Sure enough, as the beast drew nearer, it plunged beneath the waves.
Marksmen and feeder crews stood silently by the six batteries of guns. Maskelyne took a black glass bulb from his pocket and fitted it into one of the protrusions on the stock of his blunderbuss, twisting it secure with a click. He checked the weapon’s mechanism, then raised it and sighted along its length. The white metal felt unpleasantly cold to the touch. Several of the runes carved into stock had razor-sharp edges, and seemed all too keen to pluck blood from the wielder. The skull fused to the barrel ends made the gun feel unbalanced and clumsy, as though it had not been designed for human sensibilities.
He pulled his whaleskin cloak more tightly around him and lowered his goggles over his eyes.
The crew did likewise.
The sea to port erupted in an explosion of brine as the dragon burst forth from the depths in a great brown storm of wings and scales. Its eyes burned as yellow as molten rock, full of old rage, and something else… Madness, Maskelyne realized. The creature was insane. It loomed above the deck rail in a haze of rainbows as seawater steamed from its body. A wet gale blew Maskelyne backwards. He aimed along his gun.
‘Fire to port!’ Mellor cried.
The ship’s three port cannon batteries fired in rapid sequence. Thud, thud, thud. Maskelyne had been counting on the barrage to drive the serpent back from the ship, but the panicked crew had been in too much of a hurry. Even at this close range, two of the shells missed their targets and flew harmlessly out to sea. The third one tore through the dragon’s left wing.
The beast roared and then dived straight at the midships gun.
Claws clacked and skittered on steel. Maskelyne felt the ship tilt under the dragon’s weight, heard the slap and suck of the sea against the hull. Metal groaned. The serpent’s great brown neck lunged across the deck and knocked the bathysphere aside, its black teeth snapping at the fleeing crew. And then it lashed its head skywards, dragging a screaming man from a knot of his comrades and hurling him high into the air. Men hollered and slipped and scrambled away in every direction. The bow and stern gun crews ratcheted their cannons inwards as far as they would reach, but the barrels could not be brought to bear upon such a close target.
Maskelyne cursed and lowered his blunderbuss. To shoot the weapon down at such an angle would endanger his vessel. He ran his hand across the glass bulb. It was beginning to warm up dangerously. He leaped down to the midships deck.
The serpent crouched in the centre of the ship, snapping its jaws and lashing its tail back and forth. It turned its golden eyes upon Maskelyne and spoke in Unmer, ‘Return what you have stolen or I will crush this ship and send you all to the deep.’ It raised its head as if about to strike down at Maskelyne.
Maskelyne lifted the blunderbuss under the beast’s chin. ‘You’d do that anyway,’ he replied in the dragon’s own language. Then he squeezed the trigger.
The weapon clicked gently, and then became suddenly hot as a ball of flame swirled inside the glass bulb he had fitted to the stock. Vibrations ran though his hands, accompanied by a faint whining sound from inside the gun’s mechanism. And from the skull-topped barrel erupted a swarm of void flies.
The tiny black insects came pouring out of the blunderbuss, steered by the runic spells etched into in its barrel and unravelling into an ever-broadening spiral. Crackling wildly as they reduced the air around them to vacuum, these Unmer creations would remove every particle of matter with which they came into contact, whether it be stone, steel or dragon flesh. In a heartbeat a cloud of them had engulfed the great brown serpent…
… and passed straight through it. Like ten thousand tiny blades, they ripped the dragon’s body to shreds as they forged unstoppable trails through scales, bone and flesh. Scraps of meat fell like rain. Only the dragon’s lower body and tail remained mostly unscathed. It slumped heavily to the deck amidst a haze of blood.
The void flies continued onwards, a crackling stream that spiralled up towards the distant clouds and the heavens beyond.
Maskelyne wiped gore from his goggles and lowered the gun. ‘Clean up,’ he said.
CHAPTER 9
THE HAURSTAF
‘Here,’ Torturer Mara said, ‘is where we made the leucotomy, and here…’ he used a glass rod to push a section of the patient’s brain tissue aside ‘… is the cavity I told you about.’ The patient gave an involuntary twitch. His hands clenched at his sides, and he made an odd yowling sound.
Sister Briana Marks breathed through her fingers. ‘Well that settles it once and for all,’ she said. ‘The Unmer actually do posses a hole in their heads.’ She squinted at the exposed brain and frowned. ‘It looks like the inside of a chicken.’
Torturer Mara withdrew the rod and plunked it into a beaker, then wiped his hands on his apron. His stained garment was the only thing less than pristine in this operating room. Sunlight poured in through tall windows, gleaming on the white-tiled floor and steel tables. ‘A very different animal to modern man,’ he said. ‘The cavity would have acted like an echo chamber, amplifying telepathic thought. It’s probably a vestigial organ from an earlier stage in the development of their species. It became redundant as soon as the lobular bridges formed.’
‘The Unmer traded their telepathic ability for the power to dispatch matter?’
Mara shook his head. ‘I wouldn’t say traded. That word has uncomfortable implications. Besides, there’s nothing to suggest they were ever telepathic. Empathic, perhaps. The cavity is a rudimentary structure, like the worm-fish lung or the nomio’s spinal ganglion. We think early humans possessed a similar type of brain, but then developed in a different way.’
The patient began to bang the flat of his hands on the table.
‘Must he do that?’ Briana said.
Mara picked up a scalpel and made a small incision in the brain. The patient became still.
‘Thank you,’ Briana said. ‘You’re very deft with that thing.’
The torturer’s smile rearranged every wrinkle on his face. ‘Practice,’ he said.
‘You know what this discovery means?’
‘Well, it explains why they’re vulnerable…’ Mara began.
‘No, no, it means I’ve lost ten thousand gilders,’ Briana retorted. ‘Hu is going to parade this in front of his whole empire. He’ll use it to embarrass us.’ She gave a long sigh. ‘How can we possibly be related to these oiks? It sends shivers down my spine.’
The patient suddenly spoke in a loud, clear voice: ‘Kurese, I will not stand. Replace it to me.’ His fingers reached out in the direction of the table next to him, where Mara had placed the sawed-off top section of his skull, still resplendent with its white mane of hair.
Briana made a face. ‘You see that? Half his head off, and he’s still vain.’
‘Shall I patch him back up again?’
‘I suppose you’d better,’ Briana said. ‘Sister Ulla’s girls can still use him as a pin cushion. Staple him up and put him back in the maze.’
The man on the table said, ‘Replace it to me. We will war the Haurstaf.’
‘You’ll sit in a corner and dribble,’ Briana said. ‘Do you think we should give him a haircut while the skull’s off? I suppose he could cut it himself-’ She stopped as she sensed the presence of a third person in the room and turned to see a pretty young girl standing in the doorway with a look of horror on her face.
What do you want?
The girl started. ‘Eh? I’m sorry, I…’
We have company, Briana said, driving the words into the young witch’s mind like nails into wood. Torturer Mara is Hu’s own physician. So, under the circumstances, which do you think is the proper form of communication – thinking your words? ‘Or squawking them out like a fat little crow?’