Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts

by Alan Campbell

  He picked up the spectacles and studied them closely. They were more intricate than any he’d seen before. The lenses were not solid, but actually composed of a number of incredibly thin optical elements sandwiched together. When he turned the tiny wheel fixed to the frame, these inner circles of glass rotated around each other, but not in any commonsensical alignment. He could perceive nothing strange or magical about the set-up.

  He put the spectacles on.

  The cabin looked normal.

  He turned the wheel beside his right eye and heard the almost imperceptible murmur of the glass discs revolving inside the lenses. This sound was followed by a sudden crackling buzz. The legs of the silver frame felt warm against his head.

  And something odd happened. The cabin now appeared to be much darker than before, and yet everything around him was awash with a low, flickering silver luminance, as if each object – the bed, the cabinets, the artefacts – possessed a strange and intermittent aura. The workbench experiments shuddered in the dim light. He watched ghostlike wisps of light tremble across the diffraction box, the kaleidoscopes and the telescopes. It looked like some sort of interference pattern. No doubt the artefact was broken, and had been brought here to be repaired. The spectral radiance, however, did not extend beyond the cabin, for the mists beyond the window now appeared as black as night. White dots shifted in the gloom outside – like stars. Kitchener and Roberts emitted no discernible luminance at all . . .

  Indeed, both crewmen were now missing from the scene entirely.

  Maskelyne removed the spectacles. Kitchener and Roberts reappeared, standing there regarding him as if nothing had happened. He put the spectacles back on. The two men simply vanished before his eyes, leaving the surroundings intact, but stammering in that darkly uncertain light. Suddenly he thought he detected movement at the corner of his vision, and turned abruptly. But there was nothing there, just the cabin walls and the door.

  Had that door just closed?

  Remarkable. Was he witnessing some previously hidden property inherent in the objects themselves? The very essence of sorcery? Could that explain both the consistency of the cabin and the sudden disappearance of his two crewmen? The ship was sorcerous, but his comrades were not? Was it possible that these spectacles could perceive one and not the other? Maskelyne could not imagine another solution. He wondered if he could tune the spectacles to eliminate the interference and produce a clearer picture.

  He turned the wheel back to its original position.

  This time a searing white light blinded him, as if a magnesium powder flash had been set off directly in front of his eyes. Images crashed into his retina: the cabin, a ship, the sky, cabin, ship, sky, all accompanied by a terrible stuttering roar. Maskelyne tore the spectacles from his face, overcome with agony, and pinched his eyes.

  ‘Captain?’ Kitchener said.

  After-images remained burned into Maskelyne’s retinas. He’d glimpsed something he recognized . . . But what was it? Now he couldn’t see a thing. ‘I’m blinded,’ he cried, and realized that he couldn’t even hear his own words. The roaring sound still drummed in his ears. Yet even as he spoke, he realized that this sensory storm was already beginning to fade. Slowly, his vision began to return to normal. He heard himself breathing once more.

  ‘Some water,’ Kitchener said to Roberts. ‘Fetch clean water.’

  ‘No,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘I’m all right. I can see again. I can hear.’ He set down the strange spectacles and then took a deep breath. His nerves felt utterly shredded. He was shaking. What was it he’d glimpsed during that terrible glare? A face? The more he thought about it, the more he felt sure that was it. A hideous iron visage, scorched and blackened by fire. ‘Blame my own foolishness,’ he said at last. ‘I should have known better than to make assumptions. You are quite right, Kitchener. Normalcy is not a quality one should ever associate with the Unmer.’ He shook his head clear of the last vestiges of the vision. ‘Start bringing the crew over now. Leave the trove, but bring the gas welders and grab as much water, food, rope, tools and sailcloth as you can carry.’

  ‘Sailcloth, captain?’ Kitchener inquired.

  ‘I want to put a spinnaker up on that tower,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘If there is a will at work here, we ought to give ourselves the opportunity to thwart it.’

  Ianthe retreated into the darkness of her own mind. She found that she was breathing rapidly. What had happened? She’d been looking out at the cabin through Maskelyne’s eyes. She saw the optical experiments and watched her host pick up the spectacles. She had looked out of his eyes in awe at the change in luminance when Maskelyne had first turned the wheel and then gasped at the abrupt disappearance of the two crewmen. And then . . .

  Suddenly Ianthe had no longer been able to perceive the cabin at all. She had been standing right here, on the deck of Maske-lyne’s dredger, gazing up at the figurehead upon the Unmer ship. She had been looking at the scene through her own eyes.

  When the Excelsior began to shudder violently, Granger knew he’d been away from the wheel too long. He vaulted up the final few steps and burst into the bridge to see the westernmost edge of the Glot Madera looming large to port. One side of the emperor’s dragon-hunter was scraping along the prison façades, gouging deep scars into the stonework.

  He swung the wheel hard to starboard and reversed the engine throttle, hoping to turn out the Excelsior’s bow, but the yacht’s momentum continued to carry her along on her destructive path. Rubble crumbled and pattered across the deck. Metal groaned and shrieked as the ship’s port bulwark crumpled. Granger cursed and slammed the throttle forward again. He didn’t have time to worry about the hull.

