by Stephen Hunt
To Hannah, these signs looked just like the rest of the landscape. They were relying as much on her mother's notes of where she thought William of Flamewall had headed, and, perhaps more worryingly, the fragments of lost Pericurian scripture that had been recovered from his lover's original voyage into the interior's darks. Hannah hoped it was just her Circlist distaste for following prophecy and scripture making her hackles rise every time Ortin urs Ortin pointed at some feature of the landscape and announced a match corresponding to the holy fragments in his possession. How had Hannah's mother felt coming this way all those years before? Unless she had run into the ursks or the ab-locks and not – no, better not to dwell on that possibility. There were so many dangers out here. A storm the day before had nearly separated them, and Nandi had needed to use the flare launcher on her suit's ankle to shoot a bright burning star into the mist to warn the others she was in danger of becoming lost.
After two more days of travel, the dark outlines of the Cade Mountains loomed large on the horizon and Tobias Raffold announced that the expedition had now travelled as deep into the interior as anyone had ever journeyed and returned to tell of.
'Here be monsters,' the commodore announced, miserably. That drew a laugh from the trappers – the hard, coarse men knew that you didn't have to venture beyond the capital's battlements to come across those.
The Cade Mountains formed a circular range that had been reached by explorers from all four points of the compass when the Jagonese civilization had been at its height during the long age of ice. It was a sobering thought that even at the height of their nation's glory, the Jagonese hadn't explored beyond this point. Snow and ice covered the bleak, rocky plains leading up to the foothills, long billowing lances of heated steam marking the presence of geysers and blowholes from deep below the surface. Some small comfort when traversing the bleak landscape – it was as if arrows were pointing to each recharge point for their suit's foul-smelling chemical batteries.
Approaching the mountain range, the expedition's members took the most direct route across the ground in front to increase the chances that they were following a trail others might have chosen before them. They hardly needed the Pericurian ambassador's interpretation of his people's scriptures to identify the next landmark on their travels.
'The Eye of Adarn!' said Ortin urs Ortin, excitedly. 'I say, it must be.'
Hannah raised the magnification array in front of her eyes to get a better view of the incredible sight. And there it was! Hannah wasn't hallucinating. There really was an eye staring down on them from one of the slopes of the Cade Mountains, a single lidless orb as milky white as a maggot, a dark pupil lazily floating inside. The horrific detached eyeball had to be size of a house, a nest of throbbing white fleshy creepers dangling below it, anchoring the thing to the rocks and flowing down the jagged slope of the mountain.
'And Adarn urs Adarn, seeing the horror of what his children had wrought, plucked out his eye and set it down on the slopes to forever watch over the dark lands his progeny had made of their green forests. Then he cast himself into the fires of the sea, bearing the guilt of his kindred no more.'
'The eye,' whined Commodore Black, 'the evil eye.'
'I have never seen anything like it,' said Tobias Raffold. 'That thing looks like an animal, not a plant. But what in the name of the Circle is it living on up there?'
There were superstitious mutters from his trappers, the crude men giving voice to their fears; forebodings pretty much in line with the commodore's feelings. Tobias Raffold cursed his workers for girls and shouted at them to hold their peace. Perhaps, Hannah pondered, he was considering the price he might extract from the Jackelian Zoological Society if he could manage to transport such a uniquely hideous thing back to the capital.
'It's looking at us right now,' said Nandi. 'I swear it is.'
'We have our way,' announced Ortin urs Ortin. 'The Gateway of Amaja is watched over by the Eye of Adarn. Our passage lies below that eye.'
Hannah felt a frisson of fear shiver down her spine at the thought of trekking towards the foot of the Cade Mountains with that terror gazing at them every step of the way.
