Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts (50 page)

Ianthe could sense large numbers of people behind each of the doors. Her inner vision fluttered with the lights of their perceptions: a hundred of them, maybe more. And yet she held back in spite of all her nervous excitement – forcing her mind to remain in her own body. She was about to witness the Haurstaf’s greatest secret with her own eyes.

Briana opened the door.

Ianthe’ first impression of the chamber beyond was that it was upside down. Light poured into the room through huge slabs of glass set into the floor. These panes were all of various shapes and sizes: squares and oblongs and long strips. In the centre of the room stood a tall, thin wooden structure, like a small watchtower or an improbably large high-chair. A ladder on the near side gave access to a cushioned seat at its summit. Upon this sat a young witch in plain white robes. She had been peering down into the glass floor below her but now glanced up as Briana and Ianthe entered.

‘Any mischief?’ Briana asked.

The witch on the high-chair did not reply.

‘Verbally,’ Briana said

The other woman cast a curious glance at Ianthe. ‘Not in here,’ she said. ‘But we had an incident in suite seven.’

‘Who was in the chair?’

The younger woman shrugged. ‘Some new girl. She overreacted.’

‘Did the prisoner survive?’

‘Sort of.’

As Briana and Ianthe approached, Ianthe looked down through the glass pane under her feet. Below lay a bedroom, as richly furnished as any other in the palace, with silken sheets and plump pillows on the bed, Evensraum rugs on the floor. Paintings and tapestries adorned the walls, giving the room a rather stately feel. One of the two doors led to a bathroom, with a smaller glass pane for a ceiling. Ianthe walked over it and found herself gazing down at a huge copper bathtub with a matching sink. The other bedroom door opened into an enormous lounge, also roofed with glass. Through this pane, Ianthe could see a young man reclining on a red settee, reading a book. He glanced up at her without expression, before returning his attention to the pages. To the right of the lounge lay a small library containing a writing desk flanked by bookshelves. The witch’s high-chair allowed her to look down into any of the rooms below.

Briana stood directly over the man in the lounge. She tapped her heel against the floor and said, ‘How is the prince today?’

The young man yawned, but didn’t look up.

‘He’s been ignoring me for months now,’ said the witch in the high-chair. ‘Not so much as a glance.’

‘But you must be used to
that
,’ Briana said. ‘A face like yours . . .’

The witch did not reply.

Ianthe walked across the glass floor. She couldn’t take her eyes off the young man. He couldn’t have been much older than her, and yet he appeared so much more relaxed and confident in his surroundings.
A touch of arrogance, even?
He was clearly aware of the women in the chamber above him, but chose to dismiss them, casually turning the pages of his book with long white fingers. He had a pale, slightly effeminate face framed by an unruly mop of hay-coloured hair, and he wore a flamboyant smoking jacket of red velvet trimmed with gold.

‘He hasn’t been leucotomized,’ Ianthe said.

Briana looked up. ‘We couldn’t do
that
to the king’s son. It wouldn’t be civil.’ She glanced down again. ‘Not as long as he behaves himself.’

An Unmer prince?
It seemed odd to think of the Unmer having a kingdom of their own.

‘The first emperors tried for years to devise a physical prison to contain the Unmer,’ Briana said. ‘No psychics, no monitoring, just walls. They submerged their prisons under the sea. They used chains and cables to suspend them over pits.’ She paced the glass floor, watching the young man below. ‘Nothing worked.’

‘Wouldn’t they just fall
through
the ground at the bottom of the pit?’ Ianthe asked.

‘Oh, they can keep that up for a while,’ Briana replied. ‘Fifty feet into solid rock, a hundred feet, maybe more. But there’s a limit to the amount of matter they can destroy before they get tired. Sooner or later, the fall catches up with them.’ She stopped pacing. ‘No, that wasn’t the problem. The problem wasn’t what they destroyed, but what they
made
when you weren’t watching them.’

‘Trove,’ Ianthe said.

‘They’ll sit for days over a chunk of stone or scrap of metal, running their fingers over it, chanting and muttering to themselves. It’s almost as if they’re praying. And when they’ve finished, the piece of stone or metal isn’t a piece of stone or metal any more.’

‘So you watch them
all
the time?’

‘For their own protection,’ Briana said. ‘Otherwise we’d have to kill them.’ She tapped her heel against the glass floor again. ‘Isn’t that right, Marquetta?’

The young man continued to ignore her.

Briana’s lips narrowed, and all of a sudden Ianthe sensed
something
in the air around her – a reverberation like a musical note too low to hear. The young man in the room below cried out suddenly. He dropped his book, clamped both hands against his temples and rolled over in agony.

