Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  ‘I am.’

  ‘I shan’t have to tell you all the local histories then. Nearly twenty years of them I’ve learned. No doubt every cock-eyed Billie-and-Bob has fallen over each other to breathlessly fill you in about the tale of poor Mrs Riven and her awful comeuppance.’ The ivory stem clicked against her teeth as she spoke, and Arden once again was amazed at the Harbourmistress having been here for so long. She could have stepped off a Clay City boat yesterday. ‘Frankly, the people in this country can be disgusting.’

  Arden picked up a loose end of rope dangling from an arterial-blooded bow. As she coiled it, she asked as casually as she could, ‘You’ve been here twenty years. Did you ever meet Mrs Riven yourself?’

  ‘I did,’ the Harbourmistress said. ‘Knew her well.’ She chewed on the pipe, and a long moment of appraisal followed, as she decided what to tell Arden, and what to leave out. ‘Watched her as a child from this very post, coming down here among the fishing boats and yearning out towards the sea. Her father was not a marine-affiliated gentleman, but the girl … something was in her. The tide, perhaps. All the fishermen were besotted with their little queen, brought her whelk shells and sea-dollars, mermaid teeth on a string. She would sing them a song for a penny.’

  ‘Sounds like a bit of a sea-sprite, then.’ Arden flung the wrapped coil into the boat. ‘Very romantic.’

  ‘Oh, no romance there, not our Bellis. Cunning little thing, she was. Never missed a trick. A little gang of orphans and illegitimates used to run riot through the village then as they do now, and Bellis Harrow was their ringleader. Their tiny Genghis Khan, but certainly a benevolent one.’ The chewing stopped. ‘Then she grew up. Things are different for women around these parts, although one cannot say she didn’t fight harder than most to keep from being crushed by the conditions of femininity.’

  Arden blinked at the sudden fellow feeling, a rush of warmth to her skin. ‘I know what that is like,’ she said with deep sincerity. ‘I’ve fought those battles myself. I still wear the scars on my heart.’

  The Harbourmistress remained aloof, but her countenance gentled.

  ‘You take care out there now, Lightmistress. There’s more powers and prejudices in these sainted waters than you’ll hear about in your city towers. Not all the monsters have twelve arms and live in the sea. Some have two legs; you can be sure of it.’

  There followed from her a brief instruction on how messages would pass from lighthouse to harbour. Fiction had no reliable telegraph radio infrastructure, nor cable out to the promontory. Arden would need to use a mirror heliograph each morning on the tenth hour, and each evening on the third. Emergency messages to flash on the hour, if required, but anything less than the tower having fallen over was not an emergency, so she was not to bother Mx Modhi with it.

  How different from the constant flurry of communication in the signal house! Arden agreed to every instruction the Harbourmistress made, and realized she would need to relearn the mirror code she had forgotten a decade ago.

  The Harbourmistress returned to her scanning of the ocean, and Arden went to her uncle’s boat, wondering if she should have asked more about her Riven neighbour. Nobody was quite telling the same story. Was it fey and vulnerable Bellis Riven, anchored in a terrible state of marital imprisonment, or was it fighting Bellis Riven, the tough little girl who could make coarse fishermen do her bidding with just a song?

  Was there a true story at all?

  In contrast to her father, Jorgen Beacon had not been a tall fellow, so he had made the rudder and sail adjustments to suit his height. Conveniently they suited Arden as well. Fine Breeze had a small cabin for sheltering in, and batten sails that were cut in a square style. The forward sail was the largest, with a smaller sail behind the rudder.

  The waves were not so rough that morning, so after Arden familiarized herself with the craft, she unfurled the mainsail and put Vigil behind her.

  The cold bay held as much of a sparkle as the climate would ever allow, and the promontory, as always, was barely visible in the constant mist. Yet each slosh and roll took the days of strain and worry away. Arden had not entirely grasped how tense she had held herself, until the moment she tied off the rigging and relaxed at the rudder. A brisk wind filled the canvas, and she manoeuvred Fine Breeze out into the open water for her first proper, clear view of Fiction’s last sanguis lighthouse. Her heart skipped a beat, and Arden smiled. There it was, the sense of blood, powerful as homesickness and yearning. Her hands tingled in anticipation.

