Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Nandi shook her head. 'After Jago was first settled, the island survived as the only nation to remain free of the grip of the Chimecan Empire, although its early years were blighted by the constant threat of invasion.'

  'Ah, then, Nandi,' whined the commodore, 'let's not talk of that ancient terror with its dark gods and human sacrifices. We're well shot of the old empire. They've been dead a millennium and long may they stay that way.'

  'It was your father, Hannah, who dug up a book back in the Kingdom, a text dating from the centuries when Jackals was a slave state of the Chimecans and the early church was driven completely underground. It suggested that the reason Jago wasn't invaded was that the church on the island had developed a weapon that threatened the empire's gods, a mathematical weapon that would have disrupted their hold on the world if the empire had dared to invade Jago.'

  'A likely tale,' said the commodore. 'And where did the man discover this mortal account, in a Middlesteel drinking house?'

  'Sealed in a glass jar found buried in a village in Hamblefolk,' Nandi went on, ignoring the old u-boat hand's scepticism. 'We dated the book at the college to the late Chimecan era, and it was dug out of a farmer's field where one of the first Circlist churches was said to have been re-built after the end of the age of ice.'

  'The guild's archives cover that period,' said Hannah. 'But I've never heard of such a thing inside the cathedral. A weapon that could slay gods? If our church had ever crafted something like that, I think it would be recorded and still remembered by the priests.'

  'Aye,' said the commodore. 'If you want to know why the old empire never took this dark, bleak place, you only have to look at the cannons on the monstrous coral walls surrounding the island and the flames of the Fire Sea lapping against its terrible cliffs. The shifting magma would claim the best part of any fleet fool enough to sail against Jago without the services of the island's pilots to see them safely through the boils.'

  'Now you sound like the grey-hairs back at the college,' said Nandi. She looked across at Hannah. 'Don't listen to him. Your father and mother believed enough in what they found in that book to come here with you and search for records of the weapon in the guild's transaction-engine chambers. The foundations of the Circlist enlightenment were laid in mathematics, and around the edges that has a way of blurring into the sorceries of the world-song and our understanding of the universe.'

  'From knowledge comes enlightenment,' Hannah quoted from the church's book of common meditations.

  'I worry we're on nothing but a fool's errand here, Nandi,' protested the commodore. 'But old Blacky will be true to his word and stay with you all the same, to make sure you don't linger here overlong and singe your fine academic mind in the depths of the guild's dreadful vaults.'

  Nandi caught her first glimpse of the vast depths of those vaults when the walls of their passage fell away and they found themselves crossing a bridge across a human-carved canyon, buffeted by waves of heat from the legendary thinking machines of Jago. Unlike the great transaction-engine rooms of the Kingdom's civil service, these vaults were powered by electricity, not steam. No transaction-engine drums turning down there. Instead, millions of glass valves studded the walls of the subterranean canyon, pulsing and burning with light and information. Only when they reached the floor of the first of the canyon-like vaults did the scale of the chamber truly become apparent. Guildsmen marched alongside a hundred ab-lock slaves pulling a cart heavy with valves, replacements for where the erratic course of the dark power had burnt out the thermionic tubes. Each glass bulb that made up the crystal forest of valves was as tall as an oak tree. Here was the true power of Jago. Not the dark energies of electricity generated by their turbine halls – that was just what it took to energize this incredible artificial mind fashioned out of cathodes, anode plates and glass.

  The annals of over two thousand years of history were stored here; as well as the machines that kept the capital's vaults illuminated and whispered fresh air down to its streets; that regulated the battlements' killing force and pushed the transport capsules along the island's atmospheric tubes. Not to mention machines which held the model of the shifting sea of magma and the safe channels of superheated water which allowed Jago's tugs to navigate the boils outside. And Nandi was to be allowed to access it all. Humanity's oldest surviving library.

  She could hardly wait. Entry into the Hall of Echoes was forbidden to all save the High Master of the Guild of Valvemen, and Vardan Flail couldn't help but enjoy a little swell of pride each time he stepped forward to the entrance wall and the machinery inside detected his presence, confirmed his identity and admitted him to pass through to the dark chamber. Pride that it was he who had risen to this position over all his fellows through cleverness and guile and true understanding of the guild's intricacies and needs.

