Chapter Text
In Duskvol Clementine could always hear the sea. Even in Lady Desault’s living room in the middle of Nightmarket, with the curtains drawn and the maid clattering about with the tea service, she heard the grating eternal roar of pebbles being drawn back and flung up the high strand. It was different than the sound of the sea in the open ocean, but she still sometimes had to close her eyes against it.
Cold water. The gaping maw of a leviathan.
The warmth of a full teacup through her thinly gloved hands.
“Warden?” Lady Desault was offering a plate of biscuits. Clementine had not yet removed her mask in this house, and did not plan on ever doing so, but Lady Desault was polite to a fault.
She drew in a breath—bracing smell of fresh lavender and sage—and shook her head. “As much as I enjoy your company, my time is really very finite. If she can’t make it, I ought to be heading out.”
“I’m sure she’s only running a bit late. And I have found her to be reliable when it matters. That business with my husband’s late wife’s things . . . she was very helpful.”
“Mm. Because you paid her to be.”
Lady Desault laughed lightly. “Well yes, but seeing as I plan to continue doing so, I don’t think we’ll have any problems.”
“I can’t afford them, Lady Desault.”
“No, neither can I. Not anymore.” She paused. “But please, call me Janine. I do hope we’re friends by now.”
Clementine smiled, a small, tucked away gesture. It was ill advised for a spirit warden to have friends who knew too much about their work—and removing one’s mask while on duty was grounds for a severe reprimand—but after several months of working together somehow she and Lady Desault—Lady Janine—had indeed become close. But then, secrets and shared interests tended to produce such relationships. Lady Janine wanted to clear her husband’s name, now her own; Clementine wanted to see Lady Scurlock rot in Ironhook for the rest of her days. It was unclear what Miss Corbet wanted aside from money, but Clementine supposed they would find out.
“Lady Desault?” The maid stepped into the room, just far enough to draw their attention. “Miss Corbet is here.”
At last.
“Wonderful,” Lady Janine said. “Show her in please.”
Clementine heard the murmur of brief conversation, and a woman’s voice raised in laughter. Shortly after, Miss Corbet swept—it was the only word for it—into the room.
She wore a long coat, and beneath it a black mourning dress of paramatta silk trimmed with crape, whose boning glowed faintly past the veil of Clementine’s mask. The embroidery curled over her gloves glowed faintly too, and though the supernatural aspects of it all lacked the clean, practical artistry of a Warden’s uniform, there was power there, woven in. Nearly the only plain thing on her was the silver locket hanging from her neck. Her eyes were as sharp as a corpseseeker crow’s despite the dark circles dug in beneath them; she took in the room and the people in it at a glance, and seemed unsurprised at Clementine’s masked presence.
“I didn’t know what I’d need, so . . . well I suppose I brought everything. I took off the boots, of course,” she said to Lady Janine, “I’d hate to ruin the carpets.” Her voice was a little rough, but precise and definitively upper class.
“Mariah appreciates it, I’m sure,” Lady Janine said. “Would you care for some tea, as we get started?”
Miss Corbet—”Katrina’s just fine”—nodded and set her case on the floor beside one of the chairs, then settled into it. She looked at home here, in the way that upper class women somehow managed to do wherever they were—in a way that Lady Janine still sometimes did not, even six months after her marriage to Lord Desault. And her small talk was polished if a bit out-of-date: city development, the society pages—had they heard of Lord Strangleford’s marriage to Lady Susan Grey?
"And of Gregory Bennett’s peculiar demise?" Clementine asked.
“A very strange business,” Lady Janine murmured.
Clementine turned to Katrina: “And it feels rude not to mention it at all—I’m so sorry for your loss.”
Katrina’s face softened, and for a moment it looked like she was about to cry, but in the end she only dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief. “Thank you. A year ago he—my fiancé—fell ill and then . . . I’m sorry, it still feels very fresh; I don’t mean to blub.”
“No, losing someone is so difficult. And you lose yourself a bit too, don’t you. And your life . . . everything gets set adrift, like a ship breaking apart in the water.”
