Sea Of Ghosts

CHAPTER 12
A VOICE FROM THE ASHES

18th Hu-Rain, 1457

24 degrees 16 minutes north

5 degrees 43 minutes west

Aboard the deadship for two days now. Fog lifted yesterday morning, and yet its bitter gloom remains in the hearts of all aboard. This ironclad vessel seems determined to confound our attempts to return to Scythe Island. Her engines sputter to a halt whenever we deviate from a narrow range between 342° and 354°, as though the supply of electrical fluid to the tower is suddenly quenched. We are being interfered with from afar.

But by whom? And where are they trying to take us?

Heading west nor’-west would bring us into the Haurstaf-controlled waters around Awl and the Irillian Islands, leaving us at the mercy of the Guild. The northern fringes of the empire lie due east of here, from where we could easily secure passage to Losoto. This margin between 342° and 354° leads nowhere but the frozen wastes of Pertica, where we would surely perish among the poisonous ice fields. In an attempt to regain some control, we have raised a makeshift spinnaker on the ship’s tower, yet it can barely hold enough wind to maintain our current position against these southerlies. It is as if nature herself is conspiring against us. Abernathy removed the engine housing, but we have been unable to understand its workings. Amidst the myriad cables and glass lozenges he discovered a woman’s pelvis.

These events and others have led the crew to believe that this is a haunted vessel. But how can that be? Can any consciousness survive death? If an answer to this question exists, then it must surely lie in Unmer lore, being so interwoven with infinity itself. An object viewed outside of Time must encompass every one of its states of being, from the nothingness before creation to the nothingness afterwards. And yet what if that object – a ship, for example – encompasses the essence of something that is larger than the physical universe, larger even than Time itself?

Is infinity woven into the fabric of this miserable ship?

Might it not then continue to act as a vessel for its dead crew?

Whatever the cause or the crucible turns out to be, there seems little doubt that a malign will is at work here. The chronographs and compasses we salvaged from the Mistress refuse to work here, and yet many of the Unmer trove artefacts we carried over have suddenly sprung to life, each glowing, chattering, or screeching as its dormant electrical fluids are reanimated. Most of the fresh produce we managed – in our great haste – to bring aboard has already rotted. It is as if the deadship’s own corruption has flowed from its pores. Lucille suggested I delay the rot by freezing the stores in crespic salts, but I required every ounce of those chemicals to keep my last phial of void flies from thawing.

Everyone aboard has been troubled by nightmares.

I myself am haunted by visions of the Mistress’s demise. Her loss has affected me deeply. She remained afloat for nearly two hours before the sea finally swallowed her. We stood upon the ironclad’s deck and watched her disappear into the red-green brine. Mellor’s second repair team had by then succeeded in cutting through into the engine room – but, alas, we could do nothing for the men trapped in that flooded compartment. The seawater had altered them beyond all hope of recovery.

Lucille has nightmares in which our son is dying, although these are undoubtedly caused by her fears over his persistently strange behaviour. Last night she awoke to discover that Jontney was missing from his cot, although our cabin door had been bolted. After a frantic search we found him crawling across the top deck towards the open sea. Lucille has now sworn to remain awake until we are safely home, but her exhaustion is evident.

The men avoid my gaze and say little to each other. Morale is fading, with anger swelling to fill the spaces. It is only a matter of time before violence breaks out. I must find a way to channel it before then. I fear someone will have to be sacrificed to save the others.

Objects have gone missing from my cabin, including two cans of water, a gem lantern, some coins and the Unmer spectacles. We have a thief aboard, a thief who seems intent on endangering the life of my son. Who here has the motive to do such a thing?

Someone knocked on the door. Maskelyne set down his pen and got up from the workbench. He opened the door to find Kitchener standing in the passageway. The sailor was standing over an open crate.

‘We found these in a hidden compartment under the hold,’ he said. ‘We were about to throw them overboard, but I thought I’d better check with you first.’