  Eyes upon the promontory spotted Arden long before she made it to the pier.

  As the boat danced close to the weatherworn bollards of the tiny sheltered inlet the familiar figure of another Portside guildsman appeared. Friendly Mr Harris from the nomadic Sea Guilds, a man round and bushy with his great blond beard and shipwright’s shoulders that could seat both child and full-grown woman on each. He kept his hair short, a custom of the fisherfolk here. Far better to have it under a waxed woollen cap rather than getting caught in all the sea-spray, though Arden suspected hair-locks often ended in the water in superstition before a good catch. There was a parallel to the sanguis giving of blood, though anyone around here would have argued bitterly that it was not the same thing at all.

  ‘Hoy!’ he cried out, waving an arm as thick as a ham. ‘Hoy, Lightmistress!’

  ‘Hoy,’ she shouted in delight. ‘You have turned wild since I saw you last in Clay, Mr Harris!’

  ‘We have merely moved up in the world, you and myself both! I’ll throw a rope, let me tie you off.’

  The journey of a month was ended. At last she saw her lighthouse up close. It stood at the end of a long, thin natural mole of basalt blocks, squat and wide rather than the tremendously high spire of the Clay Mouth. Whitewash might have daubed the granite once, but neglect had scored the paint down to bare stone, leaving only a thin crust on the lee side. Some of the glass panes in the lantern room were broken. Not much of an attempt had been made to fix the missing panes other than a ragged piece of wood hoarding, to stop the flame from blowing out. A weathercock at the very top leaned at a forlorn angle.

  Desolation shrouded the tower. Mr Justinian had been telling the truth about its decay, at least.

  Mr Harris lumbered to the end of the pier and tossed out a rope hitch that had to weigh as much as she did. Once she made Fine Breeze fast, he reached down and pulled her out with a mighty yank.

  ‘I am glad to see a friendly face!’ she said breathlessly. ‘And to find the coast hasn’t taken the might from you.’

  ‘Little Ardie!’ He put her back down onto the pier, his own red cheeks growing redder as he blushed furiously at forgetting his manners. ‘I’m sorry, you must be properly called Madam Lightmistress now.’ He took off his battered fisherman’s hat and gave a quick bow.

  ‘I’m still getting used to the name too, Gerard.’

  ‘Ah, but you’re all grown up. You’ll need some meat on those bones of yours, girl. The wind would blow you away.’

  Arden waved him off good-naturedly. She could not call herself slender, not from all the hard work on the wharves to fill her out. No wasp-waist for her, not if you wanted the strength to haul a Fresnel element up a hundred feet of lighthouse stairs.

  ‘Don’t you worry, I’m strong enough.’

  ‘I’m sure you are.’ He stood back to measure her with his eye. ‘A fine coat you’re wearing.’

  ‘It’s real krakenskin, before you ask, Mr Harris.’

  ‘I noted that. How did you manage to afford such clothing? Did your father give you your inheritance early, and throw into the bargain that of the rest of the Beacon brothers?’

  ‘Hardly,’ she said fondly, even though the mention of her father made her wince with regret. ‘I bought it from a rag-trader’s table. Apparently, it belonged to a dead woman, as everyone is so keen to remind me.’ Arden paused and added, ‘The wife of a brutal murderer, apparently.’

  Mr Harris’ face clouded. ‘Ah, you mean Mr Riven.’<
br />
  ‘Yes. The Coastmaster of Vigil had certain other titles for him, though.’

  ‘I think most people take care not to mention them aloud. He has a habit of appearing when people speak his name.’

  Mr Harris pointed down the ridge. A mile away, three large wooden buildings crabbed the rocky beach as barnacles might cling to rock. They were as large as the workhouses back in Clay Portside, almost wharf-sized. A saltwater lichen frowsed off the grey iron roof. They had been there for a long time and suffered much the same aura of neglect as her lighthouse.

  Her sharp eyes caught gulls and cormorants gathered on one corner of the compound, a congregation of devil birds drawn by the promise of a feed.

  ‘Mr Riven lives in those buildings yonder. Does his business on the shore. Once quite an industry in the slaughter of sea-monsters here in Vigil. Serpents. Leviathans. Krakens when they could be called up. A whole family of butchers, I heard, blood-tied to the ocean, but this coast can be hungry, and the political machinations of men hungrier still, so now only one Riven remains.’

