Arden laughed, incredulous. ‘Enough, Vernon. I’m not blind. The ladies of the Black Rosette have had plenty of opportunities to show you how to make bloody love. You are a disgrace to your profession, trying to use it to seduce and bully me. I won’t stand for it.’
She stomped on up the beach-track stairs as best she could without toppling off them in the wind, reached the cliff-top before he did.
‘Then what do you want from me?’ Mr Justinian whined behind her. ‘Shall I prove my newfound desire to improve myself? Do you want me celibate, and swearing off all pleasures before you will acquiesce to my devotion? Is that what it will take to win your affection?’
‘Whatever you want, Vernon Justinian,’ she snapped. ‘Bind yourself up in thistles and itching-ivy if you must, but keep your impure thoughts to yourself. I could have died this afternoon.’
His face was furious, but he capitulated to her anger. Bowed his head. ‘It is done. It is done!’
He kept his silence as they returned from their walk. Chalice had returned, and had since coaxed Mr Quill out of the car with a cup of one of her bitter teas.
‘What happened to your dress?’ Chalice asked, then caught sight of Mr Justinian’s hangdog appearance, Arden’s dishevelled rage. ‘Ah,’ she concluded. This required a more private interrogation.
‘Come, Mr Quill,’ Mr Justinian barked. ‘I’m not paying you for laziness. We must be back in town before nightfall.’
The driver gave up his tea to the ashes, and quickly returned to his duties.
Once the car disappeared from sight, Chalice followed Arden inside the lighthouse.
‘You cannot keep me in suspense. I return to your absence and the driver waiting, only to discover you were gallivanting with the second last person in the world I’d expect you gallivanting with.’
‘And the last person being Mr Riven?’
‘By God, no. I saw the expression on your face when you heard he gave a whipping to those foppish plesiosaur hunters. If I know your weaknesses yet, it would be an overwrought sense of moral justice if you gave our besmirched neighbour the portion just to say you were sorry.’
Outside with the bowl of warm water and a sponge, Arden pulled off the sweater. Chalice gasped at what she had revealed.
‘Dear me, trying to make yourself a tasty morsel for Mr Justinian? By your appearance I’d wager he ravished you both ways.’
Arden scoffed, but had to admit she had become a sight. Getting dragged out over the rocks by the waves had knocked her bruised and bloody.
‘Just be a help and get me some soap. I couldn’t be worse if I tangled with Poseidon himself.’
‘You need more than soap. Clean yourself off and I’ll put some iodine on those cuts. Damn the devils, which man must I kill today?’
‘It’s not what you think. I fell into the water, on one of the shipwreck bays. Blame the rocks for my injuries.’
‘Just them?’
‘Just them.’
‘All right. It is a relief. The ground around here is quite unsuitable for graves. So hard to dig and I’d rather not be breaking my back for anyone.’
Arden washed the salt out of her skin and hair, and in the fading evening light deigned to sit on a stool in her cotton nightdress while Chalice dabbed reddish balm over her cuts.
As Chalice tended to her, Arden told her stormbride about Mr Justinian’s actions, the desperate swim, and the beach with Mr Riven. ‘He was feeding a plesiosaur today. A juvenile.’
‘I thought the man could only call kraken?’ Chalice asked, mid-dab.
‘Let’s just say my perilous position did not allow me to ask him. But I could have sworn the creature was the same one he carried from his boat weeks ago, except it was healed and very much alive.’
Chalice shook her head, sceptical. ‘Are you sure?’
‘Very certain. There was a scar on its back, the exact same one.’
‘An interesting talent. Truth, I couldn’t tell the difference between one plesiosaur and another, myself.’ She finished her dabbing, stood back and admired her handiwork. ‘There you go, spotted as a leopard. Now I’ll throw this old rag out.’
She had barely lifted the sweater before Arden took it out of her hands.
‘I have to clean it and give it back to him.’
