‘I believe it takes three deaths, father to son, before a sequence of misfortunes is considered to be a curse.’
‘Thank the heavens for that.’
‘You ever wonder why so many ships sink there?’
Maskelyne had given it some thought before. The conjunction of two seas led to a mixing of brines, which was essentially just a mixing of different poisons. And when the sun warmed these night-cooled confluence waters, the mists could be strange indeed. He suspected there could be a psychoactive element to the resultant chemical fumes. It was either that, or one was forced to believe the fantastical sailors’ tales: of sea monsters and blood-mottled sharks and jellyfish with gas bladders as large as city blocks, acting as host to all manner of other creatures; of Drowned mariners sailing undersea ships; of musical growths of crystal and dark tentacled things that supped on the brains of sleeping crewmen and replaced them with a sentient broth intent on breeding mischief. ‘If fate brings us to the southern arm of the Mare Regis, then so be it,’ he said. ‘We will brave the confluxes and hope to pass without incident. We’ve been in worse places, Mr Mellor.’
‘I suppose we have, sir.’
The crystal led them almost due south for three days and three nights. By all accounts it should have been getting warmer as they covered those leagues, but the sea continued to shudder under a slab of cold air from the north. On the second day a wind from the north-west picked up and blew against the Lamp’s hull, aiding her engines in the push south. And so they made good progress. The waters of the Mare Lux flashed and foamed, and copper-coloured spume blew against the wheel-house windows behind which Maskelyne stood and watched his crew at work in their whaleskins and goggles.
On the fourth day they passed the Clutching Rocks, a cluster of wind-blown pillars against which the waves exploded into droplets like a million shards of amber glass. Here the boom and fizzle of the brine reminded him of cannon fire. Two generations ago this had been a temple atop a hill upon an island on which Verluya vines had grown. Now it was all drowned. There were sailors who swore the priests still prayed within those watery halls and still plucked rank malodorous weeds from the silt, with which they made a potion that was no longer wine but an elixir to turn a living, breathing, man each night into a phantasm. Other buildings yet lay beneath the surface here, village houses and cottages and hovels where a community of the Drowned existed to this day.
They left the flooded island behind and an hour later in their wake they spotted a dragon hunting the sea around the rocks. It must have been there all along, Maskelyne supposed, watching from the deep as the dark mass of their hull passed overhead. Dragons could stay submerged for hours, but lacked speed and mobility in water, preferring to swoop down on prey from the sky above, as many sea birds had once done.
The men watched in silence.
That night the stars closest to the southern horizon glimmered with unusual colours: very frail pinks and topaz and ultramarine. An illusion caused by vapours, Mellor said, yet not vapours born of brine. They were watching, he said, the deaths of a hundred million jellyfish. Where the seas met and mixed, countless numbers of these simple creatures found themselves trapped in a poisonous mixture of different brines. And so they died, and the gases released by their decomposition coloured the stars.
Mellor watched with a grim expression. ‘We must be careful not to stray into such fields,’ he said. ‘Issue the men with gas filters for their masks.’
Maskelyne knew the dangers well. ‘Men have fished such corrupted waters before,’ he remarked. ‘The slicks attract rare predators. I remember a ship in Raine . . . another in Losoto.’
‘Carnival ships,’ Mellor said.
‘That’s right.’ Maskelyne recalled the bright designs, the scorched and painted hulls, and the wild-eyed and savage men who sailed them. ‘Have we any men who crewed such ships?’
‘I wouldn’t hire ’em.’
Maskelyne raised his eyebrows.
Mellor simply smiled and tapped a finger against his forehead.
After consulting with Hayn the navigator about alterations to their course, Maskelyne retired to his cabin, poured himself a whisky and tried to relax. The crystal continued to lead them unerringly south. He had hoped to see a change in the brightness of the mounted gem lantern, perhaps indicating that they were nearing their target, but he could not determine any noticeable increase in its illumination. Either the ray of energy they followed was not prone to variance or the artefact was very distant.
