Sea Of Ghosts

CHAPTER 14
HOW TO SINK A SHIP

Granger turned off the gas torch, lifted his mask and examined the cable welds with eyes blurred by exhaustion. He had secured the heavy tow line by wrapping it around three of the gun deck’s steel-reinforced dragon-bone arches before finally welding it fast. He glanced over at the rearmost cannon hatch, through which the cable disappeared. The bulkhead had buckled under the strain, but it would hold well enough. Raising the back of the gun carriage with a chain winch had allowed him to give the harpoon the required trajectory – down into the stern post where it met the waterline – but the recoil had badly damaged the old cannon itself.

Finding everything secure, he wondered if he ought to check on the engines. He was pushing them close to their design limits. But he felt too weary to venture down there right now. The helm was locked on course, the man-o’-war secured behind him, and he had fuel enough to drag the bastard for a hundred leagues – more than enough to take them where he needed to go. The thing about men-o’-war was that they had a deep draught. And the thing about the Excelsior was that she had much a shallower draught. And that was going to make her mightily easy to ground in coastal waters.

But now he badly needed sleep.

He wandered aft to the emperor’s private suite.

Hu’s living areas comprised a warren of deeply lustrous rosewood, hauled up from undersea forests. Some of the blood-coloured beams looked thousands of years old. Free-flowing partitions and arches made from the boughs of once-living trees divided the space between the hull into numerous nooks, each illuminated by a different-coloured gem lantern. It gave the impression of wandering through a woodland carnival. The furniture had been made in the same style, all rich dark curves lacquered to a high sheen – the sort of rustic elegance popular in Losoto that was neither rustic nor, Granger felt, particularly elegant.

In the largest of these convoluted wooded spaces Granger found an enormous circular bed set on eight gilt pedestals, each carved into the image of Hu himself. He frowned at it with disapproval but sat down anyway and took off his boots. He lay back into a mattress as soft as air and found himself staring up at his own grotesque reflection. The emperor had fitted a mirror to the ceiling. He sat up again and rubbed his eyes and went to find the head.

Hundreds of bottles, tins and jars packed the wooden shelves above the sink – a formidable collection of perfumes, lotions, medicines and creams. Granger picked up a jar of Potelemy’s Canker Sore Solution, popped it open and sniffed the contents. The odour brought a brief smile to his face. Permanganate of potash. He’d once had Banks and Creedy mix this stuff with bottles of Doctor Cooper’s Famous Sweetwater to make liquid fire. They’d poured the lot down the air shaft of an enemy bunker in Dunbar. With the right mixture of toiletries you could burn a man’s skin clean off.

While he took a piss he let his gaze wander over the shelves – Butterflower Soap, Parafranio’s Wonder Water, Sparkling Eye Drops, Face Polish, Silk Lustre Dust, Royal Lady Skin Soft Cream, Fragrance of the Glade – mentally sorting the explosive components and combustibles from the useless stuff. Most of these powders and potions cost more than he’d made in a month’s soldiering. Even the tins could be utilized by submerging them in lye and filling balloons with the explosive gas given off. It appalled him that any man could waste such potential by slapping it on his face.

He flushed the head, then went back to the bed chamber and eased his wounded body down into the sheets. That horrible, burning-eyed visage stared back at him from the mirror in the ceiling. It occurred to him that Ianthe might look through his eyes, so he closed them. He lay there for a long time, gazing into the darkness behind his eyelids, thinking about her. Then he got up again and went back to the head. He took the jar of Royal Lady Skin Soft Cream from the shelf and weighed it in his hand. Stupid thing. But he opened the jar anyway and scooped some out and rubbed it into the leathery folds of his face.

After he’d finished, he lay back down on the bed. That hideous face in the ceiling mirror, now daubed with white cream, mocked him. Granger grabbed the sheets and pillows from the bed and set off back to the bridge. It made more sense to sleep there, after all.

‘What do you want?’ Briana asked.

Maskelyne looked up from his writing desk. ‘Sister Marks,’ he said. He set down his pencil and stood up. ‘Actually, I want to help you.’

Briana glanced around the stateroom. This luxurious accommodation was usually reserved for visiting clients, and no expense had been spared on the deep Evensraum rugs, gilt furniture and clamshell lantern shades. Lucille was reclining on a white leather carasole bench with a glass of wine in her hand. Her bruises looked shocking in the bright white light. Painted toys lay scattered across the floor around Maskelyne’s son, who took one look at Briana and then crawled over to hide behind his mother’s legs.

‘As I understand it,’ Maskelyne said, ‘Colonel Granger has sunk your escort ships and is now dragging this vessel to some unknown destination.’

