Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  'I assure you that we are on the side of what is right and rational,' Jethro insisted.

  'That is as may be,' said the colonel. 'But you're also on the wrong side of the Fire Sea to be practising your true trade.'

  Colonel Knipe signalled to his men and they locked metal shackles across Jethro and Boxiron's wrists. Boxiron suffered the manacles restraining him, but Jethro knew the police militia had to be sorely aware they would need chains a lot thicker to stop his hulking body from snapping his fetters in a second if he chose to break free.

  'I shall do you and your metal brute a favour, Jackelian. Call it a professional courtesy. I'm going to hold both of you for deportation. The next boat that comes in will find itself with two extra passengers – and if either of you two rascals ever try to set foot on Jago again, I'll let the First Senator's wet-snouts throw you outside the wall and our diplomatic relations with the Kingdom be hanged.'

  'I must protest this treatment,' said Jethro as the militia dragged him away.

  'Of course you must,' said the colonel. 'Everyone always does, and you haven't even enjoyed the hospitality of our cells under the police fortress yet.'

  Jethro exchanged glances with Boxiron, the light on the steamman's vision plate pulsing uncertainly. It seemed as if their investigation on Jago had come to an abrupt end. Hannah ducked as the buzzing sound passed over her RAM suit's skull dome, chips of the tunnel lining raining across her. The trappers fired their weapon arms wildly up into the darkness, the whirling circles of light cast by their lanterns trying to pick out the creature assaulting them. Only the blinking red orbs – its eyes? – betrayed the fleeting presence of the attacker, rapidly skimming over their heads as though an enraged mosquito was harrying them. Except that this mosquito carried a sting capable of piercing the armour of a RAM suit.

  One of the trappers in front of Hannah turned, and she caught sight of the creature in her beams – it was clinging to the back of the trapper's suit with two tiny bony legs and plunging its other two limbs – long piston-like lances – into the suit's battery pack as spouts of green acid gushed out. Attached to two circular wings, the creature's body could almost have passed for human were it not for its transparent skin revealing pumping, pulsing organs within.

  Hannah's lantern beams were only on the monster fleetingly – it leapt off the disabled trapper, leaving the man's paralysed suit sparking electric energy from a damaged spine plate. The thing's eyes were twin telescopic tubes mounted on its skull, irising open and shut to blink out an evil red semaphore at her. Hannah ducked her suit as the humming of the monster's wings bounced off the tunnel walls. The creature could be circling around and heading straight for the blind spot on her suit's back right now.

  Hannah's brain desperately churned; there was something about the way the creature had shied away from the lantern beams, its telescope eyes casting diffuse red light. The sort that enabled it to hunt inside the dark tunnels?

  Hannah tugged the handle down by her knee inside the pilot frame, the handle that would activate her – 'Leg flares!' she yelled. 'Light up the tunnel!'

  Fizzing out of the tube of her suit, a flare ricocheted off the roof well before its parachute could deploy and went spinning across the tunnel like an angry firework, painting the shadows with its sodium glare. Then, all around Hannah came the sound of flares firing, and every shadow in the darkness was instantly banished, the sudden brightness making her eyes water with its ferocity; her eyes that were born to see daylight. For the murderous Angel of Airdia it must have been a different sort of pain altogether, the creature lashing around between the vaults above their heads, blindly trying to find a way out. But not before the maddened trappers raised their magnetic catapults and scored a dozen direct strikes on the thing, the creature's massive, disk-like wings torn to shreds, sending it dropping, mewling, in front of them. Lurching forward, the nearest RAM suit connected its metal foot with the creature's head – the crack from the amplified strength of the trapper's strike carrying all the way through the armoured crystal of Hannah's skull dome.

  The creature was finished now for sure, laying sprawled on the tunnel floor, energy from its long, lance-like arms sparking across the space while one of their flares spun madly around inches from it, illuminating the organs visible deep inside its transparent chest.

  'Nothing like this has ever been recorded attacking the battlements,' said Tobias Raffold, gingerly pushing at one of the monster's limp lance arms. 'Not that I've bleeding heard of, at any rate.'