She hadn’t managed to inspect this gifted garment of Mr Riven’s until then. Unlike the immaculate coat, the uneven knots in the woollen sweater very much told a sad tale by their own selves. Songs of rending and patching at least a hundred times, pale scours from repeated washing, and threadbare where sand soap had not quite rinsed out the ichor of kraken calling. Now the sleeves from the elbows down were sticky with blood.
‘Are you trying to scry the future in those woollen entrails?’ Chalice commented as Arden gently laid out the sweater on the slab table and touched the fibres as one might touch a sacred object for luck. ‘Because I can imagine scabies, and a furious genital itching.’
‘It was clean before I bled on it. I don’t want to bring it back in such a condition.’
‘Just think of it as an excuse for him to change clothes for once.’
Arden tutted at Chalice’s uncharitable thoughts. ‘I’m just fascinated. See, its old, but the quality of the work is wonderful. You’d struggle to get similar in a Clay Capital high street.’
‘I never realized the fashion tends to wearing big Fiction sweaters.’
‘Chalice, you know what I mean.’
She shrugged. ‘So the natives know their way around a needle.’
‘Don’t you think this is odd how the collar is embroidered so, with all these fun little decorations?’ Arden’s fingers stroked busy needlework of blue waves, black kraken-arms, a sun and moon. One read in the threads affectionate gestures, a shared memory between old friends.
‘What are you trying to say, dear?’ Chalice asked, droll. She dumped a load of firewood by the brazier and slapped sawdust from her hands. ‘How pretty the stitches, what delight in her patterns?’
‘If Bellis sewed these, she was not a woman in pain.’
‘Perhaps you should offer your services as a detective to Magistrate Harrow. Devils know how useless his lumpen deputies are.’
‘I don’t recognize abuse, though. The sweater and the coat were both made with affection. There is love here.’
Chalice sniffed, lit up her pipe, took a long dismissive drag. ‘There are spells here, Arden. Old Fictish magic, binding up the monster in thread so it may not harm the maker.’
Arden wanted to argue with Chalice. She saw fondness, adoration in the threads. Ill-fated, eternal, storybook love, not the brutality of the local gossips, and a twist of envy towards Bellis, small and bitter, pricked Arden’s heart. She’d have made such clothes for Richard, given the chance, were it part of their culture.
Chalice sat next to Arden wrapped her arm about her waist, lay her fiery head upon Arden’s shoulder. The smoke curled about them.
‘I’m just glad you’re alive, darling.’
‘It feel so strange, though. Like I cannot trust anything I’m being told.’
The arm squeezed harder. ‘Arden, the gods loved you today. Are you certain you’ve not got a shadow talent for enchanting wild men?’
Arden wriggled free. ‘Chalice, you mustn’t joke about shadow talents. They’re a terrible thing for a child to be afflicted with.’
Chalice held up her hand. ‘My apologies. But I can see your jealousy for Bellis Riven.’
‘I am not jealous, either!’
‘You are jealous. It’s plain as day. You want what Bellis had, to be both sanguis and free of the Guild, to be blessed with such a thing as a man’s tender devotion.’ She shrugged. ‘Even if it is Mr Riven’s. And it killed her in the end.’
Much to the displeasure of Chalice Quarry and her proclamations on the dangers of lice-borne diseases, Arden washed the blood from the sleeves, and brought the sweater indoors where it might dry by the fire. It splayed out cruciform upon the washing
line, a winged shadow.
In the morning’s dark early hours, when her shift ended and weariness made her maudlin, she fell back into her old physical longings, walked those worlds as she hovered between waking and dream.
You are jealous.
But this time, the princes and airshipmen and dockworkers of her night-time fantasies were cast aside, and a man with swollen eyes and damaged features beheld her as she emerged from the sea, her body a gold-fronded nakedness, his expression a raw wound, and a terrible longing upon his face.
13
Something in the quality of her life
Something in the quality of her life. Something had changed. She no longer worried about her real worth on the signal tower, or her tending of a dying flame. As the weather cooled from the summer mildness Arden oriented now to the old factories down the promontory, the way a creature in pain will be drawn towards its own destruction. She had to return Mr Riven’s sweater. Soon, she promised, for tardiness would raise questions.
