Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  Arden did not begrudge the farmers their caution around her. In Fiction, more so than in Lyonne even, there were bad stories of northern industries casting out a thousand workers after company had hired a lone bloodworker.

  The one man who could replace a thousand men is dangerous to you.

  How could they not be guarded against her and her talents when they see the lich-ships on the horizon, or the automatic refineries and see themselves replaced and redundant? Great powers had walked the earth in the time of their legends but it had not stopped the tide of industry. It may not have been by pure neglect that the Fiction folk had abandoned the power that ran in their veins.

  The day matured and chased away the rainclouds.

  Mr Quill turned the car towards the shore again, and that long, elegant spit that would lead back to her lighthouse.

  Arden folded back the roof and stood up at seeing the Riven factory ruins crabbing to the rocky cliffs in a precarious embrace. She had yet to view the compound from this angle, crooked upon the old foundations of Neolithic ruins.

  ‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Stop here.’

  ‘Are you certain?’ Mr Quill slowed to a crawl but did not apply the brake. ‘This is the Riven ground.’

  ‘I’m not going to waste a single night here worrying about what my neighbour might be up to,’ Arden said. ‘I need to speak to him. You can stay with the car.’

  Mr Quill was in no way in agreement, but he pulled the vehicle over to a roadside shoulder.

  ‘This part of the promontory is frequently covered by winter surge,’ he warned her. ‘It will only be you and him on the island for great stretches of time.’

  ‘Then it is fortunate I’m only here until autumn’s end.’ She held up her gloves and made a face at them. ‘My coins won’t hold within my hands much longer than that. They’ll need replacing.’

  ‘Still. I have a powder-pistol in the trunk. It’s not much but …’

  ‘If I am not back on the hour, then you may commence my rescue.’

  She left Mr Quill to fret in the car and gladly got out, her legs cramping and stiff from the hours bracing against the rough terrain. The road had overgrown with dandelion and salt-sedge, but under her boots she saw plaques of tar and stone, the remnants of a fairly civilized road.

  Though it crossed her mind to leave the krakenskin coat with the rest of her belongings, another stubborn instinct had her wear the coat instead. Best they quarrel about this now, rather than later, when she would not have a man with a powder-pistol and a car waiting in the wings.

  Now that she could make her up-close observations, Arden noted how many of the factory houses visible from the lighthouse grounds had fallen into disrepair. The environment had gnawed and savaged the metal as a shark might a corpse, reducing it to warped rust and wood splinters. Despite her coat’s warmth, Arden wrapped her arms around her. An odd caul of melancholy draped over this place. Great leviathans of the deep had been processed on these shores, their meat harvested, their ambergris and oil packed into barrels, their skins tanned to leather. How odd that such an important industry be reduced to a lone man and his cart?

  The squally wind tore and jostled about her. Mr Riven’s black wood boat had since parked below his factory ports, louring and waiting.

  I will be strong, she decided. I will be strong. So, the man had merely attempted to run her down with his boat like a coward. Let him be a coward now to her face. She had experienced worse manner of trials. A scar upon her throat remained from when a hapless dockside mutineer once took her as a hostage before taking his own life. She had worked the docks during the False Unionist war, the War of the Wharves, and the Battle of the Tea Leaves. She had seen the worst of people.

  At the end of a double-rutted track, the processing compound emerged from the scrub in fits and starts of abandoned engineering, gears and old machines. If any paint had ever graced the processing bunkers and the icehouses, the sea-wind had scoured it away in a century of furious assault. Some telegraph poles leaned in the wind, their wires stripped away by time and storm.

  A lone insulated cable flapped against a tilting trunk and left a dissonant image that made Arden ponder. If the Riven clan were savages fit only to play with knives, why would they have such technology as telegraphs and electricity?

  She continued through the grounds, found stables for at least ten heavy horses. A printing press turning to rust, with three fonts of lead type crystallizing in their cases. The foundations of a fireplace of the massive kind that heats a great hall. Pipes and spigots, an aqueduct for grey water so it would not contaminate the small freshwater streams. Easily fifty people could have lived and worked here with the home comforts one could expect in a well-serviced Lyonnian town. And a dozen more would have been required to provide support services. The administration of an electrical and communications system by itself would have employed at least four, five trained workers.

