Monstrous Heart

by Claire McKenna

  ‘By the Cross of the Redeemer we survived the fall,’ Chalice gasped. ‘If not for that paddle-foam the drop would have killed us.’

  ‘What the devils did you do?’ Arden shouted back, spitting salt. Her krakenskin coat ballooned with air, making her bob on the surface of the water. ‘And who was that man you just gave up Jonah for?’

  ‘I saved our lives,’ Chalice huffed, dog-paddling towards her within a ring of inflated fabric. Her face had taken on a fish-belly shade from the cold water. ‘They have a spy from the Order on board. He knows them, so if he says they’ll kill us if we stay, they will.’

  ‘This water will kill us! We’ll not last ten minutes!’

  A shriek from the boat interrupted them, so high-pitched and commanding that it could only have come from Bellis: Get her out. Get them out!

  The paddlewheels ceased turning. The ship listed. A rope ladder flung over Sehnsucht’s side. Mr Riven did his best to run interference, but from her water-vantage Arden knew he was hopelessly outmatched. A fist from one of Bellis’ sailors struck him once, twice. Hauled him halfway over the port railing, where his bound hands grasped open air on either side of his head.

  His eyes met Arden’s, and she had never seen such a look on a living thing.

  Jonah …

  Little more than a whisper, an entreaty, a farewell.

  Mr Riven bit down hard upon his lip and spat blood into the water.

  Bellis let out a horrific piercing scream. ‘Get him the FUCK devil AWAY from the WATER!’

  The sailors dragged him back and Arden saw him no more.

  Bellis ran to the edge of the boat, pointed at Arden, warning and accusing. Nothing she said, for such demons needed to say nothing.

  By now the men charged to bring Arden back had descended the ladder and commenced swimming out to meet their two wretched prisoners.

  … or they would have done if the surface of the water had not turned to glass and rainbows, a thousand translucent bodies writhing around them, and the ocean falling away, preparing their ascent into heaven.

  35

  Where are they taking us

  ‘Where are they taking us?’ Chalice yelled over the slosh and roar of the waves.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Arden replied breathlessly, her mind whirring as fast as the water that carried her. Magic? Magic was fragile, a phenomenon that could be explained by science eventually. Her dress clung to her but it was not unpleasant. Like a liquid carriage. Arden forced sense on what she could see: from the corner of her eye she could discern the vague shape of an eye, perhaps a hoof on the end of a long leg, forming from the white wash of the waves that lifted them away. They should have frozen in such water, but the water-horses warmed the water to the temperature of blood. Electric flashes darted about them, they were carried aloft on a tide of light. Hard bodies, threshing tails, manes of wet kelp. Arden grabbed one hippocamp mane to find it fall away in her hands and turn to jelly.

  Then almost as suddenly as it had come the phenomenon was gone and the two castaway women were floating in empty sea once more.

  ‘Well, that’s a fat lot of help,’ Chalice gasped once the last of the horse-waves had receded. She rolled about on the puffs of her inflated skirt. The becalmed sea sloshed lazily about them as the night fell and darkness closed in. ‘If he was going to summon a herd of hippocampi he could have at least taken us all the way.’

  ‘He might not be conscious any more, Chalice.’

  ‘Oh. All right.’

  Arden tested the waters with her hand. With the fading light, another source of illumination came, this time from deep below, faint red, like the afterimage of a bright light on an eye.

  ‘Water’s warm.’

  ‘Hot water current. Sea-vent, or an underwater volcano,’ Chalice said. ‘Ah, to die of exhaustion and thirst rather than chill. That makes all the difference.’

  ‘Wasn’t it your idea to jump?’

  ‘It was a spur-of-the-moment decision,’ Chalice protested in between spitting out salt water. ‘Jumping felt better than being dragged off for Queen Harrow’s entertainment.’

  Arden paddled vigorously even though the krakenskin coat would not let her sink. ‘What happened on the boat, anyway, Chalice?’ she gasped, kept aloft by anger more than anything. ‘I can put a fire out, is that my damn shadow?’

  ‘No,’ Chalice panted in return. ‘Not the fire. You only made stronger what Jonah could do. Water is his element. You increased that.’