But each hour she spent thinking about visiting Mr Riven and thanking him for the use of the garment made the act take on far more import than it should. She was not foolish enough to consider any neighbourly relationship more than casual politeness – he would never be a comrade or friend, not a Chalice Quarry or a Gerry Harris. Her imagination couldn’t extend to talking with him about anything other than the best way to slaughter a thing ten times larger than yourself.
More dangerously, her isolation from any human companionship other than Chalice made her assign fictional qualities to Mr Riven that had no true bearing on his unknown character.
He had battled poachers, he was a man of moral standing.
He had nursed an orphan water-pup to health (perhaps it had not been so dead), he was patient.
He had given her a garment, was kind, he had not taken advantage, he was polite, he was this and he was that.
See, all those things make Mr Riven not at all those things that Mr Justinian accuses him of. See? See?
Afterwards, she would become angry at herself for her wool-gathering. She needed to maintain the discipline of the lighthouse, to identify and catalogue the ships that passed, the movement of air within the barometer, the variances in the tide. Her attention was required seawards, not behind her.
I must nor contrive, she told herself. I must not. She must not wander into a fork in the road where he had taken her upon the beach, tearing the silks from her body, doing everything the traveller woman had promised. Mr Riven existed only as a cipher for her own loneliness and worry. Arden had come here to shake herself free of a demon, not pick up another one.
Her pronouncements were only playthings for a capricious God. Her solitude made her vulnerable, to the long days of watching the coast, listening to Chalice snore and snuffle in her sleep, the low hissing roar of the wind through the sea-caves, long walks along the promontory on top of gravestones and crumbled walls.
The nights were worse, and she hid Mr Riven’s sweater in a pillowcase so that Chalice might not see it unreturned. An object of veneration and suffering, to take out and press her face into the thick cables, catch a remnant of a man’s scent, regardless of who it belonged to. A life not hers, but was promised, once.
She was wise enough to know the depressive condition of acedia, how it affected isolated Lightkeepers and signallers just as it affected monks and aesthetes. Knew how close she risked falling into that dark well-pit, and could not find any way to stop herself from sliding.
14
Wake up!
Arden startled awake, alert and in a panic. The grinding of the lens motors a level above made a sound as familiar as the whoosh of blood in a womb. Light-shadow crawled over the whitewashed stone. The cold-flame burned and bright from when she had last supplied it. Devilment! How long had she been napping? To fall asleep was an unforgivable transgression in signal keeping.
‘Chalice?’ she asked the darkness, waiting for the returning scold of her assistant.
No reply from either the doorway or downstairs. Arden quickly checked the luminous hands of the clock against her last time-measurement. The shipwright’s clock pointed to a three, the devil’s number, and Arden calmed down a little. Three o’clock wasn’t too bad. She had started her shift at two o’clock, already taken the half-hour measurements, noting the low pressure and high wind of a Darkling Sea storm. She could not have been subsumed by storm morphia for more than twenty minutes.
She took her pen and notated in her log book: Atmospheric Pressure – Barometric Event? Some exotic storm conditions caused the air pressure to plunge so suddenly that entire townships would fall into unconsciousness. The pale-skinned among them would turn blue with hypoxia. Enchantment tempests, the locals called such catastrophes, invoking fairy stories of princesses asleep for a hundred years, except in these ones they never woke up.
She crossed out her notation with a shake of her head. An enchantment tempest would have dimmed the beacon flame. Perpetual it might have been, it still required oxygen. The coldfire still glowed bright.
Arden opened her glove and touched her coin to a small lantern-wick she kept for the purpose, and in the blood-light inspected her fingernails. They were bitten and split from weeks of hard work, but did not show the cyanotic darkness of a low barometric event. Something else had sapped her strength.
She replaced her notation with Absent, before cat-footing down the tower stairs, not wanting to wake Chalice. The bride’s gentle breath stuttered, and then she too woke up. Chalice hoisted herself onto her elbow, blinked in the dim glow of the brazier, then at her own small clock.