  This was no savage shore. This was an industry, ceased abruptly and without reason.

  She passed a sad patch of dirt, the only thing that looked halfway cared for in recent years, and seven wooden crosses, scored and faded by storm.

  Then she caught the smell of krakenhides.

  A strange quirk of cryptozoology made the rot and decay of animals despised by God and embraced by the devil so different in their decomposition. The sweet smell reminded Arden of a heavy Koutoubian spice. She’d heard tell of the learned sultans of the desert kingdoms using krakenmusk to bring a garden to the senses while their eyes viewed only sand and ancient books. A Djenne mathematician might burn the oil in incense, to aid her mental acuity. Arden had smelled kraken perfume oftentimes on the collar of a sharply suited Khanate merchant as he passed by with a trolley of legal agreement documents.

  But those memories belonged to her bustling trader’s home, not a desolate hamlet on the coldest end of the Darkling Coast.

  ‘Hello? Mr Riven?’

  Nobody answered. The smell of the curing hides wafted stronger here. Somebody was nearby, for nobody left their catch unattended to either elements or seabirds. A ragged pair of cormorants sat on the roof of a nearby ruin, their attention longingly fixed on the source of the smell.

  She walked past a pile of massive cuttlefish bones, each one as big as her torso. The tusks of a short-necked saurian made an unusual entry passage. Her meanderings took her by one of the few houses left standing, a country-style lodge decorated in the gingerbread-style that only a woman of Vigil could have appreciated.

  If the lodge had made it through the disaster that claimed the rest of the compound, the years were already taking their toll. The decorative architraves and wind-icons showed the ragged edges of warp and decay. Whoever had built their home here and given the stark place such a gentle touch had long vacated it. Already the garden beds were piles of dirt, any hope of flowers long gone.

  She had already made up her mind about what the lodge would look like inside. Rotted floorboards, walls leaking horsehair insulation. A bare, stained mattress would be on the floor where a man might sleep, if he slept at all.

  Beyond the house lay the vats and curing tables for krakenskin, shining bright brass in the dull day.

  Then at last she saw Mr Riven.

  He had not altered since the day when she had first lain eyes upon him. If she were pressed to admit it, then he was more appalling than before. A male, shirtless figure, almost entirely encrusted in dirt, trudging up the pier. A heavy object lay floppy in his arms, a slimy thing as big as a small woman. As she watched, he dumped it upon the curing table. A coiled rope and flabby sack followed. Plesiosaur foetus with the placenta still attached, torn viciously from its mother’s womb. Though they were reptilian by family, plesiosaur were warm-blooded and viviparous, same as mammals. They birthed live, had a maternal sense. Arden ached at seeing the baby’s wretched limpness, would have cried out if she could.

  Mr Riven was every bit the monster Mr Justinian proclaimed him. Dried plaques of blood smeared him fr
om beard to bare belly. His body echoed the decay of his compound, flesh harrowed and scarred by sea and storm. A recent trauma had made a mutilation of his face, swelling eyes into blue puffs, his lip split, jaw disfigured under his facial hair.

  She forced down her odium and approached the wicked scene.

  ‘Excuse me, sir?’

  He ignored Arden at first, too busy arranging the dead foetus lengthways on the table, more gently than one would expect given the violence he must have used to procure the poor thing. Did not glance up, and that gladdened her, for she did not have to witness his grotesque face any more than she needed to.

  At last he spoke.

  ‘What do you want?’

  No asking her name, no giving of his own. No acknowledgement that she were stranger or enemy or friend. She would not have been surprised if he spoke in animal grunts.

  ‘I am Arden Beacon from Clay Portside and now Vigil,’ she said, infuriated by the tremble in her voice. Why should she be so distracted by his filthy nakedness, the way an Old Master might have painted him in a hellscape triptych, minus the trident and the pale sinner for poking?

