Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [62]
All the strength left Granger’s legs. His knees trembled and then buckled and he found himself lying on the ground. The ceiling reeled over him drunkenly. He tried to rise, but his nerves just screamed, and his limbs would not function. ‘Her chains,’ he said.
Maskelyne’s face loomed over Granger, long and cadaverous, his expression taut with concentration. He was bleeding from his eyes now, but he continued to clutch the Unmer artefact in his fist. The hum from the siren-wire seemed to infuse his words. ‘It’s important for people to watch her die,’ he said. ‘Understanding the horror of the seas keeps them safe from harm.’ He crouched over Granger, his jaw locked, his whole body trembling. ‘Try to get some rest, Mr Granger, for both our sakes.’
That night he didn’t sleep at all. The world turned, carrying Granger and his prison under the stars. Hana’s voice grew steadily weaker. She uttered no words that he could understand. Whether she was no longer capable of human speech, or whether her pain had pushed her beyond words, he did not know. He prayed that someone – a fisherman or market trader – would show her mercy, silence her. But no one did.
They had removed everything from the cell but his clothes.
By dawn she was struggling to breathe and quite incapable of screaming. From his cell window Granger watched the Hookmen return. They took buckets of brine from the harbour and used them to soak her drying body. They forced seawater down her windpipe, softening up her lungs for another day. She gasped and choked, and then the pitiful cries began again. Granger gripped the bars of his window.
Around mid morning a jailer brought Granger a wooden pitcher of fresh water and a bowl of fish-gut soup. He tested the food by placing a strip of it under his tongue. When, after a few minutes, it began to burn, he spat it out and rinsed his mouth. The remainder of the meal he placed on the window ledge, where he hoped it might attract a rat.
Hana didn’t die until late afternoon that day. The Hookmen continued to soak her blistered grey flesh with brine, using a funnel to pour it down her throat, but they could not prolong her torture any longer. Two of the men began to argue, each loudly apportioning blame on the other for the woman’s demise. Clearly Maskelyne had not intended for her to depart so quickly. After all their attempts to revive her failed, they began the Positioning before her corpse dried out.
Three men erected a dragon-bone tripod over her body. Ropes and splints were laid out nearby. Using the stoutest length of rope they hoisted her to a standing position. They bound her arms and legs in splints and then arranged them in their chosen posture. They raised her head and lashed her hair to the small of her back to keep her chin high. A man wearing whaleskin gloves opened her eyes, then jammed his thumb between her lips and prised them apart. His companion shoved something small in her mouth and laughed uproariously, but his colleague removed it quickly. Granger couldn’t see what it was.
When they’d finished with the corpse, it was standing, facing Granger’s cell window with its arms upraised in a pleading gesture.
Granger sat on the edge of the bed and closed his eyes. Ianthe would have been taken to Maskelyne’s deepwater salvage headquarters on Scythe Island, to be assigned to one of his vessels. As long as she found trove for him, she’d be safe enough. Safe, but never free of him. And it would only be a matter of time before Maskelyne discovered the true extent of her talents.
Granger picked up one of his galoshes and reached his arm down inside it. The letter he’d once intended to send to the Haurstaf was still there, tucked into a flap in the whaleskin.
He looked at it for a long time. The date he’d chosen for the appointment was still three days hence. Using a strip of fish gut, he scrawled another message across the bottom of the letter, watching as the grease burned his words into the paper.
He strode