Читать книгу: «The Deepwater Trilogy»

Contents

Cover

Title Page

Copyright

Dedication

Book One: Vigil

1: It was only when the Coastmaster

2: A whore clothed herself

3: Oh dear

4: As was the custom

5: Her uncle had left her a boat

6: The tides had a certain

7: The Vernon Justinian who went to Garfish Point

8: Mr Quill was dreadfully curious

9: When she’d first met

10: Mr Harrow

11: Mr Quill’s car

12: She swam with the surge

13: Something in the quality of her life

14: Wake up!

15: A delicate pattern of daylight fell

Book Two: The Lion

16: The invitation came

17: The night took on a different feeling

18: Half an hour I waited in this freezing cold

19: Vigil in the morning

20: Arden had expected that she would break

21: I just wish you didn’t have to kill them

22: I saw him passing

Book Three: Blood

23: Sing to me

24: Do they know

25: No

26: I have come

27: A hull, upside down

28: … and stopped.

29: Was the dumping that woke her

30: So it’s true

31: The Harbourmistress’ boy yelped at her

32: Mr Riven made a sound

33: When he didn’t immediately reply

34: A whump of hot flame

35: Where are they taking us

36: Are you awake

37: Mr Justinian had the last word

38: She could not bear to stay

39: So, to the testmoot

Acknowledgements

About the Publisher

Book One: Vigil

1
It was only when the Coastmaster

It was only when the Coastmaster turned to remonstrate the old man struggling to load the Siegfried’s voluminous trunk that Arden Beacon seized the moment and made her escape.

She sidled behind the wheels of the automobile — a thing callously ostentatious in this wild country — and walked off with such a laboured pretence of a casual stroll that it could not be seen as anything but. With each step she feared Coastmaster Justinian’s realization that she was not waiting patiently for him, but had instead slipped his leash.

A sharp turn at a bluestone wall, and then Arden was free.

Out of his sight she felt overcome with relief, and had to lean against the salt-scored stones and gulp chilly air before she felt remotely whole again.

Had it been so long since she wasn’t confined like a criminal under house arrest that she didn’t know quite what to do with herself? This was the first time since she’d arrived in Vigil that Mr Justinian had allowed her out of the Manse, his huge family estate that overlooked the small, coarse coastal town. The instinct to make a sudden getaway had come with such an awful slug of panic she’d almost been inclined not to move at all.

Hadn’t he told her it was dangerous, hadn’t he told her …?

But he’d spent a month telling her these things about Vigil, and her thudding heart and acid stomach were evidence enough of the contempt she 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 knife lay between them, the white bone handle splatted with blood.

An old dockworker’s instinct made Arden snatch the knife out of the cobbles and toss the blade away before either man could retrieve it. Then the demonic face was gone and the brawl was back up again, this time a thankful distance away. Arden picked herself up, chest cavity twanging with pulled ligaments and crushed organs, the fine leather sleeve of her only coat torn to shreds, the skin on her elbow pebbled with rash. The men continued to heave bloody-fisted blows at each other.

How could you have missed a bar fight? Arden scolded herself as she brushed away stringy intestines and grey pebbles. She should have known that dance in three acts all too well; the gust of hot, hop-heavy wind from the flung-open tavern doors, the roil of spilled bodies and flailed fists, and the denouement where someone came close to joining the lamentable list of tavern-deceased.

The younger of the combatants had clearly grown weary of this entertainment, taking only two more hard punches to the torso before turning the fight to his advantage. An upward thrust of hip, and he upended the bearish man onto the cobblestones.

Without a word to yield or surrender, the victor took to pummelling the snarling face of the conquered until a flap of skin sheared clean off the eye socket. Blood across the stones. Blood thundering through Arden’s arteries, for suddenly she could feel …

Sanguis? No, it was impossible. The talent was gone from here. It must be her panic, making her sense power where there was none.

Something small and wooden escaped the tangle. Not a weapon this time. A turned black mangrove-wood handle with a screw thread of brass, such as would prime the oil in a ship’s pilot-light.

The handle rolled several feet before bumping against the toe of Arden’s now woefully scuffed patent leather shoe. She was loath to touch it, for the handle’s owner was upright now, a demon-faced man, taller and more brutish than she had thought him at first, his pale chest working like bellows as the blood runnelled from the broken skin of his knuckles. She could not even tell the colour of his hair, for blood from his forehead now coated his scalp with a wave of sheeny black.

How quick the fight had been, how expedient, how unnaturally silent.

In Lyonne, police or militia would have crowded around the scene in an instant. Strangers would have pulled the two apart. Shrieks and screams. Accusals might have been shouted and another fight start elsewhere, for in the big city such emotions were as infectious as a plague.

And she would not have been left to stand there unassisted in a state of fish-and-cobble-tumbled mess.

The street took on the hush of a sermon. The priest of this hard message spat blood from his mouth and indifferently wiped gore from his beard. He glared about at his witnesses, challenging the other equally bestial fellows ashine in their waxed canvas and fishmongers’ overalls to step forward and make their claim.

Nobody spoke. They averted their eyes from him, and went back to what they were doing in the dreary marketplace before the necessary interruption that passed as a trade discussion in this place. A few adjusted the coin they were charging for their bloodied sacks of produce, scrawling higher prices on the slates before facing them outwards again.

Arden sighed at her own hesitations, then with a groan of effort picked up the screw-thread handle, and held it out to its owner.

‘I presume yours?’

His attention was upon Arden for less than a second, only long enough for them to acknowledge to each other that she was insignificant and he was grotesque. Despite the muck, she noticed his bearing at once. He was different enough from the locals that she understood why he might attract the ire of fellows naturally suspicious of differences. His body was raw-boned and spare, hewn by necessity. His bloodied beard was a lighter brown than was usual on these shores, and in danger of gingering. There was no sign of the pelt of full-torso hair which appeared to grow abundantly on the Fiction men as if in response to the bitter climate, or the barrel chest built to tackle a fully laden net of monkfish. Though his arms were unmarked, under the tatters of his clothes she spied tattoos blooming across his back and flanks, a pattern of blue fish-scale chevrons, as if he were a selkie interrupted mid-transformation, and had decided to stay on land rather than the sea.

Stayed on land for love, she thought ridiculously, then immediately berated herself, for who could love such a terrifying creature enough that he should return it in kind?

She had thought his eyes dark, but they were Fiction-blue. A common shade. Eyes that averted as he took the handle out of Arden’s hands, shoved it back into his belt and returned to the tavern to resume whatever conversations had perpetuated such a disagreement.

Not even a thank-you. His victim lay bleeding on the street, forgotten.

The fight might have been silent, but that did not mean it had gone unnoticed. Mere minutes later the person Arden had been trying to avoid before the fight made his unwelcome reappearance.

He slid in behind her, exhaling a loud indignant rasp of breath in her ear. His voice followed, both sulky and wheedling. ‘You saw the fight? It is the way things are settled here in Fiction, in blood and violence. The ignoble creatures of the Darkling Coast do not bargain with words, if they consent to bargain at all.’

Then there it was, the male body pressing insistently against her back, pretending support, but hoping for the other thing too. A sharp stab of irritation made Arden grimace. She pulled away from him and affected a smile of bewildered relief, as if his appearance baffled her utterly.

‘Coastmaster Justinian, I’d wondered where you’d gotten to.’

‘What happened? I said explicitly for you to remain close.’

‘I’d thought you were following me, when I said I was going to look at the market. Then I was lost in the crowd. I didn’t realize you were only instructing the old man, and not exactly helping him.’

His eyes narrowed. Peacock he might have been, but Mr Justinian was not stupid. There was hardly a crowd on a Vigil market day. Arden had evaded him. No mere accident had made her slip away while his back was turned.

‘You do understand you may call me Vernon, now? We are not strangers to each other.’

His hand slithered about her waist. The flinch was instinctive. Handsome he might have been, with his coif of pomaded hair and smooth chin, his height six foot by the old measure, grey eyes the colour of an institutional slate, perhaps some hint of a tan to his skin that a distant and more noble ancestor had begrudgingly gifted.

But something in the Coastmaster’s features was small and bitter. Snivelling. As if the world owed him more than the sizable portion he’d been given, and he resented any other soul who merely received a fraction of his advantages.

For a woman newly arrived at this town under the employ of the powerful Seamaster’s Guild, Coastmaster Justinian was the only thing close to an equal associate she had. Even though she was sanguis and he was not, they were both of them isolated aristocrats in a way, graduated from Northern technical academies, degree-holders beholden to the great service Guilds that linked the two countries into one fraternal parliament. It made a sort of sense that they should cultivate a professional partnership.

The man’s constant touching, well, that was merely a Fiction trait, was it not? Certainly, the cold weather made even bare acquaintances huddle.

‘… now you have made a fool of yourself by running off unaccompanied.’ Mr Justinian continued to scold Arden while steering her towards the row of trestles that made up the last of the marketplace stalls. ‘Fortunately you must only contend with appearing slovenly in public.’

She held the sharp tongue in her head that would have corrected him, I have seen more and bloodier dock fights than this one, and I’d prefer a hundred of them rather than one more day with you.

These things she would have said, if her position in Vigil was not so dreadfully fraught and insecure. Though she had taken her orders dutifully, coming to Fiction had meant abandoning her secure signaller’s position in Clay Portside. If she lost this one, she would be effectively over-specialized and unemployed. This was a bad position for a sanguis to be in.

So Arden kept her counsel, and stored the little nuisance in a mental glory box of accumulated offences.

Mr Justinian steered her back towards the main street with its row of trestles while maintaining his lecture.

‘… the worst of the reprobates operate out of that establishment and upon these streets. See? This is why I have kept you in the safety of the Manse all this time, despite your obvious lack of gratitude. I have saved you from the worst outcomes that occur when men gather.’

‘They rather seemed more concerned with their own arrangements,’ Arden said, pulling away from him, and gladly so, for the Coastmaster’s hands were never content to rest upon her middle and had the unfortunate habit of crawling up towards the undersides of her bosom or the smallest part of her back. ‘My standing there was completely accidental.’

‘Oh, so you think yourself lucky for having escaped their attention?’ Mr Justinian said mulishly.

‘I do, in fact.’

He picked at the ruined sleeve of her coat. ‘Go buy a replacement for your torn coat and charge it to the Guild. Then we can leave this place. But don’t wander.’

I’ll wander off however I like, you insipid creature, Arden thought ferociously, her anger a physical pain that could not be soothed by her speaking the curse aloud, so remained inside her like a swallowed coal that did not cease to burn.

Arden picked in despondent indecision at the mess of fisherman’s clothing with gloves too fine for a village on the edge of nowhere, until her arms smelled of fishwax and linseed oil.

She had wasted so much time shut inside Mr Justinian’s decaying baronial estate, and at her first breath of liberty all she’d been allowed to see were street-fights and offal sellers. Despair – always so close and so suffocating – had fermented in her time under curfew. She had heard the domestic staff talk behind closed doors or under stairs. To them, Arden Beacon was not a professional guildswoman sent from the great ports of Clay Portside. She was merely produce fatted up for the eventuality of Mr Justinian’s bed.

‘A devil’s curse upon you, Mr Justinian,’ she said beneath her breath, tossing aside a scale-speckled pair of trousers, ‘and curse you, Mr Lindsay, for—’

The bronze flash caught her by surprise, stopped at once the bleak train of her thoughts. What imagination was that, her seeing such a thing in all these stained linens and thistle-cottons?

Arden dug in deep again and disinterred her find – an odd, slightly sheened garment – out from the knot of unwashed rags.

She raised to the day a thing that in her hands made no sense.

A coat. A stout, utilitarian coat cut for a female worker of hard ocean climates. Not too long in the hem though; no loose fabric to foul a hurried journey up stone steps in a high storm. A thing rightly made of old canvas and felted wool, worn on a body until it fell to pieces.

But the fabric …

Arden had to rub the collar with her fingers, make certain her earlier fall was not causing her to see wonders. There was only one creature alive that could supply such a hide. Leather as bright as an idol’s polished head and with a crust of luminescent cobalt-blue rings across the arms and yoke. Subtle grading to black when it hit the light just so.

She turned the coat around and her breath caught. She had not expected the fabled kraken crucifix, the terrifying pattern of a sea-monster’s crest. By all the devils of sky and blood, you’d have found its likeness only in a Djenne prince’s wardrobe in Timbuktu, not a filthy rag pile at the edge of the world, and yet here it was; hidden away with thrice-mended broadcloth trousers and sweaters that were more knots than knits.

Before Arden could inquire about the article, her benefactor already had his hand about the coat’s collar.

‘Let me put that aside for you,’ Mr Justinian said and, without asking, slid in between her and the table, ready to yank Arden’s prize away. ‘This is not suitable.’

Despite her relatively short stature, and the dark, fragile air of over-breeding about her, Arden was no pushover. Growing up within the labyrinthine map of the capital city docks, one learned in the hardest of ways those streetwise traits anybody needed to survive. She saw the snatch coming in Mr Justinian’s beady eyes before he made his move, and quickly secured the coat within her strong lantern-turner’s hands.

‘No, Mr Justinian. I wish to buy it for myself.’

‘These wares are filthy. Look at them. Fish-guts and giblets. You are required to own a new coat to work the lighthouse, not cast-offs. As Coastmaster of Vigil I will have a fine plesiosaur leather coat made for you and sent from Clay Capital.’

‘I am not fulfilling your list by this purchase, Coastmaster Justinian. This coat is for my –’ she doubled down on her grip ‘– personal use.’

‘I’m telling you, you do not want it!’

He yanked harder, with enough force to pull Arden off her feet had the trestle corner not caught her thigh. She wedged herself deep into the splintering wood and hung on for grim life. Her ribcage groaned from the earlier trauma, sent sharp currents of pain through her chest, but still she held on.

‘No.’

‘Let … it …’

‘No, sir, no!’

They struggled for a while in stalemate, before he gave in with a hissed curse.

‘Keep the disgusting thing if you must,’ he said, tossing his end of the coat down. Arden heard the snarl under his disdainful words. ‘It is only a murdered whore’s garment anyway.’

2
A whore clothed herself

‘A whore clothed herself in this rag,’ he concluded with caustic passion. ‘A bitch who lay down with an animal and got herself killed for it.’

His curse words spoken, and with God having not struck him from the face of the earth for saying them, Mr Justinian shoved the trestle table once for emphasis, then stalked off across the town square towards the Black Rosette.

Arden exhaled, prickling with both triumph and remorse. She had won something over Mr Justinian, but at what cost?

The jumble seller, a stout grey-haired woman with the pale vulpine features of a Fictish native, remained cheery in the face of Arden’s dismissal.

‘You’ll get used to the muck and bother here, love. Once our Coastmaster gets a pint of rot into him, all will be back to normal.’

‘I must apologize,’ Arden said with forced brightness to the jumble seller. ‘Ours was not a disagreement we should have made you witness to.’

‘The young Baron is correct about the krakenskin, I’m afraid.’ The woman shook the violet threads of ragfish intestines off a pair of trousers that looked identical to the ones she herself wore. ‘The coat is a cast-off and completely unsuitable for any purpose.’