  'It was waiting in ambush,' said Nandi, looking with fascination at the mangled beast, 'as if it knew we were coming.'

  'That wicked eye on the slopes behind us, lass,' said the commodore. 'It was that eye that ratted us out for sure. They're an evil pair, watchman and sentry, waiting for innocent travellers to enter their lair before slaughtering them and divvying up the meat.'

  Hannah watched Nandi looking more closely at the thing. There were cables hanging out of one of the broken tubes the creature had been using for its eyes.

  'It's a metal-flesher, an animal-machine hybrid,' observed Nandi.

  'Made for war,' whispered the commodore. 'Aye, and sure I've seen many of the same dark arts practised down Cassarabia-way by their womb mages. But this is an ancient thing, Hannah Conquest, as foul and old as that beastly eyeball up on the mountain slopes. You wanted to know what happened to William of Flamewall and his lover's terrible god-creating design, I say it ended here, in the clear belly of that tube-eyed horror.'

  'No,' insisted Hannah, firmly. 'Bel Bessant travelled past this point centuries ago and she, at least, lived to return to Hermetica to create the god-formula. William of Flamewall followed her trail here, and not just to ensure the last part of the god-formula was placed beyond the hands of the race of man. He could have simply jumped into the Fire Sea to achieve that. William came here for another reason, and whatever that reason may be, this tunnel leads towards it.'

  Yes. Bel Bessant had survived this creature. Might Hannah's mother also have lived, her brave, resourceful mother? Her mother had to have survived, she simply had to.

  'Ah, lass,' Commodore Black said to Hannah, 'you're sounding more and more like that rascal Jethro Daunt every day. So forward it is, though against all sense it be. Your blessed scripture talks of a paradise fallen to war, ambassador; if this flying devil was one of its soldiers, then it must have been a mortal hellish affair indeed.'

  'You see the evidence of the ruins around you, captain. Darkness enveloped our paradise, and darkness is all that we are left with. I must agree with the young damson,' Ortin urs Ortin said. 'The fragments of scripture that Bel Bessant retrieved were found beyond here, beyond the angel's hunting ground.'

  They moved down the tunnel even more carefully now, in case there were more survivors from the Pericurians' ancient war lurking in the arches and alcoves. Three destroyed RAM suits and dead trappers lay behind them, sporting smoking holes where the angel had administered its fatal blessing.

  Shortly before Hannah reached the end of the tunnel, the alcoves that intermittently lined the walls turned into full side-chambers connected by corridors that were too narrow and low to follow inside a RAM suit. Rather than explore the passages immediately, the expedition members conferred and decided to follow the distant suggestion of natural light to the end. And there she saw it.

  The expedition had passed right underneath the towering mass of the Cade Mountains, emerging clear on the other side, and if Hannah had lived to be a thousand years old, she would never have expected to find the shocking sight that was waiting for her outside. Hester stood in front of the tug's pilothouse, cursing her luck as the febrile waters of the boils on either side of the craft spouted angry geysers, their burning vapours keeping her rubber scald suit uncomfortably hot. The channel the Jagonese tug was bouncing along felt dangerously narrow, seventy feet of boiling water shadowed by slowly shifting walls of magma to either side. But the channel's increasing narrowness was precisely why
the tug had been dispatched from Hermetica. The great model of molten flows contained in the guild's transaction engines had predicted weeks ago that this channel was going to close, the boils of water squeezed into non-existence, and the Jagonese tug service still had a way station at the other end that needed towing to a safer mooring.

  Well, as bad as the task of keeping forward watch on this maintenance run was, Hester considered, at least she hadn't yet been assigned the lonely duty of buoy keeper. Waiting on one of the stone platforms for non-existent trading vessels that hadn't needed to be guided through the hellish sea since the southwest passage had opened up. How many solo hands of cards could you play in the confined quarters of one of the granite buoy platforms before you went mad? The service ran rich with the stories of insanity that its old hands were only too glad to inflict on a newly drafted unfortunate whose natural inclinations leaned towards fine embroidery. But the milliner's shop that belonged to Hester's mother wasn't a protected profession, so here she was. Keeping watch for any of the myriad tell-tale signs of unpredicted magma shifts that had so recently been carefully drilled into her while the boils spat searing needles of water at her.

