Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts

by Alan Campbell

  ‘It’s a prison,’ he said. ‘What do you expect it to look like?’

  Creedy grunted. ‘Other people manage to keep themselves in comfort. You’re letting this place slip under.’ He looked around. ‘That hatch’ll go back on easy enough.’

  Granger didn’t reply.

  ‘And you could raise the floors in the cells downstairs.’

  Granger shrugged. ‘Some people build things . . .’

  ‘. . . and other people break them,’ Creedy finished, with an oafish laugh. ‘Do you remember Dunbar?’

  Granger was looking for a crowbar among his tools. ‘Dunbar’s underwater now,’ he said. He couldn’t find the crowbar so he picked up a head-spade instead and carried it over to a spot at the far end of the living room, about forty paces from the front gable. He got down on his knees and crawled around, squinting down through the gaps in the floorboards. When he spotted the top of the wardrobe in the storage room below, he jammed the head of the spade between two boards and began ripping up wood.

  ‘Banks found that silverfin’s egg in the cave under the cliff,’ the other man went on, ‘and there you were, boiling it up in an old concussion shell when Hu’s Lancers came up the path. I’ll never forget the look on that young officer’s face. You stared right at him. You remember what you said?’

  Granger tossed a plank aside and pulled up another.

  ‘Would you be kind enough to keep an eye out for the mother?’ Creedy said in an affected tone. Then he guffawed. ‘Would you be kind enough?’ He tore another shred of meat from the bone and chewed it thoughtfully. ‘Tenacious bastards, though, I’ll give them that.’

  ‘Hu’s Lancers?’

  ‘Dragons, man. You ever hear the stories about that green?’

  Granger eased himself down through the hole he’d made in the floor, planting his feet on the top of the wardrobe underneath. It creaked under him. ‘Maskelyne just makes those up,’ he said. ‘He’ll sell the beast on to another collector once he’s given it a reputation as a monster.’

  ‘It was a monster,’ Creedy said. ‘Sank seven ships before they harpooned it in the eye.’

  ‘Two ships,’ Granger said.

  ‘Well,’ Creedy said. ‘But you saw what it ate.’

  Grunting, Granger manoeuvred his shoulders down through the gap in the floor. ‘Saw it?’ he said. ‘I disarmed the bloody thing.’

  Creedy laughed. ‘I don’t think Davy even knew what it was.’

  Granger dropped to a squatting position. It was a tight squeeze, but he managed to duck his head under the joists. Apart from the wardrobe, some shelves stuffed with moth-eaten blankets and a stack of old tin pails, the storage room was empty.

  ‘What are you doing?’ Creedy said. ‘I’ve got galoshes you could have borrowed. You don’t have to rip the goddamn house apart to get down there.’

  Granger opened the wardrobe door, then, turning to face the wall, he lowered himself down on splayed elbows. His boots scuffed the sides of the wardrobe and kicked against the open door, knocking it back against the wall. Finally the air under his heels gave way to a solid surface. With another grunt, he hopped down inside the narrow wooden space.

  It was musty and dark, but his fumbling hands located the tin box at once. He picked it up and slid it on top of the wardrobe, then stopped as pain seized his chest. It hit him like a punch. ‘Could you give me a hand back up, Mr Creedy?’

  ‘You got your own self down there.’

  ‘I can’t . . . breathe.’

  Granger heard a chair scrape across the floor above. A moment later, a shadow fell across the gap above, and he saw his former sergeant’s big, ugly face staring down. ‘You’re never going to fix this hole, are you?’

  ‘Grab that box and give me a hand.’

  Once he was back up in the garret, he took a drink of water straight from the spigot and then sat down on the floor, breathing slow until the cramps in his chest relaxed. He’d been inhaling this sea air for too long, living too close to the brine. The Mare Lux had got into his lungs, and there was nothing to be done about it now.

  ‘You don’t look well,’ Creedy said.

  ‘The register’s in that box.’

  Creedy opened it. ‘What’s all this?’

  He pulled out an assortment of objects. There were two books: the prison register and an old Unmer tome in raggedy script. And there was a child’s doll. This last was a representation of a human infant, fashioned out of silver and brass. Tiny joints allowed its head and arms to swivel. One of its eye sockets was empty, but the other held a glass copy of the real thing – a finer replica than Creedy’s old clockwork lens. A faint yellow light glowed behind its remaining iris.

  ‘You don’t remember it?’ Granger said.

  Creedy thought for a moment, then frowned. ‘The Unmer child,’ he said, unconsciously lifting his hand to his eye. ‘What did you keep this for?’

  ‘I don’t know,’ Granger said. ‘Evidence. Lift its arm. No, the other one.’

  A tinny voice came from the thing: ‘A oo a apee.’

  ‘I’ll be damned,’ Creedy said. ‘That sounded like speech.’ He lifted the arm again.

  ‘Oo oo uv ee.’

  ‘It is speech,’ Granger said. ‘There’s a mechanism inside.’

  ‘You opened it?’

  Granger shrugged. ‘Why not?’

