Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  He slid in behind her, exhaling a loud indignant rasp of breath in her ear. His voice followed, both sulky and wheedling. ‘You saw the fight? It is the way things are settled here in Fiction, in blood and violence. The ignoble creatures of the Darkling Coast do not bargain with words, if they consent to bargain at all.’

  Then there it was, the male body pressing insistently against her back, pretending support, but hoping for the other thing too. A sharp stab of irritation made Arden grimace. She pulled away from him and affected a smile of bewildered relief, as if his appearance baffled her utterly.

  ‘Coastmaster Justinian, I’d wondered where you’d gotten to.’

  ‘What happened? I said explicitly for you to remain close.’

  ‘I’d thought you were following me, when I said I was going to look at the market. Then I was lost in the crowd. I didn’t realize you were only instructing the old man, and not exactly helping him.’

  His eyes narrowed. Peacock he might have been, but Mr Justinian was not stupid. There was hardly a crowd on a Vigil market day. Arden had evaded him. No mere accident had made her slip away while his back was turned.

  ‘You do understand you may call me Vernon, now? We are not strangers to each other.’

  His hand slithered about her waist. The flinch was instinctive. Handsome he might have been, with his coif of pomaded hair and smooth chin, his height six foot by the old measure, grey eyes the colour of an institutional slate, perhaps some hint of a tan to his skin that a distant and more noble ancestor had begrudgingly gifted.

  But something in the Coastmaster’s features was small and bitter. Snivelling. As if the world owed him more than the sizable portion he’d been given, and he resented any other soul who merely received a fraction of his advantages.

  For a woman newly arrived at this town under the employ of the powerful Seamaster’s Guild, Coastmaster Justinian was the only thing close to an equal associate she had. Even though she was sanguis and he was not, they were both of them isolated aristocrats in a way, graduated from Northern technical academies, degree-holders beholden to the great service Guilds that linked the two countries into one fraternal parliament. It made a sort of sense that they should cultivate a professional partnership.

  The man’s constant touching, well, that was merely a Fiction trait, was it not? Certainly, the cold weather made even bare acquaintances huddle.

  ‘… now you have made a fool of yourself by running off unaccompanied.’ Mr Justinian continued to scold Arden while steering her towards the row of trestles that made up the last of the marketplace stalls. ‘Fortunately you must only contend with appearing slovenly in public.’

  She held the sharp tongue in her head that would have corrected him, I have seen more and bloodier dock fights than this one, and I’d prefer a hundred of them rather than one more day with you.

  These things she would have said, if her position in Vigil was not so dreadfully fraught and insecure. Though she had taken her orders dutifully, coming to Fiction had meant abandoning her secure signaller’s position in Clay Portside. If she lost this one, she would be effectively over-specialized and unemployed. This was a bad position for a sanguis to be in.

  So Arden kept her counsel, and stored the little nuisance in a mental glory box of accumulated offences.

  Mr Justinian steered her back towards the main street with its row of trestles while maintaining his lecture.

  ‘… the worst of the reprobates operate out of that establishment and upon these streets. See? This is why I have kept you in the safety of the Manse all this time, despite your obvious lack of gratitude. I have saved you from the worst outcomes that occur when men gather.’

  ‘They rather seemed more concerned with their own arrangements,’ Arden said, pulling away from him, and gladly so, for the Coastmaster’s hands were never content to rest upon her middle and had the unfortunate habit of crawling up towards the undersides of her bosom or the smallest part of her back. ‘My standing there was completely accidental.’

  ‘Oh, so you think yourself lucky for having escaped their attention?’ Mr Justinian said mulishly.

  ‘I do, in fact.’

  He picked at the ruined sleeve of her coat. ‘Go buy a replacement for your torn coat and charge it to the Guild. Then we can leave this place. But don’t wander.’

  I’ll wander off however I like, you insipid creature, Arden thought ferociously, her anger a physical pain that could not be soothed by her speaking the curse aloud, so remained inside her like a swallowed coal that did not cease to burn.

  Arden picked in despondent indecision at the mess of fisherman’s clothing with gloves too fine for a village on the edge of nowhere, until her arms smelled of fishwax and linseed oil.

