Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  'Those people couldn't stay in their homes?' asked Jethro.

  'A couple of thousand in a city built for hundreds of thousands?' The colonel drew a circle in the air. 'There were twelve great cities looping around our coast, connected by the atmospheric line. In a week's time Hermetica City will be all that is left of them. When your city's population is reduced beyond a workable level, things break down faster than there are people with the time or knowledge to fix them. I was in the city of Flamewall when we discovered that the hard way, manning a tower on its battlements. I left my leg behind there along with the graves of the woman I married and our two young sons.'

  'I am sorry,' said Jethro.

  Colonel Knipe hardly seemed to have heard him. 'No, better an orderly withdrawal and the planned decommissioning of Tarramack. The refugees hate us now, but they have their choice of homes in the deserted quarters here in Hermetica City.'

  'Does everyone come?' asked Jethro.

  'Some hide,' said the colonel. 'Holdouts that don't want to be resettled. A few turn outlaw. They won't last long on their own, not when the creatures outside the walls get into a city.'

  'These are the problems you said you would warn me about, good colonel?'

  'Partly,' said Knipe. 'And those that follow as a consequence of it. There are parents here, proud people, good people, who'll thrust their daughters at you as if their children were two-penny bawdy house girls in the hope you'll take them away from Jago – their sons, too, if they thought you had a taste for it. There are others who would slit your throat if they suspected you carried the foreign coins needed to bribe a u-boat man to look the other way on hatch duty. And as for the Pericurian mercenaries that guard us, you've had a taste of the misery those brutes' incompetence can bring you, with Alice Gray's death. This is what Jago has come to, our ancient redoubt of civilization. The world has forgotten who we are, and now it's just waiting for the last of us to forget too. Then there'll just be the ursks and the ab-locks and the other monsters of the interior hunting each other by the flames of the Fire Sea, amongst our broken ruins.'

  'It is never too late to change,' noted Boxiron, stumbling along nosily behind Jethro. 'There are many threads of the great pattern, many paths that may yet be taken by your people.'

  'Yes,' agreed Jethro. 'What about the senate you're taking us to see, what course do those that you've voted for favour in this matter?'

  'Voted for?' laughed Colonel Knipe, grimly. 'They're the main part of what I wanted to warn you about, Jackelian. Jago's other cities may have been abandoned, but their political wards remain, controlled by one or two voters with ancient property titles. Our senators' seats have been as good as hereditary since long before I was born. When you speak to the First Senator, make no promises. Dissemble if the fool presses you. If you are lucky and his functionaries don't get your words on paper, he will have forgotten what he asked you to do by the next time you see him. His mind will have flitted onto a new fancy.'

  Jethro nodded and continued walking, humming a tune under his breath. 'The bulldog as well as to bark may go whistle, just as an upland pup is doomed to be flogged with a thistle.'

  The Jagonese may have chosen to site the bulk of their capital in the warm subterranean caverns along the coast, but the vaults hollowed out within the Horn of Jago followed the usual laws of wealth – the higher they travelled inside the burrowed mountain, the greater the prosperity of its citizens, until the clothing of the merchants and mill-owners became so baroque that Jethro thought it a wonder they could still move under the weight of elaborate brocaded jackets and velvet cloaks. Each zone of wealth within the mountain seemed to have its own lifting room and territory, every guild and organization represented with their routes jealousy guarded, and although the passages' guards would not bar the colonel of the police militia, Knipe led them through the horn using a circuitous route to avoid unnecessary antagonism. By the time they had reached the senatorial levels inside the mountain, the public lifting rooms had become hall-sized, the padded crimson leather of their walls reflected in crystal mirrors and manned by public servants in senate livery. The last such lifting room they rode upwards deposited Jethro, Boxiron and the colonel in a long, echoing corridor lined with busts of First Senators long since departed. Each bust was as tall as a man and created the eerie impression that a company of invading stone giants had been captured and decapitated, their heads left here as a warning. In each of the gaps between the busts a waist-high wooden rack waited.

  Jethro indicated the racks. 'For umbrellas, perhaps?'

