Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [39]
She cried out.
‘Hu-shan,’ Granger hissed the old Imperial curse. ‘Are you burned?’
Ianthe was flapping water from her whaleskin cloak.
‘Did it touch your skin?’
‘No.’
Creedy got to his feet, cursing, the line still wrapped around his fist. He untangled himself and then spun the line around one of the steel oarlocks on that side of the boat. Then he turned to Ianthe. ‘Drowned fucking boy?’ he snarled. ‘What was it? Shark? Rock-caster? Eellen?’ When she didn’t answer he raised the boat hook as if to strike her.
‘Sergeant,’ Granger said quietly.
Creedy halted, and lowered the weapon.
‘We’re going back,’ Granger said. ‘It’s getting lighter, and we have enough trove for now.’ He looked at the pile of artefacts heaped next to the wheel console: the engine, the pendant, the tangled wire, the dragon harness and the spheres. A thousand gilders’ worth of unfathomable rubbish. Even with Creedy’s half deducted, it was enough to feed his captives for several months. Or a down payment on a new boat. That had been his original plan, after all, and he shouldn’t forget it.
Creedy took the treasure away with him to find a buyer. Before he left, Granger offered to let him have the Unmer doll too. ‘No sense in keeping it here,’ he pointed out. But Creedy was strangely reluctant to accept.
‘Sell it later if you need to,’ he said. ‘I’m tired, I’m going home.’ He didn’t want to come up to Granger’s jail, and he didn’t want to wait at the jetty.
Granger returned Ianthe to her cell.
Hana looked up sleepily. ‘How did it go?’
‘She did well,’ Granger said.
‘She always does.’
Granger just nodded. He went back upstairs and opened the box in which he kept the doll. But the doll was missing. He wasn’t particularly surprised. He stood there for a long moment, wondering why he didn’t feel angrier at Creedy.
The sun was up by the time he went to bed, and the garret was already becoming uncomfortably hot. As he lay in his bunk, he thought about the treasure hunt. Granger himself had stared into those lightless canals and seen nothing at all. How had Ianthe done it? Uncanny vision did not explain how she’d known about Duka, the drawer and the four hundred gilders. No matter how many different possibilities went through his head, he couldn’t figure out the answer. His gut told him that his captives were lying.
She can’t read minds.
If that was so, then why did Hana want to keep her daughter from the Haurstaf?
The Haurstaf will murder her.
Granger frowned. If Ianthe was psychic, the Guild would embrace her. And if she truly possessed nothing more than heightened physical senses, she posed no threat to them. They might or might not use her, but they had no reason to harm her.
He stared at the ceiling, watching sunlight ripple across the joists. At this hour of the morning the mists would have burned off Halcine Canal, and the water would be shining like a vein of gold.
Perhaps he was approaching this from the wrong direction?
What if she was completely normal – not psychic or special in any way? Granger’s own grandmother – Ianthe’s great-grandmother – had come from Awl without a glimmer of the telepathic ability so entrenched in her race. There had been nothing there for Ianthe to inherit. Could an ordinary fifteen-year-old girl have found a way to beat the Haurstaf at their own game? What if her strange powers were not merely a quirk of nature, that one-in-a-million mutation that appeared in the blood of western women, but rather the result of something that could be attained by anyone? Something sorcerous?
An Unmer artefact.
Granger sat upright in his cot. That made a lot of sense. Suppose Ianthe had unearthed some rare treasure – a pendant, ring or pin that granted her these inhuman abilities?