Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [83]
‘He is a blundering fool.’
‘Of course he is, but he’s also the pettiest and most vindictive man I’ve ever met. You must have known that. How did you think he was going to respond to your comments?’
Granger shook his head. He’d been angry, irritated and suffering from brine burns, but that was no excuse. He’d acted rashly.
‘Hu took it all personally,’ Marks said. ‘Now he plans to execute you in front of the whole city tomorrow morning. A trial by combat, if you can believe it.’ She walked over to the window and peered out at the preparations. ‘The Guild cannot intervene to save you, of course. We must maintain a position of neutrality.’ Now she turned around and smiled. ‘But if it turns out that you have discovered a sensitive, and I can verify her existence, I’ll see to it that you’re charged with her imprisonment and with attempted extortion.’
‘Charged?’
Her smiled broadened. ‘The trial would take place at the Guild Palace in Awl. Not even Hu would dare to interfere with our justice. We’d be compelled to take you out of the empire to await your hearing, Mr Granger.’
Granger thought about this. ‘You’d simply move me from one hangman’s noose to another.’
‘Not necessarily. The Guild would decide a fitting punishment after we have deliberated. I can’t promise anything except that you will still be alive tomorrow evening, and for several weeks afterwards. Much depends on what the woman you imprisoned has to say in your defence.’
‘Girl,’ Granger muttered. ‘She’s fifteen. Her name is Ianthe.’
‘And who has her now?’
Granger didn’t sleep that night, and when dawn came he watched the red sun rise through rags of cloud as brown as brine until it stood fuming above the Ethugran rooftops like a dragon’s eye. He looked down at the plaza for a long time. A dragon-bone corral had been erected on the wharf side. Three walls of teeth and bone formed an enclosure abutting the water’s edge. They had even moved the emperor’s steam yacht back to allow a man – him, to allow him – to leap from the corral down into the poisonous brine if he so chose. But that way lay a more lingering and painful death. Hookmen would soon drag him back from those depths to fight again.
When the crowds began to assemble he turned away from the window and sat down in a corner, naked to the waist and shivering despite the building heat.
They came for him shortly afterwards. Four of Maskelyne’s Hookmen unlocked the cell and seized him and beat the wind from his lungs with blackjacks. They fastened an Unmer slave collar around his neck, riveting it shut with an iron tool like a set of callipers. A wire connected the collar to a small metal box covered in dials and glyphs. The smallest and leanest of the Hookmen lifted the box and said, ‘This is what happens when I turn this dial.’ He turned the dial.
Granger collapsed. His head struck the floor. He could taste blood on his lips, but he felt nothing at all beneath his neck, as though his head had been severed from his body. Whorls of shadow, blacks and browns, gathered at the edges of his vision, squeezing his view of the floor into a tunnel. He smelled something like burning horse hair.
‘Mucks up your nerves,’ the man said.
Abruptly Granger felt his limbs spasm. His senses returned.
‘Get up.’
He got to his feet, and they marched him out of the cell and down the corridor, and down the steps to Averley Plaza. Before they reached the door of the jail, the Hookman with the box twisted the dial again. Granger’s head cracked against something solid, and he found himself lying on the floor again.
‘Quit it,’ said one of the other Hookmen. ‘You fry him too often, he won’t get up.’
‘Ah, lighten up,’ the first man replied. ‘Don’t make much difference now anyway.’
‘You break that, it’s your head.’
‘Get up, you.’
A boot slammed into Granger’s ribs, just as his senses returned with a jolt. He coughed and spat blood across the floor.
‘Up, I said. Hu’s