Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  ‘The Rivens have populated these shores for centuries, Arden. The man would have no more left his home than call up a storm and cast the promontory into the sea. No, it has been a mighty war of subtle violence here these past few years. Jorgen succeeded in having Riven drowned once, only to have him haul himself in from the ocean as if he’d made a pact with the devil to return. The man can’t be killed easily. Something in his nature.’

  ‘I did not come here expecting duty as a foot soldier in a war.’

  ‘Nobody ever does.’ Mr Harris pointed at her coat. ‘That coat on your shoulders is weighted with bad news. If he sees you in it, only the sea-devils can tell what he will do.’

  She collected her resolve. A possession of the dead it might be, but the coat was her possession now. Salvaged, the way a shipwreck returned to shore has no owner except the one who reports it. How many times as a signalmistress and lanternkeeper in Portside had she taken up the position others would not, them fearing the dead man who had once rung the shipping bell or worked the signal stick? Accidents were common on the wharves. Every light and buoy had a ghost attached.

  ‘No, I shall keep my coat, and if the maker wants its return, he shall do the gentlemanly thing and ask for it, with an offer of a suitable replacement. I will speak to him face to face, and we shall see if there cannot be some kind of arrangement.’

  Mr Harris exhaled, nodded, knowing better than to challenge a woman whose mind was made up.

  ‘You are your father’s daughter through and through. And your poor late mother, bless her soul and curse the pirates who took her.’

  Once Arden had finished her tour, she shared a lunch with Mr Harris outside the tower. Thick sourdough bread, the hard cheese that travels well, pickles and a runny syrup trying hard to be a chutney. They sat in the ruins of a rowboat that made for a rustic table, an Owl and the Pussycat kind of boat, as her favourite Uncle Nicolai would say. Uncle Nicolai had husbanded the great lighthouse at the Mouth, that mighty entrance to Clay Capital, the golden door to the country of Lyonne. Was to him that she had whispered her dream of keeping not just a signal flame, but the Spire at Clay’s centre, the one her grandmother used to keep in the old days, before Arden had tested late, malorum, and dim.

  No Spire for her then. A wharf-light and the associated administrations of signalling at most, but if a Beacon child might return their family’s honour by winning the Spire post, it would not be Arden who would do it.

  Mr Harris brought out some brown glass bottles containing a yeasty ale. She cast her attention westward, to where the first of the noon clouds had begun to build on the blank slate of the ocean. Fine Breeze sensed the storm before she did. The oncoming currents buffeted the boat against the pier.

  ‘I shall move in tomorrow morning,’ she said at last. ‘There’s no point delaying the handover any longer.’

  ‘Very well. I’ll signal for the Coastmaster’s driver to collect you, first thing. Your lamphouse assistant will be here by then.’

  ‘Male or female?’

  ‘Female. A real stormbride of a lass, did her post out of Harbinger Bay, where the prison ships moor. A real competent sort.’

  Mr Harris stood up and collected the scraps, which he threw to the motley collection of seagulls, auks and white ibis that had gathered to watch them eat. Another gust of wind warned her not to dally, and Mr Harris walked her down the cliff path to Fine Breeze.

  ‘Aye, I enjoyed sharing your first day, Ardie. Those souls out there are yours to keep, now.’

  He pointed at the horizon, then passed over a pair of brass spyglasses from his satchel to Arden. She peered into their eyepieces so as not to embarrass him, for her Beacon-sharp eyes had already seen what lay in the distance.

  A flotilla of boats in the distance, moving in and out of encroaching fog. At least fifteen of them, and their crooked, uneven builds had not a single uniform style. Hulks and wrecks, not fit to work a canal, let alone the open water.

  ‘They’ve bypassed both bays. Where are they going?’

  ‘Sainted Isles lie out there beyond the horizon.’

  ‘The petroleum islands? With the pumps … with the perpetual mechanica?’ She recalled the maps in her father’s Portmaster offices. A broken scatter of atolls and archipelagos surrounding three land masses in the middle of the Darkling Sea. Dashed lines where the cartographer was uncertain of the landscape. They’d seemed so lonely and far away. An exile’s islands, where one went to be forgotten, and to die.

