Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [50]
The amphora felt as heavy as a boulder. Granger was about to put it down, when the door opened and a hard-faced little man peered out and blinked. ‘I’m the jailer,’ he said. ‘You the guy with the thing?’ He glanced at Granger’s parcel, then waved him in without waiting for an answer and swung the door shut behind them both.
They were standing in a grand stone hallway. A sweeping staircase rose to a second-floor gallery. Down here on the ground level, two arched doorways led to administration offices on either side, wherein Granger could see scribes working at their desks amidst stacks of paper. One of the seated young men glanced up from his quill and frowned through his spectacles, before returning his attention to his ledger. The building contained a weighty silence that seemed several degrees more substantial than the air itself.
Given the solemn majesty of his surroundings, the jailer who had admitted Granger could not have looked more out of place. He was as small and tough as a street dog, with a naval haircut and a brawler’s skewed nose. He wore a perpetual scowl, giving his face the same creased, weather-worn appearance as his salt-stained leather tunic and his sailcloth breeches. Ink crosses and sigils tattooed across the back of his hands suggested he’d spent some time in a less imposing prison than this one, albeit on the other side of the bars.
One of Maskelyne’s men? Granger’s unease deepened.
The jailer stared at the parcel in Granger’s arms for a moment, then beckoned him to follow up the staircase. On the right side of the upper gallery he unlocked a stout iron-banded door, which looked a hundred years older than the stonework around it. Granger realized that it must originally have been fitted to a series of identical doors in the flooded levels below, only to be moved up floor by floor as the building grew higher to escape the rising seawater. Imperial builders often followed this pattern, constructing identical floor plans one above the other in order to strip out and reuse every possible fixture and fitting before filling the drowned levels with rubble.
The man waved Granger through. ‘Truan’s wing,’ he said.
His wing?
Granger stepped through the door and into a large, opulent lounge in which velvet chairs, sofas and polished hardwood tables had been artfully arranged on Valcinder rugs. Carved bone chandeliers depended from the high ceilings, while the tall windows on his left overlooked one of Ethugra’s grander canals and the façade of another Imperial jail on the opposite bank. Latticeworks of iron covered those windows, yet even these were ornate and painted white. As surprising as all this was to Granger, his attention was nevertheless grabbed by the opposite, innermost wall of the room. He’d never seen anything like it before.
A score of alcoves lined this wall, each sealed by a massive plate of glass and filled with a different type of brine. Granger recognized the tea-coloured water of the Mare Lux, the dark red Mare Regis brine and that painful green ichor that composed so much of the seas around Valcinder. But there were other colours too – the blues and purples and the soft golds of those weird and distant oceans that he had only heard mentioned in tales.
Within all of these alcoves were oleas.
Each species had been segregated from the others. There were wondrous, ghostly things with tendrils like wisps of fog, and fat brown jellies that looked like pickled brains. In one alcove, schools of tiny quick-moving motes gave off a queer electric luminance, while in the next hung an enormous bloated crimson shape among whose folds Granger thought he could discern an eye. He had an odd sensation that it was watching him.
‘Marvellous, aren’t they?’
Truan, for it must have been he, had entered the chamber through another door. He was a tall, lean man with a long, cadaverous face. He wore a padded gold tunic embroidered with steel wire in the latest Losotan fashion, and white hose that