Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts (39 page)

‘Thank you for coming to our aid,’ he said. ‘Please pass my regards on to your cannoneers.’

‘You did not seem inclined to stop,’ Briana remarked.

Maskelyne stepped aside as Kevin Lum, the
Irillian Herald
’s first officer, led a cohort of armed men across the corvus onto the stricken deadship. Most of the Guild sailors began rounding up Maskelyne’s crew, while others threw open the fore, midship and sterncastle hatches and began their search of the vessel. Maskelyne turned back to Briana. ‘You evidently want something from us,’ he said. ‘If I’d offered to parley, you might have taken advantage of our unfortunate position. However, Guild maritime law prohibits you from abandoning us on a powerless ship. I believe that would be seen as murder.’

‘He’s right,’ Howlish said. ‘The moment we shredded their sail, we made them enemy combatants. As long as they don’t resist our boarding party, we have to take them with us.’

Briana cursed under her breath. Ethan Maskelyne hadn’t changed at all.

Just then there was a commotion on the deadship’s deck, as two Guild sailors dragged a young woman through the sterncastle hatch. She was about fifteen, olive-skinned, with a mess of black hair. She kicked and screamed at them, ‘Let me go, you idiots, I need to get back . . . you don’t . . . understand.’

Briana smiled. ‘Does that look like resistance to you, Captain Howlish?’

‘Very much so, ma’am.’

Maskelyne’s eyes narrowed. He looked at the girl with marked distaste. ‘This young lady,’ he said, ‘is not part of my crew.’

Out of the hatch behind her stepped a woman with a small child in her arms. She was bruised and bleeding and walked with a limp. One of the Guild sailors helped her towards the corvus, but she hesitated before stepping aboard.

Maskelyne’s expression softened. ‘My wife and son,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid this voyage has been hard on them both.’

Briana turned to Howlish. ‘Just get them all aboard.’

‘Very good, ma’am.’

‘May I ask where you’re heading?’ Maskelyne said.

‘Awl,’ Briana replied.

Maskelyne frowned. ‘I don’t suppose you could drop us off at Scythe Island? I’d make it worth your while.’

She gave him a thin smile.

‘That’s what I thought.’

Evacuation of the deadship continued until after dark. Three of the
Herald
’s crew escorted the metaphysicist and his family to a stateroom, where their needs were to be attended to under armed guard. Maskelyne’s wife Lucille began to sob. Her relief at departing that derelict vessel was palpable. The boy, Jontney, simply watched everything with quiet wonder. Maskelyne’s crewmen were herded into the brig, although they seemed much less dissatisfied with their new accommodation than any of its former occupants. Howlish ordered his mariners to strip the ironclad of anything valuable and stow it in their own hold.

Ianthe was a problem. The girl seemed determined to remain on the deadship. She struggled against her two captors, scratching and trying to bite them until they restrained her thoroughly. Even then she wouldn’t stop screaming.

Briana fired a mental blast directly at the girl, a wordless surge of anger that should have stunned a trained psychic. It was enough to stress the entire Haurstaf telepathic network, eliciting moans of pain and fright from every corner of the empire. Ianthe, however, did not appear to notice it. Briana stood and watched the girl for a long moment, this furious crow-haired child.
Have I made a mistake?
She reached out with her mind again, more tentatively this time, hoping to sense the source of the girl’s anguish. At first she perceived nothing at all, just the featureless plane of human consciousness around her – a place known to Guild witches as the Harmonic Reservoir, where ripples of Haurstaf thought could resonate undetected by the great mass of humanity in the depths below. And then she noticed a glitch, an almost imperceptible fracture in the surface of these perfect waters. The reservoir was cracked. Curious, Briana pushed her thoughts towards that tiny imperfection . . .

Suddenly she was on the brink of falling. There was nothing to grab hold of – no emotions, no thoughts at all, just a dark and bottomless void below the sea, a vacuum that seemed to want to drag the Haurstaf witch inside.

Briana recoiled.