‘But it’s hardly used. I need a wet-coat to work the lighthouse. Only krakenskin could reliably stand all the weather that the ocean might throw at it.’

‘The lighthouse? You mean Jorgen’s lighthouse?’ The woman shifted her now-nervous attention over Arden’s shoulder. The horizon behind the town was mostly obscured by fog, but a good five or ten miles away as the crow flew the land curved into a hooked finger of stone. At the very tip of the promontory a granite tower stood erect as a broken thumb, a single grey digit topped with a weakly flashing light.

‘I am Arden Beacon, Lightmistress, Associate Guildswoman and Sanguis Ignis from Clay Portside, the traders’ city of Lyonne,’ Arden recited, still unfamiliar with her official titles. She held out her gloved hand. ‘I have come from Clay Portside in Lyonne to take over the lighthouse operation from my late uncle, Jorgen Beacon.’

‘A sanguinem?’ The woman frowned at the offered hand. ‘All the way out here?’

‘It’s all right,’ Arden said. ‘Touch doesn’t hurt me.’

Still cautious, the woman shook Arden’s hand timidly, her eyes still on the pony-plantskin gloves, so fine compared to the ubiquitous bonefish leather of the coast. Was not the gloves she minded, but what lay under the gloves that gave the woman pause. The coins. The little metal spigots that were both symbol and necessity of her trade.

Arden did not take offence. The reaction would be the same in Lyonne, among the commonfolk. The woman was gentle, and released her quickly.

‘Oh, I wasn’t minding your hands, dear. I was surprised that Jorgen was replaced so quickly when we could have well put a distillate lamp in there and be done with all the sadness.’

‘The Guild is very protective of its properties. That flame has been kept alive by sanguis for centuries, and they’d not likely stop now. Anyhow, what is the price of the c—’

‘Now that you say it,’ the woman interrupted, ‘I see the resemblance to Jorgen in you, that Lyonne high breeding, so elegant.’ She simpered a little, trying to curry favour with a rich woman from the hot North country. A rich sanguis woman, possessed of esoteric skills. ‘I am Mrs Sage. My husband is both apothecary and doctor in our town centre.’ Mrs Sage waved towards a rude row of wood and brick that even in Clay Portside would have been considered little more than ballast shacks. ‘We were told of Lightmaster Beacon’s passing, and that a blood-talented relative would soon replace him from the North, but … We expected a brother.’

‘All my uncle’s brothers have permanent Lightmaster positions in Clay Portside,’ Arden explained, annoyed that she would now have to have this conversation, and justify her sex, again. In Lyonne there would have been no question of her capabilities – labour was labour, regardless of the source. ‘I was the only one not contracted to any gazetted navigation post, and the Guild requires a sanguinem to crew their stations, so …’ She shrugged. ‘The Seamaster’s Guild requested that the Portmaster of Lyonne provide someone of the talent to take his place. So here I am. Buying a coat—’

‘Just like that?’

‘Well, the Seamaster’s Guild does have to administrate a lot of coastline. I cannot shirk a duty.’

Mrs Sage shook her head that Arden had not questioned such a direction. ‘It’s not right, a woman sent out to those rocks alone …’

‘The Portmaster of Clay is also my father,’ Arden said with a theatrical display of generous patience at Mrs Sage’s concern, so desperate was she to conclude this sale. ‘He understands more than anyone what my abilities are. He also understands that if there is not a Beacon at that lighthouse, it will go to a Lumiere or, God forbid, a Pharos, and,’ she stopped to give the most forced of smiles, ‘ignis families are very competitive for those positions offered us. It would break his heart for our family to lose another lighthouse post.’

‘Still. It pains me to sell you this coat, Lightmistress Beacon. I must refuse.’

Arden saw the coat sliding away in the manner of a barely glimpsed dream. She clutched it tighter.

‘Then why have it for sale if you won’t accept my purchase?’

Mrs Sage smoothed a sou’wester out upon its pile. Her red, chapped hands rubbed the linseedy surface of the rain hat. ‘I was hoping one of the ambergris merchants from Morningvale might buy it today, and take it far away from here. Sell this garment for a profit in a city where nobody knows its source. The young Baron was correct. The woman who owned this coat is dead.’

Murdered whore. Coastmaster Justinian had delivered the words with such venom, meant to hurt with all the force of a slap. Why had it concerned a Coastmaster so much, this discard on a rag-trader’s table?

‘Poor girl. The wife of the brute who killed her,’ Mrs Sage continued. ‘When her corpse was at last recovered from the water over yonder, all that remained was her scalp of golden hair and this coat, washed up upon the harbour shore.’ She tilted her chin towards Vigil’s small, pebbled waterfront, lying a short way down the rotting boardwalk. ‘Perhaps it was merciful, after all those months she suffered in the bed of a monster, that death should claim her so she might not suffer any more. But still, what an end. Slaughtered, and your meat used as a fisherman’s bait.’

Mrs Sage sounded so resignedly matter-of-fact at such an ignominious and unlikely method of dying that Arden couldn’t help but snort a laugh at her story.

The woman glared at Arden with brittle offence. ‘How else do you think the fisherman calls a sea-devil up from the deep by its own volition, to harvest it for such a fine leather, eh?’

And Arden saw then, the true price of the coat would be in her providing Mrs Sage an audience for a tale, a story that by the aggressive delight in her rheumy eyes was a particularly unpleasant one.

Mrs Sage dipped in close to Arden. Her breath stank of fish chowder and dandelion root.

‘These abyssal monstrosities, the kraken, the maris anguis and monstrom mare, they can only be compelled to surface by human meat. The fresher the better. They are drawn by gross desires and mutilations. There’s only so much of a slaughterman’s own body he can give. A toe, a finger, a slice of tongue or a testicle, hmm?’ Mrs Sage sucked her lined lips in thought, imagining the kind of man that would take a blade to himself for his profession. ‘An eye, a hand, a penis most probably, for in what world would anyone fornicate in consent with such an unholy creature as a man who feeds himself in fragments to the sea?’

‘I don’t—’

‘Yes, was him that killed his poor young wife for profit, slice by agonizing slice, and the coat made to clothe her, and remind her just what her sacrifice brought. What other worth was she to him? He had not the tool with which to fuck, and from that lamentable position her life was foreshortened indeed.’

Arden recoiled, taken aback by the salacious details of Mrs Sage’s story. ‘Ah, all right then, thank you for the, um … providential lesson.’

‘Was no lesson. Was caution, Lightmistress.’ Her eyes widened. ‘Was warning.’

Having exhausted her social resilience, Arden hurriedly dug into her purse and took out every note inside it, a wad of Lyonne cotton-paper bills that were not legal tender in Fiction, but all she had. Shoved them at Mrs Sage.

‘Here, here, take this money. I’ll make sure I give this coat a proper new life.’

Mrs Sage smiled and made motions of pious refusal, then took the money anyway. Her tongue pushed through the gaps in her teeth. Both pity and triumph she showed, as she made her announcement.

‘But you are still in the old life, Lightmistress. T’was for that reason I hoped you’d be male. If you are bound for the old lighthouse, then see that murderous hybrid of man and monster over there?’

Mrs Sage pointed past the grey haggle-hordes of the market plaza. Beyond the ice-baskets, one figure walked apart from the fishermen, shrugging into the same copper-black-coloured garment that Arden held in her hand. The man from the tavern fight. The demon. The victor.

Next to him, a handcart without a horse. Upon it was laden the raw, bleeding tail of a leviathan.

‘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 the 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 winding 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.

That Guild Ball was the last time she saw him. He left before dawn on his packet-ship to Vinland. Arden didn’t arrive in time to catch him, but had caught instead the girl coming out of his apartment, the one wearing Vinland pearl earrings and the rose-gold stag-brooch of the Castile family crest. Perhaps Richard had told her about Arden, for upon seeing a frantic sanguis marching in her direction the girl had blushed ferociously and ran off, dropping the silver-print in the gutter. Arden was about to call after her when she’d seen the face staring up from the cigarette butts and orange peels.

Richard’s face.

Thinking of you always – dr.

The pain had been an assassin’s dagger, slid between her ribs. She had always wanted a picture of him, but Richard had constantly refused. Too risky, he said. If an Order agent found an image of a common-blood man in a sanguis trousseau, then he would be demoted, if not worse. Arden was a Beacon, that oldest and most ancestrally fortified of sanguine genealogies. She would need to wait for Richard to catch up. Until he was a Petty Officer. Flight Lieutenant. Captain. Or the god-damned King of Lyonne, it seemed. Ten years of waiting, with no end in sight.

She snapped the opal box shut. No. He would never change his mind and she’d not lock the damn krakenskin coat away with her other failures. She would wear it, defiantly and proudly. She shared something with Mr Riven’s wife, after all. She too had been betrayed by someone she loved.

Arden stood up from the steamer trunk, the photograph still in her hand. Walked woodenly to the fireplace and threw it in. The flame leapt green, the paper crisped black. His eyes, twinkling and knowing. Eyes saying, do what you like, lantern girl. It’s really because of me that you are out here.

The eyes were the last to burn.

4
As was the custom

As was the custom in the old aristocratic families, she changed clothes for the main meal. Wore a grey linen shirt with no ruffles, a narrow dress that finished in a fishtail at the top of her boots. Bound her hair in severe knots upon her head. She headed down the bare wooden stairs towards the shabby velvets of the Justinian dining room, quite prepared to continue the argument about her new coat. Despite Mrs Sage’s pronouncements and the Dowager’s warning, she was feeling combative.

Mr Justinian arrived back from his Coastmaster meetings in the languid sort of mood that comes when one has had those meetings in the Black Rosette tavern over seaweed spirit cocktails, and in the presence of somebody generous with their affections.

He took off his coat – a slate-grey plesiosaur leather he could still ill afford on both a Coastmaster stipend and the dregs of a faded title. He sat at the table with a flourish. Arden huffed an understated disapproval. Mr Justinian knew what he was doing. A war of garments. His coat was an affectation that in Lyonne would have been vulgar, like something a slumlord crime boss would wear to impress the poor tenants. The tanned material had the tough grain of a shark or a ray. Less unfinished versions tended to take away a layer of skin against the poor soul unfortunate enough to brush against it.

Her fellow guests, a man and his wife from South Lyonne, glanced at the plesiosaur coat and kept their own counsel.

To pay running costs, the old Manse ran as a guest house for other important merchants and businesspeople who might wish to make profit off the Darkling Sea. Perhaps it did not make as much of a profit as was required, for to save on fuel not every lamp was lit, so instead of bright, cheery galleries, the large rooms became crepuscular, full of shadows and damp. The old tablecloths, laundered to transparency, were held together by little more than browning claret stains. The silverware would have better been called mottled nickel with silver-plate patches, and a century of cigar smoke now blackened the plaster ceiling roses with a dour velvet. In more than one corner, water-rot frayed the plaster walls and caused a drooping of the faded stripe wallpaper. There were not quite enough glasses to fill the display cupboards, and none of the tableware arrangements ever quite made a full set.

Altogether, a house in decline. The guests, already unsettled by the Baron’s mobster coat, glanced awkwardly at Arden’s fingerless gloves. She rubbed her hands. The bloodletting coins snagged in the oblique arches on the side of her palms. Twanged each time she closed her fist.

‘New gloves, Madame?’ the husband asked her quietly when Mr Justinian left the table in search of a better wine than the cloudy vinegar they’d been served.

He showed her his Guild pin as he spoke, a railroad degree. Though he himself was not gifted with any endowments, the Permanent Way required many sanguis disciplines, from ferrum to pondus and vaporis. A genteel way of telling Arden that even though he was commonblooded he was familiar and sympathetic to her kind. It had been the reason the trade guilds had originated, to unite their labours into one brotherhood, a fraternity of workers despite their wildly different means.

‘I’ve had my coins about a month,’ Arden admitted. ‘I’m only now getting used to having them in my skin.’ She recalled the little Guildsman who had watched with a clear, genial gaze as the nervous phlebotomist inserted the tools of her new position into her hands. Mr Lindsay, his name was. He had been a small, delicate fellow in the tweedy suit of a clerk, and wore a golden pin in the shape of a rose. He’d also been the one to bring the orders to her father.

For the railwayman’s benefit, and because she did not want to treat them as shameful or remarkable, she rolled her gloves up slightly and showed him the silver buttons set between the heart and the head lines. Her skin was still a little tender at the edges, and she suspected would not ever truly heal.

‘Why in the hands?’ asked his wife. ‘Isn’t it dreadfully more painful to cut your hands?’

Arden nodded. ‘I suspect they want us to feel pain. To remind us that power doesn’t come without a cost. Hands … well they are symbolic in a way no other body part is.’

‘I could think of one other symbolic body part,’ the wife giggled, before hiccupping wine. Arden saw that in anticipation of another awkward dinner the woman had pre-emptively gotten rather drunk. ‘The body part they always mention in those funny little Deepwater rituals, ha! I had that strange Mrs. Sage tell me all the stories of what goes on among those deviant brutes …’

The railroad man patted his wife’s hand and took the glass off her, before returning to Arden and attempting conversation again.

‘You must miss Clay Portside, Lightmistress. I’ve been there many a times, seen the air-harbours stretch out as far as the eye can see, sanguis zephyrim making the aerostats fly and the pondus who anchor them to the ground. Produce and trade from all over the world, the menagerie of animals, the babel of tongues! Of all those wonders, this place must seem like the colour has been taken from your eyes.’

She nodded, relieved at the admission. She could have never said such a thing to her hosts. ‘I do miss home. One does whatever the Guild asks. Especially if you’re sanguis, and there’s duty involved.’

‘Ah,’ he said, as if she had confirmed a suspicion. ‘I wondered why a grown sanguis woman should be getting such protection on her flesh when it’s the preserve of children. Isn’t eleven the most usual age?’

She gave them both a tight smile. ‘My blood tithings never required much from me before.’ She slid up her dress-sleeve to show the calluses on the back of her arm. ‘A cut here would last the better part of a week, and I had no symbolic act required of me.’

‘But now your work requires more blood, I see. Hence the disks to protect your skin from the knife.’

‘Yes.’

‘Did the Lions follow you here, Mx Beacon?’ he asked.

A sudden question. His wife pretended to sip her thistledown wine, but Arden could feel her listening on with harp-string tension.

‘Lions?’

In her mind she saw the little Guildsman Mr Lindsay smile. Arden took a swallow of her claret, to buy seconds and still the sudden shake of her hand.

‘I don’t quite know what you mean.’

‘The Lyonne Order. The Eugenics Society’s attack-dogs.’ With his fingers the railwayman made the sign of teeth. ‘Did they follow you to Fiction?’

Arden went for her claret again and found she had finished the glass. She knew exactly what he meant. Businessmen in Fiction were not at all keen on coming across Lions of the human kind. She was a sanguis invested late into her profession. Such a thing had the stink of Order activity, their skulking and investigations and sudden disappearances. One would think the powerful Eugenics Society would concern themselves only with policing sanguis folk, but they frequently expanded their purview into the citizenry as well. The guests viewed her with no small suspicion.

