‘I can see well in the dark.’
‘Indeed. Keep those eyes of yours peeled, for I’ve a feeling you’ll see more shortly.’
Once the rudder was under her control, she shoved the engine-order telegraph to stop. Saudade was mechanical, and instantly she moved perpendicular to the current. The propeller slowed. The boat began to drift side on, but with much less speed.
The dull, distant roaring of the Tempest Wall continued.
‘All right. The storm is loud,’ Arden said, counting her blessings. ‘It’s good. They might not have heard us.’
She went to the crate, and opened it up, inspected the revolving drum. A shape had taken form on the carbon. The rock, jagged and huge. Behind, a rectangle tapered at one end.
‘What are those lines here?’ Arden asked, pointing at a riffle of linework between the boat and the rock.
‘Thresh-waves.’ David said. ‘She’s not powered down. The island is floating, and they are using it as either pier or cover.’
‘We are all drifting at the same speed. No doubt they have an echo box of their own. Waiting to see who will make the first move.’
Down on the deck, Chalice Quarry emerged from the cabin with her hair mussed from sleep, and a wet-battery flashlight in her hands. She frowned up at the wheelhouse. Arden held a finger to her lips, bade her turn off the light, then beckoned her inside.
‘They’re back,’ she said quietly as Chalice entered. ‘Our monster didn’t scare them off at all.’
Chalice swallowed nervously. ‘Oh, I was wondering why the engine stopped.’
‘More for your concern, where is Sean Ironcup, Chalice? You’re charged with looking after him tonight.’
‘Mr Ironcup consented to getting locked in one of the storage rooms. He’s worked out it might be safer for him all round if he not appear to take sides if things take a wrong turn.’
‘Are they going to take a wrong turn?’
Chalice gestured towards the night before examining the echo-image of the rocky island. ‘Sehnsucht, I presume?’
‘We haven’t yet seen, but your presumption is likely correct.’
‘Darling, if Bellis is on that ship, you need to get Mr Riven awake.’
‘No. After blood loss, rousing him is just going to hurt. And if we don’t change angles soon, we’re going to run into that boat or she’ll try and run into us. The current takes us right past that rock. We need to turn Saudade off this fast water.’
David suffered a look of pure despair. ‘It’s too early. If we turn off now we’ll hit the storm wall. Besides, we won’t outrun Sehnsucht against the current,’ he said. ‘I remember stories about Sehnsucht, Mx Beacon. She’s a bigger, more powerful craft than Saudade ever was. She’s made for fighting monsters.’
Arden took a breath. This ship. Sehnsucht. This ghost which haunted Mr Riven in blood and love, and now in the childhood he had lost. He would want answers, about what had happened to Bellis after she sailed away. He would not be content with watching her go by like a memento mori afloat on the water.
‘David,’ she said, ‘get down below and open all the engine throttles.’
‘Mx Beacon?’
‘We can’t outrun her cross-current, you say? But if we keep going and with a head start, I think Saudade can do just that. We are unencumbered, half as small again as that white behemoth.’
‘But the water just gets harder to escape the closer we get to Maris!’
‘Let me worry about that. Go. Go!’
Chalice waited until the boy had left the wheelhouse to express her complete dissatisfaction. ‘He’s right, Arden. We’ll hit fast, hot water soon. Once that happens we might not be able to turn out so easily.’
‘We don’t have a choice. That ship is in hunting mode, and she’s not waiting for plesiosaur.’
From down below there came a screech and growl as auxiliary boilers filled with kraken oil. The gears started to turn with the slow, massive torque of lower-deck screws, and then they moved, slow at first, then faster still. The propeller grumbled up white water, the remaining vanes fell off her damaged side wheels, but it mattered not. Manoeuvrability was not the issue here.
Saudade thrust forward until the bow wave curved up nearly as high as the deck. The needle on the echo box juddered with such frantic oscillation, it was almost impossible to make out each new picture.
Then the fog parted and the moon cast its cold light. Arden saw Bellis’ ship for the first time.
