Sea Of Ghosts

NOTICE OF WARRANT(110334)

Imperial Infiltration Unit 7 (the ‘Gravediggers’ – Cmdr Colonel Thomas Granger) is summarily disbanded with immediate effect, pending investigation of article 118 malfeasance. Warrants have been issued for the arrest of the following men:

Colonel Thomas Granger – RN348384793888

Sergeant William Patrick Creedy – RN934308459839

Private Merrad Banks – RN239852389578

Able Seaman Gerhard Tummel – RN934783898 Able Seaman Swan Tummel – RN09859080908

Issued without prejudice on behalf of his Majesty Emperor Jilak Hu.

He stared at the note for a long time. His shoulder began to throb with renewed vigour as his heart rate quickened, but he barely noticed it. He felt strangely numb. He looked at the young witch. ‘How did Sister Marks get this?’

The girl just shrugged. ‘She’s Haurstaf.’

‘What is it?’ Creedy asked.

Granger ignored him. ‘And why is she helping us?’ he said to the witch.

‘She-’ The girl suddenly stopped. ‘I’m not allowed to say.’ She paused for a minute, then nodded. ‘Politics.’

Creedy leaned forward. ‘You getting love letters from psychics now?’

‘She was the only one who liked his joke,’ Banks muttered.

‘What joke was that?’ Creedy asked.

‘The one about the emperor’s cock.’

‘Be quiet,’ Granger said. He took a deep breath. ‘Private Banks, Sergeant Creedy, we are now civilians. Emperor Hu has disbanded the Gravediggers.’

Nobody spoke.

‘We’ve been charged under article 118,’ Granger went on. ‘Attempting to escape active duty through self-inflicted injuries. Warrants already issued. They’ll be coming for us at any moment.’

Creedy roared. ‘Warrants?’

‘We’re fugitives.’

‘Son of a bitch.’

Granger felt suddenly light-headed. ‘Language, Sergeant,’ he said. ‘A direct insult to the emperor-’

‘Fuck him,’ Creedy snarled. ‘Fuck him and fuck the law. We ought to wring that powdered bastard’s neck.’ His eye had begun to bleed again, and a red patch was spreading into the bandage. He looked up again in disbelief. ‘Self-inflicted injuries?’

‘It’s close enough to the truth,’ Granger said. ‘I’m afraid I’ve let us down.’

‘You’re not taking sole responsibility for this one, Colonel,’ Swan said. ‘It was about time somebody said it to his face.’

‘I’ve been itching to have it out with him myself,’ Tummel said. ‘That pond lily has been living in a fantasy too long.’

Swan gave a derisory grunt. ‘Admiral of the Fleet.’

‘Captain of War,’ Tummel added.

The pair of them chuckled. They were taking great care to move silently through the yard behind the Fenwick Ale House, which only seemed to help their drunken voices carry all the further in the darkness. Private Banks shuffled along beside Granger, wrapped in his own thoughts, but Sergeant Creedy’s anger could be heard in the thump of his boots a short distance behind them.

When they reached the yard gate, Tummel glanced over his shoulder to where a yellow outline in the gloom marked the back door of the ale house. ‘When did you last clear the tab?’ he asked his brother.

‘Three days ago,’ Swan replied.

‘Shame. Noril’s usually good for a week.’

‘Quiet now,’ Granger said. He listened for a few moments at the gate, then eased it open. The five men filed out into the alleyway behind. All was silent, but for a tolling bell down by the harbour. Overhead, the city rooftops and chimneys sawed a jagged silhouette across the grand sweep of the cosmos, where the stars sparkled like fine particles of glass. The smell of brine filled Granger’s nostrils. He hefted his kitbag higher onto his shoulder and started walking.

They hurried along the alleyway without another word, until they reach the junction with the main thoroughfare. Granger held up his hand to halt his men. He peered from the shadows. Lamps burned in the windows of the traders’ houses on Wicklow Street, throwing cross-hatch patterns across the paving stones all the way down the hill to the harbour. The masts of trawlers and whalers cluttered the water’s edge like cattails. Stevedores were working on the quayside down there, unloading crates by the light from whale-oil braziers. On the peninsula side of the bay, the dock warehouses and sailors’ hostels clung to the cliffs under the shadow of the City Fortress.

Granger scanned the buildings around that black-water basin until he found what he was looking for. A group of nine Imperial soldiers were waiting outside the Harbour Freight Office, carbine rifles slung across their backs. He traced the road around to the shadowy mass of the dragon cannery situated at the breakwater side of the bay and spotted another unit guarding the entrance to the deepwater docks. This group was smaller – only two men.

‘Samarol,’ he muttered.