‘I’m sorry,’ Arden said. ‘I hoped some brew still remained in the pot.’
‘Was not that soft footfall of yours that woke me.’ The stormbride’s eyes shone in the gloom, her distance unseeing. Arden remembered that Chalice had tested positive for chemicals and salts at a testmoot. Theirs was a shared language. ‘You fell asleep.’
‘Something in the weather. Can you feel it?’ Arden said. ‘Not a barometric event. Powerful, but distant.’
A blink again. ‘Yes,’ Chalice church-whispered. ‘There’s blood on this storm. It’s almost suffocating. I can take another watch, if you want. I can’t see myself going back to sleep.’
The wind whiffled at the glass of the lamphouse. ‘I’d best go back up and check on the light. I wouldn’t be able to sleep either.’
‘I’ll have the fire going. This storm’s only going to get worse.’
Arden quickly slipped into her krakenskin while Chalice changed back into her clothes. The stone staircase vibrated under her feet as gales battered the column.
The glass in the lamp room had held strong. The tower might have been left to weather, but mere squalls would not topple her. Arden remained behind the light-shade as her beam shot out into the wild night.
Blood on this storm, Chalice had said. Yes, there definitely was a wrinkle in the wind out there. If she were in Lyonne it would not have meant much, but in Fiction the sense filled her like the vibration from a tuning fork, struck and held.
‘We’ll have to run the foghorn!’ Arden shouted down the tower. ‘There’s no visibility up here!’
‘I’m on my way,’ the stormbride called back, and a gust of wind came up from below as Chalice opened the driftwood door to exit.
Barely half a minute passed before Chalice came back.
‘Arden!’ Chalice screamed up the staircase. ‘Arden, get down here!’
‘What is it?’ Arden tried to navigate down the staircase as best she could. ‘Is it the horn?’
‘There’s people in the water outside,’ Chalice panted. The rain had soaked her utterly. ‘Down at where promontory meets the water. One of them has a flare …’
‘For goodness’ sakes, get your oil coat on,’ Arden scolded. ‘I’m going outside.’
She snatched up a lantern, pushed her glove aside and squeezed blood into the reservoir until her hand burned and the flame inside sprang up white as b
urning magnesium. The wind pounced as soon as she stepped into the night, but it could not get past the krakenskin.
She battled her way down to the promontory point. Chalice had seen true. There were people in the water, at least four of them, staggering out of the swell. The phosphor flare in the hand of their leader illuminated them in a ghastly pink.
‘Hoy! This way!’ she cried.
The strongest of them, an older man clad only in a sopping waistcoat and breeches, stumbled to Arden and grabbed her shoulders as if he were still drowning. ‘My family,’ he said between coughs. ‘The boat … the storm …’ He was cold as death, and his lips blue-black in the lantern light. He was a Lyonnian, but it was not his blood she had sensed.
‘A shipwreck?’
The man nodded, and ran back to help another shadowy figure who waded out of the phosphor-pink foam. A hot fork of lightning illuminated the wreckage of a prospector’s boat, a spindly flat-bottomed thing lashed together from river-barges that should never have approached open water.
From the darkness a woman’s voice wailed, amplified by the cliffs and rain.
‘My babies! My children!’
A roar of horror came from the second castaway, a cry of excoriated anguish. He dived back into the surf, screaming incoherently.
Arden could not move, paralysed by empathy. Chalice ran past her and with the first survivor pulled the grieving parents out of the sea.
The woman fell to her knees and wailed. She shouted at the sky, and the dark ocean, before falling, insensible, into the sand.
‘You’ll all die out here,’ Chalice shouted at them through the tumult. ‘There’s nothing you can do.’
The wind had in the space of minutes increased. Devouring the children had given the storm strength. Chalice hauled up the woman, and Arden likewise, and in a darkness crackling with sorrow and electricity they shuffled up the lighthouse entrance in the way of a blind rat king, a creature with tails snarled together in one unbreakable knot.
Monstrous Heart Page 14