Sea Of Ghosts

SIX YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 2
A OO A APEE

Dear Margaret,

Thanks to Mr Swinekicker, I’m now officially dead. This means you can make the payments directly to him without losing half of it to tax, which will save you money and allow me to remain here in prison for twice as long. Yesterday I saw a bird soaring above my cell window. I don’t know what sort it was, but it was white and it had something clutched in its claws. Didn’t birds like that once dive for fish?

I wonder what this one had?

All my love,

Alfred

The brine had risen another inch in the week since he’d last been down here. All the books he’d piled upon the floorboards to act as stepping stones had now vanished under its toxic brown surface. Granger stood at the bottom of the steps with his lantern raised and peered along the flooded corridor, wondering how he was going to get the prison register out of the storage room at the far end. He only had one more book left, and sacrificing that one wouldn’t help. The air down here had a burned-salt, chemical aroma, like the air in a whaling station. He pulled his goggles over his eyes, then squatted down as close to the water as he dared, swinging the light around him. Dead beetles floated everywhere. Blisters of green paint and brown ichusan crystals marred the walls along the waterline, but the cell doors on either side of the passage looked intact.

‘Anyone still alive down here?’ he called.

He heard a thump and a splash, as if something had been thrown against one of the doors, then a man’s voice called back from the shadows: ‘Give me some food, you son of a bitch.’

Granger raised his goggles and went back up the stairs.

Creedy had tilted his chair back on its rear legs and sat with his boots resting on the munitions crate Granger used as a table. A huge man with a boxer’s face and hair shaved close to his skull, he still possessed an aura of brute savagery. Even now he was gnawing on a dragon knuckle, sucking at the cartilage and ripping shreds of meat free with soft, bestial grunts. Most men with a past like his would have chosen to hide it, but William Patrick Creedy still wore the Gravediggers’ tattoo on the back of his hand openly, proudly, challenging anyone who saw it to betray him to the emperor’s men. It was an attitude that had almost killed him more than once. Grey patches of sharkskin marred one side of his jaw – an injury sustained when six privateers had pinned him, momentarily, to a wet dockside in Tallship. His left ear was missing, hacked off in that same brawl. Creedy simply didn’t give a shit. His clockwork eye ticked with the steady precision of a detonator, the small blue lens shuttling back and forth in its socket, but his good eye – the cunning one – was watching Granger. ‘What’s the situation, Colonel?’ he asked.

‘The brine’s risen another inch,’ he replied.

‘I meant, are any of your guests still breathing?’

Granger shrugged. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’

‘Good,’ Creedy said. ‘You’re officially a priority now. Since they can’t expect a man to make a living from an empty jail, they are obliged do something about it.’ He leaned forward and spat out a piece of gristle. ‘That’s the law.’

Granger hung his lantern on a wall hook. ‘I can’t get to the register,’ he said.

‘The hell you keep it down there for anyway?’

The truth was Granger hadn’t thought about going back for it, not since the old man’s death. But Creedy would never have understood that. All but one of the names in the register had lines scored through them, and after that final one he didn’t think he wanted to add any more. If he accepted more prisoners he’d have to feed them, and it might be years before their families ran out of money to send. And then it would be Granger himself who’d have to carry down the last meal; Thomas Granger who’d have to watch them die. The hardest part of job was the part he did for free.

He wasn’t running a prison so much as a tomb.

‘You should have built that other storey like old Swinekicker said,’ Creedy remarked. ‘Another couple of winters like the last one, and the Mare Lux will be lapping your balls. What are you going to do when you run out of space? Where are you going to live? I mean, look at this place, man.’

The detritus of Granger’s life filled a series of cramped spaces under the building’s coombed attic ceilings. A jumble of wood, whaleand dragon-bones supported the roof. Morning light fell through the windows facing Halcine Canal, illuminating piles of spent shell casings, drip-pans positioned under leaks, carpentry tools, oarlocks and old engine parts from the Trove Market in Losoto. In the centre of the room sat a massive anchor, too heavy for Granger to lift on his own. God knows how Swinekicker had got it in here. A flap of whaleskin covered the hole leading out to the eaves, while the wooden hatch it had replaced rested against the wall nearby. He’d been forced to rip the little door off its hinges to drag the old man’s coffin out. You could still see the scrapes the heavy box had left in the floorboards; they looked like gouges left by fingernails.

