By comparison, the human world above her seemed dull. The perceptions of Ianthe’s own kind filled the dark with a million blue stars, tending to red where dusk and dawn tinged the fringes of the day. She slipped up through the void to where the deck of the ship waited for her in a cloud of disparate images.
‘He found something,’ Ianthe finally said.
She could feel the cold steel passenger rail in her hand, and the deck of Maskelyne’s dredger Mistress thrumming vaguely underfoot as she leaned over the side, pretending to peer down into the depths. Returning her mind to her own body was like stepping out of the world into a dark and silent cell. Her ears heard nothing and her eyes looked out into an impenetrable void. It frightened her. And so she set her thoughts adrift again, flitting effortlessly from one sailor to the next as she sketched a perspective of her surroundings.
Ethan Maskelyne was standing beside the port crane, from where he had been overseeing the whole winching operation. He was dressed in whaleskins just as soiled and battered as those worn by his crew. His white hair had yellowed from long exposure to brine. Every inch the sailor. ‘You can see him?’ he asked.
‘He’s almost back at the machine now.’
‘Bathysphere,’ Maskelyne said. ‘It’s a bathysphere. Did he find more ichusae?’
Ichusae was the word he gave to sea-bottles; perhaps it had been the Unmer word – Ianthe did not know. Out of habit she turned her head to face him, a gesture that came naturally to her. She had long ago grown used to imitating the behaviour of the sighted. ‘One sea-bottle, but he uncovered something else too. Something large buried under the silt.’
‘Cannon large or hull large?’
‘I don’t know. It’s made of gold.’
Maskelyne gave a smirk that seemed halfway between pleasure and derision. ‘You’re leading me astray,’ he said.
Moments later a bell rang somewhere, and the sailors rushed to winch up the bathysphere.
‘That is uncanny,’ Maskelyne said.
They heaved the bathysphere up out of the depths, then swung the crane so that its load hung over a shallow depression in the deck. Brine streamed from the metal sphere, swirling away into the deck drains. The submariner clambered out, unhitched the net bag from his hip and took out the sea-bottle. Brine poured out from it, sluicing over his heavy gloves. One of the sailors handed him a copper stopper, which he jammed into the neck of the bottle before handing his prize to another man. This sailor wiped the glass surface clean and gave it to Maskelyne, who held it up and squinted through it.
‘Perfect,’ he said.
The submariner crouched and unscrewed a winged brass cap in the heel of his boot, allowing the trapped brine to drain out of his suit leg. Then he raised his arms while another crew member hosed him down with fresh water. Finally he unhitched his helmet.
‘Looks like a chariot,’ he said. Pain creased his faced as he began unstrapping his suit buckles. Most of the other sailors stood well back, but the man with the hose continued to wash him down. ‘We’ll need to crane out the larger bones,’ he went on, smoothing back his wet hair, ‘and clear a few tons of sediment before we can get a line around it.’
Ianthe’s mind flitted between the crew members until she found someone looking at Maskelyne. For a long moment he stared at the bottle, seemingly deep in thought. Then he said, ‘Find me more like this, Ianthe, and I’ll let you see your mother.’
Maskelyne the Executioner. Ianthe’s heart clenched. She wanted to scream at him: She’s dead! I saw what your men did to her after they carried me away. I saw it all. But she couldn’t let him know the extent of her knowledge. She glared at him through the eyes of one of his subordinates, wishing only that she had the power to raise her host’s hands to seize his scrawny neck.
By now the submariner had stripped naked. He raised his arms again and turned around slowly, allowing the crewman with the hose to wash away all trace of the poisonous brine. But Mare Lux waters had already scorched one of his legs up to the thigh, and the other up to the calf. His flesh looked blotchy, red, inflamed and lined with darker veins. Maskelyne produced a jar of ointment and handed it to the submariner, who began applying it liberally to his wounds. To Ianthe’s astonishment, this seemed to reduce the inflammation.
‘Save some for the others,’ Maskelyne said.
The submariner handed back the jar. ‘Thank you, sir.’
Maskelyne smiled at Ianthe’s expression of befuddlement. ‘It is a very rare and expensive balm,’ he explained. ‘Unmer, of course. I only wish we had more of it.’ He smacked his hands together and turned to address a small man in an officer’s stripes standing nearby. ‘I want this thing raised quickly, Mellor. Put the crew on dragon watch and have all of our divers suited up and ready. Double pay and hand-over shifts until it’s up on deck. Work through the night if you can do so without risking men. I want them out of there at the first sign of trouble.’
‘Aye, sir.’ The officer replied in a breezy, whistling voice.
‘You,’ Maskelyne said, pointing at Ianthe, ‘come with me.’
He ushered her through a metal hatch and down a twist of stairs into the operations room. A map of this quarter of the Mare Lux lay spread out across a table in the centre of the broad, wood-panelled chamber. Gem lanterns clung to the walls between the portholes like poisonous jellies, throbbing with clusters of yellow-, blue- and rose-coloured light. There were booths and chairs enough to seat twenty down here, and a long bar of polished dragon-bone curving along one wall where hundreds of crystal glasses glinted in racks. Sweetmeats and hundred island fruits had been set out on platters on a small table nearby, while numerous pedestals displayed a baffling array of Unmer artefacts: machines, masks, crystal wands and knots of spell-wire, all bolted down securely to the wooden tops. Glass-fronted cabinets boasted yet more treasures: labyrinths of golden metal, tiny mannequins with ruby eyes, countless phials of every shape and size. One enormous cabinet gleamed with weapons: dragon-bone matchlocks and flintlocks and steel carbines, pistols fashioned from silver and glass, runic knives, liquid knives, rat knives and scimitars. An old blunderbuss occupied a prominent position. It was a singular piece, wrought from some strange white metal heavily embossed with Unmer runes and covered in fungi-like protrusions around the stock. The ends of its barrels protruded through the jaw of a human skull.
Maskelyne turned his gaze away from the cabinet and helped himself to a drink of honey-coloured spirit. Then he filled a glass with wine from a carafe on the bar and handed it to Ianthe.
‘Your vision seems entirely unlikely,’ he said. Through his perception she watched herself accept the glass of wine. Darkness was gathering in her own eyes. She forced herself to look away from him. ‘And yet here we are,’ he went on. ‘An unmolested dragon’s cadaver, just as you said. One ichusae recovered, and a skybarque to boot.’
‘A skybarque?’
‘An Unmer vessel,’ Maskelyne replied. ‘You’ve seen Ortho’s Chariot at night?’
She nodded.
‘Same thing. When the Unmer realized they couldn’t defeat the Haurstaf, they used airbarques to distribute their hideous little bottles across our oceans.’ He made a sound somewhere between a snort and laugh. ‘If we can’t have the world, then you can’t have it either. My two-year-old son has already developed a more mature attitude, and he has a psychopath for a father.’ He chuckled at his own joke, and took another drink. ‘Anyway, an airbarque is a rare find. With any luck we might find a thousand ichusae inside it’ – he sounded like he was smiling – ‘and so remove another source of pollution from the oceans.’ He held up the tiny bottle they had recovered from the seabed for Ianthe to see. ‘Puzzling little things,’ he remarked. ‘Where does the poison come from? Why does liquid flow out of the bottle and not back into it at higher pressures? And why does copper stem the flow?’ He glanced at her again. ‘All this matter must come from somewhere, after all, don’t you think?’