Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts (47 page)

It must have rained during the night. Fronds of clear ice crystals had formed on the metal tower in the centre of the deck and on the torn remnants of the spinnaker attached to it. The wind had blown them into crazy shapes. A sugaring of white snow crunched under Granger’s boots. He scooped some up and ate it as he paced the deck. Vast ice-fields lay ahead of the deadship, a glittering expanse of emerald and white. In her wake stretched a channel of dark green water where she had punched through the surface ice. Granger walked to the bow of the ship and scanned the horizon. Basalt cliffs rose out of the sea a league to the north, their storm-cracked aspects mortared with snow. Upon the edge of this landmass perched a single building, a drab and windowless cube supporting a vast steel tower on its roof.

A sense of dread seemed to roll down from that structure and creep into Granger’s bones. That building was the source of the deadship’s power and could only be its ultimate destination. The force that had steered the icebreaker towards his own wooden lifeboat, and then brought him inexorably north, must emanate from there. In order to gain control of this ship, he must disable that interference. He gazed up at the building for a long time, watching for signs of life, but saw only white flurries of snow blowing across the black and green.

Constant snapping and pounding noises came from the prow as the deadship smashed a channel through the ice. The air remained as cold and sharp as a knife edge. Granger rubbed his hands and stamped his boots upon the deck, trying to coax some feeling into his body. He spotted an old wharf, partially hidden behind the headland of a sheltered natural harbour. The ice was thinner here and bereft of snow, its surface etched where the frozen brine had cracked and reformed. The ironclad slowed as it drew near, until the whining from the ship’s tower suddenly stopped.

The ship coasted the final few yards and then bumped against the wharf. Silence fell over the deck, broken only by the hiss of the wind through frozen metal.

Trying to ignore the uneasy feeling in his guts, Granger hitched a canvas bag over his shoulder and, after weeks at sea, finally stepped onto dry land.

A stairway zigzagged from the wharf up into a deep cut in the cliff. Twisted iron railings bordered the steps in places, but many had sheared away and now lay at the bottom of the gully among tumbles of ice-fused rock. Granger edged his way upwards with one shoulder against the wall of the defile, testing each step before trusting his weight to it. Icicles overhung the trail in places, forming glassy passages. The wind keened like a grief-stricken child.

At the summit he paused to catch his breath. The air hurt his lungs. No other living thing was breathing this, and perhaps never had. Down below, the ironclad waited in that smashed green bay, as dark and empty as a coffin. To the north stretched a howling landscape of emerald and white, the snowfields sculpted by constant gales into scalloped ridges and dream-like shapes with razor-blade edges. From here Granger could see the transmitting station tower rising above a snowy bluff to the east. Perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high, it was far larger than the one aboard the deadship, supporting a torus three times the size of its smaller twin. A faint whining sound came from its summit.

Granger’s boots sank into deep powder as he struggled up the bluff. At the summit he was rewarded with a clear view of the Unmer station. A square grey block with a huge round metal door, it occupied more than an acre of ground. Snow drifts engulfed its windward side, partially burying the whole structure. As Granger studied the landscape, he perceived other objects partly buried in the surrounding snow.
Dragon armour and bones.
Conquillas’s Revolution, it seemed, had reached even this distant place.

And yet
this
station continued to transmit power. The attackers had failed to shut it down.

The hinges had frozen solid, and it took considerable effort to pull that massive door open. Granger chipped away at the ice with his knife until, finally, it gave way. With a metal groan, the door swung open a few feet before lodging itself in snow. A dark tunnel lay behind, wide enough to drive a horse and carriage down. Granger took out his gem lantern and held it high. There were signs of violence. Black stains spattered the curved floor. The concrete had been scorched by dragonfire and heavily scarred by impacts from blades. A single thigh bone lay in a frozen puddle, and yet, strangely, he couldn’t see any other human remains.

Close fighting in here, several opponents.