‘It’s a prison,’ he said. ‘What do you expect it to look like?’

Creedy grunted. ‘Other people manage to keep themselves in comfort. You’re letting this place slip under.’ He looked around. ‘That hatch’ll go back on easy enough.’

Granger didn’t reply.

‘And you could raise the floors in the cells downstairs.’

Granger shrugged. ‘Some people build things…’

‘… and other people break them,’ Creedy finished, with an oafish laugh. ‘Do you remember Dunbar?’

Granger was looking for a crowbar among his tools. ‘Dunbar’s underwater now,’ he said. He couldn’t find the crowbar so he picked up a head-spade instead and carried it over to a spot at the far end of the living room, about forty paces from the front gable. He got down on his knees and crawled around, squinting down through the gaps in the floorboards. When he spotted the top of the wardrobe in the storage room below, he jammed the head of the spade between two boards and began ripping up wood.

‘Banks found that silverfin’s egg in the cave under the cliff,’ the other man went on, ‘and there you were, boiling it up in an old concussion shell when Hu’s Lancers came up the path. I’ll never forget the look on that young officer’s face. You stared right at him. You remember what you said?’

Granger tossed a plank aside and pulled up another.

‘Would you be kind enough to keep an eye out for the mother?’ Creedy said in an affected tone. Then he guffawed. ‘Would you be kind enough?’ He tore another shred of meat from the bone and chewed it thoughtfully. ‘Tenacious bastards, though, I’ll give them that.’

‘Hu’s Lancers?’

‘Dragons, man. You ever hear the stories about that green?’

Granger eased himself down through the hole he’d made in the floor, planting his feet on the top of the wardrobe underneath. It creaked under him. ‘Maskelyne just makes those up,’ he said. ‘He’ll sell the beast on to another collector once he’s given it a reputation as a monster.’

‘It was a monster,’ Creedy said. ‘Sank seven ships before they harpooned it in the eye.’

‘Two ships,’ Granger said.

‘Well,’ Creedy said. ‘But you saw what it ate.’

Grunting, Granger manoeuvred his shoulders down through the gap in the floor. ‘Saw it?’ he said. ‘I disarmed the bloody thing.’

Creedy laughed. ‘I don’t think Davy even knew what it was.’

Granger dropped to a squatting position. It was a tight squeeze, but he managed to duck his head under the joists. Apart from the wardrobe, some shelves stuffed with moth-eaten blankets and a stack of old tin pails, the storage room was empty.

‘What are you doing?’ Creedy said. ‘I’ve got galoshes you could have borrowed. You don’t have to rip the goddamn house apart to get down there.’

Granger opened the wardrobe door, then, turning to face the wall, he lowered himself down on splayed elbows. His boots scuffed the sides of the wardrobe and kicked against the open door, knocking it back against the wall. Finally the air under his heels gave way to a solid surface. With another grunt, he hopped down inside the narrow wooden space.

It was musty and dark, but his fumbling hands located the tin box at once. He picked it up and slid it on top of the wardrobe, then stopped as pain seized his chest. It hit him like a punch. ‘Could you give me a hand back up, Mr Creedy?’

‘You got your own self down there.’

‘I can’t… breathe.’

Granger heard a chair scrape across the floor above. A moment later, a shadow fell across the gap above, and he saw his former sergeant’s big, ugly face staring down. ‘You’re never going to fix this hole, are you?’

‘Grab that box and give me a hand.’

Once he was back up in the garret, he took a drink of water straight from the spigot and then sat down on the floor, breathing slow until the cramps in his chest relaxed. He’d been inhaling this sea air for too long, living too close to the brine. The Mare Lux had got into his lungs, and there was nothing to be done about it now.

‘You don’t look well,’ Creedy said.

‘The register’s in that box.’

