Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts by Alan Campbell Page A

‘Fine,’ he said. ‘Have her. What do I care?’ He snatched up his ledger and stormed away into the crowd.
    Back in the launch, Granger felt like shivering despite the sun. What had he just done? His heart seemed to stutter as it wavered between feelings of responsibility and regret. He clutched his prison ledger in bloodless knuckles. Creedy steered the boat across the plaza, wrapped in a disapproving silence, while the two prisoners huddled together in the bow. Hana held her daughter tightly under a spare whaleskin cloak. She kept glancing over at Granger, a question burning in her eyes. The girl, Ianthe, stared absently across the brine, as though she wasn’t really seeing anything at all, as though the world around her didn’t really exist. She hadn’t looked at Granger once.
    Nobody spoke until they’d left the open water and plunged into the canals of Francialle, when Creedy suddenly said, ‘Big mistake, Colonel. They’re prisoners, for god’s sake.’ He picked up his boat hook and pushed the hull away from a wall with an angry grunt. ‘They’d have been better off with anyone else in Ethugra.’ He let out a sarcastic laugh. ‘And it’s against the fucking law.’
    Creedy was right, of course, and it shamed Granger to think he had finally fallen so low. His own father would have raged and beaten him over it, would have forced him to hand Hana and Ianthe back to the prison administrators.
    But his father was dead. And his mother was dead. His brother John killed in Weaverbrook, leaving a wife and child somewhere in Losoto. Even old Swinekicker had finally gone under the brine. The only family Granger had left was sitting in this boat.

CHAPTER 3
PERCEPTION
     
    Dear Margaret,
    There’s been an unexpected turn of events. One of Maskelyne’s Hookmen spotted me looking out of my cell window. He wants four hundred gilders to keep his mouth shut. Mr Swinekicker needs the money by the end of the month, or Maskelyne’s man will let the authorities know I’m still alive. If that happens I’ll be convicted of complicity in fraud and placed in one of the city plunge tanks. They drown you, and then they drag you out again and leave you to die in the sun. Sometimes the process can last for days. There’s no time to write more. I need your help.
    Love,
    Alfred
    The Evensraum woman and her daughter knelt on the floor in Granger’s garret, their leg-irons chained to a water pipe running along the wall. He didn’t know what he was going to do with them yet, and he was angry with himself for not having thought this through. The downstairs cells lay under six inches of poisonous brine. He’d have to fashion some kind of temporary platform, if he was going to keep them out of harm’s way.
    But Granger hesitated.
    Creedy’s parting words still rang in his ears. Drown them both and say they tried to escape. Do it now and save yourself all the grief later on. They’re nobodies, Tom. You’ll be lucky if you get three payments for them.
    Ianthe stared into space like a girl in a trance, while her mother hugged her daughter’s shoulders and rocked backwards and forwards, murmuring softly. They were surrounded by piles of rusting junk, broken tools and engine parts, all the things Granger had meant to fix up when he had a few spare gilders. The flap across the entrance hatch lifted in the breeze and then sank back down again.
    ‘Listen—’ Granger began.
    ‘Thank you for doing this,’ Hana said.
    He tried to read the woman’s face, searching for some hint of her expectations, but her bruises confounded him. He couldn’t see past them. ‘The cells are downstairs,’ he said at last. ‘That’s what I do now. It’s my job.’
    She nodded.
    ‘The name’s Swinekicker, now,’ he said. ‘Don’t call me Granger in public again.’
    She nodded.
    ‘I’ve got to sort things out,’ he said. ‘There’s flooding down there. You stay here.’ He was about to turn away, when he remembered his manners. ‘Do you