She stared at him as if he didn’t exist, her pale blue eyes so striking against her earthen complexion, and yet distant at the same time. She was as beautiful as her mother had been all those years ago: that same flawless skin, those dark eyebrows that tapered to perfect points, the black flame of her hair. Ianthe’s gown had been ripped at one shoulder and hung loosely over her breasts.
Could he be wrong about her?
When Hana had fallen ill in those final days before his unit had been recalled from Weaverbrook, they hadn’t talked about it. Disease already had a grip on the land. Hu’s bombardment had caused uncountable deaths – the corpses left to rot in fields and drainage ditches. They had never been able to dig enough graves.
Had Hana known she was pregnant then? Would it have made a difference if she’d told him?
Ianthe’s pale Losotan eyes belonged to him and no other. He could see that clearly, and it irked him that there was something wrong with her vision. She wasn’t reacting to movement or light the way a normal person would. If he hadn’t seen her reach for the water jug, he’d have thought she was blind.
That the fault in her should have come from him.
Hana watched them carefully. Underneath those bruises and the scars of age Granger thought he caught a glimpse of a nervous smile. Was she thinking about those nights fifteen years ago? His unit had commandeered her grandmother’s farm for the duration of the campaign. In sixty-three days of fighting, he’d lost only seven men out of fifteen hundred, while the enemy mourned for four hundred of their own. It would have been an extraordinary victory for the empire, had the empire known about it.
But telepaths were expensive. And Emperor Hu had always been unwilling to pay.
He remembered Hana’s terror when the shelling began. By the time Hu’s navy had finished there had been eight thousand more graves to dig, and scant few of his men left alive to dig them. Fewer still when the cholera took its toll.
That image just stirred his anger. Why was he doing this? He wasn’t responsible for what had happened to her or her village. He’d kept her safe. He couldn’t have taken her with him. He couldn’t have stayed. He didn’t owe her anything. He glanced at Ianthe again, but the sight of her just filled him with despair. A weight of expectation hung in the air between the three of them, and Granger could not define it. He didn’t want to think about it. He had to get his boat repaired. He had to get away from this godforsaken city.
Drown them both and say they tried to escape.
He felt trapped and foolish. He snatched up his waterproof gloves and the galoshes Creedy had left for him. And then he grabbed his toolbox and trudged downstairs to see about fixing his prisoners somewhere to sleep.
Halfway down the steps he paused to put on the thick whale-skin gloves and to pull his galoshes over his boots. He fitted a hemp face mask over his mouth and nose and snapped his goggles into place. His breathing sounded heavy and erratic. He stared at the flooded passageway for a long time before he dropped down into the shallow brine and waded along the corridor. He planned to use the sleeping pallets from three or four vacant cells to build a higher platform for his two new captives.
The first two rooms contained nothing of use but the dragon-bones he’d stockpiled to repair his roof. Both the pallets here were partially submerged, and even the dry sections of wood looked rotten. Worms had eaten into the ends of the planks. Granger selected a couple of yard-long thigh bones and then stood for a moment wondering if could use them. Finally he threw them away and left the room. The sound of his breaths came quicker. He could feel the icy chill of the water through his galoshes.
The pallet in the third cell was in better condition; he could use it. But the room itself was no good. The floorboards under the surface of the brine had collapsed, leaving a treacherous well that dropped into the flooded chamber below. Through this hole Granger spied dim beams of light slanting through a downstairs window and falling upon a heap of broken planks and plaster. Yellow particles hung suspended in the brown water. Something had disturbed the silt on that lower floor, for he could see foot-sized impressions around the rubble. Had the Drowned caused this damage? He doubted they were capable of such wilful destruction.
As Granger passed the fourth cell, he heard a splash coming from the other side of the door. He didn’t stop to check on his prisoner. No money, no food. He wasn’t running a goddamn soup kitchen here. There was nothing to be done for Duka now.
The floors in the remaining four cells looked sound, so he chose a cell facing Halcine Canal, where the barred window admitted more light. He gathered together all the solid pallets from the rest of the wing and nailed them down one upon the other to form a raised platform four yards long by two wide. It sloped badly towards the wall, but that was better than sloping the other way. When the construction was complete, Granger’s breaths outpaced his heart. He leaned against the door jamb, wheezing, until the tightness left his chest. His shoulder throbbed. The platform he had built cleared the brine by six inches or so, enough to keep his prisoners dry for most of the coming year. It would have to do. He didn’t have any more pallets.
He took some blankets from the storeroom cabinet and searched for a slop bucket in the deep lower drawers. He couldn’t find a bucket so he pulled out the drawer and dumped that on the platform instead. It would have to do.
The two women hadn’t moved. Hana held her daughter and rocked back and forward.
Ianthe said, ‘I’m not going down there.’
Granger peeled off his gloves and let them drop to the floor. They were slick with brine and would have burned his captives’ skin.
‘Shush, Inny,’ Hana said. ‘We’ll be fine.’
‘It’s thoroughly rotten. We won’t survive.’
Her mother hugged her more tightly. ‘We always survive.’
