Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [42]
His deaf-blind daughter. He thought about her walking down the wharf, stopping whenever he looked away. She had not been able to see the ground in front of her, except when he looked in her direction. He tried to imagine her growing up in Evensraum, unable to hear the wind in the trees unless someone else was there to hear it too. What kind of life was that for a child? The implications of all this were too intricate for him to unravel at once. He needed to think them through.
‘We don’t need to compete with him,’ Creedy said. ‘He has all the deepwater gear we’d need.’
Granger looked up. ‘A partnership?’
The other man shrugged. ‘Maskelyne’s a businessman.’
‘He’s a criminal,’ Granger said, ‘and a murderer.’
Creedy chewed his food slowly.
Granger picked up the money from the crate. With these gilders and the four hundred from yesterday, he could pay off his debts at the boatyard and maybe convince Maddigan to order in some new planking for his boat’s hull. Once the old girl was fixed up, he could trade her in against a storm-sealed deepwater cruiser, hopefully a tug or even an ex-naval vessel. About thirty or forty thousand would buy him something sturdy enough to cross the open ocean.
He poured two mugs of tea, then joined Creedy. ‘Somebody stole that Unmer doll.’
Creedy scraped eel jelly from his plate and spooned it into his mouth. ‘Lot of thieves about.’
‘So it seems.’
‘It’s no big deal,’ Creedy said. ‘Now we have the girl.’
‘Assuming she agrees to keep working with us.’
Creedy grunted. ‘She doesn’t have shit to say about that.’ He finished his meal and stood up. ‘Are we going, or what?’
The two men took Creedy’s launch back to the basin behind the Bower family prison in Francialle, leaving Ianthe behind. Creedy switched off the engine and stared into the brine with open hostility, as though he expected resistance from whatever lay below, and was fully prepared to counter it with force. They began to dredge the gloomy waters with a claw.
But again the bottle eluded them.
Shadows gathered in the basin and the canal beyond as evening approached. The sky between the buildings turned golden with the setting sun. Creedy grew irritable and then angry. His clockwork eye ticked and whirred as though struggling to focus. In his long whaleskin gloves, cloak and goggles he looked like some infernal golem. He hauled in the rope for the hundredth time, examined at the empty claw and then smashed it down on the deck. ‘She’s messing with us,’ he said. ‘There’s nothing down there. You said yourself the Unmer only dumped ichusae in deep water.’
‘Francialle used to be full of Unmer forges,’ Granger replied. ‘Conceivably, they could have made thousands of ichusae here. Changed ordinary glass phials and copper stoppers into something else.’
‘How did they get all the brine inside them?’
‘I don’t think they did.’
A voice from above called down: ‘You changed your mind about the map yet?’
Granger looked up to see an old man peering down at them from one of the barred windows above. His face was gaunt, his cheeks hollow from malnutrition, lending emphasis to his wildly protruding eyes. He gripped the bars of his cell with skeletal hands.
‘Shut your damn mouth,’ Creedy replied.
‘I told you there was no trove down there,’ the old man said. ‘Maskelyne’s men cleaned it all out years ago. You want to be looking near the Glot Madera, but I ain’t telling you where unless you buy my map.’
Creedy must have returned to this spot sometime after dawn, Granger realized. No doubt he had tried to look for the bottle on his own. This bothered him less than he would have expected. It wasn’t against the law.
‘Madman,’ Creedy muttered.
‘The original map was drawn by the Unmer,’ the old man retorted.