Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts

by Alan Campbell

  By comparison, the human world above her seemed dull. The perceptions of Ianthe’s own kind filled the dark with a million blue stars, tending to red where dusk and dawn tinged the fringes of the day. She slipped up through the void to where the deck of the ship waited for her in a cloud of disparate images.

  ‘He found something,’ Ianthe finally said.

  She could feel the cold steel passenger rail in her hand, and the deck of Maskelyne’s dredger Mistress thrumming vaguely underfoot as she leaned over the side, pretending to peer down into the depths. Returning her mind to her own body was like stepping out of the world into a dark and silent cell. Her ears heard nothing and her eyes looked out into an impenetrable void. It frightened her. And so she set her thoughts adrift again, flitting effortlessly from one sailor to the next as she sketched a perspective of her surroundings.

  Ethan Maskelyne was standing beside the port crane, from where he had been overseeing the whole winching operation. He was dressed in whaleskins just as soiled and battered as those worn by his crew. His white hair had yellowed from long exposure to brine. Every inch the sailor. ‘You can see him?’ he asked.

  ‘He’s almost back at the machine now.’

  ‘Bathysphere,’ Maskelyne said. ‘It’s a bathysphere. Did he find more ichusae?’

  Ichusae was the word he gave to sea-bottles; perhaps it had been the Unmer word – Ianthe did not know. Out of habit she turned her head to face him, a gesture that came naturally to her. She had long ago grown used to imitating the behaviour of the sighted. ‘One sea-bottle, but he uncovered something else too. Something large buried under the silt.’

  ‘Cannon large or hull large?’

  ‘I don’t know. It’s made of gold.’

  Maskelyne gave a smirk that seemed halfway between pleasure and derision. ‘You’re leading me astray,’ he said.

  Moments later a bell rang somewhere, and the sailors rushed to winch up the bathysphere.

  ‘That is uncanny,’ Maskelyne said.

  They heaved the bathysphere up out of the depths, then swung the crane so that its load hung over a shallow depression in the deck. Brine streamed from the metal sphere, swirling away into the deck drains. The submariner clambered out, unhitched the net bag from his hip and took out the sea-bottle. Brine poured out from it, sluicing over his heavy gloves. One of the sailors handed him a copper stopper, which he jammed into the neck of the bottle before handing his prize to another man. This sailor wiped the glass surface clean and gave it to Maskelyne, who held it up and squinted through it.

  ‘Perfect,’ he said.

  The submariner crouched and unscrewed a winged brass cap in the heel of his boot, allowing the trapped brine to drain out of his suit leg. Then he raised his arms while another crew member hosed him down with fresh water. Finally he unhitched his helmet.

  ‘Looks like a chariot,’ he said. Pain creased his faced as he began unstrapping his suit buckles. Most of the other sailors stood well back, but the man with the hose continued to wash him down. ‘We’ll need to crane out the larger bones,’ he went on, smoothing back his wet hair, ‘and clear a few tons of sediment before we can get a line around it.’

  Ianthe’s mind flitted between the crew members until she found someone looking at Maskelyne. For a long moment he stared at the bottle, seemingly deep in thought. Then he said, ‘Find me more like this, Ianthe, and I’ll let you see your mother.’

  Maskelyne the Executioner. Ianthe’s heart clenched. She wanted to scream at him: She’s dead! I saw what your men did to her after they carried me away. I saw it all. But she couldn’t let him know the extent of her knowledge. She glared at him through the eyes of one of his subordinates, wishing only that she had the power to raise her host’s hands to seize his scrawny neck.

  By now the submariner had stripped naked. He raised his arms again and turned around slowly, allowing the crewman with the hose to wash away all trace of the poisonous brine. But Mare Lux waters had already scorched one of his legs up to the thigh, and the other up to the calf. His flesh looked blotchy, red, inflamed and lined with darker veins. Maskelyne produced a jar of ointment and handed it to the submariner, who began applying it liberally to his wounds. To Ianthe’s astonishment, this seemed to reduce the inflammation.

  ‘Save some for the others,’ Maskelyne said.

