Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts (30 page)

He didn’t want to take too much time over this. The emperor’s men might arrive any moment.

He located the anchor in the winch room three decks below the forecastle. It was too heavy to be raised by one man alone, so Granger lifted the brake and then turned the huge steel spool in the opposite direction, lowering the chain further into the sea. As the spool unwound, the weight of the chain itself began to drag the whole pulley mechanism around on its own. He kicked it to give it impetus, forcing the heavy line to unwind faster and faster. Finally it jarred to a halt. The end of the chain remained connected to the spool by a securing pin as thick as his thumb. Granger tried to kick it out, but it was welded in place and would not budge. He left it alone. The torque of the ship’s engines should be more than enough to shear it when the time came.

His skin started to burn again.

Granger left the winch room and headed aft in the direction of the wheelhouse. He followed a companionway under the gun deck, passing sail rooms, storerooms and a gunnery workshop. All were empty. The corridor opened into the crew quarters, a low chamber packed with rows of triple bunks. The pain in his flesh was starting to become intolerable again. He could feel his limbs begin to stiffen. When he spotted the door to the wash room, he hesitated, then ducked inside.

It was as large as four of the guest cabins back to back, but windowless and sour-smelling. A metalled floor sloped to a gutter channel along one end. The wooden walls were rotten and warped. An enormous barrel to which a ladle pan had been connected by a length of cord stood against the back wall under a dripping tap. Granger ran over and vaulted into the barrel itself.

Cold water immersed him. He submerged his head and then stood up again and washed his face, neck, torso, groin and finally his arms and legs. He shook his eyes clear of water, and then repeated the whole process. Even in this dim light he could see his skin had already been damaged by the Mare Lux seawater. Grey, leathery patches of sharkskin covered his arms like cracked paving, leaving raw red flesh between. Crystals had already formed over most of his wounds. They had staunched the flow of blood, but itched terribly and felt painful to the touch.

He climbed out of the barrel and stood there in the dark for a long moment, contemplating his disfigured flesh. He’d been too late to save himself completely, and the chances were good he might die yet. The flesh would either heal or harden further, restricting his movement. He sat down on the floor, trembling with exhaustion and fear, and felt something prod him in the side. It was the Unmer seeing knife, still tucked into the band of his breeches. He took it out and turned it over, but his sharkskin fingers could hardly feel it at all.

Sea mist rolled in from the south, blotting the sun until the skies around the
Mistress
turned from ochre to orange to a deep and angry red. Maskelyne ordered his sharpest lookout to the bow and ordered his engineers to set the dredger’s engines to one-quarter speed. He climbed the ladder to the wheelhouse and took control of the vessel himself. Yet even from this high vantage point he could see little in the fiery gloom but the dim pink glow of the lookout’s gem lantern and the red-brown slush of seawater coursing past to port and stern. The thin iron skeletons of the deck cranes drifted in and out of mist, while the
Mistress
’s bathysphere squatted in its cradle in the centre of the deck like an enormous brass egg.

They were in the Border Waters, the confluence of the Mare Lux and Mare Regis. It was an area of unpredictable weather and vicious currents. Ships were apt to drift leagues away from their assumed positions. He’d heard rumours of reefs, too, shoals of copper sharks and wisp lights, and even great deepwater erokin samal capable of claiming entire crews with their searching tentacles. But the stories that troubled him the most were those of wandering deadships.

He pulled a cord and blew the ship’s foghorn. A deep, low blast reverberated through the mist. He did not expect to find another ship out here, but the sound reassured him nevertheless. It filled the sepulchral air with a sense of life.

He hadn’t heard Lucille come in but turned at the sound of her voice.

‘He’s asleep,’ she said. ‘At least he was until a second ago.’ She inclined her head towards the foghorn cord. She was dressed, like him, in deepwater gear. In her bulky whaleskins she looked pitifully small and fragile. She removed her goggles and took a moment to unwrap the silk scarf from her face. ‘I asked one of Mellor’s boys to watch over Jontney.’

‘That scarf’s not really necessary,’ he said. ‘These mists don’t do much damage.’

‘It’s the word “much” that concerns me in that sentence, Ethan.’

He smiled. ‘Mist blisters heal. I’d still love you, even if you looked liked a sea monster.’

‘And you’d love me no less if I didn’t.’ She stared ahead into the mist. ‘Where are you taking us?’

‘Losotans called it the Whispering Valley,’ he said. ‘Before the flood, I mean. Lots of old Unmer settlements down there.’

‘So lots of treasure?’

‘That’s the idea.’

She shook her head. ‘It’s as thick as soup out there. Do you think Ianthe would be able to see through this?’

He said nothing, but kept his gaze on the crimson fog.

She nuzzled against him. ‘This reminds me of Hattering.’

‘The mists?’

‘Well, apart from the mists,’ she replied. ‘And the boat. We were both dressed in whaleskins. I thought you looked quite dashing.’

He smiled ‘Dashing? In whaleskins?’

‘What was the name of that friend you were with? The naval officer?’

‘William Temping.’

She nodded slowly. ‘That’s him. Whatever became of him?’

Maskelyne sniffed. ‘I cut his throat.’

He felt her tense, just slightly. And then she moved away. ‘I’d better go check on Jontney,’ she said.

‘He was a terrible fraud,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Did you know he even cheated on his wife? Some woman he kept in Losoto, apparently.’

‘Was that why you killed him?’

‘No.’ He was silent for a heartbeat, thinking, but he couldn’t recall. Finally he said, ‘I must have had a good reason.’

She looked at him for a long while, then shrugged. ‘I’m sure you did what you thought you had to do, Ethan.’

A bell began to ring on the deck below. Maskelyne peered out through the window and saw the bow lookout’s gem lantern swinging madly in the mist. He reached for the engine throttle but then changed his mind. One of his crew was rushing across the deck from the lookout’s position, but he couldn’t yet make out who it was.

