Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [67]
By now the submariner had stripped naked. He raised his arms again and turned around slowly, allowing the crewman with the hose to wash away all trace of the poisonous brine. But Mare Lux waters had already scorched one of his legs up to the thigh, and the other up to the calf. His flesh looked blotchy, red, inflamed and lined with darker veins. Maskelyne produced a jar of ointment and handed it to the submariner, who began applying it liberally to his wounds. To Ianthe’s astonishment, this seemed to reduce the inflammation.
‘Save some for the others,’ Maskelyne said.
The submariner handed back the jar. ‘Thank you, sir.’
Maskelyne smiled at Ianthe’s expression of befuddlement. ‘It is a very rare and expensive balm,’ he explained. ‘Unmer, of course. I only wish we had more of it.’ He smacked his hands together and turned to address a small man in an officer’s stripes standing nearby. ‘I want this thing raised quickly, Mellor. Put the crew on dragon watch and have all of our divers suited up and ready. Double pay and hand-over shifts until it’s up on deck. Work through the night if you can do so without risking men. I want them out of there at the first sign of trouble.’
‘Aye, sir.’ The officer replied in a breezy, whistling voice.
‘You,’ Maskelyne said, pointing at Ianthe, ‘come with me.’
He ushered her through a metal hatch and down a twist of stairs into the operations room. A map of this quarter of the Mare Lux lay spread out across a table in the centre of the broad, wood-panelled chamber. Gem lanterns clung to the walls between the portholes like poisonous jellies, throbbing with clusters of yellow-, blue- and rose-coloured light. There were booths and chairs enough to seat twenty down here, and a long bar of polished dragon-bone curving along one wall where hundreds of crystal glasses glinted in racks. Sweetmeats and hundred island fruits had been set out on platters on a small table nearby, while numerous pedestals displayed a baffling array of Unmer artefacts: machines, masks, crystal wands and knots of spell-wire, all bolted down securely to the wooden tops. Glass-fronted cabinets boasted yet more treasures: labyrinths of golden metal, tiny mannequins with ruby eyes, countless phials of every shape and size. One enormous cabinet gleamed with weapons: dragon-bone matchlocks and flintlocks and steel carbines, pistols fashioned from silver and glass, runic knives, liquid knives, rat knives and scimitars. An old blunderbuss occupied a prominent position. It was a singular piece, wrought from some strange white metal heavily embossed with Unmer runes and covered in fungi-like protrusions around the stock. The ends of its barrels protruded through the jaw of a human skull.
Maskelyne turned his gaze away from the cabinet and helped himself to a drink of honey-coloured spirit. Then he filled a glass with wine from a carafe on the bar and handed it to Ianthe.
‘Your vision seems entirely unlikely,’ he said. Through his perception she watched herself accept the glass of wine. Darkness was gathering in her own eyes. She forced herself to look away from him. ‘And yet here we are,’ he went on. ‘An unmolested dragon’s cadaver, just as you said. One ichusae recovered, and a skybarque to boot.’
‘A skybarque?’
‘An Unmer vessel,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘You’ve seen Ortho’s Chariot at night?’
She nodded.
‘Same thing. When the Unmer realized they couldn’t defeat the Haurstaf, they used airbarques to distribute their hideous little bottles across our oceans.’ He made a sound somewhere between a snort and laugh. ‘If we can’t have the world, then you can’t have it either. My two-year-old son has already developed a more mature attitude, and he has a psychopath for a father.’ He chuckled at his own joke, and took another drink. ‘Anyway, an airbarque is a rare find. With any luck we might find a thousand ichusae inside it’ – he sounded like he was smiling – ‘and so remove another source of pollution from the oceans.’ He held up the tiny bottle they had recovered from the seabed