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By Root 1144 0

Mare Regis tank were turning cards, but looked up from their table when Maskelyne ushered Mr Creedy in. In the gloomy red seawater their faces appeared dim and monstrous. The girl who had formerly occupied the Mare Lux tank had been removed for dissection – but her twin sister peered out through the glass of the Mare Sepsis tank opposite. She had acclimatized well to the change in seawater. The sores on her face had all but disappeared, although her hair and eyes had changed colour. It seemed that Mare Sepsis brine was not as toxic to the Drowned as sailors claimed. When she saw Maskelyne, she became suddenly excited. She scribbled something on her slate, then turned it round to show him.

OJUJH WAW.

Maskelyne had no idea what it meant, and he doubted the girl did either. She’d been submerged in that brine for nearly two months now, quite long enough for her mind to have become pickled.

In the last tank, the remains of an old man sat on a stool and brooded. The green seawater gave him the pallor of a decayed corpse and, indeed, the Mare Verdant brine had already dissolved a great deal of his muscle mass and flesh, leaving naked bones visible at the clavicle, hip and both thighs. In time he would vanish entirely, but not before his skeleton paced for many days behind that glass wall.

Such was the queerness of the Mare Verdant. The waters consumed the flesh while acting as a body surrogate to harbour and propagate life’s energies beyond death. Maskelyne’s instruments detected no significant currents within that water, and yet there must be some subtle manipulation of pressure. How else could a man’s bones continue to move without muscle and tendon? It was, like so much of the Unmer legacy, an enigma. Because neither the corpse nor the card players had attempted to use their own slates for over a year, the truth remained elusive.

Mr Creedy took it all in with open eyes, or rather, one eye and one aperture. He seemed ill at ease in the proximity of so many Drowned, which was of course why Maskelyne had chosen this place to meet him.

‘I hope you do not intend to betray me, Mr Creedy,’ Maskelyne remarked.

‘Sir?’

‘For harbouring the Drowned?’

The big man grunted. ‘Betray you to yourself? Don’t think that would get me far.’

‘Well, quite.’ Maskelyne took a seat at his desk and gestured for the jailer to sit opposite. An infinity device, consisting of a marble in a sealed glass tube, sat upon the desk between them. Maskelyne wound it out of habit and then watched the glass tube slickly revolve. The marble rolled from one end to the other. ‘Remind me,’ he said. ‘what our agreement was.’

Mr Creedy lowered his kitbag to the floor and sat down. ‘A hundredth lay, sir.’

‘A hundredth lay is fine if we find something, Mr Creedy. But what happens if we don’t? You’ll think I’m trying to deceive you.’

Creedy’s clockwork eye made a shuttering sound. ‘I noticed you unloading a chariot from the Mistress.’

‘Yes, and what is such an object worth?’ He spread his hands on the table. ‘Let us say . . . four or five million gilders to a collector. You would agree?’ Creedy nodded, so Maskelyne continued, ‘In order to raise that artefact, I was forced to dispatch a particularly foul-tempered old dragon, which, I am afraid to say, entailed the use of a phial of void flies. Unmer void flies, Mr Creedy, sealed in their original jar. Do you have any idea how much I could have sold that container for?’

The other man said nothing.

‘A hundred million,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Conservatively. Void flies have been known to destroy cities, decimate populations, ruin whole countries. You know the Unmer make their arrows from them?’

Mr Creedy touched his clockwork eye. Then he leaned forward and spoke in a threatening tone. ‘You wasted them on a dragon?’

Maskelyne leaned back. ‘I wasted nothing, Mr Creedy. Void flies, by their very nature, cannot be studied in depth. But there are other mysteries that can. And that, for me, determines an object’s true worth.’ He paused to watch the infinity device on the desk as the marble rolled from one end of the tube