‘Anyone still alive down here?’ he called.
He heard a thump and a splash, as if something had been thrown against one of the doors, then a man’s voice called back from the shadows: ‘Give me some food, you son of a bitch.’
Granger raised his goggles and went back up the stairs.
Creedy had tilted his chair back on its rear legs and sat with his boots resting on the munitions crate Granger used as a table. A huge man with a boxer’s face and hair shaved close to his skull, he still possessed an aura of brute savagery. Even now he was gnawing on a dragon knuckle, sucking at the cartilage and ripping shreds of meat free with soft, bestial grunts. Most men with a past like his would have chosen to hide it, but William Patrick Creedy still wore the Gravediggers’ tattoo on the back of his hand openly, proudly, challenging anyone who saw it to betray him to the emperor’s men. It was an attitude that had almost killed him more than once. Grey patches of sharkskin marred one side of his jaw – an injury sustained when six privateers had pinned him, momentarily, to a wet dockside in Tallship. His left ear was missing, hacked off in that same brawl. Creedy simply didn’t give a shit. His clockwork eye ticked with the steady precision of a detonator, the small blue lens shuttling back and forth in its socket, but his good eye – the cunning one – was watching Granger. ‘What’s the situation, Colonel?’ he asked.
‘The brine’s risen another inch,’ he replied.
‘I meant, are any of your guests still breathing?’
Granger shrugged. ‘I didn’t hear anything.’
‘Good,’ Creedy said. ‘You’re officially a priority now. Since they can’t expect a man to make a living from an empty jail, they are obliged do something about it.’ He leaned forward and spat out a piece of gristle. ‘That’s the law.’
Granger hung his lantern on a wall hook. ‘I can’t get to the register,’ he said.
‘The hell you keep it down there for anyway?’
The truth was Granger hadn’t thought about going back for it, not since the old man’s death. But Creedy would never have understood that. All but one of the names in the register had lines scored through them, and after that final one he didn’t think he wanted to add any more. If he accepted more prisoners he’d have to feed them, and it might be years before their families ran out of money to send. And then it would be Granger himself who’d have to carry down the last meal; Thomas Granger who’d have to watch them die. The hardest part of job was the part he did for free.
He wasn’t running a prison so much as a tomb.
‘You should have built that other storey like old Swinekicker said,’ Creedy remarked. ‘Another couple of winters like the last one, and the Mare Lux will be lapping your balls. What are you going to do when you run out of space? Where are you going to live? I mean, look at this place, man.’
The detritus of Granger’s life filled a series of cramped spaces under the building’s coombed attic ceilings. A jumble of wood, whaleand dragon-bones supported the roof. Morning light fell through the windows facing Halcine Canal, illuminating piles of spent shell casings, drip-pans positioned under leaks, carpentry tools, oarlocks and old engine parts from the Trove Market in Losoto. In the centre of the room sat a massive anchor, too heavy for Granger to lift on his own. God knows how Swinekicker had got it in here. A flap of whaleskin covered the hole leading out to the eaves, while the wooden hatch it had replaced rested against the wall nearby. He’d been forced to rip the little door off its hinges to drag the old man’s coffin out. You could still see the scrapes the heavy box had left in the floorboards; they looked like gouges left by fingernails.
‘It’s a prison,’ he said. ‘What do you expect it to look like?’
Creedy grunted. ‘Other people manage to keep themselves in comfort. You’re letting this place slip under.’ He looked around. ‘That hatch’ll go back on easy enough.’
Granger didn’t reply.
‘And you could raise the floors in the cells downstairs.’
Granger shrugged. ‘Some people build things…’
‘… and other people break them,’ Creedy finished, with an oafish laugh. ‘Do you remember Dunbar?’
Granger was looking for a crowbar among his tools. ‘Dunbar’s underwater now,’ he said. He couldn’t find the crowbar so he picked up a head-spade instead and carried it over to a spot at the far end of the living room, about forty paces from the front gable. He got down on his knees and crawled around, squinting down through the gaps in the floorboards. When he spotted the top of the wardrobe in the storage room below, he jammed the head of the spade between two boards and began ripping up wood.
‘Banks found that silverfin’s egg in the cave under the cliff,’ the other man went on, ‘and there you were, boiling it up in an old concussion shell when Hu’s Lancers came up the path. I’ll never forget the look on that young officer’s face. You stared right at him. You remember what you said?’
Granger tossed a plank aside and pulled up another.
‘Would you be kind enough to keep an eye out for the mother?’ Creedy said in an affected tone. Then he guffawed. ‘Would you be kind enough?’ He tore another shred of meat from the bone and chewed it thoughtfully. ‘Tenacious bastards, though, I’ll give them that.’
‘Hu’s Lancers?’
‘Dragons, man. You ever hear the stories about that green?’
Granger eased himself down through the hole he’d made in the floor, planting his feet on the top of the wardrobe underneath. It creaked under him. ‘Maskelyne just makes those up,’ he said. ‘He’ll sell the beast on to another collector once he’s given it a reputation as a monster.’
‘It was a monster,’ Creedy said. ‘Sank seven ships before they harpooned it in the eye.’
‘Two ships,’ Granger said.
‘Well,’ Creedy said. ‘But you saw what it ate.’
Grunting, Granger manoeuvred his shoulders down through the gap in the floor. ‘Saw it?’ he said. ‘I disarmed the bloody thing.’
Creedy laughed. ‘I don’t think Davy even knew what it was.’
Granger dropped to a squatting position. It was a tight squeeze, but he managed to duck his head under the joists. Apart from the wardrobe, some shelves stuffed with moth-eaten blankets and a stack of old tin pails, the storage room was empty.
‘What are you doing?’ Creedy said. ‘I’ve got galoshes you could have borrowed. You don’t have to rip the goddamn house apart to get down there.’
Granger opened the wardrobe door, then, turning to face the wall, he lowered himself down on splayed elbows. His boots scuffed the sides of the wardrobe and kicked against the open door, knocking it back against the wall. Finally the air under his heels gave way to a solid surface. With another grunt, he hopped down inside the narrow wooden space.
It was musty and dark, but his fumbling hands located the tin box at once. He picked it up and slid it on top of the wardrobe, then stopped as pain seized his chest. It hit him like a punch. ‘Could you give me a hand back up, Mr Creedy?’
‘You got your own self down there.’
‘I can’t… breathe.’
Granger heard a chair scrape across the floor above. A moment later, a shadow fell across the gap above, and he saw his former sergeant’s big, ugly face staring down. ‘You’re never going to fix this hole, are you?’
‘Grab that box and give me a hand.’