Banks moved to his side. ‘I always wondered if they could see in the dark.’

‘Better than most men,’ Granger replied. He thought for a moment. ‘We’ll reach it by sea.’ He pointed to an area several hundred yards west of the harbour, where a great expanse of partially submerged and roofless houses stretched out into the sea. ‘Out through the Sunken Quarter, around the breakwater and back in to the cannery landing ramp itself.’

‘You want to steal a trover’s boat?’

‘Borrow,’ Granger said. ‘There should be dozens of them hidden down there.’

‘That’ll be because trovers are shot on sight, Colonel.’

‘The emperor’s men will be looking landward tonight.’

Banks shrugged his agreement.

They cut straight across Wicklow Street and delved into the network of cobbled lanes that ran like veins down towards the Sunken Quarter. The town houses, like all those in Upper Losoto, were Unmer built, and their pillared marble facades reeked of arrogance. Many had been slavers’ homes, and the brick foundations of the old stock pens could still be seen in a few of the adjoining courtyards, now converted into gazebos, pergolas or fountains by the new owners. Granger wondered how many of those slaves had gone on to occupy their former masters’ homes after the Uprising. Not many, he supposed. The Unmer slavers had butchered their human chattel after the Battle of Awl, when the victorious Haurstaf navy had turned their ships east towards Losoto.

These streets had run with blood.

They passed through a small quadrangle where four grand, shuttered houses faced each other across the spider-web remains of an ancient spell garden. A faintly bitter aroma still surrounded the dead winter-wools, peregollins, spleenworts and liverworts. Sergeant Creedy covered his mouth and nose and muttered something about the inducement of dark dreams. Tummel and Swan ribbed him for the next two streets until Granger ordered them to be quiet.

The houses became more dilapidated as the men drew near to the sea. Smashed windows looked out into the lanes, the rooms inside dark. The stench of brine overpowered everything else. Granger found Banks at his side again. ‘The trovers in Ratpen Pennow hide their boats on the rooftops,’ the private said. ‘Small canoes. They lower them down at night.’

Granger shook his head. ‘This isn’t the Ratpen,’ he said. ‘We should be able to find an illegal mooring in one of the sunken ruins. By the last Imperial reckoning, there were two or three dozen of them.’

‘Planks on the wall?’

‘That’s what I was thinking.’

The private nodded. ‘With any luck we’ll find a cache as well. What did Creedy tell you about his cannery man?’

‘A cousin of a cousin,’ Granger said. ‘Ex-navy. Works as a descaler now.’ He shrugged. ‘Creedy trusts him, and the price is fair.’

‘I’ve been meaning to talk to you about that,’ Banks said. He hesitated for a long moment. ‘I never did get a chance to put very much away, sir. My old man back in the Ratpen lost his pension to some bad investments, so most of my salary went home to him and his sisters.’ He glanced back over his shoulder. ‘I don’t suppose Swan and Tummel are in much of a better state. You’ve seen them play cards.’

‘Don’t worry about it, Private,’ Granger said. ‘It’s been taken care of.’

Banks seemed about to say something, then changed his mind. Finally he said, ‘I’ll pay you back somehow, sir.’

‘I know,’ Granger said.

They arrived at a street running parallel to the coast. The houses here were utterly derelict, a crumbling bank of boarded-up windows and partially collapsed roofs. Graffiti covered the walls. Across the facade immediately before them, someone had scrawled in huge black letters:

WHY ARE WE PAYING TO KEEP THE UNMER ALIVE?

Most of the doors had been staved in, revealing cavernous rooms beyond. Granger poked his head through the nearest doorway. The reek of brine filled the darkness. Through an open doorway in the opposite wall, he heard the gentle slosh of sea-water coming from the rooms beyond. He glanced around. Nothing but wet rubble and the remains of an old fire.

They set off down the street, peering into each of the houses. After a short while Banks gave a low whistle and beckoned the others over to one particular house.

Inside, the room was as damp and miserable as any other, a gloomy, rubble-filled shell with two doorways in the opposite wall. The only thing different was a wooden plank leaning against the wall to the left of the door. Granger set down his kitbag, then picked up the plank and carried it over to the first of the doorways opposite.

It had been a kitchen once. The sinks had been ripped out and taken, but a rusted iron stove remained under the chimney stack. Most of the ceiling had collapsed, along with a good part of the roof above, and heavy beams lay strewn across the floor. A doorway led out into what must have once been a back garden or courtyard. The floor here was an inch deep in brine. In this gloom the brown water looked like tar.

‘There,’ Banks said. He was pointing to a place low on the back door frame. ‘You see those marks? Something has been knocked against the wood.’