‘No, was on instruction of the Seamaster’s Guild that I take up position here,’ Arden replied.

‘All the way out here? In Fiction, where the blood has faded?’

‘Well, the lighthouse is under the navigation chain of the Lyonne sea-road. It’s still a blood light, so it needs a sanguis ignis to maintain the flame.’

The wife spoke next, and despite her high spirits she was not as generous with her trust. ‘Why not install a petrolactose lamp in that tower? Or a natural gas, which is plentiful here. Why deal with such esoteric chemistries as yours? Whenever there are sanguis, there are always Lions. The blood attracts them.’

‘See, it is …’ she drifted off, and paused, for she didn’t know either. ‘I’m sure it’s very mundane,’ she capitulated. ‘Keeping the trade and Guilds of our two countries aligned through the sea-road navigation chain. My family has always maintained the Vigil light. It would be a loss to lose a station from sheer neglect, even an unimportant one.’

The wife pondered, then visibly relaxed. Arden’s explanation seemed sound. If her posting was just a matter of navigation, then there were no Lions about.

The husband drained his wine in one gulp.

‘Ah then, let us drink to the trade Guilds, the great fraternities of Lyonne.’

They might have been at ease, but there was already an ill cast to the night. Did the Lions follow you here? The Order worked in the shadows and bore no oversight. They should not be meddling in the mere business of keeping a navigation road safe.

It’s not for Fire they’ve called you, warned the father in her mind. And Arden shivered, even though the room pressed in oppressively close and far too warm.

A fourth guest joined them then, a man of middle years and a certain overbearing pomposity. His voice came before him, echoing from the foyer, a complaint about the condition of the roads, the driver who did not give him deference of title.

Mr Justinian called Arden’s attention as he re-entered, guest in tow.

‘Mx Beacon,’ he said. ‘I’d like you to meet Mr Alasdair Harrow, the Postmaster and Magistrate of Vigil.’

Despite the size of his voice, Mr Harrow was not particularly tall, had fallen into middle-aged stoutness, yet still possessed the domineering characteristics of his youth. The broad, heavy shoulders of a brawler, a pug nose, a cauliflowered ear. She thought his hair was white, but on closer examination in the gloomy light he was a faded blond.

‘A shared title, Postmaster and Magistrate?’ Arden inquired as she shook the new guest’s meaty hand. She wondered that Mr Justinian should be so keen as to introduce her to this fellow when he had never presented Arden to anybody else. The day’s excursion to town notwithstanding, Mr Justinian had kept Arden all to himself in the same manner as a dragon might sit jealous upon its hoard. If he could not have her for a night in his bed, then she should be walled up within brickwork isolations of his own making.

‘It is difficult to find men suited to all the offices of authority,’ Mr Harrow said in a barking pronouncement, not talking to Arden but rather a central place in the room where a silk arrangement of artificial flowers collected dust. ‘Especially here, in this town. So, I must fulfil my duties by occupying both roles.’

And drawing a double stipend from the Coast Office, Arden added silently. She gave Mr Harrow a nod and returned to her meal, busied herself in chewing the most inoffensive slice of potted meat, so she would not have to fight for her place in the conversation.

‘Miss Beacon here intends to take over the lighthouse operations that old Jorgen abandoned,’ Mr Justinian said, dragging her back in. ‘A request from the Seamaster’s Guild themselves.’

Caught drinking, Mr Harrow coughed mid-swallow. ‘What’s that you say?’

‘Jorgen Beacon. This is his niece, a Beacon scion and sanguis ignis from Clay Portside, sent all the way from our air-harboured capital city to bring some culture to our humble hamlet, and to keep the old promontory flame alive.’

Mr Harrow stabbed a pink cube of fish. ‘I’d not allow it, if it were up to me.’

‘Well, it is not up to you,’ Arden said.

Mr Harrow did not respond to her. She might have been an empty chair for all that she had spoken. ‘More fools in the world than there are decent ideas, Vernon,’ he grumbled.

‘I have my opinions too,’ Mr Justinian said, flicking a look Arden’s way. At least he recognized that they were speaking as if she were not there, though presumably because a woman angry was not a woman who would be amenable later. ‘But the Guild was adamant she fill the position.’

‘She’ll be dead within the week, her corpse twice-ravished, mark my words.’ Mr Harrow shoved a grape-melon in his mouth, and the juice ran down his chin. ‘Give her a rifle and make sure she knows how to use it. I’ll not be called out to the promontory to pick up her body like a damned fool.’

Arden stood with a crash, rattling the tableware. ‘Gentlemen, I can manage my own business. I’ve worked harder docks than this pissant bit of rock!’

Mr Harrow started laughing, barks of laughter. ‘They served her up for the slaughter Vernon. To the fucking slaughter. Wasn’t for her blood they wanted a woman out there. The Guild pimped her to the monster on the promontory, and Riven will rape her bloody and thank them for it.’

The house staff came in at that very moment bearing plates of a flavourless broth that would never have been conscionable to serve in Portside, and in the meantime Arden fumed. The gall of these men. The unmitigated dreadfulness of their words.

A server-girl came by with nothing but cow-eyes for Mr Justinian, and spilled claret on Arden’s sleeve with a smirk. Between her jealousy, Mr Harrow’s gleeful predictions and Mr Justinian’s knavish gloating, Arden was twisted up into a knot of frustration so painful it made her want to scream.

‘Excuse me,’ she said through a rage-strangled throat. ‘I’m not feeling well. I need to get some air.’

She fled the crushing mood of the dining room and ran down the murky corridor, finished in what was either a large study or a small ballroom, a gloomy expanse of sapwood parquetry and mildewed corners.

Past the curtain-rags, a cold moonlight spilled across the polished floor. Arden hauled open the double doors, fell out onto the balcony where the frost clawed her face and her breath steamed. All the menace the night could give was immensely preferable to the atmosphere inside, the terrible delight of men savouring that she be in harm’s way.

She sucked down salt air until the tremor in her limbs stopped and her breathing slowed. Gooseflesh sprang on her bare arms, and she welcomed that clean discomfort.

Someone stepped into the room behind her, and imagining it one of the guests who had watched on in deep disquiet at Mr Harrow’s performance she said, ‘I can’t stand it, those uncouth—’

‘Then I apologize. It was not my intent to harm.’

Arden startled. If she had gained a modicum of relief by going outside, the feeling was gone. Mr Justinian stood behind her.

Had Arden been of a more histrionic nature she might have considered throwing herself off the balcony, only this balcony was at ground level and the act probably lost much of its meaning when one landed safely on the other side.

‘Perhaps I’d prefer ravishment by this Mr Riven than being subjected to your snide gossip upon my sense and my work. At least he’s honest in his dreadfulness!’

Mr Justinian huffed. ‘All right then. You’re welcome to him, and him to you, just please come inside. These chills might not seem so much, but they can kill a man.’ He tilted his head towards her. ‘Or a woman.’

‘One may be surprised how resilient I am.’

‘But I am not quite as cold-blooded as you. Allow me to explain our trespasses inside. Please. Please.’

Mr Justinian gestured beside him. She shook her head. They were at an impasse. He threw his crumb.

‘Postmaster Harrow’s her father.’

‘Her?’

‘The woman whose coat you now own. Let me explain.’

Truth be told, the night was infernally cold, and she wanted to know about this Harrow daughter; in the same way hearing of another’s misfortune made one’s own life easier to bear. She stepped into the warmer surrounds of the study and closed the doors behind her. On cue, a servant ran in bearing a jug of tea, deposited the tableware and departed as silkily as a shadow.

The large, dark study had the air of a mausoleum viewing area, the books in the shelves gone dusty and unread. When she had first attempted to pass the time in this neglected library, most of the tomes were reference manuals of one permutation or another, lists of shipping indexes, dry histories. If there had been any books read for pleasure, they were sequestered elsewhere, or never existed at all.

Trapped by circumstance, Arden circled a daybed and a chaise longue as big as a small skiff before her attention was caught by a wrinkle of light in the shadows. A gallon-sized specimen jar, containing the formaldehyde-pickled coils of something aquatic and otherworldly – something octopoid somehow. She tapped the glass, experiencing equally the suffocations and convolutions of the poor beast inside.

‘My ancestor kept a Wunderkammer before he died. A collection of oddities,’ Mr Justinian said. ‘If you would believe it, a woman gave birth to that thing. Nobody but Great-grandfather Alexander wanted that abomination in here, but we were rather forced to keep it.’

She left the pickled monster and returned to him.

‘Don’t change the subject, Vernon. You say Mr Riven’s wife was Postmaster Harrow’s daughter.’

‘Yes. Mr Harrow is a man grieving.’

‘I’m sure he is.’

‘He is a wellspring of bitterness. He is too keenly aware what lies in wait for you upon that promontory, having seen it up close, and to someone he loved.’ Mr Justinian poured himself a snifter of brandy, but did not offer the same to Arden. The liqueur left runnels upon the glass in the firelight. ‘We also must talk of what happened today, else it will always fester in our minds.’

Arden exhaled. ‘You were quite adamant I should not have the coat. Murdered whore, you said.’

‘I acknowledge that.’

‘Marrying a monster does not make one a harlot, Mr Justinian. If what you say is true, then it was her husband’s fault that she was trapped in the marriage, not hers. You disgrace the dead by your blame. What you said today towards me was unconscionable.’

Mr Justinian stared at his shoes, affected a hangdog expression. ‘It upset me to lose such a fine young lady to such a miserly end, that is all.’

‘So she is fine, now?’

‘She was beautiful, and fierce and somewhat intelligent in her own way, and did not deserve what became of her. Reduced from vibrancy to a shade. My guilt at not stepping up to save her, my cowardice, is constant. I chose the pejorative out of my own grief.’ He glanced about, clearly hoping a voice might pipe up and rescue him, as it usually did when the servants were about. ‘But Bellis made her decision to help her father by prostituting herself to Riven when there were other ways out of her predicament.’

‘Bellis Harrow,’ Arden said. ‘So she has a name of her own, then.’

The brandy displeased Mr Justinian. He threw the liquor into the fire, causing a blue spirit to rise from the coals. It reminded Arden of her own arcane fire, starving in its glass in a far lighthouse, waiting to be fed.

Mr Justinian spoke to the fire, and not to her.

‘A hundred years ago a family was procured from the Sainted Isles. The Rivens, they were called. Or at least they received the name because they were shorefolk, sea-savages, not sophisticated enough to understand the concept of familial lineage. It didn’t matter that they were brutes and inbreeds. Alexander Justinian, my great-grandfather, needed hands to process kraken-flesh and saurians in his factories upon the promontory. Who minded if the Rivens were illiterates and barely human? Thankfully they were not suited to the modicum of civilization Vigil provided and mostly remained upon the promontory, away from town. Within the span of a century the Rivens fought and sliced and incestually pared themselves down to one disgusting remnant individual.’

Mr Justinian made the sign of the krakenskin crucifix upon his chest before adding, ‘Your lighthouse neighbour. T’was he that killed his family in an orgy of ritual and violence nearly twenty years ago. Slaughtered every man, woman and child on that promontory in one night. His own blood, gone.’

‘I see,’ Arden said. ‘But if all this brutality did happen, shouldn’t he have been hanged in punishment?’

‘Oh, Riven was punished indeed. Charged and pleaded guilty to killing his family, sent away to the hulk prisons of Lyonne. Rotting boats on Harbinger Bay, converted to hold the worst reprobates and degenerates ever disinterred from the social sewage.

‘But then some syphilitic judge had a weak-minded moment, and over a decade later returned the animal to this town. That is not the tragedy. Fifteen years of imprisonment merely sharpened the criminal’s hunger, made his sexual urges tend to the obscene. Riven was ill-content in wallowing out on the promontory among his factory ruins. He came into town, forced a local girl to wife. Mr Harrow’s daughter.’

‘Forced?’

‘Yes.’

‘Now there,’ Arden said tartly. ‘There is the strange part. The heart wants what it wants and it takes two to marry. If he wanted to marry anyone, then they would have had to at some stage consent to it, to allow it. Before witnesses.’

‘Allow? Allow? You speak about request and consent upon this brutal shore?’ Mr Justinian laughed with an adult’s condescension towards a child. ‘The woman was stolen, just as you would steal a hog or an unsupervised cure of meat. Dragged her screaming to the Sainted Isles, where illegal unions can be effected as easily as an attack in the dead of night. She came back with both eyes blackened, and never spoke for nearly a year afterwards. Not even to her father.

‘Her last year alive she spent in abject horror and torment inside those factories and in his stinking bed. Escaped only once, whittled down to skin and bone and scar. Wanted an abortifacient for the monster curled in her womb, and Mr Sage gave her a tea that …’

‘I have had experience with such a tea,’ Arden snapped. ‘You do not need to explain in detail what Mrs Sage already has. Continue, if you decide this salacious horror is what I must hear to make my informed decision.’

‘Riven came back for Bellis that night, threatened Mr Harrow. Assaulted him, even as he tried to protect his daughter. A month later she was dead. All that was left was her coat, washed onto the beach. The Rector of our church was to make a statement to the magistrate about her death, for it was to him that she had confided. Our Rector himself went to Riven, to beg that he confess for the salvation of his holy soul. He never returned, his body was never found. Without evidence of death, the mongrel could not be charged or convicted. Two deaths within days. But let us merely agree as to who did both.’

‘Circumstantial, still …’

‘The Rector was your cousin, Arden Beacon. Rector John Stefan, the son of Jorgen Beacon, the Lightkeeper.’

Arden’s heartbeat quickened in her chest, the rush of panic that any thought of unfair violence brought. Her cousin she remembered only vaguely, for their meetings had been so long ago, a slender, dark youth with the same soft-smoky hair as Andrew and soulful eyes. He had been her age, Stefan Beacon, ungifted in blood but touched in other ways – deeply sensitive, accepted into a religious seminary and visiting his family in the North. Arden remembered more her step-mother’s exclamation. Stefan and Arden could have been brother and sister, how similar their looks!

Her cousin, murdered, along with the woman.

She needed to keep calm, for such tales were not just for her safety. Her fear was a coin that could buy Mr Justinian several more weeks of her time.

‘Surely such a performance as a literal kidnapping by the bogeyman of Vigil would have risen one or two men to heroics. You say all this happened to her, and to Mr Harrow, that you yourself stood by and watched?’

‘You don’t understand. Riven cannot be killed. The devils of the sea keep him safe, for all that he cut off his cock and fed it to them for his protection.’ In the candlelight Mr Justinian’s face darkened, and pearls of sweat sprang up from his brow. ‘And he makes money! Money for foreign businessmen who purchase his kraken hides and will not allow harm to come to him.’

He snatched at the mantelpiece, held himself there shaking, before the brandy decanter called to him once more. ‘I am sorry. For you. For her.’

‘Are we done in the telling? Is this all I must know?’

Mr Justinian nodded. ‘It is what you must know.’

‘Coastmaster, regardless of whatever went before you must sign my release papers. I must go to my lighthouse.’

