Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [57]
‘Mr Creedy is working for me,’ Maskelyne said.
‘And Hana? What do you intend to do with her?’
Maskelyne frowned.
‘The girl’s mother, the woman you left to die in my jail.’
Realization dawned on Maskelyne’s face. ‘You can’t blame my men for defending themselves,’ he said. ‘They have families too, after all.’
‘Just let her go.’
Maskelyne shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, Mr Granger, but I can’t allow the Drowned to simply wander around the city. I have a duty to uphold the emperor’s laws.’ He sighed. ‘I don’t suppose a traitor like yourself can understand that. She’ll be taken to Averley Plaza and put with the others.’
Granger couldn’t help himself. He ran at Maskelyne with the intention of breaking his bloody neck.
But the Hookmen must have been waiting for this, for they stopped him before he covered three yards. A hooked pole snagged Granger’s foot and he toppled forward and slammed into the floor. Suddenly there were two men kneeling on his spine, twisting his arms back, shoving his face down into one of the plush rugs.
‘Emperor Hu has been looking for you for a long time,’ Maskelyne said. ‘We’ll give you a trial, of course, and a cell with a view of the square in which to await your execution. I think you should use this time to reflect on everything you’ve done.’
True to his word, Maskelyne had Granger placed in a cell overlooking Averley Plaza. It was a small vaulted chamber with a concrete floor, located on the fourth storey of the jail. The bed frame was all welded metal and had been bolted to the floor, but the dusty old mattress looked soft enough. There was even a blanket. To remove the need for a cistern in the cell, the commode could only be flushed from a central pipe room. They’d use brine for that. But the steel sink had real taps providing as much purified water as Granger required – a luxury in Ethugra. All in all, the place was cleaner than most provincial hotel rooms. Only the window bars and the heavy metal door betrayed the room’s true purpose. This was a place of confinement, even if it was of a standard normally reserved for the wealthiest of prisoners. Chalk dashes covered one entire wall. Evidently the previous occupant had been here for a long time.
The window offered him a view of Ethugra’s central harbour, where administration buildings crowded around the docks and the market stalls. The stony figures of the Drowned stood in silent rows along the waterfront, their contorted bodies granting shade to small groups of fishermen, old women, costermongers and trove sellers. An eclectic mix of boats, mostly fishing vessels, ferry boats and canal traders, churned trails of spume across the tea-coloured seawater. The wharf itself lay directly below his window, some sixty feet down.
Granger spied a vessel approaching.
Two of Maskelyne’s Hookmen had Hana in their flat-sided canal barge. She was trapped in a net, over which they’d thrown a brine-soaked blanket. They berthed among fishing boats, hurling orders at Ethugra’s civilian captains and throwing out their bow and stern lines like insults. Hana couldn’t walk unaided, and so they carried her up the steps to the esplanade.
The Drowned died more quickly in direct sunshine, but the Hookmen chose a place for her under the shade of Maskelyne’s own prison façade. Whether this was to allow him a better view, or simply to prolong her suffering, Granger didn’t know. Her death, it seemed, was going to be a lengthy affair.
Wearing whaleskin gloves, the two men peeled the blanket away from Hana and unravelled the net. They used knives to cut her frock away, leaving her naked. And then they fitted manacles to her ankles and wrists, running the chains through eyelets set into the flagstones. She managed to stand, and even stagger a few feet towards the harbour’s edge, before she began to scream.
The sound was odd, coarser and deeper than Granger would have expected. Exposure to brine had already changed her larynx, thickening the tissues and cartilage in her throat. Here on dry land she sounded like a man. Her cries drove him to urgency.
He glanced at