Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts (42 page)

‘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.