Creedy opened it. ‘What’s all this?’

He pulled out an assortment of objects. There were two books: the prison register and an old Unmer tome in raggedy script. And there was a child’s doll. This last was a representation of a human infant, fashioned out of silver and brass. Tiny joints allowed its head and arms to swivel. One of its eye sockets was empty, but the other held a glass copy of the real thing – a finer replica than Creedy’s old clockwork lens. A faint yellow light glowed behind its remaining iris.

‘You don’t remember it?’ Granger said.

Creedy thought for a moment, then frowned. ‘The Unmer child,’ he said, unconsciously lifting his hand to his eye. ‘What did you keep this for?’

‘I don’t know,’ Granger said. ‘Evidence. Lift its arm. No, the other one.’

A tinny voice came from the thing: ‘A oo a apee.’

‘I’ll be damned,’ Creedy said. ‘That sounded like speech.’ He lifted the arm again.

‘Oo oo uv ee.’

‘It is speech,’ Granger said. ‘There’s a mechanism inside.’

‘You opened it?’

Granger shrugged. ‘Why not?’

Creedy looked incredulous. ‘It’s Unmer made. God knows what sort of sorcery is woven into this thing.’

‘Do you suppose it’s worth anything?’

The other man examined the doll. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘If you could figure out what it’s saying. A lot of people will pay good money for something like that. Don’t let Maskelyne’s buyers rip you off, though. No offence, Colonel, but you need the money.’ He looked pointedly around the room, before returning his attention to the doll.

‘A is oo oo.’

‘I doubt it’s even speaking Anean,’ he said. ‘Sounds like one of those old Unmer languages.’

‘Don’t wear it out, Mr Creedy.’ Granger got to his feet and picked up the prison register – a heavy book bound in blue cloth. He thumbed through hundreds of pages, the columns of convicts’ names and dates all written in Swinekicker’s fastidious handwriting and then scored through with neat lines. Coffin nails, the old soldier had called those marks. Only the last half-page had been written in Granger’s own hand. In the six years since he’d been here in Ethugra, he’d drawn nine coffin nails of his own. The final entry remained unmarked.

Duka, Eric. 3/HA/07. Evensraum. E-Com. #44-WR15102. III 30/HA/46 – 13/HR/47

Eric Duka, born in Evensraum in 1407. Fought as an enemy combatant, one of twenty thousand soldiers captured by the emperor’s forces at Whiterock Bay during the Forty-fourth War of Liberation. Granger made a clicking sound with his tongue. According to this, he’d received three initial payments from Evensraum Council, followed by ten more from Duka’s own family. Funds ceased on the 13th Hu-Rain 1447 – three weeks ago. No explanation given. Granger took a pencil from the box and drew a shaky line through the text. The chances of the prisoner’s relations sending any more money now were as good as nil. If they petitioned the Council, they might get another one or two compassion payments. But Granger could always claim those had arrived too late.

The pages after this entry were empty, space enough for a thousand more lives, if he wanted them on his conscience. He looked around at his dismal apartment, at the drip-pans, and then at the hole he’d just ripped in the floor. ‘What time does the Alabaster Sound get here?’ he asked Creedy.

‘We got hours yet.’

‘Have they posted the lists?’

Creedy shrugged. ‘No point checking them. We’re still getting combatants from Evensraum and Calloway. Hu ships them over as soon as Interrogation’s done with them. They’re all piss-poor farmers.’

They’d been in Evensraum in the thirties. Granger recalled a farm near Weaverbrook, a place tucked right in behind the seawall with twelve acres turned over to wheat and corn and another two for grazing. There had been an old stone house with a kitchen garden, an orchard and a wooden hay barn. Living trees on the hills. Rabbits. His orders had been to burn and shell nothing, to take the island by boot and sword, one smallholding at a time. But then Emperor Hu had grown impatient with their progress.

He remembered the smell of mud all around, the clean, cold taste of well water, his brother John gathering apples in his helmet. A good place, Evensraum. They said all good things were worth fighting for. But then he remembered the bombardment, the fires and the screaming, and the cholera that followed.

