His wife looked at him sadly. ‘What will you do about the bomb?’
Maskelyne kissed her on the cheek. ‘Take our son for a walk.’
Maskelyne decided to receive Mr Creedy in his laboratory. He rang for his manservant, Garstone, ordered him to prepare lunch for one and to throw open the laboratory terrace doors to dispel the monstrous odours in there. Then he told him to direct the Ethugran jailer to the anteroom and ask him politely to wait.
By the time Maskelyne had lunched and dressed in his laboratory overalls, his visitor had been waiting for almost an hour.
The laboratory boasted four enormous glass tanks, each flooded with brine from a different sea and connected to the ceiling by a wide glass tube. Daylight filtered through the vessels from tall windows on either side of the laboratory and was changed by the waters into hues of red, brown, yellow and green. The two Drowned men in the Mare Regis tank were turning cards, but looked up from their table when Maskelyne ushered Mr Creedy in. In the gloomy red seawater their faces appeared dim and monstrous. The girl who had formerly occupied the Mare Lux tank had been removed for dissection – but her twin sister peered out through the glass of the Mare Sepsis tank opposite. She had acclimatized well to the change in seawater. The sores on her face had all but disappeared, although her hair and eyes had changed colour. It seemed that Mare Sepsis brine was not as toxic to the Drowned as sailors claimed. When she saw Maskelyne, she became suddenly excited. She scribbled something on her slate, then turned it round to show him.
OJUJH WAW.
Maskelyne had no idea what it meant, and he doubted the girl did either. She’d been submerged in that brine for nearly two months now, quite long enough for her mind to have become pickled.
In the last tank, the remains of an old man sat on a stool and brooded. The green seawater gave him the pallor of a decayed corpse and, indeed, the Mare Verdant brine had already dissolved a great deal of his muscle mass and flesh, leaving naked bones visible at the clavicle, hip and both thighs. In time he would vanish entirely, but not before his skeleton paced for many days behind that glass wall.
Such was the queerness of the Mare Verdant. The waters consumed the flesh while acting as a body surrogate to harbour and propagate life’s energies beyond death. Maskelyne’s instruments detected no significant currents within that water, and yet there must be some subtle manipulation of pressure. How else could a man’s bones continue to move without muscle and tendon? It was, like so much of the Unmer legacy, an enigma. Because neither the corpse nor the card players had attempted to use their own slates for over a year, the truth remained elusive.
Mr Creedy took it all in with open eyes, or rather, one eye and one aperture. He seemed ill at ease in the proximity of so many Drowned, which was of course why Maskelyne had chosen this place to meet him.
‘I hope you do not intend to betray me, Mr Creedy,’ Maskelyne remarked.
‘Sir?’
‘For harbouring the Drowned?’
The big man grunted. ‘Betray you to yourself? Don’t think that would get me far.’
‘Well, quite.’ Maskelyne took a seat at his desk and gestured for the jailer to sit opposite. An infinity device, consisting of a marble in a sealed glass tube, sat upon the desk between them. Maskelyne wound it out of habit and then watched the glass tube slickly revolve. The marble rolled from one end to the other. ‘Remind me,’ he said. ‘what our agreement was.’
Mr Creedy lowered his kitbag to the floor and sat down. ‘A hundredth lay, sir.’
‘A hundredth lay is fine if we find something, Mr Creedy. But what happens if we don’t? You’ll think I’m trying to deceive you.’
Creedy’s clockwork eye made a shuttering sound. ‘I noticed you unloading a chariot from the Mistress.’
‘Yes, and what is such an object worth?’ He spread his hands on the table. ‘Let us say… four or five million gilders to a collector. You would agree?’ Creedy nodded, so Maskelyne continued, ‘In order to raise that artefact, I was forced to dispatch a particularly foul-tempered old dragon, which, I am afraid to say, entailed the use of a phial of void flies. Unmer void flies, Mr Creedy, sealed in their original jar. Do you have any idea how much I could have sold that container for?’
The other man said nothing.
‘A hundred million,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Conservatively. Void flies have been known to destroy cities, decimate populations, ruin whole countries. You know the Unmer make their arrows from them?’
Mr Creedy touched his clockwork eye. Then he leaned forward and spoke in a threatening tone. ‘You wasted them on a dragon?’
Maskelyne leaned back. ‘I wasted nothing, Mr Creedy. Void flies, by their very nature, cannot be studied in depth. But there are other mysteries that can. And that, for me, determines an object’s true worth.’ He paused to watch the infinity device on the desk as the marble rolled from one end of the tube to the other. ‘Do you have a family, Mr Creedy? Any children?’
The jailer shook his head.
‘Then perhaps it is more difficult for you to understand,’ Maskelyne said. ‘As a father, I have a duty to preserve my son’s future. Now, I can only succeed if I fully understand the processes by which the Unmer have threatened that future. Wealth, power, everything else is simply insulation.’ He paused again to watch the marble roll back and forward in the revolving tube. ‘If I gave you a chest of gilders, what would you spend it on? Women? Whisky? Guns? A fine apartment with a view?’ He shook his head. ‘All insulation. None of it has any importance. None of it has any true worth.’
Creedy lifted his kitbag and placed it on the table before them. ‘You’re telling me I’m not going to get paid?’
Maskelyne sighed. ‘I’m trying to make you understand the real value of trove, Mr Creedy. Because if you don’t, then our business relationship is doomed to fail. Does it please you to learn that I have personally destroyed over ninety thousand ichusae? I would happily give you one-hundredth of the satisfaction and pride I feel when I destroy the next ninety thousand, if it were possible to do so.’
Creedy’s jaw tightened.
‘Or that I have no intention of selling the chariot we salvaged two days ago?’
The other man stared at the kitbag on the table for a long moment. Finally he said, ‘I want the girl back.’
Maskelyne leaned back in his chair. ‘That is no longer possible. But let me make you an alternative offer.’
The aperture in Creedy’s clockwork eye whirred as it narrowed.
‘You saw the beach of keys when you first arrived?’
Creedy nodded.
‘Do you know where they come from?’
Creedy said nothing.
‘The Drowned leave them there,’ Maskelyne explained. ‘They crawl ashore during the night, enduring considerable pain, and deposit the keys on that shore.’ The infinity device continued to make its revolutions. ‘Why?’ He shrugged. ‘The long-term Drowned do not communicate with us in any meaningful fashion. Brine alters the mind by some slow, subtle process. The sea consumes them, takes them over, until eventually they become limbo people, ghosts, repeating human actions that they do not appear to fully understand. Look there.’ He gestured towards the card players in the Mare Regis tank. ‘Those men turn cards all day long. In the beginning they played the game of Forentz, but as the months passed by, rules began to mean less and less to them. Now they simply turn the cards over, and then gather them up again. There is no longer any discernible purpose to their actions, no competition between them. They are simply parroting actions they remember but no longer understand. Three months of submersion irreversibly alters the mind, just as three hours is enough to permanently alter the body.’ He made a dismissive gesture. ‘But I believe the Drowned gain some other form of intelligence, some deep instinctual feeling that the brine itself instils within them. I believe that they are looking for the key to some unique Unmer treasure, some locked container or tomb or room or vessel. Something they wish me to find and open.’