Maskelyne looked down at the open box. It was almost completely full of dust, but he could see the edges of artefacts partially buried in there: heavy iron rings, wrapped with wires. He brushed away the dust and picked one up. The windings felt hot to the touch. A foul, burned metal odour came from them. ‘How many are there altogether?’ he asked.

‘Twelve in each crate,’ Kitchener said. ‘And we pulled five crates out of the compartment. We stored our supplies down there first, but they rotted so fast you wouldn’t believe. I had a few of the men start carrying what was left up into one of the bow cabins, while Roberts and me went looking for the source of the problem. We found the compartment quickly enough.’ He hesitated. ‘It wasn’t just the rot, you see? The supplies had been moving about too.’

‘Moving?’

‘Our own boxes wouldn’t stay in one place. We’d leave them alone for an hour, and come back to find that they’d slid right across the floor, like somebody had been moving them when nobody was looking. The men… well, you know how things go, sir. Talk of hearing whispers when no one was around, that sort of thing.’

Maskelyne touched his dust-smeared fingers to his tongue. ‘Tastes like…’

‘Bone marrow,’ Kitchener said.

‘It’s an amplifier,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Unmer Brutalists used the consumption of human tissue to increase their energy.’ He turned the ring over in his hand. It looked quite dead now. What else, he wondered, could it amplify? ‘The effects you witnessed are just residual, amplification of decay, inertia, voices.’

‘Then they go overboard, sir?’

‘All of them.’

The crewman looked relieved.

‘Except this one,’ Maskelyne added. ‘I’ll keep it for study.’ He placed the device on his desk. ‘Is there anything else?’

Kitchener hesitated. ‘It’s the wheel console, sir,’ he said. ‘Ab-ernathy got the inner sleeve open.’ He rubbed his eyes and then took a deep breath. ‘It’s full of bones. We think maybe five or six infants.’

Maskelyne nodded. ‘Human sacrifices. Tell Abernathy to close it up again before it unsettles the crew. What’s our situation with water?’

‘The purifier’s still acting strangely, captain. The stuff coming out of it looks like urine and tastes about as good. Most of us are drinking it anyway. Got no choice.’

‘Who’s not drinking it?’

‘Duncan, Abernathy, a few of the others. They say they’d rather die.’

Their situation was deteriorating far more quickly than Maskelyne had expected. At his rate, most of his crew would be dead before the ship made it back to Scythe Island. He sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do. We need Abernathy with his wits intact. In the meantime, report anything else unusual to me.’

When Kitchener left, he returned to his journal and added a few final words.

Whoever our thief is, I will make a martyr of him.

Ethan Maskelyne, Unnamed Unmer Icebreaker.

Ianthe’s heart was racing as she returned to the quiet darkness of her own body. Maskelyne’s thief was closer to him than he could possibly imagine. But how could he ever suspect his own child?

She reached under her bunk and grabbed the children’s blanket she’d hidden there and then unfolded it on her lap. There lay the spectacles Jontney had stolen for her, the lenses and engraved silver frames gleaming like treasure. Ianthe looked down at them for a long moment. Then, carefully, she slipped them over her eyes.

The cabin blossomed into existence before her, an explosion of light in the darkness. It was accompanied by a strange crackling sound that quickly faded. There was barely room to stand up and turn around, and yet there now seemed to be more crammed into this tiny space than in the whole of the outside world: the grain of the ancient timber panelling, the warped floor, her bunk, the black iron door handle and its keyhole. Moreover, she could hear the slosh of the waves against the hull, the ship booming and groaning all around her – hear them with her own useless ears!

Ianthe drank deeply of these new sensations, hardly able to control her excitement. Everything here appeared normal, bright and clear, without the flickering silver auras she had witnessed through Maskelyne’s eyes. The spectacles, she supposed, had not been designed to be worn by two people at once.