Twenty paces further along, the passageway swelled into a spherical chamber lined by coils of copper wire. The humming sound was more intense here, the air noticeably warmer. Melt water had leaked in through the apex and collected in a shallow green pool in the hollow below. Granger stepped carefully around it. Several objects lay under the water – metal brackets or machine parts, all furred with verdigris. Two further openings led deeper into the station. He listened at each for a while, then lifted his gem lantern again and took the first passage.

This conduit took him to another wire-walled sphere where the passage branched again. Again, Granger chose the opening from which the humming noise seemed louder. He passed through four more of these junctions before he began to perceive a tremor running through the floor. It was accompanied by an uncomfortable tingling sensation in his fingertips. His gem lantern seemed brighter, too. In places he found round metal plaques set into the curving walls, each inset with a small clear lens. He passed four or five, before something about them began to bother him. When he found yet another, he stopped to inspect it more closely. As he lowered his eye to the lens at its centre, he glimpsed another eye withdrawing abruptly from the other side.

Granger shuddered and moved on.

Eventually, the concrete maze opened out into an enormous cylindrical space like the inside of a tower. Scores of other conduits led away from its base. The humming sound he had been following reached a fierce resonance here; he could feel it reverberating in his teeth and bones. Great mounds of trove covered the floor, some twenty or thirty feet high in places. Pistols and cannons and suits of armour lay among piles of wrecked war machines: arbalists and turtles and drop-forged rams. His gem lantern shone so brightly it illuminated the whole vast space from wall to wall. There were ballistic weapons and energy weapons, and countless burned and twisted metal pieces of indeterminable purpose – a bonfire of scrap and used weapons, of flanged tripods and serrated fins, with bursts of wire, glass shields, goggles, gauntlets and cannon barrels protruding like giant steel fingers. Upon a nearby mound lay an ancient sky chariot, heavily dented and fire-blackened, but seemingly intact. Granger’s gaze travelled up the walls, and higher still, to the ceiling far above, where similar mounds of wreckage had floated up and gathered there in sorcerous defiance of gravity.

He frowned. Had he been descending underground all this time? From the outside the building hadn’t seemed tall enough to contain a space this large.

Amidst all this trove, one area in the centre of the chamber had been left clear. Here a single stone pedestal supported a crystal as large as a man’s head. It was glowing brightly, radiating shafts of ever-moving light, like a lighthouse lantern. The humming noise seemed to emanate from its facets. Granger let his kitbag slide down from his shoulder to the floor, then tucked his seeing knife into his belt.

He wandered over to the nearest heap of trove and reached in to pull out a sword. But the instant his hand closed on the grip, something remarkable happened.

One moment he was alone, the next he was surrounded. Out of thin air they appeared – six men dressed in bulky Unmer furs, brutally thin, with howling red eyes and brine-scorched skin. And every one of them was pulling a sword from the surrounding scrap.

Sorcery.

Granger swung his stolen blade up at the nearest figure, but his opponent parried instantly. The two blades clashed. Granger sensed movement all around him. He leaped back, and his opponent did likewise. And then Granger recognized him.

His opponent was the very image of himself, identical in every way, from the fur jacket he had taken from the deadship down to the sword he carried. Granger turned his head to examine the other five, and as he did so these five turned
their
heads in unison. Every one of them was
him,
and every one continued to mimic his every move. He lifted his sword, and the others lifted
their
swords. He lowered the sword again, watching as the simulacrums copied him. On their faces he saw six mirror images of his own startled expression. He dropped the sword . . .

. . . and the men vanished.

He picked up the sword again, and they reappeared.

A cheerful voice called out, ‘You found my Replicating Sword.’

Granger, and his six replicas, turned to see an old man standing in the corner of the chamber. He was short, stooped and grey of face, and he wore an old suit of mail several sizes too large for him. A simple tin crown sat low upon his brow, balanced above his prodigious nose and ears. Tufts of yellow hair clung to his head the way dead weeds remain clinging to a mountainside. If a man’s attitude to life leaves its mark in his face then this crooked figure had found much to smile about over the years. And he was smiling now, a huge smile that reached all the way from his lips to his honey-coloured eyes.

