Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

Arden sighed, refastened her gloves. ‘All right then. I don’t believe it either. To tell you the truth, the real truth, nobody quite knows where the genetic talent comes from. There was indeed a war at some time, one that nearly destroyed the entire human race. There weren’t pretend things like gods or angels involved. It was us. A war of spirit perhaps, a whispered war. And there may have been some contamination introduced into our bodies that is passed on through the family line. Men of science have speculated on many things. Morphic resonance. Machines smaller than the smallest microscope can see. Magic even, although any science advanced enough can appear like magic.’

  Their mother called them from downstairs. ‘Children,’ she cried, ‘Uncle Sean is back.’

  ‘I don’t think it’s science or magic inside you,’ said the boy. ‘I think it is sin.’

  Mr Riven groaned bearishly and rolled over. He had yet to fully wake, but that was to be expected. The sanguis comedown could be gruelling on those untrained in the nuances of the sacrament; Mr Riven now wallowed at the tail end of a hard bleed, where a man might flutter in and out of consciousness, the waking body quite nonplussed by the agony of the bright new day and retreating to the insensate safety of dreams.

  No thank-yous for him, then. Leyland showed himself only too happy to board the recovery boat to Vigil when the Harbourmistress came. His gratitude was tempered by preconceptions and prejudices. This wild man had returned Mr Tallwater’s family entire, yes, however the methods of rescue filled the Hillsider with deep dread.

  Arden reluctantly left Mr Riven sleeping on her now-ruined bed, before retreating to the pier.

  Mx Modhi in her usual foul temper, barked at her boy to help the children into the dinghy. ‘David, lad, they’ve had enough trouble with the sea, they don’t need it from you,’ she said between furious puffs of her pipe. While she sat on the tiller of her recovery boat, the youth wrestled with the waterlogged pieces of Tallwater possessions that the afternoon swell had seen fit to deposit on the rocks.

  Satisfied that her son had done his part, she returned to Arden.

  ‘Won’t be the first survivors you’ll haul from the drink. Jorgen Beacon would average five a year. Bodes well that you got the whole family alive, Lightmistress. Perhaps we should rub you for luck.’

  ‘The rescue wasn’t just my doing. Mr Riven helped.’

  Mx Modhi blew pipe-smoke towards the longboat. ‘Best you not let that be known in these parts. Between you and me, Captain Cormack’s stolen longboat got onto the rocks itself.’

  She whistled over to Leyland Tallwater.

  ‘Ma’am?’ he responded.

  ‘We’ll attend the office of Postmaster Harrow and Coastmaster Justinian, fill out the papers advising of a wreck and rescue, friend. There are debts and charges attached to a rescue in these waters, and the licensing board of Clay will require contacting.’

  The Hillsider jammed his hands into his pockets. ‘We ain’t had no papers nor funds for this journey.’

  ‘No papers? No funds? You had your eyes on Sainted Island stars with no penny for the Old Guy, eh?’ Mx Modhi cackled.

  ‘We bring our hands, and the willingness to do hard work.’

  She laughed again, before exploding into a coughing fit. ‘Journeyman, your journey has ended. You don’t know the Islands. They’ll not accept prospectors to their shores unless you come with assets. They have all the labour they want over there.’

  Leyland bristled and yanked his hands out of his pockets. ‘And how would you know this, huh? Sunning yourself on a stinking little harbour?’

  Gregor, perhaps sensing that his father might be drawn into a fight, stood up and announced, ‘Well, that’s it, then. All packed. In the boat, children. And wherever has Helena gone?’

  Leyland gave a grunt and went to sit in the boat, sulking. Mx Modhi looked at him with a deep suspicion, and her tongue moved agitatedly about her ivory pipe-stem. She left the tiller on the pretence of bending to check a rope tie, but instead leaned in close to Arden’s ear.

  ‘You sure plucked a good one out of the sea, Lightmistress,’ she gruffed at Arden. ‘I don’t like him.’

  With her sharp Beacon eyes, Arden spotted the woman standing on the furthest tip of the promontory, staring out to sea.

  ‘Wait, I’ll get her,’ Arden said. ‘Make the children comfortable, Harbourmistress. The water can be rough, and another trip may traumatize them.’

