Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts

by Alan Campbell

  He slammed his head into the other man’s nose, shattering it, then slugged him hard across the side of his head.

  The jailer slumped to the ground.

  ‘You’re very good at exposing my employees’ inadequacies, Mr Granger.’

  Maskelyne was standing in the cell doorway.

  ‘If the circumstances had been different, I might actually have hired you to vet them for me,’ he went on. He slipped a hand into his tunic pocket and withdrew an object that looked like tangle of red wires. As Granger watched, Maskelyne’s hand began to bleed. A faint humming sound came from the wire device. He let out a shuddering breath. ‘Do you know what this is?’ he said.

  It was assuredly Unmer, but Granger knew nothing beyond that. The humming noise intensified, and yet it did not appear to emanate from the device. Rather, it felt as if Granger’s own bones were reverberating, as though his body had been plucked like a harp string. His legs felt suddenly weak. His jaw tightened, making it difficult to speak. He managed to say, ‘Cut Hana loose.’

  ‘The siren-wire is a hideous little weapon,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Ill suited to humans.’ The strain was evident in his eyes. Droplets of blood fell from his fingers to the floor. ‘It can kill a man unaccustomed to handling it.’ He grinned, revealing bloody teeth. ‘As with so much of Unmer sorcery, one must build up a tolerance.’

  All the strength left Granger’s legs. His knees trembled and then buckled and he found himself lying on the ground. The ceiling reeled over him drunkenly. He tried to rise, but his nerves just screamed, and his limbs would not function. ‘Her chains,’ he said.

  Maskelyne’s face loomed over Granger, long and cadaverous, his expression taut with concentration. He was bleeding from his eyes now, but he continued to clutch the Unmer artefact in his fist. The hum from the siren-wire seemed to infuse his words. ‘It’s important for people to watch her die,’ he said. ‘Understanding the horror of the seas keeps them safe from harm.’ He crouched over Granger, his jaw locked, his whole body trembling. ‘Try to get some rest, Mr Granger, for both our sakes.’

  That night he didn’t sleep at all. The world turned, carrying Granger and his prison under the stars. Hana’s voice grew steadily weaker. She uttered no words that he could understand. Whether she was no longer capable of human speech, or whether her pain had pushed her beyond words, he did not know. He prayed that someone – a fisherman or market trader – would show her mercy, silence her. But no one did.

  They had removed everything from the cell but his clothes.

  By dawn she was struggling to breathe and quite incapable of screaming. From his cell window Granger watched the Hookmen return. They took buckets of brine from the harbour and used them to soak her drying body. They forced seawater down her windpipe, softening up her lungs for another day. She gasped and choked, and then the pitiful cries began again. Granger gripped the bars of his window.

  Around mid morning a jailer brought Granger a wooden pitcher of fresh water and a bowl of fish-gut soup. He tested the food by placing a strip of it under his tongue. When, after a few minutes, it began to burn, he spat it out and rinsed his mouth. The remainder of the meal he placed on the window ledge, where he hoped it might attract a rat.

  Hana didn’t die until late afternoon that day. The Hookmen continued to soak her blistered grey flesh with brine, using a funnel to pour it down her throat, but they could not prolong her torture any longer. Two of the men began to argue, each loudly apportioning blame on the other for the woman’s demise. Clearly Maskelyne had not intended for her to depart so quickly. After all their attempts to revive her failed, they began the Positioning before her corpse dried out.

  Three men erected a dragon-bone tripod over her body. Ropes and splints were laid out nearby. Using the stoutest length of rope they hoisted her to a standing position. They bound her arms and legs in splints and then arranged them in their chosen posture. They raised her head and lashed her hair to the small of her back to keep her chin high. A man wearing whaleskin gloves opened her eyes, then jammed his thumb between her lips and prised them apart. His companion shoved something small in her mouth and laughed uproariously, but his colleague removed it quickly. Granger couldn’t see what it was.

