Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts (34 page)

Someone knocked on the door. Maskelyne set down his pen and got up from the workbench. He opened the door to find Kitchener standing in the passageway. The sailor was standing over an open crate.

‘We found these in a hidden compartment under the hold,’ he said. ‘We were about to throw them overboard, but I thought I’d better check with you first.’

Maskelyne looked down at the open box. It was almost completely full of dust, but he could see the edges of artefacts partially buried in there: heavy iron rings, wrapped with wires. He brushed away the dust and picked one up. The windings felt hot to the touch. A foul, burned metal odour came from them. ‘How many are there altogether?’ he asked.

‘Twelve in each crate,’ Kitchener said. ‘And we pulled five crates out of the compartment. We stored our supplies down there first, but they rotted so fast you wouldn’t believe. I had a few of the men start carrying what was left up into one of the bow cabins, while Roberts and me went looking for the source of the problem. We found the compartment quickly enough.’ He hesitated. ‘It wasn’t just the rot, you see? The supplies had been moving about too.’

‘Moving?’

‘Our own boxes wouldn’t stay in one place. We’d leave them alone for an hour, and come back to find that they’d slid right across the floor, like somebody had been moving them when nobody was looking. The men . . . well, you know how things go, sir. Talk of hearing whispers when no one was around, that sort of thing.’

Maskelyne touched his dust-smeared fingers to his tongue. ‘Tastes like . . .’

‘Bone marrow,’ Kitchener said.

‘It’s an amplifier,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Unmer Brutalists used the consumption of human tissue to increase their energy.’ He turned the ring over in his hand. It looked quite dead now. What else, he wondered, could it amplify? ‘The effects you witnessed are just residual, amplification of decay, inertia, voices.’

‘Then they go overboard, sir?’

‘All of them.’

The crewman looked relieved.

‘Except this one,’ Maskelyne added. ‘I’ll keep it for study.’ He placed the device on his desk. ‘Is there anything else?’

Kitchener hesitated. ‘It’s the wheel console, sir,’ he said. ‘Ab-ernathy got the inner sleeve open.’ He rubbed his eyes and then took a deep breath. ‘It’s full of bones. We think maybe five or six infants.’

Maskelyne nodded. ‘Human sacrifices. Tell Abernathy to close it up again before it unsettles the crew. What’s our situation with water?’

‘The purifier’s still acting strangely, captain. The stuff coming out of it looks like urine and tastes about as good. Most of us are drinking it anyway. Got no choice.’

‘Who’s
not
drinking it?’

‘Duncan, Abernathy, a few of the others. They say they’d rather die.’

Their situation was deteriorating far more quickly than Maskelyne had expected. At his rate, most of his crew would be dead before the ship made it back to Scythe Island. He sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do. We need Abernathy with his wits intact. In the meantime, report anything else unusual to me.’

When Kitchener left, he returned to his journal and added a few final words.

Ianthe’s heart was racing as she returned to the quiet darkness of her own body. Maskelyne’s thief was closer to him than he could possibly imagine. But how could he ever suspect his own child?

She reached under her bunk and grabbed the children’s blanket she’d hidden there and then unfolded it on her lap. There lay the spectacles Jontney had stolen for her, the lenses and engraved silver frames gleaming like treasure. Ianthe looked down at them for a long moment. Then, carefully, she slipped them over her eyes.

The cabin blossomed into existence before her, an explosion of light in the darkness. It was accompanied by a strange crackling sound that quickly faded. There was barely room to stand up and turn around, and yet there now seemed to be more crammed into this tiny space than in the whole of the outside world: the grain of the ancient timber panelling, the warped floor, her bunk, the black iron door handle and its keyhole. Moreover, she could hear the slosh of the waves against the hull, the ship booming and groaning all around her – hear them with her own useless ears!

Ianthe drank deeply of these new sensations, hardly able to control her excitement. Everything here appeared normal, bright and clear, without the flickering silver auras she had witnessed through Maskelyne’s eyes. The spectacles, she supposed, had not been designed to be worn by two people at once.

But then she noticed something strange. Her bunk was no longer made up with the fresh sheets Lucille had given her, and her clothes were no longer piled in the corner where she’d dumped them. The cabin was entirely empty of everything she’d brought in here. Nothing remained but the dismal old walls. Whatever had happened to Maskelyne in the captain’s quarters was happening to her, too. Objects were vanishing.

Could the goggles only perceive Unmer items?

Ianthe raised her hand in front of her face. There was nothing there at all, not even a trace. She looked down at her own body. Nothing. She was invisible, a ghost in her own cabin.

She slumped down on her bunk again, now gripped by despair. Why, when she’d finally been giver the means by which to see, should her vision be so fatally flawed? What use were these lenses if they turned everything important into air?

Perhaps one could adjust the lenses?

Slowly, she turned the little wheel on the side of the frames. The cabin flickered violently, and that same crackling sound harried her ears. For a moment everything became blurred and indistinct. Her pile of clothes did not reappear. She spun the wheel around further now, tears now welling in her eyes. The cabin glowed with a phosphorous yellow light, and then abruptly became quite dark. She gasped with fright. Had she broken the blasted things? But then she realized she could still perceive variations in the deep shadows. For a moment it looked as if she was standing in a
woodland
. Was that the sound of wind rushing through the trees? The image flickered again and abruptly dissolved to complete black.

Frustrated now, Ianthe twisted the wheel all the way forward until it stopped.

The cabin became a shuddering blur again and then came into sharp focus. She thought she had glimpsed something moving quickly around her, like a passing shadow, but now that the lenses had settled she couldn’t see anything like that now.