Sean had not been at all creative when he called Sehnsucht a ghost ship. The craft could have been constructed out of fog and ice, for all that it stood out from the Tempest mist. Arden ran to the wheelhouse window, watched on with horrified wonder as Saudade thundered past that white shadow. She was like Saudade in design, but so overwhelmingly larger.
‘She’s turning,’ Chalice yelped. She grabbed Arden’s elbow. ‘Arden, she’s turning.’
‘I know, Chalice. I’m trying to concentrate.’
‘This isn’t right. We should be chasing them! They tried to steal classified Order secrets!’
Arden debated shouting down the speaking tube for David to give her more oil, but without Mr Riven’s intimate knowledge of his boat, she was unsure how much to push.
Chalice pressed herself against the door frame while Arden hugged the wheel with hands and knees. They were on the current, a dun-coloured sluice through the canyon of fog. The Saudade’s wheel became capricious and unsettled. The craft failed to aim true, and any moment now it would snicker out of her hands and spin. Had she not the lantern-turner’s strength, she would have lost her grip.
A smaller paddle wheeler would have found no purchase in the disturbed water, or kept up with Saudade’s screw. They’d have escaped scot-free. From what little she’d seen of Sehnsucht, the vessel had vanes that bit deep, so she still kept behind, even if she could not gain without a screw propeller to give her speed.
Behind them, the ghost ship slid into the wash Saudade left behind. With each passing minute it receded in their view.
‘You know, we could probably lose them completely if we went faster,’ Chalice complained. The dawn stained the clouds in sickly yellow, and now there was light enough for even Chalice so see. Every few seconds she would hazard a peek out of the wheelhouse windows to make a disapproving noise.
Though most of the night had gone by without seeing their pursuer, the echo box told the story of the big threshing ship, slow but inexorable, following them along the dun current. If she lost ground, it was not enough to lose Saudade completely. If the white boat had won races against Saudade, it must have been in a time before Mr Riven had upgraded her engine to accommodate a propeller.
‘Can’t you pick up the speed a little?’ Chalice asked for at least the fifth time that night.
‘This is not my boat to make go faster or to risk,’ Arden said. ‘We can keep going this speed indefinitely, but if we don’t do something drastic, she’ll stay on our tail until this ship starts falling apart.’
‘Which is how long?’
Arden tapped one of the brass indicators. ‘She could run like this for another hour or two maybe. Eventually we’re going to overheat the valves.’
‘Then do something drastic.’
‘What?’
‘I needn’t be making suggestions to you, darling.’
Arden had words she could have said, but held them all the same. Chalice was not wrong. When she spoke at last to David, she could hear the defeat in her voice.
‘Get up here, Mr Modhi. You take the wheel. I need to wake Mr Riven.’
Chalice Quarry tutted. ‘Huh. You said he couldn’t be woken.’
‘I did not say waking was an impossibility, only that it was highly unpleasant.’
Mx Modhi had trained her son well. He did not dally on a command, and was out of the engine room within seconds, taking the wheel so she might do the most solemn of duties.
She went below decks, into the dark halls.
Arden l
ingered at the cabin door with a vial of ammoniac hartshorn from the surgeon’s box, uncertain of what to say to him when he woke. She rested her head upon the wood, breathed deep, and pushed it open.
He lay upon the old night-silk sheets of the bed, shirtless and unconscious in a half-state of undress: he had clearly been trying to undo his waistband buttons when he had succumbed to the malaise of a kraken-calling comedown. Prior to then, he had made some effort to tape up his wounds. Plasters and bandages ran along the length of a crusted blade-track that had been roughly stitched, so he resembled nothing so much as a discarded doll, ill-treated and mended and treated ill again, so many times over that he was no longer fit for anyone except for the one who had loved him first.
Images and memories not hers came unbidden: child Bellis, whispering promises to love him through the storms of life, even though hers would be the worst of them. Child Bellis and child Jonah curling little baby fingers about and making promises to cross their hearts and hope to die, die, die. And elsewhere a small Arden Beacon, a squib of blood that was either useless or mysteriously disastrous with no appreciable in-between.
