Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  It seemed to Jethro that the young academic nodded rather nervously towards the commodore. Whether it was the ruffians acting as porters, the military lines of the freighter, or the declarations of the vessel's master about his honesty that made her apprehensive, Jethro was uncertain. He didn't need his church training in reading the souls of men to know that upright people very rarely needed to proclaim their honesty. Young Nandi kissed goodbye to her mentor and was led away inside the u-boat. The commodore watched her walk away, scratching his thick black beard. There was a speckling of white on its fringes that made it look as if snow had recently fallen and settled there.

  'I've bumped into a couple of old acquaintances I wasn't expecting to see,' said the professor to the old u-boat man, indicating Boxiron and Jethro. 'They seem also to be in need of a vessel.'

  'I am led to believe you have Pericurian trading papers, good captain,' said Jethro. 'Myself and my steamman friend here need to reach Pericur to catch the supply boat to Jago.'

  'Jago is it now?' said the commodore. 'Well then, I can save you the bother of the extra leg. I'm calling at the dark isle before I head on out to Pericur.'

  'Someone's paying you to go to Jago?' said Boxiron, surprised.

  'The college is,' commented the professor. 'We're paying for the voyage and access to their great transaction-engine vaults both.'

  'And a more durable craft nor a more knowledgeable skipper you could not have picked to look after your young college flower,' said the commodore. 'There's not a vessel in port better qualified to navigate the perilous currents of the Fire Sea.'

  'I'm trusting you with Nandi's life, Jared,' said the professor, seriously. 'Her mother has never forgiven me for getting her father killed down south. I don't know whether it would be her mother or the high table back at the college that would be more upset if they knew my assistant was heading for Jago to do this research.'

  'Nobody's sailed deeper into the Fire Sea than brave old Blacky,' said the commodore. 'I'll get your lovely lass there as smartly as if my beautiful boat was still part of the fleet sea arm. And you two fine fellows, also, if you need to reach the blasted coast of that terrible isle.'

  'Our voyage requires discretion,' said Jethro. 'We are travelling on a somewhat delicate matter.'

  The commodore tapped the side of his nose knowingly. 'My discretion is legendary in this port, sir.'

  Jethro Daunt did not point out the contradiction. 'And when will your u-boat sail, good captain?'

  'As soon as my cargo and last passenger turns up, but I can see them both now. One having caught a lift with the other, so to speak. We should be away directly with the tide.'

  Out on the docks, threading their way through the fishermen spreading their drying nets, four flatbed wagons drawn by shire horses rattled into sight, their beds piled with wooden crates and a single passenger. The passenger was ursine, a large ginger male wearing Jackelian clothes – looking for all the world as if he might be a country squire out for a day's hunting with his hounds. All he lacked was a birding rifle and beagles to complete the picture.

  'Ah now,' waved the commodore as the carts halted in front of the Purity Queen and the bear-like figure on the back jumped down, landing on a fine pair of knee-length riding boots. The Pericurian moved through the crowd of stevedores coming over to haul the crates down to the u-boat's hold, and walked towards the commodore. 'I received your baggage yesterday, so I thought you might be arriving in a grand old fashion this morning, Ambassador Ortin, rather than helping keep your cargo safe.'

  The ursine creature blinked in surprise and adjusted a monocle resting in front of his left eye. 'Technically speaking, dear boy, I am not presently an ambassador, as I no longer hold the position here in the Kingdom and haven't yet been sworn in on Jago. A point the new incumbent at the Jackelian embassy was only too keen to underline by ensuring my airship berth to Spumehead was cancelled and replaced by a cheap narrowboat ticket.'

  'Well, however you've arrived Mister Ortin urs Ortin, you're here now right enough and I'll make good on my contract to deliver you to your new posting. Just as soon as the transaction-engine parts your arse was so kindly keeping warm are loaded on board my boat.'

  The commodore barked a flurry of orders at the stevedores shouldering the cargo towards his u-boat, and then with a nod to the professor, Jethro and Boxiron, he led the Pericurian diplomat across to his vessel.

