Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  Then inside, to the silence.

  The woman, once she was let go, fell to the floor in a puddle of seawater and spume. Arden felt nauseous from despair. At once she had seen that the soggy group were all Clay Hillsiders from the villages in the country of Lyonne, simple folk who had no sanguis endowments and no knowledge of the water except for the expanse of Clay Portside’s distant Mouth. From what little she had seen of their boat, it had most likely been assembled in an aqueduct, a house-barge pulled by Clydesdale horses in summer.

  Chalice, in her tough Shinlock way, went to work immediately, stoking the brazier with coal until it burned insolently against the cold. The kettle already rocked with boiling water. For the first time, Arden allowed some gratitude for Mr Justinian and his long list of equipment. On the list had been a stack of ten woollen blankets, more than she would ever need. Now, faced with these dripping strangers, the blankets became very handy. She ordered them to strip so she could hang their clothes to dry on a length of oil rope. The clothes, even after a washing in the salt, were stained and musty. The poverty of these poor folk clung to them like ship-salvager’s pitch.

  At a loss of something authoritarian to do, the patriarch of the family handed out dented cups of tea to the three shivering others before accepting one for himself.

  ‘Thank you,’ he said to Arden and Chalice at last. He fell into the rote of greetings. His face was waxen with the effort it took to remain stoic. ‘My name is Leyland Tallwater, this is my son Gregor, his wife Helena, and her brother Sean Ironcup.’ He frowned, and added in a way that Arden found disrespectful, ‘Sean is a cripple. He cannot use his body properly.’

  The one called Sean affected nonchalance through his shivering, but she could tell by his young face that the words cut him to the quick.

  ‘You are Hillsiders?’ Arden asked. ‘From outer Clay?’

  ‘In the lands of the plateau. We are farmers.’ Leyland Tallwater bent his head to tea-mug, attempted to scry the past from the present. ‘Until the land soured in the last season. My grandchildren grew sickly. I lost my younger son when we could not afford to buy him the medicine.’ His face collapsed, and Arden felt sorry for him despite his crudeness, and covered his rough, cold farmer’s hand with her own. She felt in him something that did not entirely sit right however. As if this journey had been his idea, and he had buffaloed the others into coming along …

  If she thought it, she did not say it. She patted his hand again. ‘My sympathies, sir. This is the worst pain a human can bear.’

  ‘I have killed all of them. All our babies, on a folly.’

  The woman, Helena Tallwater, silently watched as the patriarch spoke. In the brazier’s glow her face had no expression. Her spirit had vacated her eyes. Relentless, the storm ground against the tower stones, sent deep and disquiet harmonics through the empty space of the lighthouse.

  ‘You’d best get some rest,’ Arden said. ‘There’s nothing we can do until first light. Maybe that will bring some good news.’

  Immediately Arden regretted her thoughtless words. There was no good news in a shipwreck. There would be bodies. There would be death.

  Arden excused herself. She retired to the motor-room, where her mouth might do the least damage, only to find that Chalice had claimed the space before her. She wound the clockwork with vicious yanks.

  ‘Are you all right?’ Arden asked. ‘It’s cold up here.’

  ‘Can’t bear being among them,’ Chalice said mid-yank. ‘I lost a little brother to the sea when I was a child. It destroyed my mother, made a ghost of her.’

  The winder seized as tight as it would go.

  ‘This journey was their decision,’ Arden said.

  ‘You think so? I saw your face when you patted that fellow’s hand.’

  Arden frowned, and Chalice waved her away. ‘Forgive me. I’m in a mood, is all.’

  Chalice was reliving her own tragedy. As gently as she could, Arden said, ‘I remember a child pulled from the freezing waters of Clay Mouth during their coldest winter, and surviving. The sea is sometimes kinder to the young.’

  ‘Their children are dead.’ Chalice was harsh. ‘Their bodies are shoring up the Sainted Island platforms amid the Sargasso strands as we speak.’

  Arden took the last blanket and wrapped it about the stormbride’s shoulder and her own. She took off her damp glove and held Chalice’s hand.

  ‘Was he very young, your brother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I am truly sorry.’

