Monstrous Heart Page 3

  ‘See that one? Mr Riven, he goes by, the monster of Vigil. That, my poor dear, is your new neighbour.’

  3

  Oh dear

  ‘Oh dear,’ Dowager Justinian said, her thin mouth drooping further once she saw Arden Beacon on the afternoon of her market adventure. ‘I didn’t quite believe my son when he told me of what happened this morning. You got the Rivenwife’s coat.’

  Arden brushed the perpetual wet from her dress. ‘Was Mr Justinian terribly upset? I rather let him go his own way afterwards.’

  ‘I had not the chance to ask my son his full opinion,’ the Dowager said. Her eyes darted evasively behind her black gossamer veil. Dead a full decade her husband had been, and yet she still wore the same silks as for a planned funeral march. ‘I have been busy today.’

  The Dowager was a thin, regal woman who may have once been warm in her beauty and generosity. Years on Fiction’s bleak coast had turned her sallow. The jewellery which she wore upon her constant uniform of black mourning had more in common with dull chunks of quartzite than the diamonds their settings suggested.

  ‘Well, there’s not much that can be helped, you weren’t to know about the histories of our town. I’ll have tea brought to your room.’

  ‘Thank you. I’d like tea.’ Arden noticed a small pile of correspondence on the sideboard. ‘Are there any letters from my family?’

  ‘Not since the ones from last week. The mail is slow, here.’

  There were however some postcards from some old academy friends, mostly of mountains and chalets in daisy-meadows, for the summers were hot in Clay and those who could afford to escape to alpine hostels, did. Arden read the brief messages with a combined muddle of gladness and envy, and doubted finding any similar image to encapsulate Vigil when she wrote in return. Maybe a heavy-set fisherman in gumboots, waxed overalls and a gigantic cable-knit sweater, standing by a wicker basket of headless eels.

  The Dowager followed Arden up the creaking stairs of Manse Justinian. The estate house had been built on an escarpment of basalt, and by its position looked down upon the town and much of the shaggy scrub of the Fiction peninsula. The family occupied less than a quarter of its space. In her first days, Arden had found herself easily lost in entire abandoned wings, stripped of furniture and fittings. Swallows nested in the faded walls, flitted through empty corridors. A cold wind moaned through broken windows. Powdered mortar fell from the brickwork at each strong gust, and if one day the house would fall, it would not be a day far distant.

  Behind Arden, the woman’s black skirt hem whispered ill-gossip against the bare floorboards. By the bleach on the wood Arden suspected the stairs had worn carpet runners once, such as that found in a Bedouin tent-palace, but such valuable things rarely survived the harsh, damp climates south of Lyonne.

  Besides, barony or no barony, a Coastmaster’s salary could not afford to deck even a quarter of a country estate out in the manner of its Northern equivalents. The house rested on a precipice of decay, the way a family mausoleum will crumble after the last casket is interred. The men in each candle-smoked portrait lining the walls had all long since passed on. Any other images were daguerreotypes and tinplate prints, things one could obtain with half an hour of a photographer’s time.

  Strangely, no women’s faces had been seen fit to add to the cheerless décor. The Justinian line seemed to have sprung like gods, each generation from the other’s forehead without need of a woman at all. Going by the profiles she saw as she squinted in the candlelight, the line had grown a little less vital with each passing iteration, until only Mr Justinian was left at the far corner, his photographed face dilute and chinless.

  A little like the blood talent that had drained from Fiction itself, Arden thought.

  The Dowager did not leave when Arden laid the krakenskin coat out on her small, slender guest bed.

  On first arriving at the house twenty-five days previously, Arden had asked the Dowager privately for a room with a lockable door. A request she could not make of the son.

  Dowager Justinian had been surprised at Arden’s wishes, for the Coastmaster’s Manse was patrolled by dogs and a quartet of retired soldiers in her employ. She had granted Arden the room with its hard, narrow bed and a window little bigger than a postage stamp, despite it being hardly a fifth of the size of the guest house Mr Justinian had first expectantly offered.

  Still, for three nights in a row Arden had heard footsteps on the landing, the sound of the knob being turned until the lock snapped tight in the jamb. Those nights she drew her bedclothes to her chin and clutched hard the small knife of her profession.