  She had wasted so much time shut inside Mr Justinian’s decaying baronial estate, and at her first breath of liberty all she’d been allowed to see were street-fights and offal sellers. Despair – always so close and so suffocating – had fermented in her time under curfew. She had heard the domestic staff talk behind closed doors or under stairs. To them, Arden Beacon was not a professional guildswoman sent from the great ports of Clay Portside. She was merely produce fatted up for the eventuality of Mr Justinian’s bed.

  ‘A devil’s curse upon you, Mr Justinian,’ she said beneath her breath, tossing aside a scale-speckled pair of trousers, ‘and curse you, Mr Lindsay, for—’

  The bronze flash caught her by surprise, stopped at once the bleak train of her thoughts. What imagination was that, her seeing such a thing in all these stained linens and thistle-cottons?

  Arden dug in deep again and disinterred her find – an odd, slightly sheened garment – out from the knot of unwashed rags.

  She raised to the day a thing that in her hands made no sense.

  A coat. A stout, utilitarian coat cut for a female worker of hard ocean climates. Not too long in the hem though; no loose fabric to foul a hurried journey up stone steps in a high storm. A thing rightly made of old canvas and felted wool, worn on a body until it fell to pieces.

  But the fabric …

  Arden had to rub the collar with her fingers, make certain her earlier fall was not causing her to see wonders. There was only one creature alive that could supply such a hide. Leather as bright as an idol’s polished head and with a crust of luminescent cobalt-blue rings across the arms and yoke. Subtle grading to black when it hit the light just so.

  She turned the coat around and her breath caught. She had not expected the fabled kraken crucifix, the terrifying pattern of a sea-monster’s crest. By all the devils of sky and blood, you’d have found its likeness only in a Djenne prince’s wardrobe in Timbuktu, not a filthy rag pile at the edge of the world, and yet here it was; hidden away with thrice-mended broadcloth trousers and sweaters that were more knots than knits.

  Before Arden could inquire about the article, her benefactor already had his hand about the coat’s collar.

  ‘Let me put that aside for you,’ Mr Justinian said and, without asking, slid in between her and the table, ready to yank Arden’s prize away. ‘This is not suitable.’

  Despite her relatively short stature, and the dark, fragile air of over-breeding about her, Arden was no pushover. Growing up within the labyrinthine map of the capital city docks, one learned in the hardest of ways those streetwise traits anybody needed to survive. She saw the snatch coming in Mr Justinian’s beady eyes before he made his move, and quickly secured the coat within her strong lantern-turner’s hands.

  ‘No, Mr Justinian. I wish to buy it for myself.’

  ‘These wares are filthy. Look at them. Fish-guts and giblets. You are required to own a new coat to work the lighthouse, not cast-offs. As Coastmaster of Vigil I will have a fine plesiosaur leather coat made for you and sent from Clay Capital.’

  ‘I am not fulfilling your list by this purchase, Coastmaster Justinian. This coat is for my –’ she doubled down on her grip ‘– personal use.’

  ‘I’m telling you, you do not wan
t it!’

  He yanked harder, with enough force to pull Arden off her feet had the trestle corner not caught her thigh. She wedged herself deep into the splintering wood and hung on for grim life. Her ribcage groaned from the earlier trauma, sent sharp currents of pain through her chest, but still she held on.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Let … it …’

  ‘No, sir, no!’

  They struggled for a while in stalemate, before he gave in with a hissed curse.

  ‘Keep the disgusting thing if you must,’ he said, tossing his end of the coat down. Arden heard the snarl under his disdainful words. ‘It is only a murdered whore’s garment anyway.’

  2

  A whore clothed herself

  ‘A whore clothed herself in this rag,’ he concluded with caustic passion. ‘A bitch who lay down with an animal and got herself killed for it.’

  His curse words spoken, and with God having not struck him from the face of the earth for saying them, Mr Justinian shoved the trestle table once for emphasis, then stalked off across the town square towards the Black Rosette.

  Arden exhaled, prickling with both triumph and remorse. She had won something over Mr Justinian, but at what cost?

