Sea of Ghosts - Alan Campbell [95]
Eight of the crew had gathered on the port side, while one of the officers – probably Mellor – was handing out carbine rifles to them.
The deadship drew closer. There did not appear to be any crewman aboard. Her hull and sterncastle had been forged from iron, but now Maskelyne could see that she had been damaged by intense fire. Yard-long sections of the bulwark had been scorched black and warped out of shape. Cables slumped around her tower like worn shrouds. He counted the remains of six guns mounted along her port side, strange metal weapons, each with a conical arrangement of circular plates fixed to the end of its barrel. They looked charred, melted, inoperable. An iron figurehead in the likeness of an Unmer maiden remained upon her prow, now stripped of paint and partially reduced to slag. The corruption gave her a ghoulish grin. Dragonfire did this, Maskelyne thought. Dragonfire.
Every crewman had his rifle trained on the Unmer ship, following her as she slid by mere yards from the Mistress. Under the steady thump of the dredger’s engines Maskelyne fancied he could hear the groan of the old ironclad’s buckled hull and the rush of seawater caught between their two keels, and then something else – a faint, high-pitched humming sound, almost at the limits of his hearing, seemed to emanate from that tower.
A heartbeat later, the Unmer ship had passed by. Maskelyne watched her dissolve into the fog.
He let out a long breath.
‘Is it true what they say about deadships?’ Lucille asked.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘Mellor thinks the dead crews still steer them.’
Maskelyne frowned. ‘Something steers them, but it isn’t ghosts. Their engines draw electrical fluid from the air.’ He rubbed his eyes and then rested both his hands on the wheel again. ‘I don’t know . . . the energy is probably transmitted from somewhere, a station or a bunker, somewhere the Haurstaf and their allies didn’t penetrate.’
‘You think there could still be a free Unmer community out there?’
‘It’s possible.’
She shivered. ‘I’m going to check on Jontney.’
She left Maskelyne alone in the wheelhouse. For a long while he peered into the gloom, watchful for anything unusual. The rumble of the Mistress’s engines failed to calm his nerves as much as it usually did. An Unmer ironclad, still sailing these waters after god only knew how many hundreds of years? The souls of her sorcerous crew burned into her very metal at the Battle of Awl? He couldn’t accept that. The Unmer captains were long dead. The Brutalists and operators were long dead. The ship was still receiving its power from a distant station, which meant it might also be possible to steer it from afar. A free Unmer community? Maskelyne knew of only one Unmer warrior still at large. He tried to remember the line from the old children’s rhyme he’d learned at school.
And to the storm Conquillas brought,
A dragon clad in armour wrought,
By Hessimar of Anderlaine.
There was more, but the rest wouldn’t come to him. Those great serpents, led by Argusto Conquillas, had allied with the Haurstaf and risen up against their Unmer masters. Conquillas had decimated the Unmer fleet at Awl and thus betrayed his own kind for the love of a Haurstaf witch.
The lookout’s bell rang out again.
A sense of dread crept up Maskelyne’s spine, for through that red and turbulent air beyond the window he spied the dim hulk of the deadship bearing down on them once more. There could be no mistaking that hideous rusted tower, that weird droning sound. Evidently it had come about in the fog. He spun the Mistress’s wheel full lock to starboard, then flung open the wheel-house door and called down to the foredeck. ‘Get Ianthe up here, I need her sight.’
The deadship drew nearer, and for a heartbeat Maskelyne thought