Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [19]
Banks looked back once over his shoulder. ‘Tell Creedy we’re going to find the trover’s stash.’
The sergeant had lifted the heavy brass helmet onto his shoulders, but hadn’t yet clamped it down. ‘Son of a bitch,’ he muttered, his voice muffled by the cumbersome headpiece. ‘Just our luck if the bastard finds it.’
‘The suit filters will take worst of the brine out of the air,’ Davy said, ‘and there’s a jerry can of water already in there. Don’t take off your helmets except when you need to drink. And for god’s sake, don’t damage the dragon. It’s going to a collector.’ He glanced between the two men. ‘That’s it, except for the money.’
Granger pulled out a wad of gilders from his kitbag and gave it to Davy. It was everything he had. Then he gathered up the other diving suit and began to clamber inside it. Creedy snapped down the last of his helmet clamps and peered out through the circular window at his own gloved hands. ‘How do I take a piss?’ he said.
‘The usual way,’ Davy said. ‘Good luck.’
Creedy got on his hands and knees and crawled inside the dragon’s mouth. After a moment, he called back, ‘Holy shit, Colonel, you’ll never guess what this thing has eaten.’
SIX YEARS LATER
CHAPTER 2
A OO A APEE
Dear Margaret,
Thanks to Mr Swinekicker, I’m now officially dead. This means you can make the payments directly to him without losing half of it to tax, which will save you money and allow me to remain here in prison for twice as long. Yesterday I saw a bird soaring above my cell window. I don’t know what sort it was, but it was white and it had something clutched in its claws. Didn’t birds like that once dive for fish?
I wonder what this one had?
All my love,
Alfred
The brine had risen another inch in the week since he’d last been down here. All the books he’d piled upon the floorboards to act as stepping stones had now vanished under its toxic brown surface. Granger stood at the bottom of the steps with his lantern raised and peered along the flooded corridor, wondering how he was going to get the prison register out of the storage room at the far end. He only had one more book left, and sacrificing that one wouldn’t help. The air down here had a burned-salt, chemical aroma, like the air in a whaling station. He pulled his goggles over his eyes, then squatted down as close to the water as he dared, swinging the light around him. Dead beetles floated everywhere. Blisters of green paint and brown ichusan crystals marred the walls along the waterline, but the cell doors on either side of the passage looked intact.
‘Anyone still alive down here?’ he called.
He heard a thump and a splash, as if something had been thrown against one of the doors, then a man’s voice called back from the shadows: ‘Give me some food, you son of a bitch.’
Granger raised his goggles and went back up the stairs.
Creedy had tilted his chair back on its rear legs and sat with his boots resting on the munitions crate Granger used as a table. A huge man with a boxer’s face and hair shaved close to his skull, he still possessed an aura of brute savagery. Even now he was gnawing on a dragon knuckle, sucking at the cartilage and ripping shreds of meat free with soft, bestial grunts. Most men with a past like his would have chosen to hide it, but William Patrick Creedy still wore the Gravediggers’ tattoo on the back of his hand openly, proudly, challenging anyone who saw it to betray him to the emperor’s men. It was an attitude that had almost killed him more than once. Grey patches of sharkskin marred one side of his jaw – an injury sustained when six privateers had pinned him, momentarily, to a wet dockside in Tallship. His left ear was missing, hacked off in that same brawl. Creedy simply didn’t give a shit. His clockwork eye ticked with the steady precision of a detonator, the small blue lens shuttling back and forth in its socket, but his good eye – the cunning one – was watching Granger. ‘What’s the situation,