  When they’d finished with the corpse, it was standing, facing Granger’s cell window with its arms upraised in a pleading gesture.

  Granger sat on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. Ianthe would have been taken to Maskelyne’s deepwater salvage headquarters on Scythe Island, to be assigned to one of his vessels. As long as she found trove for him, she’d be safe enough. Safe, but never free of him. And it would only be a matter of time before Maskelyne discovered the true extent of her talents.

  Granger picked up one of his galoshes and reached his arm down inside it. The letter he’d once intended to send to the Haurstaf was still there, tucked into a flap in the whaleskin.

  He looked at it for a long time. The date he’d chosen for the appointment was still three days hence. Using a strip of fish gut, he scrawled another message across the bottom of the letter, watching as the grease burned his words into the paper.

  He strode over to the cell window and peered out. Down below, Averley Plaza teemed with people. Shouts, laughs and cat-calls filled the air. The market traders had already set up their stalls for the day ahead, their canopies shining in the sunlight. Foul-smelling clouds lingered above the fishmongers’ braziers. Canal boats ferried jailers’ wives to and from the docks, where fishermen, crabbers and dredgers unloaded their wares. Piles of reclaimed stone and wood steamed on the wharf side as they dried, while half a hundred vessels ploughed the amber waters of the harbour.

  Granger folded the letter into a tight wad and threw it. It arced across the harbour waters, and landed on the wharf side four storeys below.

  He watched, waiting for someone to pick it up.

  An old woman and her daughter passed by. The young girl glanced at it but didn’t stop. Shortly afterwards, a young man, barely older than a boy, stopped, and picked up the letter. He was dressed like a deckhand. He opened it up and read it. Then he looked about. Nobody else had noticed.

  Granger watched silently from his high window as the deckhand shoved the letter into his pocket and wandered off. When he reached the wharf, he called out to an older fisherman sitting on the dockside. His father? This man rubbed his hands on his breaches before accepting the letter. He was too far away to see his expression clearly, but he took a long time reading it. Some discussion passed between the two. The young man pointed back towards the wall of the jail where he’d found the letter. The older man shrugged, then shoved the paper into his own pocket.

  And then he did nothing.

  Granger cursed under his breath. Couldn’t they see how valuable the letter was? The Haurstaf would gladly pay to receive news of one of their own, an undiscovered talent rotting in an Ethugran prison.

  But the fisherman just sat there, watching the boats in the harbour.

  Granger’s fate, his daughter’s fate – hell, perhaps even the future of the empire – now lay in the hands of a stranger.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 8

  IANTHE

  Ianthe found herself inside a hollow metal ball. Aqueous yellow light danced across curves of pitted steel, across thick gloves resting on the knees of whaleskin breeches. Not her gloves; the hands inside them belonged to the sailor whose perceptions she had borrowed. She could not move this body, merely occupy it. From all around came a deep and regular hissing and rushing sound, like the breathing of some strange consumptive monster. Haaaa . . . Shuuu . . . Haaaa . . . Shuuu . . . Tiny portholes on all sides looked out into golden brine as thick as honey and illuminated by gem lanterns.

  She was inside a man, and the man
was inside a metal vessel, and the vessel was being lowered down through the sea.

  The submariner peered through a porthole. Golden motes drifted past, like flecks of hay. Some form of sea life, perhaps? Ianthe could see nothing in the gloom beyond the lantern light.

  Haaaa . . . Shuuu . . . Haaaa . . . Shuuu . . .

  The sound seemed to come from overhead. There must be a pipe up there, an air supply. Frustratingly, her host did not look up to verify this. He had no interest in that particular aspect of the machine, Ianthe could sense. She could also sense his fear. He didn’t want to be down here.

  Now through the brine she discerned vague shapes and pools of darkness. The machine was nearing the sea floor. Her host reached up and rang a bell three times. Ianthe smelled his perspiration. He looked through one window after another. A grid of ancient, tumble-down walls criss-crossed the ground – the footprints of roofless dwellings now buried under silt. This place, then, had once been a city. Now fish glided through doorways and windows. A hacker crab ambled backwards along a soft grey street, its claws raised as a warning to the rapidly descending craft.