  The Mr Justinian in her memory hissed, ’twas he that killed his family.

  ‘Blood-tied? You mean like sanguis talent?’

  ‘Not quite, Ardie. Perhaps an earlier, more ah … fundamental version of the trait, eh? The talent first appeared in this country, remember. Occasionally a sanguis jumps out of the gene pool, though if they have any sense they keep quiet about it and don’t let the Lions know.’

  ‘Has Mr Riven caused you much trouble out here?’

  Mr Harris shook his head. ‘We’ve had no need for business. He goes his way, and I mine. Whether Jorgen had dealings with Mr Riven previously, that trouble lay between themselves. I would say it’s hard to avoid the man if you were here any longer than a month.’

  She must have made a face, for he continued, ‘He won’t be a problem Ardie. Come now, there’s talk in town about you, but these towns would talk if a fellow wore the wrong clothes on a Sunday.’

  Mr Harris had kept the tower for six weeks, not long enough to attract a maintenance stipend. There would have been next to nothing he could have done to fix the place up. The small lower floor might have had the potential for cosiness, had not the walls been so slimed with sea-damp. Anything resembling home-comforts had been knocked together from desultory driftwood scaffolding. The rude bed might have suited Mr Harris, a man used to sleeping out in the open on a wharf, but for a Guildswoman Lightmistress it seemed little better than the floor. The internal stairs were constructed – if one could consider a spiral of protrusions as crooked as a brawler’s teeth a construction – from keystones in the wall. The banisters needed replacing, else Arden could foresee the very real outcome of falling to her death.

  On reaching the topmost lantern house, the vastness of the promontory view struck Arden like a bell-hammer. The sea surrounded them in a smothering slab of grey, and the thunderclouds might have been the white-rimed backs of behemoths, fallen in a heavenly grave.

  Behind her, the ruins scattered along the coast. Old monks and hermits had first built impractical monasteries upon this shore, hoping to win the unsophisticated inhabitants of Fiction to the church and to save their immortal souls. Perhaps the stone and glass had stood for a generation, maybe ten, but only rubble remained, slowly dissolving back into the earth.

  From up high she observed the one remaining cathedral wall, one that had held a stained-glass rose window, now only a perfect empty circle of mortar and rock. The window stared out to sea with a single, sightless eye.

  Old magic here, she thought. Old superstitions. The ancient saints were canny enough not to replace the cold abyssal gods of the sea-folk with the warm, dignified artifices of their own religions. She wondered if her cousin Stefan had grown into his spirituality among these old stones, if he’d felt the Almighty murmur in the drowned lands below the wind and waves and knew that he belonged to a power greater than that of his name, and blood.

  Then she inspected the perpetual lamp with growing concern.

  The ratio of blood was important to the chemical articulations within a sanguine lantern. A typical lamp required fuel to burn, the way metal required force to bend, force to control the weather, force to hold the vapour inside a container to give weight and mass and velocity. All things that were finite, exhaustible, subject to the grinding momentum of God’s creation. What Arden had, what all sanguinem had, was a catalyst within her veins that turned mass and force in upon itself so that energy in an element (for her, fire), could be sustained and intensified beyond what should be possible.

  The pain and danger of blood letting was nature’s warning – lest the wielder grow too arrogant in their contortion of the natural order.

  Arden remembered an Academy tutor drawing a broad circle with her finger over her heart while explaining. Sanguis blood was an alchemical ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail. You can change the physical property of a thing. A regenerative cycle outside of time. But eventually entropy sets in. The cycle weakens. The iron remembers it is strong, and becomes hard. The flame remembers it needs to burn fuel, finds none, and extinguishes. So something must make it right. A gifting, an exchange. Blood we use, but it was not always so. In older, less enlightened days, entire bodies would be the sacrament that the cycle of labour required …

  Arden frowned, both piqued by the memory and the sense that something was very wrong with Jorgen’s orphaned light. In the daytime, the flame should still have burned as bright as a summer’s morning, but it had the cast of a midwinter afternoon. The offering funnel, through which Jorgen would have made his blood-tithe each week, was filthy. Dried blood crusted the entrance until barely a channel remained for the offering to run through.

