FUCK YOU.
Granger scrawled another message on the back of the paper.
TELL ME, OR YOU DIE.
Creedy gave him an ugly grin. He wiped his slate clear and wrote:
COME GET ME.
Granger returned to the desk, where he gathered up all of Maskelyne’s documents. He scrunched them up and piled them around the base of the tank, as Creedy looked on from his watery prison. Granger walked back to the desk and flipped it over. Maskelyne’s glass device fell to the floor and shattered. A wire extending from the underside of the desk disappeared into a hole in the floor.
‘What are you doing?’ Garstone protested.
Granger ignored him. He hunted around the workbenches, searching through the tools, until he found a flat-headed screwdriver. He used this to disassemble the writing desk. In a short while he had a decent-sized pile of wood, which he piled around the documents at the base of Creedy’s tank. Then he took out his knife and flint, and lit the paper. Flames blossomed.
Creedy thumped his fist against the inside of the glass. Garstone yelled at Granger to stop.
Granger held up his message again.
WHERE IS THE GIRL?
Creedy erased his slate and frantically scribbled a new message.
PUT OUT FIRE.
The flames had begun to take hold of the wood now, and were licking the walls of the tank, staining the glass black. Smoke began to fill the laboratory.
Creedy banged his slate against the tank.
PUT OUT FIRE.
Granger held his own sign higher.
WHERE IS THE GIRL?
Creedy scrubbed his slate clear again and wrote:
LOOKING FOR TROVE. WHISPRING VAL. M. REGIS.
The fabled treasure-hunting site. Dredgers had been scouring the Whispering Valley since its rediscovery three years ago. The valley held the ruins of an Unmer castle, destroyed and abandoned long before the rising seas had claimed it. The sheer number of weapons salvaged from the surrounding area led many captains to believe a great battle had taken place there.
Granger wrote another message.
HOW LONG?
But Garstone interjected. ‘Ten days,’ the servant said. ‘He won’t be back for months.’
Granger turned around and walked away from the tank. He left the fire burning.
‘I won’t let you do this,’ Lucille said.
Maskelyne didn’t look up from his work. He had snuffed the lights and opened the windows in order to examine the Pole Star through an unusually heavy refraction telescope. The device had been fitted with a lead plate over its larger lens, and yet, oddly, this did not obstruct his view. The Unmer archivist spectacles lay to one side. He had been too afraid to put them on again. ‘Do what?’ he muttered.
Her voice was low and cold in the darkness. ‘You know exactly what I mean.’
Maskelyne peered through the telescope. Removing the lead plate caused the stars to blink out of existence. Only by replacing the plate could he observe the heavens. He assumed there must be some disguised hole or slit in the metal. Or the lead itself must somehow be acting as an optical element, which meant that it could not be lead. ‘I had always intended for her conceive a child,’ he said. ‘Her talents ought to be passed on.’
‘But not like this,’ Lucille said.
‘This ship has unmanned the crew-’ he began.
‘What does that have to do with anything?’
‘The men are terrified,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Terrified of ghosts. Terrified of the dark. Terrified of their own shadows. Ianthe’s punishment is necessary to strengthen the command hierarchy aboard this vessel. I’ll go further, if I have to. If we are going to make it back home, I require my men to be more afraid of me than they are of the dead.’
‘Half of them will refuse to do what you ask.’
Maskelyne set down the telescope and turned to face her. He could hardly make her out in the gloom. ‘You’ve spoken to them?’ he asked. ‘Or was your conversation just with Mellor?’
She was silent for a long moment. ‘You never used to be so cruel, Ethan. What happened to you?’
He turned back to his experiments. ‘Any man who refuses to carry out my orders will be thrown overboard.’
After a moment he heard the door shut softly behind him.
Maskelyne found himself gazing down at the Unmer spectacles, the other experiments abandoned. He had put this off too long. He picked up the lenses and examined them carefully, trying to see how the whisper-thin optical elements interacted, but he might as well have been staring into an insolvable labyrinth. He wrote in his journaclass="underline"
The spectacles show an interpretation of the past. Does the device simply record perceptions, or did the Unmer discover a way to make a link between minds located elsewhere in Space/Time? The Haurstaf command this talent, at least spatially. Is it possible that these spectacles are able to achieve the same feat, both spatially and temporally? Can I explain this in spatial and temporal terms?
He thought for a moment, then added:
What if space was simply a measure of variance, where variance is the product of both the distance and the difference between any two things?
If the distance between two particles is zero, the space between them must also be zero. Without space, attraction and repulsion forces cease to be.
If the difference between two particles is zero, they are fundamentally identical. In such a case, the space between them must also be zero, regardless of the distance that separates them. Effecting a change in one particle would therefore affect its twin, even if that twin was a thousand miles distant.
It might explain how certain Unmer artefacts worked across vast distances. The jealous knife, the seeing knife and even the trio of small pyramids Maskelyne had dredged up at the start of this voyage. He put pen to paper again.
Time = A measure of the difference between one thing and itself.
For Time to exist in Space, there must be some sort of change – some movement, spin, or oscillation. But if Space is simply an ever-shifting sea of variance, then Time must be relative. The Unmer’s ability to manipulate Space might conceivably be the very thing that allows them to manipulate Time.
This made sense in terms of Brutalist magic, since various Unmer devices appeared to quicken or slow the speed of time. Food decayed rapidly in the presence of amplifiers. The Unmer themselves lived for hundreds of years. But even if their sorcerous devices could alter the flow of Time, or observe the past, they could not change the past. However, if – as he began to suspect – the spectacles actually exchanged the wearer’s perceptions with those of a long-dead sorcerer, then that sorcerer would be able to peer out of the present owner’s eyes, which implied that the past could be changed. And that was a paradox.
Maskelyne paced the cabin. He raised the spectacles to his face but then lowered them again. He stopped and sat down on the bed and gazed at the lenses for a long time, cursing his own fear. Then he took a deep breath and put them on again.
Dragonfires raged across the icebreaker’s deck. Bodies lay everywhere. The Unmer Brutalist knelt among the flames, his flesh now scorched and blistered. He raised his fists as four great armoured serpents swept down from the skies. Conquillas rode the largest beast, his void bow now gripped in his gauntleted hands. He pulled back the bowstring and let an arrow fly.
Maskelyne turned the little wheel on the side of the frame, and the scene flickered backwards in time.
He was standing on the deck of the same ship. The electrical receiving tower loomed over him, its great torus shining in the midday sun. The black paint covering the iron deck and wheel-house was old, revealing rust in places, but the vessel itself had not yet been damaged. There were as yet no energy weapons situated behind the bulwarks.