‘Let’s get over there anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s best to be early.’

Creedy was frowning at the doll. ‘You’ve had this thing all these years?’ he said. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me about it till now? I might have been able to find you a buyer.’

‘I meant to repair it first,’ Granger said.

The other man grunted. ‘Right,’ he said, twisting the doll’s arm again.

‘Oo oo uv ee,’ said the hopeless little voice.

Outside upon the roof of Granger’s prison it was a fine blue day, but the two men wore their whaleskin cloaks out of habit. You never could tell when the wind might pick up. They hadn’t worn their uniforms in years, and in their seaman’s breeches and Ethugran jerkins they looked like the jailers they’d become. Swinekicker’s old brine purifier squatted upon a clutter of lead pipes beside the cistern, its faceted lenses gleaming in the sun like the eyes of a spider. It badly needed cleaning, he noted, as he always did. Ten yards below, Halcine Canal and its many branches formed a web of tea-coloured channels between Ethugra’s jails, the banks all crooked by pontoons and wickers of flotsam. Boats waited in shadowy moorings, the brine under their hulls as darkly lustrous as bronze.

In places where sunlight fell between the buildings, Granger could see hazy details under the surface of the water: rows of iron-barred windows, and here and there a doorway through which old Swinekicker might once have stepped. Deeper still lay ordinary windows like the ones in Old Losoto. As a boy he’d clambered over Unmer facades that looked just like that, or swung from the mooring hooks, shrieking, while the other boys thrilled at the thought of Old Man Ghoul reaching up from the depths to grab him. It seemed like another world now. The Mare Lux smothered the past. Fish now glided though spaces that were once kitchens and bedrooms. Crabs and eels traversed the old cell floors in search of food.

The majority of Swinekicker’s neighbours had kept pace with the rising seas, and their buildings cast shadows over the old man’s jail. Dun-coloured facades loomed two or three storeys above him. There was Hoeken’s, and Dan Cuttle’s jail, and there the round-tower Mrs Pursewearer was having built with her husband’s inheritance. A bare-chested labourer stood on the tower scaffold, slapping down mortar with a trowel while his companion carried blocks of stone up a ladder and laid them at his feet. This endless construction was part of Ethugran life. Masonry reclaimed from the seabed lay drying on palettes against a hundred half-built eaves, or stood in silhouette upon the rooftops like gravestones. A few of the buildings had cracked and subsided, broken by the Mare Lux tides. Others had given up the fight entirely. Thirty yards further along the canal, nothing of Ma Bitter’s place remained above the waterline but a lone chimneypot. Someone had stuffed it full of rubbish.

‘Look.’ Creedy was pointing down at the canal.

Granger looked and immediately spotted a yellow light moving through the murky waters between the prison foundations. Five fathoms down, a sharkskin man was carrying a small child in his arms. He clutched a gem lantern in one upraised fist, using it to light his way across the drowned street. Both he and the child wore rags. His trouser legs flapped against his scarred grey shins. The child’s hair wafted like a yellow flame behind its head. They moved lethargically through the brine, crossing the boulder-strewn seabed with great care, before disappearing through an open doorway into the opposite building.

‘Someone ought to tell Dan Cuttle,’ Creedy said. ‘That was his place they went into.’

‘I’ll mention it to him.’

‘It’s not right, the Drowned moving the hell into wherever they please.’

Granger continued to peer down at the doorway through which they’d disappeared. They’d come from this side of the street, which meant they might be living in his own foundations. The law required him to inform Maskelyne’s Hookmen, but that would mean inspections, and Granger didn’t want inspections.

Creedy insisted they take his own launch to Averley Plaza because he said Swinekicker’s old boat was bowed and splitting along the keel and was likely to sink with the two of them in it. Granger looked down at the places in the hull he’d filled with resin. He still owed the boatyard a thousand gilders for repairing the engine.

The launch puttered along. A former Imperial Navy tender, it still bore the scars of cannon-fire across its metal hull. Creedy claimed to have bought it cheap from a cousin who’d been a coxswain under Admiral Lamont, but Granger suspected he’d stolen it. He didn’t want to know. They’d all done desperate things these last six years.

