Alan Campbell - Sea Of Ghosts

‘The suit filters will take worst of the brine out of the air,’ Davy said, ‘and there’s a jerry can of water already in there. Don’t take off your helmets except when you need to drink. And for god’s sake, don’t damage the dragon. It’s going to a collector.’ He glanced between the two men. ‘That’s it, except for the money.’

Granger pulled out a wad of gilders from his kitbag and gave it to Davy. It was everything he had. Then he gathered up the other diving suit and began to clamber inside it. Creedy snapped down the last of his helmet clamps and peered out through the circular window at his own gloved hands. ‘How do I take a piss?’ he said.

‘The usual way,’ Davy said. ‘Good luck.’

Creedy got on his hands and knees and crawled inside the dragon’s mouth. After a moment, he called back, ‘Holy shit, Colonel, you’ll never guess what this thing has eaten.’

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?’