  The submariner handed back the jar. ‘Thank you, sir.’

  Maskelyne smiled at Ianthe’s expression of befuddlement. ‘It is a very rare and expensive balm,’ he explained. ‘Unmer, of course. I only wish we had more of it.’ He smacked his hands together and turned to address a small man in an officer’s stripes standing nearby. ‘I want this thing raised quickly, Mellor. Put the crew on dragon watch and have all of our divers suited up and ready. Double pay and hand-over shifts until it’s up on deck. Work through the night if you can do so without risking men. I want them out of there at the first sign of trouble.’

  ‘Aye, sir.’ The officer replied in a breezy, whistling voice.

  ‘You,’ Maskelyne said, pointing at Ianthe, ‘come with me.’

  He ushered her through a metal hatch and down a twist of stairs into the operations room. A map of this quarter of the Mare Lux lay spread out across a table in the centre of the broad, wood-panelled chamber. Gem lanterns clung to the walls between the portholes like poisonous jellies, throbbing with clusters of yellow-, blue- and rose-coloured light. There were booths and chairs enough to seat twenty down here, and a long bar of polished dragon-bone curving along one wall where hundreds of crystal glasses glinted in racks. Sweetmeats and hundred island fruits had been set out on platters on a small table nearby, while numerous pedestals displayed a baffling array of Unmer artefacts: machines, masks, crystal wands and knots of spell-wire, all bolted down securely to the wooden tops. Glass-fronted cabinets boasted yet more treasures: labyrinths of golden metal, tiny mannequins with ruby eyes, countless phials of every shape and size. One enormous cabinet gleamed with weapons: dragon-bone matchlocks and flintlocks and steel carbines, pistols fashioned from silver and glass, runic knives, liquid knives, rat knives and scimitars. An old blunderbuss occupied a prominent position. It was a singular piece, wrought from some strange white metal heavily embossed with Unmer runes and covered in fungi-like protrusions around the stock. The ends of its barrels protruded through the jaw of a human skull.

  Maskelyne turned his gaze away from the cabinet and helped himself to a drink of honey-coloured spirit. Then he filled a glass with wine from a carafe on the bar and handed it to Ianthe.

  ‘Your vision seems entirely unlikely,’ he said. Through his perception she watched herself accept the glass of wine. Darkness was gathering in her own eyes. She forced herself to look away from him. ‘And yet here we are,’ he went on. ‘An unmolested dragon’s cadaver, just as you said. One ichusae recovered, and a skybarque to boot.’

  ‘A skybarque?’

  ‘An Unmer vessel,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘You’ve seen Ortho’s Chariot at night?’

  She nodded.

  ‘Same thing. When the Unmer realized they couldn’t defeat the Haurstaf, they used airbarques to distribute their hideous little bottles across our oceans.’ He made a sound somewhere between a snort and laugh. ‘If we can’t have the world, then you can’t have it either. My two-year-old son has already developed a more mature attitude, and he has a psychopath for a father.’ He chuckled at his own joke, and took another drink. ‘Anyway, an airbarque is a rare find. With any luck we might find a thousand ichusae inside it’ – he sounded like he was smiling – ‘and so remove another source of pollution from the oceans.’ He held u
p the tiny bottle they had recovered from the seabed for Ianthe to see. ‘Puzzling little things,’ he remarked. ‘Where does the poison come from? Why does liquid flow out of the bottle and not back into it at higher pressures? And why does copper stem the flow?’ He glanced at her again. ‘All this matter must come from somewhere, after all, don’t you think?’

  He moved behind the bar and began hunting around, looking for something. ‘If I removed this stopper,’ he said, ‘this room would eventually fill with brine. We’d sink.’ He located a heavy brass corkscrew. ‘And yet when we break the container . . .’ He placed the tiny bottle on the bar and raised the corkscrew over it.

  Before Ianthe could yell at him to stop, Maskelyne struck the ichusae hard with the blunt end of the corkscrew. Instinctively, she raised her hands to protect her eyes . . .

