Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts

by Alan Campbell

  ‘So teach me.’

  Herian shook his head. ‘It took me years to learn. It would take you a lifetime.’

  Granger got up and walked over. He placed the barrel of his pistol against the old man’s head. ‘This gun turns things to ash,’ he said.

  Herian snorted. ‘Ash? It increases entropy.’

  Granger’s finger tightened on the trigger. ‘I don’t care what you call it,’ he said. ‘It’ll hurt just the same.’

  ‘You have no idea what you’re getting into.’

  Granger shot him in the foot.

  Herian howled as half his toes vaporized in a puff of grey-coloured ash. He clamped his hands across the stump, but there was no blood at all. His crown fell off, and he began to shudder and wail.

  ‘I think I just increased some entropy there,’ Granger said.

  ‘You bastard.’

  Granger grabbed the old man’s neck and lifted his face so he could look into those terrified eyes. ‘Tell me how these weapons work,’ he said. ‘All of them.’

  Herian just stared at him with utter contempt.

  Granger raised the pistol again.

  ‘All right,’ Herian said. He let out a growl of pain and frustration. ‘There are two main schools of Unmer sorcery: Entropic and Brutalist. Brutalist sorcery concerns the movement of energy. Gem lanterns, wave cannons, air stones, perception devices, they’re all made using those principles. Entropic sorcery focuses on matter, its destruction and creation. It’s how trove is made.’

  ‘How do I use the Replicating Sword?’

  ‘I’ll come to that!’ Herian cried. ‘Just give me a moment. Give me a moment!’

  Granger had no means to judge the passage of time inside that gloomy tower. He sat and listened for hours as the old man talked about the principles behind many of the artefacts around them. Most of it he didn’t understand, but he learned enough to be both frightened and respectful of these things the Unmer had made. Some objects, it seemed, had no discernible purpose other than to test a theory about the cosmos, while others had been deliberately crafted to torture and kill. The deadliest weapons were not always the ones that looked dangerous. Seemingly innocuous objects worked horrors Granger could scarcely comprehend. There were pins that turned flesh to gemstones and screaming rings that, once worn, could never be removed. In one corner Herian unearthed a crib once used to smother human children. Devices for exchanging perceptions abounded, and Granger wondered if he might use one of them to communicate with Ianthe. But he was afraid to try anything in the old man’s presence that might affect his own mind in ways he couldn’t predict.

  It must have been late into the night when Herian finally slumped to the ground and begged Granger to let him rest. Granger left him alone and took the chariot back out into the frozen wilderness to find a place where he himself might sleep safely.

  The sun was rising over the Mare Verdant, and the waters lay under a veil of green vapour. Not a breath of wind disturbed the snow. Granger flew the chariot leagues into the north until he could no longer see the transmitting station tower. Still the ice stretched on forever. The curve of the world bowed before him under ink blue skies.

  There he slept, wrapped in his fur jacket and clutching his pistol, while the chariot hovered twenty feet above the bitter ground.

  At dusk, he turned the machine around and headed back to the transmitting station. He had no doubt that the old man would by now be armed and waiting for him, but Granger decided to take that risk. He had so much more still to learn.

  Two soldiers strapped the Unmer man to a chair, then ripped off his blindfold, revealing the leucotomy scar on his forehead. He was a rag of a man, skeletal, limp-haired and savage-looking. He glanced feverishly around the room, before his gaze settled on Ianthe.

  Briana paced behind Ianthe’s chair. ‘Just do what you did with Caroline, but tone it down a thousandfold.’

  ‘Constance,’ Ianthe said.

  The man’s eyes filled with fury. His cheeks moved rapidly behind his gag. His naked chest rose and fell. Sweat dripped from his forehead, causing him to blink. Behind him, the Guild soldiers retreated to the far wall. One of the pair brushed a speck from his blue uniform sleeve and then stood to attention. The other man yawned. They were young, these two, but their blank expressions verged on boredom. They’d seen torture before.

