Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  'I have the week's accounts, my baroness,' Chalph announced.

  'So you do, Chalph urs Chalph,' warbled the baroness from her couch, the silvery black fur around her large belly undulating as she spoke. Here was a true ursine female in all of her middle-aged glory. So heavy that she had to be borne through Hermetica City on a litter carried by eight footmen. A noble mountain of flesh carved in the traditional manner, and the absolute ruler of her realm.

  Chalph bowed and stepped forward, placing the ledgers between bowls of honeyed fruit on a low table. Her command of detail and concentration bordered on the supernatural, and woe betide the clerk who came forward with errors in the books after having supposedly double-checked the results that week. The baroness took the first of the ledgers and languidly turned its pages, interspersing her reading of the profit and loss columns with murmured demands for the contents of the table's bowls, stirring little apoplexies of anxiety among the retainers on all sides as they competed to fulfil her whims.

  After the baroness had consumed half his ledgers and the same proportion of the honeyed fruit in front of her, she snorted and laid a massive furred finger on one of the line items. 'This charge, my clerk. Three days ago. Six gallons of paint…irregular?'

  'For the walls of our wholesaler in the Seething Round, my baroness,' explained Chalph. 'It was attacked at night and the building daubed with anti-Pericurian graffiti.'

  A sigh emanated from the large mass sprawled across the couch. 'The Seething Round used to be a good neighbourhood.'

  Chalph shrugged and he heard the chamberlain cough in annoyance behind him.

  'Speak, my clerk. Do not leave things unsaid,' ordered the baroness.

  'There are no good neighbourhoods now in Hermetica City, my baroness. Not for the people of Pericur.'

  'Oh ho. So that is the way it is, Chalph urs Chalph? I have ears enough to hear the gibes and insults that are thrown at my chair when I am carried outside the walls of the house.'

  'Things are growing worse in the city as the harvest from the domes dwindles, my baroness,' said Chalph, choosing his words carefully. 'If you travelled without the mission's guards, I fear you might have worse than insults thrown at you.'

  'I see the counsel you would offer me in the way that you stand and the tone of your voice, even though you don't suggest it.'

  'From a clerk who should mind his manners,' hissed the chamberlain behind Chalph.

  The baroness raised a slow-moving paw in Chalph's defence. 'I must know what all my people are thinking, not just those in the house's council. It is the trader's curse, my clerk. The wanderer's curse. All those of your age and younger have been raised in this strange foreign city – and you think as much like the Jagonese as you do a proud member of the House of Ush. If the harvest is poor this season, then we shall just make much of the opportunity by bringing in grain from Pericur.'

  Chalph bit his tongue. Every coin in profit the house made just fuelled Jagonese resentment against them. There would be no gratitude from the locals for bellies fed that would otherwise have gone empty, just more enmity against the Pericurian ambitions to drive the Jagonese off the island and grow fat off the islanders while they did so. Why couldn't the baroness see that she was imperilling them all by staying here? They would end up selling the Jagonese the same oil and kindling that would be used to burn the mission out when things turned to the worse here. Would she treat a pogrom against them as just another part of the trader's curse?

  'Patience, my clerk,' commanded the baroness. 'You will feel the soil of the homeland between your toes before your soul is called; but the House of Ush will not hand the conservatives back home a famous victory by voluntarily forsaking our trading licence here and sailing back to the new archduchess with our tails between our legs. That is not how I will meet her.'

  Chalph did not agree, but he kept his place and held his tongue this time. Better to leave with their tails between their legs than have those tails cut off and handed back to them by a baying mob. The cunning of the baroness and her ability to plan five moves ahead of her opponents was legendary: how she had taken a backwater trading house and allied it to the rising star of the liberal cause in the Baronial Council, parlayed her growing wealth from the new southern trade routes into the trading licence for Jago. But her star's rise had halted with the death of the last reformist archduchess, and her cunning had landed them here – the renowned wealth of Jago a fading, illusory footnote of history. The flames of the Fire Sea had consumed this place and left only bitter ashes in the grate for their house to rake over. Age, it seemed, wearied everything, and now the Baroness's guile had atrophied into whatever blind stubbornness was keeping them here.