She would never kiss him properly again, she feared, never experience what it was to kiss him in love, and not ambiguity, or ambivalence, or stolen. Like her coat, second-hand his feelings for her were ill-fitting, made for another.
‘Goodbye, Jonah.’
She bent to his lips and kissed him there. He stirred, murmured words in Old Fictish.
Then she broke the hartshorn vial beneath his nose.
The scent of the smelling salts hit her just as they hit him, a urinous punch of searing stench, and Mr Riven inhaled with the gasp of a fist darted into his diaphragm. He sat up, coughing, and frowned, instantly aware of the ship’s engines. ‘Why are we at full speed?’
‘Sehnsucht,’ Arden said. ‘Bellis’ ship. It’s definitely following us. We’ve been having a merry slow chase for most of the night.’
She stood back, waited for him to gasp and run to his wife. And for a moment it seemed certain. A leaping agitation in his eyes, then the familiar curtain closed. The chances of Bellis being on the same ship that she and Stefan had sailed to their Island sanctuary, they were slim to none. Two people on their own could not have fought off pirates with a view to a ghostwood vessel. They’d have been like castaways in plesiosaur waters.
‘How long away is she?’
‘Maybe half a mile. Saudade got a head start on propellers. Though Sehnsucht is not catching up, she’s not slowing down either.’
He shook his head to clear his mind. Tried to stand. Thought otherwise. The blood-hangover making his body tremble. Fell back down with his hand over his eyes.
‘Why do you wake me to tell me this, Arden? Could you have not given me another hour asleep?’
‘Whether it’s your wife or pirates, it’s better if you’re awake. We need you ready.’
‘Just give me a minute.’
Arden shifted uncomfortably, her envy making her speak. ‘Do you think Bellis is on that ship?’
‘I thought about it. Searched my heart. I don’t think she’s on board.’
‘You don’t?’
‘Stefan promised me, Arden. Before they left. Whatever happened, Bellis would stay with him. She knew full well how important that was, how her life depended on it.’
‘Then why did those people go after my blood, Jonah? Why did they destroy Fine Breeze?’
Mr Riven propped himself up on his elbow. ‘Is it not obvious now what is happening?’
‘No! Explain it to me!’
‘The Lyonne Order own Sehnsucht now,’ he said wearily. ‘Probably from the moment Stefan let it go. That’s why there is a Lion on board. If your blood is so important, would they have chanced its safety to Madame Quarry alone? Would the all-powerful Lyonne Order not have prepared for something like this to happen, had their agents standing by?’
‘I … I guess so.’
‘Sehnsucht could catch up to us easily if they wanted her to. It’s an escort. We’ll make it past the Wall, head back to Vigil with Mr Ironcup.’
‘And you? Will you come back with me, to Vigil?’
He sat up. ‘Isn’t that the plan?’
‘I don’t know what the plan is. What is the plan, Jonah?’
He looked as if he were thinking, and she held her breath, terrified of what might come after. Then his eyes crinkled, and when he smiled she had never seen something so beautiful, or that filled her heart with such gladness.
‘To run away with the Lightmistress, if she would allow me.’
The days and months of her solitude had done their part in reducing her to a raw nerve, and even his humour could not stop her blurring tears and half-formed syllables.
And Mr Riven swept her up in arms and kissed her with those lips and held her close to his poor wounded body.
Arden pushed him away. ‘I am not a thing to mollycoddle. You turn hot and cold, and it is unconscionable to me. Are you staying, or going? What are your intentions?’
He released her, his gaze went to the floor. His voice had a strange thoughtfulness to it. ‘It hurts me, the reality of you.’
‘Then it’s my fault now?’
‘Always!’ he said. ‘You are everything. You filled my head with thoughts of you every day. Every day. When I first saw you on the beach in your golden threads I thought you were more beautiful than … than any dream. Even when I look at you I am torn. How could I be anything else for Arden Beacon of Clay Portside but a savage from Fiction? I learned enough from Stefan to know what your posting means. I fear you one day returning to Clay and forgetting the simple creature you dallied with, and I will be twice broken.’ His bloodshot eyes were rimed with suffering. ‘Twice broken, for I loved you.’
