by Tim Clare
Loosley? No – this was a different boat. A single mast stretched up, impaling the clouded full moon. The silhouette looming over her was leaner, taller, the ears positioned higher up the head.
Thunder crumped in the purpling middle distance. The figure hauled in a small driftwood buoy on the end of a frayed rope. Already the mainsail was luffing fractiously, snapping moisture from its surface as the wind picked up. A storm was coming – lashing, punitive, righteous.
The figure moved with calm efficiency, raising the anchor and taking their place at the stern. As the boat drifted starboard, the mainsail began to fill. The figure brought the boat round in a slow, smooth curve; the boom swept over Hagar’s head with a creak as they jibbed, then they were creaming west through the ocean, back towards Fat Maw.
It hurt to swallow. The chains had left tender bruises across her arms and back. She opened her mouth and let the rain strike her tongue in refreshing gobbets that tasted of sweet pollen.
‘I rather think this makes us even,’ said the figure at the stern, tacking into the wind as they approached the reef.
Hagar tilted her head back. She squinted through the rain.
‘Bechstein?’
A flash of lightning lit a tableau of familiar features – the long nostril slits sunken within the subtly fleur-de-lis-shaped noseleaf, the regal, almost impertinent underbite, the thin, knifing eyes. It was the deposed Lord Cambridge. A waxed leather half-cloak hung about his shoulders, finished at the front with a brass buckle shaped like a stylised sun with eight spokes radiating from it. She blinked, studying his ghost-bright afterimage.
‘I no longer use that name.’ Though his face was shadowed, she could hear his scowl.
‘I thought you were dead.’
‘Apparently our respective Makers believe we have work to finish.’
Hagar snorted. Her sinuses stung with brine. She spat.
‘We have the same creator. And He loves you, Mortifer.’
The ex-Lord Cambridge let out a mirthless snort. ‘Hmm. I heard you’d spent time with the shadow order.’
Rain raked the skin of the ocean in crackling sheets. Waves began striking them abeam, slapping over their port side in bright blasts of spume.
‘What do you plan to do with me?’ she called over the rising wind.
‘Release you, of course.’
‘What?’
‘Some of us see Maison Jejunus as a . . . necessary counterbalance.’ The yawl crested a peak and became briefly weightless, before the keel thudded into the next wave. Bechstein strained to keep control of the tiller. Lightning flashed again, closer this time, and she saw mahogany fur slicked down the sharp contours of his cheekbones, the white fangs beneath set in a determined grimace. Thunder boomed an instant later. ‘Without you, Morgellon would be . . . ugh!’ The wind ripped his wings back, exposing his head to the rain. He turned into the wind, using his body as a windbreak until he could ruck them shut. ‘Your little protégée Anwen must be stopped.’
Hagar lay there, feeling her heart beat against her chains – pum pum pum. Rain struck her face. She was alive.
‘And even Loosley believes this?’
‘Especially Loosley. Why do you think he serves her so loyally?’
‘It’s his best chance of killing her.’
Bechstein flashed her a look. She had answered too quickly, with far too much venom – had revealed that she understood Loosley all too well.
The bottom of the yawl was filling with water. She shuffled and writhed like a caterpillar until she had propped her back against the mainmast. The first thing she saw was the black carcass of Lotan Reef bearing down on their port side.
Bechstein tacked hard to starboard. The boom swished overhead and the mainsail bellied with a woof. The reef rushed towards them, growing bigger, bigger. She felt the tide beneath the hull, sucking them towards the mass of coral-scabbed bone.
As if accepting the inevitable, Bechstein steered into the current, pointing their bow at the reef. The yawl accelerated. Her arms still bound behind her back, Hagar awaited the impact with a strange, tingling awe.
Just as they were about to hit, Bechstein threw his shoulder against the tiller. With the extra momentum of the tide, the boat turned cleanly, shearing through the swell. Their portside swung to within an inch of the great, petrified megacadaver, so close that Hagar could make out the polychromatic sheen of moonlit microorganisms coating its titanic ribs. She braced. The collision never came; the yawl glided past, as if sliding on greased rails.