  The weekly oversight of the accounts complete, Chalph withdrew with the pile of ledgers, feeling far more despondent than when he had arrived. There was a tiny nagging voice deep inside him that he ignored and then forgot. Which was a pity, as there was a grain of truth in it that he should have listened to.

  Blind stubbornness. Unless the baroness knew something that he didn't. The tea-tray rattled as Boxiron brought it towards the table in their hotel suite. It was all right for Jethro Daunt, the Jagonese food and drink might be foreign, but at least it proved mildly palatable to him. Boxiron had no such comfort. Trying to find high-grade coke in a city run on dark electric energies was proving as difficult as finding the archbishop's elusive killers. There were a few scuttles available from a stall in a small canal-side market that specialized in old imported Jackelian curios, but at a cost that was, quite frankly, bordering close to those charged by the extortion rackets that Boxiron had himself once acted as an enforcer for.

  Jethro looked up from the papers and documents spread across the table and gave a wan smile.

  'Are we any closer to locating the archbishop's murderer, Jethro softbody?'

  'Small steps, small steps,' said the ex-parson. 'The most interesting thing I have found is not among the police files you stole for me, old steamer, but among the more general data that is available from the public records office here.'

  'You brought back many tomes from the city's library,' said Boxiron.

  'Yes I did,' said Jethro, 'and something is exceedingly wrong with the ballot of draft for the protected professions. There are patterns of citizens being called into guilds that make no sense to me. The gas workers for instance, why are so many of their number being drafted when their trade is already essential to the city?'

  'Knowing your race as well as I do, I would expect corruption when it comes to the call into unpopular and dangerous trades,' said Boxiron. 'The rich always find a way of avoiding such duty. You are looking into the draft of the young church girl into the Guild of Valvemen?'

  'That is where I started,' said Jethro. 'But there is much more going on here than Alice's ward being press-ganged as leverage to force the archbishop into an unwanted marriage. Context, good friend, context. If only I can find the context, then all the parts of Alice's murder will start to fall into place.'

  'I shall check the files from the police militia when I return from the market,' said Boxiron. 'Perhaps I shall find something you missed. My mind is still my own, even if this pathetic body is not. It deserves little better than the overpriced second-rate garbage Hermetica's excuse of a coal merchant sells.'

  'Don't worry about the price,' said Jethro, intently sorting the papers. 'The Inquisition will pay.'

  But not, Boxiron suspected, before he and the ex-parson paid a far greater price for being here. Jethro's body twisted, hot and sweaty in the sheets of the hotel bed, while his mind churned, turning over the contents of the police files that he and Chalph urs Chalph had picked up from the capital's records office. The fruits of the steamman's raid had appeared to reveal depressingly little, apart from the cursory nature of the militia's investigation into Alice's death. All the official conclusions pointed to the mercenary force's incompetence in manning the city's defences. As fixed in stone as the weight of the cathedral that poor Alice
's body had been discovered inside.

  Alice Gray. Don't think of the militia daguerreotype of her headless corpse in situ on the cathedral floor; or of her laid out on the coroner's slab, her few possessions spread out alongside her – the archbishop's robes, the Book of Common Reflections.

  She was dead, gone. But there was a wrongness to it more than the death of the only woman he had truly loved. A wrongness to all of this. The possessions spread around her, something was missing. What was it?

  The realization came to Jethro, but then suddenly he was back among the pews of his church at Hundred Locks. Say a meditation for Alice's soul, cupped back out into the one sea of consciousness. Say a meditation and ignore the arch of fur slowly snuffling around the back of the pews. Surfacing, then sinking, as though it was the conning tower of a u-boat. Ignore the cloying voice of Badger-headed Joseph taunting him.

  'You're the man for the job, fiddle-faddle fellow. You're the man.'

  'Alice would have cast you out,' snarled Jethro. 'Just one look from her.'

