Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts

by Alan Campbell

  Now she was curious.

  Ianthe twisted the little wheel backwards again. Her surroundings flickered, and the clothes vanished from the corner once more. She turned the wheel forward, and the clothes reappeared. She tried it several times, rocking the wheel backwards and forwards, watching everything she owned slip in and out of existence. Whatever was happening?

  She spun the wheel back as far as it would go.

  The cabin erupted in a blaze of light. A kaleidoscope of images clattered across her vision with the sound of bells and shrieks and angry wasps. Colours burst before her eyes like naval shells. And then as quickly as it had started, it stopped. Her surroundings resolved themselves once more. She was back in her cabin.

  Only it was not the same cabin. Its proportions were identical, but the panelling looked new, agleam with varnish. Everything now seemed fresh and untarnished. A padded quilt of blue and gold diamonds lay across the bunk, while a silver watch and a miniature enamelled portrait hung from hooks above the pillow. The portrait was of a robust lady with orange hair and piercing violet eyes. A shelf had materialized beside the door, on which rested a bright copper gem lantern and an open book.

  Ianthe heard men shouting somewhere above. They were speaking Unmer.

  She got up and opened the door.

  The corridor outside looked different from before. All the ash and decay had been swept away, leaving a neat passageway of polished dark wood. The shouting was louder here. It was definitely coming from above deck. Ianthe paused for a moment, then, nervously, crept along the corridor.

  She recognized the wooden steps up to the main deck, even if she could not account for their miraculously rejuvenated condition. The whole ship now looked as if it might have been built yesterday. She climbed the steps and rested a hand on the hatch above her. Then she pushed it open.

  A cacophony of shouting, roaring and strange whirrs and droning sounds filled the air. Black and yellow smoke engulfed the skies, shrouding the entire ship in deep and unnatural gloom. Ianthe’s eyes widened. The sea itself was ablaze, with fires raging across the slate-grey waters as far as she could see. There were hundreds of ships out there, all Unmer vessels: men-o’-war and old electrical warships, wooden schooners, dragon-bone yachts, merchantmen and smaller pickets. Every one of them was burning.

  As Ianthe turned, she realized with horror that her own vessel had not escaped the devastation. Her surroundings bustled with activity. A score of crewmen were pulling up buckets of seawater and emptying them across the deck in a desperate attempt to quench fires raging across the stern and starboard side. These men looked like no race of sailors Ianthe had ever seen. They were unusually tall and fine-featured, with long faces and narrow eyes. They wore brigandines and pauldrons of stiff black canvas, heavily ornamented with ciphers and numerals, and all had adorned themselves with rings, earrings and amulets wrought from silvery metals. Many had shorn their hair completely and bore Unmer glyphs, circles and strings of numbers tattooed across their naked skulls, while others had teased their hair and beards into thin tails wrapped with wire. Not one of them turned to look at Ianthe. She realized that she was a ghost among them.

  Unmer sailors beat the sterncastle with sodden blankets, while their companions continued to drag up buckets of water. Smoke boiled through the struts of the ship’s tower. Metal groaned. Embers darned the air like red flies. Meanwhile, two-man teams operated a number of strange bronze cannons fixed at regular intervals inside the bulwarks. The whirrs and droning sounds were coming from these devices. Ianthe watched as three of the teams on the starboard side fired together. Crackling circles of blue energy burst from the conical ends of the barrels and shot away into the fuming sky with a shrieking hum.

  And there she saw the dragons.

  Three of the great serpents bore down on the Unmer ship, their black wings thrashing the air, their long bodies clad in flashing silver armour. Each seemed as big as the ship itself, and on the back of the central, and largest, beast rode a man.

  He was wearing golden armour and held aloft a spear to which he had attached a fluttering red pennant. Ianthe could not see him clearly from down here, but she fancied that he was as lean and tall as the sailors around her.

  A bell began to ring somewhere aft. Men shouted:

  ‘Kabash raka. Nol.’

  ‘Sere, sere.’

  Ianthe could not translate their cries, but she recognized the urgency in their voices.

