She sighed. ‘Go on.’
‘Our world is drowning,’ he said. ‘Whatever deal the Unmer made with the far side of the cosmos has evidently turned sour.’ He sighed. ‘I’m no merchant, but I know that when one party fails to adhere to a trade agreement, the other party gets angry.’
CHAPTER 16
PERTICA
Violent juddering woke Granger. He sat up abruptly, momentarily disorientated, then remembered where he was. Green light filtered through the windows of the deadship cabin, bathing the shelves of trove and Unmer experiments in a queer underwater luminance. Granger got up, wincing as his dry flesh cracked, and took a moment to work the numbness out of his arms and legs. It was freezing in here. His breath misted in the air before him. He wrapped a blanket around himself and shuffled over to the window.
Green ice floated upon a green sea. Outside the window stretched a frozen expanse of the Mare Verdant, the brine littered with broken slabs of ice and great nebulous snow-dusted masses with facets as deep and dark as bottle glass. From the bow of the ironclad came a dull pounding sound as the ship smashed its way through more of the ice field. Granger took out a fur-lined jacket from the captain’s dressing room and forced his heavy joints into it as he stomped up the steps that led above deck.
It must have rained during the night. Fronds of clear ice crystals had formed on the metal tower in the centre of the deck and on the torn remnants of the spinnaker attached to it. The wind had blown them into crazy shapes. A sugaring of white snow crunched under Granger’s boots. He scooped some up and ate it as he paced the deck. Vast ice-fields lay ahead of the deadship, a glittering expanse of emerald and white. In her wake stretched a channel of dark green water where she had punched through the surface ice. Granger walked to the bow of the ship and scanned the horizon. Basalt cliffs rose out of the sea a league to the north, their storm-cracked aspects mortared with snow. Upon the edge of this landmass perched a single building, a drab and windowless cube supporting a vast steel tower on its roof.
A sense of dread seemed to roll down from that structure and creep into Granger’s bones. That building was the source of the deadship’s power and could only be its ultimate destination. The force that had steered the icebreaker towards his own wooden lifeboat, and then brought him inexorably north, must emanate from there. In order to gain control of this ship, he must disable that interference. He gazed up at the building for a long time, watching for signs of life, but saw only white flurries of snow blowing across the black and green.
Constant snapping and pounding noises came from the prow as the deadship smashed a channel through the ice. The air remained as cold and sharp as a knife edge. Granger rubbed his hands and stamped his boots upon the deck, trying to coax some feeling into his body. He spotted an old wharf, partially hidden behind the headland of a sheltered natural harbour. The ice was thinner here and bereft of snow, its surface etched where the frozen brine had cracked and reformed. The ironclad slowed as it drew near, until the whining from the ship’s tower suddenly stopped.
The ship coasted the final few yards and then bumped against the wharf. Silence fell over the deck, broken only by the hiss of the wind through frozen metal.
Trying to ignore the uneasy feeling in his guts, Granger hitched a canvas bag over his shoulder and, after weeks at sea, finally stepped onto dry land.
A stairway zigzagged from the wharf up into a deep cut in the cliff. Twisted iron railings bordered the steps in places, but many had sheared away and now lay at the bottom of the gully among tumbles of ice-fused rock. Granger edged his way upwards with one shoulder against the wall of the defile, testing each step before trusting his weight to it. Icicles overhung the trail in places, forming glassy passages. The wind keened like a grief-stricken child.
At the summit he paused to catch his breath. The air hurt his lungs. No other living thing was breathing this, and perhaps never had. Down below, the ironclad waited in that smashed green bay, as dark and empty as a coffin. To the north stretched a howling landscape of emerald and white, the snowfields sculpted by constant gales into scalloped ridges and dream-like shapes with razor-blade edges. From here Granger could see the transmitting station tower rising above a snowy bluff to the east. Perhaps a hundred and fifty feet high, it was far larger than the one aboard the deadship, supporting a torus three times the size of its smaller twin. A faint whining sound came from its summit.
Granger’s boots sank into deep powder as he struggled up the bluff. At the summit he was rewarded with a clear view of the Unmer station. A square grey block with a huge round metal door, it occupied more than an acre of ground. Snow drifts engulfed its windward side, partially burying the whole structure. As Granger studied the landscape, he perceived other objects partly buried in the surrounding snow. Dragon armour and bones. Conquillas’s Revolution, it seemed, had reached even this distant place.
And yet this station continued to transmit power. The attackers had failed to shut it down.
The hinges had frozen solid, and it took considerable effort to pull that massive door open. Granger chipped away at the ice with his knife until, finally, it gave way. With a metal groan, the door swung open a few feet before lodging itself in snow. A dark tunnel lay behind, wide enough to drive a horse and carriage down. Granger took out his gem lantern and held it high. There were signs of violence. Black stains spattered the curved floor. The concrete had been scorched by dragonfire and heavily scarred by impacts from blades. A single thigh bone lay in a frozen puddle, and yet, strangely, he couldn’t see any other human remains.
Close fighting in here, several opponents.
Twenty paces further along, the passageway swelled into a spherical chamber lined by coils of copper wire. The humming sound was more intense here, the air noticeably warmer. Melt water had leaked in through the apex and collected in a shallow green pool in the hollow below. Granger stepped carefully around it. Several objects lay under the water – metal brackets or machine parts, all furred with verdigris. Two further openings led deeper into the station. He listened at each for a while, then lifted his gem lantern again and took the first passage.
This conduit took him to another wire-walled sphere where the passage branched again. Again, Granger chose the opening from which the humming noise seemed louder. He passed through four more of these junctions before he began to perceive a tremor running through the floor. It was accompanied by an uncomfortable tingling sensation in his fingertips. His gem lantern seemed brighter, too. In places he found round metal plaques set into the curving walls, each inset with a small clear lens. He passed four or five, before something about them began to bother him. When he found yet another, he stopped to inspect it more closely. As he lowered his eye to the lens at its centre, he glimpsed another eye withdrawing abruptly from the other side.
Granger shuddered and moved on.
Eventually, the concrete maze opened out into an enormous cylindrical space like the inside of a tower. Scores of other conduits led away from its base. The humming sound he had been following reached a fierce resonance here; he could feel it reverberating in his teeth and bones. Great mounds of trove covered the floor, some twenty or thirty feet high in places. Pistols and cannons and suits of armour lay among piles of wrecked war machines: arbalists and turtles and drop-forged rams. His gem lantern shone so brightly it illuminated the whole vast space from wall to wall. There were ballistic weapons and energy weapons, and countless burned and twisted metal pieces of indeterminable purpose – a bonfire of scrap and used weapons, of flanged tripods and serrated fins, with bursts of wire, glass shields, goggles, gauntlets and cannon barrels protruding like giant steel fingers. Upon a nearby mound lay an ancient sky chariot, heavily dented and fire-blackened, but seemingly intact. Granger’s gaze travelled up the walls, and higher still, to the ceiling far above, where similar mounds of wreckage had floated up and gathered there in sorcerous defiance of gravity.