But then she noticed something strange. Her bunk was no longer made up with the fresh sheets Lucille had given her, and her clothes were no longer piled in the corner where she’d dumped them. The cabin was entirely empty of everything she’d brought in here. Nothing remained but the dismal old walls. Whatever had happened to Maskelyne in the captain’s quarters was happening to her, too. Objects were vanishing.

Could the goggles only perceive Unmer items?

Ianthe raised her hand in front of her face. There was nothing there at all, not even a trace. She looked down at her own body. Nothing. She was invisible, a ghost in her own cabin.

She slumped down on her bunk again, now gripped by despair. Why, when she’d finally been giver the means by which to see, should her vision be so fatally flawed? What use were these lenses if they turned everything important into air?

Perhaps one could adjust the lenses?

Slowly, she turned the little wheel on the side of the frames. The cabin flickered violently, and that same crackling sound harried her ears. For a moment everything became blurred and indistinct. Her pile of clothes did not reappear. She spun the wheel around further now, tears now welling in her eyes. The cabin glowed with a phosphorous yellow light, and then abruptly became quite dark. She gasped with fright. Had she broken the blasted things? But then she realized she could still perceive variations in the deep shadows. For a moment it looked as if she was standing in a woodland. Was that the sound of wind rushing through the trees? The image flickered again and abruptly dissolved to complete black.

Frustrated now, Ianthe twisted the wheel all the way forward until it stopped.

The cabin became a shuddering blur again and then came into sharp focus. She thought she had glimpsed something moving quickly around her, like a passing shadow, but now that the lenses had settled she couldn’t see anything like that now.

She could, however, see her clothes. They had appeared in the corner. Ianthe raised her hand in front of her eyes again, and this time she could perceive it quite clearly. She sprang up from the bunk and clapped her hands and laughed out loud. Everything around her was finally as it should be: the clothes, the sheets on the bunk, Jontney’s blanket. The spectacles worked!

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 it.

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.

Granger’s former sergeant and partner looked up, then stood up and stared out through the glass.

Garstone indicated Creedy’s tank. ‘That one still retains his senses,’ he said. ‘He’s only been submerged a week or so. I’ll go downstairs and fetch you some chalk and a slate.’

‘Stay where you are,’ Granger said. He walked over to Maske-lyne’s desk, snatched up some papers, then reached for the pen. But he stopped. Something was bothering him. He glanced back at Creedy’s tank and noticed three identical pens lying on the floor in there. Granger stepped back and studied the floor in front of the desk, where a slender gap betrayed the presence of a trapdoor. He grunted, then stepped to one side of the trapdoor before removing the pen. The trapdoor fell away, slamming against the inside of a shaft. From the darkness below came the smell of brine.

Granger started to write his message on a sheet of paper.

‘Please,’ Garstone said. ‘Those are my master’s private papers, his work, his experiments. He’ll kill me if they are spoiled.’ He came over to the desk, opened one of the drawers and took out a slate, which he handed to Granger.

Granger threw the slate aside and continued to scribble over Maskelyne’s documents. Then he strolled over to the Mare Lux tank and held up his message to Creedy.

WHERE IS THE GIRL?

The brown seawater made Creedy seem huge and distorted. His eye lens dilated. He picked up a stub of chalk and a slate from the floor of the tank and wrote his reply.

FUCK YOU.

Granger scrawled another message on the back of the paper.

TELL ME, OR YOU DIE.

Creedy gave him an ugly grin. He wiped his slate clear and wrote:

COME GET ME.

Granger returned to the desk, where he gathered up all of Maskelyne’s documents. He scrunched them up and piled them around the base of the tank, as Creedy looked on from his watery prison. Granger walked back to the desk and flipped it over. Maskelyne’s glass device fell to the floor and shattered. A wire extending from the underside of the desk disappeared into a hole in the floor.

‘What are you doing?’ Garstone protested.