  ‘But still, a fire like that … nobody could heal from it.’

  ‘You’re not a very strong sanguis ignis, but of that other thing … you are strong indeed.’

  Arden paddled about. ‘I think,’ she started, raising her chin away from the water, ‘I think I know what Bellis has. What shadow made the Society so cautious and you Lions so interested.’

  Chalice tilted her head, frowned, swallowed water and coughed. ‘Oh?’

  ‘I saw a broken doll of a woman, yet I saw her issue instructions to those frightening men, on a ship that was once slower than Saudade, yet which caught us easily.’

  A look of guilt passed over Chalice’s face. Yet one more thing to hold against her former friend in the short time they probably had left.

  ‘These old talents overlap, Arden. They were never bred to be specific. Nobody can say for certain what Bellis has, or had, or what she may yet develop …’

  ‘Sanguis orientis,’ Arden said. ‘Why not? A Sainted Isle trait for a girl in such close proximity? I saw how she made those men jump at her word. She could command legions if she could work it properly. Sure, it’s a scrappy bunch of toothless pirates she compels now, but think her with an army.’

  ‘I don’t want to think of it,’ Chalice said.

  ‘No. I suppose nobody does. It would be awful, wouldn’t it. Her, Queen of Lyonne and Fiction. The Society and the Order would have to work to her command. No wonder they wouldn’t let her go to Lyonne!’ Her exhaustion made her slightly hysterical, and she giggled and wept at once.

  Dark things flitted below them. Arden was certain she saw the long neck of a plesiosaur, the bulbous head of an ichthyic whale. Were Jonah unhurt, these creatures would be in his control. But he was, and they were not.

  So Bellis was sanguis orientis. The bloodworked command upon the lich-ships that ran between Equus and Vigil, objects that did what they were told, forever.

  ‘There was a chance she could be … amenable though,’ Chalice said.

  ‘Oh yes, because Mr Lindsay hoped Jonah would tighten her leash!’

  ‘Well, we thought he would! He did it once! How was anyone to know how much of a ruse of hers that idea was!’ Chalice wallowed in her inflated dress. ‘Damn it, I’m sinking.’

  The night, when it came, was so dark. The fog hid the stars. Away from the warm-water upswell, the cold began to seep in, promising pain. They were neither of them brave enough to enter the cold water and freeze, so they remained paddling around in their little thermocline. Arden prayed for one of the monsters to come up, to eat them or save them. But they did neither, oblivious to the pitiful little lives above them, and she felt for the first time the tenuous link between herself and Jonah Riven sever, like a thread pulled tight until it snapped.

  ‘Arden,’ Chalice said, and the harsh tone brought her back from her despair.

  ‘What is it?’

  ‘We don’t have to do this. This waiting to end in agony, by thirst or frost.’ Chalice took Arden’s hand with her water-wrinkled own. ‘I have a vial,’ she said urgently. ‘A poison given to all Lions. It is placed under my skin, in my arm here. If you could dig it out, we could share it.’

  ‘I don’t … I don’t know. Let us think a while.’

  ‘All right. A little while.’

  The two women clung to each other for comfort, aware of the only path forward left to them.

  The water was getting colder. The current was moving them on.

  ‘Chalice,’ Arden said after a long silence.
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  ‘Yes, darling?’

  ‘You said my blood could increase an endowment. Make someone else’s stronger?’

  ‘Or your own. You’ve been riding on a sanguis ignis talent that was just about latent anyway. You were never ignis, or malorum. Just increased the tiny correspondence with fire you naturally had.’

  Had she not been so cold, Arden might have mourned such a revelation. Now they were identities stripped away by water.

  ‘You’ve been tested, Chalice. What did you say you had?’

  ‘Only the slightest symmetry for salts and minerals. Sodium, some lower metals.’ She shrugged as best she could with her shoulders half-submerged in the water.

  ‘Sodium is an atomic component of salt …’ Arden murmured, as if her mouth spoke a memory she could not.

  ‘See. Nothing useful, I’m afraid. Unless you wanted more salt.’ Chalice said, her teeth now chattering. ‘Curse! It could be rock candy and saltwater taffy I trammel, for all I know.’

  Arden pulled off her glove, let it float away.