  The night visitor never tried to defeat the lock. With entry thwarted, the footsteps would only linger for a moment before moving on.

  Now in the dim light of the small room, the blue kraken-cross glowed, an entirely different kind of uninvited visitor. A sullen phosphorescence in each mottled spot, unearthly and benthic. The cut came from the head of the beast, where the fabled kraken crucifix graced the cranium of a bull male at full maturity, one of the few places upon that immense, strange body that could be preserved and tanned. Rarely would any one animal produce enough usable leather for half a garment, let alone the panels for a complete coat. Those pieces never even made it to Clay Capital, Lyonne’s largest city. They were sold to foreign princes or corporate scions, displayed in glass cabinets and only worn during coronations or lying-in-states. A strange call had drawn Arden to this coat in the market.

  A murdered whore’s garment.

  Arden stroked the decorative leather tooling at the jacket’s sleeve. Pretty, but not stamped in deeply enough for permanency. A too-tentative hand had struck the die on these clumsy patterns. A woman’s hand, she guessed, one unused to those sharp instruments that her brothers all their lives had been allowed access to. Probably sewn the leather as well, judging by the tiny, precise stitches that suited a formal dress better than a coat. A woman’s labour in the threads. Places such as Fiction did not tend towards providing their sons a fully rounded education. Despite an innate skill at leather-work, Clay Portside tailors did a roaring trade in repairing breeches that clueless southernmost men could not repair themselves.

  ‘It’s such a beautiful thing,’ Arden said. ‘I can’t imagine anyone just throwing it away, no matter how it came into their possession.’

  ‘I can imagine the beast it once was.’ The Dowager’s black mourning-dress hushed against the cold hearthstones as she went to the miserly fireplace, where the embers of the night before still collected under the ash. She agitated them with an iron poker, adjusted the flue so they would have air to last them into the evening.

  Arden wondered if she would see one, at least once, and if it would be as magnificent and terrifying as her books, and beautiful as the coat upon her bed. An entire mountain of copper-body, sinuous beneath the ocean, with arms as long as a steam train of twenty carriages, a pupil so large she could stumble through.

  The Dowager seemed to have heard an inkling of her thoughts and said, ‘By the time any specimen makes it into town, it is already cut up for processing. And thank goodness for that. They are hideous. Such arms and legs. Those cold eyes, such unholy thoughts. I’ve heard they grow large enough to consume a whale, or a bull plesiosaur.’ She shuddered. ‘A plesiosaur can grow as big as two elephants, so you can make your own decision as to exactly how much monster we are speaking of.’

  ‘You’ve actually seen one, Madame Justinian? Monstrom mare? Or is it mostri marino here?’

  The Dowager’s poker thrust hard into the ash and disinterred a still-flaming coal.

  ‘Monstrom mare,’ she said. ‘Once, when I was a girl in Manhattan, I saw a kraken chick washed up upon an oyster-shell beach. Very immature, just a baby really, but each leg was twenty paces long. The old Emperor Krakens never approached so close to shore, there. It is different in Fiction. The creatures are indigenous to Vigil, and in these waters they breed and die.’

  A silence descended upon th
e small, chill room. Though she was mostly Lyonne by blood, Dowager Justinian hailed from that great country far west of the Summerland Sea, in a small village between two rivers called Manhattan, at the province’s south border. Her mother tongue was Lyonne-Algonquian, that great trader’s language that most spoke with some measure of fluency. However had a Vinlander ended up on this windswept Fiction coast, presiding over an immense family estate with a husband who seemingly, based on his portraits, had never aged?

  Breeding and death perhaps. That was always the way.

  Arden pushed aside the lace curtain at the small window, where beyond the sad patches of lawn and holly oak trees – stunted by the wind and salt – the patient expanse of Vigil’s shallow bay lurked. Giants lived in that place, creatures that had endured the aeons that had made extinct their ancestors. Every dream or terror that existed in a sailor’s lonely night moved and surfaced in those waters. Here be dragons.

  And somewhere in the fog was her lighthouse, waiting for her.

