‘Pity your small combinations of minor chemical talents didn’t end up with fire-lighting,’ Arden said as she joined Chalice.
‘Pity sanguis ignis coldfire gives no heat, likewise,’ Chalice grumped. ‘How did you fare in the night, before I took over?’
‘Quietly. There were ships out there, but they never came close.’
‘The same with my watch. The season is still young. Besides, you sleep well.’ Chalice grinned wickedly at Arden. ‘Some moaning and groaning and calling of a man’s name. I hope yours was a good dream.’
Arden felt herself blushing furiously. ‘I did not!’
‘Maybe only a little whimper, but you were certainly stoking a mightier fire than this one.’
Her mortification must have been so great that Chalice took pity upon her and gave her knee a playful shove. ‘Ease up, Lightmistress, you’re hardly the first I’ve seen to lose their decorum when sleep comes. The air here is bracing, and the sea has the most gloomy of qualities. I know what it is like for a sanguinem, held so rigidly to task in protecting those precious genes of yours.’
‘What about you, Chalice Quarry, huh? You and your latencies.’
‘Huh indeed, I stick with lovers of a female persuasion and all is well.’ She grinned at Arden, and then the fire gave a little skip, finally lighting the pine-cones. Chalice hurriedly threw on some kindling, and at last they had something worthy of a blaze.
Chalice put the kettle on the embers and turned back to Arden. ‘What was his name, this man who drove you to remember him so all of a sudden?’
Arden could not have been more solemn if she had been a priest giving last rites. ‘Richard Castile. A Frislander. Airship pilot in training. We were going to elope together. Then my talent came in late, almost to the day of our planned escape. After that, well. He didn’t quite seem so keen any more.’
‘Ah,’ Chalice said. ‘Farewell is such a sorrow.’
Arden sat on the damp log and rubbed warmth into her shins. ‘I wish he had said farewell that day. He kept on orbiting like a rather uncommitted comet.’
‘Taunted you with promises, did he? Swore to work towards some great application to the Society for you to marry a common-blooded man like him, but not yet? Wait, wait, wait, for the right time which never came?’
Arden stared, open-mouthed. ‘How did you know?’
‘Oh, you think you’re the first? As soon as you said airship, I completely deduced what kind of philanderer he was.’
Somewhere in the smoke the flame that was desperately trying to keep hold, faded. A rain shower threatened, fat blobs of chilled water on her cheek. Arden stood to collect more dried tinder, tried to help the fire along with kindling that wasn’t already sopping wet. An excuse, she decided, to talk no more about Mr Castile.
‘Didn’t my uncle perceive of a kitchen?’ she scolded, desperate not to think of him, and irritated by the fact she needed to kneel in the rain just to have a meal going. ‘Why is everything so relentlessly difficult?’
Her carefully constructed personality of staunchness broke down and Arden wept into her hands. Not for Richard, for she had cried those tears a year ago, or even that she was cold and sore. It was a cathartic, miserable and ugly cry, as selfish as a rich woman who has to wear a lesser golden brooch upon her breast for a party, when people outside are starving for bread.
Chalice hugged her shoulders and rubbed her back.
‘There you go, dear, let it out. It’s not the plesiosaur child weighing on your mind, is it? Because nature is red in tooth and claw.’
‘It’s not the pup. Or maybe it is. I don’t know. I shouldn’t have come here,’ Arden said in between gasps and swallows. ‘Here, this town, this place. I don’t know what came over me to come.’
‘But wasn’t your post voluntary?’ Chalice handed Arden the linen cloth she had been using to handle the hot kettle. The teacloth was damp from rain, and grubby from ash, but better than wiping her nose on her sleeve. ‘The Guild never forces people to go anywhere too far from Clay City, even the sanguineous.’
Arden desperately wanted to tell Chalice about Mr Lindsay and her father’s suspicions that the Guildsman clerk had really been a messenger of the Lyonne Order, then remembered how frightened the Manse’s guests had been, her father, the phlebotomist that put in her coins. Even Richard Castile. All fearing the Lions. She liked her assistant too much to make the rest of their assignment a worrisome chore.