  Mirrors covered the three walls of the room facing the prisoner. Ianthe could see nothing in them but the room’s reflection, and yet she sensed dozens of figures waiting behind those huge panes. She cast out her mind . . .

  . . . and found herself among a group of old women seated on tiered benches, their faces rapt as they studied the young Evensraum girl in a room behind a glass wall. The mirrors worked in one direction only. Ianthe flitted between the minds of her hidden observers, watching them through the eyes of their own peers. They were ancient, older than any Haurstaf Ianthe had seen. She sensed expectation, perhaps even excitement, in that secret room. She could see it in their eyes, in the twitching of skeletal fingers, the pursed lips.

  ‘Start with . . .’ Ianthe returned to her own body, ‘. . . a point behind his eyes,’ Briana said. ‘Sometimes it helps to picture a tiny tuning fork located there. Concentrate on the image until you begin to hear the fork vibrate. Haurstaf use such techniques to visualize and manipulate unconscious processes.’

  Ianthe tried to picture a silver fork between the Unmer man’s eyes. Immediately, he began to struggle against his restraints, thrashing his head left and right. Had he been sensitive to that simple act of visualization? She wasn’t convinced. She imagined the fork vibrating, and she imagined the sound it made, but it didn’t seem to affect him in any way. ‘What do I do next?’ she said.

  ‘Visualize pain in your own head,’ Briana said. ‘You can imagine someone driving a nail into your skull. As soon as you start to feel it, push the sensation across into the tuning fork. If you’ve made a connection with the subject, he’ll feel that pain, greatly amplified.’

  Ianthe found it hard to comply with the witch’s instructions. No matter how many imaginary tortures she inflicted on herself, she couldn’t spark the merest glimmer of a headache. After a while, she gave up. Thankfully, the Unmer prisoner appeared not to have suffered any ill effects from her efforts. She looked up at Briana. ‘I can’t do it.’

  ‘You did it with Car . . . Constance.’

  ‘That was different.’

  ‘How?’

  ‘She angered me.’

  Briana snorted. ‘That’s easy enough to fix.’ She nodded at one of the two Guild soldiers. ‘Remove his gag.’

  The soldier untied a knot at the back of the prisoner’s head.

  The Unmer man spat out his gag. ‘Mutants,’ he said. He spoke Anean clearly, but with a heavy accent. ‘This is what happens when entropy is retarded.’ He shook his head in exasperation. ‘Unsterilized, unchecked, a rotten branch poisoning the whole tree. Your own deformity prevents you from recognizing the truth!’ For a long moment he regarded Ianthe with narrow, cynical eyes. And then his expression softened. ‘Little girl,’ he said. ‘Look at yourself. Look at them. Do you want to be like these old women?’ He was almost pleading with her. ‘For the sake of the cosmos they should all have been drowned at birth.’

  ‘The tragedy is,’ Briana said, ‘that he genuinely believes what he’s saying.’

  The prisoner shook his head again.

  ‘He was part of what the Unmer called their Branch Evaluation and Reintegration Programme,’ Briana said, ‘one of three thousand workers
, tasked with altering aberrant “low entropy statesâ€. Ask him how he accomplished this.’

  ‘There was nothing immoral about it,’ the Unmer man said.

  ‘Then tell her.’

  The man shrugged. ‘We drowned people.’

  Ianthe stared at him.

  ‘Thousands of people,’ Briana said. ‘They were experimenting with brine long before they dumped all those bottles in the seas.’

  The man gave a bitter smile. ‘Brine is simply a medium for reworking dangerously retarded entropic states. Would you rather we extinguished you altogether?’ He looked down wistfully at his bound hands and feet. ‘And this is how you reward our restraint? With imprisonment, torture and degradation? That’s the difference between us. You lock up everything that threatens you. We set it free.’