  Shrieks came from the ship’s electrical weapons, as their Unmer operators let loose a further barrage. Blue circles of flame made vortexes through the tumbling smoke as they shot skywards. The dragons split formation, the outermost two peeling away as the central and largest of the three dropped low underneath the onslaught and dived towards the ship. Its armoured belly gleamed red by the light of the burning sea; its rider’s long white hair blew behind his head.

  Ianthe heard a cry from somewhere very close: ‘Brutalist!’

  She sensed movement nearby and shrank back as a hugely muscled man stepped past her, without as much as a glance in her direction. He was naked to the waist, his skin inked with hundreds of numerals and concentric circles, all stitched together with copper wire. He stood motionless, his fists resting on his hips and his teeth set as he glared up at the approaching serpent. One of those fists held a massive iron ring. An Unmer Brutalist. A combat sorcerer.

  ‘Conquillas,’ he yelled.

  The dragon opened its maw and vented a spume of liquid fire.

  The Brutalist abruptly dropped to one knee and raised the ring above his head. A sphere of green light bloomed from this object, encircling him instantly in a tremulous haze. Black sparks raced across the shimmering surface, accompanied by a series of frantic snapping sounds and the steadily building howl of gales as smoke rushed inwards towards the globe. The air itself was being consumed, driven out of existence. Ianthe realized that the iron ring was amplifying the sorcerer’s own innate ability. And then came sounds, like the clattering of iron-shod hooves. Through the shifting curtains of radiance and shadow Ianthe caught a glimpse of the Brutalist’s face – grim and determined, his eyes fixed in concentration. His lips moved as he chanted words she could not hear.

  Dragonfire burst across the ship, exploding through the struts of the tower and cascading down over the deck in blazing streams and drips. Incredibly, for a moment the Unmer sailors withstood the onslaught. Black fire erupted from their own flesh as they struggled to banish the heat and flames to non-existence. But the vacuums they were creating around themselves merely served to suck in more fire. It was too much. They were quickly overwhelmed, and man after man began to fall all around Ianthe, their screams filling the air. Ianthe cried out in terror as the liquid fire engulfed her – and it took twenty rapid heartbeats before she realized she felt no heat at all. She wasn’t really here. A ghost, a ghost, a ghost. The fire washed up against the bulwark and broke and surged in waves to aft and stern. She found herself chanting the words over and over in her head, but it didn’t lessen her fear.

  The whole ship was burning. The tower crackled and spat and roared like an enormous pyre. Unmer sailors howled and rolled on the deck, consumed by fire, white-toothed grimaces visible in their scorched, bloody faces. The dragon rushed by overhead, a massive silver shape that whipped the flames in its wake.

  The big man stood up.

  Incredibly, the fire had not touched him at all. A circle of deck around him remained unblemished.

  ‘Conquillas!’ he yelled. ‘Nash, nagir seen awar, Conquillas!’

  And then he turned and looked directly at Ianthe.

  Darkness.

  Ianthe struggled against some unseen force. Someone was holding her tightly. She let her mind slip into the void and saw lights of people all around her. She was still surrounded, but she could no longer see by whom. She chose the nearest mind and hurled her consciousness into i
t.

  She was still on the ship, but now it had returned to its former decrepit state. Warped iron, ash, the blackened, rusted tower. But these men . . . ? She had returned to the present, and these sailors standing around her were not Unmer, but Maskelyne’s own crew. From this borrowed viewpoint she spied the first officer, Mellor, gripping her in his arms, while another sailor passed her spectacles over to Maskelyne himself. Four other men looked on.

  Maskelyne put the spectacles on and stood for a long moment, gazing around him. Finally he took them off again and stared down at them grimly. ‘Unmer memories,’ he said. ‘How long have you been wearing these? Do you even understand the danger?’

  ‘Give them back,’ she yelled.

  Maskelyne just looked at her. ‘They don’t belong to you, young lady.’

  Ianthe held her tongue.