  But something unexpected happened. The bottle smashed, leaving only a small pool of brine on the surface of the bar. Maskelyne looked down at it. ‘Magic,’ he muttered. ‘There’s nothing inside, nothing that I can find. No portal, no trick, no . . .’ She sensed his jaw clench. ‘How can I hope to understand such lunacy? And yet this is the way I must save the world.’

  ‘What do you care for the world?’

  ‘I like the world,’ he said. ‘I live there.’ He took a swig of his drink, and Ianthe felt the raw spirit burn his throat. ‘And I, unlike so many others, am in a position to do something. What sort of man would I be if I didn’t at least try?’ He sounded angry. ‘What sort of father would I be?’

  Murderer! Tears welled in Ianthe’s eyes, and she fought to keep them back. Her thoughts tumbled over themselves, backwards to the moment when Maskelyne’s men burst into the cell. They were seizing her, Creedy shouting: Get the girl out. Hold the mother till Granger gets back. Maskelyne wants them brought to Scythe together. All these lies for her benefit! And then they were carrying her along the corridor and up the stairs, and she was kicking and spitting, and Granger wasn’t there. Her jailer. Her protector. She cast her mind out, searching for him, but there were too many people in Ethugra. Boots thumping on the stairs. Sunlight. And then she looked out through her mother’s eyes—

  ‘How large were the dragon-bones?’ Maskelyne asked.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Fallen chariots, airbarques, they’re like catnip to dragons. Like gold, or . . .’ He raised his glass and gazed into the swirling amber liquor. ‘You should see how they fight over them. One usually finds that the larger the resident beast, the larger the hoard.’ He downed his drink and poured himself another. ‘Either we were lucky enough to find a deserted site, or the bones down there are trophies and our resident dragon is off hunting somewhere nearby. Unfortunately the latter is more likely. Even the most deranged addict must occasionally leave his hoard of drugs to feed.’

  ‘He’s not boring you with his dragon stories?’

  Ianthe turned to face the voice out of habit, but she saw the new arrival through Maskelyne’s eyes – a slender woman in a simple white dress, she had come into the chamber through a door in the back. Her auburn hair gleamed under the gem lanterns like brandy. Her bright blue eyes sparkled with humour. In her pale arms she cradled a toddler, who gaped at Ianthe for a moment before burrowing its face in its mother’s hair.

  ‘Tell me that’s not troche she’s drinking,’ the woman said.

  ‘It’s my best Evensraum red,’ Maskelyne protested. ‘Four hundred gilders a cask.’

  The woman came close to Ianthe and smiled. ‘He can be so stingy with his guests.’ She extended her hand. ‘I’m Lucille.’

  ‘My wife,’ Maskelyne added.

  For a brief moment Ianthe found herself holding the woman’s fingers.

  Lucille bounced the baby in her arms. ‘And this little tyke is Jontney.’ The boy looked at Ianthe again, then hid his face. ‘Oh don’t be so shy,’ his mother said. She passed Jontney to Maskelyne, who started fussing over him at once.

  ‘Ming,’ Jontney exclaimed.

  ‘Have you fed him?’ Maskelyne asked.

  ‘He’s just being greedy,’ Lucille replied. She turned to Ianthe. ‘Ming is milk.’

  ‘Agon want ming.’

  ‘Agon had his ming too,’ his mother said.

  Jontney peered shyly at Ianthe from his father’s arms.

  All this time, Ianthe’s ego had been darting between the minds of Maskelyne and Lucille, unconsciously weaving the gamut of their perceptions into an ever-changing tapestry of light and sound inside her own head. She herself was part of that creation – the wild-haired, blank-eyed girl in a whaleskin cloak standing between the man and his wife. There was something horribly inhuman about her – something, she felt, that deserved to be hated. Suddenly angry, she bulled her consciousness into Jontney’s mind and heard him bawl suddenly in response.

  Children were more sensitive that way. Their own egos had not yet fully developed, leaving room for influence.

  Maskelyne frowned kindly at the child. ‘Hey, hey, hey. What’s the matter with you?’

