She circled Arden, inspecting every inch of her. ‘So, you’re the one the angels talk of, when they sing their songs from the Lion’s den.’ Bellis pushed up the krakenskin sleeve and touched the inside of Arden’s arm. Her thin white finger looked like a chicken bone laid against Arden’s skin. ‘They sing so sweetly, of something in these veins that entangles and endows. A strange chemistry, bred out of our genetic lines, but still commanding fear, the way mine does.’
Arden wanted to recoil from that dry, hard finger. ‘I don’t know what—’
‘So very, very Lyonne to lose sight of the gold from over-gilding,’ Bellis said, sharper now. ‘Well, we here in Fiction might not have thousand-year ancestral ledgers, but we know good breeding, and who to fuck.’
Bellis’ pinched Fictish features turned mean, and she grabbed Arden’s arm hard with her fingerless gloves, dug in her bony fingers. Had Bellis still retained fingernails, she’d have broken skin. Instead those tiny fingers were knobs, like the joints at the end of bird bones.
‘You have no right to destroy my life’s work! Jonah Riven, my Jonah, was carved in suffering and restraint, a creature conceived only to inspire terror and protection and one day be a leader to challenge even the dirty anguis worshippers on the fucking northern shore, and somehow he ends up back in my lap like this, like this, snivelling with a little hurt, for everyone to fucking see!’
Behind Bellis, Mr Riven tried to stand up. One of the crewmen shoved him by his wounded shoulder, forced him into kneeling again.
No, Jonah, Arden prayed through her terror. Don’t make it worse.
Chalice moaned. This time she wiggled her fingers, and an outsider would have seen only a woman trying to make comfort of their bonds. But she kept making the same finger sign, over and over again, and Arden recognized the signs she saw on the Clay Portside docks among men who had been imprisoned for crimes or just bad luck, the secret language of captives, made with their hands.
Fire, she was saying, but with emphasis. Fire.
Bellis turned on her gathered crew and berated them with a spitting rant that was as familiar to them as breakfast gruel, given their resigned expressions. ‘Which one of you will be running back to Miah Anguis, huh? Scurrying back to the slaughterman of Equus with little tales of this evening, of my once-terrifying husband so toothless, so lame? Oh, he’ll come to my castle and murder me with a laugh … and then I’ll fucking kill the lot of you!’
A dozen pairs of eyes turned to their feet in terror, except for Mr Absalom, who viewed them all with the odd benevolent humour of a person secure in his position.
Fire, Chalice repeated hurriedly. Sacrifice. More. More.
Bellis spun to Arden, leaned in, her breath a miasma of petrolactose fumes. ‘So how did you do it?’ she wheedled. ‘How did you take what was fierce and brilliant and important to me and soften it to rottenness? Did you fornicate with him like a fine Lyonne whore?’
Mr Riven jerked upright on his knees, his body trembling, eyes wide as a hunt-spooked animal that senses danger but cannot articulate its edges. ‘Bellis, nothing happened between us,’ he started to say through the rope bight, before Mr Taufik tugged the end and silenced him.
‘We are all puppets,’ Arden protested. ‘All of us. You might think you are free now, but Lyonne controls us with words, spreads rumours to make us dance. They wanted you to dance right back into their arms.’
‘There was a special dance around you too, was there not?’ Bellis mused, tapping her lip with her finger. ‘Some odd symmetry, some strange shadow, and they exiled you to Fiction, an experiment. See, I am exiled here too. An experiment. I know. Safe and sound and so very far away from Clay City so I can’t cause any trouble.’ Bellis simpered and giggled. ‘Oh, every once in a while the Order sends a spy or three, but nobody has got me talking yet. It is I who make them talk. And sing. And they sing such a strange song of you, I am very curious, Arden Beacon.’
‘If you and I were truly twinned in any kind of special blood chemistry, we would be meeting in the Lyonne Towers as honoured guests, not on this ship,’ Arden said urgently. ‘All I can do is make ignis fire, and that not very well.’
‘A fire,’ Bellis echoed emptily.
Arden implored her. ‘You must believe me. I’ve no wish to hurt you.’
‘Oh, you wouldn’t hurt me. Not in the slightest. The songs all alleviated that worry.’