Granger ignored him. He hunted around the workbenches, searching through the tools, until he found a flat-headed screwdriver. He used this to disassemble the writing desk. In a short while he had a decent-sized pile of wood, which he piled around the documents at the base of Creedy’s tank. Then he took out his knife and flint, and lit the paper. Flames blossomed.

Creedy thumped his fist against the inside of the glass. Garstone yelled at Granger to stop.

Granger held up his message again.

WHERE IS THE GIRL?

Creedy erased his slate and frantically scribbled a new message.

PUT OUT FIRE.

The flames had begun to take hold of the wood now, and were licking the walls of the tank, staining the glass black. Smoke began to fill the laboratory.

Creedy banged his slate against the tank.

PUT OUT FIRE.

Granger held his own sign higher.

WHERE IS THE GIRL?

Creedy scrubbed his slate clear again and wrote:

LOOKING FOR TROVE. WHISPRING VAL. M. REGIS.

The fabled treasure-hunting site. Dredgers had been scouring the Whispering Valley since its rediscovery three years ago. The valley held the ruins of an Unmer castle, destroyed and abandoned long before the rising seas had claimed it. The sheer number of weapons salvaged from the surrounding area led many captains to believe a great battle had taken place there.

Granger wrote another message.

HOW LONG?

But Garstone interjected. ‘Ten days,’ the servant said. ‘He won’t be back for months.’

Granger turned around and walked away from the tank. He left the fire burning.

‘I won’t let you do this,’ Lucille said.

Maskelyne didn’t look up from his work. He had snuffed the lights and opened the windows in order to examine the Pole Star through an unusually heavy refraction telescope. The device had been fitted with a lead plate over its larger lens, and yet, oddly, this did not obstruct his view. The Unmer archivist spectacles lay to one side. He had been too afraid to put them on again. ‘Do what?’ he muttered.

Her voice was low and cold in the darkness. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’

Maskelyne peered through the telescope. Removing the lead plate caused the stars to blink out of existence. Only by replacing the plate could he observe the heavens. He assumed there must be some disguised hole or slit in the metal. Or the lead itself must somehow be acting as an optical element, which meant that it could not be lead. ‘I had always intended for her conceive a child,’ he said. ‘Her talents ought to be passed on.’

‘But not like this,’ Lucille said.

‘This ship has unmanned the crew-’ he began.

‘What does that have to do with anything?’

‘The men are terrified,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Terrified of ghosts. Terrified of the dark. Terrified of their own shadows. Ianthe’s punishment is necessary to strengthen the command hierarchy aboard this vessel. I’ll go further, if I have to. If we are going to make it back home, I require my men to be more afraid of me than they are of the dead.’

‘Half of them will refuse to do what you ask.’

Maskelyne set down the telescope and turned to face her. He could hardly make her out in the gloom. ‘You’ve spoken to them?’ he asked. ‘Or was your conversation just with Mellor?’

She was silent for a long moment. ‘You never used to be so cruel, Ethan. What happened to you?’

He turned back to his experiments. ‘Any man who refuses to carry out my orders will be thrown overboard.’

After a moment he heard the door shut softly behind him.

Maskelyne found himself gazing down at the Unmer spectacles, the other experiments abandoned. He had put this off too long. He picked up the lenses and examined them carefully, trying to see how the whisper-thin optical elements interacted, but he might as well have been staring into an insolvable labyrinth. He wrote in his journal:

The spectacles show an interpretation of the past. Does the device simply record perceptions, or did the Unmer discover a way to make a link between minds located elsewhere in Space/Time? The Haurstaf command this talent, at least spatially. Is it possible that these spectacles are able to achieve the same feat, both spatially and temporally? Can I explain this in spatial and temporal terms?

He thought for a moment, then added:

What if space was simply a measure of variance, where variance is the product of both the distance and the difference between any two things?

If the distance between two particles is zero, the space between them must also be zero. Without space, attraction and repulsion forces cease to be.