“Yes. Yes that’s exactly right.” She was quiet for a moment, and then, “You must have lost someone too.”
Clementine shook her head. “But I’ve come close, myself. Which is . . . relevant to why Lady Janine invited you today, actually.”
Lady Janine nodded. The air of the room shifted, a sudden pressure change. “Shall we begin in earnest, then?”
Out of nothing more than an abundance of caution, Clementine waited until the maid had retreated into the kitchens. And then she began to speak.
“When I was a child I discovered I could will changes in the weather over the course of an afternoon. As I got older it got easier, and my talent found me work on merchant ships sailing to and from Duskvol. It was . . . exciting. Profitable. I sailed several times with Captain Scurlock, whose name you may recognize. I was on her ship when the storm came up. It was unlike anything I’d ever seen, greater than I could hope to quell or even measurably lessen. Wind at sixty knots, waves forty feet high—the leviathan beneath us bigger than them all. People started throwing themselves overboard; the bosun shot himself; but the captain stayed at the helm, shouting, ‘Take it! All of it! It’s yours!’ and the look on her face . . . I’ll never forget it. She didn’t look afraid of the thing at all. She looked in awe.”
In the long pause that followed, Lady Janine’s hall clock ticked over to two-thirty, and the chime sounded once with a dull, flat bonggg.
“I don’t know that more people would have survived if she hadn’t given us up. We were a merchant vessel, not a whaling ship. But she survived at the expense of her crew and passengers.” Clementine set her teacup back on the tray and leaned forward. And so they came to the business at hand. “Even more worrying, I think, is what she’s involved with now.
“The Order of the Rising Tide,” she said, glancing at Katrina, “is a doomsday cult. I don’t know how much you know about the forgotten gods, but they worship one called the Leviathan. Given that object you took care of for Lady Janine, we believe they used to operate out of this house.”
“Of course that’s no longer the case,” Lady Janine said quickly. “My husband’s late wife was a member, but Eric was not involved; she kept him quite out of it. Once she died they moved elsewhere, but as near as I can tell they used to meet in the carriage house.”
But that wasn’t right. It didn’t feel right. Clementine frowned and took up her teacup again: a mushroom blend, dark and thick, the ocean in a black mirror. Show me, she thought at it.
In her ears: The overwhelming roar of the sea. The porcelain handle snapped off in her hand. She saw in the dark shallows a set of stairs, leading down, and the roar of the ocean didn’t fade.
“Oh my,” Lady Janine said. “Mariah! Would you—thank you.”
The maid knelt to pick up the teacup, which lay unshattered on the thick carpet, and Clementine stood suddenly and strode toward the sound of the rising tide. Now that she heard it, it was impossible to sit and act as though she didn’t. “It isn’t in the carriage house,” she said to the other two, who rose in a rustle of skirts to follow her. “It’s beneath the mansion. Is there a basement?”
“I don’t believe so,” Lady Janine said. “I had quite a thorough tour of the house when I first moved in and the maid, Mariah, has been here longer than that—no, I’m certain there isn’t. We have quite a sizable pantry, though.”
She followed the sound of water out of the sitting room with its heavy curtains and neatly upholstered couches, into the library, with a lit fireplace and shelves upon shelves of leather-bound books. Down the front hallway lined with portraits, up the stairs to the second floor of the house. And there on the landing she lay a hand against the wall, very lightly—and then pressed until it clicked, and then opened.
“Oh,” Katrina said. “Oh. The construction—Lady Janine I would love to take a closer look at this wall, would you—oh—Miss, er, Warden?”
“Thorn,” Clementine said.
The door opened up into darkness, a set of stairs curling down; they were miles from the sea but the sound of waves was deafening in her ears. Clementine lit the small lantern at her hip and, without looking at the others, took a deep breath—and stepped into the dark.