Briana opened her mouth to speak, but Maskelyne held up his hand.

‘The harpoon is lodged in the Herald’s stern post below the waterline,’ he went on, ‘making it impossible to reach without diving equipment – which, of course, you lack. Nevertheless, our kidnapper cannot board us, nor fire upon us without risking the life of his own dear child.’

‘He’s-’ Briana tried to interject.

‘Furthermore,’ the metaphysicist added, ‘Colonel Granger must assume that you have already summoned aid telepathically, and so he must act quickly. What, then, are his options?’

‘Obviously,’ Briana said, ‘he’s going to turn this kidnapping into a political statement.’

Maskelyne’s eyes opened in mild surprise. ‘Precisely,’ he replied. ‘How many cultures have found themselves liberated because they could not afford the psychic services their own enemies relied upon?’ His dark eyes gleamed. ‘What do you imagine would happen, for example, if our renegade colonel decided to run the Haurstaf flagship aground on the Evensraum coast?’ He smiled. ‘Have you ever seen an animal carcass lying across an ant trail? The bones are so clean they look like they’ve been polished.’

Briana smiled thinly.

‘Would I be correct in assuming you haven’t contacted Awl yet?’

‘I’m perfectly capable of dealing with this situation myself, Mr Maskelyne.’

‘Well, quite,’ he said. ‘We wouldn’t want your sisters to think you incapable, would we?’

Briana felt her face redden. ‘Be careful, Mr Maskelyne. You are in no position to lecture others.’

‘I apologize,’ Maskelyne said. ‘I meant no disrespect.’

‘Of course not,’ Briana replied. She placed her hands on her hips and gazed around the room, thinking. Jontney peered out from behind his mother’s legs, but Lucille avoided her eyes. Finally, she faced Maskelyne again. ‘Well, what do you propose?’

He indicated the door. ‘If I can just have access to my equipment?’

The Unmer artefacts salvaged from the deadship had been packed into crates and stacked across the breadth of the Herald’s hold, lashed down under oilcloth. Maskelyne immediately began untying cords and pulling the coverings aside. While Briana waited nearby, the metaphysicist uncovered boxes of telescopes and prisms, and nautical instruments taken from the Unmer ironclad, along with crates of brine-damaged goods that looked more like seabed trove. Finally, he gave a grunt of surprise and pulled something out. It was a heavy iron ring, wrapped in wire and covered in grey dust. He blew away some of the dust and held it up.

‘What is that?’ she asked.

‘An amplifier,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘It uses one form of energy to amplify another.’ He turned it over in his hands. ‘I strongly recommend you throw it over the side before all the fresh produce aboard begins to rot.’ He set the ring down again and continued rummaging around in the trove for a while longer. Eventually he gave a sigh. ‘My blunderbuss,’ he said. ‘It isn’t here.’

Briana shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea where it is.’

‘It was in a long, narrow box,’ he said, ‘packed with crespic salts to keep it cold.’

‘They might have put it in the arms locker.’

Briana summoned the lieutenant at arms, who led them to the arms locker, where they did indeed locate a box fitting Maske-lyne’s description. The metaphysicist opened the lid and took out the weapon. It was made of brass and dragon-bone, with a dark glass phial fitted underneath the stock. Curls of ice smoke rose from its flared barrel.

Maskelyne grinned like someone who had encountered an old friend. ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘We’ll have that line off in an instant.’

Briana frowned. ‘You plan to shoot it?’

‘I do.’

‘With that old thing?’

He nodded.

She felt like she’d been swindled. ‘That’s your great plan?’

‘This old thing is no ordinary weapon,’ Maskelyne said, holding the gun towards her. ‘This phial contains Unmer void flies.’

A moment of silence passed between them.

‘Crespic salts are used to regulate the temperature of the ammunition,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Once frozen inside this phial, the flies remain quite inactive. The barrel is designed to act as a thermal gradient along which the flies are induced to pass once the phial is punctured, thus creating a directional vortex of considerable destructive force, while preserving both the weapon and its operator from harm.’

‘You brought void flies aboard my vessel?’

‘Your crew brought them aboard.’

‘And you didn’t think to tell anyone about it?’ Briana lifted her hands in exasperation. ‘What would have happened if they’d got loose?’ She shuddered to imagine the bloodshed such an event would have caused – a ship riddled with tiny holes; a crew riddled with tiny holes.

Maskelyne grinned again. ‘Now that we have established the worth of such a weapon in our present circumstances,’ he said, ‘we can start to negotiate a price.’