Granger returned for his kitbag. He opened it and handed out hemp face masks and sailors’ goggles to his men. They wouldn’t need them unless the wind picked up, but it was best to be safe. With the lenses resting on his forehead, and the mask slung loosely around his neck, he traversed the kitchen again, stepping between mounds of rubble to keep his boots out of the brine. The back doorway led to a courtyard full of dark seawater. Steps vanished down into that toxic murk. Granger couldn’t tell how deep the water was, but it was unlikely to be more than a few feet here. Small waves came through an open gate in the back wall of the yard, pushing in from the lane beyond, and lapping around the edges of the enclosed space. Someone had built a number of stone piles leading out through that gate, like widely spaced stepping stones.

Granger lowered the plank between the doorway and the first pile, then turned back into the kitchen. ‘Bring me some of those ceiling beams,’ he said.

Soon they had constructed a rudimentary walkway out into the lane, which turned out to be a narrow channel running between the courtyards of opposing ranks of houses. The buildings further out were little more than roofless shells, all of them Unmer dwellings, except for the twelve Haurstaf watchtowers that loomed like a great henge over a walled section the Sunken Quarter. From here, the stone piles led away in both directions. They would have to lift planks and beams from the start of the walkway and lay them down in the lane ahead to progress any further.

Granger stared up at the watchtowers.

Banks followed his gaze. ‘It’s the size of that place gets me,’ he said.

‘You mean how large it is, or how small?’

‘Both,’ Banks replied. ‘That used to be the largest Unmer ghetto in the world. Sixty blocks in all.’ He blew through his teeth, then shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem so big when you think how many Unmer they managed to squeeze in there.’

Granger nodded. After the Uprising, the Haurstaf had refused to allow the liberated Losotan slaves to execute their former masters. Such genocide would have offered them no profit. Instead, they’d confined half a million Unmer souls to that one small part of the city and left twelve telepaths behind to form a psychic cordon around them. The Veil of Screams. How many Unmer had died trying to pass through that invisible barrier? It had been more effective than any tangible wall could ever have been. Losoto’s taxpayers had been paying for it dearly ever since.

Creedy frowned. ‘So we’re going the other way? That whole place is likely to stink of sorcery.’

Banks laughed. ‘An Unmer ghetto? There can’t be many places less likely to stink of sorcery. You try weaving a spell with a witch sticking psychic needles into your brain. The Unmer couldn’t even take a shit without Haurstaf approval.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you what, though, if I was a trover, that’s exactly the sort of place I’d hide my stash.’

Creedy’s frown dissolved. ‘You reckon there’s treasure in there?’

Banks shrugged. ‘Creepy old places like that have an aura of mystery about them. And that keeps the idiots out.’

Creedy turned to Granger. ‘We could check it out, Colonel.’

Granger shook his head. ‘We’re here to look for a boat, Sergeant. And that means locating an illegal mooring. Banks?’

‘It’s this way,’ the private said, jabbing his thumb in the opposite direction to the watchtowers.

‘That’s a crapping guess,’ Creedy said.

Banks sighed. ‘Look at those piles,’ he said, pointing further down the lane. ‘You see where the ichusan crystals are broken? Someone put down planks.’

They set off again, lifting beams from behind them and laying them down on the stone piles ahead. Soon they reached an opening in the seaward wall which led into another yard. The stepping stones vanished through the kitchen door of the house beyond. Banks crouched to study the surroundings closely, then nodded to Granger. They made a bridge over to the house.

The kitchen opened into a hallway blocked by a collapsed staircase. Someone had left a ladder in its place. Granger’s unit manhandled their planks and beams up to the first floor and carried them over rotten floorboards to the front of the house. Here an empty room overlooked a black canal clogged with mats of seaweed and rubbish from the still-living city. Brine sucked at the brickwork. It smelled like a sewer. The gap between this house and the one opposite was narrow enough to be spanned by the longest of their beams.

‘Goddamn rat’s maze,’ Creedy muttered as he slid the beam across to the first-floor window of the opposite house.

‘Nothing wrong with rats,’ Tummel said. ‘There’s good meat on rats.’

‘Very good,’ Swan agreed. ‘We had a little farm going in our attic. Rats as big as dogs we had, hundreds of them. We were going to sell them down the market.’

‘Rat stew with dumplings,’ Tummel said.

‘Rat on a stick,’ Swan added.

Creedy glared at them. ‘You pair make me sick,’ he said. He climbed up on to one end of the beam, tested it with his foot and then strolled across to the opposite house.

‘The man has no taste,’ Swan said. ‘It’s not as if he hasn’t eaten rat before.’