  Colonel Knipe shrugged. 'For holding the senators' rapiers and foils. Duelling was outlawed five hundred years ago on Jago. It may be hard to believe now, but our cities were incredibly overcrowded once. Settling matters of honour at the point of a sword was commonplace, and the senate considered duelling a useful mechanism for society to release pressure.'

  Yes, Jethro could see how centuries before, the comforts of a warm city and dome-grown crops would have seemed a paradise when the alternative was freezing on the surface and possibly ending up as food for the ancient Chimecan empire's plate. The memory of the Chimecans' vicious heel on the continent's throat had faded into the annals of history an age ago, and yet still Jago abided. Narrowly.

  A line of Pericurian mercenaries stood sentry over a triangular-shaped door eighty feet high at the end of the corridor. After Jethro and Colonel Knipe had been thoroughly searched and the militia commander sufficiently humiliated – forced to un-belt his pistol and hand it over – one of the mercenaries behind a marble lectern threw a switch and the massive doors were powered slowly open.

  'Your staff of office, too, colonel,' said one of the mercenaries, as the three of them were about to enter.

  'A colonel of the police militia is permitted their staff on the floor of the senate,' barked Knipe.

  The ursine guard shook his large furred head. 'The tradition has changed now, by order of the First Senator.'

  Colonel Knipe's eyes narrowed at the insult, but he surrendered his staff anyway. 'Why not, there are hardly any of our traditions left to honour. One more lost won't make any difference.'

  Inside, Jethro saw where the stained senate obtained its name: the mid-peak of the mountain was hollowed out into a vast octahedron-shaped chamber, the lower half filled with marble seats, public galleries and stands for the assembly's functionaries. The upper half of the octahedron was a ring of sloped stained glass that bore testament to Jago's lost greatness. Some of the scenes were historical, pictures of the great exodus from the continent to the island – galleons trapped frozen in ice while others burned in the Fire Sea, the surviving settlers standing tall on the shores of Jago and surveying the land. Ramparts being built and defended against rolling hordes of the island's monstrous natives. Acres of rainbow glass paid tribute to the height of Jago's mercantile era – docks spilling over with trade goods, food and spices from a hundred foreign nations. These scenes were interspersed with Circlist imagery, the illustrations of ancient koans and parables mixed with mathematical formulae so dense and elaborate the effect was of an illuminated manuscript set in glass. Light chased across the thousands of panes that had gone into each scene, and for a moment Jethro thought he was seeing lightning, but then he noted its regularity and realized it was the flare-house's sodium glare high above them. Beckoning in a world that had laid Jago aside.

  Jethro hadn't known what to expect of this assembly, but it certainly wasn't this. None of the rude, urgent jostling and violent ritual of parliament back in the Kingdom. This vast echoing senate was as depopulated as the city it ruled, elegantly robed politicians dotting the chamber here and there, like patrons arrived early at a Lump Street theatre for a play that had received scathing reviews the night before, scaring away the bulk of the audience. Jethro noted some of them were sleeping. There were more senators and officials standing in the centre of the chamber than sitting down, clustered around something, and, as Jethro drew closer, he saw that it was an ar
chitect's model of a city built on top of a large round table.

  'First Senator Silvermain,' announced the colonel. 'I have the two visitors from the Kingdom you requested to see.'

  'Their presence was requested,' announced a politician in his sixties, straightening up from his observation of the model. He had wild, white curly hair and a hangdog face, his neck hidden by a long scarf despite the comfortable warmth of the chamber. 'Yours was not, Constantine Knipe.'

  The police colonel gave a slight bow. 'As the senate wishes.'

  'The senate wishes for you to go. You and your sly eyes, always watching.' The First Senator pointed to the elaborately liveried servant standing behind him carrying a tall gold staff of office. 'You think you're fit to have a senatorial rod carrier following you with the First Senator's staff? You're not! You haven't the breeding for it – and without the breeding you're nothing, Knipe.'

  The First Senator waited until the colonel had left, then beckoned Jethro and Boxiron to come towards the architect's model. 'We're watching him. Watching him talk to senators who think they can fill our chair. But not when we're cleverer than he is, with free company soldiers we trust. Protecting us. Take off your shoes.'

