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, breathing 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.’