  She glanced at the boy, who only glared back, untraumatized and full of accusation.

  The wind blew strong on the promontory. Helena stood there motionless, her shawl pulled back and her raw face rimed with salt and tears. Arden approached her with care.

  ‘They are ready to go,’ Arden said gently.

  ‘You cannot see the Sainted Isles from here.’

  ‘No, they are over the horizon. That cloud line to the south-east is only Tempestas, which you might know as the Tempest, the permanent storm. There is another route north, on which you would have gone, had your boat not wrecked.’

  ‘You have been there, yourself?’

  Arden shook her head. ‘Sometimes I spot the ships heading out. They turn at this lighthouse. I make notations for the Navigation Council. But maybe it is best that you are going home, because despite what they say, I’ve never seen anyone returning from the Islands. Only the lich-ships heading for the refineries and distillation forests of Dead Man’s Bay, never people.’

  Helena turned to Arden then. A desperate faith in her. ‘We will not go home. Leyland says we are going to the Islands, and he means it. He will buy us passage on a fishing boat, a smuggler’s boat, anything that floats.’ She tilted her chin at the lighthouse. ‘That cut-up fellow in there seems to know his way around a craft. Perhaps Leyland will make a deal with him.’

  ‘Think about your children, Helena. If you had made it to the Isles, what sort of life would it be for them? They say nothing lives out there, any more. They say that Hell would be a better place to go.’

  ‘I know.’ The woman returned to her constant scanning of the grey horizon. ‘When I thought they had drowned, you know what I felt? Relief. Relief that my babies are gone, that they will suffer no more. All the way here I have had my heart pricked by the demons of anxiety and worry. I thought: now my children are dead, I can be wounded no more. But your wild fellow brought them back to me, and the torture begins anew. So then. Damn you both to that Hell over the horizon.’

  She pulled up her shawl and wrapped the coarse wool around her, swept past Arden with a hiss of resentment.

  Arden watched the Tallwaters leave the pier upon Mx Modhi’s boat, all of them stiff-backed and nursing their secret determinations. Arden could not stop the dread gathering her bones. Chalice had gone with them, ostensibly to help, but in actuality to provide more muscle in case Mr Leyland Tallwater, in a fit of storm-addled courage, might steal the Harbourmistress’ boat for another shot at the Isles.

  Would not have been the first time it had happened, given the way Chalice merely stepped into the boat with nary a word.

  Leaving Arden alone with—

  ‘Heavens!’ she exclaimed, and ran back into the lighthouse. ‘Oh no!’

  She burst through the door into the tower’s lower floor. To her dismay, apart from the blood-stained sheets the bed lay empty.

  ‘Mr Riven?’ she called tremulously. Maybe he had gone home. Or at least she hoped he had.

  The metal stairs creaked in the rock. A body moved about in the upper reaches of the tower.

  In a fit of panic Arden reached for one of Uncle Jorgen’s old butchering knives that hung from iron hooks in the walls, hefted it, then put it down with a groan.

  What was she expecting? She had invited Mr Riven as a guest. He had not sought to harm her in all the times they had met.

  With her heart in her mouth she climbed the stairwell.

  Mr Riven stood in the engine room, peering out of one of the narrow windows. In the low light he seemed more beast than human, his back marked by
scars, swirls and spirals lain in with squid-ink and broken shell, patterns that outlined each vertebra before flaring out across his hips to disappear into the waist of his canvas strides.

  He did not startle when she came in. The bones of his shoulder blades moved beneath the flesh of his back as he shifted his point of view to another window.

  ‘I’ve never been up here,’ he said. ‘Always wondered what kind of fire got the light flashing.’

  ‘It’s not really the light that flashes,’ Arden said. ‘The battens turn. The light is always lit.’

  She heard the Tallwater boy’s voice in her head. It is sin. She briefly closed her eyes. From this moment on she could either send Mr Riven on his way, or invite him into her life, and all the problems such people bring. His woman he had killed, his family he had murdered. The plesiosaur baby he had laid gentle upon the table when he had fought three men to save the mother, and the sweater he had given her when she was close to death and vulnerable to attack. The mottled, bearded face pressed against the glass.