If the difference between two particles is zero, they are fundamentally identical. In such a case, the space between them must also be zero, regardless of the distance that separates them. Effecting a change in one particle would therefore affect its twin, even if that twin was a thousand miles distant.

It might explain how certain Unmer artefacts worked across vast distances. The jealous knife, the seeing knife and even the trio of small pyramids Maskelyne had dredged up at the start of this voyage. He put pen to paper again.

Time = A measure of the difference between one thing and itself.

For Time to exist in Space, there must be some sort of change – some movement, spin, or oscillation. But if Space is simply an ever-shifting sea of variance, then Time must be relative. The Unmer’s ability to manipulate Space might conceivably be the very thing that allows them to manipulate Time.

This made sense in terms of Brutalist magic, since various Unmer devices appeared to quicken or slow the speed of time. Food decayed rapidly in the presence of amplifiers. The Unmer themselves lived for hundreds of years. But even if their sorcerous devices could alter the flow of Time, or observe the past, they could not change the past. However, if – as he began to suspect – the spectacles actually exchanged the wearer’s perceptions with those of a long-dead sorcerer, then that sorcerer would be able to peer out of the present owner’s eyes, which implied that the past could be changed. And that was a paradox.

Maskelyne paced the cabin. He raised the spectacles to his face but then lowered them again. He stopped and sat down on the bed and gazed at the lenses for a long time, cursing his own fear. Then he took a deep breath and put them on again.

Dragonfires raged across the icebreaker’s deck. Bodies lay everywhere. The Unmer Brutalist knelt among the flames, his flesh now scorched and blistered. He raised his fists as four great armoured serpents swept down from the skies. Conquillas rode the largest beast, his void bow now gripped in his gauntleted hands. He pulled back the bowstring and let an arrow fly.

Maskelyne turned the little wheel on the side of the frame, and the scene flickered backwards in time.

He was standing on the deck of the same ship. The electrical receiving tower loomed over him, its great torus shining in the midday sun. The black paint covering the iron deck and wheel-house was old, revealing rust in places, but the vessel itself had not yet been damaged. There were as yet no energy weapons situated behind the bulwarks.

They were coming into a harbour full of Unmer warships. Maskelyne could hear the droning of the ironclad’s engines, the rush of the sea against the hull and the pounding of metalworkers’ hammers from the shore. The orange flames of welders’ torches flickered on a score of docked vessels, while other – more sorcerous – lights danced here and there on ship and shore. They were refitting the fleet. After a moment, he recognized the city behind the water’s edge. It was Losoto, but not as it existed now. The sea was blue, as yet untainted, and perhaps thirty yards lower than current levels. Tiers of fine white buildings covered a steep hill above the harbour, the streets curling around the rocky headland where Hu’s City Palace now stood. The great winged shapes of dragons looped through the skies above, held in thrall by their Unmer masters.

The Unmer were preparing to meet the Haurstaf fleet at Awl, which meant Argusto Conquillas had already betrayed his kin. His lover, Queen Aria, would now break the Haurstaf’s pledge of neutrality and bring her Guild to war against those who had enslaved the East. And yet Maskelyne suspected Conquillas hadn’t given a damn about mankind. The legendary hunter loved nothing but himself and his precious dragons.

Maskelyne turned the wheel again, moving further back in time. The spectacles crackled as days and nights fluttered across his vision.

He found himself walking through an oak forest, most likely the Great Anean Forest to the north of Losoto. Emperor Hu had built his Summer Palace on a lake among these hills. The trail meandered down a slope towards a wooden shack with a stone chimney stack, from which Maskelyne could see smoke rising.

When he reached the porch, the door opened, and an old Unmer woman came out. She was wearing simple peasant clothes. She looked up at him and smiled. And then she hugged him fiercely.

‘It’s so good to see you,’ she said in Unmer. ‘Your father is down by the river, fishing, always fishing. Don’t you dare go and join him until you’ve eaten something.’