‘A price? For what exactly?’

‘Void flies aren’t exactly easy to come by, you know.’

The Herald’s engineers had constructed a wooden derrick overhanging her stern, allowing a man to be lowered down over the rear of the ship to the smashed rudder by way of a pulley system. First officer Lum looked on as two of the crew hauled their companion back up again.

The first officer snapped to attention as Briana and Maskelyne arrived. ‘Ma’am.’

‘What’s the verdict, Mr Lum?’ Briana asked.

‘We’ve completed our first inspection now, Ma’am.’

The two sailors helped the man swinging from the derrick back onto the deck. He took off his brine goggles and gloves and faced Lum. ‘The rudder’s in bad shape, but it ought to give us some manoeuvrability,’ he said. ‘That harpoon’s in a tricky place though. Buried in solid from what I can see, about a foot under the waterline. I can’t even get close to it because of the waves. I don’t know how he got it in there using one of those old Ferredales. It’s either the luckiest shot or the finest piece of marksmanship I’ve ever seen.’

‘Can you hook the line?’ Lum said. ‘Pull it up?’

The other man shrugged. ‘You’ve got the full weight of the Herald pulling against it, sir. We might be able to rig something up, but we’d brisk tearing off the whole stern post. Then you’d be looking at a hull breach.’

Maskelyne leaned on his blunderbuss and peered down over the side of the ship. He lifted his head, following the line of cable across the waters to the steam yacht some distance away. Then he raised the gun to his shoulder and sighted on the yacht.

‘Wait!’ Briana said. ‘What are you doing?’

‘Two birds,’ Maskelyne said. ‘One stone. If I sever the cable at this end, Granger will merely lose his catch. But if I shoot it out at the other end, the flies will pass through the cable, the ship and anything inside the ship. We’ll leave him with a thousand tiny holes in his hull and, with any, luck, one or two in his own skull.’

‘That’s got to be two hundred yards. Let one of my marksmen take the shot.’

‘Accuracy is not required,’ Maskelyne said. ‘This weapon produces a vortex of flies.’

‘You might miss the cable altogether.’

Maskelyne lowered the gun and turned to face her. ‘You haven’t seen one of these weapons discharge, Miss Banks. A stream of void flies is quite unstoppable. Were I to fire this straight down, the shot would pass straight through the world and out the other side. With the right trajectory, I could easily, from my present location, reduce any city on this planet to rubble.’ He moistened his lips. ‘Now, will you please stand aside and let me take the shot before the phial thaws out?’

The crewmen and their first officer looked at Briana for an explanation, but she didn’t feel inclined to provide one. She stepped back as Maskelyne raised the gun to his shoulder again. Then she took another step back.

A click came from the blunderbuss.

And then a hazy jet of black particles erupted from its flared barrel, crackling like fat in a frying pan as it sped away across the sea. The wind howled suddenly in Briana’s ears. She watched as the stream of flies widened into a spiralling, cone-shaped vortex that momentarily engulfed Granger’s steam yacht and then abruptly disappeared into the sea with a furious popping sound. The deck under her feet pitched forward suddenly and then rocked backwards as the whole ship slowed to a halt. The towing cable had been severed.

Briana could smell ozone lingering in the air.

Maskelyne lowered his gun, then turned to her and smiled. ‘Tell your captain to raise the sails,’ he said.

Something woke Granger, although at first he could not say exactly what. He had been dreaming of Evensraum, finding himself pushing through the crowds of refugees fleeing Weaverbrook after the bombardment. They’d been shuffling across ashen fields, ragged figures heading away from the burning town. Granger had been trying to find Ianthe, although in reality she hadn’t yet been born. He had felt compelled to search nevertheless, calling out her name, desperate to find this girl that he knew did not exist.

As his bleary eyes took in his surroundings – the navigation console, the helm, the tangle of red sheets around his legs – he perceived that something was wrong. The quality of light here in the bridge seemed different somehow. It felt colder than it should. He realized he could no longer hear the sound of the yacht’s engines.

He sat up, aware of a dull stiffness in his joints and noticed blood on his right elbow. Tiny puncture marks had appeared on both sides of the joint, as though a needle had been pushed right through him. The wound began to nip at once. He felt a second prickling sensation in his right ear, and lifted a hand to examine it. His fingers came away bloody. The top of the ear was bleeding, too.

He got up and flexed his limbs and as he did so he noticed light shining through numerous perforations in the bridge walls and windows. It looked like someone had blasted the walls with buckshot. He strode over to the window and examined a number of the little holes closely. The edges were sharp, with no cracks in the glass at all. Behind the glass the cold brown sea heaved against a leaden horizon. Thunderclouds towered in the west and in places he could see sheets of rain pinned against the sky like grey gauze. He opened the window and looked aft.