Granger sat dead centre, away from the sides of the vessel. Creedy slouched over the helm, with one hand on the wheel. With his other hand he absently twisted the lens of his clockwork eye, as though the reappearance of that Unmer doll had stirred unwelcome memories. ‘You ever wonder what happened to the other guys?’ he said. ‘I heard Banks stayed on in Losoto, right under Hu’s nose.’

‘Banks was smart enough to look after himself,’ Granger replied. ‘He’s probably worked his way into Administration by now.’

‘Smarter than us, eh?’ Creedy steered the launch around Ma Bitter’s chimneypot. Massive prison buildings glided past on either side, trapping great dark slabs of shadow between them. Behind them, the propeller churned the canal waters into an ochre froth. ‘We should get the last of the Gravediggers together again,’ Creedy said. ‘Get them out here, I mean. Banks would know how to fix up that place of yours. Swan and Tummel could help dredge up stone for the walls. We could go after trove while we’re at it. Get an operation going.’

An illegal operation, Granger thought. ‘I don’t have anything to pay them with,’ he said.

‘They wouldn’t ask for nothing, not from you, Colonel. You could offer them a lay of the trove.’

‘There’s nothing valuable left in these canals,’ Granger said. ‘And we’d need a ton of equipment for deepwater salvage: cranes, steel-nets, dredging hooks. A bigger boat.’ He shook his head. ‘We’d be putting ourselves in competition with Maskelyne. Somehow, I don’t think he’d be pleased.’

Creedy spat over the side, but said nothing more.

This talk made Granger wonder how the other man’s business was faring. Creedy had grown up here, and his family still ran four or five prisons out on the edge of Tallship. They’d hooked Creedy up with a distant relation, some poor second cousin who owed the grandfather money. Didn’t want him brandishing that tattoo in the family’s own neighbourhood, they said. Not with the emperor’s spies around. The cousin’s place was big enough to be profitable, Granger supposed, but then Creedy had a talent for making money disappear.

Swinekicker had been kind to Granger. The old soldier hadn’t wanted anything from him but a hard day’s work and an ear to listen to his army stories. He been riddled with brine rot when Granger had first been introduced to him. Maybe he’d just wanted someone to carry his coffin out.

The launch turned west out of Halcine Canal and into Francialle, where the buildings brawled for space, abandoning the waterways between them in a warren of perpetual gloom. Creedy switched off the engine and took up his boat hook, pushing it against the stonework on either side as he eased the vessel through channels barely wider than its hull. In some places the clover-leaf windows of ancient palazzos could be seen dimly underwater, but mostly the brine was as impenetrable as dreamless sleep. These old drowned avenues of Francialle had once resounded with the hammers of Unmer weapon-smiths and metalworkers, and the chants of Brutalist and Entropic sorcerers as they imbued their creations with treacherous powers. Granger couldn’t help but wonder what strange devices still lay down there, chattering mindlessly to the fish. Even now it seemed perilous to disturb the silence.

A rat scampered along ledges above the water’s edge, its scarred grey snout sniffing after water-beetles. Granger watched it for a while. Once he thought he spied another lantern moving slowly through the deep. Another Drowned soul on an unknowable errand? If Creedy noticed it, he chose not to comment.

At length they left the shadows of Francialle and steered the boat out into a wide quadrangle open to the full glare of the midday sun.

Averley Plaza formed a great sunlit harbour in the centre of the city, flanked on three sides by the grand facades of Ethugra’s Imperial jails and administration buildings. Ships from Losoto, Valcinder, Chandel and the liberated territories of Cog-Ellis and Evensraum reached this place by way of the Glot Madera – a deep-water channel that meandered south through the heart of the city to the open sea. The whole basin teemed with boats: merchantmen, trawlers and dragon-claves from all corners of the empire; dredgers, squid lanterns, crane-ships and barges loaded with reclaimed stone, earth and firewood dragged up from undersea forests. A fleet of smaller vessels wove between the larger craft, from hardwood yachts to whaleskin coracles and old Unmer crystal-hulls; they bobbed and danced like bright mirages upon the bronze waters.