‘What is it?’ Lucille asked.

Maskelyne opened the wheelhouse door and looked out. The crewman on the deck shouted up to him, ‘Deadship, Captain.’

‘Bearing?’

‘Straight for us. Like she knows.’

Maskelyne closed the door again and spun the wheel hard to starboard. And now through the red fog he could make out the dim black shape of a ship. She was a huge, ancient ironclad, bereft of masts, yards or sails. Upon her midships deck stood a solitary tower – a latticework of metal struts supporting a rusted toroid. She was one of the old electrical ships that had once carried whale oil across the Northern Wastes.
An icebreaker?
Maskelyne looked more closely at the prow and saw that it had been massively reinforced. He hissed through his teeth. The
Mistress
was now turning to starboard, while the Unmer vessel maintained its course. The two ships would pass within yards of each other.

Eight of the crew had gathered on the port side, while one of the officers – probably Mellor – was handing out carbine rifles to them.

The deadship drew closer. There did not appear to be any crewman aboard. Her hull and sterncastle had been forged from iron, but now Maskelyne could see that she had been damaged by intense fire. Yard-long sections of the bulwark had been scorched black and warped out of shape. Cables slumped around her tower like worn shrouds. He counted the remains of six guns mounted along her port side, strange metal weapons, each with a conical arrangement of circular plates fixed to the end of its barrel. They looked charred, melted, inoperable. An iron figurehead in the likeness of an Unmer maiden remained upon her prow, now stripped of paint and partially reduced to slag. The corruption gave her a ghoulish grin.
Dragonfire did this
, Maskelyne thought.
Dragonfire.

Every crewman had his rifle trained on the Unmer ship, following her as she slid by mere yards from the
Mistress
. Under the steady thump of the dredger’s engines Maskelyne fancied he could hear the groan of the old ironclad’s buckled hull and the rush of seawater caught between their two keels, and then something else – a faint, high-pitched humming sound, almost at the limits of his hearing, seemed to emanate from that tower.

A heartbeat later, the Unmer ship had passed by. Maskelyne watched her dissolve into the fog.

He let out a long breath.

‘Is it true what they say about deadships?’ Lucille asked.

‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’

‘Mellor thinks the dead crews still steer them.’

Maskelyne frowned. ‘Something steers them, but it isn’t ghosts. Their engines draw electrical fluid from the air.’ He rubbed his eyes and then rested both his hands on the wheel again. ‘I don’t know . . . the energy is probably transmitted from somewhere, a station or a bunker, somewhere the Haurstaf and their allies didn’t penetrate.’

‘You think there could still be a free Unmer community out there?’

‘It’s possible.’

She shivered. ‘I’m going to check on Jontney.’

She left Maskelyne alone in the wheelhouse. For a long while he peered into the gloom, watchful for anything unusual. The rumble of the
Mistress
’s engines failed to calm his nerves as much as it usually did. An Unmer ironclad, still sailing these waters after god only knew how many hundreds of years? The souls of her sorcerous crew burned into her very metal at the Battle of Awl? He couldn’t accept that. The Unmer captains were long dead. The Brutalists and operators were long dead. The ship was still receiving its power from a distant station, which meant it might also be possible to steer it from afar. A free Unmer community? Maskelyne knew of only one Unmer warrior still at large. He tried to remember the line from the old children’s rhyme he’d learned at school.

There was more, but the rest wouldn’t come to him. Those great serpents, led by Argusto Conquillas, had allied with the Haurstaf and risen up against their Unmer masters. Conquillas had decimated the Unmer fleet at Awl and thus betrayed his own kind for the love of a Haurstaf witch.

The lookout’s bell rang out again.

A sense of dread crept up Maskelyne’s spine, for through that red and turbulent air beyond the window he spied the dim hulk of the deadship bearing down on them once more. There could be no mistaking that hideous rusted tower, that weird droning sound. Evidently it had come about in the fog. He spun the
Mistress
’s wheel full lock to starboard, then flung open the wheel-house door and called down to the foredeck. ‘Get Ianthe up here, I need her sight.’

The deadship drew nearer, and for a heartbeat Maskelyne thought he could see a group of figures standing motionless upon her fog-shrouded deck. But then the vision faded, and the ship appeared deserted once more. Nothing but burned iron, a mess of cable. The mists were playing tricks on his eyes.

The two vessels were on a collision course. Maskelyne gunned the
Mistress
’s engines and attempted to take her past the Unmer ship once again. It would be close. Down on the foredeck his crew rushed forward to the bow, training their rifles on the approaching threat.

Sixty yards now.

The
Mistress
began to turn to starboard. The Unmer ironclad maintained her course.

Thirty yards.

Ahead, the great dark vessel loomed large. Now Maskelyne could see her figurehead with its melted grin. It seemed to know it was going to collide with them.

The deadship struck the
Mistress
a glancing blow on her port side. Even from up here in the wheelhouse Maskelyne felt the force of the impact. Abruptly his vessel lurched to one side. He heard the other ship’s hull boom, and then a hideous groaning and scraping sound as the icebreaker’s reinforced prow scraped along the
Mistress
’s side. That blow would have crushed a lesser ship, but Maskelyne’s dredger was a tough old girl. Engines thumping, she thundered on, pushing the schooner aside.

Slowly, the two ships separated. The Unmer vessel drifted off into the fog.

Maskelyne’s heart was thumping. He cut power to the engines, then opened the wheelhouse door and called down. ‘What damage?’

The crew were picking themselves up from the deck. One by one they began to peer down over the port side, sweeping gem lanterns back and forth across the hull. Mellor sent a man running towards the midships hatch, presumably to check for internal damage.