  ‘Yes. Even the perpetual arbours and escapements or the rockblood machines need a conduit of labour to wind the springs. The Isles require hands to work. What better labourers than those folk already displaced by sanguine talents?’

  Arden pretended to look through the brass again so as not to show Mr Harris her uncomfortable face. She’d seen one sanguis pondus replace a dozen longshoremen on a wharf. She’d seen the union riots light up Clay Portside so for a week not one ship left nor entered. ‘Surely they aren’t attempting an ocean journey in those vessels. Those boats don’t look like they could even survive a river crossing.’

  ‘They all of them believe there’s nothing else for them in Lyonne.’

  ‘Goodness, who would put such an idea in their heads? We can’t do everything with blood.’

  Mr Harris stroked his beard with sorrowful dignity. ‘The idea of perpetual rockblood wells and their untapped bounty drives men to flights of madness. In Portside I hear of entire congregations afflicted with the idea … the dream of a place where human labour has real value, not sanguis labour, not machine. But the conduit of hand to work and no mystical power in between. Aye, a disease of greed and wealth grows in the minds of people who’ve previously known neither. Where they once sang hymns of the Holy Land and the One Who Walks the Way, they have now started to plan pilgrimages to the petroleum shores.’

  Arden returned Mr Harris his brass spyglasses. ‘I must not judge. There’s nothing anyone can do about them. Even the Lyonne Parliament cannot stop people from leaving. Free movement is a right enshrined by God.’

  He nodded, put his spyglasses away with the finality of a man who has seen all he requires. ‘Your sanguinity protects you now, Ardie, but this is the truth of it, eventually whatever privations the poorfolk suffer, the rich will suffer as well. And the rich pay sanguinem wages. Your wages. And keep your safety. Whatever cruel siren-song sung on those Islands will not be so easily contained there. Eventually the doctrine must make its way back to the mainland. Aye, coin or no coin, you would be safer at home.’

  The wind kicked up, and they had to move again, else be tumbled from the high ground. Arden took Mr Harris’ stout elbow and tried to put his troublesome words aside.

  ‘You mustn’t fret about my safety,’ she said as they walked. ‘The Guildsman said I’d only have to work the light until the start of winter. They’ll call me back and give me my full degree.’ She raised her hands. ‘I’ll have my coins taken out too, and there will be no leash upon me.’

  He raised his eyebrows. ‘All this before winter? If you leave then, you’ll miss the midwinter crowning of the Deepwater King!’ His excursion into dour prophecy quickly returned to jolly banter. ‘It’s quite a memorable festival, even in Vigil. They barely celebrate anything else.’ Mr Harris grinned then, his eyes alight with mischief. Nudged her elbow. ‘Could make Deepwater Bride for a day … and if you find yourself a suitable husband there’s nothing the Order can do about it.’

  She felt her cheeks grow hot. Goodness, how could she even consider tumbling into the greasy bed of a coarse Fiction man? He would make love like an animal, all grunts and snuffles, paw her bare flesh thoughtlessly, grow aroused and perhaps he would be coarse down there too …

  Then her cheeks burned again, for it had been a year since she’d had such a dalliance after Richard Castile had left her, and she had made a firm vow. No more men, or thoughts of love.

  She let go of Mr Harris’ warm, strong arm and navigated the final rocky stairs down
to the pier by herself.

  Once there, she turned to him and jutted her chin obstinately. ‘It is the ocean I shall love, not men. Besides, I’m not my uncle. I bear no ill-will or history to anyone.’

  Mr Harris flicked a glance towards the old kraken-processing factories and made a disapproving grumble deep in his throat. ‘Arden Beacon, I can tell you’re planning to work some trader’s charisma upon this neighbour of yours, but Riven is more beast than man. The monsters he battles upon the ocean, they are his brethren, not us.’

  ‘I am not going to battle him, Mr Harris,’ she said, untying Fine Breeze’s lashings. ‘I will pay him a visit, like a civilized person. I intend to visit many on this coast by the time the storm season is upon us.’

  ‘He may try and poke you with his harpoon rather than let you onto his property.’

  ‘You cannot make me afraid,’ Arden retorted. ‘If I am to execute my functions as a proper Lightmistress, I must be at peace with all my beloved ocean gives me.’

