Alan Campbell - Sea Of Ghosts

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.