Behind Bellis, Mr Absalom smiled, and even from across the room, Arden could see one tooth was Djenne gold. He reminded her of Uncle Nicolai Beacon, the confidence in him, the way the moving parts of the world operated around him yet affected him not at all.
‘We will discover the truth of that music soon enough, Your Majesty,’ he promised.
A clatter of activity distracted Arden from her interrogation. The sailors were hauling up tin water buckets from over the side of Sehnsucht, placing them in concentric circles about Mr Riven as he knelt in his supplication to those gods of pain. The water sloshed on the deck.
‘Now I have an opportunity, see,’ Bellis continued. ‘Certainly, I have been delivered back something broken, but what is broken can be mended. I can purge the softness and the rot from him. Not enough to kill and maim. But enough pain to remark and remember, and to do it before witnesses.’
One of the Sehnsucht sailors ran up to Bellis from outside the door. ‘We found the blood our messenger said she’d be carrying. Hidden in the lifejacket crate,’ he said breathlessly. He held aloft the mason jar. Beside Arden, Chalice stopped murmuring and became still.
‘Your blood?’ Bellis asked Arden with a beatific smile. ‘In a jar? Well, that will save us the problem of cutting you.’
‘Bellis …’ Arden implored.
‘Of course, it wouldn’t be unlike the Lyonne Order to try and trick me. This could be poison blood, and if I were to daub it on myself – well then. Would I not be the fool?’ She caressed the glass. ‘Can I tell you of my experience with fire?’
Arden did not reply. Saw the horror coming.
‘I saw a terrible accident once, in an automatic refinery fire on Equus.’ Bellis’ white fingers fluttered in the air before her. ‘A long time ago, in the days before I was married. A man burned alive because they were stealing the rockblood from the mechanica, and forgot the mechanica cannot abide being stolen from. Such a screaming fit he made of it, up in flame, eyes popping in his skull, pop-pop. And the heat, like the surface of the sun.
‘Oh, I was full of sorrow for him at first, for I was young and did not appreciate that his test was necessary and holy. How someone could survive such an immolation – it is only a question for God and His devils, but afterwards, this previously weak, cowardly man, this man who had not a single quality of leadership, was transformed by his pain. Made anew. A prophet he became, blind and hideous but powerful, oh yes. People now set themselves alight for him, and I, with my own secret flame burning within my breast and in my heart, know that this is how I will save my Jonah from his own weakness.’
Arden would have risen to her feet were she not held down. ‘He can’t be saved if he’s dead!’
Bellis poked her finger into Arden’s cheek. ‘You aren’t dead. Because I can smell the aequor profundum on your skin. He healed you. That secret Riven talent. Let’s see if he can heal himself.’
Chalice made noises into her gag that sounded like no no no.
Gasping, Arden strained against the ropes. ‘Bellis Harrow, your soul will be damned forever if you hurt him.’
‘Harrow, you call me? Harrow, when I was wedded to a Riven before witnesses?’ She came close to Arden, tilted her chin in Mr Riven’s direction. Bitterbush stench all about her. Petroleum on her breath. Her teeth blackened with coal. ‘Bellis Riven I am, protected only by my name. Only two things are feared on our Islands, the threat of fire and the name of Riven. I will be both threat and Riven, after today.’
With that, Bellis stood and in a whirl took the mason jar of Arden’s blood from the subordinate and up-ended
it over Mr Riven’s head. The blood had congealed down to gelatinous lumps and smeared him in gore. He shook his head to whip the muck from his eyes. He growled furiously through the rope bight, trapped but not surrendered.
‘Oh, look. Nothing happened. That is a shame. You did say your cold flame was weak, so I cannot fault your honesty.’
Bellis smiled down at her husband. Her expression softened to him for the first time and Arden glimpsed what she may have once looked like, as a child. He was suddenly beautiful to her like this. She caressed his bloodied, whiskered face, his shoulders, then ducked down into a squat, caressed his leather-clad thigh as if teasing him, pressed a thin, hard hand between his legs. Whispered something into his blood-smeared ear as she did so.
When he did not react quite so enthusiastically to this, their long-awaited reunion, she slipped her hand past the waistband of his strides, clasped what she found there, stroked him.