As they passed the breakwater, the wind dropped. In the snug of the bay, the waves eased to a steady, undulating pulse. The jungle gasped under the rain. Bechstein’s shoulders slumped.
‘She thinks she can conquer the old world,’ he said.
Hagar tried to disguise her fierce interest with a look of disdain.
‘Mm. Loosley said. I wonder. It was her home, after all. She’s young. She wants to impress us. It’s probably bluster.’
‘Perhaps.’ Bechstein locked the tiller and stood. He pulled a sickle from his belt. ‘And perhaps not.’ He knelt before Hagar and raised the whetted edge to her throat. ‘Now her daughter is born, we may have good reason to be impressed.’ He hooked the crescent tip inside the sailcloth and dragged it downwards until it met chain. The material slit easily as skin. He made a second incision behind her and her arms flopped free. Her chains sagged. Bright starbursts of pain erupted from her joints.
‘There,’ said Bechstein.
Hagar rolled her shoulders, wincing. He stood over her, sickle in hand, rain dripping from his wings.
‘You won’t let me remember this conversation, will you?’ she said.
‘It’s safest if you don’t.’ His face was completely in shadow. ‘I work best in darkness.’
Hagar nodded with what she hoped looked like weary resignation. ‘In umbres sorores. It’s the wisest path.’
‘And the loneliest.’ He hesitated. ‘Shame, really. There are so few of us left.’ He wiped rain from his eyes. ‘You’ll be a little disoriented, but I’ll only take these last few minutes. You’ll probably think the tide washed you back to shore. That’ll be nice for you, won’t it? Another confirmation of the hand of providence.’
She glanced across the bay, towards the few faint lights of the stilt city, the junks and coracles and sampans knocking together in the shelter of piers and jetties and launches. A lantern burned outside the harbourmistress’s hut, swaying at the top of its long pole. She slapped wet hair from her face.
‘What would you have me do with my new freedom?’
Bechstein lowered his sickle. Already she saw him focusing energy in the other hand, vapour rising from his fingers as he prepared to scrub their encounter from her memory. Many were the stories of Lord Cambridge’s nepenthean touch. Of all the losses he was accused of inflicting upon his foes, it was at once the most merciful and the cruellest. Her nostrils tingled with a smell like ozone and old coins.
‘Lo, then would I wander far off, and remain in the wilderness. I would hasten my escape from the windy storm and tempest.’
The words made her scalp prickle. She felt awake to the squalls, the thunder, the cool water pooling round her tingling wrists and ankles.
‘Well.’ She dipped her head and chuckled in her broken, ruined fashion. ‘Mortifer Bechstein is quoting me Scripture.’
‘Decades of exile offer a little reading time. There’s a tragic poetry in the lives of the saints.’ He focused power in his hand, his spindly fingers performing slow arpeggios. ‘And Mortifer Bechstein is dead. I’m just a shadow.’
Gently, she slid her feet from her boots. ‘That sounded like regret. Sins can’t be cast off so easily – I’ve tried.’
He spread his leathery wings. There were rents in the membrane where the moon shone through. Vapour steamed from his fist.
‘Oh, that I had wings like a dove. For then I would fly away, and be at rest.’
She rose placidly, offering her brow.
He moved to place his palm and administer the memory-cleanse.
Hagar smiled. ‘There is no peace, saith my God, to the wicked.’
She sidestepped, twisted, and dropped backwards over the gunwale.
She stretched her arms cruciform and let the ocean hold her as she sank. Saltwater bathed her bruises. Many were the tortures this world inflicted, but she would not suffer it to rob her of her past. No memory, no remorse. No remorse, no salvation.
She turned underwater and began swimming for shore with fast, purposeful strokes.
CHAPTER 13
PATIENCE
Delphine stood, panting.
Patience DeGroot rubbed her jaw with her human hand. Ropes of maroon flesh trailed from her shoulder and lay on the floor in slack, juicewet coils.
‘You disgusting, pathetic little monster,’ said Delphine.
Patience inhaled, pursing her lips together as she held the breath, then let out a long sigh.