As if confirming the ambassador's directions, a flight of cawing birds arrowed overhead, heading towards the slope and the sickly white orb staring at the expedition. Hannah cursed her suit's sticky, malfunctioning leg and she forced it forward to follow the trappers. Jethro Daunt's first thought when he and Boxiron returned to his hotel to find the door already open, was that Stom urs Stom and her free company soldiers had used the hours he had been searching for Chalph to circle back and attempt another arrest. But although their door had been forced, there was no sign of Stom's mercenaries inside.
A bone-like crack echoed around the room as Boxiron slipped up a gear in response to the obvious ransacking of their quarters. Tables lay overturned, drawers pulled out, their contents and those of Jethro's travel chest discarded in random piles across the floor. The steamman's skull turned quickly as he scanned the room, working his way through his combat senses, before he pointed an iron finger towards the large ursk skin that had been sent to them by the colonel of police. 'A residual heat signature, Jethro softbody. Someone is hiding there…'
Despite having been discovered, nobody moved from underneath the fur. Boxiron drew closer and grabbed the edge of the hide, still spotted with dried blood from where the ursk had been shot down by the city's defenders, giving it a fierce yank. The fur pulled back to reveal the limp body of Chalph urs Chalph lying on his side. A pair of ornamental duelling rapiers that had been displayed on Jethro's wall had been ripped off and used to skewer the poor young ursine, one through the stomach, one through the spine.
Jethro knelt down and felt for a pulse on Chalph's thick-furred wrist. Much to Jethro's surprise, his touch was answered by a faint throb, a flutter slowing to an end that was close.
'Chalph,' said Jethro. 'Can you hear me? Who did this to you?'
The ursine said nothing, but his eyes slowly focussed on Jethro Daunt, as if seeing him from the other side of the world. Chalph's mouth opened, a stream of blood released, running down his chin. 'I – am-'
'I am here with you, Chalph,' said Jethro, trying to recall what he knew of the Pericurian people's faith. 'I am standing witness for you outside the hall of Reckin urs Reckin.'
'Sorry,' hissed Chalph, the single word escaping through clenched fangs as though it was the whisper of his departing soul.
Jethro shook his head. 'Not your fault.'
The ex-parson waited for almost a minute, holding the unstirring body, saying nothing. At last Jethro gently shut his friend's eyelids. 'May your next vessel pass along a happier path.' The ex-parson glanced up at Boxiron, the steamman standing as motionless as a statue, and slowly made the sign of the Circle over his heart. 'He's moved along the Circle's turn, there's nothing we can do for him.'
'There is,' said Boxiron, his voicebox quivering with contained rage. 'When we find the ones responsible for this. But you know who caused his death, do you not? I see it by the way you are not moving to search our chambers for traces of his killer's identity.'
'Working revenge in Chalph's name will not benefit him,' said Jethro, sadly, standing up over the corpse. 'I'm sorry, good ursine. I believed you would live to see this affair through, live to walk through your home's glades.'
'Was it the free company brutes?' demanded the steamman. 'Did they come here looking for us, only to find this poor young softbody instead? Or was it the guild's thugs paying him back for helping his church friend escape their service?'
The ex-parson of Hundred Locks said nothing and the steamman pulled the blades out of the body and started to roll the corpse up inside the large ursk skin. Jethro's troubled eyes turned to vexation. 'Old steamer, please tell me you're not planning to dump his body?'
'The dark canals of this warren of a city are at least good for that,' said Boxiron.
Jethro walked to the window and pulled aside the curtain, glanci
ng down into Hermetica's streets. 'We shall certainly not just dump Chalph's body. The scriptures of the Divine Quad contain exceedingly specific burial rites.'
'You deny his gods…' said Boxiron.
'His gods, but not his right to believe in them. The Pericurian trade mission should receive his remains.'
'If we are found with a corpse in our rooms we will be handing the First Senator another excuse to toss us over his battlements.'
'His paranoia needs no excuses now,' said Jethro, 'and we have a duty to the living as well as the dead. We have to find Father Baine exceedingly quickly.'
'Is our foe eliminating everyone who has helped us?' growled Boxiron.