  ‘What are you doing, darling?’

  ‘I saw Mr Lindsay with a sodium light in the Justinian orangery,’ Arden said. ‘I can’t make enough light with ignis malorum, but if you helped me … if you could control that element, maybe I could increase your interaction with it.’

  ‘To do what?’ A note of panic twanged in Chalice’s voice.

  ‘Whatever it can do.’

  Chalice stared, terrified. For a long moment Arden feared Chalice would refuse. Then she nodded. Pulled her locket out. A rose upon thorns. She used the thorn of the Rose Order to dig into the coin in Arden’s hand. Arden could not help but hiss at the pain.

  Then Chalice inflicted the sharp locket upon her own hand. She had calluses there, from years of work, and Arden wanted to tell her that it was not important, the place.

  But Chalice wanted to cut herself in the same place she had cut Arden. It was important to her.

  ‘Ugh, almost, almost.’

  Arden senses the blood in the water with a sick lurch, both for the meaning of it, and for the realization that it was her shadow endowment making her so sensitive to sanguinity. She’d always carried that shadow with her, not knowing, oblivious.

  Now only if it would work.

  The stormbride let the rose locket go. Let it float to the bottom of the ocean. They wrapped their hands together. Arden felt the blood in her grommets prickle and ache. A deep weariness overcame her. Please, she thought. Let something happen, anything, that is not dying on an empty sea.

  Their buoyancy was increasing. They wallowed on the surface of the becalmed water.

  ‘Maybe it is salt. Oh, I could imagine an island of salt,’ Chalice murmured, her shivering chin knocking into Arden’s ear. Arden’s mind was becoming fog. Chalice’s voice drifted through it. ‘A salt crystal palace.’ Their hands squeezed tighter. ‘A Kingdom of Salt and we will be Queens upon it.’

  ‘Is anything else happening?’ Arden asked. Her hands had gone into a rictus. She was having trouble moving.

  ‘Nothing,’ Chalice said. ‘Nothing. Is it morning though? It’s so light.’

  ‘It’s not the sky,’ Arden said. ‘It’s us.’ She kicked with all her remaining strength, and the sea might have been a shimmer of yellow light. ‘It’s you, Chalice, it’s you!’

  Light all around them, orange as a sunset.

  Chalice Quarry’s cracked lips split into a grin. She spun around and shrieked into the fog. ‘Hey! Hey! Over here.’

  Through the illuminated yellow mist came the chatter of a small kraken-oil engine, and the prow of a longboat loomed. Same black dinghy the pirates had reported missing from Saudade’s stern, with a roof of black canvas. Over the bow, two familiar faces, both incandescent with sodium light and relief.

  David Modhi and Sean Ironcup. Still alive.

  36

  Are you awake

  Are you awake, dear? Truly awake?

  I have been awakened to something.

  Then best get up now. You have been asleep long enough.

  Arden sat up suddenly in a bed of soft cotton sheets. She immediately saw the portrait of the senior Justinian staring down at her from the foot of the bed. The Dowager had called him a stormcaller, from old Northern bloodlines. The old baron, Alexander Justinian. He wore shades of Mr Riven’s face.

  Next to the portrait, the very real figure of a nurse, who gasped and dropped her tray of potions, before running out of the room. Within seconds she was back with the Dowager Justinian and Mr Sage.

  ‘Where …’ Arden croaked with a voice that sounded as if her throat were lined with sand. ‘I need to get up.’

  The light through the small, high window seemed altogether too bright. She winced, and the Dowager went to draw the curtains.

  ‘You’re safe in our Manse,’ she said. ‘The Coastmaster decided it would be better for you to recover here than in Mr Sage’s hospice. He sent out a search party, you see. Saved your life.’

  After all that had happened, the simple thought of being in such a debt to Mr Justinian was the thing to turn her stomach. A more pressing need took her. ‘Bathroom.’

  Mr Sage came forward. ‘Ah, take your steps easy, then, Mx Beacon. You haven’t been on your legs for nearly three days.’

  She frowned. ‘Three days? But I was halfway to the Sainted Isles a minute ago.’

