Briana shook her head. ‘I’ve no idea where it is.’
‘It was in a long, narrow box,’ he said, ‘packed with crespic salts to keep it cold.’
‘They might have put it in the arms locker.’
Briana summoned the lieutenant at arms, who led them to the arms locker, where they did indeed locate a box fitting Maske-lyne’s description. The metaphysicist opened the lid and took out the weapon. It was made of brass and dragon-bone, with a dark glass phial fitted underneath the stock. Curls of ice smoke rose from its flared barrel.
Maskelyne grinned like someone who had encountered an old friend. ‘Perfect,’ he said. ‘We’ll have that line off in an instant.’
Briana frowned. ‘You plan to shoot it?’
‘I do.’
‘With that old thing?’
He nodded.
She felt like she’d been swindled. ‘That’s your great plan?’
‘This old thing is no ordinary weapon,’ Maskelyne said, holding the gun towards her. ‘This phial contains Unmer void flies.’
A moment of silence passed between them.
‘Crespic salts are used to regulate the temperature of the ammunition,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Once frozen inside this phial, the flies remain quite inactive. The barrel is designed to act as a thermal gradient along which the flies are induced to pass once the phial is punctured, thus creating a directional vortex of considerable destructive force, while preserving both the weapon and its operator from harm.’
‘You brought void flies aboard my vessel?’
‘Your crew brought them aboard.’
‘And you didn’t think to tell anyone about it?’ Briana lifted her hands in exasperation. ‘What would have happened if they’d got loose?’ She shuddered to imagine the bloodshed such an event would have caused – a ship riddled with tiny holes; a crew riddled with tiny holes.
Maskelyne grinned again. ‘Now that we have established the worth of such a weapon in our present circumstances,’ he said, ‘we can start to negotiate a price.’
‘A price? For what exactly?’
‘Void flies aren’t exactly easy to come by, you know.’
The Herald’s engineers had constructed a wooden derrick overhanging her stern, allowing a man to be lowered down over the rear of the ship to the smashed rudder by way of a pulley system. First officer Lum looked on as two of the crew hauled their companion back up again.
The first officer snapped to attention as Briana and Maskelyne arrived. ‘Ma’am.’
‘What’s the verdict, Mr Lum?’ Briana asked.
‘We’ve completed our first inspection now, Ma’am.’
The two sailors helped the man swinging from the derrick back onto the deck. He took off his brine goggles and gloves and faced Lum. ‘The rudder’s in bad shape, but it ought to give us some manoeuvrability,’ he said. ‘That harpoon’s in a tricky place though. Buried in solid from what I can see, about a foot under the waterline. I can’t even get close to it because of the waves. I don’t know how he got it in there using one of those old Ferredales. It’s either the luckiest shot or the finest piece of marksmanship I’ve ever seen.’
‘Can you hook the line?’ Lum said. ‘Pull it up?’
The other man shrugged. ‘You’ve got the full weight of the Herald pulling against it, sir. We might be able to rig something up, but we’d brisk tearing off the whole stern post. Then you’d be looking at a hull breach.’
Maskelyne leaned on his blunderbuss and peered down over the side of the ship. He lifted his head, following the line of cable across the waters to the steam yacht some distance away. Then he raised the gun to his shoulder and sighted on the yacht.
‘Wait!’ Briana said. ‘What are you doing?’
‘Two birds,’ Maskelyne said. ‘One stone. If I sever the cable at this end, Granger will merely lose his catch. But if I shoot it out at the other end, the flies will pass through the cable, the ship and anything inside the ship. We’ll leave him with a thousand tiny holes in his hull and, with any, luck, one or two in his own skull.’
‘That’s got to be two hundred yards. Let one of my marksmen take the shot.’
‘Accuracy is not required,’ Maskelyne said. ‘This weapon produces a vortex of flies.’
‘You might miss the cable altogether.’
Maskelyne lowered the gun and turned to face her. ‘You haven’t seen one of these weapons discharge, Miss Banks. A stream of void flies is quite unstoppable. Were I to fire this straight down, the shot would pass straight through the world and out the other side. With the right trajectory, I could easily, from my present location, reduce any city on this planet to rubble.’ He moistened his lips. ‘Now, will you please stand aside and let me take the shot before the phial thaws out?’
The crewmen and their first officer looked at Briana for an explanation, but she didn’t feel inclined to provide one. She stepped back as Maskelyne raised the gun to his shoulder again. Then she took another step back.
A click came from the blunderbuss.
And then a hazy jet of black particles erupted from its flared barrel, crackling like fat in a frying pan as it sped away across the sea. The wind howled suddenly in Briana’s ears. She watched as the stream of flies widened into a spiralling, cone-shaped vortex that momentarily engulfed Granger’s steam yacht and then abruptly disappeared into the sea with a furious popping sound. The deck under her feet pitched forward suddenly and then rocked backwards as the whole ship slowed to a halt. The towing cable had been severed.
Briana could smell ozone lingering in the air.
Maskelyne lowered his gun, then turned to her and smiled. ‘Tell your captain to raise the sails,’ he said.
Something woke Granger, although at first he could not say exactly what. He had been dreaming of Evensraum, finding himself pushing through the crowds of refugees fleeing Weaverbrook after the bombardment. They’d been shuffling across ashen fields, ragged figures heading away from the burning town. Granger had been trying to find Ianthe, although in reality she hadn’t yet been born. He had felt compelled to search nevertheless, calling out her name, desperate to find this girl that he knew did not exist.
As his bleary eyes took in his surroundings – the navigation console, the helm, the tangle of red sheets around his legs – he perceived that something was wrong. The quality of light here in the bridge seemed different somehow. It felt colder than it should. He realized he could no longer hear the sound of the yacht’s engines.
He sat up, aware of a dull stiffness in his joints and noticed blood on his right elbow. Tiny puncture marks had appeared on both sides of the joint, as though a needle had been pushed right through him. The wound began to nip at once. He felt a second prickling sensation in his right ear, and lifted a hand to examine it. His fingers came away bloody. The top of the ear was bleeding, too.
He got up and flexed his limbs and as he did so he noticed light shining through numerous perforations in the bridge walls and windows. It looked like someone had blasted the walls with buckshot. He strode over to the window and examined a number of the little holes closely. The edges were sharp, with no cracks in the glass at all. Behind the glass the cold brown sea heaved against a leaden horizon. Thunderclouds towered in the west and in places he could see sheets of rain pinned against the sky like grey gauze. He opened the window and looked aft.
The captured Haurstaf warship wasn’t there.
Granger threw open the door and stepped out onto the weather deck surrounding the wheelhouse. Icy gales buffeted his face. His skin prickled with the electric presence of the approaching storm. He walked around the outside of the bridge, scanning the horizon in all directions. There. A sail moved across the sea to the south-west, heading directly across the wind. It could only be the Irillian Herald.