‘You need not hurry. Mr Harris can—’

‘Mr Harris is not qualified to keep a lucent flame alive and the season of summer storms will be upon us. A perpetually burning flame is still vulnerable to going out, and a sanguis ignis needs to maintain the light.’

‘You cannot yet go,’ Mr Justinian insisted. ‘Not so soon. Not while Riven still lives out on that accursed promontory! He will come to you in the night, come prowling with lust in his black heart!’

Arden sniffed. ‘It will not be the first time I’ve been in situations with lustful men. Anyway, didn’t you say he fed his manhood to the devils for his protection? What is he meant to do to me without it?’

He did not take her scoffing bait. ‘I cannot release you! My guilt over Bellis’ fate prevents me.’

Arden had one play left to her. Such a play could only be used but once, and she had to take a deep breath before she deployed it.

‘If you do not sign the papers, Mr Justinian, I will have no recourse but to return to Portside with your so-called essential list. I will present such evidence to the Seamaster’s Guild and there will be an investigation. They may do more than investigate me, and cast their eyes on other parts of your business. Good night to you.’

As she turned to leave, Mr Justinian grabbed her arm. His fingers dug hard into the muscle, with the clear intent of leaving an imprint of himself upon her.

‘It is not safe.’

‘Safer than here, perhaps.’ She pulled free. ‘You cannot keep me from my lighthouse.’

‘All right then, damn you.’

He strode to the desk, unlocked it and pulled out a sheaf of papers from a leather binder, the certificates that completed the Guild transfer. ‘I have tried to warn you of the creature who will be no further from your doorstep than the east wing of this Manse from the right. This thing I do will condemn you to danger.’

‘The danger is mine to face,’ Arden said. ‘Otherwise what good am I as a Lightkeeper anywhere?’

He met her steady gaze with something approaching panic. His nostrils flared like a horse sensing the harness.

She held the gaze, until he broke first, picked up his heavy fountain pen from the inkwell and signed both copies with such violence that Arden winced for the paper and the wood of the table beneath.

He held up the certificate. She held out her hand.

‘Thank you, sir.’

Perhaps she was too subtle. The certificate never went her way.

‘One condition.’

Arden frowned. ‘I am not happy with conditions.’

‘Allow me to court you.’

‘Excuse me?’

‘I am a Coastmaster with a barony to my name. You are an interim member of the Seamaster’s Guild, the youngest ever. By winter you yourself would hold a full Guild degree, marry whom you wish. A good couple we would make. Our mating would be well-matched. The Eugenics Society will allow it, for we may yet breed some as yet unheard of talent.’

Unbidden, Richard Castile stepped into the halls of her mind. His smart uniform. His rakish cap. His handsome face taking her breath away with yearning. To touch him. To wrap herself up in a body that was not her own.

She shook her head firmly to rid herself of the association.

‘I have no interest in eugenics or breeding. Besides, in the interest of fleeting pleasure – which I am quite forbidden to pursue openly – I barely know you.’

‘Then come to know me. Allow me the chance to court you and present my case. The Society is favourable to a high lineage such as mine. You could receive a marriage dispensation at the very least. Non-breeding of course, but the operation to remove womb-horns is often quite successful.’

Arden exhaled. She shouldn’t shout. Would be unprofessional, but still, the gall of the man!

‘Mr …’

He moved to the fire, the certificate still in his hand. She saw the leaping flames, the devouring of her freedoms, the going home, the censure of the Guildmaster who might have to come out here and mediate this mess. Maybe even Mr Lindsay, whose owners even the Portmaster of Clay feared.

They would find in her favour, but the taint of being a Lightkeeper who could not handle their own business would remain. She would not keep her degree, not even the associate one. Her signal post had already been reassigned. She would be …

‘Stop!’

‘Well? What say you, Mx Beacon?’ He shook the paper. ‘I am a man alone in this cursed, misbegotten peninsula courtesy of my great-grandfather’s sentimentality. How am I to meet any woman of my equal among these inbreds of the coast? How will my family be redeemed if I marry into worthless muck?’

She wanted to say words in their defence, for the girls of the town were quite the hardworking, straight-talking type. She was no eugenicist, but something of the stoic Vigil seaworthiness in the Justinian line might be a bit more welcome than Mr Justinian thought.

The flames leapt, hungry for paper. She let out a sigh.

‘You may come to my lighthouse once a week and court me in the interests of social engagement,’ Arden said through gritted teeth. ‘I will need regular supplies brought to me anyhow. Your driver can make himself useful at least.’

‘Yes. Very good.’ Mr Justinian’s smile showed his incisors.

She wondered just what shame had sent him packing back here from Clay Portside, a cur with a tail between its legs. Arden reached for the paper again. He pulled the paper away, put the certificate back in the leather binder, then returned the binder to its locked drawer.

‘It is still much safer to keep items here,’ he said. ‘The tower structure is in poor condition. You would not want an inundation or damp to destroy your Certificate of Work. The best place for it is in the safety of the Coastmaster’s office. Any high-ranking Seamaster judge would agree with me, if there were ever – as you say – an investigation.’

‘Fine,’ she said. ‘Just make sure that I am paid on time. Certificates on fragile paper are one thing, but Djenne coins survive a sunken ship.’

With that, she swallowed her brandy-laced tea in one gulp, and stomped up the stairs to her room, and made damn sure she both locked the door and shoved a chair under the handle before retiring for the night.

5
Her uncle had left her a boat

Her uncle had left her a boat.

More correctly, Arden thought, putting her hands on her hips in unconscious imitation of her Portmaster father, he had left a boat to whomever the Guild appointed as Lightkeeper after him. No doubt the bad news would have sunk through the layers of missives and post-rumours, that Lucian Beacon’s eldest child was malorum and dim of blood.

Such a condition reflected badly on a family who made their name in fire. The great genetic and ancestral ledgers of the Eugenics Society would be opened in the inner sanctum of the legendary Clay Library. An accusing cross scrawled in blood-red ink next to the name of Beacon. Their partnerships and progeny would be scrutinized for generations to come. Jorgen would have suspected that no Beacon-born would follow after him.

Perhaps he’d made peace with the passing of the baton to a Pharos man, maybe accepted that a lesser Lumiere would take up the fire he had once tended. One of the other ignis-gifted families, just not a Beacon. Jorgen wouldn’t have ever thought little Arden here, even if he had still remembered her.

Oh, Uncle. If only I could tell you I made it. Like her cousin Stefan, Uncle Jorgen had appeared in her life only in blinks and snatches, a thin, slighter version of his four brothers, timid around adults, but with a rare patience when it came to children. She remembered his peculiarities most clearly, the shine of his nails, his moustache severely waxed at the ends, the precisely polished brass hobs in his shoes. His face was a smudge. They said that the Beacon brothers might have been handsome youths, but only Jorgen was beautiful.

She imagined he looked like her father.

An unspoken trouble had early on separated Jorgen from his Clay Portside brothers. For all that he had died only weeks ago, he had long since passed over in Arden’s life. He’d stopped making his annual pilgrimages. He’d refused contact with his family. He became a memory, and then a corpse.

And yet she wondered if he would have been pleased that his niece would be the one to have Fine Breeze. It was not the sort of craft she had expected her dour, exiled uncle to own. Instead of the faded blues and greens of those few fishing vessels that dotted the harbour, Fine Breeze was as red as a polished lacquer cabinet from the Middle Country.

‘Lightmaster Beacon loved that boat,’ the Harbourmistress said with a sour expression, as if such an emotion were peculiar and unwelcome. Her accent was pure Lyonnian, as if she’d only come from Clay City yesterday.

Mx Modhi, the Harbourmistress of Vigil, if that was what one could call the position of watching over a miserly pier for most hours of the day, was a tall, stout woman of grandmasterly years and an ancestry that went beyond the small pale folk of Fiction. The shipyard domain she beheld and no doubt ruled, from a sturdy, leather-upholstered rocking chair in the primo position to watch all the comings and goings from the bay. She wore waxed canvas trousers, not a skirt, and her legs were as broad as ship-masts, and her arms suggested the same strength of clipper ship cross-beams. She still had in her oaken face the shades of the beauty she must have been when she was younger.

A curved pipe in her mouth bobbed as the Harbourmistress watched Arden gingerly put a foot out to test the red boat’s wallow. A city girl’s apprehension made for fine entertainment.

‘Don’t fall in,’ the Harbourmistress said. ‘I’ll not get out of this chair to rescue you.’

‘Jorgen couldn’t have had the boat built here.’

‘No, she belonged to a traveller through these parts. Lost her in a game of cards – Beggar’s Blight of all things. Ended up in Jorgen’s hands – your uncle might have been slight, but he was fiery. Would take on a shorefolk brawler twice his size if he felt an injustice had been done.’

Arden smiled. ‘Oh, he was definitely a Beacon, then. We are all about correctness and balance.’ She indicated her gloves. ‘But if there was fire in him, he kept it under a bushel for the most part. This boat is very unlike him.’

‘Sometimes the most austere folk will have a weakness for rare and beautiful things.’

With that said, Mx Modhi nodded at Arden’s blue-spotted coat and, grinning, puffed a smoke-halo from her plesiosaurivory pipe.

‘Well, beautiful things can be useful. And utility is beautiful too.’

‘And you’re off to the promontory now. Our sea-washed sunset gates.’

‘I am.’

‘I shan’t have to tell you all the local histories then. Nearly twenty years of them I’ve learned. No doubt every cock-eyed Billie-and-Bob has fallen over each other to breathlessly fill you in about the tale of poor Mrs Riven and her awful comeuppance.’ The ivory stem clicked against her teeth as she spoke, and Arden once again was amazed at the Harbourmistress having been here for so long. She could have stepped off a Clay City boat yesterday. ‘Frankly, the people in this country can be disgusting.’

Arden picked up a loose end of rope dangling from an arterial-blooded bow. As she coiled it, she asked as casually as she could, ‘You’ve been here twenty years. Did you ever meet Mrs Riven yourself?’

‘I did,’ the Harbourmistress said. ‘Knew her well.’ She chewed on the pipe, and a long moment of appraisal followed, as she decided what to tell Arden, and what to leave out. ‘Watched her as a child from this very post, coming down here among the fishing boats and yearning out towards the sea. Her father was not a marine-affiliated gentleman, but the girl … something was in her. The tide, perhaps. All the fishermen were besotted with their little queen, brought her whelk shells and sea-dollars, mermaid teeth on a string. She would sing them a song for a penny.’

‘Sounds like a bit of a sea-sprite, then.’ Arden flung the wrapped coil into the boat. ‘Very romantic.’

‘Oh, no romance there, not our Bellis. Cunning little thing, she was. Never missed a trick. A little gang of orphans and illegitimates used to run riot through the village then as they do now, and Bellis Harrow was their ringleader. Their tiny Genghis Khan, but certainly a benevolent one.’ The chewing stopped. ‘Then she grew up. Things are different for women around these parts, although one cannot say she didn’t fight harder than most to keep from being crushed by the conditions of femininity.’

Arden blinked at the sudden fellow feeling, a rush of warmth to her skin. ‘I know what that is like,’ she said with deep sincerity. ‘I’ve fought those battles myself. I still wear the scars on my heart.’

The Harbourmistress remained aloof, but her countenance gentled.

‘You take care out there now, Lightmistress. There’s more powers and prejudices in these sainted waters than you’ll hear about in your city towers. Not all the monsters have twelve arms and live in the sea. Some have two legs; you can be sure of it.’

There followed from her a brief instruction on how messages would pass from lighthouse to harbour. Fiction had no reliable telegraph radio infrastructure, nor cable out to the promontory. Arden would need to use a mirror heliograph each morning on the tenth hour, and each evening on the third. Emergency messages to flash on the hour, if required, but anything less than the tower having fallen over was not an emergency, so she was not to bother Mx Modhi with it.

How different from the constant flurry of communication in the signal house! Arden agreed to every instruction the Harbourmistress made, and realized she would need to relearn the mirror code she had forgotten a decade ago.

The Harbourmistress returned to her scanning of the ocean, and Arden went to her uncle’s boat, wondering if she should have asked more about her Riven neighbour. Nobody was quite telling the same story. Was it fey and vulnerable Bellis Riven, anchored in a terrible state of marital imprisonment, or was it fighting Bellis Riven, the tough little girl who could make coarse fishermen do her bidding with just a song?

Was there a true story at all?

In contrast to her father, Jorgen Beacon had not been a tall fellow, so he had made the rudder and sail adjustments to suit his height. Conveniently they suited Arden as well. Fine Breeze had a small cabin for sheltering in, and batten sails that were cut in a square style. The forward sail was the largest, with a smaller sail behind the rudder.

The waves were not so rough that morning, so after Arden familiarized herself with the craft, she unfurled the mainsail and put Vigil behind her.

The cold bay held as much of a sparkle as the climate would ever allow, and the promontory, as always, was barely visible in the constant mist. Yet each slosh and roll took the days of strain and worry away. Arden had not entirely grasped how tense she had held herself, until the moment she tied off the rigging and relaxed at the rudder. A brisk wind filled the canvas, and she manoeuvred Fine Breeze out into the open water for her first proper, clear view of Fiction’s last sanguis lighthouse. Her heart skipped a beat, and Arden smiled. There it was, the sense of blood, powerful as homesickness and yearning. Her hands tingled in anticipation.

Eyes upon the promontory spotted Arden long before she made it to the pier.

As the boat danced close to the weatherworn bollards of the tiny sheltered inlet the familiar figure of another Portside guildsman appeared. Friendly Mr Harris from the nomadic Sea Guilds, a man round and bushy with his great blond beard and shipwright’s shoulders that could seat both child and full-grown woman on each. He kept his hair short, a custom of the fisherfolk here. Far better to have it under a waxed woollen cap rather than getting caught in all the sea-spray, though Arden suspected hair-locks often ended in the water in superstition before a good catch. There was a parallel to the sanguis giving of blood, though anyone around here would have argued bitterly that it was not the same thing at all.

‘Hoy!’ he cried out, waving an arm as thick as a ham. ‘Hoy, Lightmistress!’

‘Hoy,’ she shouted in delight. ‘You have turned wild since I saw you last in Clay, Mr Harris!’

‘We have merely moved up in the world, you and myself both! I’ll throw a rope, let me tie you off.’

The journey of a month was ended. At last she saw her lighthouse up close. It stood at the end of a long, thin natural mole of basalt blocks, squat and wide rather than the tremendously high spire of the Clay Mouth. Whitewash might have daubed the granite once, but neglect had scored the paint down to bare stone, leaving only a thin crust on the lee side. Some of the glass panes in the lantern room were broken. Not much of an attempt had been made to fix the missing panes other than a ragged piece of wood hoarding, to stop the flame from blowing out. A weathercock at the very top leaned at a forlorn angle.

Desolation shrouded the tower. Mr Justinian had been telling the truth about its decay, at least.

Mr Harris lumbered to the end of the pier and tossed out a rope hitch that had to weigh as much as she did. Once she made Fine Breeze fast, he reached down and pulled her out with a mighty yank.

‘I am glad to see a friendly face!’ she said breathlessly. ‘And to find the coast hasn’t taken the might from you.’

