Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [12]
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