Sea Of Ghosts

CHAPTER 9
THE HAURSTAF

‘Here,’ Torturer Mara said, ‘is where we made the leucotomy, and here…’ he used a glass rod to push a section of the patient’s brain tissue aside ‘… is the cavity I told you about.’ The patient gave an involuntary twitch. His hands clenched at his sides, and he made an odd yowling sound.

Sister Briana Marks breathed through her fingers. ‘Well that settles it once and for all,’ she said. ‘The Unmer actually do posses a hole in their heads.’ She squinted at the exposed brain and frowned. ‘It looks like the inside of a chicken.’

Torturer Mara withdrew the rod and plunked it into a beaker, then wiped his hands on his apron. His stained garment was the only thing less than pristine in this operating room. Sunlight poured in through tall windows, gleaming on the white-tiled floor and steel tables. ‘A very different animal to modern man,’ he said. ‘The cavity would have acted like an echo chamber, amplifying telepathic thought. It’s probably a vestigial organ from an earlier stage in the development of their species. It became redundant as soon as the lobular bridges formed.’

‘The Unmer traded their telepathic ability for the power to dispatch matter?’

Mara shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t say traded. That word has uncomfortable implications. Besides, there’s nothing to suggest they were ever telepathic. Empathic, perhaps. The cavity is a rudimentary structure, like the worm-fish lung or the nomio’s spinal ganglion. We think early humans possessed a similar type of brain, but then developed in a different way.’

The patient began to bang the flat of his hands on the table.

‘Must he do that?’ Briana said.

Mara picked up a scalpel and made a small incision in the brain. The patient became still.

‘Thank you,’ Briana said. ‘You’re very deft with that thing.’

The torturer’s smile rearranged every wrinkle on his face. ‘Practice,’ he said.

‘You know what this discovery means?’

‘Well, it explains why they’re vulnerable…’ Mara began.

‘No, no, it means I’ve lost ten thousand gilders,’ Briana retorted. ‘Hu is going to parade this in front of his whole empire. He’ll use it to embarrass us.’ She gave a long sigh. ‘How can we possibly be related to these oiks? It sends shivers down my spine.’

The patient suddenly spoke in a loud, clear voice: ‘Kurese, I will not stand. Replace it to me.’ His fingers reached out in the direction of the table next to him, where Mara had placed the sawed-off top section of his skull, still resplendent with its white mane of hair.

Briana made a face. ‘You see that? Half his head off, and he’s still vain.’

‘Shall I patch him back up again?’

‘I suppose you’d better,’ Briana said. ‘Sister Ulla’s girls can still use him as a pin cushion. Staple him up and put him back in the maze.’

The man on the table said, ‘Replace it to me. We will war the Haurstaf.’

‘You’ll sit in a corner and dribble,’ Briana said. ‘Do you think we should give him a haircut while the skull’s off? I suppose he could cut it himself-’ She stopped as she sensed the presence of a third person in the room and turned to see a pretty young girl standing in the doorway with a look of horror on her face.

What do you want?

The girl started. ‘Eh? I’m sorry, I…’

We have company, Briana said, driving the words into the young witch’s mind like nails into wood. Torturer Mara is Hu’s own physician. So, under the circumstances, which do you think is the proper form of communication – thinking your words? ‘Or squawking them out like a fat little crow?’

‘Thinking?’ the girl said.

‘You’re not the brightest thing, are you?’

Mara paid them no heed. He picked up the staple punch and the scalp and calmly went to work on the Unmer patient’s head. The girl in the doorway looked positively sick, and it took a moment before she regained enough composure to form a mental reply.

This letter arrived for you, she said, holding out a soiled scrap of folded paper. An Ethugran fisherman brought it here. He’s waiting outside the palace. I think he expects some sort of payment for it.

Briana cast her mind out, but failed to sense the fisherman at all. He was no more psychic than a sewer rat, and therefore just as invisible to her from here. She took the letter and opened it.

To Sister Briana Marks:

My name is not important. I am a jailer in Ethugra who has recently, and legally, been granted incarceration rights to a powerful psychic. Given this person’s value to your Guild, I would be glad to hand them over in return for a finder’s fee of two hundred thousand gilders. If this is agreeable, please have a Guild representative (yellow-grade only) meet me at Averley Plaza on the 30th HR. I will find her.

Faithfully,

A Friend

‘Oh, this is extortion,’ she said. ‘Two hundred thousand gilders!’ She looked up at the girl. ‘How much did we pay for you?’

‘Nothing, Sister.’

‘Nothing,’ Briana confirmed. ‘You see how good we are at putting a precise value on talent?’