She ushered him inside. The interior was simple, but tidy: a few stools around a table, a bed with a colourful woollen blanket, a kettle sitting on a iron wood stove. A collection of small glazed animals stood on a shelf under the window. The old woman opened a cupboard over the sink and took out two cups.

Maskelyne turned the wheel again, forwards this time. The image of the shack blurred into pulsing shadows and lights. He heard a sound like gunfire, followed by a gravelly roar. He turned the wheel all the way forwards, to the present.

Blinding white light assailed his eyes. The noise rose to an intolerable screech. Maskelyne cried out and tore the lenses from his face again.

Gods in Hell.

It was as if some universal force or barrier prevented the dead sorcerer from viewing the present through Maskelyne’s eyes. Maskelyne could look back, but the sorcerer could not look forward beyond his own time. The cosmos would not allow a paradox. The spectacles were of little use to anyone but a historian.

Evidently Ianthe had never turned the wheel all the way forwards. Maskelyne thought about giving them back to her. She’d soon learn not to tamper with Unmer artefacts.

Later, perhaps later. He looked down at his notes, and added:

If Space is the distance and the difference between two objects, what happens in places when Space is zero?

Maskelyne rummaged through the box on the workbench until he found a matched pair of magnets. He pulled them apart, then pushed the north poles towards each other, until he felt them repelling each other. Then he turned one magnet around and noted the attraction between unlike poles. It seemed to him that the material in one pole was identical to the other. He picked up his pen again.

Can Space be stretched and compressed? Are the forces of attraction and repulsion witnessed between poles merely the tendency for such stressed spaces to reach an equilibrium determined by the mean variance of the surrounding universe? As the variance between two points is reduced, the energy required to further compress Space increases exponentially, until that space is compressed to zero. The energy contained in such minutiae must be considerable indeed. Is there a horizon where forces of attraction and repulsion no longer apply?

Could our universe have once been a single invariant point, perhaps one of many such points, containing vast amounts of Space in ultra-compressed form? What if the expansion and contraction of Space continues? Do tiny knots of super-compressed Space still remain in the heart of everything? Such knots must contain identical particles, trapped together and yet unable to repel each other until variance is introduced. Opposing particles would gather at the horizon (or horizons – if space is truly waveform), and yet be unable to come any closer. Furthermore, if compressed Space has no physical quantity, then each of these knots would act like a vacuum pump, drawing a constant flow of uncompressed Space (created by variant particles) into itself. What if we called this force gravity?

Maskelyne set down his pen again and gazed out of the window. The old ship creaked and groaned around him, rocked by the sea. He thought of the ocean currents, and it seemed to him that Space might flow in a similar fashion. It was all degrees of variance. He lifted one of the magnets and let it drop. It hit the workbench with a thud.

One wonders if it is possible for enough knots of super-compressed Space to gather together and thus provide an overwhelmingly powerful force of attraction? Such an object would become progressively larger as it sucked more and more of the cosmos into itself – stabilizing only when it reached a point of true invariance.

Is it possible to release the energy within these knots – within the heart of matter itself? The sudden expansion of Space must surely be absorbed by the particles around it, radiating outwards over time until equilibrium is achieved once more. If this assumption is correct, then these radiation waves created by the birth of the universe itself must still be detectable. Indeed, the universe must continue to expand wherever knots of super-compressed Space are split apart. To an observer at any point of expansion, it would seem that that point was itself the heart of the cosmos. Ultimately, variance might only exist between a few massive knots of ultra-compressed Space. Space will thin as the universe dies. But as long as a trace of variance remains between the last dark leviathans, then a breath of Space remains. Like massive ships sailing a vaporous and ever-diminishing sea, it is not inconceivable to imagine a collision between them. Were such a collision to occur, these ships might break apart, spilling their holds and thus creating a new sea through which the remaining vessels might continue to sail.