She found herself standing on the
Herald
’s deck once more, clutching Howlish’s arm to steady herself. She had never sensed anything like that before. It was like a force of nature, a storm, but without wind or substance – an abyss.

‘Are you all right, ma’am?’ Howlish asked.

Briana couldn’t answer. She was still fumbling to locate her own wits. What had just happened? She raised her head to find Ianthe gazing at her with a curiously detached look in her eyes.

‘Did you just do something?’ the girl said.

Briana swallowed, then took a deep breath. Her thoughts still spun. That break in the reservoir had been so tiny she might easily have overlooked it, and yet it had contained a space so vast it had overwhelmed her. ‘We’re not trying to harm you,’ she said.

‘Then let me go,’ Ianthe said. ‘Get these idiots off me!’

Briana nodded to the Guild sailors, who released the girl.

Ianthe bolted immediately. She ran back across the boarding ramp onto the Unmer ship. Briana watched her go with mute incomprehension, before she realized what was happening. She cursed and raced after the girl.

‘Ianthe, wait!’

The girl reached the sterncastle hatch, threw it open and plunged inside.

Moments behind, Briana hurried down the steps after the girl. She found herself in a narrow wooden space with doors leading off both sides. It took her eyes a moment to adjust to the gloom – and then she spotted Ianthe stumbling along the passageway ahead, her hands held out like those of a blind woman trying to feel her way. The girl reached a door at the end of the passageway and burst through it.

This door led to the captain’s cabin, and here Briana found Ianthe fumbling about on her hands and knees, searching for something.

‘You can’t stay here,’ Briana said quietly.

‘Help me find them.’

‘Find what?’

‘The lenses, the spectacles.’

‘What?’

Ianthe gave a shriek of frustration. ‘Spectacles! Unmer spectacles!’

Briana glanced around her. There was a bed, a wardrobe, a chest and a large workbench under the stern windows that held an amazing assortment of telescopes, boxes, prisms, magnets and wires. Among all these objects she spotted a slender silver-frame pair of spectacles.

‘That’s them!’ Ianthe cried. She got to her feet, snatched the spectacles from the table and put them on with shaking hands. Then she stared at Briana. ‘There,’ she said. ‘Now we can go.’

Night was encroaching by the time they sailed away. Clouds covered the stars, and the Mare Lux glimmered faintly like old brass in last rays of dusk. Briana stood on the
Herald
’s sterncastle and watched the icebreaker recede into the distance. It seemed to her that the abandoned ship was turning in the wind, its melted figurehead coming about to watch them depart. She smelled rain and lifted her face to the skies. Banks of thundercloud moved overhead, as dense and massive as continents. Lightning pulsed soundlessly across the far northern horizon and again, dimly, in the west. When she lowered her gaze again, the deadship had disappeared.

A few of the
Herald
’s crew were busy setting out basins and pots to collect rainwater from the expected storm. As she crossed the deck, Briana acknowledged their greetings with a few sullen nods. She didn’t stop to talk. What did she have to say to these people? She went below deck to the galley, where she filled a bowl with thrice-boiled shrimp and land kelp and poured two mugs of coffee. She put the lot on a tray and took it to Ianthe’s cabin.

The girl was lying on her bunk, still wearing her spectacles. She turned round as Briana came in.

‘Hungry?’ Briana said.

Ianthe ignored her.

Briana set the tray down on a small table beside the bunk, then sat down on the stool opposite. Steam rose from the bowl of shrimp, filling the cabin with the vaguely unpleasant aroma of detoxified seafood. The room was large and airy with freshly painted white clapboarding and a floor of crushed pearl. On the wall beside the wardrobe hung a painting of the Guild Palace at Awl – its black and pyrite towers and minarets in striking contrast to the deep greens of the surrounding forest. In the background rose the mountains that formed the spine of Irillia, their layered peaks blurring into a gaseous blue haze. Briana looked at the girl. ‘Must you wear those things?’

‘What do you care?’