  Creedy looked incredulous. ‘It’s Unmer made. God knows what sort of sorcery is woven into this thing.’

  ‘Do you suppose it’s worth anything?’

  The other man examined the doll. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘If you could figure out what it’s saying. A lot of people will pay good money for something like that. Don’t let Maskelyne’s buyers rip you off, though. No offence, Colonel, but you need the money.’ He looked pointedly around the room, before returning his attention to the doll.

  ‘A is oo oo.’

  ‘I doubt it’s even speaking Anean,’ he said. ‘Sounds like one of those old Unmer languages.’

  ‘Don’t wear it out, Mr Creedy.’ Granger got to his feet and picked up the prison register – a heavy book bound in blue cloth. He thumbed through hundreds of pages, the columns of convicts’ names and dates all written in Swinekicker’s fastidious handwriting and then scored through with neat lines. Coffin nails, the old soldier had called those marks. Only the last half-page had been written in Granger’s own hand. In the six years since he’d been here in Ethugra, he’d drawn nine coffin nails of his own. The final entry remained unmarked.

  Duka, Eric. 3/HA/07. Evensraum. E-Com. #44-WR15102. III 30/HA/46 – 13/HR/47

  Eric Duka, born in Evensraum in 1407. Fought as an enemy combatant, one of twenty thousand soldiers captured by the emperor’s forces at Whiterock Bay during the Forty-fourth War of Liberation. Granger made a clicking sound with his tongue. According to this, he’d received three initial payments from Evensraum Council, followed by ten more from Duka’s own family. Funds ceased on the 13th Hu-Rain 1447 – three weeks ago. No explanation given. Granger took a pencil from the box and drew a shaky line through the text. The chances of the prisoner’s relations sending any more money now were as good as nil. If they petitioned the Council, they might get another one or two compassion payments. But Granger could always claim those had arrived too late.

  The pages after this
entry were empty, space enough for a thousand more lives, if he wanted them on his conscience. He looked around at his dismal apartment, at the drip-pans, and then at the hole he’d just ripped in the floor. ‘What time does the Alabaster Sound get here?’ he asked Creedy.

  ‘We got hours yet.’

  ‘Have they posted the lists?’

  Creedy shrugged. ‘No point checking them. We’re still getting combatants from Evensraum and Calloway. Hu ships them over as soon as Interrogation’s done with them. They’re all piss-poor farmers.’

  They’d been in Evensraum in the thirties. Granger recalled a farm near Weaverbrook, a place tucked right in behind the seawall with twelve acres turned over to wheat and corn and another two for grazing. There had been an old stone house with a kitchen garden, an orchard and a wooden hay barn. Living trees on the hills. Rabbits. His orders had been to burn and shell nothing, to take the island by boot and sword, one smallholding at a time. But then Emperor Hu had grown impatient with their progress.

  He remembered the smell of mud all around, the clean, cold taste of well water, his brother John gathering apples in his helmet. A good place, Evensraum. They said all good things were worth fighting for. But then he remembered the bombardment, the fires and the screaming, and the cholera that followed.

  ‘Let’s get over there anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s best to be early.’

  Creedy was frowning at the doll. ‘You’ve had this thing all these years?’ he said. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me about it till now? I might have been able to find you a buyer.’

  ‘I meant to repair it first,’ Granger said.

  The other man grunted. ‘Right,’ he said, twisting the doll’s arm again.

  ‘Oo oo uv ee,’ said the hopeless little voice.

  Outside upon the roof of Granger’s prison it was a fine blue day, but the two men wore their whaleskin cloaks out of habit. You never could tell when the wind might pick up. They hadn’t worn their uniforms in years, and in their seaman’s breeches and Ethugran jerkins they looked like the jailers they’d become. Swinekicker’s old brine purifier squatted upon a clutter of lead pipes beside the cistern, its faceted lenses gleaming in the sun like the eyes of a spider. It badly needed cleaning, he noted, as he always did. Ten yards below, Halcine Canal and its many branches formed a web of tea-coloured channels between Ethugra’s jails, the banks all crooked by pontoons and wickers of flotsam. Boats waited in shadowy moorings, the brine under their hulls as darkly lustrous as bronze.

  In places where sunlight fell between the buildings, Granger could see hazy details under the surface of the water: rows of iron-barred windows, and here and there a doorway through which old Swinekicker might once have stepped. Deeper still lay ordinary windows like the ones in Old Losoto. As a boy he’d clambered over Unmer façades that looked just like that, or swung from the mooring hooks, shrieking, while the other boys thrilled at the thought of Old Man Ghoul reaching up from the depths to grab him. It seemed like another world now. The Mare Lux smothered the past. Fish now glided though spaces that were once kitchens and bedrooms. Crabs and eels traversed the old cell floors in search of food.