‘Little Ardie!’ He put her back down onto the pier, his own red cheeks growing redder as he blushed furiously at forgetting his manners. ‘I’m sorry, you must be properly called Madam Lightmistress now.’ He took off his battered fisherman’s hat and gave a quick bow.

‘I’m still getting used to the name too, Gerard.’

‘Ah, but you’re all grown up. You’ll need some meat on those bones of yours, girl. The wind would blow you away.’

Arden waved him off good-naturedly. She could not call herself slender, not from all the hard work on the wharves to fill her out. No wasp-waist for her, not if you wanted the strength to haul a Fresnel element up a hundred feet of lighthouse stairs.

‘Don’t you worry, I’m strong enough.’

‘I’m sure you are.’ He stood back to measure her with his eye. ‘A fine coat you’re wearing.’

‘It’s real krakenskin, before you ask, Mr Harris.’

‘I noted that. How did you manage to afford such clothing? Did your father give you your inheritance early, and throw into the bargain that of the rest of the Beacon brothers?’

‘Hardly,’ she said fondly, even though the mention of her father made her wince with regret. ‘I bought it from a rag-trader’s table. Apparently, it belonged to a dead woman, as everyone is so keen to remind me.’ Arden paused and added, ‘The wife of a brutal murderer, apparently.’

Mr Harris’ face clouded. ‘Ah, you mean Mr Riven.’

‘Yes. The Coastmaster of Vigil had certain other titles for him, though.’

‘I think most people take care not to mention them aloud. He has a habit of appearing when people speak his name.’

Mr Harris pointed down the ridge. A mile away, three large wooden buildings crabbed the rocky beach as barnacles might cling to rock. They were as large as the workhouses back in Clay Portside, almost wharf-sized. A saltwater lichen frowsed off the grey iron roof. They had been there for a long time and suffered much the same aura of neglect as her lighthouse.

Her sharp eyes caught gulls and cormorants gathered on one corner of the compound, a congregation of devil birds drawn by the promise of a feed.

‘Mr Riven lives in those buildings yonder. Does his business on the shore. Once quite an industry in the slaughter of sea-monsters here in Vigil. Serpents. Leviathans. Krakens when they could be called up. A whole family of butchers, I heard, blood-tied to the ocean, but this coast can be hungry, and the political machinations of men hungrier still, so now only one Riven remains.’

The Mr Justinian in her memory hissed, ’twas he that killed his family.

‘Blood-tied? You mean like sanguis talent?’

‘Not quite, Ardie. Perhaps an earlier, more ah … fundamental version of the trait, eh? The talent first appeared in this country, remember. Occasionally a sanguis jumps out of the gene pool, though if they have any sense they keep quiet about it and don’t let the Lions know.’

‘Has Mr Riven caused you much trouble out here?’

Mr Harris shook his head. ‘We’ve had no need for business. He goes his way, and I mine. Whether Jorgen had dealings with Mr Riven previously, that trouble lay between themselves. I would say it’s hard to avoid the man if you were here any longer than a month.’

She must have made a face, for he continued, ‘He won’t be a problem Ardie. Come now, there’s talk in town about you, but these towns would talk if a fellow wore the wrong clothes on a Sunday.’

Mr Harris had kept the tower for six weeks, not long enough to attract a maintenance stipend. There would have been next to nothing he could have done to fix the place up. The small lower floor might have had the potential for cosiness, had not the walls been so slimed with sea-damp. Anything resembling home-comforts had been knocked together from desultory driftwood scaffolding. The rude bed might have suited Mr Harris, a man used to sleeping out in the open on a wharf, but for a Guildswoman Lightmistress it seemed little better than the floor. The internal stairs were constructed – if one could consider a spiral of protrusions as crooked as a brawler’s teeth a construction – from keystones in the wall. The banisters needed replacing, else Arden could foresee the very real outcome of falling to her death.

On reaching the topmost lantern house, the vastness of the promontory view struck Arden like a bell-hammer. The sea surrounded them in a smothering slab of grey, and the thunderclouds might have been the white-rimed backs of behemoths, fallen in a heavenly grave.

Behind her, the ruins scattered along the coast. Old monks and hermits had first built impractical monasteries upon this shore, hoping to win the unsophisticated inhabitants of Fiction to the church and to save their immortal souls. Perhaps the stone and glass had stood for a generation, maybe ten, but only rubble remained, slowly dissolving back into the earth.

From up high she observed the one remaining cathedral wall, one that had held a stained-glass rose window, now only a perfect empty circle of mortar and rock. The window stared out to sea with a single, sightless eye.

Old magic here, she thought. Old superstitions. The ancient saints were canny enough not to replace the cold abyssal gods of the sea-folk with the warm, dignified artifices of their own religions. She wondered if her cousin Stefan had grown into his spirituality among these old stones, if he’d felt the Almighty murmur in the drowned lands below the wind and waves and knew that he belonged to a power greater than that of his name, and blood.

Then she inspected the perpetual lamp with growing concern.

The ratio of blood was important to the chemical articulations within a sanguine lantern. A typical lamp required fuel to burn, the way metal required force to bend, force to control the weather, force to hold the vapour inside a container to give weight and mass and velocity. All things that were finite, exhaustible, subject to the grinding momentum of God’s creation. What Arden had, what all sanguinem had, was a catalyst within her veins that turned mass and force in upon itself so that energy in an element (for her, fire), could be sustained and intensified beyond what should be possible.

The pain and danger of blood letting was nature’s warning – lest the wielder grow too arrogant in their contortion of the natural order.

Arden remembered an Academy tutor drawing a broad circle with her finger over her heart while explaining. Sanguis blood was an alchemical ouroboros, the snake biting its own tail. You can change the physical property of a thing. A regenerative cycle outside of time. But eventually entropy sets in. The cycle weakens. The iron remembers it is strong, and becomes hard. The flame remembers it needs to burn fuel, finds none, and extinguishes. So something must make it right. A gifting, an exchange. Blood we use, but it was not always so. In older, less enlightened days, entire bodies would be the sacrament that the cycle of labour required …

Arden frowned, both piqued by the memory and the sense that something was very wrong with Jorgen’s orphaned light. In the daytime, the flame should still have burned as bright as a summer’s morning, but it had the cast of a midwinter afternoon. The offering funnel, through which Jorgen would have made his blood-tithe each week, was filthy. Dried blood crusted the entrance until barely a channel remained for the offering to run through.

Unthinkingly, Arden thumbed the curve of her arm. As she had shown the guest the previous night, dozens of small scars laddered there. When Arden maintained her small signal light upon the Parrot Wharf, the compact lantern’s cold flame had required only a smear of blood, once a week, to stay bright. Grommets had been unnecessary in her previous life. But a lighthouse keeper needed to give so much more blood than a lamp-turning signaller did, to maintain the ratio of instruction, to make those sacrifices. The scar tissue could cause her hands permanent damage, if not for a coin to protect the skin.

Mr Harris joined her at the top of the stairs, puffing and panting. He’d never been tested for talent, but like any associate labour guildsman he had familiarity with the blood tithing of the docks. She did not have to hide the trade tools from him.

‘Do you know why my uncle died, Mr Harris?’

‘Heartbreak, Lightmistress. Plain and simple heartbreak.’

‘Maybe the motivation, but by what mechanism? We cannot easily take our lives.’

‘Not take, but certainly neglect.’ Mr Harris said evasively, not quite looking at Arden. ‘Anyone with implanted silver in their skin must regularly return. Return to Clay annually and have them cleaned, replaced. You think the Lyonne Order would permit their sanguineous guildsmen to live in freedom so easily?’

She tucked her hands under her arms, feigning a chill from an open window. ‘It seems odd, that he should not return, or at least, find an illegal phlebotomist to take the grommets out.’

Those great shoulders of Mr Harris gave a slow shrug. ‘After Stefan died – was killed, if you ask certain people – Jorgen stopped going back to Clay. No reason to, in his mind. Estranged from his family, his son lost to bad dealings. When an infection set into his hands, the Guild sent me to see what was going on. By the time I arrived, the sepsis had set in. Made him deathly ill, his blood poisoned. I could not convince him to go home. He did not last much longer after that.’

Arden moved through to Jorgen’s possessions, trying to marry these crude items, this filthy degradation, with the gentle man in her memory. The knife he’d used to cut away the layer of callused skin from his decaying coins lay encrusted upon a similarly disgusting table. A whetstone nearby explained why the blade had a shapeless edge, the metal pared down paper-thin.

‘Could you not have imposed upon him some penicillium, and some powdered kraken beak Mr Harris? Of all the places, those medicines would be most available here.’

‘Oh, I tried. But it was too late, and the coins belong to the Order, the way the sanguineous do. Only Order-sanctioned phlebotomists can be relied upon to take them out. He would have had to go out to the Sainted Isles to find himself a man who could remove such invasiveness.’ Mr Harris tilted his head towards the horizon, straight as a carpenter’s plumb. ‘People go to the Isles to die, Mx. Beacon. They don’t often come back.’

‘Thank you for telling me this, Gerry. I shall endeavour to have my coins removed when I finish here and return to Lyonne. A puppet string is one thing, but they shall not put a leash on me. I shall not turn into my uncle. At least … at least unlike him I have nobody to lose.’

The Clayman’s face became so dour, he might have been dipped in shadow. He motioned her to silence. The walls could be listening. Those bodiless spirits of fate and irony in the old stones were deeply aligned to secrets. They inflicted their own bad luck.

Then quieter, ‘Your cousin the Rector was a witness to all that Mr Riven did. All of it. Everything. Took the confessions of both man and wife. Knew secrets in the confessional terrible enough that he would face church censure by testifying in the magistrate’s court.’

The wave-bellows echoed through the tower. Words spoken in the confession box were sacred. For a priest to bring such testimony into the open …

‘Stefan was going to testify against Mr Riven?’

Mr Harris continued solemnly. ‘He was the prosecution’s only reliable witness and Mr Riven killed him. Look, Jorgen didn’t take it lying down. Had it in mind that he would have Mr Riven experience the same fate. If not by an accident, then by some misfortune. He joined forces with Mr Harrow, put aside the feud the men had shared previously. Did the fellow some real damage, but only enough to rile him up, not blunt his teeth.’

‘I have had the misfortune to meet Mr Harrow. Surely Mr Riven would have left this place, if he knew the townsfolk hated him so much.’

‘The Rivens have populated these shores for centuries, Arden. The man would have no more left his home than call up a storm and cast the promontory into the sea. No, it has been a mighty war of subtle violence here these past few years. Jorgen succeeded in having Riven drowned once, only to have him haul himself in from the ocean as if he’d made a pact with the devil to return. The man can’t be killed easily. Something in his nature.’

‘I did not come here expecting duty as a foot soldier in a war.’

‘Nobody ever does.’ Mr Harris pointed at her coat. ‘That coat on your shoulders is weighted with bad news. If he sees you in it, only the sea-devils can tell what he will do.’

She collected her resolve. A possession of the dead it might be, but the coat was her possession now. Salvaged, the way a shipwreck returned to shore has no owner except the one who reports it. How many times as a signalmistress and lanternkeeper in Portside had she taken up the position others would not, them fearing the dead man who had once rung the shipping bell or worked the signal stick? Accidents were common on the wharves. Every light and buoy had a ghost attached.

‘No, I shall keep my coat, and if the maker wants its return, he shall do the gentlemanly thing and ask for it, with an offer of a suitable replacement. I will speak to him face to face, and we shall see if there cannot be some kind of arrangement.’

Mr Harris exhaled, nodded, knowing better than to challenge a woman whose mind was made up.

‘You are your father’s daughter through and through. And your poor late mother, bless her soul and curse the pirates who took her.’

Once Arden had finished her tour, she shared a lunch with Mr Harris outside the tower. Thick sourdough bread, the hard cheese that travels well, pickles and a runny syrup trying hard to be a chutney. They sat in the ruins of a rowboat that made for a rustic table, an Owl and the Pussycat kind of boat, as her favourite Uncle Nicolai would say. Uncle Nicolai had husbanded the great lighthouse at the Mouth, that mighty entrance to Clay Capital, the golden door to the country of Lyonne. Was to him that she had whispered her dream of keeping not just a signal flame, but the Spire at Clay’s centre, the one her grandmother used to keep in the old days, before Arden had tested late, malorum, and dim.

No Spire for her then. A wharf-light and the associated administrations of signalling at most, but if a Beacon child might return their family’s honour by winning the Spire post, it would not be Arden who would do it.

Mr Harris brought out some brown glass bottles containing a yeasty ale. She cast her attention westward, to where the first of the noon clouds had begun to build on the blank slate of the ocean. Fine Breeze sensed the storm before she did. The oncoming currents buffeted the boat against the pier.

‘I shall move in tomorrow morning,’ she said at last. ‘There’s no point delaying the handover any longer.’

‘Very well. I’ll signal for the Coastmaster’s driver to collect you, first thing. Your lamphouse assistant will be here by then.’

‘Male or female?’

‘Female. A real stormbride of a lass, did her post out of Harbinger Bay, where the prison ships moor. A real competent sort.’

Mr Harris stood up and collected the scraps, which he threw to the motley collection of seagulls, auks and white ibis that had gathered to watch them eat. Another gust of wind warned her not to dally, and Mr Harris walked her down the cliff path to Fine Breeze.

‘Aye, I enjoyed sharing your first day, Ardie. Those souls out there are yours to keep, now.’

He pointed at the horizon, then passed over a pair of brass spyglasses from his satchel to Arden. She peered into their eyepieces so as not to embarrass him, for her Beacon-sharp eyes had already seen what lay in the distance.

A flotilla of boats in the distance, moving in and out of encroaching fog. At least fifteen of them, and their crooked, uneven builds had not a single uniform style. Hulks and wrecks, not fit to work a canal, let alone the open water.

‘They’ve bypassed both bays. Where are they going?’

‘Sainted Isles lie out there beyond the horizon.’

‘The petroleum islands? With the pumps … with the perpetual mechanica?’ She recalled the maps in her father’s Portmaster offices. A broken scatter of atolls and archipelagos surrounding three land masses in the middle of the Darkling Sea. Dashed lines where the cartographer was uncertain of the landscape. They’d seemed so lonely and far away. An exile’s islands, where one went to be forgotten, and to die.

‘Yes. Even the perpetual arbours and escapements or the rockblood machines need a conduit of labour to wind the springs. The Isles require hands to work. What better labourers than those folk already displaced by sanguine talents?’

Arden pretended to look through the brass again so as not to show Mr Harris her uncomfortable face. She’d seen one sanguis pondus replace a dozen longshoremen on a wharf. She’d seen the union riots light up Clay Portside so for a week not one ship left nor entered. ‘Surely they aren’t attempting an ocean journey in those vessels. Those boats don’t look like they could even survive a river crossing.’

‘They all of them believe there’s nothing else for them in Lyonne.’

‘Goodness, who would put such an idea in their heads? We can’t do everything with blood.’