  She took a breath, took the dive.

  ‘There’s a better view in the lamp room. I’ll bring the battens down over the coldfire, and you can discover for yourself.’

  Those horizon-blue eyes on her again, almost unnaturally bright in the engine room. She unhooked the gate and went up first, let him make his own path as if he were an untamed creature she had fed but did not expect to follow.

  He shadowed her at a silent, respectable distance. She heard the catch of his breath as he beheld the view from the height, the wide sea and the scrubby, desolate land in a thousand different directions.

  Mr Riven walked about the lamp room. He touched the blood collection chamber. He studied the horizon maps over the windows, the semaphore codes, the shipping signals. Arden stayed by and watched him. Despite his height, he didn’t strike her as a particularly threatening sort of gentleman, carrying his lean strength with a certain economy and his power under a bushel. As far as he was concerned there might have been nobody in the room other than him.

  Arden had a strange, unbidden recollection from her childhood, of her half-sister Sirena rescuing a stray dog from the streets. The mutt had shown no interest in its new surroundings, only paced the walls of their bedroom for a day before their step-mother came upon them with exclamations of responsibility and ownership.

  Nina Beacon had allowed her daughter to keep the pup on strict orders that it be fed and cared for by Sirena herself. A week later it returned to the streets, having never bonded to anyone, and fleeing the room at the first moment of freedom it got.

  Maybe Mr Riven would flee, after he’d exhausted his curiosity about his old nemesis’ home. Perhaps it was better if he did.

  ‘I must excuse the slovenliness of downstairs,’ Arden said nervously. ‘My uncle never left it in very much of a good condition. In fact, the only thing he was good at was reminding an eternal flame to keep eternal. Whichever way, this might be the last time you ever see it. The Seamaster’s Guild intends to replace it with a regular light come winter time.’

  Mr Riven didn’t answer. Arden found herself looking skyward for a modicum of heavenly help with these taciturn men and boys.

  He rubbed one of the window panes. Mx Modhi’s boat was well on its way to Vigil with the other equally conversational guests. The bandage about his chest had soaked entirely black with blood. It runnelled over his abdominal muscles, stained the waistband of his waxed-canvas breeches and to Arden’s dismay spattered the lamp room’s finally clean floor.

  ‘… which is why you should really consider getting some stitches in those deep cuts. The skin is likely to damage if you let it gape around in the open with just a rag bandage.’ She pointed to her own hands. ‘Even I required disks sewn into my skin when I was deployed to the lighthouse so I wouldn’t destroy my hands.’

  ‘I’ll stitch it myself when I get back.’

  His rebuff annoyed her. This was not charity. This was necessity. Was he being obnoxious out of spite?

  ‘If you doubt my skill, I have my minor surgeon’s certificate. It’s a requirement of dock working. Lest I forget to remind you, Gregor Tallwater also wanted to pass on his thanks that you rescued his children, but he doesn’t have a penny to his name, now. He owes you. I owe you.’

  Mr Riven was not entirely incapable of reading the mood in the room. Sensing he had crossed a line of social grace, the man nodded, though from his expression he was not pleased.

  ‘Do what you must.’

  She encouraged him, dripping blood all the while, down to the engine-room, where there was space and light enough for her to do her work. Directed him to a driftwood stool and pulled her surgical case from the trunk. A blood-worker always had boiled needles nearby, pre-threaded in glass so they might be used at once. One can never tell when a knife will cut too deep.

  Then, feeling somewhat awkward for the intimacy it presented, knelt between his knees and released the bandages.

  She knew soon after that she needn’t have worried about his reaction to her nearness. Only a moment where a brief apprehension crossed his face – not so easy to hide when their breaths were on each other and his leather-clad thighs spanned her waist – and Arden huffed, ‘I won’t hurt you.’

  As if a light had gone out behind his eyes, Mr Riven became still and absent. Only the slight rise and fall of his chest made it certain he was alive. One could envisage her touch turning him to stone, like the curses of old. She looked over him, and wondered what hand had carved this clay, what had flensed this man so brute and lean? His skin was warm and pale under her fingers, pale russet hairs upon each pectoral and the thin, dark blond line to his belly, the dip of skin at his throat where his heartbeat raced.