On the north embankment Ethugra’s weekly market was already underway. Several hundred tents and stalls crammed the broad swathe of flagstones along the wharf side, selling everything from soil-grown produce to flame coral, thrice-boiled fish and trove. At the water’s edge stood the stony figures of men and women – not statues, but the corpses of sharkskin men and women, each netted in Ethugra’s own canals and left out to harden in the glare of the sun.

Creedy was looking south. ‘Lucky we got here when we did,’ he said. ‘The Baster’s early.’

A former Imperial battleship, the Alabaster Sound was now one of the largest of Emperor Hu’s prisoner transport vessels. Two steam tugs were nudging her battle-scarred steel bow through the gates of the Glot Madera and into Averley Plaza. She had been decommissioned after the Forty-third War of Liberation, but her iron guns still loomed over her deck rails, the shadows of their barrels sweeping across the brine like black banners. Her massive sloping funnel towered above the roofs of even the tallest buildings, disgorging fumes into the blue sky. A blast from her horn announced her arrival to the whole city, and her engines began to rumble like an earthquake as she turned. The captain stood on her wheelhouse deck, clad in emerald storm armour, his bulbous glass faceplate gleaming in the sun like the eye of a frog.

Ethugra’s prison administrators were busy preparing for the Alabaster Sound’s arrival, laying out their ledgers and inkwells on long tables under canopies facing the waterfront. The harbour master shouted orders to his stevedores, who ran to positions beside stanchions, ready to haul in mooring ropes. Sailors scrambled to move smaller boats and coracles out of the former battleship’s way. An expectant crowd began to gather behind them.

Creedy steered the launch across the plaza and into a public berth at the westernmost end of the docks, where he and Granger alighted. A dozen hawkers assailed Creedy at once, shoving all manner of cheap food and worthless trove into his face.

‘Chariot ballast, Mr Creedy?’

‘Catspin claws, sir. Original claws – see the brass work on this. ..’

‘… dredged from the Mare Verdant…’

‘Mr Creedy?’

‘Six gilders an ounce, my friend.’

A fat man wearing spectacles stepped in front of Granger. He had dozens of similar pairs of eyeglasses arranged on a tray hung from his neck. ‘See the past through the eyes of a dead sorcerer,’ he said. ‘Genuine Unmer lenses. They’ll show you where to find lost trove, sir.’ His voice dropped to a whisper. ‘Unholy rituals, human sacrifices, Unmer sex, dragon sex.’

Granger ignored them all. Creedy hesitated, ogling the dizzying array of goods with his rapidly stuttering eye. He glanced back, spotted the spectacle seller, and then shoved him aside to let Granger past. ‘Fakes,’ he muttered. ‘You don’t see shit through them.’ He was about to go, but then became distracted by a man selling silver puzzle boxes.

Granger urged him on.

Scores of other jailers had gathered around the administrators’ desks by now. They sat on the harbour’s edge with their legs dangling over the poisonous water, or leaned on the corpse-statues, watching the stevedores secure the ship and lower her loading ramps. Granger recognized a few faces and nodded greetings. They were all small-timers. Nobody from the larger prisons would bother with such low-value captives. There wasn’t enough profit in peasants. Creedy fell into conversation with a man Granger didn’t know, so Granger turned back to watch the Alabaster Sound.

The captain stomped down the gangplank, his helmet gripped in the crook of his arm, his lacquered steel boots clanking. He was typical Losotan, dark-haired with fine features. He grinned broadly, wiped sweat from his brow and called out, ‘Grech.’

The head administrator peered up from his desk with darkly suspicious little eyes. ‘You’re early,’ he said. He was all joints, this man – a great shambling preying mantis. He wore a dusty wig, woven into plaits, and an ash-coloured Imperial robe enriched with silver and lead chain-links around the shoulders. His chin hovered over his ledger like a stalactite.