‘The Seamasters offered me a full Guild degree if I came here until the start of winter. Such a title would be almost impossible to come by working a mere blood-lantern, and I’d never be permitted an independent navigation post without one.’ She looked at her dirty, tear-stained napkin. ‘I’m tired of being scared.’
Chalice kissed her on the cheek. ‘Buck up, love. I was myself weepy when I first came to this place. The isolation, you see. The way the waters just never let the fog go. There’s ghosts in the ruins, and the sadness has soaked right through.’
‘And Mr Riven down there, the beast that might one day break his chain.’
‘Yes, him too. Now, if we can keep this real fire going, perhaps after eating we can pry through your late uncle’s garbage pile. I’m sure I saw a pot-belly stove in that mess. Something remotely salvageable.’
For all the crude surrounds, Chalice managed to get a pot of porridge upon the boil, sweetened with wild honey. After Arden ate, the burden of an interrupted life lightened a little. Only a few months to go before freedom, and then the autumn testmoot, and if God and the Old Guy should both allow it by granting some sullen coastal child blood-talent, then she could go home sooner and not have to mourn being the last flame-keeper to hold this old tower’s post.
The sea hissed and shushed at her mood, and the wind whispered about the lighthouse spire, and slowly she began to feel a little better. Arden reminded herself once again, and this time sternly, that it had been her childhood dream to work a lighthouse signal. So it wasn’t exactly the Clay City Spire, but this was still the tallest signal in the country, which had to count for something.
True to Chalice’s words, their inspection of the old lantern gears discarded behind the outhouse uncovered a rusted stove, of which its only failing was a firebox door missing a hinge. Arden repurposed some barrel hoops that would do as a gusset about the stove’s belly until they could employ the services of a proper blacksmith.
They had just finished setting up the stove inside the tower, with a chimney spout through a window stopped with rags, when a distant squawk of a car horn sounded.
Arden wiped her hands on a rag. ‘That not Mr Quill’s automobile. The rockblood makes the engine clatter.’
The two women stepped outside. Arden’s assessment was correct. It was not the Justinian Siegfried. Instead, a large black sedan that had seen better days nosed its way through the rough roads. An older-model Maybach of the kind popular in Lyonne when she was a girl, with an electrical engine that made it slink in a predatory and dangerous silence. Arden felt her hands prickle with anxiety. If strange vehicles were making their way out to the tower, it was not due to fine tidings.
The Maybach braked suddenly, its wheels leaving dark gouges in the white quartz crust. A short Fictish man in a grey damask waistcoat and a bowler hat exited the driver’s seat.
Could there have been anyone less welcome at her door than Mr Justinian? Yesterday she would have said no, having erased the unpleasantness of Alasdair Harrow from her mind the way a body pushes out a splinter. Today however, Mr Justinian seemed as benign as a summer shower compared to the stormy presence of her visitor.
Chalice whispered out of the side of her mouth. ‘What does the Postmaster Magistrate want with you?’
‘It can’t be good,’ Arden whispered back. ‘I had a dreadful dinner with him three nights ago. Best get this over with.’
Postmaster Harrow came with three others of similar pale ethnicity, two large strapping youths with ruddy pink cheeks and full yellow beards, and one s
ea-bitten fellow who had obviously been on the losing side of a fight.
‘Mr Harrow,’ she said with assumed brightness. ‘What brings you here?’
Mr Harrow did not at first return Arden’s greeting. He cast his judgmental gaze over the lighthouse, and his lips thinned over his gravestone teeth.
‘Um, can I help you? Is this Postmaster business, sir?’
‘I am Magistrate Harrow today,’ he said brusquely, then grunted towards his two deputies, made them walk off around the tower grounds to scout the area. Only the sea-bitten fellow that they had brought with them remained, scowling under his drooping canvas fisherman’s hat. The cant of the brim did not quite hide a purple bruise on the side of his face as big as a birthmark. Alone among them, he acknowledged Arden and Chalice with the briefest of nods.
Chalice ran after one of the large lads, scolding them for kicking over the porridge pot. Arden stayed before the door, ready to not permit entry if they tried to come in.