  The child’s distress filled Ianthe. She could hear his screaming through his own ears, feel the warmth of tears on his cheek, the snot bubbling in his nose, the after-taste of his mother’s milk. He was hot, flustered, annoyed. But he was receptive. She pushed a single thought into the boy’s mind, and he lifted his hand and struck Maskelyne across the face.

  ‘Hey you.’ Maskelyne tried to soothe his son to no avail.

  ‘Let me take him,’ Lucille said.

  Maskelyne passed the screaming boy to his wife. ‘He’s not usually like this,’ he explained to Ianthe. ‘I don’t know what’s wrong with him today.’

  Ianthe withdrew her consciousness from the child, pulling it back out into the void. She was about to settle back into Maske-lyne’s mind, when she sensed something nearby – a great sphere of perception moving quickly through the darkness between the living. It was underwater and it was coming at them fast.

  At that same moment, alarms sounded on the deck above.

  ‘That will be our dragon,’ Maskelyne said. He strolled over to the weapons cabinet and took out his blunderbuss. Then he opened a nearby hatch in the floor, revealing an insulated compartment packed with ice. Freezing vapours swirled within the open hatch. He scraped away at the frost until he had uncovered several black glass globes. He examined each carefully, before selecting one and putting it in his pocket. He grinned at Ianthe’s puzzled frown. ‘Ammunition,’ he said.

  Upon opening the hatch, Maskelyne found his men scrambling and slipping across the deck amidst the clamour of bells. He did not approve of this chaotic urgency. He looked for Mellor, finding the first officer standing by the port-side bow gun.

  One of the crew shouted, ‘Captain on deck.’

  Mellor turned.

  Maskelyne grinned. He strolled forward and called out in a cheerful voice, ‘Am I the bravest man you men have ever known?’

  The crew replied as one: ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Am I the smartest man you men have ever known?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Am I the man to slay the beast we see before us now?’

  ‘Aye, sir.’

  ‘Then let’s bloody the sea.’

  The crew cheered.

  Maskelyne reached Mellor and gazed out past the deck rail.

  There the dragon flew above the sea. It was an enormous female, a great brown drunken monster with a meat-swollen belly and teeth as old and black
as fossils. Its scales were dull and crusted with rime from centuries of brine. Its claws were as yellow as a smoker’s teeth. The tips of its mighty wings thrashed the tops of the waves, flinging up spume. As it drew nearer they could see that it carried the corpse of a Drowned man in its jaws.

  Mellor said, ‘Takes a hellish cunning for them to reach such a size.’

  ‘Don’t forget yourself, Mr Mellor,’ Maskelyne replied.

  ‘She’s coming into cannon range now.’

  ‘Let her dive.’

  Mellor looked like he was about to protest, but then he said, ‘Aye, sir.’

  The serpent had seen the boat and would know its purpose. But Maskelyne had no doubt that the creature’s own addiction would drive it under the sea before it attacked. Fearing that its hoard of ichusae had been plundered, it would dive down to check. Once there it would discover the theft and resurface enraged. And anger could unbalance the wisest of foes.

  Sure enough, as the beast drew nearer, it plunged beneath the waves.

  Marksmen and feeder crews stood silently by the six batteries of guns. Maskelyne took a black glass bulb from his pocket and fitted it into one of the protrusions on the stock of his blunderbuss, twisting it secure with a click. He checked the weapon’s mechanism, then raised it and sighted along its length. The white metal felt unpleasantly cold to the touch. Several of the runes carved into stock had razor-sharp edges, and seemed all too keen to pluck blood from the wielder. The skull fused to the barrel ends made the gun feel unbalanced and clumsy, as though it had not been designed for human sensibilities.

  He pulled his whaleskin cloak more tightly around him and lowered his goggles over his eyes.

  The crew did likewise.

  The sea to port erupted in an explosion of brine as the dragon burst forth from the depths in a great brown storm of wings and scales. Its eyes burned as yellow as molten rock, full of old rage, and something else . . . Madness, Maskelyne realized. The creature was insane. It loomed above the deck rail in a haze of rainbows as seawater steamed from its body. A wet gale blew Maskelyne backwards. He aimed along his gun.