  Ianthe felt Briana’s hands on her shoulders. The witch leaned close and whispered, ‘Picture a fork behind his eyes.’

  But Ianthe couldn’t. The prisoner’s frank admissions had provoked the anger that Briana had doubtlessly intended, and yet those feelings weren’t directed at him. They were directed at herself. She had allowed herself to pity the young Unmer prince in the palace dungeons, to be fooled by his beauty, to spend so many waking moments thinking about him. And now she felt betrayed and humiliated by a man she’d never even met. She closed her eyes and let the world’s perceptions flood into the darkness around her.

  And she could see the dungeons down there through the eyes of the Unmer, the concrete maze under its cruciform catwalk, its starved and naked inmates. She allowed herself to drift down through the unperceived void below it, down to the glass-floored suites where the witches sat on high-chairs. Twelve suites. Ianthe had been foolish not to show herself the extent of it before. She wandered from one Haurstaf mind to another, until she found the chamber Briana had shown her. The prince was sitting at a desk in his library, writing a letter. With a hammering heart, Ianthe slipped into the mind behind his eyes.

  Dearest Carella,

  This ugly language frustrates me. It lacks the finesse to fully express my feelings. And yet you must not forget that the Haurstaf, by binding us within their petty laws, admit their own weakness. As much as they grub through each other’s minds, they can never peer into ours. They can only see what we choose to let them see.

  How can what we show them not shame them?

  Your last letter filled me with such despair I felt that I must surely destroy this place or die in the attempt. My rage would carry me through the heart of the world. Only your strength holds me back. Every day I kneel before the gods and beg them to transfer your suffering to me. Every night my dreams bring me to your bedside so that I can hold and kiss you, and mop the sweat from your fevered brow. We lie in each other’s arms and talk about that summer in Forenta: the old dragon cave that father showed us, Mistress Delaine waddling around without her shoe, our lunches in the rose gardens, the field behind the orchard. Have hope, my love, and do not be afraid. My arms are always around you.

  ‘Ianthe?’

  The voice came from a world away. Ianthe opened her eyes and found herself back in the mirrored room. Briana was looking at her strangely. Her thoughts, however, remained with the Unmer prince and his letter. Those had not been the words of a heartless fiend, but of a thoughtful and caring young man. Ianthe couldn’t help but wonder who the real monsters were.

  ‘Ianthe? What’s wrong? You’re a million miles away.’

  Ianthe glared at the witch. ‘I can’t do it,’ she said.

  ‘It takes time—’ Briana began.

  Ianthe rose from her chair. ‘I don’t want to do it!’

  ‘Ianthe?’

  She strode towards the door. ‘Leave me alone.’

  Briana hurried after her. ‘Listen . . .’

  Ianthe rattled the door handle, but it was locked. ‘Let me out of here.’

  ‘. . . I only want to—’

  ‘Open the door!’

  Briana put a hand on her shoulder. ‘Ianthe, please.’

  That single touch was a spark to a flame. Ianthe spun round, her anger bunched like a fist inside her. She threw the witch’s hand aside and cried out, ‘Leave me!’ And in that moment something happened that she did not plan and could not control. She compressed all of her rage into a single, desperate thought, like a mental scream, and released it.

  The wall-sized mirrors exploded. In the galleries behind, Ianthe glimpsed the witches reeling and clutching their heads. Many had bleeding, lacerated hands. Sobs, wails and groans came from their midst. Briana Marks took three steps back, her face white with shock. She wiped away blood from her nose and gaped at it dumbly. The Unmer man lay slumped forward in his chair, unmoving. Only the two Guild soldiers seemed unaffected. For a moment they looked on in stunned disbelief, and then one of them unstrapped a baton from his belt and came for Ianthe.

  She cried out, raised her hands to defend herself.

  He swung the baton, and everything went dark.

  ‘This is an Unmer infiltration,’ Commander Rast said, ‘The girl is a spy and an assassin, the explosion . . . clearly designed to distract our troops while she carried out her mission.’