Fortunately they merely did a cursory if destructive patrol of the outer grounds, before returning to slouch by the electric Maybach, and smoke a sour-smelling tobacco.
Mr Harrow returned last, one of Jorgen Beacon’s blood-knives in his fist.
‘Yours, I presume.’
Arden took the knife back. ‘Thank you,’ she said grudgingly. ‘I meant to throw it out, though. This tool has reached the end of its life.’
‘Still, not a good thing to leave lying around outside. Not in your circumstances.’
‘My circumstances were fine, up until now. Whatever is your reason for coming here?’
She may have spoken to the wind. He took off his spectacles, polished them with a cloth, then did the same to a pewter star upon his breast pocket.
‘I note you have settled in well to your new abode,’ Mr Harrow said. ‘Not so secure, but some people have different requirements when it comes to that.’
‘If you needed to do an inspection, you could have asked me for an appointment rather than barging on in.’
He put his spectacles back on his face. ‘My apologies, Lightmistress, but there were chances you were already being held hostage, maybe dead.’
‘Excuse me?’ Chalice interjected, returning from righting the mess the deputies had made. ‘Who’s saying we were dead?’
Mr Harrow did not immediately recognize Chalice as a person different from any other Vigil woman in his orbit. What was one more in coastal drab? He was the sort of man that decided all women invisible, and then became startled by their speaking, as if a ghost had rapped on a spiritualist’s table in the middle of dinner.
‘I am Alasdair Harrow, the Postmaster and Magistrate of Vigil. You two ladies are adjacent to my investigation of a violent act and attempted murder that happened yesterday. Thank you for speaking with me.’
He came forward and shook Arden’s hand. A damp and indifferent grip. Were you a good father to Bellis Riven? She envisioned asking, before a deeper caution warned her to silence.
‘Then sir, if this is an investigation, how may we help you?’
He stood aside. ‘These fellows are Giles and Pieter Haas, brothers and peacekeeping deputies of mine.’
The two lads moved almost imperceptibly but obviously, so that their oil coats parted to reveal the long-guns they carried.
‘We have come with Captain-Guide Mr Georges Cormack, who as you can see had a crime committed against him and his clients.’
‘A crime, sir?’
Mr Harrow paused briefly, noting that Arden had refused to use his title yet, before he continued, ‘I am investigating a theft and an assault, as a Marshal of Vigil and the Eastern Fictish Coast.’ He puffed himself up, a bantam cock certain that investigating the concerns of sea dogs in far-flung coastal hamlets were equivalent to a Clay High Court.
‘My livelihood,’ Captain Georges Cormack barked. ‘My client refuses to pay since he din’ get what he wanted. I am out almost five hundred guineas! Real Djenne Bank currency, not that rubbish Lyonne rag-paper. A year’s wages worth to a man here!’
‘I don’t quite understand how I am involved …’ Arden started, before Mr Harrow held up his hands.
‘As a witness, my dear Lightmistress, a witness.’
Chalice jumped in. ‘We didn’t see anything.’
‘But I understand you have been to visit your neighbour,’ Mr Harrow said. His face twisted as he enunciated the word. He could not bear to say Mr Riven’s name. ‘Mr Justinian’s driver told me you went to converse with him at an opportune time yesterday, perhaps observed something that could assist in my inquiry.’
‘But into what, exactly, sir? You haven’t yet explained why you’ve turned up here.’
‘Like I said, grievous assault and a theft. Details would only worry you, but what did you see of him when you visited him in his compound?’
Something about the four men and their half-explanations aggrieved Arden in a way that made her hackles rise. She had experienced much the same behaviour in merchants at the docks pushing her to let a ship laden with contraband through a backwater lock when they knew she could not allow them. Oh, they would not specifically say there were illegal wares aboard, but they would give the same sly half-answers to her questions.
‘I saw many things in the Riven compound. But if you can narrow down your request to a specific thing, then I can say yay or nay. Otherwise, we had a deal, Mr Riven and I, to stay out of each other’s business. I cannot help you Mr Harrow and you are wasting my valuable time.’
She went to move off, when Captain Cormack shouted out, ‘A hunter’s longboat and a plesiosaur corpse.’