  Professor Harsh leant in close to speak quietly to Jethro. 'I won't ask what you'll be doing on Jago, but I would be grateful if you kept an eye out for Nandi on the island.'

  'In addition to the eyes of the good commodore?'

  'I trust Jared Black,' said the professor. 'That is, I trust him well enough to guard my spine when sabres are drawn and pistols are pulled, but the commodore has an unhealthy knack for getting into mischief and you're not the only ones trying to arrange a discreet passage to Jago.'

  'Your young assistant's work, good professor, it isn't the sort of archaeology that involves jewelled artefacts and murderous dispute over precisely who has the rights to secure them?'

  'Nandi will simply be trawling Jago's records in their transaction-engine vaults,' said the professor. 'But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.'

  'So it can,' agreed Jethro.

  After the academic had extracted a promise of safe-keeping for her assistant and was walking away, the transaction-engine drum in the centre of Boxiron's chest began to rumble as it turned – usually a sign that the steamman was drawing down extra processing power for his ruminations.

  'What are you thinking?' asked Jethro.

  'Much the same as you, I expect,' answered the steamman.

  'Yes,' Jethro hummed thoughtfully.

  That the good professor knew their business on Jago must be an investigation, and if she was asking for the help of Jethro Daunt and Boxiron, it was only because she suspected her assistant's dealings was likely to put her in even more danger than consorting with the pair of them.

  Bob his soul, but not all the truth of the academic's business on Jago had been told here.

  CHAPTER FOUR

  Hannah was about to go into the archbishop's chancellery when a monk stopped her with a message. 'Your friend Chalph is waiting for you outside on the north bridge.'

  'Thank you, father. Could you tell him I'll be finished here in a little while?'

  He nodded and departed as she entered the office. It was still strange seeing someone else sitting behind Alice's desk, even if Father Blackwater – the head of the testing rooms – was only acting as their senior priest until another archbishop was appointed. A fiercely clever man who hid his true thoughts behind the odd veiled comment or dry remark, Father Blackwater was a Jagonese priest through and through. Which was precisely why the Rational Synod would never confirm him to the archbishop's post he obviously thought he deserved.

  Hannah entered and took the seat where she had sat opposite Alice Gray so many times over the years. Meeting an ursk wearing the robes of a priest would not have seemed as alien to her.

  'I have mixed blessings to report,' said the father. 'As I feared, the senate will not allow me to oppose your draft ballot. I am not regarded as having the seniority to even speak on the floor on your behalf.'

  Her heart sank. 'Then I am finished.'

  'Not yet, my dear,' said the priest. 'On the other side of the equation, we have found this-' he flourished an envelope '-among the personal effects of the late archbishop. It stipulates that in the event of her demise preceding your majority, you receive her grant of authority to sit our entrance exam early.'

  Her waiver! Alice had granted her dispensation after all. Hannah was overwhelmed, the grief over losing her guardian momentarily lifted. But…Hannah did the calculation in her head, working out the date of the next church board examination. 'I'll already be drafted into the guild's service by then, father!'

  'We can't nullify the guild's draft order,' said Father Blackwater, 'but Vardan Flail can't nullify a wr
itten waiver from the archbishop that precedes your ballot notification, either. Her letter was written weeks before your name was ever posted on the draft ballot.'

  Weeks before? It was as Alice Gray's clerk had said: almost as if she had been preparing for her own death. How many run-ins had there been between Vardan Flail and Alice in the previous months that Hannah hadn't been around to witness, before Hannah's name was 'coincidently' teased out at 'random' for entry into the lists of the Guild of Valvemen?

  Father Blackwater pointed to the chess set waiting lonely on the table in the corner of the chancellery, and Hannah remembered the gentle snorts that Alice would make while planning her next move. 'Stalemate, Hannah. You will unfortunately be in service with the guild for a while, but the guild cannot forbid you to take our tests, and if you pass, you will be free of the curse of the draft for the rest of your life. You will be part of the church.'