‘My parents thought it a great honour-’

‘Oh shut up,’ Briana said. ‘Your parents were lucky we didn’t have them executed for foisting you upon us. But this Ethugran jailer.. .’ she shook the letter in Mara’s face ‘… has the audacity to demand a fortune for a potential.’

‘Such is the world we live in,’ Mara said wearily.

‘We will war upon the Haurstaf,’ the Unmer patient added.

Briana growled. ‘Snip something, Torturer, please.’ Did they have any representatives in Ethugra? She broadcast the question to every psychic in the palace, and they answer came back at once: No.

She’d have to send someone.

But who?

As she gazed at the letter, thinking, she noticed something else. Somebody had scrawled something, very faintly, across the bottom margin. At first she’d taken the scribble to be a stain, but now that she looked closer she could definitely make out the words. They looked like they had been written in brine. There was a date, and a name. And she recognized the name.

Briana smiled. Hu would recognize that name too and pay the Guild a considerable sum to learn of its owner’s whereabouts. Prepare a carriage for me, she said to the girl. I’m leaving the palace at once.

‘Yes, sister.’

‘Wait,’ Briana added. ‘On second thoughts, I’ll arrange it myself.’ She gave the girl a long, clinical look and then turned to Mara. ‘Torturer, I was just thinking. Is it really necessary to let the emperor know the results of this anatomical exploration? I mean, aren’t we just fuelling his prejudices? Wouldn’t he be happier, deep down, if he believed that the Haurstaf – and by extension all humans – are completely unrelated to the Unmer?’

The Torturer made a gesture of non-committal. ‘He’s not convinced the Haurstaf are human. I believe his favoured term is brine mutants, although he has been known to use the phrase inhuman parasites. Of course, when he’s really angry he-’

‘Yes, yes,’ Briana said. ‘But look at that pretty little creature at the door. Does she look like a mutant to you?’

‘Of course not,’ Mara replied.

‘Then you agree. Keeping Hu in the dark would be beneficial for all concerned. Think of it as propagating peace and harmony between our communities.’

Mara grunted. ‘I’d be risking my position in his court.’

‘We’d compensate you for that.’ Briana inclined her head towards the young girl in the doorway. ‘I could offer you the opportunity to do a little more anatomical research?’

The girl glanced from the torturer to Briana. ‘Sister?’

Mara looked the young witch up and down, stroking his chin.

‘In more comfortable surroundings,’ Briana added. ‘You must stay as our guest for a few more nights. I insist.’

‘Hu’s gone to Lorimare for the summer,’ Mara said. ‘I could actually delay my return by several weeks.’

‘Take months if you like.’

The girl was turning red. ‘I will not,’ she said.

‘You absolutely will,’ Briana said.

The girl burst into tears and ran from the room, slamming the door behind her.

A moment of silence passed before Briana said, ‘So ungrateful. We take them from the fields and slums, train them up and offer them a life of luxury and ease, and this is how they repay us. I blame the parents.’

‘Such is the world,’ Mara muttered. ‘Shall we just say five thousand then?’

Briana took his arm and led him away. ‘Let’s not discuss money,’ she said. ‘It’s so vulgar.’

The steel motor launch moved between the ships in the bay. Maskelyne followed her progress from a high window in his castle. He lost sight of her as she passed behind the older of his two Valcinder dredgers, the Lamp, and then spotted her again rounding the vessel’s bow. She was battered and rusty. From up here he could not make out her name or the name of her port painted on the hull, but he heard her engine rattling. He guessed she was from Ethugra. She looked like a jailer’s boat.

‘Is it Hu?’ his wife Lucille asked.

‘No.’

‘But it’s heading for our house dock.’

Maskelyne smiled. ‘The emperor would rather submit to torture than be seen aboard a tub like that,’ he said. ‘I suspect this is our Mr Creedy, come to negotiate his partnership share.’

She wilted against his shoulder and murmured in his ear: ‘Or maybe it’s your secret lover.’

Maskelyne raised his eyebrows. ‘Mr Creedy is not my secret lover.’

‘I don’t like him.’

‘That seems like an appropriate and reasonable reaction.’

‘Will you kill him?’

Maskelyne turned to face her. ‘Why would I do that?’

‘To save money.’

‘I’m married to a sociopath.’

She turned away, drawing his arm after her before letting it go. ‘Aren’t men of your reputation supposed to murder on a whim? What do they call you now? Maskelyne the Butcher?’

‘The Executioner,’ her husband replied. ‘I don’t think Mr Creedy’s death would do much to enhance my standing among the city jailers. He is innocent of any crime, after all.’