  ‘I am the Lighthouse—’

  ‘I know who you are.’ He fixed her then with those ferocious blue eyes, blue like the horizon that mocks the castaway sailor. ‘You are Jorgen’s niece, and you are not welcome here.’

  ‘What business my uncle had with you, that was his own,’ Arden said, light-headed with revulsion. ‘I came to ask that whatever bad blood you two had with each other, stays in the grave. I do not intend to bother you, merely conduct my lighthouse business.’

  ‘Then go conduct your business. I will not interfere, if you give me the same respect.’

  She stood for a moment, strangely unfulfilled, having expected more, and less from him. Yelling and curses she could have borne. But not this quiet horror.

  ‘Thank you.’ She turned to leave, and paused. ‘It has not escaped your notice, sir, that I am wearing this coat. I bought it off a jumble seller in town. I need this coat to work the flame during a storm. I want to wear it with your blessing.’

  ‘You don’t need my blessing.’

  ‘But it is your wife’s coat. That is what people tell me.’

  ‘My wife is dead. Wear whatever you want. Just don’t come back here again.’

  He returned to the table, and his terrible face stared at the plesiosaur’s murdered child as if it had materialized, like an awful magic trick, in front of him.

  8

  Mr Quill was dreadfully curious

  Mr Quill was dreadfully curious, but far too polite to pry. He had seen enough to presume, from Arden rushing back to the automobile before climbing inside and taking several gulping dry sobs, to her wiping her eyes with a handkerchief and saying, ‘Let’s leave this place. I have seen enough.’

  They drove the last mile in silence, and he watched her twist the handkerchief to knots within the tangle of her fingers.

  Her composure had not quite returned by the time they reached the lighthouse, and when she saw Mr Harris she hugged him for longer than was necessary to hug a friend.

  ‘Oof, Ardie, what is that in aid of?’

  ‘I’m a touch vulnerable today, that’s all. And dismayed by all men. Except you. And Mr Quill of course, who remains a delightful travelling companion.’

  She blew her nose on her handkerchief and the tears prickled her eyes again, but every time she tried to think about something else, the poor tiny puppy-face of the foetus came back to her, a little animal that would only know the cold butcher’s table and never its mother.

  ‘And I shall refuse to eat meat ever again.’

  ‘Ah, all right, then. Now if you have finished with your discussions on pitiful humankind, come and meet your new assistant. She’s from Lyonne originally but has since been working in—’

  ‘Harbinger Bay. With the Lightkeeper there. Morningvale before that.’

  Arden stood back cautiously as Mr Harris introduced a young, strong-boned woman as Miss Chalice Quarry, the Lightkeeper’s assistant. ‘Miss’ and not ‘Mx’ of course – for she lacked the higher guild degrees for that title. Miss Quarry, pale freckled skin and auburn plaits dusted with sea-salt, had a sturdiness to her frame that made her what the signallers called a stormbride, for only the stoutest among them could survive the hard weather and relight an extinguished lamp or tie a giant mooring howser after it has snapped at the pier. Such folk were married to the storm, their equal. She wore a Guild-associate coin on a chain about her neck, a chunky pewter triangle.

  After Mr Quill had unpacked Arden’s belongings, he left with Mr Harris, and Arden, quite unexpectedly, had to share her surroundings with a stranger. This assistant would not always be in Arden’s company, but she would be around enough that if they did not get along, the next few months would be miserable indeed.

  They sized each other up with the wariness of fighters in a wharf-house pit-ring. Arden decided this red-haired Chalice Quarry suffered no nonsense. In their day together she had quickly made a home among the rocks and scrub of the promontory and the gruff company of Mr Harris. The arrival of an actual sanguis Lightkeeper, and a startlingly young one at that, would not have been altogether welcome.

  ‘Um, are your hours here long, Miss Quarry?’ Arden asked as politely as she could.

  ‘Most days I will be of help,’ Chalice said. ‘Other days David Modhi ferries me by boat from Vigil. I have a small business in town, to keep my mind off this desolate place. Oh, and before our greetings become too long in the tooth, you shall call me Chalice and I shall call you Arden. There are no standards to uphold here except expedience.’

