Alan Campbell - Sea Of Ghosts

WHY ARE WE PAYING TO KEEP THE UNMER ALIVE?

Most of the doors had been staved in, revealing cavernous rooms beyond. Granger poked his head through the nearest doorway. The reek of brine filled the darkness. Through an open doorway in the opposite wall, he heard the gentle slosh of sea-water coming from the rooms beyond. He glanced around. Nothing but wet rubble and the remains of an old fire.

They set off down the street, peering into each of the houses. After a short while Banks gave a low whistle and beckoned the others over to one particular house.

Inside, the room was as damp and miserable as any other, a gloomy, rubble-filled shell with two doorways in the opposite wall. The only thing different was a wooden plank leaning against the wall to the left of the door. Granger set down his kitbag, then picked up the plank and carried it over to the first of the doorways opposite.

It had been a kitchen once. The sinks had been ripped out and taken, but a rusted iron stove remained under the chimney stack. Most of the ceiling had collapsed, along with a good part of the roof above, and heavy beams lay strewn across the floor. A doorway led out into what must have once been a back garden or courtyard. The floor here was an inch deep in brine. In this gloom the brown water looked like tar.

‘There,’ Banks said. He was pointing to a place low on the back door frame. ‘You see those marks? Something has been knocked against the wood.’

Granger returned for his kitbag. He opened it and handed out hemp face masks and sailors’ goggles to his men. They wouldn’t need them unless the wind picked up, but it was best to be safe. With the lenses resting on his forehead, and the mask slung loosely around his neck, he traversed the kitchen again, stepping between mounds of rubble to keep his boots out of the brine. The back doorway led to a courtyard full of dark seawater. Steps vanished down into that toxic murk. Granger couldn’t tell how deep the water was, but it was unlikely to be more than a few feet here. Small waves came through an open gate in the back wall of the yard, pushing in from the lane beyond, and lapping around the edges of the enclosed space. Someone had built a number of stone piles leading out through that gate, like widely spaced stepping stones.

Granger lowered the plank between the doorway and the first pile, then turned back into the kitchen. ‘Bring me some of those ceiling beams,’ he said.

Soon they had constructed a rudimentary walkway out into the lane, which turned out to be a narrow channel running between the courtyards of opposing ranks of houses. The buildings further out were little more than roofless shells, all of them Unmer dwellings, except for the twelve Haurstaf watchtowers that loomed like a great henge over a walled section the Sunken Quarter. From here, the stone piles led away in both directions. They would have to lift planks and beams from the start of the walkway and lay them down in the lane ahead to progress any further.

Granger stared up at the watchtowers.

Banks followed his gaze. ‘It’s the size of that place gets me,’ he said.

‘You mean how large it is, or how small?’

‘Both,’ Banks replied. ‘That used to be the largest Unmer ghetto in the world. Sixty blocks in all.’ He blew through his teeth, then shrugged. ‘Doesn’t seem so big when you think how many Unmer they managed to squeeze in there.’

Granger nodded. After the Uprising, the Haurstaf had refused to allow the liberated Losotan slaves to execute their former masters. Such genocide would have offered them no profit. Instead, they’d confined half a million Unmer souls to that one small part of the city and left twelve telepaths behind to form a psychic cordon around them. The Veil of Screams. How many Unmer had died trying to pass through that invisible barrier? It had been more effective than any tangible wall could ever have been. Losoto’s taxpayers had been paying for it dearly ever since.

Creedy frowned. ‘So we’re going the other way? That whole place is likely to stink of sorcery.’

Banks laughed. ‘An Unmer ghetto? There can’t be many places less likely to stink of sorcery. You try weaving a spell with a witch sticking psychic needles into your brain. The Unmer couldn’t even take a shit without Haurstaf approval.’ He shook his head. ‘I’ll tell you what, though, if I was a trover, that’s exactly the sort of place I’d hide my stash.’

Creedy’s frown dissolved. ‘You reckon there’s treasure in there?’

Banks shrugged. ‘Creepy old places like that have an aura of mystery about them. And that keeps the idiots out.’

Creedy turned to Granger. ‘We could check it out, Colonel.’

Granger shook his head. ‘We’re here to look for a boat, Sergeant. And that means locating an illegal mooring. Banks?’

‘It’s this way,’ the private said, jabbing his thumb in the opposite direction to the watchtowers.

‘That’s a crapping guess,’ Creedy said.

Banks sighed. ‘Look at those piles,’ he said, pointing further down the lane. ‘You see where the ichusan crystals are broken? Someone put down planks.’

They set off again, lifting beams from behind them and laying them down on the stone piles ahead. Soon they reached an opening in the seaward wall which led into another yard. The stepping stones vanished through the kitchen door of the house beyond. Banks crouched to study the surroundings closely, then nodded to Granger. They made a bridge over to the house.

The kitchen opened into a hallway blocked by a collapsed staircase. Someone had left a ladder in its place. Granger’s unit manhandled their planks and beams up to the first floor and carried them over rotten floorboards to the front of the house. Here an empty room overlooked a black canal clogged with mats of seaweed and rubbish from the still-living city. Brine sucked at the brickwork. It smelled like a sewer. The gap between this house and the one opposite was narrow enough to be spanned by the longest of their beams.

‘Goddamn rat’s maze,’ Creedy muttered as he slid the beam across to the first-floor window of the opposite house.

‘Nothing wrong with rats,’ Tummel said. ‘There’s good meat on rats.’

‘Very good,’ Swan agreed. ‘We had a little farm going in our attic. Rats as big as dogs we had, hundreds of them. We were going to sell them down the market.’

‘Rat stew with dumplings,’ Tummel said.

‘Rat on a stick,’ Swan added.

Creedy glared at them. ‘You pair make me sick,’ he said. He climbed up on to one end of the beam, tested it with his foot and then strolled across to the opposite house.

‘The man has no taste,’ Swan said. ‘It’s not as if he hasn’t eaten rat before.’

‘Best keep that quiet,’ Tummel said.

As Granger stomped over the makeshift bridge after Sergeant Creedy, he experienced a moment of dizziness. For an instant he wavered between the black, sucking brine and the stars cartwheeling across the heavens above. He halted and crouched on the beam until the moment passed.

‘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.