Jethro Daunt sighed, popping a Bunter and Benger's aniseed drop in his mouth. 'If I am correct in my fears, good steamman, then the killings in this city have barely even begun.' A mile from the jagged rise of the Cade Mountains, the expedition members were labouring through the tail of a steam storm blown far inland by the howling winds, the heat of it melting the snow on the rocky plain, leaving knives of treacherous ice in its wake. One small mercy emerged from the storm: the waves of billowing steam blocked the ever-watching gaze of the terrible, massive eye halfway up the mountain slope.
It was during the storm that Hannah stumbled unexpectedly across something frozen in the ice – an oval of rusting girders jutting out like whale bones on top of broken caterpillar tracks, the decayed treads so eroded some of them were little more than shadows of rubble in the snow.
'I've seen one of these before,' said Tobias Raffold, his dome, like Hannah's, retracted for a better look, despite the bitingly cold wind. 'Outside one of the empty cities down south. It's a land hauler – like one of our horseless carriages back in the Kingdom. The Jagonese used them to cross the wilds once.'
'Around the time of William of Flamewall,' said Nandi, excitedly. 'Look how little is left of its hull – that level of corrosion puts it squarely in the period we're interested in.'
'Ah, the poor wretches,' sighed the commodore. 'And we're to end up sharing the same fate.'
'Chin up,' observed Ortin urs Ortin. 'We have the advantages of modern RAM suits and rapid-fire weaponry on our side.'
'You've a blessed unhealthy faith in the trappings of modernity,' said the commodore. 'In my experience a foot of sharp steel is your best friend in a tight spot, no capacitor to decharge on you when your back's against the wall, no clockwork lock to jam on your rifle.'
'An easy comment to make, dear boy, when your nation is the sole keeper of a navy of airships ready to pummel all your foes to pieces from the sky.'
'Not in my mortal name,' the commodore muttered.
Hannah looked ahead. The storm was changing direction, the rise of the towering Cade Mountains revealed through the shifting curtain. The baleful eye was still watching the expedition from on high and there was something else revealed at the foot of the slope. An oval of darkness bordered by something that appeared too regular to be a natural rock formation.
'There!' called Hannah.
It was what they were looking for, it had to be.
Hannah pushed her RAM suit as fast as she dared across the treacherous ground until she was standing in the shadow of the mountain, the Gateway of Amaja revealed as a light-less tunnel sixty feet across its entrance. The portal was bordered with raised mouldings around its rim, mouldings of winged cherubs holding hands – children of the race of man alternating with ursine cubs – all of them with curled hair and fur clearly marked against a panel of what appeared to be grape vines.
Hannah watched Nandi retract her skull dome, reaching out of her suit to touch the mouldings with her own fingers. 'It's hardly weathered at all. I've never felt anything like it before – a ceramic of some sort, but mixed with metal? And it's cold to the touch – the mountain stone is warm in comparison.'
Hannah spotted something. 'There's something scratched on it over here. I think it's written in old Jagonese.'
Nandi brought her suit alongside Hannah's. 'It is old Jagonese.' The academic looked closer, mouthing the translation out loud as she read. 'To. Enter. Is. To. Die.'
'A warning from William of Flamewall,' said the commodore, dejectedly. 'Ah, but who among us is wise enough to heed his omen?'
'I don't think it was William that scratched out this message,' said Nandi. 'Old Jagonese used different verbs depending on whether the writer was male or female. "Die", here, is in the female form. I think this was scratched by Bel Bessant – it dates back to her original expedition.'
The ambassador stared up at the line of cherubs. 'And the Angels of Airdia came as a host to bear away all of the dying children that had been burnt by the fires of the last war, for they wore their innocence as their mantle.'
Hannah looked into the inky darkness of the tunnel. All things considered, if their path took them inside the mountain, Hannah was happier to be wearing the armour of the RAM suit as her mantle.