  The jumble seller, a stout grey-haired woman with the pale vulpine features of a Fictish native, remained cheery in the face of Arden’s dismissal.

  ‘You’ll get used to the muck and bother here, love. Once our Coastmaster gets a pint of rot into him, all will be back to normal.’

  ‘I must apologize,’ Arden said with forced brightness to the jumble seller. ‘Ours was not a disagreement we should have made you witness to.’

  ‘The young Baron is correct about the krakenskin, I’m afraid.’ The woman shook the violet threads of ragfish intestines off a pair of trousers that looked identical to the ones she herself wore. ‘The coat is a cast-off and completely unsuitable for any purpose.’

  ‘But it’s hardly used. I need a wet-coat to work the lighthouse. Only krakenskin could reliably stand all the weather that the ocean might throw at it.’

  ‘The lighthouse? You mean Jorgen’s lighthouse?’ The woman shifted her now-nervous attention over Arden’s shoulder. The horizon behind the town was mostly obscured by fog, but a good five or ten miles away as the crow flew the land curved into a hooked finger of stone. At the very tip of the promontory a granite tower stood erect as a broken thumb, a single grey digit topped with a weakly flashing light.

  ‘I am Arden Beacon, Lightmistress, Associate Guildswoman and Sanguis Ignis from Clay Portside, the traders’ city of Lyonne,’ Arden recited, still unfamiliar with her official titles. She held out her gloved hand. ‘I have come from Clay Portside in Lyonne to take over the lighthouse operation from my late uncle, Jorgen Beacon.’

  ‘A sanguinem?’ The woman frowned at the offered hand. ‘All the way out here?’

  ‘It’s all right,’ Arden said. ‘Touch doesn’t hurt me.’

  Still cautious, the woman shook Arden’s hand timidly, her eyes still on the pony-plantskin gloves, so fine compared to the ubiquitous bonefish leather of the coast. Was not the gloves she minded, but what lay under the gloves that gave the woman pause. The coins. The little metal spigots that were both symbol and necessity of her trade.

  Arden did not take offence. The reaction would be the same in Lyonne, among the commonfolk. The woman was gentle, and released her quickly.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t minding your hands, dear. I was surprised that Jorgen was replaced so quickly when we could have well put a distillate lamp in there and be done with all the sadness.’

  ‘The Guild is very protective of its properties. That flame has been kept alive by sanguis for centuries, and they’d not likely stop now. Anyhow, what is the price of the c—’

  ‘Now that you say it,’ the woman interrupted, ‘I see the resemblance to Jorgen in you, that Lyonne high breeding, so elegant.’ She simpered a little, trying to curry favour with a rich woman from the hot North country. A rich sanguis woman, possessed of esoteric skills. ‘I am Mrs Sage. My husband is both apothecary and doctor in our town centre.’ Mrs Sage waved towards a rude row of wood and brick that even in Clay Portside would have been considered little more than ballast shacks. ‘We were told of Lightmaster Beacon’s passing, and that a blood-talented relative would soon replace him from the North, but … We expected a brother.’

  ‘All my uncle’s brothers have permanent Lightmaster positions in Clay Portside,’ Arden explained, annoyed that she would now have to have this conversation, and justify her sex, again. In Lyonne there would have been no question of her capabilities – labour was labour, regardless of the source. ‘I was the only one not contracted to any gazetted navigation post, and the Guild requires a sanguinem to crew their stations, so …’ She shrugged. ‘The Seamaster’s Guild requested that the Portmaster of Lyonne provide someone of the talent to take his place. So here I am. Buying a coat—’

  ‘Just like that?’

  ‘Well, the Seamaster’s Guild does have to administrate a lot of coastline. I cannot shirk a duty.’

  Mrs Sage shook her head that Arden had not questioned such a direction. ‘It’s not right, a woman sent out to those rocks alone …’

  ‘The Portmaster of Clay is also my father,’ Arden said with a theatrical display of generous patience at Mrs Sage’s concern, so desperate was she to conclude this sale. ‘He understands more than anyone what my abilities are. He also understands that if there is not a Beacon at that lighthouse, it will go to a Lumiere or, God forbid, a Pharos, and,’ she stopped to give the most forced of smiles, ‘ignis families are very competitive for those positions offered us. It would break his heart for our family to lose another lighthouse post.’

