The Deepwater Trilogy. Claire McKenna
held for Mr Justinian, the man who was both the Master of the Coast and her employer. He had made it clear he wanted to be more to her, still. Arden shuddered.
Still, forced to endure his hospitality, Arden had observed Mr Justinian with a calculating eye and taken his measure. She discovered that foremost her host had a predilection towards causing humiliation. It delighted him to be petty, and mean; and so she had grasped the opportunity to be well away from him while his voice still remained fixated on castigating the poor elderly porter.
‘You fool, you’ll break every dish in that trunk! Put some backbone into it, guy, or I’ll have the Magistrate charge you with the damage …!’
Mr Justinian would occupied for quite a while longer. Arden straightened her jacket and skirts and looked down a street undergoing some kind of market day. Market day was trading day in this town where even the dread sea-serpent, maris anguis, could find itself pickled in salt and up for sale with the lumpfish. The siren song of trade brought the coastal dwellers out of their hamlets and huts, hauling with them their spoils of the sea. A row of trestle tables fronted anonymous doorways. Each table was topped with the ocean’s produce laid out like a museum of grotesque curiosities. For every recognisable ichthyosaur in a zinc tub filled with ice there bobbed something ghastly and incomprehensible; fish with ten eyes, a barnacle the size of a woman’s torso.
Arden set off, searching for the experience that would make her brief sojourn into freedom worthwhile, and instead found to her sinking disappointment that her host had not lied to her. Vigil was both grim and drab in appearance and utility. An oily yellow mist shrouded the slate roofs and slunk about the chimney pots, giving everything a murky air. The cold air had a burned and salty miasma, despite it having drizzled earlier. Arden startled at the tootling of foghorns as the fishing boats came into the harbour. People wore the odd uniform of the shore: salt-country linens dipped in flaxseed oil and fish-tallow, shirt-collars embellished in bleached thread, plain hogwool jumpers knitted thick and warm.
All this strangeness, but no real sense of blood. No impression of the power that eddied and washed through her own hot northern country like a tide of whispers, that great sympathetic connectedness with the manifestations of life. No Sanguis.
Blood was the great divide that separated the country of Lyonne from the wilder climes of Fiction. The talents that had once been so powerful in this land were now all but forgotten. Once upon a long time ago Arden would have found kin here, talented users of blood like herself.
Arden rubbed her hands, and felt the cut-coins beneath her soft leather fingerless gloves catch and tug from where they’d been newly sewn into her palms. Before the Seamaster’s guildsman had come into her Portmaster’s salty office with bad-news and orders wrapped up in a vellum scroll, she’d kept respectable employment as a lead signaller upon one of the busiest trading harbours in the world. She had been Sanguis Ignis, flame-keeper. Respectable.
But with a single request she had been sent south to this place where no ignis had been born for a hundred years. Nobody would share what she was. She would be at best a novelty come from far away. At worst … well. There was no bottom to that particular pit.
When Arden walked past one market table, a scarred, bearded man touted her in a foreign language. Old Fictish, the dying tongue of the shorefolk of these cold, grey southern oceans. Then he stopped, and stared.
Arden pulled her fine leather coat about her, feeling as much an outsider as she had at any time in her life. If she thought the Fictish people backwards, then they would see her as inexplicably strange, with her sun-embraced complexion, the bright colours of her clothing, and the waxed cotton of her skirt still creamy and un-stained by the oily coal that heated every rude little home here.
‘Roe for sale, madam, sturgeon eggs? Would you like a taste?’ he repeated in a passable Lyonnian.
‘I’m not buying anything today, I’m sorry,’ Arden replied, even though she didn’t even know what he was trying to sell her, for the mess in front of him was as unlikely to be caviar as it was anything edible. He shrugged, unconcerned with her disinterest, as she was not quite his usual customer anyway.
There wasn’t much of a town centre to be had, and soon she found herself back on the waterfront again, where six feather-footed dray horses provided the counterweight to a pulley and a load bound for an overladen cargo boat. Arden stayed to watch at the marvel of such a thing, for in Lyonne’s capital city of Clay Portside a sanguis pondus could make a counterweight weigh whatever it had to, ten tonnes if needed, and no effort was required except a simple pulley. Just as she suspected, no blood here in the country of Fiction, no control over elemental forces, just pure labour.
From the waterfront she had her best view yet of Vigil clawing itself from the sea as a hillocky mess of factories and trade offices fronting a sheltering port. The region played host to fish-processing warehouses, one merchant hotel, and a clumping of lonely, ugly little houses with tiny windows. It had not always been so miserable and backwards, perhaps. At one stage in the recent past there had been an effort to modernize the town, for wires still occasionally strung between lamp posts, evidence of elektrifikation, that startling new technology. Yet on closer inspection the wires hung lax and broken, the lamps in their curlicued galleries browned out, their internal globes grey with a fine ash from where the filaments had charred away.
A shout and Andrew whirled about, expecting to have been discovered by her jailer.
Instead of Mr Justinian however, it was a rotund man with a publican’s medallion about his neck, fleeing his own establishment. Vigil’s lone merchant inn, the Black Rosette, was at three storeys high the largest building in town, ramshackle in stone base and tin cladding. The entirety of the ground floor seemed to have become a cross between a pub and charnel house, for whatever drama was going on inside the Black Rosette tavern, it caused not a few strangled shrieks and cries for mercy.
A man in an oily duffel coat staggered out of the warped saltwood doors, barking for reinforcements. In answer, to which three men ran in. An intense curiosity made Arden linger a moment. Not more than a breath later, the fight that had begun in the Black Rosette’s stifling interior burst its banks and spilled out across the fish-gut cobbles of the Vigil waterfront.
Two men, caught in a savage embrace. It was a hopelessly unequal combat, for one was bearish and older, armed with twelve dangerous inches of boning knife, the other a slighter man blinded by a bloody gash across his forehead.
The boning knife darted towards the younger man’s pale chest and snarled itself in the grey linen of its victim’s shirt. Tied up in threads the two men fell against a table burdened with a decapitated ichthyosaur head, narrowly missing the row of serrated teeth as the scuffle took them past the carcass, and in doing so they collected Arden, inconveniently in the fight’s way.
‘Oh!’ she cried, and struck the ground with her shoulder, felt her coat tear and a hot pain flower from her elbow.
The fall gave them all only a brief pause. The men were back at each other immediately, locked hand-over-hand around the boning blade while Arden rolled onto her back, stunned and breathless. Beside her the two brutes reached a violent stalemate over control of the knife.
Someone grunted a curse-word in Old Fictish. The older man took higher ground, rolled upon his opponent and pinned him to the cobblestones. The blade-steel blurred in the fringes of her vision before stabbing into a cobble-join inches from Arden’s nose.
‘Devilment!’ she cried out. ‘Watch yourselves!’
In that sliver of breath between his living and dying, the younger man’s head turned towards Arden. She met a pair of eyes from the distance of a hand span, and all she could see was dark iris in a bloodied face, inhuman almost, and yet …
There was there a broken nobility that did not belong on a monster’s face … and a suffering too, of the kind one only saw in children, or the carvings of salvagewood saints in poor-man’s churches. They were close enough to kiss. A second ago either one of them could have died from a blade through the skull.
The