LITMIR.BIZ

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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

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