The Deepwater Trilogy. Claire McKenna
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Название: The Deepwater Trilogy
Автор: Claire McKenna
Издательство: HarperCollins
Жанр: Ужасы и Мистика
Серия: The Deepwater Trilogy
isbn: 9780008337148
isbn:
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.’
‘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 СКАЧАТЬ