Mr Harris stroked his beard with sorrowful dignity. ‘The idea of perpetual rockblood wells and their untapped bounty drives men to flights of madness. In Portside I hear of entire congregations afflicted with the idea … the dream of a place where human labour has real value, not sanguis labour, not machine. But the conduit of hand to work and no mystical power in between. Aye, a disease of greed and wealth grows in the minds of people who’ve previously known neither. Where they once sang hymns of the Holy Land and the One Who Walks the Way, they have now started to plan pilgrimages to the petroleum shores.’

Arden returned Mr Harris his brass spyglasses. ‘I must not judge. There’s nothing anyone can do about them. Even the Lyonne Parliament cannot stop people from leaving. Free movement is a right enshrined by God.’

He nodded, put his spyglasses away with the finality of a man who has seen all he requires. ‘Your sanguinity protects you now, Ardie, but this is the truth of it, eventually whatever privations the poorfolk suffer, the rich will suffer as well. And the rich pay sanguinem wages. Your wages. And keep your safety. Whatever cruel siren-song sung on those Islands will not be so easily contained there. Eventually the doctrine must make its way back to the mainland. Aye, coin or no coin, you would be safer at home.’

The wind kicked up, and they had to move again, else be tumbled from the high ground. Arden took Mr Harris’ stout elbow and tried to put his troublesome words aside.

‘You mustn’t fret about my safety,’ she said as they walked. ‘The Guildsman said I’d only have to work the light until the start of winter. They’ll call me back and give me my full degree.’ She raised her hands. ‘I’ll have my coins taken out too, and there will be no leash upon me.’

He raised his eyebrows. ‘All this before winter? If you leave then, you’ll miss the midwinter crowning of the Deepwater King!’ His excursion into dour prophecy quickly returned to jolly banter. ‘It’s quite a memorable festival, even in Vigil. They barely celebrate anything else.’ Mr Harris grinned then, his eyes alight with mischief. Nudged her elbow. ‘Could make Deepwater Bride for a day … and if you find yourself a suitable husband there’s nothing the Order can do about it.’

She felt her cheeks grow hot. Goodness, how could she even consider tumbling into the greasy bed of a coarse Fiction man? He would make love like an animal, all grunts and snuffles, paw her bare flesh thoughtlessly, grow aroused and perhaps he would be coarse down there too …

Then her cheeks burned again, for it had been a year since she’d had such a dalliance after Richard Castile had left her, and she had made a firm vow. No more men, or thoughts of love.

She let go of Mr Harris’ warm, strong arm and navigated the final rocky stairs down to the pier by herself.

Once there, she turned to him and jutted her chin obstinately. ‘It is the ocean I shall love, not men. Besides, I’m not my uncle. I bear no ill-will or history to anyone.’

Mr Harris flicked a glance towards the old kraken-processing factories and made a disapproving grumble deep in his throat. ‘Arden Beacon, I can tell you’re planning to work some trader’s charisma upon this neighbour of yours, but Riven is more beast than man. The monsters he battles upon the ocean, they are his brethren, not us.’

‘I am not going to battle him, Mr Harris,’ she said, untying Fine Breeze’s lashings. ‘I will pay him a visit, like a civilized person. I intend to visit many on this coast by the time the storm season is upon us.’

‘He may try and poke you with his harpoon rather than let you onto his property.’

‘You cannot make me afraid,’ Arden retorted. ‘If I am to execute my functions as a proper Lightmistress, I must be at peace with all my beloved ocean gives me.’

‘Well, you might love the ocean, but a woman with fire in her blood cannot win such love back,’ Mr Harris said. ‘You talk of power? In two centuries no child alive has displayed a blood-alignment for cryptobiological specimens the way the Rivens have constantly done. Aye, even the human race is closing ranks about such a damn travesty of inheritance. He is incompatible with you. He is incompatible with everybody.’

6
The tides had a certain

The tides had a certain personality in the dusk that they did not have during the day. The waters passed that stage where one would call them frolicsome and instead become malicious, and active in wanting harm.

After an hour of fighting the steadily swelling sea, the Fine Breeze’s bow relievedly turned towards the Vigil pier. Arden would have no trouble in securing mooring, for another boat had just left the small, rickety marina.

Within minutes she saw the shape entirely, huge and dark, an oil-powered side-paddle wheeler that didn’t float upon the restless water but rather compelled it to submission. The plume of smoke had a curiously luminous blue tinge. Only one kind of oil produced such luminous particulates.

Kraken oil.

So then. Her neighbour. She adjusted her sails and continued in a straight line towards the docks. Mr Riven’s giant sea-barge approached Fine Breeze with frightening speed. The bow wave rose on either side with the power of waves breaking against rocks.

‘Sir, a sail ship heading into port on this bearing has right of way,’ she muttered to the wind. If one of them didn’t turn soon, they were going to collide. She wouldn’t stand a chance. But the barge kept coming and if it did not turn soon, she would be crushed under the threshing wheels.

At the last moment Arden wrenched her rudder sideways. Fine Breeze’s sail boom swung around, and had she not had her wits about her, it would have knocked Arden off her feet and into the water.

‘Come on, come on!’ She cursed. ‘If you old gods have any power here, give me wind!’ Disturbed, the gusts roiled about her but had little success in filling the sail. And that massive vessel was so close now that she saw the hooded figure in the wheelhouse, resolutely steering his juggernaut onwards.

The chopping wheels powered closer and closer still until finally the ship bore down upon her wake, missing a collision by less than an arm span. She could have reached over and touched the black boat, so close were they. Fine Breeze keeled over to near-capsize in the great bow wave, the hammering engine so cacophonous in her ears it made her head ring. For an awful moment a name filled her sight. A name scored upon the black side in an unadorned script. Saudade.

‘You monster!’ Arden screamed, shaking her fist. ‘You could have killed me!’

The figure in the wheelhouse did not turn back to see if she was all right. She could be in pieces, drowning, and he would have cared not one whit.

Finally her boat righted itself, the wind returned in somewhat of a constant direction, and Arden could return to the rude little harbour, shaken up but in one piece.

‘How did the boat go, Lightmistress?’ Harbourmistress Modhi called out as soon as she butted into the buoys lining the lone pontoon that made up the marina.

‘Fine,’ Arden said, still angry from her near-drowning. In rebellion against her brief imprisonment she had for a little while felt somewhat of a sympathetic warmth towards the mysterious fellow Mr Justinian had spoken so rudely about. She had not wanted the odious Coastmaster to be right.

‘Wasn’t an accident, that. He’d have seen you from a mile away.’ Mx Modhi grinned and puffed victoriously on her pipe. ‘I had an inkling he’d take uncomfortably to your get-up.’

Arden clutched her coat about her with defiance. One thing said for Beacons, they were known for their stubbornness. The ship moves for the signal light, not the other way around.

‘I bought this salvage garment fair and square. If Mr Riven wants it back, he can be the gentleman and ask.’

The pipe smoke surrounded the Harbourmistress in wreaths of grey silk.

‘He won’t ask. He’ll just take.’ Her voice rose in timbre. ‘Isn’t that right, David, my boy?’

A black-haired lad ran from another pontoon pier, all gangly adolescent limbs yet to settle into adulthood, to fasten Fine Breeze on Arden’s behalf. He was perhaps seventeen years old, and Arden noted the marks on the youth’s hands, pale scars from the required testmoots he’d have taken on his eleventh birthday. Fiction children were still tested, despite sanguinity being uncommon in the south. It was not a duty shirked. A ledgered talent popping up out of nowhere could bring a sudden unexpected wealth to a poor family.

She said her thank-yous to the boy, uttered some words to draw him into a conversation, but he barely met her eye. A fine black down on his upper lip trembled. He hovered in that strange halfway world between child and man He’d be a child far longer yet at this rate under his mother’s shadow.

‘Don’t mind my fool son,’ the Harbourmistress said once David scuttled away. ‘He’s just out of sorts because I won’t let him on board that dirty black boat. Doesn’t understand I’m protecting him the way a mother should. Lord knows what perversions that fellow gets up to out there.’

‘Oh, is your son friends with Mr Riven?’ Arden asked, tossing her head. ‘I thought him quite the hermit when not trying to run people down in his boat.’

Mx. Modhi chewed on her pipe for a weighty second before gruffly admitting, ‘Guild stipend won’t cover good tobacco and a proper Lyonnian education for my son. Your neighbour was the only one to give him the time of day. Fisherfolk around here don’t take kindly to anyone who can’t count ten generations wasting away on these shores.’

‘I’ll take your word for it, Harbourmistress. I haven’t had much contact with the locals.’

‘No, you wouldn’t have, would you? Ensconced with Mr Justinian up in the Manse, I gather.’

Something in the winking way Mx Modhi spoke made Arden indignant. ‘Only until I get myself ready for my lighthouse duties. And we are not ensconced. Our relationship is purely professional. He is a member of a professional Guild, as am I. He is bound by vow to help me set up.’

‘Indeed. These things take time, do they not? And my boy David here, he’s been paid already to ferry Mr Justinian to your doorstep once a week for trysts in case his car won’t make it. He thinks of all possibilities, our Baron.’

Arden would wonder later why her mouth hurt. At Mx Modhi’s assertion, she had clenched her jaw so hard that bright sparks of pain prickled her cheeks.

‘He is Coastmaster, and Mr Justinian has to have his briefings. I would prefer them once a month, myself, but these are unfamiliar waters, and I need supplies brought to me.’

Harbourmistress Modhi sucked on her pipe, blew more smoke for her airy spirit. ‘If that is the case, then I welcome the correction. Excuse my misunderstandings, there has been more than one lady here who has fancied herself the second Mrs Justinian, and they’ll not take kindly to a stranger whisking his affections away.’

‘The second?’ Arden asked, although she would more prefer that she never speak his name again. ‘Nobody spoke of Mr Justinian being married before.’

‘Well, nearly married. So far as the priest had not blessed the union in public. They were practically at the altar.’

‘What happened to her?’ Arden asked, even though her deep suspicions already told her the answer. Who else could it be, to arouse such a passion in him?

‘Goodness, we only just spoke of her before. Miss Bellis Harrow was her name, but she died as Bellis Riven.’

Evening fell with all the finality of a closing funeral casket. The Manse’s few lights battled the darkness and in the most case failed miserably. Arden retired to the mouldering study, desperate to pass time before the morning, and her final freedom. She had quite expected another argument with Mr Justinian, but the previous day’s clash had made him sulk, and there was no better sulking place than in Garfish Point, a hundred miles north, far and away from Vigil and the duties of his home.

That didn’t mean he’d taken with him the constant sense of unease that haunted the mansion’s main rooms. The uneasiness worked its way though the corridors like a low fog. From a proud position on the library’s sideboard, the octopus-thing in the glass bell jar gave a subtle shudder, its liquid tomb sensitive to atmosphere, the barometric shifts in air pressure. Arden stopped to peer in close. Not an octopus, perhaps. No mottled hide, or suckers. Just smooth, human-like skin.

A woman gave birth to that thing.

‘Oh, goodness, I’m certain our circus-find will curse you if you look at it too much,’ Dowager Justinian scolded as she came in with a cup of tea. She picked up one of the large napkins and threw it over the jar. ‘I have nightmares of it breaking out and crawling about the house.’

Startled, Arden stepped away. ‘I wondered if it were indeed true.’ She kept her voice sceptical. ‘That it came from a woman.’

Dowager Justinian’s lips vanished inside the disapproving line of her mouth. ‘Sadly true. One of the shorefolk worked here as a domestic. They are frivolous with their affections. A child, fourteen years old when she declared herself. In the end we had to supply our own doctor to assist in the delivery.’ She shuddered at the memory, twisted her wedding ring. ‘The Baron was delighted. The old Baron, I mean. My late husband’s grandfather, Alexander Justinian, not my son. Such things reflect badly on the House.’

‘Shouldn’t the Eugenics Society have been called to report the birth?’ Arden asked. ‘They get fussy over an extra finger …’ She waved at the jar, not altogether concealed by the napkin. ‘This would make the Society have hysterics.’

‘Baron Alexander Justinian had friends high up in the Society during his life,’ the Dowager sighed. ‘You are right, if it were up to a reasonable person the creature and the wench both would have been investigated. But they didn’t seem much to care, and the Baron did like his curios.’

‘What happened to the girl? Her family?’

The older woman fiddled with her earring. The marcasite chips caught the lantern glow. ‘Oh, I think they’re all gone now. Nomadic folk, islanders. They come and go, and the fish are bad, lately. What are you working on?’

She showed the Dowager her map. ‘Finding my way. Learning the geography of Vigil.’

According to Arden’s maps, which in the last few weeks she had spent most of her time studying in lieu of actually going out to sea, the shore where the Rivens’ old factory buildings clung was not particularly accessible by watercraft. The wash and tempest on the rocks made it difficult to bring a small boat close, and the remains of a pier, broken at the root, showed just how dangerous the waves could be.

However on the other side of the promontory, on a circlet helpfully named Dead Man’s Bay, a divot in the cliffs provided a few natural shelters and a small pebbled beach that was spared the tumult of the ocean waves. There were more ruins here, old fortifications of a Neolithic tribal folk, made before their more enlightened current era. The map illustrated them with helpful asterisks and the word ruins in the key.

To access the Riven factory, she could make her way on foot through the ruins.

Dowager Justinian raised the wick on the lamp. ‘It’s so dim in here, Lightmistress. How on earth are you seeing?’

‘Beacons are good with little light and long distances,’ Arden said. ‘Blood aside, they’re part of our small endowments, the mark of our family.’

‘The Eugenics Society must think highly of such a trait.’

‘There’s always someone who will. It’s not just lamps and signals. There’s many shipping companies who pay handsomely for the distance-skill alone.’

The Dowager squinted in the lamplight, composed a sentence carefully in her thoughts before speaking. ‘My son tells me you are in your twenty-seventh year. Unless you have made a vow to God or the Sapphic orders, I’m surprised someone of your genetic value is not yet married.’

Arden pointed at the risen lamp. ‘It becomes complicated when one comes from old ledgered families. The Eugenics Society must approve any union I make. For now, I am forbidden anyone until my full degree.’ She closed her eyes briefly, remembering the Guildsman clerk in her father’s offices. His sly winking expression. With a full degree you could certainly choose who you would like to marry, for one thing.

How pathetic, that Richard Castile feared discovery by Lions, when they had known about the relationship all along.

‘You are of a good age,’ the Dowager continued, and Arden realized at once what the Madam of the house was leading in to.

She put her fountain pen down. ‘Dowager, you never told me your son was going to marry Bellis Riven.’

‘Didn’t I?’ The Dowager’s fingers dappled upon a cameo brooch at her throat. ‘I could never quite keep up with Vernon’s dalliances when he was a young man.’

‘A proposed marriage is hardly a dalliance.’

‘I suppose not.’ Her eyes became hard in the lamplight, knowing that Arden had foiled an ill-considered matchmaking. ‘One could never be certain if he’d only suffered a youthful fantasy. Without meaning to, Bellis could be quite the coquette.’

‘My concern is,’ Arden continued, ‘although I have an assistant, there will be times when I’ll be on the promontory alone with Miss Harrow’s suspected killer nearby. I cannot have unresolved issues between him and your son making my job difficult. Mr Riven is my closest neighbour, and regardless of what he has done, or whatever rumours swirl, I may come to depend on him for assistance out there.’