‘He sold his friend’s daughter into slavery.’

‘Like I said,’ Maskelyne remarked, ‘innocent.’

The launch docked at the stone pier on the westernmost end of Key Beach. A large man wearing a grey whaleskin cloak alighted. The blue lens of his clockwork eye flashed in the sunlight. He was carrying an enormous kitbag over his shoulder. He tied up, then stood alone for a long moment, apparently watching the deepwater wharfs, where Maskelyne’s stevedores were unloading the Unmer chariot from the hold of the Mistress. Then he looked directly up at the the very window in which Maskelyne stood and waved.

‘It is him,’ Lucille said. ‘I’d recognize that eye anywhere.’

‘I’m afraid so.’

‘I wonder what he has in his bag.’

‘Some sort of bomb, I imagine.’

Mr Creedy began strolling up the pier, but then he stopped again and stared down at the crescent beach to his right. Evidently he had noticed its unusual composition. A few of Maskelyne’s men were wandering across that strange silver shoreline, stopping every now and then to pick up likely keys from the tens of millions deposited there and trying them in the locks of boxes they carried.

Maskelyne smiled. ‘Now that will have him wondering.’

‘I’m going to check on Jontney,’ Lucille said. ‘I’m worried that he’s coming down with something. It’s not like him to behave this way.’

‘Have you spoken to the doctor?’

She shook her head.

‘Call for him anyway,’ Maskelyne said.

His wife looked at him sadly. ‘What will you do about the bomb?’

Maskelyne kissed her on the cheek. ‘Take our son for a walk.’

Maskelyne decided to receive Mr Creedy in his laboratory. He rang for his manservant, Garstone, ordered him to prepare lunch for one and to throw open the laboratory terrace doors to dispel the monstrous odours in there. Then he told him to direct the Ethugran jailer to the anteroom and ask him politely to wait.

By the time Maskelyne had lunched and dressed in his laboratory overalls, his visitor had been waiting for almost an hour.

The laboratory boasted four enormous glass tanks, each flooded with brine from a different sea and connected to the ceiling by a wide glass tube. Daylight filtered through the vessels from tall windows on either side of the laboratory and was changed by the waters into hues of red, brown, yellow and green. The two Drowned men in the Mare Regis tank were turning cards, but looked up from their table when Maskelyne ushered Mr Creedy in. In the gloomy red seawater their faces appeared dim and monstrous. The girl who had formerly occupied the Mare Lux tank had been removed for dissection – but her twin sister peered out through the glass of the Mare Sepsis tank opposite. She had acclimatized well to the change in seawater. The sores on her face had all but disappeared, although her hair and eyes had changed colour. It seemed that Mare Sepsis brine was not as toxic to the Drowned as sailors claimed. When she saw Maskelyne, she became suddenly excited. She scribbled something on her slate, then turned it round to show him.

OJUJH WAW.

Maskelyne had no idea what it meant, and he doubted the girl did either. She’d been submerged in that brine for nearly two months now, quite long enough for her mind to have become pickled.

In the last tank, the remains of an old man sat on a stool and brooded. The green seawater gave him the pallor of a decayed corpse and, indeed, the Mare Verdant brine had already dissolved a great deal of his muscle mass and flesh, leaving naked bones visible at the clavicle, hip and both thighs. In time he would vanish entirely, but not before his skeleton paced for many days behind that glass wall.

Such was the queerness of the Mare Verdant. The waters consumed the flesh while acting as a body surrogate to harbour and propagate life’s energies beyond death. Maskelyne’s instruments detected no significant currents within that water, and yet there must be some subtle manipulation of pressure. How else could a man’s bones continue to move without muscle and tendon? It was, like so much of the Unmer legacy, an enigma. Because neither the corpse nor the card players had attempted to use their own slates for over a year, the truth remained elusive.

Mr Creedy took it all in with open eyes, or rather, one eye and one aperture. He seemed ill at ease in the proximity of so many Drowned, which was of course why Maskelyne had chosen this place to meet him.

‘I hope you do not intend to betray me, Mr Creedy,’ Maskelyne remarked.

‘Sir?’

‘For harbouring the Drowned?’

The big man grunted. ‘Betray you to yourself? Don’t think that would get me far.’

‘Well, quite.’ Maskelyne took a seat at his desk and gestured for the jailer to sit opposite. An infinity device, consisting of a marble in a sealed glass tube, sat upon the desk between them. Maskelyne wound it out of habit and then watched the glass tube slickly revolve. The marble rolled from one end to the other. ‘Remind me,’ he said. ‘what our agreement was.’