  A pod of Fire Sea dolphins was following in the tug's wake, drawn by the fish that the turbulence of the craft's passage stirred up, their granite-thick skins slapping down as they arced through the boils to enjoy their supper.

  Oddly, the tug was drawing to a halt, the paddles on her side slowing their rotation as the door to the pilothouse clanged open. The tug master himself stepped out in his bright orange scald suit slashed with the black bars of a captain – not that his manner ever left any doubt about who was master and commander of this vessel.

  'Nothing to report, sir,' Hester ventured.

  'I'm not here to inspect the watch, tugman. This is where our way station should be anchored.'

  Hester gazed out across the searing channel, thinking of all the stories she had heard of buoy keepers who had gone mad and cut their moorings to allow their stations to be sucked into the flow of magma, welcoming the fury of the Fire Sea as if it was a warm blanket in winter.

  'Check to starboard for wreckage,' ordered her skipper, scanning the bubbling boils on his side of the tug.

  'Nothing, sir. No wreckage in the water.'

  But they expected that, the currents of the shifting molten rock sucked in everything not under power, which was why failing to make the mandatory engine checks before a voyage was a court martial offence.

  'Diving stations,' barked the captain. 'We need to check the seabed.'

  Hester felt a twinge of fear. That was something else she'd had drummed into her – that these floating engines they piloted were safely submersible only in the vicinity of the docks – their craft weren't full u-boats. If their tug's seals failed this far from Jago, the way station wasn't going to be the only thing missing from the service's lists. On the surface of the boils, the dolphins watched the craft that had been flushing fish towards them sink away, the pod's disappointment turning to fear as a massive geyser of water erupted from the surface where the tug had been sinking out of sight moments before.

  One of the dolphins curiously nosed Hester's yellow rubber-skinned body when it came floating up to bob facedown on the steaming surface. The dolphin watched the body and the scattered burning metal that had been the tug rotating around, swirling into the wall of magma, before it noticed the angry clicks from the rest of the pod. There was a painful wall of sound flowing under the water, making their highly attuned sense of hearing pinch with irritation. None of the dolphins had ever heard anything like the terrible resonance before and the entire pod fled back down the magma-walled channel.

  There was a good reason the dolphins had never encountered anything quite like what they were hearing. The Fire Sea hadn't heard the likes of this before, not once in two millennia.

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  Behind Hannah lay the rise of the Cade Mountains and the tunnel's exit. In front of her lay a hundred yards of basalt rubble and rock, then perhaps a mile of smooth dark glassy material, as though a giant glass blower had discarded one of his works halfway through the process, leaving a slick of black frozen surf across the floor. But it was what lay beyond the band of glassy territory that caught Hannah's attention as she stepped out of the dark tunnel.

  The ground there was heavily fissured and in between the vast cracks stood a dense thorny maze of emerald green, almost a jungle, thriving in the heat and clinging to what looked like the ruins of a city. But if a city it had been, the place had fallen prey to some unknown malady – towers a hundred storeys high stood twisted and melted, the squares of windows distorted into disfigured orifices. Half-dissolved foundation pillars broke the canopy of the thick jungle, thousands of stone fingers branching out in a beseeching spread. The place had taken on the look of a sweep of colossal, malformed anthills, covered by bush, thorns and creepers while hissing waves of steam rose up from the land and channelled through its ruins.

  Nandi's voice sounded over the speakers. 'There's more behind us.'

  Hannah turned and saw that the young academic was right. The slopes of the Cade Mountains were studded with buildings – not overgrown with vegetation like those on the steaming plain ahead of them, but still wrecked and mangled almost beyond recognition. The ruins looked to be made of the same queer ceramic that formed the interior of the tunnel, but twisted and distorted as if by intense heat. Rivers of the bone-white material had flowed down to the foot of the mountain as liquid, and then cooled back to rock, before being worn away to become the rim of rubble from which they were currently surveying the scene. Higher up the mountain the structures looked to be better preserved, closer perhaps to their original state.