‘Best keep that quiet,’ Tummel said.

As Granger stomped over the makeshift bridge after Sergeant Creedy, he experienced a moment of dizziness. For an instant he wavered between the black, sucking brine and the stars cartwheeling across the heavens above. He halted and crouched on the beam until the moment passed.

‘Colonel?’ Banks was clinging to the window frame of the house behind, his hand outstretched.

Granger shook his head. ‘Lack of sleep,’ he muttered. But it had seemed to him something far more profound, as if the universe had just shifted around him. He looked down at the beam and noticed an old Unmer sigil carved into the grain: an eye encircled. This particular lump of wood had once been part of an Unmer ship. Hadn’t eye sigils been used to observe a ship’s crew from afar? Granger wasn’t entirely sure. So much of their understanding of Unmer sorcery was little more than conjecture. He stood up, careful to keep his heavy kitbag from unbalancing him. Creedy waited in the opposite room with his fists on his hips.

Granger crossed over the remainder of the bridge and ducked through the window into another dark bedroom.

‘Signs of life here, Colonel,’ Creedy said, shifting a pile of empty cans with the toe of his boot. ‘Trovers used this place recently.’ It was an observation that need not have been said, but Granger gave his sergeant a nod. Creedy had a habit of taking even the smallest opportunity to prove his worth when Banks was around.

The other three men arrived. Now that they were far enough from the occupied city to avoid detection, Granger opened his kitbag and took out a gem lantern. He handed it to Banks, who opened its shutters. Light flooded the dismal chamber. Tummel helped Swan pull the bridge across to their side, and then the whole group set off through the derelict house. The rooms had all been stripped bare. They filed along passageways still clad in peeling wallpaper with floral or mathematical designs. They peered out of glassless windows into drowned lanes and gardens steeped in darkness. They stepped over the skeleton of a dog. Openings smashed through the outer walls gave them access to adjacent buildings. And always Banks’s keen eyes kept them on the correct path through this brine-sodden labyrinth.

Finally they came to the doorway of a large attic. A square trapdoor occupied the centre of the floor beyond. The hatch was padlocked shut, but marks in the dust around it indicated it had been opened recently. Creedy was about to step through, when Granger seized his arm.

Creedy froze.

Granger slid his kitbag down from his shoulder. He held it out at arm’s length over the floorboards inside the doorway. Then, keeping a hold of the strap, he let the heavy bag drop.

The floorboards shattered where it hit the floor, falling into the darkness below. Granger heard the splash of water.

Banks looked down at the hole and blew through his teeth. ‘They must have chiselled into the floorboards from below.’

Granger nodded. ‘That’s what I would do.’

The men stepped over the hole and into the attic. Creedy broke the lock hinge with the butt of his hand-cannon and opened the trapdoor.

Two wooden canoes floated on brine four feet below the opening. Their mooring lines had been tied to a bent nail under the floor. Creedy moved to ease himself down through the opening, but Granger stopped him. He opening his kitbag again and pulled out a length of wire cord, which he attached to the handle of the gem lantern. Then he lay down on the floor, lowered the light down through the trapdoor and poked his head through after it.

The smell of that black brine made him cough. The canoes rocked gently in the centre of a broad chamber. Treasure-hunting equipment packed each narrow hull – the nets, lines and hooks the trovers used to haul up Unmer artefacts from the deep. A hole on the northern wall led out to the sunken lanes beyond.

Granger lowered the lantern even further, allowing it sink down beneath the surface of the poisonous seawater. As the light descended, it illuminated the flooded room below the canoes: bare brick walls, a rubble-strewn floor.

Banks’s voice came suddenly from behind. ‘Bloody hell.’

Three women and a boy stood under the surface of the brine, their corpse-eyes gazing up at the lantern above them. They waited, immobile and expressionless, their grey sharkskin flesh draped in the last tatters of their former clothing. Slowly, one of the women reached up her hands towards the light.

‘That one’s fresh,’ Tummel said. ‘Can’t be more than three or four days since they drowned her. The others are just about gone. The little one’s probably her son. Looks enough like her.’

Granger stared down at the people under the water. He’d heard of trovers drowning people to scour the seabed for treasure, but he’d never seen any until now. The victims’ personalities couldn’t survive for more than a few days. After that, they’d forget who they were. They’d drift away, become part of the sea itself.

‘Fucking trovers,’ Banks said.

Creedy peered down over his shoulder and laughed. ‘That is one phenomenally ugly bitch,’ he said. ‘You ask me, they did her a favour.’

