Claire McKenna - The Deepwater Trilogy

‘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.’

‘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.’