A little part of her laughed at the thought of seeking assistance from someone who had tried to run her down as casually as a cur in the middle of the road. But she had committed herself to signal-keeper business, and that meant business with the other person who shared her territory.

‘Miss Bellis Harrow and Vernon – I mean my son, Mr Justinian – may have made plain their intention to marry, but my son never wasted his youth on adult responsibilities.’ The Dowager adjusted the wick on one lamp, for the brightness illuminated an alarming patch of swelling damp on one wall. ‘By my count ten girls in all Fiction have considered themselves the next Madame Justinian. I dare not think about Lyonne. But she was the best of them, Bellis. A good, sweet-natured girl. Always had a kind word for me. They were friends from their first year. My son courted her when he still had baby-cheeks, before the city called him away.’

‘So they must have been of similar age, then.’

‘Yes, yes they were. Quite a few children in town were. They formed quite a cadre. Vernon and Bellis exchanged rings in promise before he left. Being a hopeful mother, I’d hoped that meant they would one day marry. But you see, friendships from the cradle rarely survive the storms of adulthood.’

She fiddled with the wick up on a third lamp, this one to chase away the spirits of the gathering night. The only effect was to make the shadows darker, and harshen those lights already in the room.

‘Strange,’ Arden said. ‘With all those tales of a forced marriage to Mr Riven, it led me to believe Miss Harrow a literal child. If she shared Vernon’s age she must have been in her late twenties at least. My age, then. An independent adult.’

‘Age is relative, you see. Her father, Mr Harrow, is a firm man. Very firm. Owns the general store in Vigil, and is Postmaster into the bargain. Does duties as Magistrate when we have cause to hold a criminal court. So he rather preserved his child in a state of innocence longer than most.’

‘I take it he approved of the union between Mr Justinian and Bellis?’

‘Of course. Not a better match could a Vigil girl make, not even the daughter of a Magistrate Postmaster. Perhaps this made Mr Harrow blind to his daughter’s beauty and friendly nature, how such a thing is a flame in the night-time, and attractive to night-flying things. Bellis loved my son. What a terrible, tragic surprise that she should marry Mr Riven so very suddenly.’

‘Something must have happened to have spoiled this gilded cage that Mr Harrow kept her in. People don’t flee comfort lightly.’

‘No they do not,’ Dowager Justinian said. ‘She did not flee. Mr Riven desired that he should have her. An unseemly lust overcame him upon seeing Bellis in the town one day. He is blood-bound to the wild things of the sea, you understand. No doubt his urges are similarly wild.’ Her hand went to her throat, appalled at what such an indecorous affinity meant.

Arden shook her head. ‘Any magistrate could have granted divorce immediately had there been any true element of non-consent or violence.’

‘The economy of Vigil needs kraken—’

‘Goodness, morals go beyond that!’

‘Well, people tried! Once Vernon attempted to visit Bellis out on the promontory and inquire about her welfare. Mr Riven fired at him with a Middle Country musket. And then a month later the girl was dead.’ Dowager Justinian heaved a breath, fiddled nervously with a lace handkerchief wedged up her dark sleeve, then went to close the curtains for the night as if the act, more suited to servant-staff, assuaged a deeper trouble of which she had yet to speak.

‘Hers is a wretched tragedy, I agree,’ Arden said. ‘But it’s more tragic that I hear everyone’s voice on the matter excepting Bellis Harrow-Riven’s. What was her truth? What was her reason?’

‘It doesn’t need a truth or reason. She is dead. I have cried enough tears.’

With her duties done, Dowager Justinian went from the study with a rustle of skirts, and left Arden in the gloom with her maps.

A storm had come upon the shoreline, whistling mournfully across the barren black cliffs of Vigil’s bay. When the oil lamps burned low, Arden put away her ocean-current almanacs and headed to her bed. The embers from the fire cast orange highlights across the room, made them move with an uneven flicker. The krakenskin’s thousand eye-rings watched her with abyssal coldness, wiser than any holy stone. The black ship forever bore down upon Arden in her memory.

A dead woman had worn this coat. A dead woman stolen away, as in the fairy stories, where the King of the Sea would take a fair maiden from the beach and ravish her upon his oyster-pearl bed for a thousand nights.

An innocent tale, yet Bellis Harrow’s life was just that story, whisked off by a lord of the sea and ravished in a crude bed in a decaying factory-shack. For her the reality had been a story of violence and despair.

The coat, though. The puzzle piece that did not fit.

Months, it would have taken to craft such a garment, to cut and cure and fit and sew. The tremulous leather-work at the sleeves had increased in confidence at the collar and yoke. A teacher had been patient, and their student enthusiastic. The patterns were exultant and joyful. A woman in pain could not have made this garment.

Arden’s Portside stubbornness returned. During her duties as lantern mistress she had seen illegal ships enter the harbour through the Parrot Wharf turning bowl, filled with the spoils of piracy and illegal gains. Her job concerned the safe passage of boats through the locks and wharves. If she had no evidence of wrongdoing, it was not for her to judge the misbegotten contents they held. That task she would leave for the sheriffs and the inspectors

She had a lighthouse to manage, and a future far from here.

Whatever the locals got up to in the meantime, that was their business alone.

7
The Vernon Justinian who went to Garfish Point

The Vernon Justinian who went to Garfish Point the day before, and the one who woke up the next morning could hardly be considered the same person. He moaned piteously through the breakfast table and collapsed on the daybed afterwards with a damp napkin over his eyes. The sound of morning rain on the windows made him whimper. The house staff were obliged to tiptoe around, for the shuffle of their feet on the worn parquetry made him yell in a manner most unbecoming to a man of his station.

Everyone from the butler to the pretty girl of the scullery found themselves bludgeoned with his wrathful tongue. The girl’s darting, angry eyes found Arden, and blamed her silently for Mr Justinian’s foul condition.

Only Dowager Justinian received permission to come close, to bring the opium tea laced with cannabis oil which only served to make him delirious. Within minutes of his dashing the bitter drink to the carpet, Mr Justinian fell into a daze from which he could not be roused.

Arden could not find it in herself to be very upset at the Coastmaster’s complaint. It meant she would get easy escape from the grey confines of the Manse, and an unhurried excursion through the lands she would temporarily call home. Mr Quill, the old, tweedy fellow who did double duty as groundskeeper and Justinian driver, agreed to take Arden to the lighthouse by the long-route. He too feared his employer’s temper, and relievedly accepted the excuse of a road trip.

The car rattled and coughed its way along the inland lanes that led past the racelakes and the ethanol-spirit farms that brought Fiction’s economy a little coin by feeding the hungry country to the north. The coastal scrub was dominated by an aromatic bush, and the air through the open window smelled of menthol as well as salt.

Through most of the morning Arden hid her gloves under her bag politely until Mr Quill told her that he was not at all troubled by her presence.

‘My second cousin twice-removed went to Lyonne after he was tested, near on fifty years ago,’ he said. ‘I saw the coins in his hands.’

‘Oh? Would I know him?’

‘Would you?’

‘A Fiction blood-worker quite stands out these days. They’re so rare.’

Mr Quill shook his head and his mouth fell into long, sad lines. ‘Lass, you were not alive when he died. Fool didn’t last a week. Got roaring drunk one night. Struck his head on a low beam, fell into a Clay Portside canal.’

‘Oh, that is a shame,’ Arden said, and felt her hands prickle awfully. ‘The city can be quite disorienting to newcomers.’

He gave a phlegmy, dismissive cough. ‘Disorienting! We aren’t that lumpen, or grain-pickled. I know my cousin never touched alcohol. No, it was the Eugenics Society that had him killed.’

It was such a shockingly open pronouncement that Arden wound the window down a little more and silently turned to the menthol gust and the clattering engine rather than reply. Such conversations were never had in Lyonne, where a Lion might be lurking about every corner. ‘The Eugenics Society wouldn’t just murder people. They’re a little more subtle than that.’

The skin under his eyes had a little nervous tic.

By now the vehicle had crested an uplift in the land and they came upon a great forest of silver and rubber piping, of vessels as large as airship bladders, and tall chambers as high as her lighthouse. If Arden wanted to talk to Mr Quill more about the economies of Lyonne and blood, her thoughts were gone in an instant.

‘Goodness,’ Arden exclaimed. ‘These are automatic rockblood refineries, are they not?’

‘Yes, Sainted Isle crude rockblood, straight from the wound.’

‘I’ve never seen one so large before.’

‘You don’t use petralactose in that big Clay city?’

‘All the time. We get petroleum distillates transported to Lyonne, but never in the crude form.’

A giant copper distillation tank towered above the scrub, bristling with walkways and transoms. From their distance, the refinery had the appearance of a malign castle built by madmen, except no man had made this terrible feat of automatic engineering. Arden spotted a puddle of iridescent petralactose pooling at the bottom of one tank, the old edifice leaking through aged valves no living being had the knowledge to fix. It was there that she caught her first view of human figures, oily workers scuttling about the old refinery with patches and seals, trying to keep it alive the way ants might attend at the swollen belly of their great, gravid queen.

‘One of them damn grey ships is at dock,’ Mr Quill said, pointing. ‘Can you see the godforsaken thing? Have you not in your life witnessed such a travesty of nature?’

The ship was more barge than anything, a grey vessel without windows, berthed on the far shore of the peninsula. Arden knew little about the logistical workings of the Sainted Isles, only that the grey ship was a watch-worked craft with a single purpose, obligated to ferry itself to the Islands and return with a bellyful of raw petrolactose. Compelled by old bloodworked commands, it cruised back and forth between the Island wells and the mainland refineries as thoughtless as the gears in her lantern house.

‘Is that a lich-ship? I saw one beached at the Clay Mouth when I was a girl.’

‘Really? I didn’t think the lich-ships went that far north.’

She shook her head. ‘Usually they don’t. A storm forced one off course. The internal mechanisms were confused and it ran aground in Lyonne. The Clay Mouth swampfolk weren’t impressed by their clockwork visitor.’

‘What did they do?’

‘Burned it. They thought it was evil.’

‘Perhaps they were not wrong. What manner of sanguinity could make such a machine?’

‘Ones lost to us now, thank goodness. Ferrum perpetua, mandari, orientis … the old talents. Though one would need the entire compliment to control something like that.’ She tilted her chin towards the grey ship and its empty dock.

Mr Quill drove on, relieved to be away from the unholy automata. The copper forests faded along with the relentlessly aromatic fermented-pine smell of petroleum fractions. Some of the acrid scent clung to Arden’s skin, a dreadfully bitter perfume. It made her recall the petroleum dens of Clay, where debauched scions might inhale distillations of rockblood from crystal decanters. The euphoria was brief and terrible, and long-term partakers often lost control of their faculties, became confused, and died.

Perpetua, procuro, orientis. Her intonation of the old talents to Mr Quill had made her uneasy, a feeling that carried even after the refinery was out of view. There were some sanguineous symmetries that were not inheritable, even by a Society who knew more about coaxing heritable traits out of a bloodline than any scholarly system in existence. She knew only of the old talents as one knew all general trivia, something learned to pass an Academy mid-term exam and then forgotten forever.

Out on the ocean, more boats dotted the grey slate water. More desperate, hopeful souls heading to the source of the refinery’s awful contents. A land torn open and dying, like a wound. Imagine breathing that kind of air all the time, she thought with a shudder. Imagine such a place.

They stopped at a sugar-beet farm for midday refreshments, and the family were pleased to offer Arden provisions in exchange for Lyonne coin. She needed a little smear of her blood to restore antique bloodlight lanterns extinguished for over a century. They had last been lit only in those days when blood was strong in Fiction.

‘These instruments are of a good design,’ Arden said to her hosts, pleased at the steady glow. ‘They’ll not need feeding for two years, maybe three.’

And I’ll be far away from here.

The children gawped at the strange, cold blue flame behind glass that had always resisted a normal fire. Their parents, as expected, were a little less enthusiastic.

Arden did not begrudge the farmers their caution around her. In Fiction, more so than in Lyonne even, there were bad stories of northern industries casting out a thousand workers after company had hired a lone bloodworker.

The one man who could replace a thousand men is dangerous to you.

How could they not be guarded against her and her talents when they see the lich-ships on the horizon, or the automatic refineries and see themselves replaced and redundant? Great powers had walked the earth in the time of their legends but it had not stopped the tide of industry. It may not have been by pure neglect that the Fiction folk had abandoned the power that ran in their veins.

The day matured and chased away the rainclouds.

Mr Quill turned the car towards the shore again, and that long, elegant spit that would lead back to her lighthouse.

Arden folded back the roof and stood up at seeing the Riven factory ruins crabbing to the rocky cliffs in a precarious embrace. She had yet to view the compound from this angle, crooked upon the old foundations of Neolithic ruins.

‘Wait,’ she said. ‘Stop here.’

‘Are you certain?’ Mr Quill slowed to a crawl but did not apply the brake. ‘This is the Riven ground.’

‘I’m not going to waste a single night here worrying about what my neighbour might be up to,’ Arden said. ‘I need to speak to him. You can stay with the car.’

Mr Quill was in no way in agreement, but he pulled the vehicle over to a roadside shoulder.

‘This part of the promontory is frequently covered by winter surge,’ he warned her. ‘It will only be you and him on the island for great stretches of time.’

‘Then it is fortunate I’m only here until autumn’s end.’ She held up her gloves and made a face at them. ‘My coins won’t hold within my hands much longer than that. They’ll need replacing.’

‘Still. I have a powder-pistol in the trunk. It’s not much but …’

‘If I am not back on the hour, then you may commence my rescue.’

She left Mr Quill to fret in the car and gladly got out, her legs cramping and stiff from the hours bracing against the rough terrain. The road had overgrown with dandelion and salt-sedge, but under her boots she saw plaques of tar and stone, the remnants of a fairly civilized road.

Though it crossed her mind to leave the krakenskin coat with the rest of her belongings, another stubborn instinct had her wear the coat instead. Best they quarrel about this now, rather than later, when she would not have a man with a powder-pistol and a car waiting in the wings.

Now that she could make her up-close observations, Arden noted how many of the factory houses visible from the lighthouse grounds had fallen into disrepair. The environment had gnawed and savaged the metal as a shark might a corpse, reducing it to warped rust and wood splinters. Despite her coat’s warmth, Arden wrapped her arms around her. An odd caul of melancholy draped over this place. Great leviathans of the deep had been processed on these shores, their meat harvested, their ambergris and oil packed into barrels, their skins tanned to leather. How odd that such an important industry be reduced to a lone man and his cart?

The squally wind tore and jostled about her. Mr Riven’s black wood boat had since parked below his factory ports, louring and waiting.

I will be strong, she decided. I will be strong. So, the man had merely attempted to run her down with his boat like a coward. Let him be a coward now to her face. She had experienced worse manner of trials. A scar upon her throat remained from when a hapless dockside mutineer once took her as a hostage before taking his own life. She had worked the docks during the False Unionist war, the War of the Wharves, and the Battle of the Tea Leaves. She had seen the worst of people.

