Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [102]
He walked over to examine one of the queer guns bolted to the deck. The cone of circular plates over its barrel prevented any type of shot from passing through the weapon. Perhaps it had also once utilized electrical fluids? It seemed unlikely that he could repair the device, for it looked utterly destroyed. Its metal surfaces had been heated to the point where they had actually flowed downwards, leaving tallow-like trails of iron. Maskelyne leaned closer and smelled burned copper. Nothing salvageable.
The three men made their way across groaning deck towards the sterncastle.
‘Look at this,’ Kitchener said. He indicated an area of deck where a black scorch mark formed the shape of a sprawled human body. It looked as if the corpse had been removed, leaving a perfect shadow behind.
‘There’s more over here,’ Roberts said. ‘Four, five of them.’
Maskelyne gazed down at the twisted shapes. ‘The remains of the crew,’ he said. ‘They were sorcerers, all of them.’ And not as much as a fragment of their bone left behind. Dragonfire had consumed them utterly. Maskelyne bent down to examine the shadow more closely—
—and abruptly recoiled. For an instant he’d felt searing heat, and it had seemed that he himself was lying there amidst the smoke and flames, with the stink of burning flesh in his nostrils and the cries of the dying all around. Burned alive. They were burned alive almost three hundred years ago. The sensation left him shaking, and it took a moment to clear the echoes of that terrible screaming from his head. Had the ship itself absorbed the essence of the men who’d died here? All Unmer creations contained a spark of the infinite. Was it possible that the crew had somehow contrived to find refuge there?
‘Let’s not linger,’ he said.
They found the door to the captain’s quarters in the sterncastle.
There was little evidence of fire damage inside. A short wood-panelled corridor opened into a small, sour-smelling wash room on the left. It contained a beaten copper sink and a wooden commode, a stack of rotten books on the floor. Roberts gagged and turned away at the stink, but Maskelyne pushed past him and picked up one of the books. It was a volume on surgical sorcery written in Unmer and packed with illustrations of opened human cadavers beside wire-wound rods and spheres. He translated the title as Venal Tissues of Man.
To the right an open doorway led to a larger dressing room wherein the remains of the captain’s clothes still hung in musty wardrobes. The garments were covered in tiny spiders. Webs cocooned them completely, and yet not one strand of silk reached beyond the wardrobe itself. On the dressing table lay a copper egg and a small flute carved from a human finger. Maskelyne picked up the egg, but sensed nothing unusual about it.
At the end of the corridor a third door gave them access to the captain’s cabin.
Here Maskelyne stopped and stared in astonishment. Every corner of the cabin was filled with Unmer treasure. An entire rack of brightly lacquered swords, surgical swords, knives, daggers and stilettos hung upon the wall beside the bed, their steel blades agleam. A glass cabinet held chronographs, sextants, anemometers, compasses and astrolabes, all exquisitely wrought from a strange green alloy. There were shelves upon shelves of scientific instruments and small, boxed machines whose purpose could only be guessed at. An open chest at the foot of the bed contained a glittering hoard of gold coins. Maskelyne retrieved a coin with the intention of examining it, but it made him feel suddenly nauseous, and he dropped it back among the others. His skin prickled for a moment afterwards, and