Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts

  The man looked vaguely Unmer, but he spoke Anean like a Losotan. His crown rested low on his brow, and Granger thought he knew why. If this man had fought during the Uprising, it would be covering another scar.

  ‘Some of the other inventions are even harder to wield,’ the old man said. ‘You’re lucky you didn’t pick up any of the Sniggering Blades. A sword like that will trick you into cracking open your own bones and sucking out the marrow if you give it half a chance. Even Brutalists are frightened of them.’ He nodded amicably. ‘And then there are the Phasing Shields and Void Blades, of course. To call them terrifying doesn’t even begin to do them justice.’

  ‘Who are you?’ Granger said. He was startled to hear his own voice coming out of six mouths at once, but not startled enough to drop the weapon.

  ‘The name’s Herian,’ the old man replied. ‘I’m the operator here.’

  ‘I didn’t think there were any free Unmer left,’ Granger said, ‘except Conquillas.’

  Herian’s smile withered. ‘Conquillas will be judged by powers greater than us,’ he said, strolling forward. ‘He gave up the right to call himself Unmer a long time ago.’

  Granger noted that the old man’s crown only partially covered a red welt above his left eyebrow. Not exactly free, then. Herian had been leucotomized by the Haurstaf. But if he’d been captured and deliberately crippled at Awl, then how did he find his way out here?

  The old man picked his way across piles of trove. ‘A lot of these flowspaces were used for storage during the war. Dragons don’t much like to venture inside them. Not against a gradient of this magnitude.’ He stubbed his foot on something and let out a curse, then picked up the offending object and flung it away. It was a skeletal box of some sort. ‘It’s all clutter to me now,’ he said. ‘I swear there’s more of it every time I come in here.’ He approached the crystal and examined it carefully, allowing curtains of shimmering light to bathe his face. For a moment he seemed to forget himself, but then he said, ‘Have you looked at this closely, yet?’

  ‘How do I get out of here?’ Granger said.

  Herian didn’t answer.

  ‘How do I gain control of the ironclad?’

  The old man continued to gaze into the crystal.

  ‘The icebreaker,’ Granger insisted. ‘Tell me how to steer it.’

  ‘You don’t steer it,’ Herian said. ‘Only the captain can do that.’

  ‘The captain is dead.’

  Herian smiled again. ‘That didn’t stop him from delivering his package and then bringing you here, did it?’ His gaze returned to the jewel, which was now shining even more brightly than moments before. The colour and texture of its light had altered, too. A scattering of pink and orange rays swept across the old man’s mail suit, his weathered face and his tin crown. ‘Don’t you find it mesmerizing?’ he said. ‘The light, I mean . . .’ Radiance flooded over the mounds of trove behind him. As the rays touched the Unmer devices, many of them activated. Deep within the heap it seemed that embers began to glow. Energy weapons hummed and crackled. To Granger’s astonishment, additional copies of himself began to appear. He moved towards Herian, and his simulacrums moved too.

  ‘Draws you in, doesn’t it?’ Herian said.

  Granger stopped.

  ‘Time’s horizon,’ the old man went on. ‘Entropaths use it to control the gradient, the rate of aspacial flow. You can’t see it, but it’s all around us now. If this device let it all through at once, our universe would collapse like that.’ He glanced up at Granger and snapped his fingers. ‘Bang. Crushed in a blink.’

  The radiance from the crystal now filled the entire chamber. Through its facets Granger spied an image of a black plain under a burning sky. Curtains of red and pink light tore across the horizon. Lightning flickered. He took another step forward and then stopped himself. Had he meant to approach? His instincts screamed at him not to get any closer. The sky within that jewel continued to pulse and writhe. All around him, his simulacrums began to walk forward. And Granger found himself following them.

