The Deepwater Trilogy. Claire McKenna

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СКАЧАТЬ 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 СКАЧАТЬ