‘Plesiosaur?’
She exchanged a glance with Chalice, who bit her lower lip and kissed her Guild assistant triangle nervously.
‘Hush,’ Mr Harrow said, but the Captain had his dander up now and snapped, ‘I will not hush! A longboat that wretched bastard stole from me, after he dashed a rich man called Mr Landwin into the water with an oar, assaulted another with his fists. Rich men, blood-bound men from Morningvale, who had paid me good money to hunt plesiosaur!’
‘But why hunt here? These are breeding grounds, sir. There is no licence to hunt gravid females south of Garfish Point.’
All four men swayed in an uneasy quorum. Now they would have to tell the truth. Was not adult males the Captain’s clients had been hunting.
‘I issued them a local dispensation,’ Mr Harrow said. ‘To do some limited winnowing for the good of the species.’
‘Mr Harrow, you of all people should know it is an Act of Parliament that the breeding females not be touched,’ Arden said. ‘A local Magistrate cannot grant such things.’
Georges Cormack came close, and he smelled of fish oil and old tallow. ‘Then you saw it? Saw the bounty that my clients paid me good money to procure?’
He turned back to Mr Harrow. ‘Sir Magistrate, the bastard twice interfered with us and let the quarry flee. We shot him out of his ship with a stunning cannon. A face-full of cotton ballast he took, and fell straight into the water as good as dead. A godly man would have been killed instantly. The thug rose out of the waves as the devilspawn he is and pursued us for a night. An entire night. He boarded just as we cut out the pup from the plesiosaur bitch.’
‘You cut out a foetus,’ Arden said. ‘You …’
‘T’was not a foetus. It wriggled and cried, fresh enough that we could skin the caul from it’s face and have it take a breath. A thousand gold coins that runt’s skin was worth to them and to me, and a thousand more for the egg case!’
Mr Harrow caught the Captain’s arm before he could advance more on Arden. ‘Easy now, friend. We will get your property back. Plesiosaur veal does not degrade so quickly as beef-meat.’
The Captain continued in a frenzy now, his grievances storming about him. ‘And then he assaulted us again, a madman possessed by all the devils of the deep, beat this bruise upon my face and broke the arm of Mr Landwin who wants compensation for his lost property!’
Arden felt a tightness in her chest that made it hard to breathe. Hunting and fishing was a way of life on the sea, that was true, but there were laws and morals attached to procuring bounty from the ocean. This Captain had allowed a barbarism to occur on his watch, and worse than that, had people pay him for the privilege.
‘I am sorry, but I cannot help you.’ Her voice came out in a rasp, her tongue felt like an iron filing, her throat sand. Her fists clenched to think of the little beast squirming and crying on the bloodied deck of the longboat, a dead mother nearby. At least with Mr Riven there had been a sense of a lone sailor hunting for sustenance, but these men had done so for sport. Why, if she were certain her punch carried the weight required, she would have struck the Captain herself.
‘Lightmistress, you can tell us what you saw. Give your testimony to me in my capacity as Magistrate and it will go no further,’ Mr Harrow said.
If he had promised this Captain a quick fix to his complaint, Mr Harrow was about to find out that he was not the only authority on this coast. Arden set her jaw and shook her head. ‘If you have an issue with Mr Riven, then take it up with him.’
‘He has assaulted men. The plesiosaur cow was dead already, he had no cause. Is that not enough of a reason for you to assist us in his arrest and prosecution?’
‘Go home, all of you. Go home and school yourself on moral equivalence,’ she said. She shook now, sick to her stomach with the sheer effort of keeping a calm countenance. ‘Away with you.’
Mr Harrow’s face grew as red as a fresh-harvested beet. ‘This is not the end of it, Miss Beacon. You do yourself no favours helping that nephilim over yonder.’
‘If he is a fallen man, then your complainants are doubly fallen. A beast has nobody to speak for them. Good day, sirs.’
Muttering to themselves, three climbed back into the Maybach. Only Mr Harrow remained, bloodless as a ghoul.
‘Your safety is dependent on us, you know this? You won’t be the first woman to disappear from this coast because of him.’
Monstrous Heart Page 11