  They were dropping fast.

  The submariner must have been aware of this too, for he rang the bell another three times.

  Then he looked down, and Ianthe realized that the floor of this craft was not solid. A circle of brine waited under the submariner’s seat. Grapples, hooked rods and coils of cables filled the floor space around the hole. Evidently this craft was intended to retrieve trove.

  The mechanical breathing continued – Haaaa . . . Shuuu . . . Haa . . . Shuuu . . . – and now the submariner’s own breaths sounded laboured. He rubbed sweat from his eyes, then slid off his seat and crouched over the hole.

  How did this man’s handlers expect him to find treasure in such a crude manner? He could see nothing but a yard of seabed through that open portal, and not much more beyond those thick glass windows.

  A bell rang overhead.

  The craft slowed until it was barely a fathom above the sea bed – then stopped.

  The submariner looked up to where a huge brass helmet hung under a fat spool of rubber piping fixed to the ceiling. He manoeuvred himself up past the seat, until he was almost standing upright in the confined space. Then he pushed his head inside the helmet.

  Now Ianthe found herself looking out through the edge of an even smaller window, this one in the helmet itself. Haaaa . . . Shuu . . . Haaaa . . . Shuuu . . . The rasp and suck of air grew loud in her ears. She realized that the breathing pipe had been in the helmet all along. Sweat trickled down her neck – his neck. His neck. He gave a grunt, then wrenched the helmet round so that its tiny window lined up with his face. Ianthe heard four clamps, one after the other, snap into place.

  He crouched down over the hole again. His heart was racing, his lungs straining in his chest. He picked up a spade. Then he lowered himself down into the brine.

  Ianthe felt icy cold water close around her host’s knees, then his waist, and then he was gliding down through that toxic murk. His boots sank into grey silt, raising clouds as fine as pollen. She could see even less than before now. Gem lanterns glimmered on the exterior of the diving craft, but they were centuries old, and their radiance had long since lost its vigour. The man unhitched one of them and held it out.

  A few yards ahead of him lay the ragged outline of a low wall. An anchor chain rose up beyond this, the links rimed with brine crystals. The submariner began to walk towards the chain, inclining his head in his direction of travel to keep the heavy helmet balanced as he dragged his feet through the sucking earth. That short walk seemed to take an age, but finally he reached his goal. He ran a gloved hand along the rough surface of the wall, disturbing a cloud of silt. Then he regarded the chain and looked up.

  He was barely six fathoms down, yet the brown weight of the seawater above made it appear much deeper. Dusk glimmered on the surface of the waters like a peat fire. The anchor chain terminated at a buoy, close to which lay the silhouette of a ship’s hull.

  The submariner found a gap in the wall and stepped through into the street Ianthe had seen from the diving craft. She spotted the trail of the hacker crab she’d noticed earlier, but the creature itself was nowhere in sight. Something dark wriggled at the edge of her vision.

  The man’s heart quickened. He swung round.

  An eel darted away into the gloom.

  ‘Give me grace.’

  His voice startled Ianthe. She had assumed he’d be unable to speak down here. But there was air here, of course – a frighteningly small pocket, certainly, but air nonetheless. Her host’s heart slowed, and he resumed his trek.

  ‘Sixteen gilders a dive,’ he muttered. ‘Bastard wouldn’t buy a night in ’thugra.’

  She was used to hearing people speak to themselves, but this man’s voice sounded odd down here, huge and metallic. Yet it was strangely comforting, like a light in an immense void. You wouldn’t want a night in Ethugra, she thought.

  His eyes filled with perspiration, and he blinked. ‘Still better than here,’ he said.

  Ianthe smiled inwardly. Wasn’t it funny how people sometimes seemed to respond to her thoughts? She tried again. What are you looking for down here?