Banks wheeled round and took a swing at Creedy. But the big man was way too fast for him. He knocked Banks’s blow aside with his elbow and then drove his fist into the smaller man’s stomach. Banks doubled over, gasping, and dropped to his knees. Creedy raised his hand to strike him across the back of the neck.

‘Sergeant!’ Granger said.

Creedy lowered his hand. He looked abashed. ‘Fucker started it,’ he said. He spat on the floor and then walked over to the doorway to be by himself.

Granger pulled up the lantern. He couldn’t do anything for the Drowned but leave them in peace. ‘Banks, Swan and Tummel, take the first canoe,’ he said. ‘Sergeant Creedy, you’re with me in the second.’

One by one they dropped down into the small craft. Granger passed down his kitbag to Creedy. Once it was safely stowed, he eased himself down into the tiny boat, untied the lines and then pushed off against the low ceiling with the paddle. Both canoes slid across the dark water and passed through the hole in the wall.

Stars glimmered above. They paddled through a large glass-less greenhouse, where the branches of sunken trees reached out to pluck at them. Granger glanced back to see Swan edging the other canoe along behind with all the skill of an old smuggler. Banks sat between the two brothers, wrapped in sullen silence. They glided out of the greenhouse into another yard, slipped through a set of tall iron gates and reached a channel where the walls and railings on the far side side barely broke the surface of the water. The tide was going out, Granger noted. He could see ichusan crystals clinging to the metalwork, glinting as Creedy moved the gem lantern across the brine.

‘Eyes ahead, Sergeant,’ Granger said. ‘This is no time to search for trove.’

Creedy glanced back over his shoulder. ‘I saw bubbles, sir. Could have been a sea-bottle down there.’

Granger shook his head. ‘It’s just the Drowned,’ he said. ‘The Unmer sank all their ichusae in deep water.’ After they’d realized that defeat was inevitable, the Unmer had seeded the oceans with god-only-knew how many millions of these toxic little bottles. It had been an act of astonishing spite, so typical of the Unmer. They would watch the world drown in poison rather than leave it to their enemies.

Creedy peered down into the black water. ‘You reckon those women are following us?’ he said.

Granger nodded. ‘It’s what they were trained to do.’

Creedy wrapped his cloak more tightly around his shoulders and said nothing more about it for a while. He gazed up at the blazing heavens. He sniffed and spat into the water. Finally he said, ‘How did you know they were down there at all? Why lower the lantern into that pool of brine?’

‘Intuition.’

‘Like that time in Weaverbrook? The food panic?’

Granger shrugged.

‘Or when you got us out of the Fall Caves?’ Creedy looked at him intently. ‘Or Ancillor? What was that bloody warlord called? Captain something?’ He shook his head and grinned. ‘I reckon you’ve got some Haurstaf blood in you somewhere, Colonel. If you’d been born a woman, they’d have snatched you away to Awl a long time ago.’

Granger said nothing. His great-grandmother had indeed come from Port Awl, but he never talked about it. That sort of heritage wasn’t likely to win him many favours in the Imperial Army. Not that the old woman had ever belonged to the Guild, or shown even a glimmer of psychic ability. She’d made her money dressing corpses.

They reached the end of the lane and paddled out into a glooming quadrangle where the town houses had been scorched by dragonfire an age ago. Brine lapped the front-door lintels. Four human skeletons hung from an upper window. Granger spied residues of red paint on their bones. A trovers’ territory marker. A battle had been fought here over treasure rights. Man’s liberation from slavery had merely given them the freedom to slaughter each other. Our world is drowning, and we squabble over trinkets. He wondered if mankind had always been so flawed.

A mound of rubble blocked any passage to the south. Banks looked around and then gave a short whistle. He pointed to a window fronting one particular house, where the panes and lead cames had been smashed out, leaving a wide gap. The men steered the canoes between jutting shards of glass and into a room that must have once been a grand entrance hall. A sweeping marble staircase sank into the brine. The rising seas had drowned everything but the uppermost four feet. Creedy held up his lantern to inspect a chandelier depending from the ceiling rose. Its lowest candles were submerged in brine. Ichusan crystals covered the curlicues of brass and ran up the chain itself.

‘The tide must be going out,’ he said.

A ragged hole in the back wall gave them access to an inner corridor behind the staircase, where the hulls of their small craft knocked and scraped the stonework on either side. Someone had fixed a rope to the ceiling, which they used to pull themselves along. They negotiated the boats around a tight corner and into a further passageway flanked by doorways on both sides. Through the last of these openings, Granger spotted the unmistakable glow of a lantern.

Trovers?

Creedy must have seen it too, for he immediately shuttered their own light. He looked back at Granger, his huge body now silhouetted against the dim yellow illumination at the end of the passageway. Then he reached inside his jacket and withdrew his hand-cannon. Granger heard the click of the weapon’s wheel-lock.