  ‘Designed to distract troops by drawing their attention to the palace?’ Briana said.

  The commander’s face reddened, and his lip-whiskers twitched. Murmurs swept around the table, vocally among the other Guild commanders and mentally among the Haurstaf contingent. Seven combat psychics were in attendance, led by Sister Ulla, although in light of recent events, the term combat psychic now seemed little more than an embarrassing misnomer. Ianthe had wrecked the minds of six of their best with one thought.

  One thought. Briana was still reeling from the girl’s attack. The sheer scale of the power she’d sensed coming from Ianthe had shocked her to the core. It had been like catching a glimpse of a howling abyss, some raw, savage, primordial vortex of energy. Even now ripples still spread through the entire Harmonic Reservoir, that abstract plane the Haurstaf used to envision the telepathic network. Ianthe could not have generated such a force herself, Briana felt sure. The girl had to have accessed and channelled it – much as the Unmer channelled their sorcery – from somewhere else. They had been naive to try to bring her into the Haurstaf. This girl was on a different level altogether.

  ‘What about the eyeglasses?’ she asked.

  Torturer Mara looked up. ‘A simple perception transference device,’ he said. ‘They appear to contain the mind image of an Unmer sea captain – one of the old Brutalist sorcerers who fought Conquillas’s dragons at Awl. One can look back through his eyes into past moments of his life, which is somewhat unnerving, but not particularly useful to anyone except a historian.’ He tapped his pencil against the table. ‘Nevertheless, two odd things about them have come to light. Ianthe had the focus wheel set to the present time, which meant she was essentially looking at the world around her through his perceptions rather than her own. The sorcerer’s image in turn must have been able to see through her eyes.’

  ‘Then she was spying,’ Rast exclaimed.

  Mara snorted. ‘Spying for a ghost,’ he said. ‘And an impotent ghost, to boot. That Brutalist is merely an image, an optical illusion trapped forever within those lenses.’ He raised a hand to stop the commander’s objections. ‘If you listen, Rast, I have better ammunition for your cause. What’s more perplexing is that Ianthe managed to wear the lenses at all. Because the mental link happens both ways, she sees through his eyes and he sees through hers. But the Brutalist’s mind is essentially trapped in the past. He cannot perceive events in our present time without creati
ng a paradox that the lenses don’t allow. Any attempt to do so produces an unbearable strain on the wearer’s mind. The human volunteers we used to test them could not bear to wear the blasted things for more than an instant.’

  ‘And what effect on Haurstaf?’ Briana asked.

  Mara rolled his pencil between his fingers. ‘We did try them on one girl, but I should probably speak to you about that in private. The results were . . . dramatic and rather messy. Suffice to say, a sensitive mind reacts much more severely to the lenses, which begs the question as to why Ianthe should be immune to their effects.’

  Rast gave a bellow of frustration. ‘The lenses were obviously created for her. The facts here are clear. She attacked a room full of Guild psychics and left the single Unmer prisoner unharmed.’

  Briana thought about this. ‘He survived because she didn’t target him directly,’ she said. ‘But he didn’t escape unharmed. His mind lost all of its higher functions.’ She leaned over the table. ‘Ianthe’s anger was directed at the room, at those who were pushing her to do something she didn’t agree with. I was there. What I saw was an emotional outburst from a sixteen-year-old girl, not a carefully engineered plan.’ She left the rest of her reasons for doubting the commander unspoken. It had seemed to her that Ianthe had held back.

  And yet she couldn’t deny that the girl had much in common with the Unmer: her resistance to any ill effects caused by the lenses, her channelling of power from somewhere outside her own body, her uncanny ability at finding lost trove. Had Maskelyne spotted the connection, too? Briana had been foolish to underestimate him once, and now she had a sixty-foot-wide hole in the side of the palace to remind her of that fact.

  ‘And what news of Maskelyne?’ she said.