Mr Creedy lowered his kitbag to the floor and sat down. ‘A hundredth lay, sir.’

‘A hundredth lay is fine if we find something, Mr Creedy. But what happens if we don’t? You’ll think I’m trying to deceive you.’

Creedy’s clockwork eye made a shuttering sound. ‘I noticed you unloading a chariot from the Mistress.’

‘Yes, and what is such an object worth?’ He spread his hands on the table. ‘Let us say… four or five million gilders to a collector. You would agree?’ Creedy nodded, so Maskelyne continued, ‘In order to raise that artefact, I was forced to dispatch a particularly foul-tempered old dragon, which, I am afraid to say, entailed the use of a phial of void flies. Unmer void flies, Mr Creedy, sealed in their original jar. Do you have any idea how much I could have sold that container for?’

The other man said nothing.

‘A hundred million,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Conservatively. Void flies have been known to destroy cities, decimate populations, ruin whole countries. You know the Unmer make their arrows from them?’

Mr Creedy touched his clockwork eye. Then he leaned forward and spoke in a threatening tone. ‘You wasted them on a dragon?’

Maskelyne leaned back. ‘I wasted nothing, Mr Creedy. Void flies, by their very nature, cannot be studied in depth. But there are other mysteries that can. And that, for me, determines an object’s true worth.’ He paused to watch the infinity device on the desk as the marble rolled from one end of the tube to the other. ‘Do you have a family, Mr Creedy? Any children?’

The jailer shook his head.

‘Then perhaps it is more difficult for you to understand,’ Maskelyne said. ‘As a father, I have a duty to preserve my son’s future. Now, I can only succeed if I fully understand the processes by which the Unmer have threatened that future. Wealth, power, everything else is simply insulation.’ He paused again to watch the marble roll back and forward in the revolving tube. ‘If I gave you a chest of gilders, what would you spend it on? Women? Whisky? Guns? A fine apartment with a view?’ He shook his head. ‘All insulation. None of it has any importance. None of it has any true worth.’

Creedy lifted his kitbag and placed it on the table before them. ‘You’re telling me I’m not going to get paid?’

Maskelyne sighed. ‘I’m trying to make you understand the real value of trove, Mr Creedy. Because if you don’t, then our business relationship is doomed to fail. Does it please you to learn that I have personally destroyed over ninety thousand ichusae? I would happily give you one-hundredth of the satisfaction and pride I feel when I destroy the next ninety thousand, if it were possible to do so.’

Creedy’s jaw tightened.

‘Or that I have no intention of selling the chariot we salvaged two days ago?’

The other man stared at the kitbag on the table for a long moment. Finally he said, ‘I want the girl back.’

Maskelyne leaned back in his chair. ‘That is no longer possible. But let me make you an alternative offer.’

The aperture in Creedy’s clockwork eye whirred as it narrowed.

‘You saw the beach of keys when you first arrived?’

Creedy nodded.

‘Do you know where they come from?’

Creedy said nothing.

‘The Drowned leave them there,’ Maskelyne explained. ‘They crawl ashore during the night, enduring considerable pain, and deposit the keys on that shore.’ The infinity device continued to make its revolutions. ‘Why?’ He shrugged. ‘The long-term Drowned do not communicate with us in any meaningful fashion. Brine alters the mind by some slow, subtle process. The sea consumes them, takes them over, until eventually they become limbo people, ghosts, repeating human actions that they do not appear to fully understand. Look there.’ He gestured towards the card players in the Mare Regis tank. ‘Those men turn cards all day long. In the beginning they played the game of Forentz, but as the months passed by, rules began to mean less and less to them. Now they simply turn the cards over, and then gather them up again. There is no longer any discernible purpose to their actions, no competition between them. They are simply parroting actions they remember but no longer understand. Three months of submersion irreversibly alters the mind, just as three hours is enough to permanently alter the body.’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘But I believe the Drowned gain some other form of intelligence, some deep instinctual feeling that the brine itself instils within them. I believe that they are looking for the key to some unique Unmer treasure, some locked container or tomb or room or vessel. Something they wish me to find and open.’

Creedy looked at him blankly.

Maskelyne indicated the infinity device on the desk. ‘Observe this machine,’ he said. ‘As the tube revolves, the marble falls from one end to the other.’ He waited until the marble had done just that. ‘Of course, gravity causes it to fall. But Unmer devices do not suffer from such constraints. They are not bound by our physical laws. Their very existence suggests that our universe is infinite, that anything that can happen, happens somewhere… or somewhen. If this little desktop machine is maintained indefinitely, then the marble should – one day – refuse to fall. And yet I don’t instinctively feel that that will happen. Something is missing from the device, something the Unmer discovered.’

