Sea Of Ghosts gc-1 Read online

  ‘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.

  T
rovers?

  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.