  'From a real priest?' snickered the distant prowling voice. 'But she's dead and you're the man. The Inquisition's man now.'

  'I won't hear you.'

  'Did you never wonder why that was? Why the Inquisition wanted you to come to Jago, you of all people.'

  'I won't hear you.'

  'You don't need to,' hissed the ancient god. 'You hear them and because of that you need to believe in something, and we're it. We're the ones that went before your godless church set up empty altars to the reason of humanity. The best. The original and we're still waiting for you. Patiently. Benevolently.'

  'I'm not a Circlist parson any more,' howled Jethro.

  'Yet the refugees still keep coming to visit you,' said Badger-headed Joseph. 'I can hear them outside your confessional, queuing. Can't you? And it's your duty to see them. Every last runaway escaped over the border from Quatershift to the safety of the Kingdom of Jackals.'

  'Shut up!' Jethro covered up his ears. 'Shut up about the-'

  Organized communities – long lines of naked bodies – emaciated – they beat me for the last of the gruel when the food arrived – and I thought they were my friends and neighbours – cleaning out the blood from the blades in the machines – my friends – before they took my children away and made them – but that's not the worst of it, father – when they-

  'Shut up!'

  – were pulling sacks of processed flesh from the grinding bins – guards forced them to play on flutes while they took the women inside and – are you listening to me, father? When they-

  'Please shut up.'

  'Why should they be silent?' laughed Badger-headed Joseph. 'They're the sound of the boundless humanity your Circlists cling to. There wasn't much humanity in the nation next door when the glorious revolution started, was there? The synthetic morality machine, snick-snick-snick. Toss another bag of organs on the manure pile, compatriot. And if you run out of coal for the killing machines, there are always plenty of knives or sticks or stones. But then, why waste good sticks on the enemy when you can just toss them outside the walls and let the beasts eat them?'

  'Leave me alone,' begged Jethro.

  'What else were you going to believe in after the refugees came to you?' sneered the half-animal god's voice. 'That horse-shit inside your Circlist book. A little light algebra? A koan or two? Bloody koans, more like a children's tale that kicks you in the head at the end of it.'

  Jethro tried to crawl away across the floor of the church. 'Why me, why?'

  'We're here for you, fiddle-faddle fellow. But we're going to need to hear you say it. Say that you believe in us.'

  'You can wait for the Circle's end. I cast you out!'

  'And in return we're going to do exactly what the Inquisition expected us to do. We're going to help you.'

  'Liar!' Jethro pulled himself towards the altar.

  'That's it,' said Badger-headed Joseph. 'Go towards the altar, crawl towards your empty, barren altar.'

  The refugees outside his confessional were fading; their emaciated, scarred bodies disappearing with each hand's length Jethro pulled himself closer to the front of his church.

  'That was your clue, by the way,' growled Badger-headed Joseph, releasing a stream of warm, foul-smelling liquid over the back of Jethro's boots. 'Don't you dare look back at me – eyes forward, eyes on the prize. On the altar. The empty altar.'

  'I – don't – believe – in – you!'

  'But you will. And much more, too.'

  Jethro touched the altar. It became the headboard of his bed, his fingers clawing the bamboo wood. And as he woke he saw in his mind's eye what was missing from amongst Alice's possessions. What the police should have found but didn't. What had been stolen from her corpse.

  There was a breeze blowing in through his room's open window, cooling the sweat-soaked sheets lying across his legs. It was an artificial breeze, the whisper of the vault's machines. Hannah couldn't believe she was still arguing when they got to the rooms of this great church investigator that Chalph and Father Baine had sworn would be able to help her. She should have risked bringing Chalph along with her to help argue her case, even if the police militia guarding the hotel did get suspicious about his comings and goings.

  Why couldn't the commodore and Nandi see that she had to go back to the guild to serve out her last few days' service before sitting the church's entrance exam? Not because of the dangers of being arrested as a draft dodger, or even for the chance of unmasking the guild's head as Alice's killer – but because Hannah's parents might still be alive. The discovery of the skipper of the boat that had disappeared with the supposed loss of all hands frozen to death in an abandoned mining station didn't have to mean, as the commodore suspected, that Captain Maggs had arranged to murder her mother and father, and then been silenced in turn. Her parents might have bribed Maggs to fake their sinking, then disappeared. Hannah's parents could both still be alive!

