Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [75]
The jailer shook his head.
‘Then perhaps it is more difficult for you to understand,’ Maskelyne said. ‘As a father, I have a duty to preserve my son’s future. Now, I can only succeed if I fully understand the processes by which the Unmer have threatened that future. Wealth, power, everything else is simply insulation.’ He paused again to watch the marble roll back and forward in the revolving tube. ‘If I gave you a chest of gilders, what would you spend it on? Women? Whisky? Guns? A fine apartment with a view?’ He shook his head. ‘All insulation. None of it has any importance. None of it has any true worth.’
Creedy lifted his kitbag and placed it on the table before them. ‘You’re telling me I’m not going to get paid?’
Maskelyne sighed. ‘I’m trying to make you understand the real value of trove, Mr Creedy. Because if you don’t, then our business relationship is doomed to fail. Does it please you to learn that I have personally destroyed over ninety thousand ichusae? I would happily give you one-hundredth of the satisfaction and pride I feel when I destroy the next ninety thousand, if it were possible to do so.’
Creedy’s jaw tightened.
‘Or that I have no intention of selling the chariot we salvaged two days ago?’
The other man stared at the kitbag on the table for a long moment. Finally he said, ‘I want the girl back.’
Maskelyne leaned back in his chair. ‘That is no longer possible. But let me make you an alternative offer.’
The aperture in Creedy’s clockwork eye whirred as it narrowed.
‘You saw the beach of keys when you first arrived?’
Creedy nodded.
‘Do you know where they come from?’
Creedy said nothing.
‘The Drowned leave them there,’ Maskelyne explained. ‘They crawl ashore during the night, enduring considerable pain, and deposit the keys on that shore.’ The infinity device continued to make its revolutions. ‘Why?’ He shrugged. ‘The long-term Drowned do not communicate with us in any meaningful fashion. Brine alters the mind by some slow, subtle process. The sea consumes them, takes them over, until eventually they become limbo people, ghosts, repeating human actions that they do not appear to fully understand. Look there.’ He gestured towards the card players in the Mare Regis tank. ‘Those men turn cards all day long. In the beginning they played the game of Forentz, but as the months passed by, rules began to mean less and less to them. Now they simply turn the cards over, and then gather them up again. There is no longer any discernible purpose to their actions, no competition between them. They are simply parroting actions they remember but no longer understand. Three months of submersion irreversibly alters the mind, just as three hours is enough to permanently alter the body.’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘But I believe the Drowned gain some other form of intelligence, some deep instinctual feeling that the brine itself instils within them. I believe that they are looking for the key to some unique Unmer treasure, some locked container or tomb or room or vessel. Something they wish me to find and open.’
Creedy looked at him blankly.
Maskelyne indicated the infinity device on the desk. ‘Observe this machine,’ he said. ‘As the tube revolves, the marble falls from one end to the other.’ He waited until the marble had done just that. ‘Of course, gravity causes it to fall. But Unmer devices do not suffer from such constraints. They are not bound by our physical laws. Their very existence suggests that our universe is infinite, that anything that can happen, happens somewhere . . . or somewhen. If this little desktop machine is maintained indefinitely, then the marble should – one day – refuse to fall. And yet I don’t instinctively feel that that will happen. Something is missing from the device, something the Unmer discovered.’
‘Sorcery,’ Creedy said.
‘We call it sorcery,’ Maskelyne admitted. ‘But that’s just a word. You might as well describe it as an act of god. I prefer to think of it as the essence of infinity, a force that the Unmer