‘Sorcery,’ Creedy said.

‘We call it sorcery,’ Maskelyne admitted. ‘But that’s just a word. You might as well describe it as an act of god. I prefer to think of it as the essence of infinity, a force that the Unmer utilized when they forged their treasures. They were able to unlock the gates of infinity and reach inside. Their treasures are of little worth to me in any real practical sense. I am more interested in what they represent, in the details of their manufacture, for therein lies the key to their mystery. Don’t you see? Solve that mystery and you save the world.’

The big man was silent a moment. ‘What do you propose?’

Maskelyne smiled. ‘I propose to set you up, Mr Creedy. I will outfit you with a ship of your own, a crew and a generous salary. You will also have a captain’s lay of any saleable trove you find – which is one-fifteenth – on the condition that you return any locked containers to me unopened. I need men such as yourself, sir: men with wits and ambition, training, an eye for treachery and a firm hand to quell it, and of course a certain moral flexibility. These are dangerous seas and turbulent times. Only the ruthless survive, Mr Creedy.’

‘A fifteenth lay?’

‘Of such trove as has no intellectual value to me.’

‘My own ship?’

‘You agree, then?’

The jailer grinned. ‘Where do I sign?’

Maskelyne rummaged in the desk drawer for some papers, then inclined his head towards a pen protruding from a brass holder in front of Creedy.

‘I always knew you were a fair man,’ Creedy said. He plucked the pen from its holder.

There was a click.

And the hidden trapdoor under Creedy’s chair opened.

The jailer, chair and all, disappeared down a shaft in the floor. From below came the sound of an enormous splash, followed by a cry cut short. And then the pumps began to work. The floor of Maskelyne’s laboratory trembled. A gurgling, rushing sound came from the huge pipes below, and then behind the wall and, a moment later, Creedy’s writhing body dropped down into in the Mare Lux tank amidst a swarm of bubbles.

He was gagging, clutching at his throat as he drowned.

Maskelyne looked at the struggling figure behind the glass, then looked down at the empty pen holder and sighed. ‘They always take the pen with them.’

The Guild man-o’-war Irillian Herald was gliding along the Glot Madera, her tall masts and yards rising above the buildings on either side. Briana Marks stood at the prow, as pale and slender as a dragon-bone figurehead. Her long coat tails flapped in the breeze as she stared out at the godforsaken dump that was Ethugra. A red sun burned low in the west, blurred by the haze of smoke that lingered over the city. The buildings themselves spread out before her in a filthy maze of yellow stone and chimneypots, eaves and gables aflame in the sunset, rooftops cluttered with cranes and piles of seabed rubble. Construction never stopped here. She could hear the sound of masons’ hammers coming from a dozen places in the city, like some irregular heartbeat.

The ship’s old Unmer engines thrummed under Briana’s feet as she watched the greasy brown waters flow past the Herald’s red dragon-scale hull. The channel was full of dead rats, newspapers and milk cartons. Indeed, the whole city reeked of brine and death. She could smell occasional wafts of spoiled food on the breeze, the earthen scent of mortar and the ever-present metal stink of the sea. There were no birds, she noted. Not one bird in Ethugra.

A whistle shrilled and the engines dropped to a low rumble. On the open deck below, Guild mariners began taking up their positions at the docking lines. Beyond the ship’s bow Briana could now see the pillars of a great gate, and a wide harbour beyond. The womb of the city. On a promenade at the far end of the harbour waited a welcome committee of Ethugran administrators – men in black cloaks and white wigs, standing grimly in the heat. Thankfully, the general populace had been banished from this reception.

The engines dropped to an even lower tone as the great ship passed the gate and began to turn, lining her port side up with the deepwater berth at the promenade. Briana reached out towards the waiting men with her mind, and sensed… nothing at all. Not a spark of ability among the lot of them. She was alone here.

And yet she was never truly alone. She could hear her Guild sisters chattering in the back of her mind, like the ever-present murmur of a city. Even after all of these years she had never grown used to it. In the palace at Awl the Haurstaf voices could feel like a nest of wasps trapped deep in her subconscious, but even here, two hundred leagues away, there was scarcely any respite. Try as she might, she couldn’t shut it out. The most powerful psychics could always reach their queen. Briana took a draught of poppy water from the tiny bottle in her coat pocket, but she feared it would not dull the sounds for long. She had become too dependent on the drug. It affected her less each time she took it.

Ropes groaned as the Herald eased alongside the dock. The ship’s metal gangway clanged against the edge of the plaza. Briana pocketed her poppy water and went down to meet her hosts.

