I don’t quite know what you mean.’

&n
bsp; ‘The Lyonne Order. The Eugenics Society’s attack-dogs.’ With his fingers the railwayman made the sign of teeth. ‘Did they follow you to Fiction?’

  Arden went for her claret again and found she had finished the glass. She knew exactly what he meant. Businessmen in Fiction were not at all keen on coming across Lions of the human kind. She was a sanguis invested late into her profession. Such a thing had the stink of Order activity, their skulking and investigations and sudden disappearances. One would think the powerful Eugenics Society would concern themselves only with policing sanguis folk, but they frequently expanded their purview into the citizenry as well. The guests viewed her with no small suspicion.

  ‘No, was on instruction of the Seamaster’s Guild that I take up position here,’ Arden replied.

  ‘All the way out here? In Fiction, where the blood has faded?’

  ‘Well, the lighthouse is under the navigation chain of the Lyonne sea-road. It’s still a blood light, so it needs a sanguis ignis to maintain the flame.’

  The wife spoke next, and despite her high spirits she was not as generous with her trust. ‘Why not install a petrolactose lamp in that tower? Or a natural gas, which is plentiful here. Why deal with such esoteric chemistries as yours? Whenever there are sanguis, there are always Lions. The blood attracts them.’

  ‘See, it is …’ she drifted off, and paused, for she didn’t know either. ‘I’m sure it’s very mundane,’ she capitulated. ‘Keeping the trade and Guilds of our two countries aligned through the sea-road navigation chain. My family has always maintained the Vigil light. It would be a loss to lose a station from sheer neglect, even an unimportant one.’

  The wife pondered, then visibly relaxed. Arden’s explanation seemed sound. If her posting was just a matter of navigation, then there were no Lions about.

  The husband drained his wine in one gulp.

  ‘Ah then, let us drink to the trade Guilds, the great fraternities of Lyonne.’

  They might have been at ease, but there was already an ill cast to the night. Did the Lions follow you here? The Order worked in the shadows and bore no oversight. They should not be meddling in the mere business of keeping a navigation road safe.

  It’s not for Fire they’ve called you, warned the father in her mind. And Arden shivered, even though the room pressed in oppressively close and far too warm.

  A fourth guest joined them then, a man of middle years and a certain overbearing pomposity. His voice came before him, echoing from the foyer, a complaint about the condition of the roads, the driver who did not give him deference of title.

  Mr Justinian called Arden’s attention as he re-entered, guest in tow.

  ‘Mx Beacon,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to meet Mr Alasdair Harrow, the Postmaster and Magistrate of Vigil.’

  Despite the size of his voice, Mr Harrow was not particularly tall, had fallen into middle-aged stoutness, yet still possessed the domineering characteristics of his youth. The broad, heavy shoulders of a brawler, a pug nose, a cauliflowered ear. She thought his hair was white, but on closer examination in the gloomy light he was a faded blond.

  ‘A shared title, Postmaster and Magistrate?’ Arden inquired as she shook the new guest’s meaty hand. She wondered that Mr Justinian should be so keen as to introduce her to this fellow when he had never presented Arden to anybody else. The day’s excursion to town notwithstanding, Mr Justinian had kept Arden all to himself in the same manner as a dragon might sit jealous upon its hoard. If he could not have her for a night in his bed, then she should be walled up within brickwork isolations of his own making.

  ‘It is difficult to find men suited to all the offices of authority,’ Mr Harrow said in a barking pronouncement, not talking to Arden but rather a central place in the room where a silk arrangement of artificial flowers collected dust. ‘Especially here, in this town. So, I must fulfil my duties by occupying both roles.’

  And drawing a double stipend from the Coast Office, Arden added silently. She gave Mr Harrow a nod and returned to her meal, busied herself in chewing the most inoffensive slice of potted meat, so she would not have to fight for her place in the conversation.

  ‘Miss Beacon here intends to take over the lighthouse operations that old Jorgen abandoned,’ Mr Justinian said, dragging her back in. ‘A request from the Seamaster’s Guild themselves.’

  Caught drinking, Mr Harrow coughed mid-swallow. ‘What’s that you say?’

  ‘Jorgen Beacon. This is his niece, a Beacon scion and sanguis ignis from Clay Portside, sent all the way from our air-harboured capital city to bring some culture to our humble hamlet, and to keep the old promontory flame alive.’

  Mr Harrow stabbed a pink cube of fish. ‘I’d not allow it, if it were up to me.’

  ‘Well, it is not up to you,’ Arden said.

  Mr Harrow did not respond to her. She might have been an empty chair for all that she had spoken. ‘More fools in the world than there are decent ideas, Vernon,’ he grumbled.