She chased it down one floor and then another, the sound of their footsteps echoing softly against wood, then rock. The air had the wet, oily smell of limestone. And at the bottom she stepped out into a cavernous, echoing space, so large it swallowed up the light from her lantern and threw it back to her as the sound of water, lapping gently against an unseen shore.
It was suddenly very, very quiet.
Lady Janine found another lantern, and Katrina found a third; their intersecting pools of light revealed a space nearly as large as the footprint of the mansion above them, half of it a limestone shelf smoothed approximately flat, the other an unstill pool of water. Against the wall stood a table and a few chairs, a small workplace with a large sink, several empty bookshelves. A pristine hardwood rowboat bobbed at the edge of the water.
“This . . .” Lady Janine cleared her throat quietly. “I had no idea this was here. This is quite something.”
“They wired it for electricity, even,” Katrina said wonderingly. “Look.” She brushed a bundle of naked wires stretching along the wall, and when she found the switch, they set up a faint hum and came on yellower than the sun. Then: “Oh.”
There was a strange iridescent dark patch beneath the table, and a long, narrow channel cut into the stone ran from it straight into the water. Clementine didn’t need to look closer to know what had once been done there, but Katrina was already going through the scant pile of balled-up papers left behind. Clementine could hear her muttering, occasionally letting out more enthusiastic noises.
“That’s evidence,” Clementine said, turning toward the water. “All of it had better still be there when the team comes around.”
“What’s that? Oh, of course, no, I’ll make my own copies. This person’s handwriting was awful, how did they even . . . oh. Oh interesting.”
Although the space had been cleared out months ago, Clementine still felt an echo of power here. It clung to the walls above the water like a moss; it was in the air, even, faint but undeniable, and thickest near the far wall, in a small alcove carved into the rock. A waist-high pillar stood empty there, but if she focused she could almost . . . see . . . she could almost—she could—
A woman. Dark-haired, statuesque, sheathed in a dress the color of fresh blood and standing with one hand on the pillar, as casually as if it were hers. There was no special expression on her face. Why should there be. But there was a stopped, strange moment where neither of them blinked, and neither of them moved, and then the woman—Lady Scurlock—said in quite a neutral tone, “Keeping tabs on me, are you?”
“Hardly.” Yes. Yes I know every street you walk and every person to whom you speak; I know the woman who arranges your parties, and the spirit wardens you’ve bribed to waylay the crows and remove the bodies from your mansion. I’ve devoted my life to you, haven’t I? What other choice was there, after I’d survived you?
“Warden Thorn?” Lady Janine had come up behind Clementine on a faint wave of floral perfume. “What is it?”
Lady Scurlock’s head tilted just a bit at that, a curious sea bird with flat black eyes, and then her expression opened in recognition. “You . . .”
The deck creaking beneath her feet, the impact of the water, the dark and cold and abject terror. There was water in Clementine’s mouth, then, her ears and nose, brackish and cold. She tore a corner of her robe up over her head and vanished—
—and reappeared, choking on nothing, in the sitting room upstairs. The rug was soft and forgiving beneath her feet, the air gloomy with fading daylight rather than inadequate electric bulbs. The air smelled faintly of dust and wool. The big clock in the hallway ticked over to three o’clock. Bonggg. Bonggg. Bonggg.
Breathe.
Breathe.
Breathe.
There was someone watching her. She tore her hair back from her face and looked up—but it was only Mariah, the maid, standing in the sitting room doorway. She was carrying the tea service, and her fingers were white around its edges.
“Everything’s fine,” Clementine told her. Her voice sounded calm, but her hands shook with the backwash of adrenaline as she clenched them into her trousers. She was glad, suddenly, for the inscrutability of the spirit warden’s mask. “We didn’t find anything dangerous, just a surprise. Lady Desault and Miss Corbet should be up shortly.” And in fact she could hear muffled voices from deeper in the house: they were already coming up.
Mariah was quiet for a long moment, but eventually she nodded. “Would you like a cup of tea, Warden?”
Another deep breath.
Forget it. She’d send a crow to the offices later. “Do you have any gin?”