  He said the words with satisfaction, as if there could be no higher honour. A couple of days ago Hannah would have agreed with him; that life had seemed almost inevitable to her. But with the death of Alice Gray, the cathedral's bright stained glass seemed so much dimmer, the formulae and lessons of the Circlist teachings mere parroting of the echo of great thinking done by minds long since dead. In their stead grew the cold hard seed of something else planted in a ground far more fertile than the volcanic basalt outside the capital's battlements. Vengeance, vengeance and the fell craving for it.

  To Hannah's surprise, vengeance could be like one of the mathematical puzzles of synthetic morality. You could lose yourself considering it, studying its shape. Vengeance could become as much an obsession as some of the paradoxes that had driven church priests insane when pondered for too long. There was a beauty in vengeance's pursuit and gratification to be gained in solving the riddle of the murder. Gratification that would climax in Vardan Flail being led by a hooded executioner across Snapman's Bridge and made to stand on the trapdoor while the crowds gathered on each side of the black canal.

  It took a heinous crime to earn a death sentence that wasn't commuted to banishment or life indenture by the senate judiciary, but Hannah was determined to see that Vardan Flail was one of the few that received it. And if she had to serve that twisted monster in the guild's own vaults, then that would just take her a step or two closer to realizing her new goal. Jethro Daunt pulled himself up the final few rungs of the u-boat's conning tower and emerged onto the observation deck, almost immediately finding the goggles of his rubber scald suit misting up from the heat of the Fire Sea.

  Standing against the rail wearing a battered greatcoat and holding a telescope was Commodore Black, his black-bearded face tinged orange from the glow of the magma. 'Come up for your turn of fresh air, Mister Daunt?'

  'That I have, good captain, and I'm already regretting not bringing my coat.'

  It was a curious, unhealthy mix outside, the intense waves of heat from the Fire Sea's magma interspersed with jabbing arrows of a freezing artic wind from the north. Too much exposure to this was likely to bring any passenger – or sailor – down with a fever.

  'A savage, strange sea,' said the commodore. 'But old Blacky has got used to it. I've sailed further and deeper inside it than any other skipper, and left many a good friend's bones on the shores of its wild islands while doing so.'

  'I'm hoping for a rather more pedestrian voyage.' Jethro looked down at the boiling waters their u-boat was pushing through on the surface – boils in nautical parlance – searing, shifting channels of water veined through the bubbling magma. He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a paper bag filled with striped sweets. 'Would you care for a Bunter and Benger's aniseed drop, good captain?'

  Commodore Black put aside the telescope he had been using to sweep the burning waves. 'I won't be troubling you for one of those wicked things. You know what they put in them…?'

  'Defamation on the part of their commercial rivals, I am certain.'

  'I'll stick to eating what goes well with a drop of wine. No need to suck those blessed things for your nerves, Mister Daunt – a nice boring voyage is what you'll get aboard the Purity Queen. Jago barely lies inside the rim of the Fire Sea and The Garurian Boils here are settled waters. The magma keeps to its course and so do the boils we sail through.' Commodore Black pointed to the north. 'One hundred and seventy miles ahead is a buoy station of the Jagonese tug service. That's when the magma gets unpredictable and choppy, but the island's sailors will lead us through the safe channels – for a price.'

  Jethro stared where the old u-boat man was pointing, but all he could see from the conning tower was a burning ocean of red seamed by black cooling rock, the passages of superheated water they were following marked out by curtains of rising steam.

  'You've never sailed the Fire Sea before, Mister Daunt? Never been to Jago. I can see it in the way the flames are casting a mortal spell on your gaze.'

  'My business has occasionally seen me travel across the nations of the continent,' said Jethro, 'but never over the ocean.'

  'Yes, now, your discreet business,' said the commodore, teasingly. 'But you've travelled widely enough to know that a master of a boat is rightly addressed as captain, be they an admiral or a commodore.'

  A cracking sounded in the distance and a geyser of molten rock and gas fumed into the air, adding to the chemical stench of the place – sulphur, by its reek.

  'Someone told me that at the docks,' Jethro dissembled. 'An ocean this wild, it seems hard to believe that the people on Jago can predict where the ebbs and flows of the magma and the passages of water through them will lie within an hour's time, let alone days and weeks ahead. It's a wonder anyone can follow the boils back to Jago.'