The captain handed him a scroll. ‘One hundred and sixty-three redundants. Eighteen twenty-eight still breathing, and another eighteen lawbreakers pickling in our seawater tanks. That’s two thousand and nine bodies delivered.’

‘Eighteen lawbreakers?’ the administrator said. ‘That seems excessive.’

‘Discipline,’ the captain replied. ‘You give these people an inch and their lawlessness starts to infect the crew. Besides, I know how much you like to watch them dry out.’ His gaze wandered to the nearest stone figure – the stone body of a woman curled up on the ground, her face a rictus of agony – and he gave a little smile.

The administrator examined the document, then scrawled something across the bottom and handed it back to the other man. The captain turned and gestured to one of the Alabaster Sound’s deck crew, who began unloading their human cargo.

The prisoners were much as Granger had expected: a rabble of Evensraum farm labourers, militia, women and old men. Hardly a trained combatant among them. Shackled hand to foot and linked by chains, they shuffled down the loading ramps under the watchful eyes of the ship’s overseer. The crew lined them up on the dockside, while Ethugra’s jailers crowded around the administrators’ desks to collect the numbered tickets necessary to claim new arrivals. Granger was about to join them, when Creedy came forward, holding out two slips of paper.

‘You’re sorted,’ he said.

Granger hesitated. ‘How did you get these?’

The sergeant grunted. ‘My first cousin’s husband knows a man who knows a man,’ he said. ‘Just take them, Colonel, or we’ll be here all day. It’s too damn hot to hang around here any longer than we need to.’

Granger accepted the tickets and examined them. He was to be allocated prisoners forty-three and forty-four from the first batch. ‘Is there anyone in this city your family doesn’t know?’

Creedy thought for a moment. ‘Aye, but they’re all below water.’

The two men waited their turn as the first prisoners were brought, one by one, before the administrators. Documents were signed and passed along the line to be stamped and countersigned. Numbers were called out, whereupon the jailer holding the appropriate ticket claimed his captive and herded them further down the line to finalize the paperwork. The Alabaster Sound’s overseer unlocked chains, lashing his whip at his charges when they delayed.

The sun hammered them without mercy. The smell of whale oil from the ship’s funnels lingered in the air and clung to the roof of Granger’s mouth. He watched the boats bobbing in the bay. He eyed a beer seller and rummaged in his pocket for coins, but his hand came out empty. He tugged at his collar and wiped sweat from his brow and peered down the line of prisoners. Fewer than thirty had been processed. Underfed and dejected, half of them wouldn’t last a year in Ethugra.

‘Thomas?’

A female captive at the front of the line was staring at Granger. Evidently she had been troublesome on the voyage, for the face under her bonfire of black hair had been beaten black and yellow. Dried blood caked her lower lip. She was clinging fiercely to a girl of fifteen or sixteen, trying to stop the overseer from separating them. ‘Thomas?’ she said quickly. ‘It’s you, isn’t it?’

Granger shook his head. ‘I don’t know you, ma’am.’

The overseer wrenched the young girl away from the older woman and thrust her towards a waiting jailer. The woman shrieked, ‘Ianthe,’ and tried to follow, but the overseer kicked her to the ground. She reached out her arms and wailed. ‘She’s my daughter!’

Both mother and daughter wore simple Evensraum peasant clothes, as torn and filthy as any of the other captives, and yet the girl’s boots were exceptionally fine, certainly not the sort of footwear one might expect a farm girl to own. Even in rags she was a striking young woman, olive-skinned with full lips, and a slender nose under a riot of black hair. She was terrified, confused, her eyes wild and brimming with tears. She didn’t even appear to see the jailer as he grabbed her wrist and dragged her quickly down the line of tables. Something about her appearance struck a chord in Granger’s heart. She looked strangely familiar.

‘Please,’ the woman on the ground begged him. ‘Don’t let them take her away from me. It would kill her.’

‘Ma’am…’ Granger began.

‘My name is Hana,’ she cried. ‘You know me, Thomas. You know me from Weaverbrook.’