  Maskelyne studied her for a while longer, as if weighing something up in his mind. At last he said, ‘You’ve been trying to harm my son.’

  Ianthe snorted. ‘What?’

  ‘Scheming,’ he went on. ‘Ever since you’ve been aboard, you’ve been scheming, planning the murder of a child.’

  ‘You killed my mother!’

  Maskelyne’s brow’s rose. And then he frowned. ‘Who told you that, Ianthe? It’s not true.’

  ‘Liar.’

  Maskelyne glanced at Officer Mellor, who just shrugged. ‘What do you want me to do?’ he sighed. ‘Over the side with her, I suppose?’

  ‘She’s too valuable,’ Maskelyne replied. He sighed and tapped the spectacles against his leg. ‘Do you suppose Roberts could fashion some stocks from the packing crates?’

  ‘Stocks, sir?’

  ‘Head and wrists. You know the sort of thing.’

  Mellor nodded.

  ‘Strip her,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Put her in the stocks, and let each of the men have their way with her. God knows, we could all use something to lighten the mood a bit round here.’ He looked wearily at the spectacles in his hand. ‘Clean her up once they’re done and lock her in her cabin.’

  Mellor hesitated. ‘Sir?’

  Maskelyne’s expression darkened. ‘I gave you an order, First Officer.’

  Ianthe’s heart was thumping. Her limbs felt numb. She wanted to cry, but no tears came. Mellor started to drag her away, and for a moment she lost sight of herself.

  Not one of Maskelyne’s men was looking at her.

  Granger looked out of the port window. The Ethugran pursuit ships were little more than a smudge of smoke on the western horizon. None of them had been able to match the Excelsior’s speed across open water. Granger himself had scarcely been able to believe the rate of knots she’d accomplished. He turned his attention to the shimmering sea ahead. Maskelyne’s fortress sat atop Scythe Island’s quartz cliffs like a crown. A faint mauve aura surrounded it, as though it had been built from whisperglass. Below the sheer rocky drop at its base, a private wharf extended from a sparkling crescent of beach. The industrial harbour and dredging operation would be tucked into the shadows just around the headland, momentarily out of sight.

  Air exposure had dried out and toughened Granger’s skin. His hair had fallen out, and his eyes smouldered like embers in the grey wasteland of his face. Occasionally he’d catch a glimpse of himself in the chromic sheen of a chronograph or some other ship’s instrument, and it seemed to him that he looked like a man clad entirely in old leather armour. At other times he perceived himself as some hideous golem, a thing spawned from the depths of the earth itself. His own flesh creaked when he moved. His joints continued to throb dully and remained stiff enough to impede his movement. But he didn’t care. He was alive. His muscles still worked. His brain still worked. And Maskelyne wasn’t yet dead.

  There was no way to approach the island without being seen, so Granger set a direct course. He slid he throttle forward again, and the emperor’s yacht responded with a powerful surge of her engines.

  As he took the Excelsior around the headland, the island’s main deepwater docks, whale-oil factory and shipyard came into view. Two iron dredgers waited in their berths in the shadowy harbour. One of four dock cranes unloaded crates of goods from one, the operation managed by a team of stevedores. Gas welding torches flickered on the deck of the second ship, while another crane shifted enormous metal plates from the quayside over to the workers. Yellow-brown smoke rose from one of the whale-oil factory’s three chimneys and bruised the sky above. Several labourers stopped to stare in Granger’s direction, but none of them paused for long.

  The Excelsior was an Imperial vessel, after all.

  He took the yacht alongside the private quay and disengaged her engines. Without any crew present to fix the bow and stern lines, he’d have to do the work himself.

  Securing the ship took longer than he’d hoped. He pitched out the fenders along the port side, then threw one of the heavy bow lines across a quayside cleat and used the forward steam winch to draw it tighter, but he was forced to return to the bridge and use the engines to counter stern drift. When everything was finally fast, he lowered the gangway and stepped onto the quayside.

  The sun beat down on him from a clear blue sky. There was nobody about, no sign of life in the fortress up there on the cliffs, no sounds but the rush of waves on the beach and the distant banging from the shipyards. Granger walked up the quay.