  ‘I have my opinions too,’ Mr Justinian said, flicking a look Arden’s way. At least he recognized that they were speaking as if she were not there, though presumably because a woman angry was not a woman who would be amenable later. ‘But the Guild was adamant she fill the position.’

  ‘She’ll be dead within the week, her corpse twice-ravished, mark my words.’ Mr Harrow shoved a grape-melon in his mouth, and the juice ran down his chin. ‘Give her a rifle and make sure she knows how to use it. I’ll not be called out to the promontory to pick up her body like a damned fool.’

  Arden stood with a crash, rattling the tableware. ‘Gentlemen, I can manage my own business. I’ve worked harder docks than this pissant bit of rock!’

  Mr Harrow started laughing, barks of laughter. ‘They served her up for the slaughter Vernon. To the fucking slaughter. Wasn’t for her blood they wanted a woman out there. The Guild pimped her to the monster on the promontory, and Riven will rape her bloody and thank them for it.’

  The house staff came in at that very moment bearing plates of a flavourless broth that would never have been conscionable to serve in Portside, and in the meantime Arden fumed. The gall of these men. The unmitigated dreadfulness of their words.

  A server-girl came by with nothing but cow-eyes for Mr Justinian, and spilled claret on Arden’s sleeve with a smirk. Between her jealousy, Mr Harrow’s gleeful predictions and Mr Justinian’s knavish gloating, Arden was twisted up into a knot of frustration so painful it made her want to scream.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said through a rage-strangled throat. ‘I’m not feeling well. I need to get some air.’

  She fled the crushing mood of the dining room and ran down the murky corridor, finished in what was either a large study or a small ballroom, a gloomy expanse of sapwood parquetry and mildewed corners.

  Past the curtain-rags, a cold moonlight spilled across the polished floor. Arden hauled open the double doors, fell out onto the balcony where the frost clawed her face and her breath steamed. All the menace the night could give was immensely preferable to the atmosphere inside, the terrible delight of men savouring that she be in harm’s way.

  She sucked down salt air until the tremor in her limbs stopped and her breathing slowed. Gooseflesh sprang on her bare arms, and she welcomed that clean discomfort.

  Someone stepped into the room behind her, and imagining it one of the guests who had watched on in deep disquiet at Mr Harrow’s performance she said, ‘I can’t stand it, those uncouth—’

  ‘Then I apologize. It was not my intent to harm.’

  Arden startled. If she had gained a modicum of relief by going outside, the feeling was gone. Mr Justinian stood behind her.

  Had Arden been of a more histrionic nature she might have considered throwing herself off the balcony, only this balcony was at ground level and the act probably lost much of its meaning when one landed safely on the other side.

  ‘Perhaps I’d prefer ravishment by this Mr Riven than being subjected to your snide gossip upon my se
nse and my work. At least he’s honest in his dreadfulness!’

  Mr Justinian huffed. ‘All right then. You’re welcome to him, and him to you, just please come inside. These chills might not seem so much, but they can kill a man.’ He tilted his head towards her. ‘Or a woman.’

  ‘One may be surprised how resilient I am.’

  ‘But I am not quite as cold-blooded as you. Allow me to explain our trespasses inside. Please. Please.’

  Mr Justinian gestured beside him. She shook her head. They were at an impasse. He threw his crumb.

  ‘Postmaster Harrow’s her father.’

  ‘Her?’

  ‘The woman whose coat you now own. Let me explain.’

  Truth be told, the night was infernally cold, and she wanted to know about this Harrow daughter; in the same way hearing of another’s misfortune made one’s own life easier to bear. She stepped into the warmer surrounds of the study and closed the doors behind her. On cue, a servant ran in bearing a jug of tea, deposited the tableware and departed as silkily as a shadow.

  The large, dark study had the air of a mausoleum viewing area, the books in the shelves gone dusty and unread. When she had first attempted to pass the time in this neglected library, most of the tomes were reference manuals of one permutation or another, lists of shipping indexes, dry histories. If there had been any books read for pleasure, they were sequestered elsewhere, or never existed at all.

  Trapped by circumstance, Arden circled a daybed and a chaise longue as big as a small skiff before her attention was caught by a wrinkle of light in the shadows. A gallon-sized specimen jar, containing the formaldehyde-pickled coils of something aquatic and otherworldly – something octopoid somehow. She tapped the glass, experiencing equally the suffocations and convolutions of the poor beast inside.

  ‘My ancestor kept a Wunderkammer before he died. A collection of oddities,’ Mr Justinian said. ‘If you would believe it, a woman gave birth to that thing. Nobody but Great-grandfather Alexander wanted that abomination in here, but we were rather forced to keep it.’