‘You use your dead daughter as part of a threat to my life?’
His nostrils flared. ‘I use her as everything, for she meant everything to me before she was taken, raped and discarded.’
Would be a wretched life, she thought, as the sole orient of existence for this man. To be on a pedestal was much the same as a prison.
She remained at the transom of her lighthouse, refusing entry and Mr Harrow returned to the sedan with failure naked on him as a burn, spun the vulcanized rubber wheels in the soft road, and left angry gouges behind.
The waves fretted along the promontory. The gulls screamed at each other.
‘Sea slime,’ Chalice said. ‘Miscreants.’ She pursed her lips. ‘That Captain Cormack. Heard a few stories about him, oh yes. On the off-seasons when there are no wealthy game hunters for him to escort, he ferries poor, unlicensed folk to the Sainted Isles. If there is not enough room on the boat, or if he runs into trouble, he is known to dump his motley cargo into the ocean. Entire families, murdered by drowning.’
‘I’m not at all upset about Mr Harrow,’ Arden said as gamely as she could, given that her hands were still trembling. ‘They’ll not be the first and last men to threaten me.’ A strange concern made her nod towards the factory sheds in the fog. ‘Do you think they’ll go to Mr Riven’s now?’
‘No, you could tell they were too scared. Mr Harrow would have to request the Morningvale judge to intervene on a visit, and she won’t send anyone here unless they could provide a clear reason for it.’
‘Such as the testimony of a former Clay Portside Lightmistress.’
‘Exactly. If Mr Harrow were to ask for vexatious help too often, then the Lyonne courts might decide the region cannot manage its own affairs. Both Magistrate and Coastmaster could lose their positions.’
With that, Chalice headed off to the ratcheting log-splitter, a contraption that resembled a torture device from the oldest times.
Arden hurried after Chalice. ‘Go on. Tell me. I’m an idiot.’
‘What are you on about, Arden Beacon? If you’re coming to that conclusion now, you are quite behind the times.’ Chalice hefted a log into the cradle and pumped the handle with the enthusiasm of winching a garrotte.
‘I was completely wrong about what I saw in the compound. I jumped to all the wrong conclusions. Mr Riven hadn’t killed the plesiosaur pup. He had rescued the animal from Cormack and his hunters, and I had … in my rush to agree with everyone … failed to entertain that possibility!’
Chalice only gave a snort at Arden’s crisis. ‘Just because Mr Cormack is a devil, it does not make Mr Riven a saint. I have known many a bad man to show kindness to animals. It is something of a perversion that they appreciate a beast for keeping its place in the scheme of things, that is, lower than low.’
‘Yet, the other way is just as true. If you have no compassion for animals, hard to extend it to humankind.’
‘Then consider this,’ Chalice said, giving the splitter a few final hefts. ‘It takes two boats to hunt plesiosaur comfortably. Far better for a lone rogue to attack a couple of milksop dandies in the company of an old man than single-handedly attempt a giant beast about to whelp. Our neighbour wasn’t being compassionate. He was being expedient.’
She turned away from Arden and with a sharp kick, the log was torn asunder.
10
Mr Harrow
Mr Harrow did not return. If he’d found any other proof of the crime he had accused his former son-in-law of, the balance could not have been enough to send his men to arrest Mr Riven. Arden worried for her mail, her tenuous links with her family. It would not be unheard of for a malicious Postmaster to withhold her correspondences.
But the letters from her former life still came, albeit with some crinkled evidence of steaming and re-gluing. A riotous scrawl from her Uncle Nicolai, speaking of lighthouse matters as if she were an equal to him in his great tower at the Mouth. Her father’s careful penmanship, reviews of some books he had read and promised would send in the next post. Well wishes from step-mother Nina, and her step-sister Sirena, and her half-brother Odie, who was sanguis ferro – his blood trammelled iron – and whose labour contract had been won at auction by Clay’s largest steel-works. He quoted a tremendous sum. Arden wrote back to him cautioning that he see a financial adviser at once.