  It never stayed dark inside the chamber for long. When the high guild master started talking, squares of light would form on the cold black stone wall, images from the memories of the hundreds of guild heads and high officials who had been judged worthy to become valve-minds. Freed from the weak needs of the body and the pain of decaying flesh, they were pure intellect, moving through the transaction engines with the speed of electricity itself.

  'I have raised my objections with the senate,' announced Vardan Flail. 'But they will not act in our favour this time, of that I am certain.'

  In response to his words, lines of illuminated squares shot across the stone, pictures flowing almost too fast for him to follow. There a remembrance of the senate as it had existed centuries before, here an image of a nose smelling a plant. Beautiful, meaningless, wise and foolish – it was like staring at the firing synapses of a brain. Then the chain of pictures slowed and stopped while disembodied voices started echoing around the chamber. The wisdom of his ancestors within the guild.

  ‹Keep her.›

  ‹Let her go.›

  ‹Kill her.›

  ‹Protect her.›

  The clamour grew louder and more discordant, then, as was the way, the suggestions started to slow and finally coalesce into the community view.

  ‹She must not be allowed to leave.›

  'She will be allowed to sit the church entrance exam,' said Vardan Flail, scratching with his left hand at the bleeding flesh of his elbow. 'And she is clever, a mathematical prodigy. In the little time she had been with us she has already mastered every level of instruction set we possess for the transaction-engine core. She will pass the church's entrance exam.'

  ‹Stop her.›

  ‹Fail her.›

  ‹Work her.›

  ‹Keep her.›

  Again the disembodied voices clamoured their way to a crescendo before coalescing into the majority opinion.

  ‹She must not pass the church's entrance exam. You know what must be done.›

  'I do,' hissed Vardan Flail.

  Hannah Conquest must not be allowed to pass the church tests. And there was one way he could make sure of that…

  CHAPTER SIX

  Boxiron's silver skull swept left and right as he and Jethro walked towards the rendezvous, the steamman still uneasy that the note the ex-parson of Hundred Locks had found under the confessional booth's seat might be a trap.

  It was darker here than in the streets that ran along the Grand Canal, the sun-like plates on the vault's roof poorly maintained and malfunctioning as a result. This vault, called the Mistrals, was still inhabited, but barely. Its paving was cracking, the albino stems of cavern bamboo starting to push out into the passages. This was the oldest part of the vault, too, a maze of buildings and narrow streets, the waters of the small canals the pair passed slow-moving and pungent with few working filters to clear them.

  Boxiron and Jethro had to duck lines of drying clothes left drooping in the warm air by whoever still lived in the crumbling apartments. The directions they were following from one of the hotel's porters appeared accurate, as was the observation that this part of the vault's air recycling sys
tem had broken years ago – giving its passages a close humidity that was deeply unpleasant to walk through.

  If the gloom and the dereliction of this area of the capital had been intended to disconcert the two of them, then those they were meeting would be disappointed. Boxiron didn't have much of his old steamman knight's body left, but his skull still had the proud vision plate of a knight of the Order of the Commando Militant. Boxiron switched to his ambient light profile and the shadows around them became a bright green patchwork of clear empty passages and deserted bridges, red targeting icons for weapon limbs he no longer possessed settling over any sign of movement – the scuttling of rats or the brief flutter of curtains in a fourth-storey window above.

  'I have calculated the chances this may be a trap,' Boxiron warned Jethro.

  'So have I,' said Jethro. 'But I have a feeling about the message under the seat. The sort of murderous creature that did what was done to Alice isn't the sort to shilly-shally around with slipped notes and uncertain ambushes.'

