The deadship drew closer. There did not appear to be any crewman aboard. Her hull and sterncastle had been forged from iron, but now Maskelyne could see that she had been damaged by intense fire. Yard-long sections of the bulwark had been scorched black and warped out of shape. Cables slumped around her tower like worn shrouds. He counted the remains of six guns mounted along her port side, strange metal weapons, each with a conical arrangement of circular plates fixed to the end of its barrel. They looked charred, melted, inoperable. An iron figurehead in the likeness of an Unmer maiden remained upon her prow, now stripped of paint and partially reduced to slag. The corruption gave her a ghoulish grin. Dragonfire did this, Maskelyne thought. Dragonfire.
Every crewman had his rifle trained on the Unmer ship, following her as she slid by mere yards from the Mistress. Under the steady thump of the dredger’s engines Maskelyne fancied he could hear the groan of the old ironclad’s buckled hull and the rush of seawater caught between their two keels, and then something else – a faint, high-pitched humming sound, almost at the limits of his hearing, seemed to emanate from that tower.
A heartbeat later, the Unmer ship had passed by. Maskelyne watched her dissolve into the fog.
He let out a long breath.
‘Is it true what they say about deadships?’ Lucille asked.
‘I wouldn’t bet on it.’
‘Mellor thinks the dead crews still steer them.’
Maskelyne frowned. ‘Something steers them, but it isn’t ghosts. Their engines draw electrical fluid from the air.’ He rubbed his eyes and then rested both his hands on the wheel again. ‘I don’t know… the energy is probably transmitted from somewhere, a station or a bunker, somewhere the Haurstaf and their allies didn’t penetrate.’
‘You think there could still be a free Unmer community out there?’
‘It’s possible.’
She shivered. ‘I’m going to check on Jontney.’
She left Maskelyne alone in the wheelhouse. For a long while he peered into the gloom, watchful for anything unusual. The rumble of the Mistress’s engines failed to calm his nerves as much as it usually did. An Unmer ironclad, still sailing these waters after god only knew how many hundreds of years? The souls of her sorcerous crew burned into her very metal at the Battle of Awl? He couldn’t accept that. The Unmer captains were long dead. The Brutalists and operators were long dead. The ship was still receiving its power from a distant station, which meant it might also be possible to steer it from afar. A free Unmer community? Maskelyne knew of only one Unmer warrior still at large. He tried to remember the line from the old children’s rhyme he’d learned at school.
And to the storm Conquillas brought,
A dragon clad in armour wrought,
By Hessimar of Anderlaine.
There was more, but the rest wouldn’t come to him. Those great serpents, led by Argusto Conquillas, had allied with the Haurstaf and risen up against their Unmer masters. Conquillas had decimated the Unmer fleet at Awl and thus betrayed his own kind for the love of a Haurstaf witch.
The lookout’s bell rang out again.
A sense of dread crept up Maskelyne’s spine, for through that red and turbulent air beyond the window he spied the dim hulk of the deadship bearing down on them once more. There could be no mistaking that hideous rusted tower, that weird droning sound. Evidently it had come about in the fog. He spun the Mistress’s wheel full lock to starboard, then flung open the wheel-house door and called down to the foredeck. ‘Get Ianthe up here, I need her sight.’
The deadship drew nearer, and for a heartbeat Maskelyne thought he could see a group of figures standing motionless upon her fog-shrouded deck. But then the vision faded, and the ship appeared deserted once more. Nothing but burned iron, a mess of cable. The mists were playing tricks on his eyes.
The two vessels were on a collision course. Maskelyne gunned the Mistress’s engines and attempted to take her past the Unmer ship once again. It would be close. Down on the foredeck his crew rushed forward to the bow, training their rifles on the approaching threat.
Sixty yards now.
The Mistress began to turn to starboard. The Unmer ironclad maintained her course.
Thirty yards.
Ahead, the great dark vessel loomed large. Now Maskelyne could see her figurehead with its melted grin. It seemed to know it was going to collide with them.
The deadship struck the Mistress a glancing blow on her port side. Even from up here in the wheelhouse Maskelyne felt the force of the impact. Abruptly his vessel lurched to one side. He heard the other ship’s hull boom, and then a hideous groaning and scraping sound as the icebreaker’s reinforced prow scraped along the Mistress’s side. That blow would have crushed a lesser ship, but Maskelyne’s dredger was a tough old girl. Engines thumping, she thundered on, pushing the schooner aside.
Slowly, the two ships separated. The Unmer vessel drifted off into the fog.
Maskelyne’s heart was thumping. He cut power to the engines, then opened the wheelhouse door and called down. ‘What damage?’
The crew were picking themselves up from the deck. One by one they began to peer down over the port side, sweeping gem lanterns back and forth across the hull. Mellor sent a man running towards the midships hatch, presumably to check for internal damage.
‘There’s no obvious breach, Captain,’ Mellor called back. ‘But she’s taken a hell of a pounding. I’ve sent Broomhouse to check the bulkheads from fore to aft.’
At that moment the midships companionway hatch opened, and another crewman appeared with Ianthe. He led the girl by the arm to the wheelhouse ladder and bade her climb. She looked nervous and shaken and had been hurriedly wrapped in an old whaleskin cloak.
Maskelyne took her hand and helped her into the wheel-house. ‘We’ve been hit by another vessel,’ he said. ‘An Unmer deadship.’
She said nothing.
‘It’s still out there somewhere,’ Maskelyne said. ‘I need you to watch out for it.’
‘There’s no one aboard it,’ she replied.
It struck him as an odd thing to say. ‘I’m not one to pander to superstitions myself,’ he said. ‘But that vessel has already come straight at us twice. Someone has to be steering it.’ He thought about the figures he’d glimpsed momentarily upon the deadship’s deck, but chose not to mention them.
Ianthe merely shrugged.
The door swung open, and Mellor’s head appeared at knee level. He was clinging to the ladder outside. ‘Four of the engine room bulkheads have been buckled, Captain, but it’s not too grim. Our hull is intact, engine sound, and we’re still tight as a drum. Repair crews are working on it now.’
‘Tell them to go easy,’ Maskelyne ordered. ‘I don’t want them putting the bulkheads under any more stress. We’ll refit back in dry dock at Scythe. No cross-braces. Have them raise props from the motor housings only and weld the plates in the meantime.’
‘Aye, Captain.’ Mellor reached up and shut the door.
Maskelyne gently increased power to the engines and spun the wheel to port again, keeping an eye on the ship’s compass as he brought the Mistress back on her original course. Red-brown fumes drifted over the foredeck and the dim figures of his crew. Through the starboard window he could see the dun lantern of the sun, almost directly to the south. It was almost noon, although it felt like dusk. Like the seas are burning. With any luck they would be out of the border waters and into the Mare Regis proper by mid afternoon.
For a long while Maskelyne kept his gaze on the mists ahead. Neither he nor Ianthe spoke. The lookout’s lantern on the prow burned like a solitary star. The old dredger rocked gently back and forth as she ploughed on through the poisonous waters, her engines maintaining a steady rhythm. Maskelyne could sense the uneasiness of his crew in the way they moved about the deck and in the fashion in which they clutched their rifles. He noted how each man kept himself apart from his companions. The fog drew denser and bloodier until it coiled around the cranes like dragon’s breath. Maskelyne had the impression that they were moving into some strange borderland that was not a part of this world.