  He halted beside Herian, without having made the decision to approach. And now he saw that the plain within the jewel was not land at all, but a great black sea, empty but for a single cone of rock rising above the tarry waters. Upon this solitary island stood a cylindrical metal tower as tall and broad as the interior of this chamber. ‘What is that place?’ he said.

  ‘It’s this place,’ Herian said, ‘and yet it’s not. It’s a fortress, a refuge, a doorway, the last bastion of thought in a dying universe.’

  ‘The source of brine?’

  Herian chuckled. ‘Do you even know what brine is?’

  Granger hesitated.

  Herian grinned even more fiercely. ‘What happens when the seas rise?’

  ‘We drown.’

  ‘That’s the sort of limited answer I’d expect from a human,’ Herian said. ‘The seas rise, the land shrinks, and woe to all mankind.’ He laughed. ‘Brine never stops flowing. Not in a hundred years, nor in a million; not when our air thins and boils away and this bloated planet pulls the moon and the sun down from the sky. It will fill the vacuum between the stars long after my race has departed this world and yours has perished. It isn’t a weapon, it’s a catalyst – the broth from which a new cosmos will be manufactured.’

  ‘Who sent it here?’

  Herian shrugged. ‘We made a deal.’

  ‘With whom?’

  At that moment the whole chamber gave a sudden shudder. Light burst from the trove all around, as though those dull embers within the mountains of scrap had suddenly been fanned into flames. Herian cocked his head to one side and grinned. ‘You’re about to see for yourself,’ he said. ‘They’ve sensed you and activated the conduits.’ He gestured towards the nearest wall, where a dim green glow now pulsed within the passageway openings. ‘They don’t like trespassers.’

  Granger grabbed the old man’s mail shirt. ‘Who are they?’

  Herian beamed. ‘Your race would call them gods,’ he said. ‘Mine think of them as masters of entropy. They have stalled the end of their own universe.’ His eyes sparkled with awe. ‘Can you comprehend the sheer magnitude of that achievement? To actually resist the formation of a singularity . . . even for a moment?’

  Granger shook him. ‘You invited them here?’

  ‘Not me,’ Herian said. ‘I’m just an operator.’

  At the old man’s words, someone seized Granger from behind. A strong arm gripped his neck, dragging him backwards. Granger reacted at once, driving his elbow into the unseen opponent’s ribs.

  Something struck him hard in the gut, punching the air from him. The blow had come from nowhere. Granger hadn’t even seen whatever had hit him, but he felt his opponent’s grip slacken. He wrestled free, spun round . . .

  . . . and found himself facing one of the simulacrums.

  This copy was no longer mimicking him. It was bent over, clutching its ribs. And, to Granger’s astonishment, so were all the others. At least a dozen copies stood around him, every one of them doubled over in pain.

  Had Granger struck himself, along with all the others? He raised the sword, but none of the simulacrums copied his gesture. Many of them had already recovered. They were edging closer from all directions at once. For a moment, Granger stood there, uncertain. Then he dropped the sword.

  The simulacrums vanished.

  Herian laughed. â
€˜If you don’t make decisions for your own swordsmen,’ he said, ‘then there are always others who’ll do it for you.’ He indicated the scrap pile. ‘Please, help yourself to something else. Plenty more weapons to choose from.’

  Granger stooped to grab a different sword but hesitated. He glanced at Herian.

  Herian shrugged. ‘It wouldn’t be my choice.’

  Granger walked up to him and punched him in the face.

  The old man fell back into a pile of metal. His crown fell off, revealing the leucotomy scar on his forehead. He spat blood, then gave Granger a red grin. ‘A hundred years ago I’d have made you suffer for that,’ he said. ‘Old age has mellowed me.’ He reached over into a heap of trove and grabbed a heavy flintlock pistol with a barrel big enough to ram a fist inside. He swung it round to bear on Granger.