  A narrow humped bridge led across the empty canal and Boxiron detected the mass of the vault's eastern wall looming up ahead of them. In front of the wall, a long line of stone columns stood sentry. Not holding the distant roof up, but coiled with steaming copper pipes – bleeds that would, they'd been warned, erupt with fire when the pressure inside them grew too intense. This was one part of the vault's systems that had to be kept in good repair – the alternative being the poisoning of the population from the veins of subterranean gas that bubbled beneath their feet. The steam from the pipes grew thicker, until they were wading through a river of fog that came up to Boxiron's chest unit. This was fast turning into the ideal spot for the out-of-the-way murder of a couple of foreigners.

  Boxiron's combat instincts automatically overlaid the shifting steam with a grid that could differentiate between gaseous and organic movement: green lines running across the dancing haze, then suddenly deforming as a geyser of flame blew out ahead of them from one of the pipes, the heat-shock rippling over Boxiron and Jethro's heads.

  ‹So desperate.›

  Boxiron twitched. The memory, the terrible memory of a mansion burning back in Middlesteel, flames licking out of the bay windows and sparks leaping across to light bushes in the sprawling, overgrown garden.

  ‹So desperate.›

  And there she was, Damson Aumerle, a black silhouette clawing at the curtains on her great house's third floor, transformed into a demon capering in the flames of hell, the flames of-

  ‹So desperate.›

  Old Damson Aumerle, so desperate to resurrect the ancient human-milled butler that had been in her family for generations, so starved of affection that she had come to think of the stuttering automatic servant as her-

  ‹So desperate.›

  – that she pushed aside the grave robbers she had paid to loot the battlefield at Rivermarsh for the skull unit of a steamman knight, an advanced positronic brain to replace the decayed Catosian transaction engine in her beloved friend's-

  ‹So desperate.›

  – the hearth lighter in his hand, his metal fingers releasing the blazing hot iron towards the dry grass of the grounds. Had he done this, had he started the fire because he had been-?

  ‹So desperate.›

  '-to see you,' cried Damson Aumerle, her ancient eyes ablaze with relief as Boxiron raised his arm to see the primitive machine fingers of his hand for the first time. Not his hand. His hand was that of a steamman knight, not this pathetic, human-created simulacrum-

  ‹So desperate.›

  Aumerle House going up in flames. The flames of-

  ‹So desperate.›

  Jago.

  'Are you alright?' asked Jethro, steadying his steamman friend.

  'Looping,' said Boxiron. 'That's all, Jethro softbody. My combat filter is drawing too much power for the pathetic boiler of this body I find myself trapped within.'

  Jethro checked that Boxiron hadn't slipped a gear, but the steamman could feel he was still only idling in first. 'Don't worry about me. Movement ahead.'

  A figure came out of the steam, wearing the robes of one of the cathedral's priests.

  'And there is one still hiding back there…' called Boxiron.

  Another figure emerged, a dark leather-clad ursine. Barely an adult if Boxiron wasn't mistaken.

  'You have good eyes,' said the ursine.

  'My vision plate is one of the few parts of me that is good,' replied Boxiron.

  'I saw you, good father,' noted Jethro to the priest. 'Back at the cathedral.'

  'I am Father Baine,' said the priest. 'I'm the archbishop's clerk at the cathedral. My companion is Chalph urs Chalph, of the Pericurian trade concession here.'

  Jethro drew out the message that had been left in the confessional booth. 'I should have known from the elegance of your calligraphy. A scribe. What makes you think that we are with the League of the Rational Court?'

  'I knew the Inquisition would come when she died,' said the young father.

  'Archbishop Alice Gray?'

  'Yes,' said Father Baine. I nursed old Father Bell on his deathbed, the priest who was clerk to the archbishop's office before me. He told me how it was here.'

  'That we would be coming?' said Boxiron. 'An exceptionally prescient member of your race, then.'

  'No, metal brother, he was the one who told me that all of the appointees to the archbishop's chair on Jago have been ranking members of the Inquisition.'

  That was news to Boxiron, and from the surprised look on Jethro's face, news to him also.

  'I think if there was anyone the least likely to be an agent of the Inquisition, it would be Alice Gray,' said Jethro. 'Besides, there's been hundreds of appointees since the island was settled. How can they all have been members of the Inquisition?'