More postcards arrived from desert countries, where the sand moved like a river, and the men wore blue robes. An engagement announcement from a close friend who’d made full Guild on her eleventh birthday, and another letter mourning the end of a brief affair.
Arden read them all with detachment. For all that her name was on the envelopes, they were missives meant for another person. A Guildswoman with her own posting, one obtained honourably.
On the second week, a message came from Mx Modhi across the harbour. The Coastmaster had been called away on business for at least a month. It would be her son David who would bring supplies.
Arden greeted that particular news with relief. Since the dream of Mr Castile, she had agonized over meeting up with the young Baron and his whispered offers. Fretted that she might cast aside her good nature and say yes. The nights had been strange to her, aloft in the sea-facing tower while the clockwork motor ground out its constant refrain of escapement and arbour. The wild messenger pigeons in the dome, cousins to the ones Chalice kept in a roost behind the lighthouse to run the daily observations, cooed to each other in the darkness, an avian language, full of augury. The ocean breathed and retreated. The nights held Arden captive, overwhelmed her with a physical hunger of missing – something.
But what? Not the blind fumbling of intercourse surely, for she’d experienced enough to know it would only lead to sadness and emptiness upon the sunrise. But something. An experience deep and meaningful, an equivalent revelation about another human being.
The days passed quicker than she could mark them, for an instinct lived within Arden to find joy and purpose in things she could rely on, and in her work. The rising of the sun, the clock-chime advising the keeping of records, the morning and afternoon flash of mirrors to Mx Modhi signifying that all was well. In the afternoons a lich-ship might grind towards the horizon, and in the morning another would return. She logged them studiously in the journal, along with the records of flotillas, single boats, patchworked barges, all heading in one direction and these ones never returning.
Over those first days of her seasoning, she emptied the last of the old furniture and rubbish from the house’s interior. On Chalice’s first return to Vigil, she came back with buckets of whitewash paint, and for a while they slept in the upper convolutions of the tower with every window open, just to escape from the drying paint-fumes below.
Chalice made good company during her waking hours. She collected many stories of her time in Shinlock a mining town not so different from Vigil, where the fibrous asbestos from the mines would turn the air smoky-blue, and the men chewed kraken-beak pills so as not to get tumours in their lungs, though sometimes unscrupulous doctors sold squid beak instead, and they died anyway.
She gossiped too, about her Harbinger Bay assignment with the sanguinem Lightkeeper Stephen Pharos, of the rotting ships lashed together to make the floating prisons in the small bay, for the laws on the sea were different from on land, and a man could be disappeared into the prison hulks without legal recourse or trial. A prisoner had escaped once, found shelter in the lighthouse. Chalice had cared for him three days, until he had died of his injuries. He had not said much, Chalice recalled, but his ruined eyes and terrified silence spoke volumes.
In the afternoons, when Chalice slept and took her stories with her, Arden subsumed herself into her hermit’s life. In between blood-letting and record-keeping she walked through the missionary ruins and down to the rocky shore. Occasionally she saw a plesiosaur pod rise their necks, swan-like, above the waves, and once found a sea-cow sunning itself on the pebbles, all glistening bulk with a sharkskin hide. Each rhomboid flipper was the size o
f Arden’s torso.
Arden dared not come any closer, but the saurian was not at all comfortable with the added human presence, and humped back into the wave-wash with agitated hissing.
Near the sea-caves she disturbed trilobites and anemones in the rockpools. Fossicked small relics clearly discarded from the older settlements, small icons of religious protection. A pottery kraken missing most of its glazed arms. A small tooth of nephrite jade. Her favourite was a blanket-ring featuring a tiny cast iron man straddling a coiled maris anguis – a giant sea-serpent.
‘That’s the Deepwater King,’ David Modhi would tell her later, when she showed him her find upon his weekly visits to the lighthouse.
The young man rubbed the crust of red oxide from the small figure’s face and gazed at it. ‘The King lives in a cathedral under the ocean, and all men who drown must serve Him.’
‘He must be a fierce regent, if he rides a serpent like a horse.’ she quipped, keeping the tone light, for she knew belief systems were inscribed deep upon Fiction hearts, and the Harbourmistress’ son might take offence to mocking.