He had been in his cabin for less than fifteen minutes when he heard a bellowing sound from outside so loud and deep that the spirit in his glass shuddered. It had to be a whale. The Lamp’s engines slowed at once. Maskelyne took his drink to the wheelhouse. It was a calm night and everyone but the helmsman had gathered on the deck outside. They were clustered around the starboard rail, lanterns raised, as the dredger edged forward at less than quarter speed. Maskelyne grabbed a whaleskin cloak, opened the wheelhouse door and climbed down to join his men.
The whale must have surfaced close to starboard as Maskelyne reached the edge of the ship for he heard it blow. It was near enough that he could hear the spray spattering against the surface of the ocean, but he couldn’t yet see it out in that glimmering darkness. It bellowed again, a sound so vast it might have been the cry of a god, and now Maskelyne recognized it as a cry of fear and pain. The whale was in some sort of trouble.
‘There!’
One of the men was pointing out at the dark ocean.
At first Maskelyne could see nothing. But then he spotted a great long shadow drifting some two hundred yards distant, like the hull of a capsized ship. There appeared to be something snarled around it, a mass of pale rope or weed.
Maskelyne suddenly understood what he was seeing. He located Mellor in the throng and seized his shoulder. ‘Have the helmsman steer us away,’ he said. ‘Engines full ahead.’
Mellor gave him a brief quizzical look, before comprehension lit his face. He muttered a curse under his breath. ‘Full speed?’
‘The time for stealth has passed. It must have heard us by now.’
‘Aye, Captain.’ He turned and ran back towards the wheel-house.
Just as Maskelyne was about to address his crew, one of them spoke urgently. ‘Samal.’
A few of the crewmen scrambled to get a better look. Silence fell.
Finally, one of his men said, ‘That’s not a whale.’
He was right, of course. The large shape drifting past their starboard side had the wrong outline to be a whale. It was too bulbous and uneven. Among the mass of flesh Maskelyne thought he spotted a limb, huge and distended, ending in a lump that might once have been a hand. Huge gas-filled sacs swelled from the skin. The sound he had assumed to be the bellow of a whale had come from vocal cords that had once been human. He said, ‘We’re moving away quickly. Mellor will distribute firearms. I want all watch stations manned immediately. Remain in pairs and watch your colleagues closely.’
Once Mellor had handed out the rifles, the men dispersed quickly, without a word, moving in pairs to each watch station. Each of them wore a grim expression. Sailors had been encountering erokin samal in the seas since the Unmer unleashed their poisonous brine on the world. Many thought they had once been a benign species, a form of deepwater worm or polyp mutated by the toxins. They were notoriously sensitive. It was unlikely that they had escaped the creature’s attention.
Maskelyne returned to the wheelhouse. At length he found himself pacing behind the helmsman, repeatedly checking their speed and their engine oil pressure. Every few seconds his gaze returned to the window. Samal were parasitic. This one had most likely trapped one of the Drowned, and then slowly altered its host’s pathology to suit its own needs. The inflated body was used as a flotation aid and a crude sail, allowing the parasite to drift with the wind. The organs within the host would have been adapted to process brine and toxic marine invertebrates into food. Large samal would often ensnare severa
l hosts, forming whole islands of biological matter. By altering blood-flow, the creature would then create pockets of decay among the living tissue, thus allowing wind-blown seeds to take root. Vegetation grew vigorously in such a rich medium. Such islands often resembled natural landmasses, but with the parasite’s slender tentacles waiting amidst the greenery to snatch unwary birds, or men. Samal could keep their hosts alive for many hundreds of years.
He heard a gunshot.
There was a commotion at the bow of the ship. One of his crewmen had just shot his comrade and was now backing away, his rifle still trained on the body. Maskelyne could see blood pooling around the fallen man.
‘Was he got?’ the helmsman said.
Mellor came up beside them. ‘Men lose their nerve when there’s a samal around. There’s no—’
Another shot rang out.
‘Mellor, with me!’ Maskelyne ran to the wheelhouse door.