  ‘Well, you might love the ocean, but a woman with fire in her blood cannot win such love back,’ Mr Harris said. ‘You talk of power? In two centuries no child alive has displayed a blood-alignment for cryptobiological specimens the way the Rivens have constantly done. Aye, even the human race is closing ranks about such a damn travesty of inheritance. He is incompatible with you. He is incompatible with everybody.’

  6

  The tides had a certain

  The tides had a certain personality in the dusk that they did not have during the day. The waters passed that stage where one would call them frolicsome and instead become malicious, and active in wanting harm.

  After an hour of fighting the steadily swelling sea, the Fine Breeze’s bow relievedly turned towards the Vigil pier. Arden would have no trouble in securing mooring, for another boat had just left the small, rickety marina.

  Within minutes she saw the shape entirely, huge and dark, an oil-powered side-paddle wheeler that didn’t float upon the restless water but rather compelled it to submission. The plume of smoke had a curiously luminous blue tinge. Only one kind of oil produced such luminous particulates.

  Kraken oil.

  So then. Her neighbour. She adjusted her sails and continued in a straight line towards the docks. Mr Riven’s giant sea-barge approached Fine Breeze with frightening speed. The bow wave rose on either side with the power of waves breaking against rocks.

  ‘Sir, a sail ship heading into port on this bearing has right of way,’ she muttered to the wind. If one of them didn’t turn soon, they were going to collide. She wouldn’t stand a chance. But the barge kept coming and if it did not turn soon, she would be crushed under the threshing wheels.

  At the last moment Arden wrenched her rudder sideways. Fine Breeze’s sail boom swung around, and had she not had her wits about her, it would have knocked Arden off her feet and into the water.

  ‘Come on, come on!’ She cursed. ‘If you old gods have any power here, give me wind!’ Disturbed, the gusts roiled about her but had little success in filling the sail. And that massive vessel was so close now that she saw the hooded figure in the wheelhouse, resolutely steering his juggernaut onwards.

  The chopping wheels powered closer and closer still until finally the ship bore down upon her wake, missing a collision by less than an arm span. She could have reached over and touched the black boat, so close were they. Fine Breeze keeled over to near-capsize in the great bow wave, the hammering engine so cacophonous in her ears it made her head ring. For an awful moment a name filled her sight. A name scored upon the black side in an unadorned script. Saudade.

  ‘You monster!’ Arden screamed, shaking her fist. ‘You could have killed me!’

  The figure in the wheelhouse did not turn back to see if she was all right. She could be in pieces, drowning, and he would have cared not one whit.

  Finally her boat righted itself, the wind returned in somewhat of a constant direction, and Arden could return to the rude little harbour, shaken up but in one piece.

  ‘How did the boat go, Lightmistress?’ Harbourmistress Modhi called out as soon as she butted into the buoys lining the lone pontoon that made up the marina.

  ‘Fine,’ Arden said, still angry from her near-drowning. In rebellion against her brief imprisonment she had for a little while felt somewhat of a sympathetic warmth towards the mysterious fellow Mr Justinian had spoken so rudely about. She had not wanted the odious Coastmaster to be right.

  ‘Wasn’t an accident, that. He’d have seen you from a mile away.’ Mx Modhi grinned and puffed victoriously on her pipe. ‘I had an inkling he’d take uncomfortably to your get-up.’

  Arden clutched her coat about her with defiance. One thing said for Beacons, they were known for their stubbornness. The ship moves for the signal light, not the other way around.

  ‘I bought this salvage garment fair and square. If Mr Riven wants it back, he can be the gentleman and ask.’

  The pipe smoke surrounded the Harbourmistress in wreaths of grey silk.

  ‘He won’t ask. He’ll just take.’ Her voice rose in timbre. ‘Isn’t that right, David, my boy?’

  A black-haired lad ran from another pontoon pier, all gangly adolescent limbs yet to settle into adulthood, to fasten Fine Breeze on Arden’s behalf. He was perhaps seventeen years old, and Arden noted the marks on the youth’s hands, pale scars from the required testmoots he’d have taken on his eleventh birthday. Fiction children were still tested, despite sanguinity being uncommon in the south. It was not a duty shirked. A ledgered talent popping up out of nowhere could bring a sudden unexpected wealth to a poor family.