  She had not entirely been truthful with Mrs Sage today, when she had said the Seamaster’s Guild had requested she to go to Vigil – and that her father approved. They had merely relayed the instruction. The request came from altogether another, deeper branch of government, and one not entirely known for sincerity.

  Her Portmaster father had not been pleased at the Guild orders. Had begged her not to go. But she had gone anyway, because of what had been promised. It was worth risking everything. Before she’d departed for Vigil, Portmaster Beacon had taken Arden aside. The post was an unlikely request from them, he’d cautioned her. He’d fought hard for her to receive her little signaller position after she’d matured so late and so weak in her talent. The Seamaster’s Guild had been so reluctant in even that small concession. Now here she was, being offered a prime flame-keeper’s position … in Fiction granted, but still a full-degree holder posting.

  Refuse the post, Daughter. I fear you are in the sight of Lions. If you agree to go to Fiction you will be a puppet. It’s not for Fire they’ve called you. Just give me the word, and I won’t sign your release papers.

  She should have taken his advice, but an odd, resentful stubbornness had made Arden disagree with her father.

  And yet …

  It’s not for Fire they’ve called you.

  The Dowager spoke then, interupting Arden’s thoughts. ‘The season is too early for kraken, they come in deep winter, most of the time. If the fisherfolk can bring in at least one or two small hens, it will certainly stave off the hungry months.’

  ‘That’s good,’ Arden replied absently, her mind still on her father’s reproach. Had he been right and her wrong? What if the Lyonne Order only wanted her to stay in this mansion for a Coastmaster who desires to have a high-bred wife?

  ‘Yes the kraken are important to our economy, and that’s why the Riven man is tolerated here, despite what he did to his wife.’

  ‘Suspected to have done, I assume, given that he’s still living among you.’

  ‘Suspected.’ The Dowager nodded at the coat. ‘Because he can bring the giants to shore in the winter time.’

  ‘They’re worth covering up a murder?’

  ‘Krakenskin is precious. Not just for leather.’ The Dowager picked up the coat and stroked it reverently. ‘Keep the skin wet, put it on the deepest burn and there will be no scar. The ground-up beak is medicinal against all sorts of tumours and growths. Kraken eye-jelly dissolves cataracts, can make the blind see. The oil is health tonic for a heart, and fuel and perfume, and is far more expensive than either jasmine, civet or ambergris.’ She nodded. ‘The flesh makes for a fine meal, if the fishermen butcher it early enough.’ The Dowager counted the treasures off as if they were the accounts of a banker.

  ‘I heard the monsters are worshipped as gods, here.’

  ‘Yes. They once were. The old religion is gone now, but we still host many tourists in this Manse during Deepwater season, the winter time. There is even a masque on the longest night, where men dress up like a sea-serpent and rampage through the town until a king is crowned among them, for a day. More than one child owes their beginning to the Deepwater Night. More than one dispute finds its permanent end as well.’

  ‘It sounds very, ah … primitive.’

  ‘They love their brutalities, do our Vigil folk. And with its history, and that devotion, are you sure you want to keep that odd coat? It would fit no sea dog of course, but a good tailor could unpick the seams and marry the panels with a dress suit. I could get you an entire bonefish wardrobe for the price of the leather.’

  Arden shook her head. ‘I could never destroy such a beautiful thing. It would be a desecration. More to the point, this coat is equipment I need. I will be able to attend my duties at the lighthouse and relieve Mr Harris sooner, especially now that I don’t have to worry about freezing to death.’

  ‘I am surprised you are not out there already.’

  Arden bundled up the coat so that it might fit into the steamer trunk she kept under the bed.

  ‘Mr Justinian has such concern for my wellbeing, you see.’ Her irritation prickled her tongue. ‘He will not sign a certificate for the interim Lightkeeper’s release until he is certain I am ready. He has undertaken to prepare an extensive list of equipment.’