‘Actually I
do
care. They’re Unmer, so they’re probably dangerous. I don’t want you running to me when your brain starts trickling out through your nose.’

Ianthe grunted.

Briana took a sip of her coffee. Gently, she reached out with her mind again, gliding across the abstract plane of the Harmonic Reservoir until she found the same glitch she’d discovered earlier. This time she approached more cautiously, stopping when she felt the pull of the void beyond. It wasn’t like touching the mind of another psychic, but more like exposing herself to a crack in the substance of perception itself. Beyond lay powerful forces, and yet they seemed raw and utterly mindless. It was like standing on the edge of an abyss with the wind howling at her back; another step and she’d lose herself completely. She backed away quickly, afraid to go further. Ianthe gave no sign that she’d even noticed Briana’s presence in that other realm. But she had noticed before, Briana recalled.
Did you just do something?

‘Your father told me you’re good at finding trove,’ she said.

‘He’s not my father.’

‘He seemed to think he was.’

‘I don’t care what he thinks.’

Briana set her coffee down again. ‘Why don’t you tell me about it?’

‘You’re wasting your time,’ Ianthe said. ‘I can’t read minds.’

‘Very few psychics are born with any demonstrable ability,’ Briana said. ‘It takes years of training to develop the skill. But we always find some indication of potential in raw recruits, some quirk of personality that gives them away.’ She thought for a moment. ‘Have you ever guessed what someone was going to say before they said it, or been thinking about someone you haven’t seen in a while, and then suddenly bumped into them in the street?’

Ianthe turned away and folded her arms. ‘No.’

‘So finding trove is just a lucky guess?’

The girl continued to stare at the wall through those etched Unmer lenses.

‘An odd little talent like that could be indicative of a greater sensitivity,’ Briana said. ‘I mean, I’m not mocking you. A gift for treasure-hunting is always going to make you useful to people like Maskelyne and your father. You might even make a good living from it yourself one day. But I think that with the proper training you could be capable of so much more. Wouldn’t you like the opportunity to develop your abilities more thoroughly, in comfortable surroundings, with girls of your own age?’

Ianthe snorted. ‘You don’t know anything.’

‘That’s true,’ Briana said. ‘But what do you know about the Haurstaf?’

Ianthe shrugged.

‘We provide various services,’ Briana said, ‘intelligence gathering, communications, containment and security. Our clients range from humble merchants to emperors.’

‘Containment?’ Ianthe said. ‘You mean oppression?’

‘We contain the Unmer humanely,’ Briana said, ‘without the need for walls. Our psychics simply monitor their movements and punish them if they step outside their allocated territory. We certainly don’t kill them unless we have to.’ She looked at Ianthe. ‘Would you rather we allowed them to wander free?’

Ianthe’s arms tightened around herself. ‘You brought war to Evensraum.’

‘Hu brought war to Evensraum—’

‘But you helped him,’ Ianthe retorted. ‘You make it possible.’

‘We facilitate the implementation of our clients’ strategies, if that’s what you mean,’ Briana said. ‘But we never start wars. In fact, our presence in a conflict situation usually saves lives. The bombardment at Weaverbrook happened because Hu chose
not
to use a Guild psychic. He didn’t make that mistake a second time.’

The girl snorted. ‘I didn’t see any psychics on the Evensraum side.’

Briana was silent for a while. Finally she said, ‘The Guild protects itself, first and foremost. If that means adopting a mercenary attitude at times, then that is what we must do. Any other race of people would do the same.’ She finished her coffee and set down the cup. ‘I’m not your enemy, Ianthe. I’m trying to help you.’

Ianthe gazed at the painting on the wall. ‘We’re going to Awl, aren’t we?’

‘That’s right.’

‘What about Maskelyne?’

‘What do you mean?’

‘I don’t want him near me.’

‘That can be arranged,’ Briana said. ‘If it turns out he held a psychic against her will, he’ll be punished accordingly.’

Ianthe turned to face her. ‘Executed?’

‘Would you like that?’