The captured Haurstaf warship wasn’t there.

Granger threw open the door and stepped out onto the weather deck surrounding the wheelhouse. Icy gales buffeted his face. His skin prickled with the electric presence of the approaching storm. He walked around the outside of the bridge, scanning the horizon in all directions. There. A sail moved across the sea to the south-west, heading directly across the wind. It could only be the Irillian Herald.

He was about to go back inside, when he noticed that the Excelsior was sitting lower in the water. Realization that she’d been holed crept into his pores like the sea itself.

He ran back inside and hurried down the main stairwell to the engine-room level. Seawater sloshed between the bulkheads at the bottom of the steps. Countless tiny holes peppered the hull, the interior bulkheads and even the stairwell itself. Granger cursed. He knew what had caused this.

He waded into the cold, dark brine, and pushed open the door to the engine room. The stink of whale oil filled the whole chamber. Void flies had passed through scores of pipes, seawater pump housings and even the main block of the engine itself, causing fuel to leak from innumerable places. Thin shafts of light shone through the hull, while seawater continued to bubble up through a thousand perforations in the floor. He had no way to fix the pumps and seal all these leaks. Nothing he could do would prevent the Excelsior from sinking.

The Excelsior had two lifeboats: sixteen-feet-long wood-built skiffs with seating for twenty men, four sets of oars and hooped rails to support a storm cover. Between them, they might have held a third of her original crew. Both had been damaged by void flies, so he chose the soundest of the two and began sealing the holes with marine gum. By the time he’d finished, the sea had begun to lap across the Excelsior’s bow, leaving him minutes to load the smaller craft with supplies.

He grabbed some rope and a pile of bad-weather gear from a midships locker, then hurried back to the bridge for the old Valcinder compass, sextant, almanacs and his water flask. The emperor’s yacht was sloping down towards the bow, which meant the galley would be underwater already. He had no time to search the cabins or stores for food.

Waves broke across the bowsprit. The ship listed, then righted herself with a terrible groan, and then started to slide under the frothing brine. Seawater came surging up the main deck and lifted the lifeboat’s keel just as Granger climbed aboard. He cut her loose with his seeing knife and pushed off with an oar. A second wave took hold of the small wooden vessel at once, carrying her away from the stricken steam yacht and out into open sea.

The Excelsior sank in seconds. Granger watched from the lifeboat as the steam yacht’s wheelhouse tilted forward into the dark brown water. Two fathoms down, the portholes of the emperor’s suite burned a deep yellow, then grew dim. The stern lifted momentarily, and the funnels behind the bridge seemed about to topple. And then the whole ship slid down into the depths with a final sucking rush. The waters crashed and foamed and seethed in its wake. A heartbeat later, there was no trace of her but an oily slick on the surface of the waters.

Granger pulled his cloak more tightly around himself. Waves rose ten feet or more around the lifeboat, tossing the small vessel around like a cork. The wind blew steadily from the south-east, driving storm clouds and sheets of rain before it. It would be dark in less than an hour. He clambered over to the lifeboat’s stern and checked the storage locker. He found the whaleskin tarpaulin for the hoop rails, a tank of fresh water, a gem lantern and a sealed bag containing an officer’s pistol, powder and shot, a compass, a knife, spare flints and a signal mirror. None of it looked as if it had ever been used. There was no food.

He stowed the gear away carefully again and then slid two oars into their rowlocks and took a seat facing aft. Then he began to row after the Herald.

The storm raged into the night. Rain battered the lifeboat like grapeshot. Lightning pulsed in the western skies. In those moments of clarity, the heaving seas around Granger’s boat glittered like mounds of anthracite, massive and terrifying. Darkness returned, with thunder in its lungs. Water blurred the lenses of his storm goggles and sloshed against his boots in the bilge. By the light of his gem lantern he hauled the whaleskin tarpaulin over the hooped frame and fastened it down, forming a damp, salty tent over the open hull.

Six hours at the oars had left his muscles beaten. Granger crawled into the bow and tried to sleep, with only the thin wooden skin of the hull separating his body from a mile of brine below. He lay there for a long time, listened to the rain on the tarpaulin, the creaking planks and the furious concussions of the thunder. He wondered if Ianthe was listening too.

‘I couldn’t stop them from doing what they did to your mother,’ he said. ‘But I’m not going to let that happen to you.’ He felt suddenly foolish, talking to himself like this in the middle of the ocean. Was Ianthe even listening to him? ‘I’ll find you in Awl,’ he said, ‘even if I have to walk across the seabed to get there.’