At the end of a double-rutted track, the processing compound emerged from the scrub in fits and starts of abandoned engineering, gears and old machines. If any paint had ever graced the processing bunkers and the icehouses, the sea-wind had scoured it away in a century of furious assault. Some telegraph poles leaned in the wind, their wires stripped away by time and storm.

A lone insulated cable flapped against a tilting trunk and left a dissonant image that made Arden ponder. If the Riven clan were savages fit only to play with knives, why would they have such technology as telegraphs and electricity?

She continued through the grounds, found stables for at least ten heavy horses. A printing press turning to rust, with three fonts of lead type crystallizing in their cases. The foundations of a fireplace of the massive kind that heats a great hall. Pipes and spigots, an aqueduct for grey water so it would not contaminate the small freshwater streams. Easily fifty people could have lived and worked here with the home comforts one could expect in a well-serviced Lyonnian town. And a dozen more would have been required to provide support services. The administration of an electrical and communications system by itself would have employed at least four, five trained workers.

This was no savage shore. This was an industry, ceased abruptly and without reason.

She passed a sad patch of dirt, the only thing that looked halfway cared for in recent years, and seven wooden crosses, scored and faded by storm.

Then she caught the smell of krakenhides.

A strange quirk of cryptozoology made the rot and decay of animals despised by God and embraced by the devil so different in their decomposition. The sweet smell reminded Arden of a heavy Koutoubian spice. She’d heard tell of the learned sultans of the desert kingdoms using krakenmusk to bring a garden to the senses while their eyes viewed only sand and ancient books. A Djenne mathematician might burn the oil in incense, to aid her mental acuity. Arden had smelled kraken perfume oftentimes on the collar of a sharply suited Khanate merchant as he passed by with a trolley of legal agreement documents.

But those memories belonged to her bustling trader’s home, not a desolate hamlet on the coldest end of the Darkling Coast.

‘Hello? Mr Riven?’

Nobody answered. The smell of the curing hides wafted stronger here. Somebody was nearby, for nobody left their catch unattended to either elements or seabirds. A ragged pair of cormorants sat on the roof of a nearby ruin, their attention longingly fixed on the source of the smell.

She walked past a pile of massive cuttlefish bones, each one as big as her torso. The tusks of a short-necked saurian made an unusual entry passage. Her meanderings took her by one of the few houses left standing, a country-style lodge decorated in the gingerbread-style that only a woman of Vigil could have appreciated.

If the lodge had made it through the disaster that claimed the rest of the compound, the years were already taking their toll. The decorative architraves and wind-icons showed the ragged edges of warp and decay. Whoever had built their home here and given the stark place such a gentle touch had long vacated it. Already the garden beds were piles of dirt, any hope of flowers long gone.

She had already made up her mind about what the lodge would look like inside. Rotted floorboards, walls leaking horsehair insulation. A bare, stained mattress would be on the floor where a man might sleep, if he slept at all.

Beyond the house lay the vats and curing tables for krakenskin, shining bright brass in the dull day.

Then at last she saw Mr Riven.

He had not altered since the day when she had first lain eyes upon him. If she were pressed to admit it, then he was more appalling than before. A male, shirtless figure, almost entirely encrusted in dirt, trudging up the pier. A heavy object lay floppy in his arms, a slimy thing as big as a small woman. As she watched, he dumped it upon the curing table. A coiled rope and flabby sack followed. Plesiosaur foetus with the placenta still attached, torn viciously from its mother’s womb. Though they were reptilian by family, plesiosaur were warm-blooded and viviparous, same as mammals. They birthed live, had a maternal sense. Arden ached at seeing the baby’s wretched limpness, would have cried out if she could.

Mr Riven was every bit the monster Mr Justinian proclaimed him. Dried plaques of blood smeared him from beard to bare belly. His body echoed the decay of his compound, flesh harrowed and scarred by sea and storm. A recent trauma had made a mutilation of his face, swelling eyes into blue puffs, his lip split, jaw disfigured under his facial hair.

She forced down her odium and approached the wicked scene.

‘Excuse me, sir?’

He ignored Arden at first, too busy arranging the dead foetus lengthways on the table, more gently than one would expect given the violence he must have used to procure the poor thing. Did not glance up, and that gladdened her, for she did not have to witness his grotesque face any more than she needed to.

At last he spoke.

‘What do you want?’

No asking her name, no giving of his own. No acknowledgement that she were stranger or enemy or friend. She would not have been surprised if he spoke in animal grunts.

‘I am Arden Beacon from Clay Portside and now Vigil,’ she said, infuriated by the tremble in her voice. Why should she be so distracted by his filthy nakedness, the way an Old Master might have painted him in a hellscape triptych, minus the trident and the pale sinner for poking?

‘I am the Lighthouse—’

‘I know who you are.’ He fixed her then with those ferocious blue eyes, blue like the horizon that mocks the castaway sailor. ‘You are Jorgen’s niece, and you are not welcome here.’

‘What business my uncle had with you, that was his own,’ Arden said, light-headed with revulsion. ‘I came to ask that whatever bad blood you two had with each other, stays in the grave. I do not intend to bother you, merely conduct my lighthouse business.’

‘Then go conduct your business. I will not interfere, if you give me the same respect.’

She stood for a moment, strangely unfulfilled, having expected more, and less from him. Yelling and curses she could have borne. But not this quiet horror.

‘Thank you.’ She turned to leave, and paused. ‘It has not escaped your notice, sir, that I am wearing this coat. I bought it off a jumble seller in town. I need this coat to work the flame during a storm. I want to wear it with your blessing.’

‘You don’t need my blessing.’

‘But it is your wife’s coat. That is what people tell me.’

‘My wife is dead. Wear whatever you want. Just don’t come back here again.’

He returned to the table, and his terrible face stared at the plesiosaur’s murdered child as if it had materialized, like an awful magic trick, in front of him.

8
Mr Quill was dreadfully curious

Mr Quill was dreadfully curious, but far too polite to pry. He had seen enough to presume, from Arden rushing back to the automobile before climbing inside and taking several gulping dry sobs, to her wiping her eyes with a handkerchief and saying, ‘Let’s leave this place. I have seen enough.’

They drove the last mile in silence, and he watched her twist the handkerchief to knots within the tangle of her fingers.

Her composure had not quite returned by the time they reached the lighthouse, and when she saw Mr Harris she hugged him for longer than was necessary to hug a friend.

‘Oof, Ardie, what is that in aid of?’

‘I’m a touch vulnerable today, that’s all. And dismayed by all men. Except you. And Mr Quill of course, who remains a delightful travelling companion.’

She blew her nose on her handkerchief and the tears prickled her eyes again, but every time she tried to think about something else, the poor tiny puppy-face of the foetus came back to her, a little animal that would only know the cold butcher’s table and never its mother.

‘And I shall refuse to eat meat ever again.’

‘Ah, all right, then. Now if you have finished with your discussions on pitiful humankind, come and meet your new assistant. She’s from Lyonne originally but has since been working in—’

‘Harbinger Bay. With the Lightkeeper there. Morningvale before that.’

Arden stood back cautiously as Mr Harris introduced a young, strong-boned woman as Miss Chalice Quarry, the Lightkeeper’s assistant. ‘Miss’ and not ‘Mx’ of course – for she lacked the higher guild degrees for that title. Miss Quarry, pale freckled skin and auburn plaits dusted with sea-salt, had a sturdiness to her frame that made her what the signallers called a stormbride, for only the stoutest among them could survive the hard weather and relight an extinguished lamp or tie a giant mooring howser after it has snapped at the pier. Such folk were married to the storm, their equal. She wore a Guild-associate coin on a chain about her neck, a chunky pewter triangle.

After Mr Quill had unpacked Arden’s belongings, he left with Mr Harris, and Arden, quite unexpectedly, had to share her surroundings with a stranger. This assistant would not always be in Arden’s company, but she would be around enough that if they did not get along, the next few months would be miserable indeed.

They sized each other up with the wariness of fighters in a wharf-house pit-ring. Arden decided this red-haired Chalice Quarry suffered no nonsense. In their day together she had quickly made a home among the rocks and scrub of the promontory and the gruff company of Mr Harris. The arrival of an actual sanguis Lightkeeper, and a startlingly young one at that, would not have been altogether welcome.

‘Um, are your hours here long, Miss Quarry?’ Arden asked as politely as she could.

‘Most days I will be of help,’ Chalice said. ‘Other days David Modhi ferries me by boat from Vigil. I have a small business in town, to keep my mind off this desolate place. Oh, and before our greetings become too long in the tooth, you shall call me Chalice and I shall call you Arden. There are no standards to uphold here except expedience.’

‘Of course, Miss … I mean, Chalice. Mr Harris said you toured Harbinger Bay. That’s a hard inlet. Are you from Clay Portside?’

‘No. My hometown is Shinlock, far west of Clay Riverina. I trained in Portside for a while. T’was Mr Harris who hired me to work at Morningvale, so I did not mind joining him here when they made him an interim keeper.’

The woman picked up Arden’s entire shipping trunk as casually as she might have hefted a linen basket, set it inside the tower’s ground floor with an effortless grunt. ‘David Modhi will come by tomorrow. We’ll sail back and retrieve your boat.’

‘That would be appreciated, but perhaps he could do that today.’

‘Not with this place a pigsty and a squall coming. By the time we’re finished here it will be almost dark.’

‘Finished?’

‘Cleaning, of course. Come now. Hop to it.’

A little flustered at being bossed around in her own signal post, Arden took off her coat, rolled up her sleeves, and followed Chalice’s lead. They got a fire started in an iron coal-pit outside, and Chalice unearthed a large rusted kettle from a mound of rubbish. A prior attack on the lighthouse’s poor condition by herself and Mr Harris had unearthed several treasures. A mercury barometer, a storm glass, a radio-electrograph that inscribed approaching objects with a needle on carbon paper. She hauled some seawater up from a blowhole, and boiled it with an oily soap.

Arden stared with dismay at the salt-encrusted remnants of a valve-telegraph, the earpiece now a home to a family of tiny spiders. A ticker tape rained a miserable confetti on the floor. She imagined composing a letter in her mind to her friends, and having to pretend everything fine and dandy, when it completely was not.

‘How am I meant to report the conditions if none of the communications are working?’

Chalice hauled open a large journal, the leaves a sturdy drab green. Mr Harris’ penmanship had always been atrocious, and Arden noticed he’d missed a few entries. Of Jorgen Beacon’s entries, there were none.

‘You’ll need to make the weather observations by hand, four during the day, two at night. I will post them weekly, on a Sunday, to the Meteorological Society,’ Chalice said. ‘I will maintain the barometers, and we shall share the work of collecting the measurements from both bays. Any storm or adverse conditions, one of us must immediately take a boat across to Vigil and have Mr Harrow send a telegraph to the Garfish Point station.’

Arden nodded, trying to keep the dismay from her face. ‘I have met Mr Harrow.’

‘I can do that errand if you like,’ Chalice said, kindly now. ‘If you prefer to watch your light.’

At least one duty was hers alone. ‘Yes, I’d feel better, staying close to my lantern.’

So, into the kettle went all Uncle Jorgen’s implements of his talent. His knives and bloodletting equipment, the dishes and vials, the collectors and extractors and refiners.

They stood about the fire and watched the water bubble. The old clots floated up with the detergent.

‘Well,’ Arden said at last. ‘This is all very rustic.’

Chalice agitated the pot with a paddle, sent some miserly soap bubbles skidding across the surface.

‘We cannot waste the water here on the peninsula. There is a spring, but it is barely enough for drinking and bathing, and besides, the rain is mostly sea-spray. The streams are further down the promontory, near the pilgrim ruins. Their water must be carted by hand.’ Chalice continued to stir the kettle until the blood tools lost their noxious crust.

‘There,’ she said after a few minutes. ‘You can use them now.’

‘You’re familiar with bloodworking?’

Surprisingly, Chalice pointed to an old scar upon her hand. ‘Went to a testmoot on my tenth birthday. Shinlock fell under the auspices of Clay Capital despite the distance between the town and the city, so of course we all had to go and get ourselves tested.’

‘Did you test positive for a talent?’ Arden blurted out, and instantly regretted it. Of course the woman hadn’t tested positive. Children with talent were given stipends and scholarships, went to school in Clay Capital. The best of them stayed on, were utilized for their precious labour. The rest went home, often subtly neutered so they might not sully their family lines further.

To Arden’s further surprise, Chalice nodded. ‘Not positive, but some latencies for trace minerals. The salt of the ocean appeals to my sense of sodium chloride, but that’s about it.’

‘Oh, what a shame, to not have a talent.’

‘Trust me darling, I wouldn’t wish to be sanguine. Far too much trouble, and the Society breathing down your neck like an overly invested uncle during St Stephens dinner? Ugh, not for me.’

Over the bubbling kettle Arden admitted her own failings, of her late blooming at seventeen rather than eleven, of a half-brother with sanguis ferro talent. ‘Between me and him, our family is not particularly healthy in the eyes of the eugenicists right now. Our ledger page is all red crosses and angry notations.’

She waited for Chalice to enquire incredulously how, with all that against her, Arden had managed such an important signal post.

To her credit, the stormbride kept her counsel and only said with genuine feeling, ‘Then I hope this small sojourn to these shores works out well for you, Arden Beacon.’

‘Thank you. I do hope it works out.’

‘What happens once you are done here?’

‘Home awaits. I’ll have a full Guild membership then and dispensation to—’ she faded off, worrying she might be too personal with this woman she’d only just met.

‘Dispensation?’ Chalice said with a chortle. ‘To marry, you mean?’ Her eyes sparkled wickedly.

Arden’s cheeks grew hot. ‘It would be nice, I suppose.’

Chalice wagged a finger at Arden. ‘Then make this time quick, and marry your fellow. It will make a fitting end.’

‘What do you mean, a fitting end?’

‘This is the last of the blood-kept lights, and the Guild has decided to keep it no more. The light will be de-registered at your departure, and I will return to Clay and take another posting.’ She picked up the triangular Guild assistant coin from about her neck and kissed it. ‘God willing it be an easy one this time.’

‘Oh, that’s a shame,’ Arden said, crestfallen. She couldn’t bear thinking of her uncle’s light extinguished like the beet-farmer’s lanterns. A Beacon could not let a fire lapse, it was against their code.

‘It’s politics darling. The Fiction Guild folk would prefer one of their own in this tower. And since they don’t lean to blood, its only fair this should be a common fire.’

Then another worrisome thought came over her, and it showed on her face long enough for Chalice to ask, ‘What troubles you?’

‘I think it is peculiar.’

‘Losing a lighthouse?’

‘No, that the Fiction Seamaster’s Guild should wait until winter to decommission the light. it would have been better to replace the lamp now, when the days are long.’

Chalice silently stirred the pot until the tools clunked, and Arden felt bad for dumping her cares upon a stormbride whom she’d decided was quite nice after all.

‘Oh, don’t mind me, Chalice. I’m just glad for the opportunity. I’d never have gotten this chance in Lyonne. Maybe they’re even expecting a sanguinem ignis from Fiction? Maybe that is the delay.’