Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [55]
He grabbed his whaleskin gloves and pulled them on. Then he ran downstairs and waded along the corridor to Hana’s cell.
She was as he’d left her – lying unconscious in the shallow brine.
Granger scooped her into his arms. As he half-dragged, half-carried her out to the corridor, he could hear through the open cell window the barge cut her engines, followed by the sound of boots pounding across his wooden jetty.
In the opposite cell, he pulled her over to the hole in the floorboards. His chest was tight with agony again, and his breaths seemed to whistle in his throat. Now he could hear raised voices coming from upstairs.
‘I’m sorry, Hana.’ he whispered into her ear. And then he eased her body down through the hole.
Most of the air had already gone from her lungs, and so she slipped away into the brine and crumpled gently onto the floor of the flooded room below. A cloud of sediment rose around her, muddying the tea-coloured waters.
Granger dragged one of the broken pallets across the opening to hide it, and turned as the first of Maskelyne’s Hookmen came through the door.
From their appearance they might have been Drowned men themselves. Their leader stood half a foot shorter than Granger, but he was far stouter and more heavily muscled. Sharkskin covered most of his naked forearms like a skin of cracked cement. He had daubed the wounded flesh with some greasy white tincture. Five gutting knives with wooden handles and blades of varying curvature and length hung from loops on the front his padded oilskin. He grinned, displaying wide brown teeth, as the others filled the doorway behind him.
‘Hello, Tom,’ he said. ‘How are you doing, Tom?’
Granger scowled at him. ‘I know you?’
‘Don’t think so, but I know you.’
‘What do you want?’
‘I don’t like that tone of voice, Tom,’ the other man replied. ‘Why are you taking that tone of voice with me?’ He stepped forward, pushing out his chest as though challenging Granger to reach for one the knives hanging there. ‘I mean, you’re a fucking Drowned lover, aren’t you, Tom? You shouldn’t be speaking to me like that.’
Granger had seen his type in a hundred bars and back alleys. He had no patience with this fool.
‘Get out of my house,’ he said.
The Hookman grinned. ‘That’s not nice, Tom. We’re only doing a job here.’ He looked down at the pallet covering the hole. ‘I mean, you sound like someone who wants their face shoved in the fucking brine. Why would you want that, Tom?’
There were four others blocking the doorway behind, but they couldn’t all push through the door at once. Since he wasn’t getting out of here without a fight, Granger thought it best to have the fight on his own terms. No sense in waiting.
He slugged the Hookman in the face.
Granger’s blow was as hard as any he’d ever given. The Hookman grunted in surprise, but he didn’t go down. The bastard had a neck like a girder. Granger brought his other fist up in an uppercut, striking the other man under the chin. He heard the blow connect. It should have broken the Hookman’s jawbone.
But it didn’t.
The shorter man came at him in a rage, pummelling his stony fists under Granger’s ribs.
Granger didn’t want to allow him any space to let the others in, so he drew in his elbows and suffered the punches. They felt like hammer blows. He brought his elbow up into the other man’s armpit to halt one angle of attack, while trying to force him back towards the door.
But the Hookman was too strong for him. He shoved back, one fist continuing to pound Granger’s ribs, the other arm trying to reach over Granger’s elbow, scrabbling to grab his hair. With his free left hand Granger fish-hooked the man’s cheek, jerking that fat snarling face to one side. He grunted and heaved, but couldn’t find the