‘Oh no, He’s killing the serpent here, see? Bringing the meat to feed those people who keep His laws. It is His gift for those who believe and still follow His ways. He won’t ever let them starve or go hungry …’
‘Does your mother know you’re familiar with such legends, young David?’
He blushed, and shook his head.
‘I won’t tell her,’ she said. ‘It can be our secret.’
David Modhi smiled, before gazing at the ring fondly. ‘This will bring you luck. It reminds me of Mr Riven, don’t you think?’
She smiled with kindness, for love and worship tangled painfully in the young. ‘I wouldn’t know Mr Riven well enough to say.’ She paused and then said, ‘Would you like to have it?’ She offered the blanket-ring to him.
He shook his head again. ‘The King made you find his image, so it’s yours to keep Lightmistress.’
The youth looked over her other finds, then picked up the legless ceramic kraken. ‘And this is the King’s enemy, the Old Emperor, whom He must battle on the Last Day. The sea belongs to the Deepwater King. Everything upon the shore and under the waves.’
He leaned in close as if whispering a secret.
‘And in the midwinter He takes a wife.’
‘Goodness,’ Arden said, laughing. ‘That’s quite a thing to say.’
‘It’s true,’ he said flaming with offence. ‘He’s given you his ring, Lightmistress. He’s seen your face.’
11
Mr Quill’s car
Mr Quill’s car chattered out of a fog bank the same way the devil might greet lost travellers, appearing from nowhere while trailing malice and shady agreements. The Siegfried’s patched-up wheels churned through the thin, sandy slip of soil that made for the lighthouse road. The skids from Mr Harrow’s arrival in the month before still scarred the top layer of stones.
Arden, in the challenging middle portion of throwing a seldom-laundered bedsheet up over a rusted washing line her uncle had probably never used, watched the car’s arrival with all the sinking dread of a condemned criminal. Well, so much for her peace. Reality had arrived over the walls of her austere garden.
She raised her hand in greeting to Mr Quill, who did not leave his seat. Instead the rear door of the car opened, and a pinstriped trouser leg emerged, shining shoes, that spotted plesiosaur leather coat.
‘Mr Justinian? I thought you were away on business until next week. I’d have made an effort otherwise.’ She pointed at the sheet with arms as raw as pork skin in an icebox.
‘I cut it short, after news came to me.’
‘What news?’
‘I was concerned for your safety,’ he said. ‘You left without saying farewell, and Mr Quill said you did something rather rash a few weeks ago when he first took you here.’
‘I can’t quite—’
‘Of course, he neglected to tell me all this, so he’ll get his pay-packet lightened.’
Arden sighed and looked in sympathy at Mr Quill, cowering behind the steering wheel. ‘Coastmaster, please don’t blame him. We were quite safe. As for yourself, you were in no fair condition that day. I needed to act in haste, to save my uncle’s light.’
Mr Justinian dropped his pleasant-face for a brief moment. ‘Those Garfish Point ingrates should tackle that particular blame. Will cheat a man out of honest money and sell contaminated liquor to boot.’
She returned as much of a smile as she could without it being forced. ‘See? Mr Quill did excellent work. He must be rewarded, as an example, otherwise your staff might lose their sense of pride.’
‘Hmm,’ Mr Justinian said, unable to figure if he was being manipulated or her request genuine. In the afternoon light Mr Justinian stepped towards Arden. She had to admit his dress was impeccable. He wore an expensive cologne, touches of gold upon his eyelids, carmine on his lips. Handsome in any part of the world, and here among the ‘lumpen inbreds’, as he so dismissively called his Fiction counterparts, beautiful.
The only man of any worth available to her, if she were to choose that path.
‘Anyhow, where is your Miss Quarry? I thought your stormbride should be out doing the hard domestic work, not a Lightmistress.’ He sniffed disapprovingly at the flapping sheets.
‘She has taken the boat into Vigil,’ Arden said. ‘She must deliver the tide observations to the Postmaster.’
