Once he was back up in the garret, he took a drink of water straight from the spigot and then sat down on the floor, breathing slow until the cramps in his chest relaxed. He’d been inhaling this sea air for too long, living too close to the brine. The Mare Lux had got into his lungs, and there was nothing to be done about it now.
‘You don’t look well,’ Creedy said.
‘The register’s in that box.’
Creedy opened it. ‘What’s all this?’
He pulled out an assortment of objects. There were two books: the prison register and an old Unmer tome in raggedy script. And there was a child’s doll. This last was a representation of a human infant, fashioned out of silver and brass. Tiny joints allowed its head and arms to swivel. One of its eye sockets was empty, but the other held a glass copy of the real thing – a finer replica than Creedy’s old clockwork lens. A faint yellow light glowed behind its remaining iris.
‘You don’t remember it?’ Granger said.
Creedy thought for a moment, then frowned. ‘The Unmer child,’ he said, unconsciously lifting his hand to his eye. ‘What did you keep this for?’
‘I don’t know,’ Granger said. ‘Evidence. Lift its arm. No, the other one.’
A tinny voice came from the thing: ‘A oo a apee.’
‘I’ll be damned,’ Creedy said. ‘That sounded like speech.’ He lifted the arm again.
‘Oo oo uv ee.’
‘It is speech,’ Granger said. ‘There’s a mechanism inside.’
‘You opened it?’
Granger shrugged. ‘Why not?’
Creedy looked incredulous. ‘It’s Unmer made. God knows what sort of sorcery is woven into this thing.’
‘Do you suppose it’s worth anything?’
The other man examined the doll. ‘Maybe,’ he said. ‘If you could figure out what it’s saying. A lot of people will pay good money for something like that. Don’t let Maskelyne’s buyers rip you off, though. No offence, Colonel, but you need the money.’ He looked pointedly around the room, before returning his attention to the doll.
‘A is oo oo.’
‘I doubt it’s even speaking Anean,’ he said. ‘Sounds like one of those old Unmer languages.’
‘Don’t wear it out, Mr Creedy.’ Granger got to his feet and picked up the prison register – a heavy book bound in blue cloth. He thumbed through hundreds of pages, the columns of convicts’ names and dates all written in Swinekicker’s fastidious handwriting and then scored through with neat lines. Coffin nails, the old soldier had called those marks. Only the last half-page had been written in Granger’s own hand. In the six years since he’d been here in Ethugra, he’d drawn nine coffin nails of his own. The final entry remained unmarked.
Duka, Eric. 3/HA/07. Evensraum. E-Com. #44-WR15102. III 30/HA/46 – 13/HR/47
Eric Duka, born in Evensraum in 1407. Fought as an enemy combatant, one of twenty thousand soldiers captured by the emperor’s forces at Whiterock Bay during the Forty-fourth War of Liberation. Granger made a clicking sound with his tongue. According to this, he’d received three initial payments from Evensraum Council, followed by ten more from Duka’s own family. Funds ceased on the 13th Hu-Rain 1447 – three weeks ago. No explanation given. Granger took a pencil from the box and drew a shaky line through the text. The chances of the prisoner’s relations sending any more money now were as good as nil. If they petitioned the Council, they might get another one or two compassion payments. But Granger could always claim those had arrived too late.
The pages after this entry were empty, space enough for a thousand more lives, if he wanted them on his conscience. He looked around at his dismal apartment, at the drip-pans, and then at the hole he’d just ripped in the floor. ‘What time does the Alabaster Sound get here?’ he asked Creedy.
‘We got hours yet.’
‘Have they posted the lists?’
Creedy shrugged. ‘No point checking them. We’re still getting combatants from Evensraum and Calloway. Hu ships them over as soon as Interrogation’s done with them. They’re all piss-poor farmers.’
They’d been in Evensraum in the thirties. Granger recalled a farm near Weaverbrook, a place tucked right in behind the seawall with twelve acres turned over to wheat and corn and another two for grazing. There had been an old stone house with a kitchen garden, an orchard and a wooden hay barn. Living trees on the hills. Rabbits. His orders had been to burn and shell nothing, to take the island by boot and sword, one smallholding at a time. But then Emperor Hu had grown impatient with their progress.
He remembered the smell of mud all around, the clean, cold taste of well water, his brother John gathering apples in his helmet. A good place, Evensraum. They said all good things were worth fighting for. But then he remembered the bombardment, the fires and the screaming, and the cholera that followed.
‘Let’s get over there anyway,’ he said. ‘It’s best to be early.’
Creedy was frowning at the doll. ‘You’ve had this thing all these years?’ he said. ‘And you didn’t think to tell me about it till now? I might have been able to find you a buyer.’
‘I meant to repair it first,’ Granger said.
The other man grunted. ‘Right,’ he said, twisting the doll’s arm again.
‘Oo oo uv ee,’ said the hopeless little voice.
Outside upon the roof of Granger’s prison it was a fine blue day, but the two men wore their whaleskin cloaks out of habit. You never could tell when the wind might pick up. They hadn’t worn their uniforms in years, and in their seaman’s breeches and Ethugran jerkins they looked like the jailers they’d become. Swinekicker’s old brine purifier squatted upon a clutter of lead pipes beside the cistern, its faceted lenses gleaming in the sun like the eyes of a spider. It badly needed cleaning, he noted, as he always did. Ten yards below, Halcine Canal and its many branches formed a web of tea-coloured channels between Ethugra’s jails, the banks all crooked by pontoons and wickers of flotsam. Boats waited in shadowy moorings, the brine under their hulls as darkly lustrous as bronze.
In places where sunlight fell between the buildings, Granger could see hazy details under the surface of the water: rows of iron-barred windows, and here and there a doorway through which old Swinekicker might once have stepped. Deeper still lay ordinary windows like the ones in Old Losoto. As a boy he’d clambered over Unmer facades that looked just like that, or swung from the mooring hooks, shrieking, while the other boys thrilled at the thought of Old Man Ghoul reaching up from the depths to grab him. It seemed like another world now. The Mare Lux smothered the past. Fish now glided though spaces that were once kitchens and bedrooms. Crabs and eels traversed the old cell floors in search of food.
The majority of Swinekicker’s neighbours had kept pace with the rising seas, and their buildings cast shadows over the old man’s jail. Dun-coloured facades loomed two or three storeys above him. There was Hoeken’s, and Dan Cuttle’s jail, and there the round-tower Mrs Pursewearer was having built with her husband’s inheritance. A bare-chested labourer stood on the tower scaffold, slapping down mortar with a trowel while his companion carried blocks of stone up a ladder and laid them at his feet. This endless construction was part of Ethugran life. Masonry reclaimed from the seabed lay drying on palettes against a hundred half-built eaves, or stood in silhouette upon the rooftops like gravestones. A few of the buildings had cracked and subsided, broken by the Mare Lux tides. Others had given up the fight entirely. Thirty yards further along the canal, nothing of Ma Bitter’s place remained above the waterline but a lone chimneypot. Someone had stuffed it full of rubbish.
‘Look.’ Creedy was pointing down at the canal.
Granger looked and immediately spotted a yellow light moving through the murky waters between the prison foundations. Five fathoms down, a sharkskin man was carrying a small child in his arms. He clutched a gem lantern in one upraised fist, using it to light his way across the drowned street. Both he and the child wore rags. His trouser legs flapped against his scarred grey shins. The child’s hair wafted like a yellow flame behind its head. They moved lethargically through the brine, crossing the boulder-strewn seabed with great care, before disappearing through an open doorway into the opposite building.