He slid down the ladder to the midships deck with Mellor following close behind, just as four more of his men arrived from aft. The sailor who had fired the shots was reloading his rifle. His target was lying on his back ten paces further along the deck, his whaleskins soaked in blood. He had two puncture wounds in him, one through the chest and one above his left eye. That eye had filled with blood. The skull behind had burst outwards, leaving a gap into which a man could shove a fist. And yet he was still moving. As Maskelyne watched, the fallen sailor lifted his head and tried to rise from the bloody pool in which he lay. The flesh around his ribs and at his thighs had already begun to swell. From his lips there came a low, mournful wail.
Maskelyne’s gaze searched the gore-drenched deck behind the unfortunate man. After a moment he spotted a mass of slender white tendrils writhing within the spilled blood. They resembled fungal mycelium, it seemed to him. He watched them slide over each other with morbid fascination. They had connected with the back of the wounded man’s knees and again at his lower spine. Maskelyne’s gaze traced them out through the wash-gaps in the bulwarks to where they disappeared into the darkly rushing sea. Perhaps it would have been more appropriate to compare these filaments to fishing lines? They had, after all, just snagged the creature’s prey.
He raised his own rifle. ‘Aim for the head,’ he said. ‘Try to remove as much brain matter as possible.’ Then he turned to those standing closest to the deck rail. ‘And keep an eye out for more, will you?’
They fired upon the crewman until they had reduced his head to a rag-like clod. And yet after each volley the stricken man rose again and came lumbering towards them with his arms outstretched. His wailing was unbearable to hear until one of the sailors shot out his larynx and most of his throat. The distension in his belly and thighs continued and then moved to his shoulders so that in the space of several minutes he looked like some gruesome hunchback. His clothes ripped, revealing skin inflated and stretched to translucency. Bubbles of blood formed amid the mulch of flesh at his neck and now they could hear the whine of gases escaping from this area. Finally Maskelyne raised his hand to stop his men from firing any further rounds.
‘Over the side with him,’ he said.
The men drove boat hooks into their transforming comrade and, with a chorus of yells and one almighty heave, pitched him over the side.
Maskelyne watched the sea in silence for a long moment. ‘Now return to your watches,’ he said at last. ‘And remain vigilant. Samal are notoriously persistent.’
He returned to his cabin and lay on his bunk, listening to the ever-present creaking of wood and the steady thrum and thump of the Lamp’s engines. He could not sleep. Something was troubling him, but he could not say what it was. Something all around him, an ambience of unease. He closed his eyes and let his mind go blank, filling it instead with the sound of the ship’s engines.
His eyes snapped open, and he grabbed the com funnel.
‘Mellor.’
The first officer’s reply came at once. ‘Captain?’
‘The engines are labouring.’
‘Sir?’
‘I’ve spent long enough aboard this tub to know how she sounds. And we’re not carrying enough cargo to account for the noise she’s making.’
‘The samal?’
‘It’s attached itself to us somehow, Mellor. I want our sides examined for tendrils – and a full head count. Now.’
‘Right away, sir.’
Mellor came back on the com several minutes later. The head count was underway, but they had spotted samal tendrils low on the port side, amidships.
‘The animal pens,’ Maskelyne said. ‘I’ll meet you there.’
‘Aye, sir.’
He caught up with Mellor and four other crewmen in the bathysphere hold and together they hurried towards the midships deck well. Every man carried a rifle. The great metal bell of the submersible loomed over them, and in the gloom all around stood shelves of machine parts and dredging hooks and nets, spades, harpoons and chains – all coated with whale oil lubricant and glistening black. To Maskelyne this chamber smelled like a cavern at the heart of the earth and the oceans – awash with that fragrance of brine and rock oil and treasure. Their boots clanged on welded iron deck plates and their gem lanterns threw grotesque shadows across the bulkheads.
The cabins and living areas occupied the stern section of the Lamp underneath the wheelhouse, while the salvage hold took up most of the bow space before the dredger’s crane. The food stores and livestock cages were located amidships, in those low cramped decks immediately below the equipment level. All the portholes and storm shutters should have been sealed, as they were every night, although the men sometimes left volver vents open to allow the livestock some fresh air. Such an opening seemed the most likely point of ingress.