Bellis meant to humiliate Jonah further, reduce him to nothing before her men, show him in sexual thrall to the Queen of this death-white ship. And Arden understood with a dreadful clarity what it meant. Maybe … maybe if he responded to her gross ministrations, Bellis would spare him. Maybe if he showed Bellis proper deference, this would all be a threat and never carried out.
Arden wanted Mr Riven to look at her, to silently give him courage in this abject act. Grow hard at her touch, she implored. Spend yourself into that hand of bones and skin. Make Bellis believe she is that upon which all your desires hinge, even when there is nothing left outside of promised pain and endless despair. This might save you.
But his gaze had turned blank and distant, and he shrank in upon himself, encased in a cocoon of his own flesh. Bellis continued to stroke him and whisper her fascinations. Nobody moved, except Mr Absalom, who watched them all with his knowing basilisk gaze.
The fact that Mr Riven didn’t – or couldn’t – respond clearly vexed Bellis. She gave him one last malicious squeeze and stood up suddenly. ‘What’s wrong with you? You have lost your vigour. Impotent. Neutered. Like a dog.’
She turned back to Arden. Bared her teeth. ‘Now we find out what the Lions were talking about. Persephone!’
The yellow-dressed girl fished in the folds of her dress, and pulled out a pint-jar that might have once been a milk-bottle. Bellis discarded the lid. Aromatic fumes washed over them. Distilled petroleum, and flammable as the sun. A man nearby lit a flare, a crimson, phosphorous eye, almost too bright to look at. Laid it between Jonah’s knees.
‘Ignis fire is cold, more’s the pity. But my fire is strong.’
Arden saw Mr Riven swallow a breath. The phosphor flare turned his skin an unholy colour. The sailors readied their buckets nervously, ever fearful of a fire upon a wooden ship.
‘Healer,’ Bellis said. ‘Cure this.’
Jonah, Arden breathed.
The liquid fell upon him and the fire ignited.
34
A whump of hot flame
A whump of hot flame and a roil of smoke and char that filled the air with embers. Arden might have screamed, if not for the rattle and bang of people falling upon the decks and a lone body stumbling out of the smoke into Bellis’ arms.
‘Save me, Holy Maria,’ the burned sailor groaned.
‘Get off me, you brute!’ Bellis shoved him away into the acrid mist. ‘Where is he? Where is my husband?’
The smoke was thicker than the fog, a grey murk swirling with trails of white. A fire had taken hold of the forecastle, flames licking as high as the wheelhouse.
The smoke swallowed Bellis from Arden’s view, and in the melee Arden dived for Chalice, tearing off her gag.
‘Quick Chalice, move!’
Arden dragged Chalice sideways, down the length of the deck. Anyone would have been blinded by the smoke if they’d not worked all their lives in pea-soupers, could tell by the echo of a footfall where to go.
She got her stormbride about and twisted off the shackle catch, freeing her arms. ‘Did you see Jonah, is he dead?’
Without waiting for the obvious answer Arden turned about so Chalice could do the same.
Once Chalice had her bit out, she spat coir and said, ‘No, he healed himself, your blood can—’
A man loomed out of the clouds, still in stocks. Mr Riven, his shirt blackened and in tatters, emerged slightly singed but otherwise unharmed. His eyes bright. Arden sobbed in relief. She wrapped him up in her arms, wanted to take the weight of him if she could.
‘How? I saw you consumed!’
‘I need … to get help. To call up …’ he gasped, and began to cough, each spasm wracking his injured chest. He’d used sanguinity from the blood in his wound, but too much, too much …
‘Jonah, dammit.’ Arden seized one bound hand. ‘Let me get the stocks off.’
‘No time,’ he croaked. ‘We have to get to the back of the ship before they put the petroleum fire out and regroup.’
Chalice took the other side of Mr Riven and they stumbled through the clearing air.
‘These people are mendicants of the highest order!’ she protested, as they came across the dinghy lashed to Sehnsucht’s side. ‘You too, Chalice Quarry.’
Mr Riven shook himself free of their hands. ‘You must lower the lifeboat, quickly.’
A throat cleared with a cough. Arden’s shoulders wrenched tight. They were too late.
‘Ah, I thought you would make it back here,’ said the deep Lyonne voice. ‘My instincts for sensing benightedness are still keen despite repeated exposure.’
