Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [65]
For Ianthe, the feeling was so intolerable that she almost fled his mind. She imagined blisters appearing on her own ankle, the skin bubbling, then turning grey and leathery. She wanted to lift her foot, but she couldn’t. The man was merely a vessel, and she his passenger. It wasn’t even her pain. If he could bear it, then so would she.
There were other tracks on the seabed now. By the golden light of the gem lantern, Ianthe could see scores of bootprints criss-crossing the street. They converged on one massive roofless house. Slowly the submariner made his way over to the doorway of that drowned building and stepped through.
A wide pit stretched before him, strewn with the bones of a dragon. It appeared to be an excavation, for many of the smaller bones and much of the silt had been scraped back towards the walls of the dwelling. The size of the dragon’s skeleton indicated that it had been a mature adult, perhaps as much as a thousand years old. A man could walk easily between the bars of its ribcage. Every morsel of its flesh had been picked clean. Its skull rested against the far wall, where it seemed to gaze blindly at the heavens. Ianthe’s host paused and took three long breaths. The encroaching brine had by now filled the lower half of one suit leg. She could feel the pressure of it pushing against his knee binding.
‘Another day,’ he muttered.
He strode forward into the garden of bones. Then he drove his spade into the ground below the dragon’s ribs and began heaving heaps of silt aside. Grey clouds muddied the waters. After a few minutes effort, something glinted under his spade. The man knelt down and began rummaging through the silt with his gloved hands.
He pulled something out.
Ianthe breathed a sigh of relief. She had seen enough sea-bottles to recognize this one at once. The tiny Unmer artefact was missing its stopper, and a blur of liquid could be seen pouring forth into the surrounding seawater, as vaporous and agitated as the air above a hot vent. Such bottles were often found amidst the remains of dragons. Serpents had an insatiable – and ultimately deadly – desire for them.
The submariner slipped the bottle into a net bag at his hip and then stooped to clear away more silt. An original stopper was worth as much as the bottle itself. Something golden flashed under his hands. He waved away clouds of suspension.
At first Ianthe thought she was looking at a gilded shield. A clearing in the sediment revealed a metalled surface embossed with sigils. It was unmistakably Unmer. There was the stamp of Ursula Dragon Mother, the constellation of Coreollis, the Fist of Armitage and the Precept, and a wheat sheaf and sickle that could only signify some powerful noble house. Interspersed with these devices were words written in the runic language of the First Alchemists – a spell, or possibly a ward against human men.
The submariner paused, panting heavily, then hurriedly brushed away more silt. More of the surface came into view, then more still. The man pushed his gloves into the yielding dust, looking for an edge. But wherever he dug, he simply revealed more of that flat gold plane. Whatever this treasure was, it was much larger than a shield.
Finally, he stopped. The brine had begun to leach through the bindings around his knee and irritate the skin on his thigh. What was more, his other boot was now leaking, too. Both his feet had begun to feel like hot lead.
Ianthe could stand no more of it.
Quietly and smoothly as a memory, she slipped out of his mind.
The world went dark. She found herself adrift in a void. In the distance she could see pools of electric-blue radiance – the perceptions of the Drowned nearby. Other marine life revealed itself as