But Ianthe struggled out of Hana’s embrace. ‘There’s a starving man in one of his cells,’ she cried, pushing her mother away. ‘And a drawer for a loo. How can you say we’ll be fine when he treats his captives like that?’ She took a breath as if to scream. ‘The man in the boat told him to drown us!’
Granger stopped and stared at her, as helpless to respond to this sudden squall of teenage anger as he was to the words themselves. How did she know these things? She couldn’t have heard Creedy. She couldn’t be aware of the man in the cell.
Hana tried to restrain her daughter. ‘Inny, please . . .’
But Ianthe would not be pacified. She stood up, her leg-irons clattering, then picked up the chain and pulled it. The locking cuff rattled against the water pipe, but it would not yield. Suddenly she spun round to face her mother again, her face flushed and savage. ‘Who is he to you?’ she demanded. ‘Why do you look at him like that? He’s hideous. You can’t know him. You can’t!’
‘Inny—’
Granger felt his heart sink. ‘She’s psychic,’ he said.
‘No,’ Hana replied.
‘You hid her from the Haurstaf?’
The woman’s expression tightened with frustration. ‘No. You don’t understand.’
‘Do you know what they’ll do to you when they find out?’
‘She’s not like them, I swear. They can’t sense her. She—’
Ianthe cut her off with a yell. ‘Don’t you dare tell him!’
Hana reached for her daughter again. ‘Sweetheart, maybe it’s—’
Ianthe slapped her.
The sound of it snapped the argument to silence. For a long time Granger just stood there, listening to his own heart drumming in his ears. He didn’t know what to say. Ianthe was trembling, bre
athing heavily as she gazed vacantly down at her mother. Hana sniffed and rubbed tears from her eyes.
‘I’m not psychic,’ Ianthe said bitterly.
‘You’re untrained,’ Granger said, ‘unfocused.’
She snorted. ‘What difference does it make? You’ve already got it all planned out. Sell me to the Haurstaf, build yourself a proper jail. I don’t care.’
A proper jail? She’d slipped that remark in with admirable ease. He’d been thinking of selling her to buy a new boat, as she well knew. Despite himself, he felt a twinge of admiration for the girl. ‘Was that particular insight intended to convince me you’re not psychic?’
Her hands tightened to fists. ‘You just don’t get it, do you?’ She faced him and spoke with emphatic sarcasm, pronouncing each word as if he were retarded. ‘I don’t know what you are thinking.’
‘Then explain it to me.’
Ianthe sat back down on the floor beside her mother.
After a moment Hana clasped her daughter’s fingers in her own. Then she wiped away more tears and said, ‘Ianthe can see and hear things that other people can’t.’
‘That’s obvious enough,’ Granger said.
‘That’s not what I mean,’ Hana said. ‘Psychics read thoughts, but Ianthe only sees and hears whatever is around her. Her senses are just like yours or mine, only better. A lot better.’
Granger frowned. ‘She heard Creedy whispering to me?’
Hana nodded.
‘And the man downstairs?’
‘Ianthe?’
The girl shrugged. ‘I heard him sobbing.’
Had Duka been sobbing? Granger hadn’t heard anything like that at all. He tried to think of a moment in which the starving man had made a sound that might have revealed his condition to the girl upstairs, but there simply wasn’t one. No money, no food, Granger had thought. His every instinct told him he was being lied to.
‘And the drawer?’ he said.
Ianthe hesitated. ‘What drawer?’
‘The drawer in your cell,’ he said. ‘Did you hear that too?’ He turned to find her glaring furiously at him and knew he’d trapped her. ‘I’m sending a letter to Losoto tomorrow,’ he said. ‘I don’t suppose I need to tell you who it’s for and what I’m going to write.’ The Haurstaf would pay a fortune for one of their own.
Her cold hard eyes narrowed. ‘You don’t have to tell me anything,’ she growled. ‘I know all about you. Your father was a beggar and your mother was Drowned when he took her. That’s why you’re so ugly. She squeezed you out of her womb like a fish. And your father took one look at you and wanted to vomit, so now you run this rotting prison because you can’t do anything else. A sad little tinpot dictator who gets his thrills out of locking people up. You make me sick.’
Hana closed her eyes.
Granger took a deep breath. Then he unlocked the girl’s leg-irons, seized her by the waist and pitched her over his shoulder. She wasn’t heavy, but she fought like a cat in a kitbag, screaming and kicking and trying to scratch him. One of her boots flew off and smashed into the crockery in the sink. He carried the struggling girl down the stairs and along the flooded corridor and dumped her unceremoniously onto the platform he’d constructed in the fourth cell. And then he stood there wheezing while she scrambled back against the wall, her cheeks burning with embarrassment, her eyes mere pinpricks of hate.
‘You . . . stay, while I get . . . your mother.’
‘Bastard.’
He didn’t bother to close the cell door behind her. The brine would damage her feet if she tried to escape. When he reached the bottom of the steps he sat down and rested his head against the wall. Ten slow breaths. The metal stench of seawater pinched his nostrils. He could hear her sobbing further down the corridor. He gnashed his teeth and dragged himself upright and went back upstairs.
