Maskelyne nodded. ‘Human sacrifices. Tell Abernathy to close it up again before it unsettles the crew. What’s our situation with water?’
‘The purifier’s still acting strangely, captain. The stuff coming out of it looks like urine and tastes about as good. Most of us are drinking it anyway. Got no choice.’
‘Who’s not drinking it?’
‘Duncan, Abernathy, a few of the others. They say they’d rather die.’
Their situation was deteriorating far more quickly than Maskelyne had expected. At his rate, most of his crew would be dead before the ship made it back to Scythe Island. He sighed. ‘I’ll see what I can do. We need Abernathy with his wits intact. In the meantime, report anything else unusual to me.’
When Kitchener left, he returned to his journal and added a few final words.
Whoever our thief is, I will make a martyr of him.
Ethan Maskelyne, Unnamed Unmer Icebreaker.
Ianthe’s heart was racing as she returned to the quiet darkness of her own body. Maskelyne’s thief was closer to him than he could possibly imagine. But how could he ever suspect his own child?
She reached under her bunk and grabbed the children’s blanket she’d hidden there and then unfolded it on her lap. There lay the spectacles Jontney had stolen for her, the lenses and engraved silver frames gleaming like treasure. Ianthe looked down at them for a long moment. Then, carefully, she slipped them over her eyes.
The cabin blossomed into existence before her, an explosion of light in the darkness. It was accompanied by a strange crackling sound that quickly faded. There was barely room to stand up and turn around, and yet there now seemed to be more crammed into this tiny space than in the whole of the outside world: the grain of the ancient timber panelling, the warped floor, her bunk, the black iron door handle and its keyhole. Moreover, she could hear the slosh of the waves against the hull, the ship booming and groaning all around her – hear them with her own useless ears!
Ianthe drank deeply of these new sensations, hardly able to control her excitement. Everything here appeared normal, bright and clear, without the flickering silver auras she had witnessed through Maskelyne’s eyes. The spectacles, she supposed, had not been designed to be worn by two people at once.
But then she noticed something strange. Her bunk was no longer made up with the fresh sheets Lucille had given her, and her clothes were no longer piled in the corner where she’d dumped them. The cabin was entirely empty of everything she’d brought in here. Nothing remained but the dismal old walls. Whatever had happened to Maskelyne in the captain’s quarters was happening to her, too. Objects were vanishing.
Could the goggles only perceive Unmer items?
Ianthe raised her hand in front of her face. There was nothing there at all, not even a trace. She looked down at her own body. Nothing. She was invisible, a ghost in her own cabin.
She slumped down on her bunk again, now gripped by despair. Why, when she’d finally been giver the means by which to see, should her vision be so fatally flawed? What use were these lenses if they turned everything important into air?
Perhaps one could adjust the lenses?
Slowly, she turned the little wheel on the side of the frames. The cabin flickered violently, and that same crackling sound harried her ears. For a moment everything became blurred and indistinct. Her pile of clothes did not reappear. She spun the wheel around further now, tears now welling in her eyes. The cabin glowed with a phosphorous yellow light, and then abruptly became quite dark. She gasped with fright. Had she broken the blasted things? But then she realized she could still perceive variations in the deep shadows. For a moment it looked as if she was standing in a woodland. Was that the sound of wind rushing through the trees? The image flickered again and abruptly dissolved to complete black.
Frustrated now, Ianthe twisted the wheel all the way forward until it stopped.
The cabin became a shuddering blur again and then came into sharp focus. She thought she had glimpsed something moving quickly around her, like a passing shadow, but now that the lenses had settled she couldn’t see anything like that now.
She could, however, see her clothes. They had appeared in the corner. Ianthe raised her hand in front of her eyes again, and this time she could perceive it quite clearly. She sprang up from the bunk and clapped her hands and laughed out loud. Everything around her was finally as it should be: the clothes, the sheets on the bunk, Jontney’s blanket. The spectacles worked!
Now she was curious.
Ianthe twisted the little wheel backwards again. Her surroundings flickered, and the clothes vanished from the corner once more. She turned the wheel forward, and the clothes reappeared. She tried it several times, rocking the wheel backwards and forwards, watching everything she owned slip in and out of existence. Whatever was happening?
She spun the wheel back as far as it would go.
The cabin erupted in a blaze of light. A kaleidoscope of images clattered across her vision with the sound of bells and shrieks and angry wasps. Colours burst before her eyes like naval shells. And then as quickly as it had started, it stopped. Her surroundings resolved themselves once more. She was back in her cabin.
Only it was not the same cabin. Its proportions were identical, but the panelling looked new, agleam with varnish. Everything now seemed fresh and untarnished. A padded quilt of blue and gold diamonds lay across the bunk, while a silver watch and a miniature enamelled portrait hung from hooks above the pillow. The portrait was of a robust lady with orange hair and piercing violet eyes. A shelf had materialized beside the door, on which rested a bright copper gem lantern and an open book.
Ianthe heard men shouting somewhere above. They were speaking Unmer.
She got up and opened the door.
The corridor outside looked different from before. All the ash and decay had been swept away, leaving a neat passageway of polished dark wood. The shouting was louder here. It was definitely coming from above deck. Ianthe paused for a moment, then, nervously, crept along the corridor.
She recognized the wooden steps up to the main deck, even if she could not account for their miraculously rejuvenated condition. The whole ship now looked as if it might have been built yesterday. She climbed the steps and rested a hand on the hatch above her. Then she pushed it open.
A cacophony of shouting, roaring and strange whirrs and droning sounds filled the air. Black and yellow smoke engulfed the skies, shrouding the entire ship in deep and unnatural gloom. Ianthe’s eyes widened. The sea itself was ablaze, with fires raging across the slate-grey waters as far as she could see. There were hundreds of ships out there, all Unmer vessels: men-o’-war and old electrical warships, wooden schooners, dragon-bone yachts, merchantmen and smaller pickets. Every one of them was burning.
As Ianthe turned, she realized with horror that her own vessel had not escaped the devastation. Her surroundings bustled with activity. A score of crewmen were pulling up buckets of seawater and emptying them across the deck in a desperate attempt to quench fires raging across the stern and starboard side. These men looked like no race of sailors Ianthe had ever seen. They were unusually tall and fine-featured, with long faces and narrow eyes. They wore brigandines and pauldrons of stiff black canvas, heavily ornamented with ciphers and numerals, and all had adorned themselves with rings, earrings and amulets wrought from silvery metals. Many had shorn their hair completely and bore Unmer glyphs, circles and strings of numbers tattooed across their naked skulls, while others had teased their hair and beards into thin tails wrapped with wire. Not one of them turned to look at Ianthe. She realized that she was a ghost among them.