  Jethro thought he had misheard the politician. 'I'm sorry, Your Excellency?'

  'Off with your shoes, man, and your socks too.' He tapped the round table. 'Sit there and do it. Him too.'

  'I am a creature of the metal,' said Boxiron. 'A steamman. These are my feet, not iron boots.'

  'Capital,' said the First Senator. 'But your fleshy friend here is not, he is clearly of the race of man, we can all see that.'

  Jethro did as he was bid, and as soon as his socks were off, the First Senator was kneeling down, performing a detailed inspection of his feet. 'See, no calluses, neatly clipped nails, the feet of a gentleman – but not pedicured, not pampered, the feet of an honest man. These are wise feet.' The First Senator indicated that Jethro should pull his socks and shoes back on while the courtiers and other senators standing about the table sounded rumbling notes of agreement; as if they had known this would be the case all along.

  'You were a Circlist priest,' continued the First Senator. 'You stared deep into the souls of men. As you can see, we possess that talent too.'

  Jethro stood up from the edge of the table. 'I was merely a humble country parson. But I fear my soles have given me away.'

  The First Senator missed the irony in Jethro's voice and fixed him with an earnest stare, his eyes as glassy as marbles. It was like staring into the shifting magma of the Fire Sea. Hypnotic and dangerous. 'They have betrayed you to a good end. We have need of men like ourselves. We have need of the Jethro Daunt who was clever enough to solve the greatest theft ever to be reported from one of the Kingdom's museums. We can read the future in the lines of your feet, and we see that you have been sent to help solve our robbery.'

  'Something has been stolen from you?' inquired Jethro, remembering the militia colonel's advice not to commit to anything in front of the First Senator.

  'Oh, they are planning it,' said the First Senator, his hand sweeping grandly across the architect's model on the table. 'A conspiracy to steal this away from us. The future, the future of Jago. What is a mere missing oil painting compared to such a devious theft?'

  Jethro was no architect, but even he could see there wasn't enough marble in the Kingdom – let alone on Jago's basalt wastes – to build the imposing boulevards of the city grid laid down on the table. Jethro tapped the table's surface. 'This scale must be wrong; from what I've seen there's not enough space in the vaults of Hermetica City to contain even half of these constructions.'

  'There is no scale for the human imagination,' laughed the First Senator. 'This is not a reworking of Hermetica City you see laid out here, Jackelian. This is New Titus, the first of seventy new cities we are planning to circle the coast of our great island nation. A bright necklace of civilization ushering in a new age of enlightenment.'

  Jethro thought of the atmospheric terminus he had passed, the forced relocation of the last refugees living outside the capital. 'You have the people for such work?'

  'We sense the wheeze of old thinking, of departing life,' said the First Senator. 'You have only just arrived here, but already you are becoming infected by Jago's curse. There is no place for old thinking in our new age. You Jackelians have shown us that, with your airships and your proud pneumatic towers pushing towards the heavens. But your Kingdom would be nothing without us. We passed the torch of civilisation to you when you needed it most; now your nation is to do the same for us. We are sending the creatures of the island's interior to your Royal Zoological Society. They will find a way to breed them in captivity for us.'

  'Breed them?'

  'We already have ab-locks tamed and labouring for us in the Guild of Valvemen's vaults. When we can breed them in captivity without having to trap their young outside, then we will have workers enough to achieve any task, any dream. And what if we should be able to tame the ursks, too? What need then to pay for our Pericurian friends to guard our battlements for us?' The First Senator shifted excitedly between each foot and jabbed a finger towards Boxiron. 'You have brought the future with you, Jethro Daunt, with your metal servant. You have shown us the way, as a man of wisdom often does. We have also placed an order for a hundred automatics with Dentley and Sons. Our mills here stand ready to disassemble them and learn the craft of their production.'

  Jethro's eyes narrowed and he noticed the juddering of Boxiron's large arms growing more violent at the politician's words. Dentley and Sons, indeed. The Kingdom of Jackals' manufactories were less sophisticated even than those of the Catosian city-states when it came to creating their crude simulacra of the life metal, and if the First Senator had known the first thing about how a steamman knight's skull had come to be welded onto the primitive frame of a human-manufactured butler, he would have all his imported metal servants tossed into the Fire Sea when they arrived.