  He neither startled nor acknowledged her contact, nor the cold tincture across his chest, but she could feel a deep nervous tremble in the long muscles, a prey-animal finally caught. She wondered about his prison time as a child, and how he’d survived. About what the sea required of him. Shamefully, looked between his legs, to see if he had cut off his maleness to catch his sea-monsters, and was assured, with a flush of heat to her cheeks, that he had most certainly not.

  Strange thoughts came to her. Had anyone ever touched him in love, and tenderness? Had Bellis? Or had all his human interactions been in cruelty and convenience? It seemed so odd, that he not react at all when she pierced the lip of one wound and drew through a thread, yet that he tremble so when she placed her hand upon his knee so she might draw closer.

  ‘So, what is your kinship to blood then, Mr Riven?’ she said, wanting to fill the silence lest it grow too deep. ‘Storm caller? Searcher, sanguis appellandi?’

  ‘I should have left the children in the water.’

  Arden had not expected him to speak, and the Lyonnish lilt to his flat Fiction vowels caught her by surprise. His eyes were still elsewhere. She only sighed in reply, did not scold him for making such a comment, and tied off her stitches. ‘Their mother said much the same thing. Oh, they’ll find their way to the Isles, one way or another. You may have a visit from Leyland, pleading for transport.’

  ‘He’ll not have to go so far. Would be a score of fishermen who would take him over for a bag of pennies. Or a night with the daughter.’

  ‘Mr Riven, that’s rather mean-minded of—’

  He looked down at her, cold as the ocean. ‘Why do you think he’s taken the children, the family? Why has he gone to such trouble to drag such baggage, when it would have been more expedient to go to the Islands on his own? The Old Guy doesn’t take anyone without payment, everyone knows that.’

  Arden’s face burned, realizing that in her wilful ignorance she had seen Mr Tallwater as equally innocent to the cost of prospecting. The family was even more abject than the crowd of hopefuls she had seen on the Firth crossing, when she had first come to Lyonne. No paddle-steamer cruise for them. They would find themselves on a boat of rot and driftwood, and be half-dead when they reached one corpse-pontoon shore.
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  ‘He’ll sell the children?’

  ‘You know it.’

  ‘Then I’ll have to warn Helena, and the Harbourmistress!’

  Mr Riven stood awkwardly up from the stool. Winced at the stitching. ‘Yes, warn the women. Warn the Coastmaster and the Magistrate. Flash it coded in this devil’s light. Shout it to the wind, Lightmistress. Do what you must so that you may sleep at night. It will make no difference. You think I do not know this from experience?’

  She bowed her head in surrender. ‘By God in his heaven, this world is cruel.’ She repacked the bandages. ‘Every time I think that it tilts towards miracles, I am dismayed by the awfulness of it.’

  ‘You’re a fool if you thought any different.’

  He went to go past her, and she shot out a hand to grab his arm.

  ‘Did you kill your wife, Mr Riven? Am I the same fool for having invited you in here so you know that I spend most of my hours vulnerable, and alone?’

  She shocked him with her directness. She wanted him shocked, not dismissive, not regarding her as a mere annoyance. If this man wanted to kill her, he could kill her now and be done with it. She stood up to him in defiance but oh, a part of her, a beaten, cast-off and love-scarred demon inside Arden imagined – in a wrench of forbidden and sordid joy – him doing to her what they whispered he did to Bellis; his rope-burned hands about her neck, her air-starved convulsions as he took her life, took without thought to Guild laws or eugenics or the portion of the blood that gave talent.

  Her breath came fast and heavy. Her heart moved in her with the anxious fear of a bird caged in bone. Her body became an object of disgust and deceit, wanting an awful thing because it felt better that way. Better than the nothingness forced upon her by her duties as a Fiction lighthouse keeper, tending a lantern destined to die.

  He did have some measure of sensitivity. Sensing the repellent desires in her, Mr Riven scowled and jerked back.

  ‘No,’ Mr Riven growled, harsh with reproach. ‘I did not kill my wife. I love her and love her still. All these things you wish to do to save the Tallwater children, I have done for Bellis, and no difference has it made. Good day to you.’