Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts (20 page)

‘The fault?’ The man glanced at the body in the olea tank. ‘I don’t know, sir.’

‘You don’t know?’ Maskelyne sat up. He studied the man for a moment, trying to judge the fellow’s level of retardation. ‘Well let me ask you this: Did he spend those forty-six minutes tunnelling through the walls?’

The jailer was growing paler with every passing moment. ‘We thought he’d killed himself.’

‘We?’

‘I thought he’d killed himself.’

Maskelyne stood up and wandered over to the brine-filled alcoves. He pressed his hands against the glass and watched the jellyfish drift past like tiny luminous globes. They had absorbed almost all of their meal by now. Only the corpse’s skull and part of its spine remained in the tank. ‘Men like that don’t kill themselves,’ he said. ‘They keep on going, and going, and going until somebody like me stops them. That’s why men like me are so valuable to the empire.’

‘Yes, sir.’

‘You stripped his new cell?’

‘Completely, sir. Basin, bed, mattress and commode. He’s got nothing but his clothes.’

‘Nothing?’

The jailer shook his head, then nodded. ‘A blanket, sir.’

Maskelyne thought for a moment. He glanced at his pocket watch. It was approaching forty-five minutes since his men had hosed the colonel down and placed his unconscious body into the new cell. ‘I’d like to see him myself,’ he said.

‘Yes, sir. Thank you, sir.’

Maskelyne wandered over to one of the tables. He opened an ornate box and took out a tangle of red wires like a small bird’s nest, which he placed in his jacket pocket. ‘Bring a chair,’ he said to the jailer.

‘A chair, sir?’

‘Any one of these will do.’

They walked over to the prison wing, with the jailer carrying a chair from the lounge. He set this down to unlock the watch station and then carried it inside. The duty guard rose to attention and admitted them into the cell corridor.

Maskelyne ordered the jailer to place the chair outside Granger’s cell. He took a seat, while the other man opened the hatch at the bottom of the door.

There was a moment’s pause.

And then the jailer let out a hiss and said, ‘He’s trying the same damn thing again, sir.’

Maskelyne looked at his pocket watch again, and smiled. ‘What could he have used to stuff the mannequin with this time?’

The jailer frowned. ‘Nothing, sir.’ He looked puzzled, and then realization slowly dawned in his eyes. He peered back through the hatch again.

‘Open the door,’ Maskelyne said.

This time it was no mannequin hanging from the lantern chain, but the body of Thomas Granger himself. He had fashioned a second rope from the blanket they’d left with him. To this one he had added a noose. His eyes were closed, his neck crooked, and his tongue protruded from his mouth. His boots dangled a foot from the floor.

Maskelyne looked up at the hanging figure in utter disbelief. Brine scars now covered Granger’s lips and one side of his face. From the plaza outside could be heard the wailing of the Drowned woman.

‘Cut him down,’ he said. And then he turned and left the room.

Granger’s eyes opened the moment he felt the jailer grab his legs. He reached inside his shirt and tugged at the knot he’d tied across his chest. The whole of his makeshift harness immediately came undone, and he dropped down from the rope into the arms of the startled jailer.

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 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.