There was no way to approach the island without being seen, so Granger set a direct course. He slid he throttle forward again, and the emperor’s yacht responded with a powerful surge of her engines.
As he took the Excelsior around the headland, the island’s main deepwater docks, whale-oil factory and shipyard came into view. Two iron dredgers waited in their berths in the shadowy harbour. One of four dock cranes unloaded crates of goods from one, the operation managed by a team of stevedores. Gas welding torches flickered on the deck of the second ship, while another crane shifted enormous metal plates from the quayside over to the workers. Yellow-brown smoke rose from one of the whale-oil factory’s three chimneys and bruised the sky above. Several labourers stopped to stare in Granger’s direction, but none of them paused for long.
The Excelsior was an Imperial vessel, after all.
He took the yacht alongside the private quay and disengaged her engines. Without any crew present to fix the bow and stern lines, he’d have to do the work himself.
Securing the ship took longer than he’d hoped. He pitched out the fenders along the port side, then threw one of the heavy bow lines across a quayside cleat and used the forward steam winch to draw it tighter, but he was forced to return to the bridge and use the engines to counter stern drift. When everything was finally fast, he lowered the gangway and stepped onto the quayside.
The sun beat down on him from a clear blue sky. There was nobody about, no sign of life in the fortress up there on the cliffs, no sounds but the rush of waves on the beach and the distant banging from the shipyards. Granger walked up the quay.
When he drew near the beach, he stopped in surprise. This slender crescent that stretched away on both sides of the quay wasn’t composed of sand or gravel as he’d expected, but rather of countless keys: iron keys, rusted keys, but mostly of keys that glinted in the sun like silver, forcing him to squint against the glare.
What were they doing here?
The question troubled him, although he couldn’t say exactly why.
There must have been a thousand steps leading up the cliff to Maskelyne’s fortress. By the time Granger reached the top, he was panting and dizzy with the heat. His dry grey skin felt as hot and dusty to the touch as the stones around the path. He paused for a minute and gazed out at the view. The Mare Lux stretched as far as he could see, the waves shining like chamfered copper. Ethugra crouched against the horizon in a watery haze, a single island of prison blocks rising from the curve of the earth. Four or five ships were approaching from that direction, but they wouldn’t reach Scythe Island for several hours. Granger noted that the Haurstaf man-o’-war was not among them. He scanned the seas to the north and noticed a flash of white sail. Could that be her? Had Briana Marks abandoned her search for Ianthe? Or had she received some other intelligence?
Granger turned and surveyed the castle above him.
It had been constructed from blocks of amethyst quarried from the island’s spine. Light bled through translucent purple edges and angles, so that the whole structure seemed to radiate an internal glow, like a jellyfish. Two fluted pillars flanked an open doorway leading into the cool, plum-coloured interior of a barbican. Scalloped machicolations overhung the outer walls, but these were bereft of arrow loops and must surely have been designed for decoration. Private Banks would have been able to tell Granger more; it was the sort of place the young soldier had once enthused over. He looked up inside the barbican for murder holes, but saw none. The place appeared to be deserted.
Granger strolled inside.
The barbican inner door was closed, but there was a bell pull. Granger yanked the cord and heard a faint chime.
He waited.
A short while later, the door swung open to reveal a tidy courtyard walled and flagged with the same red-blue quartz. The air had a calm, floral quality. A stuffy little grey-haired man wearing servant’s brocade stood there, blinking. He took one look at Granger and immediately tried to close the door again.
Granger booted it open, knocking the servant to the ground. ‘Where’s Maskelyne?’ he demanded.
The man stared up at him in horror. ‘What are you?’
‘Where is your master?’
‘Gone,’ he replied. ‘At sea.’
‘Where’s the girl?’
The man blinked. ‘What girl?’
Granger stood on his neck.
‘She’s with him,’ the servant gasped. ‘They’re… all… at
… sea.’
‘Where?’
‘I don’t know!’
Granger put more weight down on his boot.
The man sputtered something incomprehensible.
Granger removed his boot.
‘They went… to find trove,’ the servant said. ‘I don’t know where.’
Granger raised his boot again.
The servant lifted his hands in a pleading gesture. ‘The Drowned will know,’ he said. ‘My master keeps a few specimens in his laboratory. They see and hear everything he does.’ He stared at Granger. ‘They look just like you.’
The servant – who gave his name as Garstone – led Granger through a series of plum-pink amethyst halls and corridors, and finally up a stairwell into a laboratory that occupied most of the southern half of the second floor. Dozens of Unmer machines in various stages of disassembly lay scattered about on workbenches, along with a number of old gem lanterns and tools. A writing desk occupied the centre of the chamber, upon which rested a pile of papers, a metal pen in its holder and a device consisting of a marble trapped in a pivoting tube of glass. Situated around the desk, four huge brine tanks – each containing a different colour of seawater – bubbled quietly. Wide tubes connected them to the ceiling. Two men sat in crimson Mare Regis brine, playing cards. A young girl looked out from the yellow brine Mare Sepsis tank, while a partially dissolved old man sat on a stool in the grass-green Mare Verdant tank. The final tank had been filled with Mare Lux brine. On the floor of this tank sat Creedy.
Granger’s former sergeant and partner looked up, then stood up and stared out through the glass.
Garstone indicated Creedy’s tank. ‘That one still retains his senses,’ he said. ‘He’s only been submerged a week or so. I’ll go downstairs and fetch you some chalk and a slate.’
‘Stay where you are,’ Granger said. He walked over to Maske-lyne’s desk, snatched up some papers, then reached for the pen. But he stopped. Something was bothering him. He glanced back at Creedy’s tank and noticed three identical pens lying on the floor in there. Granger stepped back and studied the floor in front of the desk, where a slender gap betrayed the presence of a trapdoor. He grunted, then stepped to one side of the trapdoor before removing the pen. The trapdoor fell away, slamming against the inside of a shaft. From the darkness below came the smell of brine.
Granger started to write his message on a sheet of paper.
‘Please,’ Garstone said. ‘Those are my master’s private papers, his work, his experiments. He’ll kill me if they are spoiled.’ He came over to the desk, opened one of the drawers and took out a slate, which he handed to Granger.
Granger threw the slate aside and continued to scribble over Maskelyne’s documents. Then he strolled over to the Mare Lux tank and held up his message to Creedy.
WHERE IS THE GIRL?
The brown seawater made Creedy seem huge and distorted. His eye lens dilated. He picked up a stub of chalk and a slate from the floor of the tank and wrote his reply.