  Unthinkingly, Arden thumbed the curve of her arm. As she had shown the guest the previous night, dozens of small scars laddered there. When Arden maintained her small signal light upon the Parrot Wharf, the compact lantern’s cold flame had required only a smear of blood, once a week, to stay bright. Grommets had been unnecessary in her previous life. But a lighthouse keeper needed to give so much more blood than a lamp-turning signaller did, to maintain the ratio of instruction, to make those sacrifices. The scar tissue could cause her hands permanent damage, if not for a coin to protect the skin.

  Mr Harris joined her at the top of the stairs, puffing and panting. He’d never been tested for talent, but like any associate labour guildsman he had familiarity with the blood tithing of the docks. She did not have to hide the trade tools from him.

  ‘Do you know why my uncle died, Mr Harris?’

  ‘Heartbreak, Lightmistress. Plain and simple heartbreak.’

  ‘Maybe the motivation, but by what mechanism? We cannot easily take our lives.’

  ‘Not take, but certainly neglect.’ Mr Harris said evasively, not quite looking at Arden. ‘Anyone with implanted silver in their skin must regularly return. Return to Clay annually and have them cleaned, replaced. You think the Lyonne Order would permit their sanguineous guildsmen to live in freedom so easily?’

  She tucked her hands under her arms, feigning a chill from an open window. ‘It seems odd, that he should not return, or at least, find an illegal phlebotomist to take the grommets out.’

  Those great shoulders of Mr Harris gave a slow shrug. ‘After Stefan died – was killed, if you ask certain people – Jorgen stopped going back to Clay. No reason to, in his mind. Estranged from his family, his son lost to bad dealings. When an infection set into his hands, the Guild sent me to see what was going on. By the time I arrived, the sepsis had set in. Made him deathly ill, his blood poisoned. I could not convince him to go home. He did not last much longer after that.’

  Arden moved through to Jorgen’s possessions, trying to marry these crude items, this filthy degradation, with the gentle man in her memory. The knife he’d used to cut away the layer of callused skin from his decaying coins lay encrusted upon a similarly disgusting table. A whetstone nearby explained why the blade had a shapeless edge, th
e metal pared down paper-thin.

  ‘Could you not have imposed upon him some penicillium, and some powdered kraken beak Mr Harris? Of all the places, those medicines would be most available here.’

  ‘Oh, I tried. But it was too late, and the coins belong to the Order, the way the sanguineous do. Only Order-sanctioned phlebotomists can be relied upon to take them out. He would have had to go out to the Sainted Isles to find himself a man who could remove such invasiveness.’ Mr Harris tilted his head towards the horizon, straight as a carpenter’s plumb. ‘People go to the Isles to die, Mx. Beacon. They don’t often come back.’

  ‘Thank you for telling me this, Gerry. I shall endeavour to have my coins removed when I finish here and return to Lyonne. A puppet string is one thing, but they shall not put a leash on me. I shall not turn into my uncle. At least … at least unlike him I have nobody to lose.’

  The Clayman’s face became so dour, he might have been dipped in shadow. He motioned her to silence. The walls could be listening. Those bodiless spirits of fate and irony in the old stones were deeply aligned to secrets. They inflicted their own bad luck.

  Then quieter, ‘Your cousin the Rector was a witness to all that Mr Riven did. All of it. Everything. Took the confessions of both man and wife. Knew secrets in the confessional terrible enough that he would face church censure by testifying in the magistrate’s court.’

  The wave-bellows echoed through the tower. Words spoken in the confession box were sacred. For a priest to bring such testimony into the open …

  ‘Stefan was going to testify against Mr Riven?’

  Mr Harris continued solemnly. ‘He was the prosecution’s only reliable witness and Mr Riven killed him. Look, Jorgen didn’t take it lying down. Had it in mind that he would have Mr Riven experience the same fate. If not by an accident, then by some misfortune. He joined forces with Mr Harrow, put aside the feud the men had shared previously. Did the fellow some real damage, but only enough to rile him up, not blunt his teeth.’

  ‘I have had the misfortune to meet Mr Harrow. Surely Mr Riven would have left this place, if he knew the townsfolk hated him so much.’