Granger pulled the canoe along silently towards the source of the light. He couldn’t identify any man-made sounds coming from that room, just the slosh of seawater against their own hull. As the bow of the canoe reached the doorway, he reached out and braced the craft against the wall to accommodate any recoil from the sergeant’s cannon.

Creedy’s face became illuminated – a battlefield corpse face with its mess of bloody bandages and teeth bared as if in a rictus of death. He held his weapon in one powerful fist, training it on the room behind the doorway. He scanned the room for an instant and then turned back to Granger and placed a finger against his lips. Then he grabbed the sides of the door frame and pulled the canoe through.

They were in a ballroom. Huge windows occupied the southern wall, the panes all broken to provide exits from the building. Long chains fixed to the ceiling supported gem lanterns, but the seawater had risen above them and they now shone underwater. Ripples of light chased each other across faded scenes painted onto the corbelled plaster overhead. There were images of long-dead Unmer kings and queens at court, pale exquisite palaces set among woodlands or ornamental gardens, depictions of ships at sea and then moored at harbour, where human slaves unloaded chests of jewels and strange golden machines. The painted heavens above these scenes contained a great mass of stars joined by interconnected lines and mathematical symbols. Taken as a whole, the artwork seemed to tell the story of the Unmer’s arrival from the East and the subsequent enslavement of the human race.

The ballroom itself was empty, but for a floating platform being used as a mooring for three blood-red dragon-hide skiffs. Upon this makeshift dock lay a man wrapped in a dirty blanket. He appeared to be asleep.

Creedy inclined his head toward the skiffs. Granger nodded. Those vessels were more suited to the open sea. He glanced back to see Tummel manoeuvring the other canoe quietly through the doorway. Banks and Swan had their own weapons out.

Without a sound, they paddled across the room to the dock.

Granger peered down at the ballroom floor two fathoms below. It was littered with rubble, opened cans, snarls of wire and broken nets. He couldn’t see any of the Drowned, but he spotted a pile of bones from at least three more human skeletons. A chain rose from a concrete anchor to the underside of the platform. Shoals of small silver fish glided through the murky water.

The sleeping trover did not stir as Granger slid his canoe alongside. His mouth was open. He was snoring softly. He wore soiled whaleskins, too large for his narrow shoulders, and sported an uneven beard that grew only from the few remaining patches of his jaw not burned by seawater. Sergeant Creedy disembarked silently, then walked over and jammed the barrel of his hand-cannon down over the trover’s mouth.

‘Wakey wakey, son,’ he said.

The man’s eyes flicked open. He would surely have screamed if Creedy’s gun hadn’t entirely obscured his lips. He managed a gasp and tried to get up, but the sergeant just shook his head. ‘Where do you hide your trove?’

Granger stepped onto the platform and dragged his kitbag after him. He inspected the skiffs. One was leaking from holes in the hide, but the remaining two looked sound enough. He helped Banks and Swan out of the other canoe, then reached an arm down to assist Tummel. The old soldier groaned and complained about stiffness in his legs.

‘More brine than blood in my veins,’ he muttered.

‘More whisky, you mean,’ Swan said. ‘Give me hand with that skiff.’

‘Your stash,’ Creedy said, holding the barrel of his weapon firmly over the trover’s mouth. ‘Where d’you keep it?’

The man began to choke.

‘Leave it,’ Granger said. ‘We’re only here for the boats.’

Creedy spat. ‘We’ll need money where we’re going, sir.’

‘We’re not thieves, Sergeant.’

Swan and Tummel had untied the soundest of the skiffs. It was also packed with nets, hooks and lines – larger versions of the equipment in the canoes – along with goggles and whaleskin cloaks to protect the treasure hunters from caustic sea spray. Granger unfastened the other boats and kicked them away from the dock. Then he shoved the two canoes out after them.

The four men clambered into the open-decked craft, leaving Creedy pinning the trover to the dock.

‘Sergeant,’ Granger said.

Creedy leaned his big ugly face closer to his captive. ‘Tell me where it is, you son of a bitch.’

‘Sergeant.’

Creedy gave a growl of frustration, then released the trover and stood up. He kicked the man hard in the ribs and swung back his boot to do it again.

‘We’re leaving, Sergeant,’ Granger said. ‘Right now.’

Creedy stomped over and got into the stern seat beside Tummel, while Swan and Banks slotted oars into the rowlocks midway along the hull. Granger stuffed his kitbag down by his feet and pushed off from the bow.

They crossed the ballroom, leaving the stranded trover gazing after them.