  The ship turned slowly. With a final screech of metal, she broke away from the bank and began steaming out into the centre of the canal. Golden sunlight reflected off the ship’s copper-plated hull, illuminating the prison façades on either side of the channel as if by the radiance of some great golden lantern. Ahead of him, Granger could see the seaward opening of the Glot Madera with nothing beyond but the distant shimmering horizon.

  * * *

  CHAPTER 12

  A VOICE FROM THE ASHES

  18th Hu-Rain, 1457

  24 degrees 16 minutes north

  5 degrees 43 minutes west

  Aboard the deadship for two days now. Fog lifted yesterday morning, and yet its bitter gloom remains in the hearts of all aboard. This ironclad vessel seems determined to confound our attempts to return to Scythe Island. Her engines sputter to a halt whenever we deviate from a narrow range between 342° and 354°, as though the supply of electrical fluid to the tower is suddenly quenched. We are being interfered with from afar.

  But by whom? And where are they trying to take us?

  Heading west nor’-west would bring us into the Haurstaf-controlled waters around Awl and the Irillian Islands, leaving us at the mercy of the Guild. The northern fringes of the empire lie due east of here, from where we could easily secure passage to Losoto. This margin between 342° and 354° leads nowhere but the frozen wastes of Pertica, where we would surely perish among the poisonous ice fields. In an attempt to regain some control, we have raised a makeshift spinnaker on the ship’s tower, yet it can barely hold enough wind to maintain our current position against these southerlies. It is as if nature herself is conspiring against us. Abernathy removed the engine housing, but we have been unable to understand its workings. Amidst the myriad cables and glass lozenges he discovered a woman’s pelvis.

  These events and others have led the crew to believe that this is a haunted vessel. But how can that be? Can any consciousness survive death? If an answer to this question exists, then it must surely lie in Unmer lore, being so interwoven with infinity itself. An object viewed outside of Time must encompass every on
e of its states of being, from the nothingness before creation to the nothingness afterwards. And yet what if that object – a ship, for example – encompasses the essence of something that is larger than the physical universe, larger even than Time itself?

  Is infinity woven into the fabric of this miserable ship?

  Might it not then continue to act as a vessel for its dead crew?

  Whatever the cause or the crucible turns out to be, there seems little doubt that a malign will is at work here. The chronographs and compasses we salvaged from the Mistress refuse to work here, and yet many of the Unmer trove artefacts we carried over have suddenly sprung to life, each glowing, chattering, or screeching as its dormant electrical fluids are reanimated. Most of the fresh produce we managed – in our great haste – to bring aboard has already rotted. It is as if the deadship’s own corruption has flowed from its pores. Lucille suggested I delay the rot by freezing the stores in crespic salts, but I required every ounce of those chemicals to keep my last phial of void flies from thawing.

  Everyone aboard has been troubled by nightmares.

  I myself am haunted by visions of the Mistress’s demise. Her loss has affected me deeply. She remained afloat for nearly two hours before the sea finally swallowed her. We stood upon the ironclad’s deck and watched her disappear into the red-green brine. Mellor’s second repair team had by then succeeded in cutting through into the engine room – but, alas, we could do nothing for the men trapped in that flooded compartment. The seawater had altered them beyond all hope of recovery.

  Lucille has nightmares in which our son is dying, although these are undoubtedly caused by her fears over his persistently strange behaviour. Last night she awoke to discover that Jontney was missing from his cot, although our cabin door had been bolted. After a frantic search we found him crawling across the top deck towards the open sea. Lucille has now sworn to remain awake until we are safely home, but her exhaustion is evident.

  The men avoid my gaze and say little to each other. Morale is fading, with anger swelling to fill the spaces. It is only a matter of time before violence breaks out. I must find a way to channel it before then. I fear someone will have to be sacrificed to save the others.

  Objects have gone missing from my cabin, including two cans of water, a gem lantern, some coins and the Unmer spectacles. We have a thief aboard, a thief who seems intent on endangering the life of my son. Who here has the motive to do such a thing?

  Someone knocked on the door. Maskelyne set down his pen and got up from the workbench. He opened the door to find Kitchener standing in the passageway. The sailor was standing over an open crate.

  ‘We found these in a hidden compartment under the hold,’ he said. ‘We were about to throw them overboard, but I thought I’d better check with you first.’

  Maskelyne looked down at the open box. It was almost completely full of dust, but he could see the edges of artefacts partially buried in there: heavy iron rings, wrapped with wires. He brushed away the dust and picked one up. The windings felt hot to the touch. A foul, burned metal odour came from them. ‘How many are there altogether?’ he asked.

  ‘Twelve in each crate,’ Kitchener said. ‘And we pulled five crates out of the compartment. We stored our supplies down there first, but they rotted so fast you wouldn’t believe. I had a few of the men start carrying what was left up into one of the bow cabins, while Roberts and me went looking for the source of the problem. We found the compartment quickly enough.’ He hesitated. ‘It wasn’t just the rot, you see? The supplies had been moving about too.’

  ‘Moving?’