She smiled. ‘It really is you.’
Delphine had imagined this moment many times, inventing various scenarios where they might meet again, investing each with the vivid detail of an erotic fantasy – what they would be wearing, the look on Patience’s face, the utter submission, the violence – never once believing that it might come to pass.
She struggled to reconcile the figure in front of her with the one from her memories. Patience wore a white cotton dress, ankle-length, split up to the knee. Her cheeks were pink and strands of hair not pulled back into her snaking blond braid hung across her face in a messy fringe.
The reality was all wrong. Patience seemed like a replica of herself. Her hair had changed. Delphine hung her head. Talking with Butler had spoilt all her rage. It was tainted with awareness.
‘You might want a sit-down,’ said Patience. With a dragging noise, her tendrils slid back into her shoulder, plaiting and melding into a shapeless, fleshy club.
Rusted iron rings and brackets hung from the walls. The stonework bore several dark stains. Radio equipment lay stacked on a table. To the left was a doorway with a heavy stone lintel, and steps leading up.
Delphine touched her machine pistol through her shirt.
‘I’ll be upstairs.’
‘It’s a trap,’ said Patience, her angel arm wrapped in white muslin fastened with a silver pin. ‘Hundred per cent.’
They were in a large chamber in the old jail’s northwestern turret. Butler stood with his wings folded, beside the window, smoking a cigarette and blowing the smoke through the narrow slit.
‘You sound very sure.’
‘Would you prefer I hedged? Hmm. Who can say? Maybe the Doyenne just wants what’s best for you.’
Delphine sat in a cushioned chair, her machine pistol and loose ammunition laid out on a rattan side-table. Distributed across several tables was a substantial spread – bowls of steamed grains mixed with vegetables, baked spiced tubers, soft cheeses, flatbreads studded with dried cherries, clear jellies, soup, dumplings and ramekins of chutneys and pickles. Patience had told them to help themselves – the mailboat brought food every morning but she threw most of it away. Alice and Martha sat next to each other, working through a bowl of fruits.
Butler looked back over his shoulder. ‘Maybe she wants what’s worst for the perpetuum. The enemy of my enemy.’
‘Darling, you really are an optimist. Doyenne Lesang has been consolidating power for years. The brick clique are hers in all but name. North of the river is all hers.’
‘You get on well enough, don’t you?’
‘Oh, she won’t pick fights unnecessarily. She’ll be perfectly friendly until she decides it no longer suits her. She’s been moving small arms into the undercity for months. Not isolated batches. Big numbers. Doyenno Becquel has the saltpetre gunsmiths working day and night.’
‘Sounds like someone’s preparing for war,’ said Butler.
‘Or perhaps a coup d’état. It may very well suit Lesang’s purposes to have you start a firefight with the city peace. Draw resources on their second-busiest night of the year. I suspect she wants Sheriff Kenner’s people out of the way.’
‘You haven’t answered my question. Can you help us?’
‘Of course I can,’ said Patience, looking irritated. ‘The question isn’t can. It’s will. As it happens, our goals are in concordance. If this doctor fellow’s claims are even half-true, he must be sitting on a great deal of very dangerous research. There are many people I want to ensure don’t get their hands on it. Lesang gave you an address, didn’t she?’
Butler waved the slip of paper.
‘Good. In that case, Reggie can help you brute-force your way in, and I can pull you and the doctor out with my angel-arm.’
‘By “brute-force” you mean “kill”.’
‘Unless you can charm the officers into resigning, yes. Kenner’s staff are very loyal. Trust me. I’ve been trying to corrupt them for years.’
Delphine lifted a glass teapot, pear-shaped with a narrow swan-necked spout. She tilted it until a column of umber-red liquid flowed into her cup. The ritual helped steady her nerves.
‘What if we don’t go in at all?’ she said.
Everyone turned and looked.
‘What do you mean?’ said Butler.
She poured tea for Alice and Martha. Her pale, lineless hand was marked with tiny red nicks and scratches. Though she could ball it into a fist and haul rope, it looked weaker than her old one, the one with liver spots and raised tendons, veins showing through loose skin. That had been the hand of someone with stories. Someone who didn’t give a damn.