  Granger forced his boot down on Herian’s arm, pinning the weapon. He crouched over the old man and slugged him again, breaking his jaw. Herian howled. He managed to squeeze the trigger and the pistol gave a soft hiss, like an exhalation. A haze passed through the air, scattering the trove beyond the weapon’s barrel in all directions. The flying scrap turned to dust even as Granger watched. He slammed Herian’s wrist down, again and again, until the old man dropped the pistol. Then he kicked the damn thing away. He punched Herian’s face a second time, and then a third.

  Herian sputtered and coughed, but then he grinned once more. ‘Beating me doesn’t even scratch the cosmos, you know?’ he said. ‘The wings of a fly make as much damage. Look around you, man.’

  The crystal was blazing now, filling the whole room with the radiance of that alien sky trapped inside. And something equally strange was happening within the mouths of the conduits. Green light flickered within each of those portals, accompanied by a furious crackling sound and a deeper, more regular mechanical shunting. Was this whole tower a machine? A piece of trove itself? Many of the surrounding weapons began to glow and shiver, as weird fires danced across their metal surfaces. Granger could feel the energy crawling across his skin.

  A bolt of lightning shot from one of the conduit doorways and struck the crystal, followed a heartbeat later by dozens more in rapid succession. The air fizzed with power. Herian shrieked with laughter, his bruised and swollen face contorted into a rictus of joy. His tongue lolled in his mouth; his eyes stared madly at the lightning. Granger released him and searched around frantically for something, anything with which to protect himself. He hauled out a heavy glass shield and raised it before him. Looking through it was like looking through an old, warped window, and yet the landscape he saw through that shield bore no resemblance to the chamber around him. Instead, he perceived a winter forest, the trees like charcoal dashes on a white page.

  Herian growled, ‘Beware of wolves.’

  Granger spied movement in that world beyond the shield – grey shapes loping through the snow. Something flashed by to his immediate left, and he spun the shield around to follow the movement. Through the woozy glass he saw a wolf pounce at him, its red eyes agleam, its fangs bared. The beast slammed against the shield, knocking Granger backwards. And suddenly he felt its weight on top of him, pinning him down as it slavered and snapped at the other side of the glass.

  Herian laughed. ‘How does it feel to hold something that’s in two places at once?’

  Granger heaved the shield aside and the weight abruptly disappeared. The wolves and their bleak forest remained inside the glass.

  Electrical fluids were now streaming between the crystal and the mouths of the conduits, forming a blazing net that filled the centre of the chamber. The air smelled of storms. As Granger watched, the energy began to coalesce in front of the crystal, forming a discernible shape. It seemed to him that he could see the outline of a female figure in that chaos – white and luminous with lightning for hair.

  ‘She’s reversing entropy,’ Herian said. ‘Recreating herself in this place.’ He scrambled to his feet and laughed again. ‘You needn’t bother arming yourself – flesh, steel, bullets, it’s all just matter to her.’

  The woman amidst the lightning was becoming more solid with each passing moment as energy hardened and took the shape of flesh and bone and armour. Her mirrored plate had been crafted to resemble the facets of a crystal and shone with the brilliance of a thousand gem lanterns. She wore a glass shield strapped to her back, and carried a whip that sparkled with energy. Her long hair blazed and snapped, the electric fluids arcing in every direction. As the energy dissipated around her, Granger saw that her face was old and grey and haggard. For an instant he thought that she was weeping, but then he realized the truth. Those weren’t tears he saw, but brine leaking from the corners of her eyes and trickling out of her open mouth. She looked and smelled like one of the Drowned.

  ‘Those tears will burn,’ Herian said. ‘But I see you’ve had some experience of that already.’ He was sitting on a nearby mound of trove with his chin resting on his fist. ‘You look like a man who’s already had a taste of the world to come.’

  Granger tore his eyes from the woman. Frantically, he eyed the trove around him. Swords, shields, pistols, armour. He didn’t know what any of it did. He reached for another sword, but then stopped when Herian began to snigger. This was Unmer weaponry. Most of it would be beyond him. He spied the kitbag he’d brought from the deadship. He’d packed it with tools he’d found aboard. But they were Unmer too. He snatched it up anyway and threw it at the entropath in wild desperation.