‘Who the hell are you?’ he shouted. ‘You’re not Imperial soldiers.’

Creedy raised his hand-cannon.

‘Lower you weapon, Sergeant,’ Granger said.

They rowed the skiff out through one of the windows.

The street outside was broader, and the sea noticeably rougher, here. Waves washed through the roof spaces of ruined houses. The land below must have fallen away more steeply beyond this point, because the five men reached the edge of the Sunken Quarter after only three blocks. Ahead lay open ocean, silver in the starlight. To the west they could see foam thrashing against the dark ridge of the harbour breakwater. On the landward side stood the cannery, with the Fortress peninsula behind. Lanterns burned on the decks of an old iron dragon-hunter moored at the cannery loading ramp.

The skiff pitched and rolled, but Banks and Swan kept her bow pointed towards the waves. The wind was fresh, but manageable, and they made good progress. Every man aboard had sailed in worse. They wore the trovers’ goggles and whaleskin cloaks to guard against sea spray, and they stuffed scraps of sackcloth into the rowlocks to muffle the sound of the oars. They didn’t speak, lest the wind carry their voices back to the shore. Soon they had cleared the breakwater and were heading back into the harbour.

Unseen in the dark, they slipped past the port side of the dragon-hunter. The silhouettes of her harpoons could be seen overhead, pointing at the stars. Her engines throbbed inside her iron belly. The rich odour of meat filled the air here, mingling with the ever-present shipyard aromas of brine and oil.

Creedy directed them to a ladder beside the cannery loading ramp at the rear of the ship, where the sea was red with blood. Granger held the skiff while his men disembarked, then tied her bow line to the ladder and hefted his kitbag over his shoulder before climbing up the greasy rungs after them.

The sea door at the rear of the dragon-hunter had been lowered onto the loading ramp below, revealing the ship’s cavernous interior. At the top of the ramp, a massive steel winch waited beside an overhead conveyor system of hooks and chains designed to uplift carcasses and carry them through an enormous doorway obscured by flaps of whaleskin.

Three big stevedores worked to unload the vessel. Two of them dragged a pair of hooked chains down the blood-soaked loading ramp below the winch and disappeared with them into the darkness of the ship’s hold. After a moment, one of them called out, ‘Pull.’

The third man had remained at the winch. He clanked a lever forward, whereupon the chains tightened and then slowly began to reel back onto a huge spool. As Granger watched, the carcass of a dragon emerged from the ship’s hold. It was a common red from the Sea of Kings, about eighty feet from snout to tail-tip. The chain hooks had been rammed into the flesh between the scales at the nape of its neck. Its crumpled wings scraped over the bloody concrete as the chain dragged it up the ramp towards the huge factory doorway. The stevedores emerged from the ship again, following a few yards behind. The dragon was still bleeding out from a harpoon wound in its chest. At the top of the ramp, the third man stopped the winch. His two comrades unhooked the carcass from one set of chains and hooked it up to another pair fixed to the conveyor system above.

‘That’s Davy,’ Creedy said, pointing to a fourth man who had just appeared through the factory doorway. He was a lean, hard-faced fellow, draped in bloody oilskins. A cheroot hung from the corner of his mouth. He carried a head-spade like a staff. He glanced at the carcass, then pulled a lever on the wall behind.

Another clunk, and the dragon carcass rose from the concrete floor, pulled up onto the overhead conveyor system by hooks in its neck and in the base of its tail. When it was fully off the ground, Davy halted the mechanism and then threw another switch.

The conveyor gave a jerk, a rattle, and then rumbled forward, carrying the suspended carcass through the whale-hide doorway.

‘Davy!’ Creedy called.

The hard-faced man looked up. He frowned and then jerked his head over his shoulder. And then he disappeared back through the doorway into the factory.

‘Come on,’ Creedy said.

Granger and the others followed the sergeant along the edge of the loading ramp, while the two stevedores below returned the chains to the ship to hook up another carcass. Creedy pushed through the whaleskin flaps covering the conveyor doorway.

Davy was waiting for them on the other side. He glared at Creedy and growled, ‘I said two.’

They were in an enormous butchering hall, where dozens of dragon carcasses trundled along the overhead conveyor system. Workers slewed off scales with head-spades and opened bellies to spill out guts and hacked off wings and flesh with heavy machetes. White bones glistened among red meat. Blood ran in runnels across the floor and collected in frothing channels. The smell and heat was overpowering.

‘Two, five, what’s the difference?’ Creedy said.

‘The difference is, I only got two suits,’ Davy replied. ‘The price was for two. We already agreed that.’

Granger stepped between them. ‘What does he mean?’ he said to Creedy. ‘The arrangement was for all five of us.’