The administrator who greeted her had a deformed spine and walked like a man forced to drag an invisible burden around with him. He moved by sliding one foot forward and then dragging his other foot along the ground after it. He had a prominent nose like a great knuckle of bone, and eyebrows like clods of wool under his white horsehair wig. He seemed so much older and mustier than the others, if such a thing was possible. ‘Sister Briana Marks,’ he said. ‘Such a pleasure – indeed, an honour – to welcome you to our proud city.’ He spoke infuriatingly slowly, crawling over his syllables in a singsong voice. ‘My name is Administrator Grech, and I am wholly at your service. If there is anything I can do for you, anything at all, it will be my… er… pleasure and honour.’

Briana detested his manner at once. ‘I’ve no intention of staying in this ghastly place a moment longer than is absolutely necessary,’ she said. ‘I’m here to see a prisoner, one Thomas Granger – former colonel of the Gravediggers.’

‘Ah yes,’ Grech muttered. ‘Oh dear.’

Briana glared at him with impatience. Verbal exchanges could be so tedious.

‘We responded to your message immediately,’ he added. ‘But I fear your man-o’-war had already departed Losoto.’

The other officials stood around in silence, waiting in the baking heat. Averley Plaza was so quiet Briana fancied she could hear the roar of distant fires within the sun.

‘Alas,’ Grech said. ‘Fate has been cruel to both of us. Had we known of your wishes earlier, we would have striven to accommodate them. Striven, Sister Marks, for you know that Ethugra has always been a loyal friend to the Haurstaf, and one must-’

‘Get to the point, you hideous little man.’

‘His execution is scheduled for three days hence.’

‘His trial, you mean?’

‘Trial, yes. As you say.’

She shrugged. ‘I’m well aware of that. The verdict means little enough to me. Colonel Granger has information I require. I’ll see him now.’

Grech cringed. ‘Alas, alas. But we have had word from the Imperial Palace. When Emperor Hu learned that the leader of the Gravediggers had been captured, he decided in his great wisdom to sit in judgement on the case himself.’

‘Hu is coming here?’

‘He has cut short his stay at the summer palace and is sailing from Losoto as we speak. We are deeply honoured.’ Grech wrung his hands. ‘But, and forgive me if I say alas again, but he has ordered that no one be permitted to see the prisoner until the trial.’

Briana looked at him coolly. ‘Did he know I was coming here?’

Grech bowed so low he seemed to fold in on himself. ‘Assuredly not, your graciousness, but-’

‘Then obviously the orders don’t apply to me.’

The administrator cringed. ‘His instructions were very clear. My life would be forfeit if I failed to carry them out.’

‘That’s fine with me. We’ll see the colonel after lunch.’

Grech’s lips quivered. ‘I beg you to wait, madame. Two or three days more, and Hu will be here himself.’ He reached toward the sleeve of her dress then stopped himself and wrung his hands again. ‘Please accept my hospitality in the meantime. My wife’s mother is from Awl, she’ll cook for you herself.’

‘God, how awful.’

He stood there with a pleading look in his eyes. Briana sighed. She would have had it out with Hu right now if the emperor kept a telepath on his ship. She looked at Grech again. ‘Your hospitality had better be exceptional.’

‘Everything I have is yours.’

‘You’d better hope that it’s enough.’

‘He looks at me strangely,’ Maskelyne said. ‘It’s almost as if there’s someone else in there.’

The moment he said this, Jontney lowered his eyes and went back to his toys. Maskelyne found this all the more disconcerting. His son looked like a normal two-year-old, but his perception of his environment seemed altogether more mature. Maskelyne had the distinct impression that the little boy was very much aware of what his father had just said and had tried to disguise that knowledge. Jontney banged his toy dragon against the floor.

Doctor Shaw frowned.

‘Those bruises are self-inflicted,’ Maskelyne said. ‘We found him twisting his arms through the bars of his cot, howling with pain.’

‘I see.’

‘You don’t believe me?’

‘No, I mean, of course.’

The doctor rummaged through his satchel, avoiding eye-contact with Maskelyne. He appeared to be looking for something, but then changed his mind. He reached down and pressed a hand against the boy’s forehead. ‘No fever.’

Jontney bit his hand.

Shaw cursed and jerked away, knocking his satchel over. Phials, bandages, clamps and pincers spilled out across the floor. ‘And no lack of vitality,’ he added, scooping everything back into the case.