  ‘He lives in the halls of the Deepwater King now,’ Chalice said, inexplicably, for she was not one to make a mockery of others’ religion, or replace her own arid Shinlock catechisms for the old gods of the coast.

  Though what was Chalice’s religion? She had worked this ocean for a long time. What strange instructions had she been exposed to?

  ‘The King will keep him well and forever,’ Arden replied. ‘And the children too. They belong to Him now.’

  With their backs to the old dovetailed joint of the stone they huddled, and waited for the blood-soaked storm to dwindle and die.

  15

  A delicate pattern of daylight fell

  A delicate pattern of daylight fell on her face, disturbing her through the thin veil of sleep, and Arden stirred. The previously incessant wind had stopped so suddenly, Arden’s ears still rang from the absence. She would rather not have moved out from under the blanket, but a pressing urge to relieve herself put all other necessities aside. She rubbed the crook of pain out of her neck, before descending the stairway to where their rescued prospectors huddled together by the brazier.

  The belly of the stove received one of their precious coal briquettes rather than a log of scrub wood. Arden quietly left the lighthouse to survey what damage had been caused outside.

  The morning sun hovered low behind filmy clouds, a baleful yellow eye. A blood morning, full of portents. The sea had becalmed, but only so much that it didn’t surge, merely roll as if it were the scanty covering over a gigantic resting form. Arden rubbed her damp gloves, the silver coins itching beneath the leather. Where had the blood come from, she wondered. Why was she feeling it so strongly? She’d always been burdened with a particularly powerful nose for sanguinity in others, but it never had disturbed her so much as it did this morning.

  After she had paid a visit to their new outhouse, she walked around to the cliffside, and sucked in an uncomprehending breath—

  Three Lyonne Hillsider children wandered down by the scanty sand of the point, dazed and lost and grey with cold, but not in the least bit drowned.

  ‘Oh!’ she cried to nobody and everybody. ‘Come quick, come quick!’

  Her shouts roused the prospectors, who dashed out of the door in half-dressed shambles. Arden had already made her muddy slide down the cliff-slope and was running for the children.

  She reached a little girl who could be no more than four years old. Fell to her knees in front of the child, placed her hands upon the child’s face, her arms, touching a miracle. Understandably clammy skin, but the girl showed no sign of chill-sickness yet. How could this be? Such a Lyonne Hillchild could not have spent the night in the ocean, on the storm, and survived it. This phenomenon was of a kind Arden had never witnessed.

  The eldest girl saw Arden and walked over with a casual air. ‘Excuse me, ma’am,’ she asked in the polite way of Hillfolk when they come upon sanguis nobility. ‘Have you seen my parents?’

  ‘Lissa! Tomas, Deborah!’ came the screams. The prospector woman ran across the cold sand and fell about with her children tangled in her arms. ‘It’s a miracle, a miracle! Oh, my babies!’

  Arden stood back to watch the family reunion, delighted and puzzled at the same time. The children shook their heads to their mother’s impassioned questions as to their survival. They didn’t know how they’d bested the storm. All that had happened between the breaking up of their ship and their arrival on the beach was a blank canvas upon which no memory had been painted
.

  Unless …

  Arden turned around. In the panic of finding the children she had missed seeing the boat floating at the old pier.

  Not just any boat. A longboat, a hunting craft with CORMACK daubed on the side. Captain Georges’ stolen plesiosaur boat.

  And there, walking away from the commotion of the shore. A man in a wet krakenskin coat.

  Arden felt her breath fall out of her, as it all suddenly made sense.

  ‘Mr Riven?’

  He turned about stiffly. It obviously hurt him to do anything more than walk upright. He wore no shirt underneath his coat save for rags. Great weeping cuts scored diagonally along the pale span of his chest.

  In the weeks since their first introduction, Mr Riven’s face had yet to lose all its discoloration from his battle with the game hunters. The water straggled his gingering beard into serpentine twists. He took a step towards her, and she immediately took one back, feeling by the lurch of her blood in her chest the wildness rampant beneath his bruise-mottled skin. The power had come from him.

  ‘What do you want?’

  Not a threat. Only a deep weariness, the kind that blood-loss brings.