  'What could melt stone like that?' asked Tobias Raffold in amazement.

  The ambassador swivelled his suit to face the trapper's. 'The wrath of Reckin urs Reckin. The same tears that formed the Fire Sea.'

  Hannah sighed. The ambassador might make a good show of affecting the manners of a modern Jackelian gentleman, but his heart still belonged to the savage deep forests of his homeland, it seemed.

  'A prickly fellow to have done all of this, then,' muttered the commodore.

  'The terrain across there looks volcanic,' said Nandi. 'I've never read of ruins in such a strange condition in any of the texts back in Saint Vine's. The damage doesn't match what I've read of pyroclastic flows.'

  There were signs that someone had visited the foot of the mountains before their expedition, wooden planks laid like a pier across the band of glassy ground, stopping halfway out at an oval circle of ground, almost an island, formed of a lighter-coloured rock than the black surf. There were piles of discarded garbage to Hannah's right, opened food cans rusting by the remains of a fire.

  'A decade old, I reckon' said Tobias Raffold, examining the circle of rocks that had contained the fire. 'Give or take.'

  Hannah's heart leapt. Around the same time her mother would have arrived here!

  Nandi pointed back to the tunnel. 'There might be more inside those side corridors we passed. I'm going to dismount and have a poke around on foot.'

  Commodore Black reluctantly opened his suit and climbed down after her, a long-barrelled rifle slung over his shoulder, sabre and holstered pistol hanging from his wide girth. Hannah pushed open her canopy and joined them while Tobias Raffold ordered two suited trappers to stand guard at the mouth of the tunnel so nothing could slink after his clients, and a couple more to wait a hundred feet inside to ensure that their weapon arms' firepower was available should they need it.

  Hannah held a lantern she had unclipped from her suit, flickering light dancing from the tight featureless corridors and antechambers. She shivered. Was it fear, or excitement at what she might find?

  A couple of chambers back from the tunnel the three of them discovered a pile of supplies that Nandi dated to the era of William of Flamewall. A barrel of dried food – little more than desiccated leather now – and spindly
rifles with intricate engravings on their imported beech-wood butts that spoke of an age of wealth and opulence.

  In the chamber behind they made another discovery, one that made Hannah recoil as her lantern revealed the shape of a camp table with a shining white skeleton sitting at a chair behind it, a silent sentinel watching the open arch they had just walked through. The remains of tattered clothes clung to its bones and there was a splint attached to the left leg. On the table in front of it were a dust-covered satchel and a pistol with crystal charges scattered about.

  Commodore Black picked up the pistol and rubbed its clockwork hammer mechanism clean. 'A Buford and Armstrong lady's pattern. This is a Jackelian gun.'

  Nandi collected the satchel, and Hannah saw the young academic wince as she noticed something on the satchel's flap. Nandi lifted out a number of books, placing them carefully on the tabletop.

  Hannah was staring so intently at the satchel's flap – the same arms of Saint Vine's College that decorated Nandi's own bag – that it took a couple of seconds for her to notice the young academic holding out one of the books to her in an almost apologetic fashion.

  'No!'

  The initials on the diary's leather cover.

  Hannah's eyes ran with tears, blurring the figure in the chair. In no way was this the reunion that she had been planning with her mother.

  'It's all right.' Hannah leant forward to kiss the skull's forehead, but nothing happened: her mother's skeleton was still a skeleton. A kiss to bring them back to life. But all the magic had fled. Hannah's hands were still gently trembling as she read the pages of her mother's diary. She felt a mixture of shock and denial that the bones behind the camp table belonged to the woman who had given birth to her – denial even when Nandi had examined the pelvis and declared it was a woman's, even when Hannah had come to the page in the diary that described the ursk attack on the other side of the Cade Mountains and the wound on her mother's leg exactly where the skeleton's splint had been set. The writing grew shakier page by page as the infection spread and the medicines Hannah's mother was carrying failed to heal it.