  'Our new cities won't be built by us,' continued the First Senator, oblivious to Jethro and Boxiron's reaction. 'Only populated by us. And how our people will live, like kings and queens, even the lowliest Jagonese commanding a legion of servants numerous enough to befit the Archduchess of Pericur herself. Servants of flesh and metal who will toil ceaselessly to please our every whim. Our people shall labour no more, but instead turn their minds to the arts and sciences, to the enjoyments of culture and leisure. It will be an age unlike any other. A perfect age. A paradise of ease and plenty.'

  'It is a most ambitious plan, Your Excellency.'

  'Only if it comes to fruition,' said the First Senator. 'Empty caverns have been surveyed, great plans – as you see before you – have been laid. But there is a conspiracy here to stop us; those who cling to the old ways that have failed us, those who fear change. We can trust the free company fighters to support us – the Pericurian soldiers know who pays the bills, but they are dull brutes. We must do their thinking for them. But the high guild masters, the senators in the opposition, many of the traders and the city councillors, they are beyond the pale, all of them. They live like princes already and would deny our people their chance to share in the age of glory we have planned for them.'

  'Such conspiracies often have a way of coming to light.'

  The First Senator continued without acknowledging Jethro's obtuse reply – neither a confirmation nor a denial, merely a statement of fact. 'Move among our people, our Jackelian friend, uncover the conspirators.' He winced as Boxiron shifted his weight and loud clunks echoed around the vast chamber's stained glass walls. 'But you must ask your friend to tread carefully.' He indicated the handful of senators dozing in the benches above. 'Some of our ministers are made of glass, too much noise from your servant's iron boots will surely shatter them.'

  Jethro and Boxiron left as quietly as they could, the excited shouts of the First Senator following them out, echoing around the empty senate hall. 'Our new city isn't a stolen painting, it is a stolen fut
ure! Find it for us, Jackelian, find what the traitors and schemers have stolen from us!'

  'Well,' said Boxiron, after they had exited the vast triangular doors of the stained senate's chamber, 'you can stare into softbody souls. What did you see in there?'

  'Bob my poor soul,' said Jethro. 'A blasted echoing void, hollowed out by the fires of Jago.'

  'I claim no great understanding of your people,' said Boxiron, 'but even by the standards of this clumsy body I find myself grafted to, the ruler of Jago is clearly deeply defective.' 'You,' said Nandi, looking at the young girl wearing the robes of the Guild of Valvemen. 'Damson Hannah Conquest! I was asked to try and find you, but when I visited the cathedral the priests told me you weren't there.'

  'I don't work for the church,' said Hannah. 'At least, not yet. I don't even live there now. You're from the same college my mother and father taught at, then, Saint Vines?'

  'A Jackelian girl, here?' said the commodore, surprised. 'You're new to the guild, lass, that much I can see from how your body hasn't been taken sick yet. What's the likes of you doing in the guild? Don't you know what happens to those that work in its cursed ranks?'

  'I know all too well,' said Hannah. She hitched up the crimson robes around her legs, showing a line of red weals forming above her ankles. It looked as if someone had been rubbing at her skin with sanding paper. 'But believe me, I'm not planning to stay inside the guild any longer than I have to. Why were you looking for me?'

  'My professor asked me to make a call on you,' said Nandi. 'I don't think the college has ever been happy that the church made you its ward out here.'

  'My father was an only child, the same as my mother,' said Hannah. 'I have no uncles or aunts in the Kingdom of Jackals, no grandparents left alive.'

  'The college knows that,' said Nandi. 'Do you think we would have seen you turned out to a poorhouse back home? You are a living dependent of members of the college who died on duty. You should have become a ward of the Chancellor's Court of Benefactors, like me. College service, the same as your parents, and my studies and board are paid for by the college. Even if you don't want to study at Saint Vines, you have the rights to your parents' accrued pension and death benefits. Double in fact, as your parents were both tenured doctors at the university.'