  'You can't go back to the guild,' Nandi insisted as Hannah knocked on the door to the hotel room. 'They tried to kill you. If we hadn't got off that carriage when we did…'

  'Alice was killed here in the city,' said Hannah. 'In the supposed sanctuary of her own confessional booth inside the cathedral. Besides, you'll be with me for the last few days – you need my help to mine the guild's transaction-engine archive. And I have to find out what really happened to my parents.'

  'You'll be safer on the Purity Queen,' lass,' begged the commodore. 'Papers or no, you're a Jackelian. We'll stow you in my cabin and let's see which of the black-hearts on this dark isle think themselves big enough to board my boat and take you off. They'll find not all her fangs were pulled before the fleet sea arm was done with her, that much I can promise you.'

  Hannah shook her head vehemently. 'I want to join the church here, not start a war between Jago and Jackals.'

  'An admirable aim,' announced the beak-nosed gentleman with gently greying hair who opened the door to them. 'As a rule, the church prefers to work towards the preservation of life rather than its extinguishment.'

  So this was the man? He didn't look much like an agent of the Inquisition dispatched to investigate the archbishop's death as Father Baine had intimated. But then, he didn't look much like the sort of man that Alice Gray might have once married, either. Ordinary, plain, but with a slightly vulpine face.

  Commodore Black bulled his way after Hannah as she entered the room, Nandi following behind them.

  'I knew there was a blessed sight more to you than you told us on the voyage over here,' the commodore accused Jethro Daunt.

  'I owe a certain amount of discretion to my clients, good captain,' said Jethro. 'Much the same as you do to those whose cargoes you transport in the Purity Queen's hold.'

  A clunking metal creature entered the room bearing a tray loaded with porcelain cups, a pot and a couple of sliced bamboo pieces. So, that was what one of the Steamman Free State's metal creatures looked like? Hannah's reading on the sub
ject had suggested they might be more…elegant, somehow. Or was this creature one of the Jackelian or Catosian manufactured automatics milled by the hands of man?

  'I have made tea, as is the fashion here,' the creature's voice projected scratchily from his voicebox. He indicated the short slices of bamboo on the tray, each hollow tube stuffed with drying tea powder for use in the pot.

  'Tea will serve perfectly,' said Jethro. 'Put it down there on the table, Boxiron, and let us listen to your story, young Damson Conquest. I am eager to find out why someone would wish Alice Gray's ward dead enough to risk letting a pack of ursks into the city.'

  Hannah expanded on what Chalph and Father Baine had said they'd already told the church's agent, reciting to him everything that had happened to her, everything that she suspected. The archbishop's argument with Vardan Flail, Alice's murder, Hannah's enforced guild service, Chalph's discovery of the sabotaged section of the city's wall, locating her parent's research in the guild's transaction-engine vaults, the bomb on the atmospheric carriage, their discovery of the frozen corpse out in the mining station.

  Jethro Daunt seemed very interested in the dead skipper, Tomas Maggs, and had just as many questions for Hannah about the nature of her parent's research on Jago – peeling away at everything they had discovered inside the guild's transaction-engine vaults. Then Jethro cast back even further, prying into the circumstances of Hannah's arrival on Jago, her adoption by the church, what she remembered growing up and her ambition to join the ranks of the Circlist church.

  By the time Hannah had finished, she felt as if a burden had been lifted from her shoulders. The man she had told her story to, though, looked as if his had been increased.

  'Does any of this make any sense to you?' Hannah begged the ex-parson of Hundred Locks.

  'A little more than when you came in,' said Jethro. 'Bob me sideways, but there is more to this than just the matter of a high guild master spurned and a murder of passion, that much is obvious to me. A question for you, good damson, which might at first appear not to make much sense. Why would someone be crawling towards an empty altar in a church?'