  'Ah now,' said the commodore. 'It's an easy enough matter predicting a safe passage when you have caverns filled with mortal clever transaction engines. Machines that could give King Steam a run for his money when it comes to the thinking game. And when we get to the buoy station and the master there summons up a tug to see us safe to their black shores, we'll no doubt pay for every penny of their engine room's power and the model of the Fire Sea they have sealed up down there with them.'

  'That will be a sight to see on Jago, good captain,' said Jethro. 'Cities where they have actually tamed the wild power.'

  'Electricity,' said Commodore Black. 'Yes, nowhere else in the world, only on Jago.' He pointed to the currents of magma sliding past the watery channel of the boils they were navigating. 'Something to do with all that blessed molten iron swirling around out there, or so a fine steamman friend of mine would have it.'

  'You sound like you don't approve, good captain.'

  'I've used the wild energy to tickle the armour of wicked savages trying to break their way into my hull and had cause to thank it,' said the commodore. 'But for more practical purposes I'll take the thump of good honest steam power, the hum of high-tension clockwork and the burn of a little expansion-engine gas any day of the week. The kind of dark power the Jagonese use is as good for your blessed health as taxes.'

  Jethro nodded. The commodore was as superstitious as most u-boat men. It was small wonder when a small metal bubble of air was all that stood between them and death under the darks of the ocean. The Circlist church always did have its work cut out in the harbour towns of the Kingdom. U-boat men were almost as bad as airship sailors with their strange rituals and their profession's cant.

  He raised a hand to shield his hair from a few rogue cinders drifting across from a fire plume that looked to be erupting ten miles to starboard. It was no wonder that no airship could cross above the Fire Sea intact – the combination of plumes, wild thermals and fierce artic storms made an aerial crossing a one-way bet: with a grinning skeleton drawn on the reverse of every card in the deck. Jethro remembered reading about a few foolhardy Jack Cloudies who were never seen again after attempting the voyage in the early days of Jackelian aviation.

  Commodore Black pressed the telescope back to the brass goggles protecting his face and Jet
hro looked on as the whistle of a magma fountain off their starboard became the whisper of Badger-headed Joseph. 'The blood, the blood of the earth is your sea.'

  Jethro gritted his teeth. The old gods never normally bothered him during the day, only within his dreams. He wiped the steam off his goggles and unnoticed by the commodore, stepped back and rubbed at the side of his head. This was his choice, sailing to Jago. His. Not the Inquisition's, not theirs. Only his. An invitation to dinner at the captain's table wasn't something that Jethro expected, but perhaps for Commodore Black it mitigated the guilt he felt at the extortionate rates he was charging his passengers to travel through the inhospitable currents of the Fire Sea. Although looking at the square navigation table in the captain's cabin that had been pressed into service for dinner, Jethro suspected the location of their supper had more to do with the wishes of the coarse men and woman that served as the u-boat's crew – desiring to make free with their ribald table manners in the mess, rather than feeling they had to be on good behaviour in front of the 'cargo'.

  The Pericurian ambassador-in-transit – Ortin urs Ortin – demonstrated the highest manners at their table, every facet of Jackelian etiquette smoothly performed in almost mocking counterpoint to Boxiron's jerky shovelling of high-grade boiler coke into his furnace trap and the noisy siphoning of the water the steamman needed to feed his boiler heart. The young academic Nandi Tibar-Wellking was a fairly neutral observer of the two polar extremes at the table, but recalling his own time in the company of her professor, Jethro rightly guessed that Nandi had been well taught and exposed to the intricacies of dining at foreign tables. If the cabin boy acting as steward had served them sheep's eyes and fried scorpion tails rather than their usual fare of scrambled duck eggs, Spumehead rock crab and pot-roasted lamb, he doubted she would have even blinked.

  Commodore Black's appetite tipped the table's balance back towards the ribald; he ripped apart the meats with gusto and matched Boxiron's siphoning of water with an equal capacity for sweet wines, jinn and beer. If the boat's master had an excuse for his thirst, it was that even with the Purity Queen's cooling systems running on maximum, it was hard not to drip sweat onto their food as they maintained their course through the outer boils of the Fire Sea.