‘Didn’t that, whatever her name was, say that he’d given all his notes to a lawyer for safe-keeping?’ Delphine said.
Patience glanced at Butler. ‘What’s this?’
He sniffed. ‘Yes, something like that. To be destroyed if he’s bumped off. What’s your point?’
‘Why don’t we just go straight to the lawyer?’
There was a long silence. She sluiced hot tea through her teeth. It had a floral, fruity smokiness, with a bitter tang at the finish as a palate cleanser. All in all it was a bit busier than she preferred.
Butler looked down at the stub of his cigarette. ‘That sounds . . . almost not stupid.’ He looked to Patience. ‘Can we do that?’
‘If we can find out who they are . . .’ She stroked her angel-arm like a hunting dog. ‘I can send out some feelers. You should all get some rest. There are bedrooms all over the place. I hardly use them. Just take one. The cleaners only come every few days and they’re off for the festival.’ She sniffed. ‘I’ll have us a name by morning.’
Delphine walked the full square of the corridors, gazing down through tall, glassless windows into a courtyard full of plants in neat rows. Couldn’t be easy, growing stuff with such poor light.
She found a room facing east, out across the ocean. There were heavy rugs across the stone floor, and dressers with statuettes of odd sea creatures in pastel-coloured stone. The bed was a wide, square hammock, big as a king-sized bed, stretched tight across six curving wooden posts carved into spirals and stained a deep red. It was heaped with round pillows, a silky fur blanket folded into a triangle in one corner. On a bedside table was a small stoppered flask. She opened it. It smelt like some sort of alcohol, but creamy.
She walked to the barred window.
Outside, the moon was low across the water. She could hear waves crashing on the cliffs below. The wind smelt fresh and keen.
She felt hands on her shoulders. Thumbs pressed under her trapezius muscles, turned slow circles. A chin settled against the curve of her neck.
‘We’ve been sent to prison,’ said Alice.
Delphine fought the impulse to withdraw. Ever since they had encountered Reggie she had been feeling bruised, fearful in ways she had not let herself experience for years. She could not admit as much to Alice, of course. It was utterly stupid. Why was she so scared of letting herself feel? She had tried the other thing. The slow hunger str
ike. The locked room. The deep freeze.
Feeling as if she were dropping from an aeroplane, she tilted her head back. ‘What are you in for?’
‘I beat a man to death with a chair leg.’
Delphine tutted. ‘You’re supposed to say something titillating.’ A glow was spreading through her upper back.
‘You weren’t there to see it.’
‘Alice . . .’
‘Well, you name a sexy crime, then.’
Delphine rocked side to side as Alice’s hands moved down towards her waist. ‘Jewel heist.’
Alice blew a raspberry.
‘What?’ said Delphine.
‘So much planning.’ She began steering Delphine towards the bed. ‘My crime was wild . . . impulsive . . .’
‘It sounds deranged.’
‘Yes! I’m a monster!’
The huge hammock shook as Delphine fell onto it; the cushions bounced. She was laughing. Alice stood over her, undoing shirt buttons, her hair all messy.
If only they could hold onto this. If only they could dig their fingers into time and scoop it up and hoard it. Delphine felt herself standing outside the moment, terrified. This joy was temporary. It could not last. They could not last. The one she loved was mortal. They would age, they would sicken, they would die.
She wished dearly, intensely, that it were otherwise. What a fearful thing it is to be alive. What agony to be truly awake. And as they fell together, hot and free and breathless, she clung on, tight as she could.
‘Advocate Ashesh-Ro,’ said Patience, walking into the side room where they were eating a late breakfast. ‘Her chambers are opposite the spire.’ She slid a piece of paper across the table with a scribbled map and an address.
Delphine was eating a flatbread from the evening’s meal, and drinking cold tea. She was ravenous. Martha was sitting on the floor, sorting through various objects she had retrieved from the foot of the cliffs before sunrise.
‘Temperament?’ said Butler.
‘Hard worker. Model of integrity.’
‘Bribes are out, then.’