She could, however, see her clothes. They had appeared in the corner. Ianthe raised her hand in front of her eyes again, and this time she could perceive it quite clearly. She sprang up from the bunk and clapped her hands and laughed out loud. Everything around her was finally as it should be: the clothes, the sheets on the bunk, Jontney’s blanket. The spectacles worked!

Now she was curious.

Ianthe twisted the little wheel backwards again. Her surroundings flickered, and the clothes vanished from the corner once more. She turned the wheel forward, and the clothes reappeared. She tried it several times, rocking the wheel backwards and forwards, watching everything she owned slip in and out of existence. Whatever was happening?

She spun the wheel back as far as it would go.

The cabin erupted in a blaze of light. A kaleidoscope of images clattered across her vision with the sound of bells and shrieks and angry wasps. Colours burst before her eyes like naval shells. And then as quickly as it had started, it stopped. Her surroundings resolved themselves once more. She was back in her cabin.

Only it was not the
same
cabin. Its proportions were identical, but the panelling looked new, agleam with varnish. Everything now seemed fresh and untarnished. A padded quilt of blue and gold diamonds lay across the bunk, while a silver watch and a miniature enamelled portrait hung from hooks above the pillow. The portrait was of a robust lady with orange hair and piercing violet eyes. A shelf had materialized beside the door, on which rested a bright copper gem lantern and an open book.

Ianthe heard men shouting somewhere above. They were speaking Unmer.

She got up and opened the door.

The corridor outside looked different from before. All the ash and decay had been swept away, leaving a neat passageway of polished dark wood. The shouting was louder here. It was definitely coming from above deck. Ianthe paused for a moment, then, nervously, crept along the corridor.

She recognized the wooden steps up to the main deck, even if she could not account for their miraculously rejuvenated condition. The whole ship now looked as if it might have been built yesterday. She climbed the steps and rested a hand on the hatch above her. Then she pushed it open.

A cacophony of shouting, roaring and strange whirrs and droning sounds filled the air. Black and yellow smoke engulfed the skies, shrouding the entire ship in deep and unnatural gloom. Ianthe’s eyes widened. The sea itself was ablaze, with fires raging across the slate-grey waters as far as she could see. There were hundreds of ships out there, all Unmer vessels: men-o’-war and old electrical warships, wooden schooners, dragon-bone yachts, merchantmen and smaller pickets. Every one of them was burning.

As Ianthe turned, she realized with horror that her own vessel had not escaped the devastation. Her surroundings bustled with activity. A score of crewmen were pulling up buckets of seawater and emptying them across the deck in a desperate attempt to quench fires raging across the stern and starboard side. These men looked like no race of sailors Ianthe had ever seen. They were unusually tall and fine-featured, with long faces and narrow eyes. They wore brigandines and pauldrons of stiff black canvas, heavily ornamented with ciphers and numerals, and all had adorned themselves with rings, earrings and amulets wrought from silvery metals. Many had shorn their hair completely and bore Unmer glyphs, circles and strings of numbers tattooed across their naked skulls, while others had teased their hair and beards into thin tails wrapped with wire. Not one of them turned to look at Ianthe. She realized that she was a ghost among them.

Unmer sailors beat the sterncastle with sodden blankets, while their companions continued to drag up buckets of water. Smoke boiled through the struts of the ship’s tower. Metal groaned. Embers darned the air like red flies. Meanwhile, two-man teams operated a number of strange bronze cannons fixed at regular intervals inside the bulwarks. The whirrs and droning sounds were coming from these devices. Ianthe watched as three of the teams on the starboard side fired together. Crackling circles of blue energy burst from the conical ends of the barrels and shot away into the fuming sky with a shrieking hum.

And there she saw the dragons.

Three of the great serpents bore down on the Unmer ship, their black wings thrashing the air, their long bodies clad in flashing silver armour. Each seemed as big as the ship itself, and on the back of the central, and largest, beast rode a man.

He was wearing golden armour and held aloft a spear to which he had attached a fluttering red pennant. Ianthe could not see him clearly from down here, but she fancied that he was as lean and tall as the sailors around her.

A bell began to ring somewhere aft. Men shouted:

‘Kabash raka. Nol
.
’

‘Sere, sere.’

Ianthe could not translate their cries, but she recognized the urgency in their voices.

Shrieks came from the ship’s electrical weapons, as their Unmer operators let loose a further barrage. Blue circles of flame made vortexes through the tumbling smoke as they shot skywards. The dragons split formation, the outermost two peeling away as the central and largest of the three dropped low underneath the onslaught and dived towards the ship. Its armoured belly gleamed red by the light of the burning sea; its rider’s long white hair blew behind his head.

Ianthe heard a cry from somewhere very close: ‘Brutalist!’

She sensed movement nearby and shrank back as a hugely muscled man stepped past her, without as much as a glance in her direction. He was naked to the waist, his skin inked with hundreds of numerals and concentric circles, all stitched together with copper wire. He stood motionless, his fists resting on his hips and his teeth set as he glared up at the approaching serpent. One of those fists held a massive iron ring.
An Unmer Brutalist. A
combat sorcerer.

‘Conquillas,’ he yelled.

The dragon opened its maw and vented a spume of liquid fire.

The Brutalist abruptly dropped to one knee and raised the ring above his head. A sphere of green light bloomed from this object, encircling him instantly in a tremulous haze. Black sparks raced across the shimmering surface, accompanied by a series of frantic snapping sounds and the steadily building howl of gales as smoke rushed inwards towards the globe. The air itself was being consumed, driven out of existence. Ianthe realized that the iron ring was amplifying the sorcerer’s own innate ability. And then came sounds, like the clattering of iron-shod hooves. Through the shifting curtains of radiance and shadow Ianthe caught a glimpse of the Brutalist’s face – grim and determined, his eyes fixed in concentration. His lips moved as he chanted words she could not hear.