Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [66]
By comparison, the human world above her seemed dull. The perceptions of Ianthe’s own kind filled the dark with a million blue stars, tending to red where dusk and dawn tinged the fringes of the day. She slipped up through the void to where the deck of the ship waited for her in a cloud of disparate images.
‘He found something,’ Ianthe finally said.
She could feel the cold steel passenger rail in her hand, and the deck of Maskelyne’s dredger Mistress thrumming vaguely underfoot as she leaned over the side, pretending to peer down into the depths. Returning her mind to her own body was like stepping out of the world into a dark and silent cell. Her ears heard nothing and her eyes looked out into an impenetrable void. It frightened her. And so she set her thoughts adrift again, flitting effortlessly from one sailor to the next as she sketched a perspective of her surroundings.
Ethan Maskelyne was standing beside the port crane, from where he had been overseeing the whole winching operation. He was dressed in whaleskins just as soiled and battered as those worn by his crew. His white hair had yellowed from long exposure to brine. Every inch the sailor. ‘You can see him?’ he asked.
‘He’s almost back at the machine now.’
‘Bathysphere,’ Maskelyne said. ‘It’s a bathysphere. Did he find more ichusae?’
Ichusae was the word he gave to sea-bottles; perhaps it had been the Unmer word – Ianthe did not know. Out of habit she turned her head to face him, a gesture that came naturally to her. She had long ago grown used to imitating the behaviour of the sighted. ‘One sea-bottle, but he uncovered something else too. Something large buried under the silt.’
‘Cannon large or hull large?’
‘I don’t know. It’s made of gold.’
Maskelyne gave a smirk that seemed halfway between pleasure and derision. ‘You’re leading me astray,’ he said.
Moments later a bell rang somewhere, and the sailors rushed to winch up the bathysphere.
‘That is uncanny,’ Maskelyne said.
They heaved the bathysphere up out of the depths, then swung the crane so that its load hung over a shallow depression in the deck. Brine streamed from the metal sphere, swirling away into the deck drains. The submariner clambered out, unhitched the net bag from his hip and took out the sea-bottle. Brine poured out from it, sluicing over his heavy gloves. One of the sailors handed him a copper stopper, which he jammed into the neck of the bottle before handing his prize to another man. This sailor wiped the glass surface clean and gave it to Maskelyne, who held it up and squinted through it.
‘Perfect,’ he said.
The submariner crouched and unscrewed a winged brass cap in the heel of his boot, allowing the trapped brine to drain out of his suit leg. Then he raised his arms while another crew member hosed him down with fresh water. Finally he unhitched his helmet.
‘Looks like a chariot,’ he said. Pain creased his faced as he began unstrapping his suit buckles. Most of the other sailors stood well back, but the man with the hose continued to wash him down. ‘We’ll need to crane out the larger bones,’ he went on, smoothing back his wet hair, ‘and clear a few tons of sediment before we can get a line around it.’
Ianthe’s mind flitted between the crew members until she found someone looking at Maskelyne. For a long moment he stared at the bottle, seemingly deep in thought. Then he said, ‘Find me more like this, Ianthe, and I’ll let you see your mother.’
Maskelyne the Executioner. Ianthe’s heart clenched. She wanted to scream at him: She’s dead! I saw what your men did to her after they carried me away. I saw it all. But she couldn’t let him know the extent of her knowledge. She glared at him through the eyes of one of his subordinates, wishing only that she had the power