Hana was sitting on the floor. ‘We’ve been in one cell or another for the last six months,’ she said. ‘The detention centre, the ship, but the worst was Interrogation. When we didn’t know the answer to their questions; they kept on asking until we did. The hard part was figuring out what they wanted to hear.’
‘And that’s what you’ve been doing with me?’
She looked at him directly. ‘The Haurstaf will kill her.’
‘They’ll give her a good life.’
She shook her head defiantly.
Granger frowned. ‘Is it so hard to let her go? Even if it means keeping her here?’
Hana closed her eyes. ‘How do I convince you to trust me?’
‘Tell me the truth.’
‘We tried to!’
Granger unlocked her leg-irons and led her downstairs to the cell block. She didn’t resist as he scooped her up in his arms. He carried her along the flooded corridor and across the threshold into the cell. Ianthe was curled up in the corner, crying into her elbows. Hana went over to her at once and embraced her.
Granger watched them for a moment, and then he eased the cell door closed behind him and turned the key in the lock out of habit.
Moonlight flooded the garret. Granger couldn’t sleep. His prisoners would probably be awake in their cell below. No one slept well on the first night. They’d be looking at the walls and wondering what the dawn would bring. They’d be looking at the slop drawer. Granger lay in his cot, wrapped in blankets that didn’t reach his feet, and stared at the head of a nail embedded in the ceiling. In this quiet darkness the smell of the sea always reminded him of his childhood in Losoto. The scent of brine was much stronger down in the cells, where there were bars instead of glass in the windows. Some nights it made you dream of drowning.
On the floor all around lay the scraps of wood and tools that he and Swinekicker had gathered over the years to fix the old man’s boat. He’d dismantled most of the furniture last winter and burned what he decided couldn’t use. His whaleskin cloak lay in a crumpled pile beside the heavy grey galoshes he’d borrowed from Creedy. In the gloom the dragon-bone joists in the ceiling looked like a sketch of a land at war with itself, a framework of pale borders dividing innumerable fiefdoms. It was a map of fear, lust and betrayal, just like any other map in Hu’s empire.
Can you hear me?
The shadows gave no reply. Granger felt foolish. Perhaps Ianthe was asleep. Either way, the girl seemed determined to hide her powers from him. All Haurstaf could stare into the minds of their own kind, and an exceptional few could read the thoughts of humans. Their powers over an Unmer mind were akin to rape. And yet none of them possessed preternatural vision and hearing. He shook his head. Ianthe had to be psychic, and a powerful one to boot. And that made her valuable to him. She was his ticket out of here.
A sturdy deepwater boat could take him across the Mare Lux, beyond Losoto and the reach of the empire. Valcinder still maintained some free ports, it was said. He could sell the boat there and buy passage on a vortex-class ship across the Strakebreaker Sea. In a year or so he might reach the Herican Peninsula, the last great wilderness – the place where gods once walked with men.
He could escape the brine.
The thought should have given him solace, and yet he found it impossible to sleep. Doubts continued to nag at him. Was there any way she could simply have heard him pull the drawer from the cabinet? He couldn’t see how such a feat was possible. But if he was going to sell Ianthe to the Haurstaf, then he had to be absolutely certain. She was still too much of a mystery to him. The extent of her abilities remained untested, obscured by her lies. It was like peering into the dept
hs of the sea. One never knew exactly what one might find down there.
He had to determine her limits.
But how do you test a psychic who knows your every thought and plans to confound you?
Granger got up and took the water jug from the sink. Then he walked downstairs to the flooded cell corridor. No windows opened onto the narrow space, and it was utterly dark down there, but Granger could have found his way in his sleep. He counted fifteen steps, then crouched. Slowly and carefully, he eased the lip of the jug into the brine, filling it with poison.
He slept later than usual. When he woke the sun was high and the room was already uncomfortably warm. He opened a window and pissed into the canal below. He still felt tired. He threw on a robe and pulled his borrowed galoshes over his bare feet. Then he picked up the jug of poisonous water and sniffed it. It smelled sulphurous and metallic, but so did everything else in his jail. He doubted any normal person would be able to detect the deception until it was too late. A psychic, however, would already know what he had done.
He carried it down to the flooded cell block.
Neither of his prisoners looked like they’d slept at all. Ianthe didn’t seem to have the energy even to raise her head and scowl at him. She was still curled up in the corner, her head turned away, but breathing with such fierceness that Granger knew she was awake. Hana pushed herself up from the palette and tried to smile.
He handed her the jug and thought to himself, I’ve poisoned the water, Ianthe.
She set it down and rubbed her eyes. ‘Do you feed us?’ she said.
‘In a minute.’ He waited.
She picked up the jug.
‘Hana.’
She lowered the jug and looked at him.
Don’t count on me stopping her from drinking it, Ianthe. I’m not going to do it again. And don’t pretend to be asleep. I can hear you breathing. ‘How did you survive? In Evensraum, I mean. Cholera wiped out the colonies.’
She shrugged. ‘Why did you change your name? Why Swinekicker?’
Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts Page 8