His unease deepened as the party advanced along the companionway towards the first of the animal holds, for they could hear a frightful commotion coming from ahead. The goats and pigs were greatly distressed.
Mellor cast a grim look in his direction. Maskelyne checked his rifle, upheld his lantern and then nodded to the men at the front. They took a breath and then opened the door of the hold.
A terrible shrieking noise assailed them. Something huge and fleshy bulled through the group, scattering men to either side. Maskelyne raised his rifle and almost fired, before he recognized the corpulent shape. A pig. The frantic animal scrambled up the companionway away from them, screaming hellishly, its hooves clattering across the iron.
‘Hell o’brine.’
The curse had come from one of the two men in the lead. He was standing by the open hatchway, gazing into the hold. He made no effort to raise his gun, but wore on his face an expression of horror.
Maskelyne and the others joined them.
As he raised his lantern through the hatchway, his immediate reaction was one of confusion. The walls and ceiling appeared to be lined with some organic substance – a dense mat of fungus or the root system of an enormous plant. He glimpsed walls of dark fleshy swellings, all folded and creased and interspersed with white nodules and tendrils and tufts of brown scrub. An excavation – it reminded him of an archaeological dig he had attended on a rain-drenched hillside near Losoto: sodden clay, bones protruding from the root ball of a tree. Moments later he realized just how much of the available space this substance occupied. Except for a scant few yards in front of the party, the entire hold was full of it. It must have been sixty paces deep, by forty wide. And the smell . . .
One of the men retched. Others covered their noses. The stench was of putrescent brine or rotten shellfish mixed with something earthier, like animal blood or flesh – the musk of a menagerie.
Mellor coughed. ‘What was it?’
‘Goat or pig,’ another man replied. ‘No way to tell.’
‘There may be more than one animal in there,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Our guns are useless here. It’s grown too large already.’
The wall of tissue continued to unfurl and distend before them. In that mass of meat and gas-filled bli
sters Maskelyne could see veins and hair and even something that might have been a curl of horn. He guessed the thing was mostly goat. A yard below the ceiling he could perceive an eye – vastly bloated, perhaps eighteen inches across, but undeniably caprine. He shuddered and took a step back, clenching his nose. ‘Seal it off,’ he said.
They closed the hatch and Maskelyne posted two guards.
He met with Mellor and the other officers in the officers’ mess. ‘Well,’ he said. ‘Our stowaway appears to be quite firmly entrenched. Do we have any ideas on how we shift it?’
Jones’s oil-stained fingers drummed the table. ‘Looks like it got in through a volver vent,’ he said. ‘We might want to think about keeping those closed in future.’
‘We’ll see,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Our first task must be to sever the connection between the unfortunate animal below decks and the parasite we are now dragging through the sea. But that still leaves us with the problem of how to dispose of the . . . eh . . . matter in the hold.’
A murmur swept through the assembled men.
‘Maybe it’s edible,’ Jones said.
Maskelyne gave him a thin smile.
They all fell to silence.
‘We could burn it out,’ Mellor suggested.
Maskelyne shook his head. ‘I’m concerned by the quantity of gases trapped within the host animal’s flesh. There’s a risk of explosion. Even if we could contain it . . .’ He shrugged. ‘Such a fire might taint the air in unforeseeable ways.’
‘Then it’s down to hatchet work,’ Mellor said. ‘We go in, in teams, and cut it out.’
Most of the men nodded.
‘I feared it would come to this,’ Maskelyne said. ‘Triple rum rations for any man who volunteers for the job.’
The men used a whaler’s headspade to cut the samal tendrils from the side of the ship. They were almost translucent and as fine as gossamer. They checked the other volver vents but found nothing. As soon as the Lamp was freed, Maskelyne noted a distinct change in the tone of her engines – testament to the prodigious weight of the parasite they had been pulling behind them. Now with the creature gone, they could begin the process of removing its host from the livestock hold. Maskelyne met briefly with the first of the cutting teams, offering instruction and advice, and then retired to his cabin. It was almost dawn and he had been awake for too many hours.