‘It’s designed to allow a warrior to fight multiple enemies at once,’ he said. ‘But controlling them is tricky. You have to think of multiple manoeuvres at the same time or the simulacrums just mimic you. I could never completely master it myself.’ He chuckled. ‘And I’ve got the scars to prove it.’

The man looked vaguely Unmer, but he spoke Anean like a Losotan. His crown rested low on his brow, and Granger thought he knew why. If this man had fought during the Uprising, it would be covering another scar.

‘Some of the other inventions are even harder to wield,’ the old man said. ‘You’re lucky you didn’t pick up any of the Sniggering Blades. A sword like that will trick you into cracking open your own bones and sucking out the marrow if you give it half a chance. Even Brutalists are frightened of them.’ He nodded amicably. ‘And then there are the Phasing Shields and Void Blades, of course. To call them
terrifying
doesn’t even begin to do them justice.’

‘Who are you?’ Granger said. He was startled to hear his own voice coming out of six mouths at once, but not startled enough to drop the weapon.

‘The name’s Herian,’ the old man replied. ‘I’m the operator here.’

‘I didn’t think there were any free Unmer left,’ Granger said, ‘except Conquillas.’

Herian’s smile withered. ‘Conquillas will be judged by powers greater than us,’ he said, strolling forward. ‘He gave up the right to call himself Unmer a long time ago.’

Granger noted that the old man’s crown only partially covered a red welt above his left eyebrow.
Not exactly free, then.
Herian had been leucotomized by the Haurstaf. But if he’d been captured and deliberately crippled at Awl, then how did he find his way out here?

The old man picked his way across piles of trove. ‘A lot of these flowspaces were used for storage during the war. Dragons don’t much like to venture inside them. Not against a gradient of this magnitude.’ He stubbed his foot on something and let out a curse, then picked up the offending object and flung it away. It was a skeletal box of some sort. ‘It’s all clutter to me now,’ he said. ‘I swear there’s more of it every time I come in here.’ He approached the crystal and examined it carefully, allowing curtains of shimmering light to bathe his face. For a moment he seemed to forget himself, but then he said, ‘Have you looked at this closely, yet?’

‘How do I get out of here?’ Granger said.

Herian didn’t answer.

‘How do I gain control of the ironclad?’

The old man continued to gaze into the crystal.

‘The icebreaker,’ Granger insisted. ‘Tell me how to steer it.’

‘You don’t steer it,’ Herian said. ‘Only the captain can do that.’

‘The captain is dead.’

Herian smiled again. ‘That didn’t stop him from delivering his package and then bringing you here, did it?’ His gaze returned to the jewel, which was now shining even more brightly than moments before. The colour and texture of its light had altered, too. A scattering of pink and orange rays swept across the old man’s mail suit, his weathered face and his tin crown. ‘Don’t you find it mesmerizing?’ he said. ‘The light, I mean . . .’ Radiance flooded over the mounds of trove behind him. As the rays touched the Unmer devices, many of them activated. Deep within the heap it seemed that embers began to glow. Energy weapons hummed and crackled. To Granger’s astonishment, additional copies of himself began to appear. He moved towards Herian, and his simulacrums moved too.

‘Draws you in, doesn’t it?’ Herian said.

Granger stopped.

‘Time’s horizon,’ the old man went on. ‘Entropaths use it to control the gradient, the rate of aspacial flow. You can’t see it, but it’s all around us now. If this device let it all through at once, our universe would collapse like that.’ He glanced up at Granger and snapped his fingers. ‘Bang. Crushed in a blink.’

The radiance from the crystal now filled the entire chamber. Through its facets Granger spied an image of a black plain under a burning sky. Curtains of red and pink light tore across the horizon. Lightning flickered. He took another step forward and then stopped himself. Had he meant to approach? His instincts screamed at him not to get any closer. The sky within that jewel continued to pulse and writhe. All around him, his simulacrums began to walk forward. And Granger found himself following them.