  ‘I wanted to say thank you,’ she blurted, cotton-mouthed and quite suddenly shy. ‘For rescuing the children.’

  ‘Those fools took their children to the mouth of death.’

  ‘But still …’

  He made to turn away but had given so much blood to the sea. One knee failed to take his weight, and he went down onto the other as if making obeisance to an angry god.

  Arden stumbled through the sand up to Mr Riven, torn between giving comfort and keeping distance. ‘Are you all right?’

  Not only his chest, but also one corded forearm was laid open to blade-cuts. It was a desecration of talent to bleed so profusely and openly, and she tsked in indignant concern.

  ‘Do you even know how to use your blood endowments, sir?’

  Despite the strength in his lean, raw-boned body, the clumsy cuts almost made him fragile. A creature infinitely wounded, not just physically, but spiritually too. Forgetting her concern, she reached out a hand.

  He recoiled as her fingers grazed his shoulder. ‘Don’t touch me.’ Salt-rasped, his accent falling into an odd lilting place between Fiction and Lyonne. ‘Don’t …’ he said again, before staggering upright with the ungainliness of a newborn foal. ‘I don’t need your help.’

  ‘Come now,’ Arden scolded. ‘There’s only so much blood in a man before he empties himself out.’ She held out her hand again. ‘Do you want my support or not? Your boat is not going anywhere ever again.’

  His boat – and obviously not his property but the longboat of Captain Cormack – had wedged high in the spar of rock at the promontory. Another improbable artefact of the rescue, along with the babes who should have been dead.

  He muttered some curse word at her, something filthy learned in a prison hulk no doubt, but she had heard worse on the docks and he still leaned on her so that he might stand upright. Arden grunted in quite an unladylike way as she heaved his arm across her shoulders. Despite his clamminess, he radiated warmth where his skin met hers. Hale enough to walk.

  ‘This way,’ she said. ‘And for heaven’s sake, don’t bleed over my dress.’

  Mr Riven ate the leftover stew in starving, bestial gulps, and halfway through his second bowl fell asleep sitting upright, head thrown back against the wall, his mouth open and gurgling. For the first time she was able to look at him unconstrained. Once it dried out, his hair lightened, and had the distinct unevenness of having been chopped off with a knife blade at moments when it suited him. His nose was long and straight, aristocratic almost, and would have made him appear weak, among these people. His cheekbones high and his skin translucent, blueing where his eye sockets deepened. Long blond lashes, such as one might find on a child. A contradiction of toughness and utter vulnerability.

  ‘So, there’s the blood I sensed upon the storm.’ Chalice nodded at his wounds. ‘There’s your Fiction sanguinem, Lightmistress.’

  ‘It’s not just a monstercalling trait,’ Arden said, and the surprise she felt was a little glow of solidarity with this wild creature. ‘That’s proper bloodwielding he’s gone and done. I never would have guessed.’

  ‘Well, in times past, Fiction had more genetic lines of sanguine endowment than Lyonne,’ Chalice said. ‘The folks here were quite diverse.’

  ‘Yes, before they thought themselves better off without blood talents.’

  ‘Oh rats,’ Chalice said. ‘The lumpen out here couldn’t keep a guinea in their pocket let alone talent in their blood. They lost it all in ten generations. Your fellow here’s probably the last of them, along with Bellis. What a sorry pair they probably were.’

  It turned out that Helena had some Hillside folk medicine about her, and she packed Mr Riven’s chest wounds with spider webs procured from the rafters. Though Arden was uncertain about touching him, nursing duties required a certain intimacy. She followed Helena’s lead and tugged off her neighbour’s wet krakenskin coat. His breath surged warm in her ear. His ginger-blond beard tickled her neck, but did not arouse the shudders of revulsion she expected from such an encounter. There was no threat to him, only an exhaustion beyond measure.

  ‘Webs will stop the bleeding,’ Helena Tallwater instructed Arden, as the woman passed a linen bandage about the sleeping man’s chest. ‘A well-known cure.’

  ‘Thank you. I don’t have enough clotting powder for anything bigger than a scratch at the moment.’

  ‘Brew up some fruit-mould tea if you have it, soak the bandage in some. It tastes terrible to drink, but the wounds are less likely to go bad under the dressings.’