Mr Absalom stood on the deck with a harpoon spear in his hand, one long enough to spike a leviathan if he had to. His eyes streamed red from the smoke. His waistcoat was singed from escaping the fire upon the deck.
He nodded at Mr Riven. ‘So it’s true. The woman is a catalyst. That blood of hers turned your little healing trick into something powerful. You survived immolation.’
Mr Riven made to lunge at him, but Mr Absalom did not have the clumsiness of a brute fighter from a dock pit, nor was there a chance of Mr Riven defeating him while bound up and close to collapsing. Arden stepped in front of Mr Riven before he could move, caught him about his waist, could feel his heart in his chest, the dread in him.
‘Wait, Jonah.’
‘Arden,’ he said. ‘Don’t trust this man.’
‘Sir,’ Arden said to Mr Absalom, ‘let us go. We did not deserve this inhumane treatment from your Queen. I can see you are different from the others, but there is no help you can give other than letting us go.’
Mr Absalom shook his head. ‘At present the others scramble about their Maiden Queen and try to stop Sehnsucht from springing a burning leak, but not for much longer. If a lifeboat is to disappear, then they will blame me.’
‘Then make up something, damn you! If you consider yourself noble Djenne, or Karakorum or whatever you are! If you wear the embellishments of great people, then live up to them! Just say we struck you from behind or you passed out. Have you no pride?’
Mr Riven sagged behind Arden. She caught his body, and he had seemed so much more solid when she had held him in joy. Now he was a wraith.
‘Jonah, I need you awake. Don’t falter now …’
‘Arden, you can’t be here.’
Behind them, Chalice struggled with the rearward lifeboat rope.
‘The damn thing has an Athenian knot! I can’t budge it.’ She stared hopelessly out towards the horizon. ‘Saudade’s drifting. We’ll never catch her.’
Mr Absalom stood above them, watching with all the pitilessness of a desert. ‘They will make a vivisection of you, Lightmistress. Bled and torn limb from limb until you are meat. Your blood has proven itself worth a little parlour trick, but the Queen will want to see it work on herself. She has many shadows that, were they to be increased, well … she would be a very powerful creature indeed.’
Shouts echoed from the end of the ship. Angry shouts. They had been spotted. Mr Absalom’s eyes widened.
To Chalice he
said, ‘Is there no help for the Widow’s Son?’
The words meant nothing to Arden, but Chalice stopped yanking on the knots. A strange, almost blank acknowledgement appeared on her face. ‘What do you need, brother?’
He pulled a small tablet of polished brass from his waistcoat pocket and shoved it into Chalice’s hands. ‘Hide it.’
Arden had only a moment to look upon the rose and thorn crest of the Lyonne Investigatory Order as her stormbride snatched up the shining locket and shoved it in between her bosoms.
‘Take Mx Beacon off this ship,’ Mr Absalom urged Chalice. ‘Now. But the man must stay here.’
He had given an order. Chalice grabbed Arden’s hand. ‘Arden, we have to jump.’
She pulled herself away. ‘No! What has gotten into you, Chalice Quarry? We don’t leave without Jonah.’
The footsteps peppered the deck through the smoke. She stood firm, ready to protect him. Mr Riven made a last despairing sound. His chin fell against her face and the words came out raw.
‘Go. Go but remember me. Remember your poor fisherman from Vigil. Give him the Deepwater prayer in midwinter and remember him.’
‘I don’t know the Deepwater prayer.’
‘Nor do I, but I will serve the King soon. He will teach it to me in the court of my ancestors.’
‘You cannot die. You cannot.’
Jonah Riven kissed her once upon her forehead, something more tender than passion, more marbled with regret.
From the centre deck, Bellis Harrow screamed.
‘Don’t you dare move!’
Arden looked at Jonah one last time, then she met the woman’s eyes in defiance. Glassy as cataracts, with only evil behind them. With a gasp of a desperately committed breath, Arden tipped backwards over Sehnsucht’s stern.
The wake of the water swallowed her in a roar of bubbles, and the cold wash penetrated her with the agony of a thousand needles. When her head cleared the surface, Chalice was already floundering alongside, agitating her skirts to make them buoyant.
Monstrous Heart Page 33