‘Someone ought to tell Dan Cuttle,’ Creedy said. ‘That was his place they went into.’
‘I’ll mention it to him.’
‘It’s not right, the Drowned moving the hell into wherever they please.’
Granger continued to peer down at the doorway through which they’d disappeared. They’d come from this side of the street, which meant they might be living in his own foundations. The law required him to inform Maskelyne’s Hookmen, but that would mean inspections, and Granger didn’t want inspections.
Creedy insisted they take his own launch to Averley Plaza because he said Swinekicker’s old boat was bowed and splitting along the keel and was likely to sink with the two of them in it. Granger looked down at the places in the hull he’d filled with resin. He still owed the boatyard a thousand gilders for repairing the engine.
The launch puttered along. A former Imperial Navy tender, it still bore the scars of cannon-fire across its metal hull. Creedy claimed to have bought it cheap from a cousin who’d been a coxswain under Admiral Lamont, but Granger suspected he’d stolen it. He didn’t want to know. They’d all done desperate things these last six years.
Granger sat dead centre, away from the sides of the vessel. Creedy slouched over the helm, with one hand on the wheel. With his other hand he absently twisted the lens of his clockwork eye, as though the reappearance of that Unmer doll had stirred unwelcome memories. ‘You ever wonder what happened to the other guys?’ he said. ‘I heard Banks stayed on in Losoto, right under Hu’s nose.’
‘Banks was smart enough to look after himself,’ Granger replied. ‘He’s probably worked his way into Administration by now.’
‘Smarter than us, eh?’ Creedy steered the launch around Ma Bitter’s chimneypot. Massive prison buildings glided past on either side, trapping great dark slabs of shadow between them. Behind them, the propeller churned the canal waters into an ochre froth. ‘We should get the last of the Gravediggers together again,’ Creedy said. ‘Get them out here, I mean. Banks would know how to fix up that place of yours. Swan and Tummel could help dredge up stone for the walls. We could go after trove while we’re at it. Get an operation going.’
An illegal operation, Granger thought. ‘I don’t have anything to pay them with,’ he said.
‘They wouldn’t ask for nothing, not from you, Colonel. You could offer them a lay of the trove.’
‘There’s nothing valuable left in these canals,’ Granger said. ‘And we’d need a ton of equipment for deepwater salvage: cranes, steel-nets, dredging hooks. A bigger boat.’ He shook his head. ‘We’d be putting ourselves in competition with Maskelyne. Somehow, I don’t think he’d be pleased.’
Creedy spat over the side, but said nothing more.
This talk made Granger wonder how the other man’s business was faring. Creedy had grown up here, and his family still ran four or five prisons out on the edge of Tallship. They’d hooked Creedy up with a distant relation, some poor second cousin who owed the grandfather money. Didn’t want him brandishing that tattoo in the family’s own neighbourhood, they said. Not with the emperor’s spies around. The cousin’s place was big enough to be profitable, Granger supposed, but then Creedy had a talent for making money disappear.
Swinekicker had been kind to Granger. The old soldier hadn’t wanted anything from him but a hard day’s work and an ear to listen to his army stories. He been riddled with brine rot when Granger had first been introduced to him. Maybe he’d just wanted someone to carry his coffin out.
The launch turned west out of Halcine Canal and into Francialle, where the buildings brawled for space, abandoning the waterways between them in a warren of perpetual gloom. Creedy switched off the engine and took up his boat hook, pushing it against the stonework on either side as he eased the vessel through channels barely wider than its hull. In some places the clover-leaf windows of ancient palazzos could be seen dimly underwater, but mostly the brine was as impenetrable as dreamless sleep. These old drowned avenues of Francialle had once resounded with the hammers of Unmer weapon-smiths and metalworkers, and the chants of Brutalist and Entropic sorcerers as they imbued their creations with treacherous powers. Granger couldn’t help but wonder what strange devices still lay down there, chattering mindlessly to the fish. Even now it seemed perilous to disturb the silence.
A rat scampered along ledges above the water’s edge, its scarred grey snout sniffing after water-beetles. Granger watched it for a while. Once he thought he spied another lantern moving slowly through the deep. Another Drowned soul on an unknowable errand? If Creedy noticed it, he chose not to comment.
At length they left the shadows of Francialle and steered the boat out into a wide quadrangle open to the full glare of the midday sun.
Averley Plaza formed a great sunlit harbour in the centre of the city, flanked on three sides by the grand facades of Ethugra’s Imperial jails and administration buildings. Ships from Losoto, Valcinder, Chandel and the liberated territories of Cog-Ellis and Evensraum reached this place by way of the Glot Madera – a deep-water channel that meandered south through the heart of the city to the open sea. The whole basin teemed with boats: merchantmen, trawlers and dragon-claves from all corners of the empire; dredgers, squid lanterns, crane-ships and barges loaded with reclaimed stone, earth and firewood dragged up from undersea forests. A fleet of smaller vessels wove between the larger craft, from hardwood yachts to whaleskin coracles and old Unmer crystal-hulls; they bobbed and danced like bright mirages upon the bronze waters.
On the north embankment Ethugra’s weekly market was already underway. Several hundred tents and stalls crammed the broad swathe of flagstones along the wharf side, selling everything from soil-grown produce to flame coral, thrice-boiled fish and trove. At the water’s edge stood the stony figures of men and women – not statues, but the corpses of sharkskin men and women, each netted in Ethugra’s own canals and left out to harden in the glare of the sun.
Creedy was looking south. ‘Lucky we got here when we did,’ he said. ‘The Baster’s early.’
A former Imperial battleship, the Alabaster Sound was now one of the largest of Emperor Hu’s prisoner transport vessels. Two steam tugs were nudging her battle-scarred steel bow through the gates of the Glot Madera and into Averley Plaza. She had been decommissioned after the Forty-third War of Liberation, but her iron guns still loomed over her deck rails, the shadows of their barrels sweeping across the brine like black banners. Her massive sloping funnel towered above the roofs of even the tallest buildings, disgorging fumes into the blue sky. A blast from her horn announced her arrival to the whole city, and her engines began to rumble like an earthquake as she turned. The captain stood on her wheelhouse deck, clad in emerald storm armour, his bulbous glass faceplate gleaming in the sun like the eye of a frog.
Ethugra’s prison administrators were busy preparing for the Alabaster Sound’s arrival, laying out their ledgers and inkwells on long tables under canopies facing the waterfront. The harbour master shouted orders to his stevedores, who ran to positions beside stanchions, ready to haul in mooring ropes. Sailors scrambled to move smaller boats and coracles out of the former battleship’s way. An expectant crowd began to gather behind them.
Creedy steered the launch across the plaza and into a public berth at the westernmost end of the docks, where he and Granger alighted. A dozen hawkers assailed Creedy at once, shoving all manner of cheap food and worthless trove into his face.
‘Chariot ballast, Mr Creedy?’
‘Catspin claws, sir. Original claws – see the brass work on this. ..’