  ‘I do have some spore-powder, and the tea sounds like a good interim.’

  Helena had not, however, anything to stop the deep, physical pain that came from a sanguis losing so much blood, and Mr Riven’s sleep was a deep pit from which he could not be roused. Arden took the spoon and bowl from his slack hands, and tipped him sideways onto her makeshift bed, where he could sleep off the blood-loss hangover.

  ‘Will he be all right, wife?’ Gregor Tallwater asked once Helena had finished her ministrations. ‘This man saved my children. I cannot leave without thanking him.’

  ‘I cannot say,’ Helena said. ‘I have no experience for these sorts of people.’ Her eyes swung nervously between Arden and Mr Riven’s uncouth drunk-sleep. ‘No offence, Lightmistress, but your kind is different from ours in body and mind.’

  ‘Sanguine folk have a slightly different physiology, it is true,’ Arden said gently. ‘But there is much in us that is similar. Let him sleep off his blood intoxication, and you may thank him later.’

  The patriarch of the rescued family appeared less than impressed by their saviour. Leyland Tallwater sat at a remove near the brazier, his craggy Hillfolk features not hiding his deep discomfort. In Clay he would rarely have spoken to anyone blood-bound, and only if he had known them before a testmoot, and then only as a child. Unlike in Fiction, Lyonne society stratified through the existence of sanguine talent, and in such social separations, superstitions took root. Arden had known of Hillfolk to tell their children night-creeping stories. Tales of how the sanguinem sometimes needed the blood of others to replenish their own.

  Considering it took only a drop of blood to execute one’s phlebotomous labour, it did not bode well to see Mr Riven so pale and lifeless. In his blood-loss frailty one could halfway believe such stories of vampiric hunger. Arden wished she hadn’t been so quick to send Chalice with Sean Ironcup to Vigil earlier.

  It had very much been Chalice’s idea that they report the castaways to the Coastmaster at once. She’d chosen to take the Ironcup lad with her, a slim, delicate youth of perhaps twenty-two years, who had a palsy of his left side. ‘Not to offend, but the more wretchedly vulnerable you people appear to the Coastmaster, the more he’ll likely let you come ashore with only a warning and not a penalty,’ Chalice had sai
d. ‘The Baron Justinian has a distaste for deformities. So, Master Ironcup, you come with me.’

  ‘I’ll have you know,’ Sean Ironcup had said, deeply affronted, ‘I can handle a boat with one hand better than most men with two. And it’s Mister Ironcup.’

  ‘It’s true,’ Helena had added. ‘He’s the only one of us who knows his way around a ship.’

  A vegetable barge is certainly not a ship, Arden thought. From her wincing face, Chalice thought exactly the same thing. Still, it was those two who did the honours of reporting, and left Arden with six wary strangers.

  ‘Come, children,’ she said to the two eldest. ‘I’ll show you how I keep the lighthouse fire alive.’

  ‘Go,’ Helena urged, when they looked at their mother.

  ‘All right then,’ replied the girl. ‘Come now, Tomas.’

  They followed Arden up the twisting stairs to the lamp room. She showed them the disks that she kept under her gloves, and how she cut into each one in turn to feed the flame.

  ‘How does it work,’ asked the girl, Lissa. ‘Your blood?’

  ‘Well now,’ Arden said, and launched into a familiar explanation. ‘It is said that when God made Man, He also made angels, and demons. Demons feast on angel blood, you see. And angels are argumentative, easily offended. The angels formed a union against God for allowing such powers to exist, and there was a war in heaven. An agreement was made that He should cast them down to live with humankind. And so they do, hid in every nook and cranny of the earth. Even our blood.’

  There was no response from the children, and Arden, flustered, barrelled on.

  ‘In time, some angels rebelled and fell in love and came to mate with Men. The descendants can feed the demons not only of flame, but demons of mathematics, of memory and storm and iron and physics, make them do their bidding.’

  The tale satisfied most Clay city children, but the two Hillsiders glared at her with darkly sceptical eyes. ‘That is not the truth.’

  ‘Of course it is.’

  ‘It’s not. Don’t lie to us.’