  She didn’t add that she’d never heard of a keeper charged with such a list, full of items not so easy to obtain and that required delivery via a postal network that worked only when certain people felt that it should. Poultices for exotic ailments and shipping encyclopaedias for irrelevantly distant shores. Hot-water heaters and a strange pachyderm-fibre blanket rather than the goat-hair one that suited just as well. Three kinds of leather shoe, the manufacture of which could be carried out only in Portside. An expensive coil of Mi’kmaq coal-ether rope, for no purpose whatsoever. What was wrong with Lyonne-laid coir?

  ‘My son has been a Vigil Coastmaster and proxy for the Lyonne Seamaster’s Guild for quite some time too, Mx Beacon. You have a dangerous position out there, literally between the devil and the deep blue sea. I’m sure he knows what he is doing.’

  ‘I need to start my job, Madame Justinian. Soon. The chemistry of the perpetual flame requires tending by a sanguinem, and if it goes out, the Lyonne Navy will be down here in a flash wondering why half their marine fleet is littering the rocks of the promontory.’ She widened her eyes for emphasis. ‘I can’t imagine what the Seamaster’s Guild will say if they start getting invoices for fuelling a regular lamp.’

  The Dowager muttered words in a Manhattanite tongue, gave a little hiss between her teeth. She frowned up at the dusty lamp-covers. ‘Ah, it reminds me. Best I light the house lamps for the night. It comes quickly on these shores.’

  Arden was being dismissed. The staff could very well have lit the fifty lamps within the Manse themselves and the Dowager could have made a promise to convince her son to hurry up and release Arden to her lighthouse. Instead, even the black-veiled woman seemed complicit in Arden’s extended stay.

  ‘I’ll give you time to freshen up,’ the Dowager concluded, as she lit the first lamp in Arden’s room. ‘Supper will be in an hour.’

  Arden waited impatiently until the Dowager was gone before she opened up the flame-embossed lid of her steamer trunk. Though Mr Justinian’s mother was harmless, she was just as guilty of familial designs as her son, and possibly just as curious as to what was stopping Arden from falling into Mr Justinian’s arms.

  Arden’s trunk was her life reduced to a painted tin box, four foot by two. It contained all the certificates of her career as a signaller, ten years as a Lady of the Lights upon the Clay Portside docks. It was an odd paradox that she was both nobility and labourer in a country where there was such a deep and unfathomable division between commonblood folk and the sanguinem with their precious and valuable labours.

  She paused before the trunk and studied her gloves before sliding one off. Her hands were strong as any common worker’s, with calluses from the endless windi
ng mechanisms of signal-work and canal locks.

  But the new coins in her palms made her weak.

  A metal disk in the centre of each inflammed hand – a silver moon stitched in between the heart and head-line. They were protective grommets for the act of blood-spilling required to keep the lighthouse fire burning.

  The small fires of the signal lights she had tended before had needed far less blood. She hadn’t needed the disks before now.

  With a hiss of discomfort she pulled the gloves back on and shifted books and papers aside.

  ‘Only a few months,’ she said herself. ‘Then you’ll have everything you ever wanted.’ All her shuffling of the contents of the trunk to make way for the coat ended up uncovering a small trinket-chest carved of bone. A small noise escaped Arden’s throat.

  ‘Don’t open it,’ she said to herself sternly. ‘Don’t open it, Beacon.’

  But she couldn’t help herself. The enchantment within was too great. Love was venomous, its toxin poisoned you forever. Arden opened the box and the past fell out.

  A silver-print on paper floated onto the bedspread, no bigger than her palm. A clean-cut man in an airship officer’s uniform looked out at her, his black hair grown long from a military shave, rakishly tilted cap, twinkling, good-natured eyes.

  On the back, a blue-ink cursive. Thinking of you always – Richard.

  The regret hit her hard. A bitter memory came, of a stolen kiss at the Guild Ball a year before. I’ll come back for you, Richard Castile had said to her. I will be a Captain at last. We will be married in the winter. Wait for me.

  She had wanted to spirit him away to her apartments that night. But Richard had been evasive, preoccupied. Danced with other women. She’d tried not to be upset. Their love was forbidden, so of course he wouldn’t risk affections in public. He’d told her that he had already bought a ring for their upcoming elopement. All she had to do was wait. Fretting would only be foolish.

  The cracks in their relationship, so easily ignored, could not be ignored forever.