Creedy looked at the ground. ‘You couldn’t afford five,’ he said. ‘Those suits aren’t cheap.’

Granger took a deep breath. ‘What did you think was going to happen when we got here?’

Creedy shrugged. ‘I dunno,’ he said. ‘Maybe whaleskins. Hell, what was I supposed to say? I thought you’d figure something out. You always figure something out.’

Davy laughed. ‘Whaleskins? You’ll be dead in a day.’

Granger turned to him. ‘Show me.’

He led them through the butchering hall and through a set of hangar doors into a cold room. Here, lying among blocks of ice, was an enormous green dragon. It was twice the size of the reds. Its mouth had been propped open with a head-spade, revealing the pink tunnel of its throat. One of its eyes stared glassily at the ceiling, the other had been mangled into red pulp. On the floor beside it lay two bulky brass diving suits. They looked perilously old and rotten.

‘You were lucky,’ Davy said. ‘We’ve not seen a monster like this in months.’ He rested a hand on the dragon’s snout. ‘She sank two ships, dragged them straight to the bottom, before the third put a harpoon through her eye.’

Banks blew through his teeth. ‘That is one phenomenally ugly bitch,’ he said. ‘She reminds me of someone.’ He looked over at Creedy. ‘Can’t think who, though.’

Creedy gave him a grim smile.

‘You aren’t gonna survive in there without a suit,’ Davy said. ‘Not all the way to Ethugra, anyways. These greens have guts like acid. Burn a man alive.’

‘Can you get more suits?’ Granger said.

Davy snorted. ‘Tonight?’ He stared at the dragon for a long moment. ‘Maybe for sixteen thousand, I can get one.’

‘I don’t have that sort of money.’

‘Then you’re screwed, aren’t you? Ship sails at dawn.’

Banks stepped up to Granger. ‘You and Creedy go,’ he said. ‘We’ll follow when we can.’

Granger shook his head.

‘Creedy knows Ethugra,’ Banks said. ‘You’ll need him once you get there.’

‘Makes sense to me,’ Creedy said.

‘No,’ Granger insisted. ‘I’m not leaving anyone behind. Banks and Swan can use the diving suits. The rest of us will have to wrap up in whaleskins. Once the carcass is aboard, we’ll climb out and look for another place to hide.’

Creedy grunted. ‘It’s a goddamn prison ship. Where you going to hide?’

‘We’ll deal with that problem when we have to,’ Granger said.

‘The sergeant’s right for once,’ Swan said. ‘We wouldn’t stand a chance on a ship like that, not outside that big green bastard. You and Creedy take the suits.’ He sniffed and wiped his nose on his sleeve. ‘To be honest, I never much liked the idea of Ethugra anyway.’

‘Absolute shit-hole,’ Tummel agreed. ‘Too many jailers and not enough publicans.’

‘Gambling’s illegal in Ethugra,’ Swan muttered.

‘Everything’s illegal in Ethugra,’ Tummel said.

Banks nodded. ‘We’ll take our chances here.’

Creedy had already chosen the better of the two diving suits and began to pull it on.

Granger wouldn’t have ordered them to obey him if he still had the power to do so. They were his men – the last and best of his men – but more than that, they were their own men. He couldn’t order them, but he didn’t have to abandon them either. ‘I’m staying here,’ he said. ‘One of you can have that suit.’

‘I don’t think you understand, sir,’ Banks said. ‘If you don’t go, the suit stays empty.’ He glanced over at Swan and Tummel, and then the three of them turned around and walked away.

Banks looked back once over his shoulder. ‘Tell Creedy we’re going to find the trover’s stash.’

The sergeant had lifted the heavy brass helmet onto his shoulders, but hadn’t yet clamped it down. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered, his voice muffled by the cumbersome headpiece. ‘Just our luck if the bastard finds it.’

‘The suit filters will take worst of the brine out of the air,’ Davy said, ‘and there’s a jerry can of water already in there. Don’t take off your helmets except when you need to drink. And for god’s sake, don’t damage the dragon. It’s going to a collector.’ He glanced between the two men. ‘That’s it, except for the money.’

Granger pulled out a wad of gilders from his kitbag and gave it to Davy. It was everything he had. Then he gathered up the other diving suit and began to clamber inside it. Creedy snapped down the last of his helmet clamps and peered out through the circular window at his own gloved hands. ‘How do I take a piss?’ he said.

‘The usual way,’ Davy said. ‘Good luck.’

Creedy got on his hands and knees and crawled inside the dragon’s mouth. After a moment, he called back, ‘Holy shit, Colonel, you’ll never guess what this thing has eaten.’