Free Gravedigger 01 - Sea Of Ghosts by Alan Campbell

now.’
    ‘Smarter than us, eh?’ Creedy steered the launch around Ma Bitter’s chimneypot. Massive prison buildings glided past on either side, trapping great dark slabs of shadow between them. Behind them, the propeller churned the canal waters into an ochre froth. ‘We should get the last of the Gravediggers together again,’ Creedy said. ‘Get them out here, I mean. Banks would know how to fix up that place of yours. Swan and Tummel could help dredge up stone for the walls. We could go after trove while we’re at it. Get an operation going.’
    An illegal operation , Granger thought. ‘I don’t have anything to pay them with,’ he said.
    ‘They wouldn’t ask for nothing, not from you, Colonel. You could offer them a lay of the trove.’
    ‘There’s nothing valuable left in these canals,’ Granger said. ‘And we’d need a ton of equipment for deepwater salvage: cranes, steel-nets, dredging hooks. A bigger boat.’ He shook his head. ‘We’d be putting ourselves in competition with Maskelyne. Somehow, I don’t think he’d be pleased.’
    Creedy spat over the side, but said nothing more.
    This talk made Granger wonder how the other man’s business was faring. Creedy had grown up here, and his family still ran four or five prisons out on the edge of Tallship. They’d hooked Creedy up with a distant relation, some poor second cousin who owed the grandfather money. Didn’t want him brandishing that tattoo in the family’s own neighbourhood, they said. Not with the emperor’s spies around. The cousin’s place was big enough to be profitable, Granger supposed, but then Creedy had a talent for making money disappear.
    Swinekicker had been kind to Granger. The old soldier hadn’t wanted anything from him but a hard day’s work and an ear to listen to his army stories. He been riddled with brine rot when Granger had first been introduced to him. Maybe he’d just wanted someone to carry his coffin out.
    The launch turned west out of Halcine Canal and into Francialle, where the buildings brawled for space, abandoning the waterways between them in a warren of perpetual gloom. Creedy switched off the engine and took up his boat hook, pushing it against the stonework on either side as he eased the vessel through channels barely wider than its hull. In some places the clover-leaf windows of ancient palazzos could be seen dimly underwater, but mostly the brine was as impenetrable as dreamless sleep. These old drowned avenues of Francialle had once resounded with the hammers of Unmer weapon-smiths and metalworkers, and the chants of Brutalist and Entropic sorcerers as they imbued their creations with treacherous powers. Granger couldn’t help but wonder what strange devices still lay down there, chattering mindlessly to the fish. Even now it seemed perilous to disturb the silence.
    A rat scampered along ledges above the water’s edge, its scarred grey snout sniffing after water-beetles. Granger watched it for a while. Once he thought he spied another lantern moving slowly through the deep. Another Drowned soul on an unknowable errand? If Creedy noticed it, he chose not to comment.
    At length they left the shadows of Francialle and steered the boat out into a wide quadrangle open to the full glare of the midday sun.
    Averley Plaza formed a great sunlit harbour in the centre of the city, flanked on three sides by the grand façades of Ethugra’s Imperial jails and administration buildings. Ships from Losoto, Valcinder, Chandel and the liberated territories of Cog-Ellis and Evensraum reached this place by way of the Glot Madera – a deep-water channel that meandered south through the heart of the city to the open sea. The whole basin teemed with boats: merchantmen, trawlers and dragon-claves from all corners of the empire; dredgers, squid lanterns, crane-ships and barges loaded with reclaimed stone, earth and firewood dragged up from undersea forests. A fleet of smaller vessels wove between the larger craft,