  The majority of Swinekicker’s neighbours had kept pace with the rising seas, and their buildings cast shadows over the old man’s jail. Dun-coloured façades loomed two or three storeys above him. There was Hoeken’s, and Dan Cuttle’s jail, and there the round-tower Mrs Pursewearer was having built with her husband’s inheritance. A bare-chested labourer stood on the tower scaffold, slapping down mortar with a trowel while his companion carried blocks of stone up a ladder and laid them at his feet. This endless construction was part of Ethugran life. Masonry reclaimed from the seabed lay drying on palettes against a hundred half-built eaves, or stood in silhouette upon the rooftops like gravestones. A few of the buildings had cracked and subsided, broken by the Mare Lux tides. Others had given up the fight entirely. Thirty yards further along the canal, nothing of Ma Bitter’s place remained above the waterline but a lone chimneypot. Someone had stuffed it full of rubbish.

  ‘Look.’ Creedy was pointing down at the canal.

  Granger looked and immediately spotted a yellow light moving through the murky waters between the prison foundations. Five fathoms down, a sharkskin man was carrying a small child in his arms. He clutched a gem lantern in one upraised fist, using it to light his way across the drowned street. Both he and the child wore rags. His trouser legs flapped against his scarred grey shins. The child’s hair wafted like a yellow flame behind its head. They moved lethargically through the brine, crossing the boulder-strewn seabed with great care, before disappearing through an open doorway into the opposite building.

  ‘Someone ought to tell Dan Cuttle,’ Creedy said. ‘That was his place they went into.’

  ‘I’ll mention it to him.’

  ‘It’s not right, the Drowned moving the hell into wherever they please.’

  Granger continued to peer down at the doorway through which they’d disappeared. They’d come from this side of the street, which meant they might be living in his own foundations. The law required him to inform Maskelyne’s Hookmen, but that would mean inspections, and Granger didn’t want inspections.

  Creedy insisted they take his own launch to Averley Plaza because he said Swinekicker’s old boat was bowed and splitting along the keel and was likely to sink with the two of them in it. Granger looked down at the places in the hull he’d filled with resin. He still owed the boatyard a thousand gilders for repairing the engine.

  The launch puttered along. A former Imperial Navy tender, it still bore the scars of cannon-fire across its metal hull. Creedy claimed to have bought it cheap from a cousin who’d been a coxswain under Admiral Lamont, but Granger suspected he’d stolen it. He didn’t want to know. They’d all done desperate things these last six years.

  Granger sat dead centre, away from the sides of the vessel. Creedy slouched over the helm, with one hand on the wheel. With his other hand he absently twisted the lens of his clockwork eye, as though the reappearance of that Unmer doll had stirred unwelcome memories. ‘You ever wonder what happened to the other guys?’ he said. ‘I heard Banks stayed on in Losoto, right under Hu’s nose.’

  ‘Banks was smart enough to look after himself,’ Granger replied. ‘He’s probably worked his way into Administration by now.’

  ‘Smarter than us, eh?’ Creedy steered the launch around Ma Bitter’s chimneypot. Massive prison buildings glided past on either side, trapping great dark slabs of shadow between them. Behind them, the propeller churned the canal waters into an ochre froth. ‘We should get the last of the Gravediggers together again,’ Creedy said. ‘Get them out here, I mean. Banks would know how to fix up that place of yours. Swan and Tummel could help dredge up stone for the walls. We could go after trove while we’re at it. Get an operation going.’

  An illegal operation, Granger thought. ‘I don’t have anything to pay them with,’ he said.

  ‘They wouldn’t ask for nothing, not from you, Colonel. You could offer them a lay of the trove.’

  ‘There’s nothing valuable left in these canals,’ Granger said. ‘And we’d need a ton of equipment for deepwater salvage: cranes, steel-nets, dredging hooks. A bigger boat.’ He shook his head. ‘We’d be putting ourselves in competition with Maskelyne. Somehow, I don’t think he’d be pleased.’

  Creedy spat over the side, but said nothing more.

  This talk made Granger wonder how the other man’s business was faring. Creedy had grown up here, and his family still ran four or five prisons
out on the edge of Tallship. They’d hooked Creedy up with a distant relation, some poor second cousin who owed the grandfather money. Didn’t want him brandishing that tattoo in the family’s own neighbourhood, they said. Not with the emperor’s spies around. The cousin’s place was big enough to be profitable, Granger supposed, but then Creedy had a talent for making money disappear.

  Swinekicker had been kind to Granger. The old soldier hadn’t wanted anything from him but a hard day’s work and an ear to listen to his army stories. He been riddled with brine rot when Granger had first been introduced to him. Maybe he’d just wanted someone to carry his coffin out.

  The launch turned west out of Halcine Canal and into Francialle, where the buildings brawled for space, abandoning the waterways between them in a warren of perpetual gloom. Creedy switched off the engine and took up his boat hook, pushing it against the stonework on either side as he eased the vessel through channels barely wider than its hull. In some places the clover-leaf windows of ancient palazzos could be seen dimly underwater, but mostly the brine was as impenetrable as dreamless sleep. These old drowned avenues of Francialle had once resounded with the hammers of Unmer weapon-smiths and metalworkers, and the chants of Brutalist and Entropic sorcerers as they imbued their creations with treacherous powers. Granger couldn’t help but wonder what strange devices still lay down there, chattering mindlessly to the fish. Even now it seemed perilous to disturb the silence.