A slow, horrible realization came over Granger as he looked down at the beaten woman, at the face behind the bruises. She hadn’t aged well. Suddenly he found himself staring after the girl in the hands of the other jailer. She had her mother’s hair and skin, but what about the rest? The almond shape of that face, the tiny bump in the bridge of her nose, the strong line of her chin. Anyone could see the girl had some Losotan blood. And her eyes? Not dark like her mother’s, but the same pale shade of blue Granger looked at in his shaving mirror every day. Fifteen years old? God help him. Fifteen years. Not here, not now. Not in this godforsaken place.

Creedy must have seen Granger’s expression change, because he grabbed his arm and whispered, ‘Fucking hell, Colonel. Don’t even think about it. You’re not Granger no longer. What happens in wartime happens. This has nothing to do with you now.’

The woman was sobbing. ‘Please help her.’

The grip on Granger’s arm tightened. ‘Not a good idea, Mr Swinekicker.’

Granger wrenched away from the other man. He walked up to the administrator’s desk and laid down his tickets. ‘Give me these two,’ he said.

The administrator didn’t even glance at the tickets. ‘I’m sorry, sir. These prisoners have already been claimed.’

‘What difference does it make?’ Granger insisted. ‘They’re randomly allocated.’

One of the men standing nearby glanced at the sobbing peasant woman, then turned to him and said, ‘She’s supposed to come with me, but I don’t need the trouble, mate.’ He held out his ticket. ‘I’ll trade you.’

Granger swapped tickets with the man. Then he approached the jailer holding the young girl. ‘What do you say?’

The other man made a dismissive gesture. ‘Forget it. I ain’t queuing up again.’ He handed his prison ledger to one of the administrators and stood there, studiously avoiding Granger’s eye. The administrator looked at the ledger, then looked at Granger.

Granger leaned close to the jailer and said, ‘One prisoner is as good as another.’

The other man shook his head. ‘I told you,’ he replied weakly. ‘I’m not interested.’ He rubbed sweat from his brow and stared intently down at the desk. Still, the official did nothing. The sun beat down on the plaza, on the administrators’ desks, on the assembled crowds. Finally the jailer turned to Granger and whispered, ‘I got another business to run, you know?’ He moistened his lips. ‘I can’t trade her for some old man.’

‘You paid extra for her?’

‘You know how it is, man.’

Granger placed his remaining ticket and his ledger on the desk. ‘Sign her over to me,’ he said to the administrator.

The administrator gazed blankly at the scrap of paper.

‘Do it,’ Granger hissed, ‘before I start using words like corruption and prostitution. Those terms are quite clearly defined in the Evensraum Convention.’

The jailer threw his ticket down. ‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Have her. What do I care?’ He snatched up his ledger and stormed away into the crowd.

Back in the launch, Granger felt like shivering despite the sun. What had he just done? His heart seemed to stutter as it wavered between feelings of responsibility and regret. He clutched his prison ledger in bloodless knuckles. Creedy steered the boat across the plaza, wrapped in a disapproving silence, while the two prisoners huddled together in the bow. Hana held her daughter tightly under a spare whaleskin cloak. She kept glancing over at Granger, a question burning in her eyes. The girl, Ianthe, stared absently across the brine, as though she wasn’t really seeing anything at all, as though the world around her didn’t really exist. She hadn’t looked at Granger once.

Nobody spoke until they’d left the open water and plunged into the canals of Francialle, when Creedy suddenly said, ‘Big mistake, Colonel. They’re prisoners, for god’s sake.’ He picked up his boat hook and pushed the hull away from a wall with an angry grunt. ‘They’d have been better off with anyone else in Ethugra.’ He let out a sarcastic laugh. ‘And it’s against the fucking law.’

Creedy was right, of course, and it shamed Granger to think he had finally fallen so low. His own father would have raged and beaten him over it, would have forced him to hand Hana and Ianthe back to the prison administrators.

But his father was dead. And his mother was dead. His brother John killed in Weaverbrook, leaving a wife and child somewhere in Losoto. Even old Swinekicker had finally gone under the brine. The only family Granger had left was sitting in this boat.