‘Why do you not do it yourself? I seem to recall you had a desire to meet the good people of our town.’
She shrugged, and pushed a damp tendril of hair from her brow. ‘I like it out here. I can see why the missionaries chose to build their first church upon this site.’
‘For all the good it did. The loneliness killed them, in the end.’
‘Yes,’ she said, then berated herself for agreeing with him.
Mr Justinian blinked, not missing that tenuous connection. ‘Have you felt it, Lightmistress, the noonday demon? What the climate of the Darkling Sea does to those newcomers unused to our great melancholy sink?’
He took another step closer, and the heat from the Siegfried’s internal heaters still radiated off him.
With an inward sigh, Arden suspected that Mr Justinian might not have gone away on business at all, and waited for the isolation to do its work. He would know her alone with only the waves and wind. Her defences could be breached now.
‘I dare say one could get used to it. Under the right conditions.’
‘There were no right conditions. Those missionaries, they were constantly at war, my dear. With the old religions who worshipped the kraken and the spawning monsters of our coast and the abominable King in his abyss. Built their first church they might have done, but they could not stay. More than one massacre has left behind a choir-load of bones.’
She shivered, not from cold. Ghosts perhaps. His closeness, so unwanted, but piquing her memory. Coldfire in her blood, but still, her needs had always burned hot.
He saw the shiver, and her response pleased him.
‘Go on then. Clean yourself up. We shall go for a walk, you and I. A sortie of your assigned portions. I shall tell you more history, if you wish.’
Arden searched for excuses, found none. Why should a Lightmistress not patrol grounds that a Coastmaster controlled?
And walks tended to turn into much more.
‘I’ll meet you out here,’ Arden said brusquely. ‘I won’t be long.’
She closed the driftwood door and leaned hard against it. This had to be a test, surely. What would she endure for that full Guild degree? She had invited Mr Justinian to her lighthouse, and he would be unlikely to leave without his pound of flesh. Arden knew his kind. Too much refusal would make an enemy out of him. Trapped in a cage of possible disasters, Arden lingered over Bellis Riven’s krakenskin by her bed, the blue eye-marks bright in the dim light.
‘Why not just once, scratch the itch, get it over and done with? It’s not like he’s
the kind that makes a habit of it,’ she said to the empty room. Squeezed her fists until her coins hurt. He had dressed well, at least. It would not be distasteful.
In Lyonne, Arden’s position and her family protected her. Here, she would need to put all the morals of the North aside. Why not spend a few uncomfortable minutes with Mr Justinian and consider her duty done? The act would put a firm boundary between the woman who used to believe in love, and the one who saw it only as expedience. She would be gone before the winter and he would be forgotten.
As she had promised, Arden changed quickly. At the last minute she decided to forgo her utilitarian cotton undergarments for a particular gold silk lingerie set purchased from an old traveller-folk merchant back in the days of Richard Castile. Maybe they would make her think romantic and sensual thoughts, yes? She still remembered the old woman’s shrewd sales pitch. An old magic in these gold threads. Wear this before your beloved and he will be overwhelmed with desire.
Not that they worked, for she’d had no chance to disrobe in front of Richard when she last wore them. The garments had most likely been fenced from a pirate haul, and were possibly not altogether made of sea-silk either. Yet for the story the old woman wove Arden had bought an overpriced courtesan’s corset, cut far too low about the neck and boned such that her upper half would be forever in danger of falling out.
Such an ignominy to waste their prettiness on Mr Justinian. Quite the opposite of the krakenskin coat, which bore such a disagreeable tale. What better way to discard a memory that had also become disagreeable?
Her best dress was a blue broadcloth, warm enough against the wind but not too dowdy. She fixed her hair and stained her lips with crimson.
Mr Justinian smirked when at last he saw Arden again. His fingers and thumbs made small circles, already envisioning her skin between them.
His back is straight and his voice is well spoken, Arden thought to herself in a desperate catalogue of positive things. He has the kind of style that serves a man well in high company. He is a Baron by blood.
Monstrous Heart Page 12