Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [120]
Only three hundred feet of the fuse cord was of higher fast-burn grade, which would allow him to rig two cannons to fire with a twelve-second delay between ignition and detonation.
It wasn’t good enough.
Granger carried the spools of quick cord back up to the gun room. There had to be better solution. He began the heavy work of loading and tamping each of the cannons. He had hours ahead to figure it out.
Briana Marks drew her hair out of the collar of her white woollen tunic, and let it fall over her shoulders. She was standing at the back of the Irillian Herald’s wheelhouse, quietly watching the crew at work. Her captain, Erasmus Howlish, was leaning over the map table, speaking quietly to the navigator about their course. A former Losotan privateer, Howlish still bore the raised white lines across the back of his hands where a Guild torturer had once applied his lash. He wore his black hair in a long plait in defiance of protocol, but Briana allowed him this small conceit. One had to be flexible when employing one’s former enemies.
The helmsman stood rigidly at the wheel, his eyes fixed on the horizon beyond the Herald’s foredeck. She was an old Valcinder man-o’-war, refitted in Awl to provide the sort of luxury accommodation expected by the Guild, but Briana cared little for the silks and silver and teak down in the staterooms. She preferred the simple functionality of the wheelhouse. Its position high on the quarterdeck gave her an uninterrupted view of the surrounding sea. This hemisphere of Unmer duskglass contained nothing but the ship’s wheel console, a navigation station and a curved steel bench, over which Briana had placed her whaleskin cloak. The Unmer glass served to filter out much of the late-afternoon sun, along with most of the fury of the wind and sea. Through the glass dome she could see the rise and plunge of copper-coloured waves as gales whipped across the Mare Lux, driving amber breakers. Spume battered the Herald’s bow, but here in the dome it remained warm and peaceful.
Two telepaths, one on each of the Herald’s sister men-o’-war, had been relaying information to her throughout their search for Maskelyne. Briana knew her distant compatriots only as Pascal and Windflower, both young Losotan yellow-grade psychics who had been attached to the Guild navy since completion of their training. She had probably seen them numerous times at the school in Awl, but for now they remained disembodied voices to her. She had no desire to learn more about them than their names and rank. En route to the Whispering Valley, they had happened upon a strange ironclad vessel a few minutes south of the Border Waters. It was an Unmer deadship of archaic design using a makeshift spinnaker to tack south – and it was being captained by the very man they had been looking for.
Briana’s own ship was still three leagues to the south-east, and it frustrated her that she couldn’t see the pair of red-hulled Haurstaf craft converging on the ironclad.
An Unmer deadship.
They informed her that it looked like an icebreaker – perhaps one of the very ships sent south from Pertica to join the Unmer fleet at the battle at Awl. If so, nobody had seen its type at sea for almost three hundred years. Briana reached out with her mind, feeling for the presence of Unmer consciousness.
She heard her companions psytalking in hushed tones, but she didn’t bother to listen in. She felt for the ship, searching for any psychic presence aboard. And then she noticed something odd. An echo? Not quite. It was almost a reverberation, like the resonant silence an Unmer tuning fork makes when its tone is below human hearing.
Are either of you sensing this?
Sensing what? Windflower said.
There are no Unmer aboard, Pascal added. I’ve already checked.
Briana sent her thoughts back across the sea.