  This time he didn’t give any indication that he’d heard her.

  He trudged on down the street.

  But then something horrible happened.

  Ianthe felt brine seep into her boot. The chill sensation came as such a shock that it took her a moment to remember that she wasn’t actually here. It’s his boot, his foot, his . . . flesh. The sea-water was dribbling down behind his ankle, scalding him. Yet he paid no attention to it whatsoever. His breathing continued steadily. If anything, he actually picked up his pace.

  For Ianthe, the feeling was so intolerable that she almost fled his mind. She imagined blisters appearing on her own ankle, the skin bubbling, then turning grey and leathery. She wanted to lift her foot, but she couldn’t. The man was merely a vessel, and she his passenger. It wasn’t even her pain. If he could bear it, then so would she.

  There were other tracks on the seabed now. By the golden light of the gem lantern, Ianthe could see scores of bootprints criss-crossing the street. They converged on one massive roofless house. Slowly the submariner made his way over to the doorway of that drowned building and stepped through.

  A wide pit stretched before him, strewn with the bones of a dragon. It appeared to be an excavation, for many of the smaller bones and much of the silt had been scraped back towards the walls of the dwelling. The size of the dragon’s skeleton indicated that it had been a mature adult, perhaps as much as a thousand years old. A man could walk easily between the bars of its ribcage. Every morsel of its flesh had been picked clean. Its skull rested against the far wall, where it seemed to gaze blindly at the heavens. Ianthe’s host paused and took three long breaths. The encroaching brine had by now filled the lower half of one suit leg. She could feel the pressure of it pushing against his knee binding.

  ‘Another day,’ he muttered.

  He strode forward into the garden of bones. Then he drove his spade into the ground below the dragon’s ribs and began heaving heaps of silt aside. Grey clouds muddied the waters. After a few minutes effort, something glinted under his spade. The man knelt down and began rummaging through the silt with his gloved hands.

  He pulled something out.

  Ianthe breathed a sigh of relief. She had seen enough sea-bottles to recognize this one at once. The tiny Unmer artefact was missing its stopper, and a blur of liquid could be seen pouring forth into the surrounding seawater, as vaporous and agitated as the air above a hot vent. Such bottles were often found amidst the remains of dragons. Serpents had an insatiable – and ultimately deadly – desire for them.

  The submariner slipped th
e bottle into a net bag at his hip and then stooped to clear away more silt. An original stopper was worth as much as the bottle itself. Something golden flashed under his hands. He waved away clouds of suspension.

  At first Ianthe thought she was looking at a gilded shield. A clearing in the sediment revealed a metalled surface embossed with sigils. It was unmistakably Unmer. There was the stamp of Ursula Dragon Mother, the constellation of Coreollis, the Fist of Armitage and the Precept, and a wheat sheaf and sickle that could only signify some powerful noble house. Interspersed with these devices were words written in the runic language of the First Alchemists – a spell, or possibly a ward against human men.

  The submariner paused, panting heavily, then hurriedly brushed away more silt. More of the surface came into view, then more still. The man pushed his gloves into the yielding dust, looking for an edge. But wherever he dug, he simply revealed more of that flat gold plane. Whatever this treasure was, it was much larger than a shield.

  Finally, he stopped. The brine had begun to leach through the bindings around his knee and irritate the skin on his thigh. What was more, his other boot was now leaking, too. Both his feet had begun to feel like hot lead.

  Ianthe could stand no more of it.

  Quietly and smoothly as a memory, she slipped out of his mind.

  The world went dark. She found herself adrift in a void. In the distance she could see pools of electric-blue radiance – the perceptions of the Drowned nearby. Other marine life revealed itself as shoals of pink or yellow lights that wandered through the darkness like fireflies. Ten yards from her human host, a dull brown sphere betrayed the hacker crab’s hiding place. Such creatures perceived their environments through rude eyes. So much life in the seas! Its variance and abundance never ceased to amaze her.