He must have slept, for although it was still dark his joints had seized again, and the rain had stopped. The sea felt calmer. He got up and stretched, and lifted the shutter from the gem lantern. The storm canopy sagged over his head. A few inches of rain had collected there. He pricked a hole in the oilcloth with his knife and raised his mouth to catch the water that trickled through. It was pure enough, so he slaked his thirst and topped up his flask.

Then he pulled back the tarpaulin and looked out.

The storm had moved on to the north, leaving the skies overhead clear. A thousand stars sparkled in the heavens among the pale pink and blue wisps of nebulae. The sea shone like dark glass. The lifeboat rocked gently back and forth in low swells. Granger stood up and scanned the horizons, but he could not spot any sails. His breath misted in the freezing air. He was the only one breathing it for leagues around.

He took his position from the stars. Awl would be almost a hundred leagues to the north-west. He was about to sit down when he spotted Ortho’s Chariot racing overhead. The tiny light zigzagged erratically across the sky, then seemed to pause directly above him for an instant before shooting off again to the north.

An uneasy feeling crept into Granger’s stomach. For an instant he thought he had sensed the presence of an unnatural force. It was like the time he’d almost fallen from the makeshift bridge in Losoto’s Sunken Quarter. The cosmos had seemed to shift in some subtle way, although he couldn’t say how or why he felt this. He returned to his seat, took up the oars and began to row.

Time passed with nothing to mark it but the sound of the oars splashing through the water and the occasional grumble of thunder in the north. But then Granger heard a different sound, like the distant drone of a ship’s horn. He set down the oars and listened. After a moment he heard it again – a long, mournful bellow. It seemed nearer this time. He clambered over to the stern and took out the pistol, powder and shot from the storage locker. He loaded the pistol and tucked it into the belt of his breeches.

The sound resonated across the water again, louder now.

To starboard Granger spotted a faintly phosphorescent shape under the sea. As it drew nearer he saw that it was a whale, about three times the size of his boat, with an elongated body and a massive blunt head. He aimed the pistol at it, but did not fire. The creature glided under the lifeboat’s keel, about a fathom down, its black eye looking up at him.

A sudden splash off the bow made him wheel round.

A second whale had surfaced nearby. Its back arced out of the water as it blew out a jet of seawater. And then the great blade of its tail broke the surface and crashed down again, showering the lifeboat in brine.

The whales stayed with him for about an hour, until the sky began to lighten in the east. And then they dived down into that dark and fathomless brine. He heard them lowing for a while afterwards, but he didn’t see them again.

At dawn he found himself surrounded by a school of tiny silver fish, flashing like needles in the bromine waters. He might have made a net from his own shirt to catch them, but he had no means to boil them without spoiling his fresh water. So he sat there and watched them sparkling all around his hull, as bright and poisonous as drops of quicksilver.

He rowed until midday, when he stopped to take noon sight under a blazing sun. But the rocking boat frustrated his efforts. He threw the sextant into the jumbled pile of his storm-weather gear, too tired and too irritable to persist. The wind had turned easterly and slackened off to a stiff breeze, which did little to cool him. He set his course by dead reckoning instead, assuming he hadn’t drifted too far since dark. But he couldn’t be sure exactly where he was. A north-west course would bring him to Irillia eventually, if his water didn’t run out first. He’d seen nothing of the Herald all morning.

On the evening of the third day he spotted an erokin samal drifting three hundred yards to the south. The jellyfish had captured at least three sharks in its tendrils, turned their corpses into the bloated grey masses of flesh that it used to catch the wind. Granger rowed his boat due north away from the creature until he could no longer see it. Even so, he did not sleep well that night, unsettled by the thought of tendrils reaching under the tarpaulin and into his boat.

The next morning he found himself enveloped in rust-coloured mist. He had travelled farther north than he’d intended, reaching the border waters where the Sea of Lights met the Sea of Kings. Here the oily red currents of the northern sea mingled with the brown waters of the southern one, whorling around the hull like spilled paint. Their interaction produced the haze of fumes through which the sun now glowered. Granger put his goggles and storm mask on and set his back to the oars again, now pushing due west. He did not wish to encounter any sea life here.

And then he thought he detected an unusual noise in the mist – a high-pitched hum almost beyond his range of hearing. His eyes strained to see through the haze. Was that a shadow? He took his goggles off again. There was definitely something out there in the fog, something huge and dark. It could almost be the outline of a ship. Granger turned his boat around and began to row towards it.