  She cracked her whip. The kitbag fell in two pieces, spilling its contents onto the floor.

  Shit.

  He glanced back at the conduits leading into the chamber. Green fires now burned deep inside them with such savagery that each opening looked like the mouth to a strange chemical furnace. Streamers of lightning flowed from every one of them, feeding the crystal which fed the manifestation before him. He wheeled round and fixed his gaze upon the Unmer chariot lying at a shallow angle upon a heap of trove. Blue and pink electrical auras fluttered across its egg-shaped hull.

  Granger bolted across the room and, chased by the sound of Herian’s laughter, ducked inside the open hatch of the flying machine. The floor sloped sharply down towards the stern. Dozens of switches, dials, rollers and levers occupied a console that swept across the bow of the vessel, each marked by Unmer glyphs and numbers of indeterminable meaning. Several panels beneath the console had been removed, leaving the internal mechanics exposed. Lights of all colours flickered within that mess of wires. Above the console, three glass panels hinged like winged dresser mirrors offered views of the chamber beyond. Through these Granger watched the entropath approach. Brine continued to pour from her mouth and eyes; it trickled from her fingers and through the spaces in her armour.

  Granger studied the console. None of the controls made any immediate sense. He placed the heel of his hand against a roller and eased it forward. The chariot bucked suddenly and then shuddered, but did not move from its position. The machinery within the console gave out a painful screech. He began trying each control in turn, flipping switches in sequence, pulling levers and spinning rollers in all directions. The chariot jerked suddenly to port, slamming Granger against the bulkhead. He heard laughter behind him.

  Herian was holding onto the hatch. ‘I don’t know what you hope to accomplish,’ he said, smiling. ‘There’s enough energy pouring through the conduits to burn this ship to nothing. My lady will simply absorb the residue.’

  Granger located the roller that had sent the craft to port and turned it in the opposite direction. The chariot lurched suddenly to starboard, causing Herian to tumble head over heels in through the open hatch. He landed on the floor, striking his head, as the flying machine burst free of the scrap pile and car
eened across the chamber. Granger rolled the control wheel back to its central position. That’s lateral control. Carefully, he turned a second wheel, set several inches above the first. The chariot responded by rising quickly through the air. Vertical control. Now, where was thrust? Two large hand-grips caught his attention. He eased them both away from himself, and the craft surged forward, trembling slightly.

  Herian groaned. ‘You’re wasting a perfectly good chariot,’ he said.

  Granger ignored him. Through the glass panels he watched the entropath diminish below him as the craft rose higher and higher. She had strapped her glass shield to one arm and carried her whip in her free hand. Brine continued to pour from her, forming an expanding pool around her boots. She lifted her gaze to the chariot and then lashed out with the whip.

  The flying machine should have been well beyond the range of that weapon. But as Granger watched in horror, the lash extended upwards like a bolt of black lightning.

  He spun the lateral control wheel to port, but he wasn’t fast enough. The whip struck the craft, opening a thin crack in the port side of the hull. Light shone through.

  Herian began to chuckle again. ‘She’s toying with you,’ he said. ‘That lash could cut the world in half.’

  Granger spun the vertical control wheel, and the craft shot upwards at breakneck speed. Through the view screens he watched the floor drop far away. The entropath was drawing back her whip to strike again. Granger waited a heartbeat before halting his ascent. As the woman struck out a second time, he sent the chariot plummeting downwards like a stone.

  The force of acceleration almost lifted him from his feet, but he clung to the console. He heard the whip crack somewhere overhead. A yard from the floor, he brought the flying machine to a sudden halt, then sent it barrelling sideways towards the centre of the chamber, towards the entropath herself. If he’d judged his heading correctly . . .