‘Love? You speak of love when you would not let anyone love you back? You are so infuriating, Mr Riven,’ she said between gasping sobs. ‘The most infuriating man I have ever met. I don’t take lightly my affections. I’m no coquette.’
Her pronouncements confused him so, and he seemed so stricken that she had to kiss him again, and he whimpered at the pain in his chest and when Arden went to pull away he only darted in again, his clumsy, uncouth mouth rough and greedy on her lips.
‘Ah,’ he said, and his eyes became dark with desire and his lips red and swollen from kissing, and she had to sigh to herself, for how often had she read in her penny presses about women swooning from kisses? Tough, incorrigible Mr Riven, weak and pliant before her. His excitement was evident in the soft leather of his breeches.
He took her hand, a silent query in him, regret and shame and longing at once. Her touch had merely started a cascade. Was perhaps not fully aware of his body’s response, only that it came with so many others he could not distinguish.
‘Oh, come now? In your condition? We have no time.’
‘We must be quick, then,’ he said, already unbuttoning himself.
‘You are love mad,’ she laughed, only the words came out hoarse with her own rapid quickening, and they were fools together, scraping out these hollow minutes from the uncertainty beyond them. She scooped him free of the leather strides and stroked the thick, silken length of Mr Jonah Riven, wanting to own him for the moment when he was so unquestionably certain of his love for her, when he spoke from lust and sexual hunger and yes, maybe yes, the thought of Bellis forever between them.
If her body wanted Mr Riven then, her mind was merely a startled passenger. Desire had the same landscape as pain, and its map – though detailed in familiar places – had lines hastily scrawled where they did not intersect with true trust and true love.
This was one of those places. She went into his lap, and his mouth again claimed hers in insatiable gulps. He wanted to devour her with kisses. His trembling hands moved under her skirts, over her thighs, through the still-damp lace, and was there he touched the centre of her in newfound intimacy, took startled delight in the folds of warmth he’d only experienced so briefly before.
Had they the time Arden would have guided Mr Riven’s fingers to where they pleased her most, the creamy folds between her labia, the hard arousal of her clitoris, but the creaking juddering reminder of their rapidly gaining pursuers made her take matters to their conclusion. She mounted his lap, guided his penis into the hot centre of her, and he jerked up with forceful, inelegant thrusts into Arden with the same determined expression of a man committed to a fight.
Once more they heaved together, moved on by the thrum of the levers and their own breaths in the dark room, and their lovemaking was the engine that drove on the ship, an engine bruised and battered in both body and soul. Two people who had been tested and failed in all their dreams and perhaps had little else but one another, and even in that they weren’t sure; for to what others had they promised themselves first?
Lost to his crisis, Mr Riven growled Fictish words, and his thrusts shortened and quickened. His arms tightened about her waist, the strength in them elating and terrifying at once. He lingered at the precipice of a terrible, violent act, and although she had consented to his bed, the fear remained that were his mind to change she could not stop him.
Arden was too wrung out and sore to climax again, too overwhelmed by this man’s demands upon her body. So she held Mr Riven carefully as he breathed through his final peak. He came inside her, and she let him grow soft within the heated embrace of her.
They held each other with the closeness that only comes with uncertainty. Aftershocks of pleasure still coursed through him. Arden laid her cheek on Mr Riven’s sweat-damp shoulder, doubtful if she should stay in this illusion of love or wake up to her place in his affections. Time had stood still in this room. Perhaps only five minutes had passed beyond the doors. There was magic here, the same as those stories of children who walked through glowing doors into other worlds and remained in timeless stasis as all outside grew old and faded away.
But such stories rarely ended well. They always had to return to the cold, real world to die.
‘We need to go,’ she murmured. ‘We are almost at the Maris waters.’
He pressed a soft kiss to both her eyelids, her mouth. ‘Ah, devils, you are lovely, Arden. I wish I could do it again.’
Monstrous Heart Page 31
