How did this man’s handlers expect him to find treasure in such a crude manner? He could see nothing but a yard of seabed through that open portal, and not much more beyond those thick glass windows.
A bell rang overhead.
The craft slowed until it was barely a fathom above the sea bed – then stopped.
The submariner looked up to where a huge brass helmet hung under a fat spool of rubber piping fixed to the ceiling. He manoeuvred himself up past the seat, until he was almost standing upright in the confined space. Then he pushed his head inside the helmet.
Now Ianthe found herself looking out through the edge of an even smaller window, this one in the helmet itself. Haaaa… Shuu… Haaaa… Shuuu… The rasp and suck of air grew loud in her ears. She realized that the breathing pipe had been in the helmet all along. Sweat trickled down her neck – his neck. His neck. He gave a grunt, then wrenched the helmet round so that its tiny window lined up with his face. Ianthe heard four clamps, one after the other, snap into place.
He crouched down over the hole again. His heart was racing, his lungs straining in his chest. He picked up a spade. Then he lowered himself down into the brine.
Ianthe felt icy cold water close around her host’s knees, then his waist, and then he was gliding down through that toxic murk. His boots sank into grey silt, raising clouds as fine as pollen. She could see even less than before now. Gem lanterns glimmered on the exterior of the diving craft, but they were centuries old, and their radiance had long since lost its vigour. The man unhitched one of them and held it out.
A few yards ahead of him lay the ragged outline of a low wall. An anchor chain rose up beyond this, the links rimed with brine crystals. The submariner began to walk towards the chain, inclining his head in his direction of travel to keep the heavy helmet balanced as he dragged his feet through the sucking earth. That short walk seemed to take an age, but finally he reached his goal. He ran a gloved hand along the rough surface of the wall, disturbing a cloud of silt. Then he regarded the chain and looked up.
He was barely six fathoms down, yet the brown weight of the seawater above made it appear much deeper. Dusk glimmered on the surface of the waters like a peat fire. The anchor chain terminated at a buoy, close to which lay the silhouette of a ship’s hull.
The submariner found a gap in the wall and stepped through into the street Ianthe had seen from the diving craft. She spotted the trail of the hacker crab she’d noticed earlier, but the creature itself was nowhere in sight. Something dark wriggled at the edge of her vision.
The man’s heart quickened. He swung round.
An eel darted away into the gloom.
‘Give me grace.’
His voice startled Ianthe. She had assumed he’d be unable to speak down here. But there was air here, of course – a frighteningly small pocket, certainly, but air nonetheless. Her host’s heart slowed, and he resumed his trek.
‘Sixteen gilders a dive,’ he muttered. ‘Bastard wouldn’t buy a night in ’thugra.’
She was used to hearing people speak to themselves, but this man’s voice sounded odd down here, huge and metallic. Yet it was strangely comforting, like a light in an immense void. You wouldn’t want a night in Ethugra, she thought.
His eyes filled with perspiration, and he blinked. ‘Still better than here,’ he said.
Ianthe smiled inwardly. Wasn’t it funny how people sometimes seemed to respond to her thoughts? She tried again. What are you looking for down here?
This time he didn’t give any indication that he’d heard her.
He trudged on down the street.
But then something horrible happened.
Ianthe felt brine seep into her boot. The chill sensation came as such a shock that it took her a moment to remember that she wasn’t actually here. It’s his boot, his foot, his… flesh. The sea-water was dribbling down behind his ankle, scalding him. Yet he paid no attention to it whatsoever. His breathing continued steadily. If anything, he actually picked up his pace.
For Ianthe, the feeling was so intolerable that she almost fled his mind. She imagined blisters appearing on her own ankle, the skin bubbling, then turning grey and leathery. She wanted to lift her foot, but she couldn’t. The man was merely a vessel, and she his passenger. It wasn’t even her pain. If he could bear it, then so would she.
There were other tracks on the seabed now. By the golden light of the gem lantern, Ianthe could see scores of bootprints criss-crossing the street. They converged on one massive roofless house. Slowly the submariner made his way over to the doorway of that drowned building and stepped through.
A wide pit stretched before him, strewn with the bones of a dragon. It appeared to be an excavation, for many of the smaller bones and much of the silt had been scraped back towards the walls of the dwelling. The size of the dragon’s skeleton indicated that it had been a mature adult, perhaps as much as a thousand years old. A man could walk easily between the bars of its ribcage. Every morsel of its flesh had been picked clean. Its skull rested against the far wall, where it seemed to gaze blindly at the heavens. Ianthe’s host paused and took three long breaths. The encroaching brine had by now filled the lower half of one suit leg. She could feel the pressure of it pushing against his knee binding.
‘Another day,’ he muttered.
He strode forward into the garden of bones. Then he drove his spade into the ground below the dragon’s ribs and began heaving heaps of silt aside. Grey clouds muddied the waters. After a few minutes effort, something glinted under his spade. The man knelt down and began rummaging through the silt with his gloved hands.
He pulled something out.
Ianthe breathed a sigh of relief. She had seen enough sea-bottles to recognize this one at once. The tiny Unmer artefact was missing its stopper, and a blur of liquid could be seen pouring forth into the surrounding seawater, as vaporous and agitated as the air above a hot vent. Such bottles were often found amidst the remains of dragons. Serpents had an insatiable – and ultimately deadly – desire for them.
The submariner slipped the bottle into a net bag at his hip and then stooped to clear away more silt. An original stopper was worth as much as the bottle itself. Something golden flashed under his hands. He waved away clouds of suspension.
At first Ianthe thought she was looking at a gilded shield. A clearing in the sediment revealed a metalled surface embossed with sigils. It was unmistakably Unmer. There was the stamp of Ursula Dragon Mother, the constellation of Coreollis, the Fist of Armitage and the Precept, and a wheat sheaf and sickle that could only signify some powerful noble house. Interspersed with these devices were words written in the runic language of the First Alchemists – a spell, or possibly a ward against human men.
The submariner paused, panting heavily, then hurriedly brushed away more silt. More of the surface came into view, then more still. The man pushed his gloves into the yielding dust, looking for an edge. But wherever he dug, he simply revealed more of that flat gold plane. Whatever this treasure was, it was much larger than a shield.
Finally, he stopped. The brine had begun to leach through the bindings around his knee and irritate the skin on his thigh. What was more, his other boot was now leaking, too. Both his feet had begun to feel like hot lead.
Ianthe could stand no more of it.
Quietly and smoothly as a memory, she slipped out of his mind.
The world went dark. She found herself adrift in a void. In the distance she could see pools of electric-blue radiance – the perceptions of the Drowned nearby. Other marine life revealed itself as shoals of pink or yellow lights that wandered through the darkness like fireflies. Ten yards from her human host, a dull brown sphere betrayed the hacker crab’s hiding place. Such creatures perceived their environments through rude eyes. So much life in the seas! Its variance and abundance never ceased to amaze her.