  When he drew near the beach, he stopped in surprise. This slender crescent that stretched away on both sides of the quay wasn’t composed of sand or gravel as he’d expected, but rather of countless keys: iron keys, rusted keys, but mostly of keys that glinted in the sun like silver, forcing him to squint against the glare.

  What were they doing here?

  The question troubled him, although he couldn’t say exactly why.

  There must have been a thousand steps leading up the cliff to Maskelyne’s fortress. By the time Granger reached the top, he was panting and dizzy with the heat. His dry grey skin felt as hot and dusty to the touch as the stones around the path. He paused for a minute and gazed out at the view. The Mare Lux stretched as far as he could see, the waves shining like chamfered copper. Ethugra crouched against the horizon in a watery haze, a single island of prison blocks rising from the curve of the earth. Four or five ships were approaching from that direction, but they wouldn’t reach Scythe Island for several hours. Granger noted that the Haurstaf man-o’-war was not among them. He scanned the seas to the north and noticed a flash of white sail. Could that be her? Had Briana Marks abandoned her search for Ianthe? Or had she received some other intelligence?

  Granger turned and surveyed the castle above him.

  It had been constructed from blocks of amethyst quarried from the island’s spine. Light bled through translucent purple edges and angles, so that the whole structure seemed to radiate an internal glow, like a jellyfish. Two fluted pillars flanked an open doorway leading into the cool, plum-coloured interior of a barbican. Scalloped machicolations overhung the outer walls, but these were bereft of arrow loops and must surely have been designed for decoration. Private Banks would have been able to tell Granger more; it was the sort of place the young soldier had once enthused over. He looked up inside the barbican for murder holes, but saw none. The place appeared to be deserted.

  Granger strolled inside.

  The barbican inner door was closed, but there was a bell pull. Granger yanked the cord and heard a faint chime.

  He waited.

  A short while later, the door swung open to reveal a tidy courtyard walled and flagged with the same red-blue quartz. The air had a calm, floral quality. A stuffy little grey-haired man wearing servant’s brocade stood there, blinking. He
took one look at Granger and immediately tried to close the door again.

  Granger booted it open, knocking the servant to the ground. ‘Where’s Maskelyne?’ he demanded.

  The man stared up at him in horror. ‘What are you?’

  ‘Where is your master?’

  ‘Gone,’ he replied. ‘At sea.’

  ‘Where’s the girl?’

  The man blinked. ‘What girl?’

  Granger stood on his neck.

  ‘She’s with him,’ the servant gasped. ‘They’re . . . all . . . at . . . sea.’

  ‘Where?’

  ‘I don’t know!’

  Granger put more weight down on his boot.

  The man sputtered something incomprehensible.

  Granger removed his boot.

  ‘They went . . . to find trove,’ the servant said. ‘I don’t know where.’

  Granger raised his boot again.

  The servant lifted his hands in a pleading gesture. ‘The Drowned will know,’ he said. ‘My master keeps a few specimens in his laboratory. They see and hear everything he does.’ He stared at Granger. ‘They look just like you.’

  The servant – who gave his name as Garstone – led Granger through a series of plum-pink amethyst halls and corridors, and finally up a stairwell into a laboratory that occupied most of the southern half of the second floor. Dozens of Unmer machines in various stages of disassembly lay scattered about on workbenches, along with a number of old gem lanterns and tools. A writing desk occupied the centre of the chamber, upon which rested a pile of papers, a metal pen in its holder and a device consisting of a marble trapped in a pivoting tube of glass. Situated around the desk, four huge brine tanks – each containing a different colour of seawater – bubbled quietly. Wide tubes connected them to the ceiling. Two men sat in crimson Mare Regis brine, playing cards. A young girl looked out from the yellow brine Mare Sepsis tank, while a partially dissolved old man sat on a stool in the grass-green Mare Verdant tank. The final tank had been filled with Mare Lux brine. On the floor of this tank sat Creedy.