  ‘Our own boxes wouldn’t stay in one place. We’d leave them alone for an hour, and come back to find that they’d slid right across the floor, like somebody had been moving them when nobody was looking. The men . . . well, you know how things go, sir. Talk of hearing whispers when no one was around, that sort of thing.’

  Maskelyne touched his dust-smeared fingers to his tongue. ‘Tastes like . . .’

  ‘Bone marrow,’ Kitchener said.

  ‘It’s an amplifier,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Unmer Brutalists used the consumption of human tissue to increase their energy.’ He turned the ring over in his hand. It looked quite dead now. What else, he wondered, could it amplify? ‘The effects you witnessed are just residual, amplification of decay, inertia, voices.’

  ‘Then they go overboard, sir?’

  ‘All of them.’

  The crewman looked relieved.

  ‘Except this one,’ Maskelyne added. ‘I’ll keep it for study.’ He placed the device on his desk. ‘Is there anything else?’

  Kitchener hesitated. ‘It’s the wheel console, sir,’ he said. ‘Ab-ernathy got the inner sleeve open.’ He rubbed his eyes and then took a deep breath. ‘It’s full of bones. We think maybe five or six infants.’

  Maskelyne nodded. ‘Human sacrifices. Tell Abernathy to close it up again before it unsettles the crew. What’s our situation with water?’

  ‘The purifier’s still acting strangely, captain. The stuff coming out of it looks like urine and tastes about as good. Most of us are drinking it anyway. Got no choice.’

  ‘Who’s not drinking it?’

  ‘Duncan, Abernathy, a few of the others. They say they’d rather die.’

  Their situation was deteriorating far more quickly than Maskelyne had expected. At his rate, most of his crew would be dead before the ship made it back to Scythe Island. He sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do. We need Abernathy with his wits intact. In the meantime, report anything else unusual to me.’

  When Kitchener left, he returned to his journal and added a few final words.

  Whoever our thief is, I will make a martyr of him.

  Ethan Maskelyne, Unnamed Unmer Icebreaker.

  Ianthe’s heart was racing as she returned to the quiet darkness of her own body. Maskelyne’s thief was closer to him than he could possibly imagine. But how could he ever suspect his own child?

  She reached under her bunk and grabbed the children’s blanket she’d hidden there and then unfolded it on her lap. There lay the spectacles Jontney had stolen for her, the lenses and engraved silver frames gleaming like treasure. Ianthe looked down at them for a long moment. Then, carefully, she slipped them over her eyes.

  The cabin blossomed into existence before her, an explosion of light in the darkness. It was accompanied by a strange crackling sound that quickly faded. There was barely room to stand up and turn around, and yet there now seemed to be more crammed into this tiny space than in the whole of the outside world: the grain of the ancient timber panelling, the warped floor, her bunk, the black iron door handle and its keyhole. Moreover, she could hear the slosh of the waves against the hull, the ship booming and groaning all around her – hear them with her own useless ears!

  Ianthe drank deeply of these new sensations, hardly able to control her excitement. Everything here appeared normal, bright and clear, without the flickering silver auras she had witnessed through Maskelyne’s eyes. The spectacles, she supposed, had not been designed to be worn by two people at once.

  But then she noticed something strange. Her bunk was no longer made up with the fresh sheets Lucille had given her, and her clothes were no longer piled in the corner where she’d dumped them. The cabin was entirely empty of everything she’d brought in here. Nothing remained but the dismal old walls. Whatever had happened to Maskelyne in the captain’s quarters was happening to her, too. Objects were vanishing.

  Could the goggles only perceive Unmer items?

  Ianthe raised her hand in front of her face. There was nothing there at all, not even a trace. She looked dow
n at her own body. Nothing. She was invisible, a ghost in her own cabin.

  She slumped down on her bunk again, now gripped by despair. Why, when she’d finally been giver the means by which to see, should her vision be so fatally flawed? What use were these lenses if they turned everything important into air?

  Perhaps one could adjust the lenses?

  Slowly, she turned the little wheel on the side of the frames. The cabin flickered violently, and that same crackling sound harried her ears. For a moment everything became blurred and indistinct. Her pile of clothes did not reappear. She spun the wheel around further now, tears now welling in her eyes. The cabin glowed with a phosphorous yellow light, and then abruptly became quite dark. She gasped with fright. Had she broken the blasted things? But then she realized she could still perceive variations in the deep shadows. For a moment it looked as if she was standing in a woodland. Was that the sound of wind rushing through the trees? The image flickered again and abruptly dissolved to complete black.

  Frustrated now, Ianthe twisted the wheel all the way forward until it stopped.

  The cabin became a shuddering blur again and then came into sharp focus. She thought she had glimpsed something moving quickly around her, like a passing shadow, but now that the lenses had settled she couldn’t see anything like that now.

  She could, however, see her clothes. They had appeared in the corner. Ianthe raised her hand in front of her eyes again, and this time she could perceive it quite clearly. She sprang up from the bunk and clapped her hands and laughed out loud. Everything around her was finally as it should be: the clothes, the sheets on the bunk, Jontney’s blanket. The spectacles worked!