Maskelyne set down his pen and rubbed his temples. He was making too many assumptions, sailing down too many channels without stopping to look around him. How did any of this account for the electrical fluids used by the Unmer? Were they merely the propagation of variance? And what about the expansion of heated gas? Did adding energy to a system expand Space only when there was Space to expand? He lacked any mechanism aboard this vessel with which to test his theories. Such sorcery belonged only to the Unmer.

He gazed out of the window at the setting sun, marvelling at the ferocity of its fires, which now turned the sky and sea to blood. It was just one of countless stars in a cosmos he could not understand. The universe was so vast and unknowable, so far beyond imagination. Had the Unmer even fully understood what they were doing?

Lucille didn’t come to bed that night. Maskelyne lay in his bed and could not sleep. Whenever he closed his eyes he saw Unmer warships in a harbour that no longer existed. The old wooden ship pitched and growled, as gales whipped rags of spume from the Mare Lux and flung them against the cabin windows. It was growing cold.

At some point he must have slept, because he woke in the dark before dawn, gasping and terrified, certain that someone had placed the Unmer spectacles over his eyes. He could not shake the feeling that someone had been watching him.

Had he been dreaming?

He recalled something…

Adrift in the vacuum, spheres of starlight expanding into dead vacuum. He had dreamed of an explosion in the darkness, a great fuming bubble of energy, its edges uncertain. It grew larger than imagination. He realized that the particles of light were separating as they flew apart, leaving waves of energy in their wake, leaving variance. There could be no space between them because it had not yet been created. Space and Time existed only in the great froth of energy they left behind. The shortest distance between different particles was a wave. Space itself was merely the potential between any two points. He saw the universe as ripples of energy expanding across a pond and bouncing back, but the pond did not really exist, only the ripples.

The dull glow of morning shone through the windows. Maskelyne sat up and shivered. He must have fallen asleep again. He got up and got dressed and then took a long draught of water from his personal supply. Then he glanced at his journal.

At the bottom of the page he spotted a paragraph that he didn’t recognize. He sat down slowly, and picked up the journal. The passage was undoubtedly written in his handwriting, but he had no recollection of ever doing so. It was a riddle.

Two brothers were separated at birth. They lived in the same house, and often spoke to one another at the supper table, although they never met. Each married the same two women, who bore them the same two sons. The world perceived them as mad, and yet they themselves perceived the world as quite normal. What quality did the brothers lack?

Maskelyne felt queasy and woolly-headed, as though the lenses had given him a hangover. Was he now writing things in his sleep? How on earth had Ianthe managed to wear them for so long?

He called for Kitchener to inquire about their progress and was told that the stocks had been built and bolted to the midships deck. Maskelyne instructed him to assemble the crew. He did not ask about his wife. He did not want to know where she was.

He went back to his journal.

My experiences with the lenses lead me to believe that Unmer sorcery is concerned with variance. If our universe is an expanding sea of variance, and if it does indeed conglomerate in places to form knots of ultra-compressed Space, thinning the remaining cosmos, then might our universe be only one of such spatial reactions? Should invariance not exist between separate universes, even if it is nothing more than a slender thread? Have the Unmer found one or more of these threads? Are they somehow able to manipulate them, to transfer energy and matter between them? Is there a network, a series of hidden tunnels that reach beyond our own universe?

One wonders if a map of such paths exists. Is this the object I have been looking for? Is this what the deranged Drowned wish me to find? A human man with knowledge of such pathways could wield the same terrifying powers as the Unmer, while remaining immune to the Haurstaf.

Compared to Unmer sorcery, the Haurstaf’s mental powers seem crude and simple. And yet they are devastatingly effective. If the Unmer are the wizards of a thousand wavelengths, the Haurstaf are the masters of one. That the latter should have so much power over the minds of the former cannot be a coincidence. The Unmer have disturbed the natural order of the cosmos, and the cosmos has reacted to restore equilibrium.