The playroom was evidence of that. Great mounds of toys of every shape and colour covered the floor: manatees and cloth jellyfish and boats carved from real wood, soldier dolls and brightly lacquered houses and wagons, clatter-clatters and sponge throws, pyramids, stack-rings, thrumwhistles, bricklets, woof-woofs, huckle-henrys, twistees, wibble-wobbles and a hundred other objects still known by the idiot names the Losotan shopkeepers had given them. The bastardized vernacular irked Maskelyne, but he bought the toys – mountains of them – for Jontney. He could not refuse his son anything.

And dragons of course. Most of all Jontney loved his dragons.

‘I have a tincture we might try,’ Doctor Shaw said, although he looked as doubtful now as he did when he came in. Evidently he could see nothing wrong with the child. ‘To calm his riotous airs,’ he added with a nod.

‘What is in the tincture?’ Maskelyne inquired.

The doctor waved his hand. ‘Oh, the usual. Kelp and leech-blend and such.’

Maskelyne sighed. ‘Very well.’

Doctor Shaw produced a spoon and a medicine bottle from his satchel. He filled the spoon with dark green liquid and, with surprising deftness, manhandled it into the child’s mouth. Jontney looked startled. He coughed, and his eyes welled with tears. Then he lifted his small fist. He was holding something shiny.

In that awful moment, Maskelyne saw that it was a scalpel.

Jontney plunged the blade into the doctor’s thigh.

The doctor cried out and struck the child with the back of his hand. Jontney reddened and began to wail. Blood was streaming from the doctor’s leg, covering the rug, the toys. His face whitened with shock. He clamped his hands over the wound and exclaimed, ‘He cut me, he cut me.’

Maskelyne just scooped his son up into his arms and carried him out, leaving the doctor fumbling in his satchel for bandages and alcohol.

He found Lucille in the morning parlour. She glanced up at him and smiled, then she saw Jontney, and her smile withered. She stood up.

‘Take him,’ Maskelyne said.

‘What happened?’

‘He’s fine,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘Just frightened. I need to take care of the doctor.’ He dumped his son into Lucille’s arms.

‘He’s covered in blood.’

‘It’s not his blood!’

‘Ethan!’

But he was already hurrying away. ‘I’ll be back in a minute,’ he called, and slammed the door after him.

On his way back to the playroom he stopped at the armoury.

Racks and cabinets packed with Unmer weapons filled every wall. There were swords of blue and yellow poison-glass and burning-glass with wicked amber edges, seeing knives of the type used by Emperor Hu’s blind bodyguards, carbine weapons and hand-cannons for launching sorcerous or cursed missiles, devices that drank blood and whispered or screamed spells and Unmer war songs, jewelled dragon harnesses and mirrored armour, black stone armour and platinum runic plate, death vision helmets and torcs and rings of every conceivable warrior’s nightmare. Ten score objects sparkled in the gloom, treasures salvaged from drowned battlefields across the world. And every single piece of it exacted some horrible price from the wielder or wearer, what the Unmer would refer to as Balance.

Maskelyne opened a mahogany box full of silver pins, each with a crystal head of a different colour. He shifted through them carefully, selected one and held it up. A faint blue light shone from the tiny translucent sphere. He listened to the crystal for a moment and shivered.

Suitable payment.

Doctor Shaw was still in the playroom. He had bound his thigh with bandages and was in the process of easing his breeches back on over his wound. He looked up nervously when Maskelyne entered. ‘A high-spirited lad,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid I should have kept a more careful eye on my satchel.’

‘Indeed, you should have,’ Maskelyne said.

The doctor’s throat bobbed. He moistened his lips. ‘Give him a spoonful of medicine a day for seven days. That ought to sort him out.’

Maskelyne produced the pin with a flourish. ‘Your payment, sir.’

‘No payment necessary,’ the doctor said.

‘But I insist,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘Do you know what this is?’

‘I’m not much of a collector, Mr Maskelyne.’

‘It’s an alchemist’s pin. Would you like to see how it works?’

The doctor looked uncertain.

Maskelyne approached him and held the pin over the doctor’s wounded thigh. It began to thrum in his hand. The crystal head changed from blue to gold and then finally began to glow white. ‘The Unmer used these to sterilize wounds,’ he explained.

The doctor frowned. He gazed at his wound for a long moment, then touched the bandages tentatively. ‘That’s… extraordinary,’ he said. ‘The pain has gone.’

‘Now watch.’ Maskelyne pushed the pin straight into the doctor’s leg.

Doctor Shaw flinched and began to protest, but then he stopped. ‘I feel nothing at all,’ he said.

Maskelyne nodded. ‘That’s because the nerves are dead.’

‘What do you mean?’

‘Can’t you feel the numbness spreading along your leg?’