To enter is to die. There had nearly been a mutiny among Tobias Raffold's crew of trappers when he had ordered them into the tunnel through the Cade Mountains. Only the Pericurian ambassador's promise of a large bonus upon their return to Hermetica City overcame the trappers' unease enough to activate their RAM suits' lanterns and file inside.
With the two lights mounted on the shoulders of Hannah's RAM suit throwing twin yellow beams forward, she could twist her machine's chest above its hip gimble to focus in on sections of the tunnel. She had grown up in vaults bored and enlarged by the Jagonese Lodge of Engineer Diggers and the smoothness of this tunnel surpassed anything she had seen down in Hermetica. It was as if the walls had been carved out true by the rays of a sun and then layered with the same strange substance that formed the mouldings bordering the entrance.
Dozens of gutters, alcoves, ledges and air vents emerged under Hannah's beams, signalling that this was no natural excavation. Whether there had once been a source of light along its length she could not say. There didn't appear to be any lantern grates she could see, or anything resembling the LED panels lining Hermetica's roof vaults.
When twin lights blinked into life in front of them, Hannah's first thought was that the trapper scouting the way had turned to signal back to them. But then she realized that the points of light ahead were glowing demon red. Suddenly the tunnel was filled with the lead trapper's screams as his machine came stumbling backwards before collapsing in front of them, a molten hole burning in its chest armour.
'The Angel of Airdia,' the dying trapper croaked.
One of Alice Gray's sayings echoed in Hannah's mind.
Given enough time, all angels prove to be diabolic.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Jethro's heart sank when he saw the police militia standing on the cathedral's bridge. Boxiron jumped to the same conclusion. 'Father Baine has been murdered and-'
They both stopped as a company of green-uniformed militia led the young priest out of the cathedral's main entrance, his hands in chains. He was still alive!
Jethro shouted and waved at the young priest to attract his attention, but when he saw the ex-parson of Hundred Locks standing there with Boxiron his face turned towards the ground with an embarrassed expression. Jethro pursed his lips. Guilt, or something exceedingly close to it? What had Father Baine done? Before Jethro could call out to ask, the lead militiamen hustling the prisoner out of the cathedral had spotted the pair on the edge of the bridge. Leaving the priest in the custody of their compatriots, they came sprinting towards Jethro and Boxiron, pushing their velvet capes back to draw pistols on the two of them. They were soon surrounded, their way impeded by police staffs.
'Why do you have Father Baine in shackles?' Jethro demanded. 'You are violating the rational ground of the church by your actions.'
'If that were the least of the violations here I would be a happy man,' said Colonel Knipe, emerging from behind his circle of militiamen. 'When I heard that fool Silvermain's charges against you I hardly gave them credence. But then upon further investi
gation and with a little encouragement, Father Baine here confessed everything to us. And against the weight of all past experience, it seems that idiot in senatorial robes has actually struck a vein of truth! It would have been far better if you had told me what you were really here for when you arrived, Jethro Daunt. We have enough problems on Jago already – we do not need foreign powers thinking they can send their agents to our shores to operate with impunity.'
Jethro looked at the priest being led away, his face bruised from the local police's 'encouragement' to volunteer what he knew. 'The League of the Rational Court is an arm of the Circlist church, good colonel, it holds no civil power or temporal authority in Jackelian affairs.'
'Oh, please.' The police commander waved Jethro's objections away. 'Save your semantics for someone trained enough in church logic to care to debate with you. You two have been up to your necks in it here in the capital with your Inquisition mischief.'
Boxiron's voicebox shook with barely contained fury. 'Do you call it mischief to try to find out who murdered Alice Gray?'
'You've got the ursk fur of the archbishop's killer hanging in your rooms, steamman, and your justification for being here makes a sorry excuse for interference with evidence, disruption of lawful ballot service, suspected involvement in the death of the merchant Hugh Sworph, failure to declare true intent to our customs officers and multiple counts of espionage against the Jagonese state.'