‘Their minds are like wine glasses,’ Briana said. ‘Easy to crack, easy to shatter.’

‘Stop it!’ Ianthe cried.

Briana exhaled, and the sensation in the air abruptly disappeared. Down below, the young man slumped forward and held his face in his hands. He was breathing heavily, his shoulders trembling slightly.

Briana turned to Ianthe and smiled. ‘Now let’s go find you one to practise on,’ she said.

CHAPTER 17

Maskelyne was pacing his room when someone slid a piece of folded paper under the door. He raced over and snatched it up. He had been expecting a reply from Lucille, but this note startled him. It was a coded message from his contact.

Maskelyne cursed. His contact had repeated several of the numbers, which meant that any fool might decipher the message without the pass. How many times did he have to tell the man? Even the staff who delivered the messages might easily unravel such an obvious formula. He went over to the bookshelf and pulled out a volume of
Clarke’s Almanac
, then sat down, turned to page 412 and began counting through the script to find the letters corresponding to each number. A short while later, he had his answer.

Maskelyne crumpled up the paper and popped it in his mouth. While he chewed, he decided it was probably a good idea to leave sooner rather than later.

He went out onto the terrace, where his scattered trove gleamed in the bronze evening light among potted plants and stone garden furniture. Reefs of golden cloud filled the western sky behind the mountains. Maskelyne leaned on the balustrade and looked out across the valley. Smoke rose from a dozen military encampments located in cleared areas of forest below the palace. Several artillery emplacements occupied strategic ridges and hilltops, their steel barrels trained on the heavens. A foot patrol was marching south-east along the banks of the Irya towards Port Awl. He filled his lungs with cool mountain air, so sharp with the antiseptic scent of pine, and he waited for the sun to set.

Mountainous shadows crept across the valley floor. A few lights winked on in the military bases, and fires flickered between the trees. The sky grew darker. Maskelyne watched the first stars appear overhead. Cloud cover would have been better, but there wasn’t anything he could do about that. He licked his finger and held it up to test the direction of the breeze. The evenings frequently brought cool air down from the mountains towards Port Awl and the sea, and he was relieved to find such conditions tonight. He picked up the gem lantern from the table he used as a workbench, opened the shutter so that its light spilled out and went back inside.

From under his bed, he took out a brown paper parcel and tore it open to reveal a Guild soldier’s uniform and a specially adapted leather harness. Maskelyne stripped, then donned the uniform. The heavy cotton was lined with wool and fitted him snugly. Warm enough, he supposed. Then he secured the harness over the jacket, tightening its padded straps around his waist and under his arms. Its many pockets had originally been used to hold ammunition, but Maskelyne’s contact had had these enlarged and reinforced with wire. A further addition had been the ring of brass hooks around the base, each of which supported a small burlap sack full of sand.

Finally dressed, he checked all of the straps a second time. The harness was heavy and cumbersome, and the weight of the sandbags put an uncomfortable strain on his shoulders. He wandered into the bathroom and set the gem lantern on top of the cistern. He lowered the commode seat and stood on top of it. From here he could reach the eight chariot ballast spheres resting upon the ceiling. One by one, Maskelyne took them down and fed them into the pockets on his harness, securing each firmly with a brass buckle. The harness began to strain upwards against his chest, wanting to rise, but his weight kept him grounded. When the last sphere was in place, he stepped off the commode.

He drifted slowly down the floor.

No good.
He had to shed some weight.

He raised the commode seat again and unbuttoned his fly. A few moments later, his head touched the ceiling. He buttoned himself up again, then grabbed the gem lantern. Its extra weight was just enough to bring him back to earth. By traversing the bathroom in a series of slow leaps, and by pushing himself along the walls, he made his way back through the doorway and into the bedroom. At the door to the terrace, he stopped and reached inside the gem lantern, making a small adjustment to the feedback mechanism he had fitted inside. The light began to grow brighter immediately. Quickly, he set down the lantern and pushed himself through the terrace doorway. His boots scraped the flagstones for an instant, but then he was rising swiftly into the star-encrusted sky. Up past the palace pinnacles he soared, watching the terrace drop away below him. The breeze carried him southeast, out over the forest towards the army encampments and the coast. The palace dwindled behind him, its windows all glimmering like the facets of a jewel.

But the light from his bedroom already outshone all others, and was growing brighter still.

Maskelyne drifted out across the valley, enjoying the cold, pine-scented air. Acres of dense woodland swept by under his feet. To the east he could see the mercurial ribbon of the Irya gleaming faintly among patchwork fields, with the dark mass of the mountains towering behind. His flight path would take him directly over a Guild army camp, but that couldn’t be helped. He had to hope that any spotters would have their telescopes fixed on the palace by now.