  'I only know what I was told,' said Father Baine. 'And that the archbishop had a private encryption machine that wasn't like any of the others in the cathedral. She was placing correspondence in the church bag addressed to the League of the Rational Court. You must have heard rumours that the Inquisition was first established here on the island.'

  'Rumours breed around the Inquisition,' said Jethro. 'And I suspect it suits their purpose for it to be so.'

  'Yet here you are,' said Father Baine, 'you and your friend. They sent you, didn't they?'

  'Here we are, good father, at any rate.'

  'Tell them,' urged the ursine cub. 'Tell them what we've found out about the church woman's death.'

  Jethro listened while Boxiron focused in on the ursine and the priest's eyes, measuring their blink response while they recounted what they had uncovered. About how Alice Gray and her ward Hannah Conquest had fallen prey to a high guild master and his terrible love for the archbishop, the premeditated investigation of the police militia cut to fit the cloth of their political infighting against the ursine mercenaries. The sabotaged wall, the sabotaged dome. A young woman snatched by the guild using the rule of the ballot draft. When the ursine and the young father at last fell silent, Jethro glanced towards Boxiron and the steamman raised an iron finger toward his inferior pressure-leaking boiler heart. His signal that the story was true. Jethro crossed his fingers in response, indicating that his church trickery and the body language of the pair in front of them was pointing to the same deduction.

  'There it is,' concluded Father Baine. 'Can you help us?'

  'My friend Hannah needs protection,' added Chalph urs Chalph. 'At the very least you can take her off Jago with you and back to your homeland.'

  'I believe your intentions are good,' said Jethro, 'and what you have discovered sheds some light on Alice's death. It's obvious to me that she wasn't killed by ursks – allowing the monsters into the dome was indeed a diversion to throw the city into confusion.'

  'You'll help us?' asked Chalph.

  'I shall,' confirmed Jethro. 'At the very least, I know a few things about the church entrance exams that will give Alice's ward, this Hannah Conquest, a fightin
g chance of escaping servitude to the guild.'

  Boxiron listened as Jethro explained how the young priest and his ursine friend were to stay in contact using dead-letter drops under the bridge they had crossed to get here, with a cipher based on passages from the Book of Common Reflections. Then the young pair were gone; presumably relieved they had successfully engaged the services of Daunt and Boxiron.

  'Jethro softbody,' said Boxiron, a suspicion itching at him. 'If you had served in the militant order of your people's church, you would tell me, wouldn't you?'

  'I have never been a member of the Inquisition,' said Jethro. He smiled and added, 'Although if I had, I doubt I would be able to tell a heathen steamman who might pass such a secret to his pantheon of ancestors.'

  'I fear the Steamo Loas have forsaken me,' said Boxiron.

  'Bob my soul, but I could do with a few less deities in my life, too,' said Jethro. 'What did you think of that pair's theories on Alice's murder?'

  'I have seen your race commit the darkest deeds in the name of love, but I can sense that you have your own theory on this matter.'

  'I have some thoughts,' admitted Jethro. 'I used to know about passion. What happened back in the cathedral, in the confessional, that was cold. I think it would be good to discover what Colonel Knipe and his police really know about Alice's murder, not just what they've cooked up to find fault with the mercenaries from Pericur. Luckily for us, we now have the acquaintance of a young ursine who I believe might be able to help us.'

  'Then it's time,' said Boxiron.

  'Yes.'

  Time for him to go all the way up to five.

  Top gear. Nobody noticed the figure moving through the atmospheric station. Just another crimson-robed guildsman whose footsteps were lost in the roar of the water cascading down the sloped iron walls of the station. When he accessed the terminal that indicated which transport capsules on the turntable were allocated to which team on the duty roster, it was the most normal thing in the world. Just another valveman checking what time he would be departing to the capital's central vaults, and which piece of machinery he would be overhauling, repairing or maintaining when he got to Hermetica. And when his eyes alighted on a particular capsule and it was temporarily shunted into a maintenance bay, nobody would have thought to challenge a guildsman who then purposefully strode towards said capsule, overriding the door controls and entering it.