  ‘Dear, whatever you and your stormbride were doing on the open ocean so close to winter I cannot begin to opine, but you caught yourself a dreadful case of ichor meritis.’ When Arden remained bewildered the Dowager added, ‘It’s a disease of the water around here. The creatures from the depths have a wicked venom.’

  ‘Chalice, oh, how is she?’

  ‘Hale as anything. Some people have a natural resistance. Some however, not. Up you get.’

  The Dowager Justinian helped her into the bathroom, and afterwards waited with a bowl of lukewarm soup for Arden to teeter back, as weak as a foal taking its first steps.

  ‘If you’re up to visitors, there’s the young lady here for you.’

  Arden nodded. ‘Give her permission.’

  Chalice ran in before Dowager Justinian had a chance to advise her of Arden’s decision, and kissed her messily on both cheeks before seizing up her hands.

  ‘Ah, Arden, you’re quite alive! Mr Sage came by twice a day and said all you needed was rest. I snuck David Modhi past the nurse at the door. He was so worried. Ichor meritis! It’s a death sentence in these parts. I would have sent for a proper doctor but …’

  ‘Your work is appreciated,’ Arden said, and smiled though every muscle in her face hurt and her heart hurt twice more.

  When the Dowager left them alone, Chalice closed the door and came close. The rigours of their castaway journey were still on her peeling skin and sunburned face.

  ‘Mr Lindsay interviewed me,’ she said quietly. ‘I gave him the locket Mr Absalom gave me.’ Arden frowned and Chalice waved her hand in dismissal – for a moment resembling the no-nonsense friend she’d known before.

  ‘Don’t fret, a copy was made before I handed it over. It contained a map printed on a square of silk, an up-to-date map of the Islands and their cities more detailed than we had ever yet seen.’

  ‘What else did you tell him?’

  ‘Not about Mr Riven, or that you know of your shadow endowment now, or that you made me stronger, if only for a little while.’

  ‘I can’t remember what we did. It’s all rather muddy.’

  ‘You increased me, made me sanguinem. Only long enough to make a little sodium arc in seawater. I can’t say it was the most brilliant talent ever to show itself, but it certainly helped the boys find us. Oh, and I brought you a present.’

  Then Chalice took a pair of new leather gloves from her pocket and unwrapped the bandages from Arden’s hands. The grommets had been sealed with an antibiotic honey-wax.

  ‘To replace the ones you lost.’

  ‘Thank you, Chalice.’

>   ‘The Eugenics Society would use you terribly, if they had real proof of what they suspect you capable of, this sanguinem evalescendi.’ She pushed the gloves forward, urged Arden to take them.

  ‘Doesn’t this silent assistance go beyond your Order vows?’

  ‘Oh, I am loyal to the Lyonne Order. But the Order is made up of mere men, and they will make all the same wrong decisions if they try to use you the same way they tried to use Bellis. You deserve to make your own decisions about your body and your blood.’

  Arden turned to face the window, where the salt-stumped gardens of the Manse struggled against the climate.

  ‘You appear to be in the minority,’ Arden said. ‘For holding that belief.’

  Fortunately, Mr Justinian’s lechery was not sufficient to induce him to intrude upon a convalescent, and for a long time Arden did not have to contend with him. Besides, according to the whispering gossip of the house staff, sickness and disablement were conditions quite distasteful to the young lord of this saltwater estate.

  He did not approach to claim his gratitude from Arden until she took her first steps in the delicate winter sun a few days later. She was in an empire line dress of urchin-blue cream, with her beloved krakenskin coat over the top of it, and her wobbly gait had eased enough to stand upright, unaided. One of the walled gardens provided a natural shelter from the elements, caught rays of the morning sun in that brief period before the afternoon fog came in.

  She sat among the moss-covered statuary. Her strength returned in small moments. She would rub her grommets through her new gloves, and her thoughts had no purchase, turning to fog and forgotten memories, losing themselves to the chill air. A true endowment she now had, one that was powerful, but only expressed through the terms and skills of others. She herself was a cypher, without purpose of her own.

  She was gifted and depleted at once. Jonah was gone. Her body was numb to his passing. He had been torn out of her, and she was hollow without him.

  Time passed both slowly and fast. She’d taken some of the brighter days in the walled garden by herself. Today Mr Justinian intruded on her without apology.