  ‘Still. It pains me to sell you this coat, Lightmistress Beacon. I must refuse.’

  Arden saw the coat sliding away in the manner of a barely glimpsed dream. She clutched it tighter.

  ‘Then why have it for sale if you won’t accept my purchase?’

  Mrs Sage smoothed a sou’wester out upon its pile. Her red, chapped hands rubbed the linseedy surface of the rain hat. ‘I was hoping one of the ambergris merchants from Morningvale might buy it today, and take it far away from here. Sell this garment for a profit in a city where nobody knows its source. The young Baron was correct. The woman who owned this coat is dead.’

  Murdered whore. Coastmaster Justinian had delivered the words with such venom, meant to hurt with all the force of a slap. Why had it concerned a Coastmaster so much, this discard on a rag-trader’s table?

  ‘Poor girl. The wife of the brute who killed her,’ Mrs Sage continued. ‘When her corpse was at last recovered from the water over yonder, all that remained was her scalp of golden hair and this coat, washed up upon the harbour shore.’ She tilted her chin towards Vigil’s small, pebbled waterfront, lying a short way down the rotting boardwalk. ‘Perhaps it was merciful, after all those months she suffered in the bed of a monster, that death should claim her so she might not suffer any more. But still, what an end. Slaughtered, and your meat used as a fisherman’s bait.’

  Mrs Sage sounded so resignedly matter-of-fact at such an ignominious and unlikely method of dying that Arden couldn’t help but snort a laugh at her story.

  The woman glared at Arden with brittle offence. ‘How else do you think the fisherman calls a sea-devil up from the deep by its own volition, to harvest it for such a fine leather, eh?’

  And Arden saw then, the true price of the coat would be in her providing Mrs Sage an audience for a tale, a story that by the aggressive delight in her rheumy eyes was a particularly unpleasant one.

  Mrs Sage dipped in close to Arden. Her breath stank of fish chowder and dandelion root.

  ‘These abyssal monstrosities, the kraken, the maris anguis and monstrom mare, they can only be compelled to surface by human meat. The fresher the better. They are drawn by gross desires and mutilations. There’s only so much of a slaughterman’s own body he can give. A toe, a finger, a slice o
f tongue or a testicle, hmm?’ Mrs Sage sucked her lined lips in thought, imagining the kind of man that would take a blade to himself for his profession. ‘An eye, a hand, a penis most probably, for in what world would anyone fornicate in consent with such an unholy creature as a man who feeds himself in fragments to the sea?’

  ‘I don’t—’

  ‘Yes, was him that killed his poor young wife for profit, slice by agonizing slice, and the coat made to clothe her, and remind her just what her sacrifice brought. What other worth was she to him? He had not the tool with which to fuck, and from that lamentable position her life was foreshortened indeed.’

  Arden recoiled, taken aback by the salacious details of Mrs Sage’s story. ‘Ah, all right then, thank you for the, um … providential lesson.’

  ‘Was no lesson. Was caution, Lightmistress.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Was warning.’

  Having exhausted her social resilience, Arden hurriedly dug into her purse and took out every note inside it, a wad of Lyonne cotton-paper bills that were not legal tender in Fiction, but all she had. Shoved them at Mrs Sage.

  ‘Here, here, take this money. I’ll make sure I give this coat a proper new life.’

  Mrs Sage smiled and made motions of pious refusal, then took the money anyway. Her tongue pushed through the gaps in her teeth. Both pity and triumph she showed, as she made her announcement.

  ‘But you are still in the old life, Lightmistress. T’was for that reason I hoped you’d be male. If you are bound for the old lighthouse, then see that murderous hybrid of man and monster over there?’

  Mrs Sage pointed past the grey haggle-hordes of the market plaza. Beyond the ice-baskets, one figure walked apart from the fishermen, shrugging into the same copper-black-coloured garment that Arden held in her hand. The man from the tavern fight. The demon. The victor.

  Next to him, a handcart without a horse. Upon it was laden the raw, bleeding tail of a leviathan.