  She said her thank-yous to the boy, uttered some words to draw him into a conversation, but he barely met her eye. A fine black down on his upper lip trembled. He hovered in that strange halfway world between child and man He’d be a child far longer yet at this rate under his mother’s shadow.

  ‘Don’t mind my fool son,’ the Harbourmistress said once David scuttled away. ‘He’s just out of sorts because I won’t let him on board that dirty black boat. Doesn’t understand I’m protecting him the way a mother should. Lord knows what perversions that fellow gets up to out there.’

  ‘Oh, is your son friends with Mr Riven?’ Arden asked, tossing her head. ‘I thought him quite the hermit when not trying to run people down in his boat.’

  Mx. Modhi chewed on her pipe for a weighty second before gruffly admitting, ‘Guild stipend won’t cover good tobacco and a proper Lyonnian education for my son. Your neighbour was the only one to give him the time of day. Fisherfolk around here don’t take kindly to anyone who can’t count ten generations wasting away on these shores.’

  ‘I’ll take your word for it, Harbourmistress. I haven’t had much contact with the locals.’

  ‘No, you wouldn’t have, would you? Ensconced with Mr Justinian up in the Manse, I gather.’

  Something in the winking way Mx Modhi spoke made Arden indignant. ‘Only until I get myself ready for my lighthouse duties. And we are not ensconced. Our relationship is purely professional. He is a member of a professional Guild, as am I. He is bound by vow to help me set up.’

  ‘Indeed. These things take time, do they not? And my boy David here, he’s been paid already to ferry Mr Justinian to your doorstep once a week for trysts in case his car won’t make it. He thinks of all possibilities, our Baron.’

  Arden would wonder later why her mouth hurt. At Mx Modhi’s assertion, she had clenched her jaw so hard that bright sparks of pain prickled her cheeks.

  ‘He is Coastmaster, and Mr Justinian has to have his briefings. I would prefer them once a month, myself, but these are unfamiliar waters, and I need supplies brought to me.’

  Harbourmistress Modhi sucked on her pipe, blew more smoke for her airy spirit. ‘If that is the case, then I welcome the correction. Excuse my misunderstandings, there has been more than one lady here who has fancied herself the second Mrs Justinian, and they’ll not take kindly to a stranger whisking his affec
tions away.’

  ‘The second?’ Arden asked, although she would more prefer that she never speak his name again. ‘Nobody spoke of Mr Justinian being married before.’

  ‘Well, nearly married. So far as the priest had not blessed the union in public. They were practically at the altar.’

  ‘What happened to her?’ Arden asked, even though her deep suspicions already told her the answer. Who else could it be, to arouse such a passion in him?

  ‘Goodness, we only just spoke of her before. Miss Bellis Harrow was her name, but she died as Bellis Riven.’

  Evening fell with all the finality of a closing funeral casket. The Manse’s few lights battled the darkness and in the most case failed miserably. Arden retired to the mouldering study, desperate to pass time before the morning, and her final freedom. She had quite expected another argument with Mr Justinian, but the previous day’s clash had made him sulk, and there was no better sulking place than in Garfish Point, a hundred miles north, far and away from Vigil and the duties of his home.

  That didn’t mean he’d taken with him the constant sense of unease that haunted the mansion’s main rooms. The uneasiness worked its way though the corridors like a low fog. From a proud position on the library’s sideboard, the octopus-thing in the glass bell jar gave a subtle shudder, its liquid tomb sensitive to atmosphere, the barometric shifts in air pressure. Arden stopped to peer in close. Not an octopus, perhaps. No mottled hide, or suckers. Just smooth, human-like skin.

  A woman gave birth to that thing.

  ‘Oh, goodness, I’m certain our circus-find will curse you if you look at it too much,’ Dowager Justinian scolded as she came in with a cup of tea. She picked up one of the large napkins and threw it over the jar. ‘I have nightmares of it breaking out and crawling about the house.’

  Startled, Arden stepped away. ‘I wondered if it were indeed true.’ She kept her voice sceptical. ‘That it came from a woman.’