The doctor looked suddenly worried. He pinched the pin between his thumb and forefinger and tried to pull it out, but it wouldn’t budge. A look of desperation came into his eyes. ‘What is it doing to me?’

Maskelyne smiled. ‘These pins were the precursors to ichusae sorcery,’ he said. ‘They change one substance into another substance. Brine changes flesh into sharkskin. An alchemist’s pin is far less subtle. It alters the minerals in your blood.’

‘What?’ The doctor seized the pin head and pulled with all his strength, but it remained firmly embedded in place. A strange cracking sound came from his leg. He gave a short yelp. ‘What substance? What’s happening to me?’

‘Are you familiar with starfish, Doctor?’

The doctor’s eyes were wild.

‘When one severs the limb of a starfish,’ Maskelyne said, ‘it simply grows a new one. But the interesting thing is that the severed limb grows into a new starfish. Now, are those two starfish different organisms, or are they actually the same creature?’

‘What?’

‘The Unmer believe that mankind is a single organism,’ Maskelyne went on, ‘that every man and woman is merely a part of the same creature. And when we breed, we create new parts of that same creature, like branches on a tree. So sex is actually asexual – it’s simply the method by which the whole… human entity grows. Do you understand?’

‘Help me,’ the doctor said, ‘please.’

‘If you believe that – and there are days when I do believe it,’ Maskelyne explained, ‘then an assault on a child is an assault on the father and the mother, and on every other living person. It’s an attack against mankind itself.’

The doctor stared at him in fear and disbelief. ‘Assault?’

‘You struck my child.’

‘But I meant no harm.’

Maskelyne shrugged. ‘You caused harm.’

Now the doctor’s gaze searched the ground. He was trying to comprehend this. ‘But now you’re hurting me,’ he said. ‘It’s the same thing.’

‘You’re probably right,’ Maskelyne admitted. ‘But it’s too late now.’ He thought for a moment. ‘I wonder if we could justify your death if we assume that mankind isn’t a single organism, but is actually two organisms. That way, I could be part of one… and you could be part of the other.’ He nodded. ‘Yes, that works. You die, while I maintain the moral high ground.’

‘What? You’re completely insane.’

Maskelyne sat down beside him. ‘You’re not a psychiatrist are you, doctor?’

Shaw shook his head.

‘No, I didn’t think you were.’

‘Please…’ The doctor was gasping now, trying to move his rapidly stiffening leg. ‘Stop this.’

‘Can’t be done,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Your blood is changing.’

The doctor grabbed his trouser leg and pulled it up. Green crystals had already begun to form on his skin. He let out a wail. ‘Changing into what?’

‘Exactly what it looks like,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Your widow is going to be a very rich woman.’

Ianthe withdrew her consciousness from the whirlwind of terror in the doctor’s mind. She lay in darkness and focused on the rising and falling of her chest as she breathed. Maskelyne’s wife, Lucille, had put her in a small bright room in the west wing of the fortress. The views she’d seen through the other woman’s eyes had been of a sickle-shaped island with deepwater docks and industrial buildings down by the shore. Heavy iron ships waiting in their moorings in the bay. A metallic beach flashing in the sunshine, lapped by the tea-coloured sea. The scent of brine of the breeze. They were three leagues east of Ethugra, but she hadn’t been able to see the city from Lucille’s perspective.

She could feel silk cushions under her. She knew they were blue.

For a long while she lay there, thinking. Should she try to reach her father again? She hadn’t been able to locate him since Maskelyne’s men had captured her. Had he even returned to the prison on Halcine Canal? Had she simply missed him, or had he abandoned her again? She didn’t even know if he was alive or dead. And with a million people living in Ethugra, a million perspectives to explore, she might never know the answer to that question. Her frustration quickly turned to anger. Nothing really mattered but punishing Maskelyne for what he’d done. And she had the means to accomplish that.

She slipped into Jontney’s mind, but found him cuddling his mother, and so she quickly departed again. She didn’t want to feel Lucille’s arms around her. Maskelyne was in a storeroom next to his armoury, where he was busy rummaging through a box of tools and humming to himself. He had already looked out a hammer and a stone chisel.

Ianthe let her mind fly through the abyss between minds like a comet racing through the heavens. The inhabitants of Scythe Island formed a small but intense constellation beneath her, surrounded by a plain of countless lights burning under the sea. To the west she perceived Ethugra as a great conflagration of dusty spots, a galaxy formed by tens of thousands of people. As she neared the city, she became aware of a fine ship berthed in Averley Harbour. A group of people had gathered on the plaza before the Administration Buildings. And all of them were looking at one woman.