Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [73]
‘Such is the world,’ Mara muttered. ‘Shall we just say five thousand then?’
Briana took his arm and led him away. ‘Let’s not discuss money,’ she said. ‘It’s so vulgar.’
The steel motor launch moved between the ships in the bay. Maskelyne followed her progress from a high window in his castle. He lost sight of her as she passed behind the older of his two Valcinder dredgers, the Lamp, and then spotted her again rounding the vessel’s bow. She was battered and rusty. From up here he could not make out her name or the name of her port painted on the hull, but he heard her engine rattling. He guessed she was from Ethugra. She looked like a jailer’s boat.
‘Is it Hu?’ his wife Lucille asked.
‘No.’
‘But it’s heading for our house dock.’
Maskelyne smiled. ‘The emperor would rather submit to torture than be seen aboard a tub like that,’ he said. ‘I suspect this is our Mr Creedy, come to negotiate his partnership share.’
She wilted against his shoulder and murmured in his ear: ‘Or maybe it’s your secret lover.’
Maskelyne raised his eyebrows. ‘Mr Creedy is not my secret lover.’
‘I don’t like him.’
‘That seems like an appropriate and reasonable reaction.’
‘Will you kill him?’
Maskelyne turned to face her. ‘Why would I do that?’
‘To save money.’
‘I’m married to a sociopath.’
She turned away, drawing his arm after her before letting it go. ‘Aren’t men of your reputation supposed to murder on a whim? What do they call you now? Maskelyne the Butcher?’
‘The Executioner,’ her husband replied. ‘I don’t think Mr Creedy’s death would do much to enhance my standing among the city jailers. He is innocent of any crime, after all.’
‘He sold his friend’s daughter into slavery.’
‘Like I said,’ Maskelyne remarked, ‘innocent.’
The launch docked at the stone pier on the westernmost end of Key Beach. A large man wearing a grey whaleskin cloak alighted. The blue lens of his clockwork eye flashed in the sunlight. He was carrying an enormous kitbag over his shoulder. He tied up, then stood alone for a long moment, apparently watching the deepwater wharfs, where Maskelyne’s stevedores were unloading the Unmer chariot from the hold of the Mistress. Then he looked directly up at the the very window in which Maskelyne stood and waved.
‘It is him,’ Lucille said. ‘I’d recognize that eye anywhere.’
‘I’m afraid so.’
‘I wonder what he has in his bag.’
‘Some sort of bomb, I imagine.’
Mr Creedy began strolling up the pier, but then he stopped again and stared down at the crescent beach to his right. Evidently he had noticed its unusual composition. A few of Maskelyne’s men were wandering across that strange silver shoreline, stopping every now and then to pick up likely keys from the tens of millions deposited there and trying them in the locks of boxes they carried.
Maskelyne smiled. ‘Now that will have him wondering.’
‘I’m going to check on Jontney,’ Lucille said. ‘I’m worried that he’s coming down with something. It’s not like him to behave this way.’
‘Have you spoken to the doctor?’
She shook her head.
‘Call for him anyway,’ Maskelyne said.
His wife looked at him sadly. ‘What will you do about the bomb?’
Maskelyne kissed her on the cheek. ‘Take our son for a walk.’
Maskelyne decided to receive Mr Creedy in his laboratory. He rang for his manservant, Garstone, ordered him to prepare lunch for one and to throw open the laboratory terrace doors to dispel the monstrous odours in there. Then he told him to direct the Ethugran jailer to the anteroom and ask him politely to wait.
By the time Maskelyne had lunched and dressed in his laboratory overalls, his visitor had been waiting for almost an hour.
The laboratory boasted four enormous glass tanks, each flooded with brine from a different sea and connected to the ceiling by a wide glass tube. Daylight filtered through the vessels from tall windows on either side of the laboratory and was changed by the waters into hues of red, brown, yellow and green. The two Drowned men in the