  ‘Of course, Miss … I mean, Chalice. Mr Harris said you toured Harbinger Bay. That’s a hard inlet. Are you from Clay Portside?’

  ‘No. My hometown is Shinlock, far west of Clay Riverina. I trained in Portside for a while. T’was Mr Harris who hired me to work at Morningvale, so I did not mind joining him here when they made him an interim keeper.’

  The woman picked up Arden’s entire shipping trunk as casually as she might have hefted a linen basket, set it inside the tower’s ground floor with an effortless grunt. ‘David Modhi will come by tomorrow. We’ll sail back and retrieve your boat.’

  ‘That would be appreciated, but perhaps he could do that today.’

  ‘Not with this place a pigsty and a squall coming. By the time we’re finished here it will be almost dark.’

  ‘Finished?’

  ‘Cleaning, of course. Come now. Hop to it.’

  A little flustered at being bossed around in her own signal post, Arden took off her coat, rolled up her sleeves, and followed Chalice’s lead. They got a fire started in an iron coal-pit outside, and Chalice unearthed a large rusted kettle from a mound of rubbish. A prior attack on the lighthouse’s poor condition by herself and Mr Harris had unearthed several treasures. A mercury barometer, a storm glass, a radio-electrograph that inscribed approaching objects with a needle on carbon paper. She hauled some seawater up from a blowhole, and boiled it with an oily soap.

  Arden stared with dismay at the salt-encrusted remnants of a valve-telegraph, the earpiece now a home to a family of tiny spiders. A ticker tape rained a miserable confetti on the floor. She imagined composing a letter in her mind to her friends, and having to pretend everything fine and dandy, when it completely was not.

  ‘How am I meant to report the conditions if none of the communications are working?’

  Chalice hauled open a large journal, the leaves a sturdy drab green. Mr Harris’ penmanship had always been atrocious, and Arden noticed he’d missed a few entries. Of Jorgen Beacon’s entries, there were none.

  ‘You’ll need to make the weather observations by hand, four during the day, two at night. I will post them weekly, on a Sunday, to the Meteorological Society,’ Chalice said. ‘I will maintain the barometers, and we shall share the work of collecting the measurements from both bays. Any storm or adverse conditions, one of us must immediately
take a boat across to Vigil and have Mr Harrow send a telegraph to the Garfish Point station.’

  Arden nodded, trying to keep the dismay from her face. ‘I have met Mr Harrow.’

  ‘I can do that errand if you like,’ Chalice said, kindly now. ‘If you prefer to watch your light.’

  At least one duty was hers alone. ‘Yes, I’d feel better, staying close to my lantern.’

  So, into the kettle went all Uncle Jorgen’s implements of his talent. His knives and bloodletting equipment, the dishes and vials, the collectors and extractors and refiners.

  They stood about the fire and watched the water bubble. The old clots floated up with the detergent.

  ‘Well,’ Arden said at last. ‘This is all very rustic.’

  Chalice agitated the pot with a paddle, sent some miserly soap bubbles skidding across the surface.

  ‘We cannot waste the water here on the peninsula. There is a spring, but it is barely enough for drinking and bathing, and besides, the rain is mostly sea-spray. The streams are further down the promontory, near the pilgrim ruins. Their water must be carted by hand.’ Chalice continued to stir the kettle until the blood tools lost their noxious crust.

  ‘There,’ she said after a few minutes. ‘You can use them now.’

  ‘You’re familiar with bloodworking?’

  Surprisingly, Chalice pointed to an old scar upon her hand. ‘Went to a testmoot on my tenth birthday. Shinlock fell under the auspices of Clay Capital despite the distance between the town and the city, so of course we all had to go and get ourselves tested.’

  ‘Did you test positive for a talent?’ Arden blurted out, and instantly regretted it. Of course the woman hadn’t tested positive. Children with talent were given stipends and scholarships, went to school in Clay Capital. The best of them stayed on, were utilized for their precious labour. The rest went home, often subtly neutered so they might not sully their family lines further.