It occurs to me that the Unmer, so used to wandering the halls of infinity, perhaps perceive this tiny world with indifference. And yet, for Jontney’s sake, I cannot afford to do the same.

Ianthe had been secured in the stocks. The men stood around in silence. Maskelyne closed the sterncastle hatch behind him and walked over. Ianthe was staring absently at the deck, breathing heavily. He looked around for Lucille, but she was nowhere in sight.

‘Strip her,’ he said to Mellor.

The first officer nodded.

‘Wait.’

Maskelyne turned to see his wife, now pushing through the crowd of men. She was carrying Jontney in her arms.

‘I thought your son could learn something from this,’ she said.

Maskelyne just glared at her.

‘He ought to know what sort of man his father is.’

‘Take him inside,’ Maskelyne said.

Lucille didn’t move.

‘Take him inside!’

She stared at him defiantly. Jontney began to cry, his sobs the only human sound upon that deck.

Maskelyne was losing respect with every passing moment. He couldn’t allow himself to be humiliated like this, not now – when their very survival depended on it. Lucille was forcing him into a situation where he’d have to hurt her to protect her. Didn’t she realize how self-destructive her actions were? And then in a flash of inspiration he saw the truth. She wanted to push him. She wanted him to hurt her. Nothing else made sense. She was trying to help him. He was almost overwhelmed with a feeling of love for her.

‘Mellor,’ he said breathlessly, ‘Take my son inside.’

The first officer hesitated for a heartbeat, then stepped towards Lucille.

‘No,’ she said.

Mellor reached for the boy.

Jontney shrieked.

Lucille turned away, but Mellor already had a grip of the child’s jumper.

‘Don’t,’ she said.

She tried to get away. Mellor scuffled with her, trying to pull the child free from her arms. She struck out at him repeatedly with her free hand, scratching his face, but Mellor did not retaliate. Jontney howled.

And suddenly Mellor had the boy in his arms. He broke away, walking swiftly towards the sterncastle.

Lucille was sobbing now. ‘Don’t do this, Ethan, please. I know you think you have to, but you don’t.’

She was playing her part perfectly. At that moment this poor sobbing wretch of a woman looked more beautiful to him than ever before. His heart swelled with love. He made a fist and swung it at her head, punching her across the temple. She staggered but didn’t fall, and then looked up at him with wide, stunned eyes. He smiled and hit her again, much harder.

This time she went down. She clamped a hand to her nose and it came away bloody.

‘You coward!’ she cried.

He kicked her in the chest, and heard her gasp. He felt the weight of her body move against his boot. She began to wail. Snot and blood bubbled from her nose. She beat the palms of her hands against the rolling deck. ‘You’re a coward, Ethan,’ she said again. ‘That’s why you do these things. You’re afraid of your men, of me, of everyone you’ve ever met. You’re afraid because you don’t understand them. All these foolish theories you make up to justify everything… the truth is, you’re just a coward.’

Maskelyne recognized every word she spoke for the sacrifice that it was. She was trying to make it easier for him to punish her. The thought made his heart shudder with pain and love. Each blow he administered hurt him more than it hurt her. He wanted to pick her up and carry her away, and yet by doing so he would be betraying her. He wavered for an instant. He didn’t know if he could match her courage.

She spat at him.

He was about to respond when he heard Mellor shouting. ‘Ships to port.’

The first officer stood by the sterncastle hatch, gazing out to sea. Maskelyne realized that every man of the crew was looking in the same direction or moving to the port side to get a better view.

‘Men-o’-war,’ someone shouted. ‘Two of them.’

Maskelyne could see them now: two old, Irillian tall ships, their hulls clad in red dragon scale. They were three-masted, with foretops on their bowsprits and silver cutwaters. The fire-power from any one vessel’s triple gun decks would be enough to reduce the Unmer icebreaker to toothpicks. They were running near to full sail, despite the gales, and they were headed this way.

‘It’s the Haurstaf,’ Ianthe said.