Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Hannah's mother, the redoubtable Doctor Jennifer Conquest, must have been feverish even as she arrived where the expedition was now camped. She described how she'd made friends with a gentle translucent flying creature in the tunnel under the mountain, and there were long rambling pages written to her husband whom she must have known was dead. More details on how she had found William of Flamewall's remains on something she called Bloodglass Island, and then burnt the priest's papers and notes so no one else could get them; her description of how the third part of the god-formula had not been among William's possessions – the one thing she could have used to rise above her mortally fatal affliction. After that, the diary was filled with pages and pages of mathematics. Mad mathematics, symbols that Hannah didn't recognize blended with formulae that seemed to run contrary to any of the accepted rules she had been taught. At first Hannah thought her mother must have been trying to recreate the third section of the god-formula herself, but as bizarre as the formulae in her mother's diary were, their structure didn't seem to match either of the first two parts of the god-formula she had seen. Had the fever sent her mother insane? Later, the lines of mathematics were interspersed with descriptions of songs of siren beauty, her mother's hand getting scratchier and scratchier. They seemed to make a sense – but only in the way that you could gaze at abstract patterns on wallpapers and start to see meaningful pictures as you let your mind wonder.

  Nandi came around the corner, the glow of her lantern announcing her presence long before she appeared. 'It is done. Do you want to see where we buried her?'

  'That wasn't my mother,' said Hannah. 'They were just the clothes she wore, is all.' Hannah realized that the young academic had probably interpreted what she just said as a Circlist homily. 'No, I mean this is her.' Hannah raised the diary. 'What she believed in. What she thought. Not the dust that's left behind.'

  Nandi lifted the satchel she had found. 'I've been looking through your mother's other notebooks. There are more complete descriptions of what she and your father discovered in the guild's transaction-engine rooms – material she chose not to compress into the Joshua's Egg she hid for us. Your mother believed that William of Flamewall came here to destroy something.'

  'Not the missing section of the god-formula,' said Hannah. 'William was a priest of the rational orders; the ritual of coming all the way out here to where his lover had preceded him to burn the last piece of Bel's work wouldn't have appealed to him.'

  'Well, Bel Bessant retrieved her fragments of Pericurian scripture from here, but the Circle knows where or how. I've just returned from climbing up to the buildings on the slopes above us – this place is an archaeologist's worst nightmare. Just empty rooms, thousands of them, twisted out of shape. Whatever was hot enough to melt stone turned everything to ashes here. No furniture, no bones, no pottery, no doors or windows. Certainly no manuscripts.'

  'The city beyond the glass plain might be in better condition.'

  'No,' said Nandi. 'I've studied it through my telescope; if anything, it's in a far worse state. It was closer to whatever killed this civilization and there's a whole new ecos clinging to the steam fissures across there. Nothing destroys a good dig site like weeds and creepers.'

  There was a distant ringing from camp, a dinner call being sounded.

  'Do you want to eat?'

  Hannah shook her head in answer.

  'Finding your mother's bones makes it real, doesn't it? The fact that she's dead.'

  'I don't want to talk about her.'

  'When my mother told me my father was dead, I never believed it. It never felt real to me – I would always catch myself expecting him to come through the door to our home.'

  'How did your father die?' asked Hannah.

  'Much as your mother did,' said Nandi. 'About the business of St. Vines' college. He was on an unauthorized dig in Cassarabia, and when the caliph's soldiers found him there, they shot him as a grave robber.'

  'Did you ever stop thinking about him?'

  'Never,' said Nandi. 'But when I was older, the head of the school of archaeology took me down into the southern desert to show me where she had buried his body. I still think about him, but now I know he won't be coming through the door.'

  'If we find the last piece of the god-formula here we could use it to bring him back…'

  'What would such a thing be but a poorly formed simulacra of how I remembered my father?' Nandi tapped her head. 'And he is already inside my mind like that now, in how I remember and honour him.'

  'I think it would be more than that,' said Hannah. 'If you had the powers of a god.'

  'My father had a near-perfect memory, crammed full of stories which I used to love to hear,' said Nandi. 'One of his favourites he would tell me many times. It's from one of the Circlist books of koans: The Koan of the Wondrous Thing. Have you heard it?'

  Hannah shook her head.

  'Then I shall tell it to you,' said Nandi. 'There was a young boy who was said to have been born enlightened, although many did not believe it and continually tested him. They would try to goad him by filling his shoes with crumpled pages torn out of the Book of Common Reflections.'

  'There's a few like that in the cathedral school here,' said Hannah.

  'Back at St. Vines, also,' said Nandi. 'Anyway, the day came when the boy had to attend the funeral of his grandmother and the Circlist vicar leading the service noticed that of all the mourners there, the boy was the only one not crying. So the vicar approaches the boy after the service and says to him, "Lad, why do you not cry? Did you not love your grandmother?"'

  'And what did the boy say?' asked Hannah.

  'He said, "Of course I loved her, but this is a wondrous thing." The vicar was naturally very curious about this and asked the boy to explain. The boy gave this explanation: if his grandmother had not died, she would have seen her sons and daughters die before her. If she had not died she would also have had to see her grandchildren die before her and borne the pain of that. She moved along the Circle in harmony with the natural order of the universe and that is a wondrous thing.'

  Hannah nodded in understanding. At its core, Circlism was just a humanist way to underscore the mathematical truth that reality's strings were so closely woven together that there was no difference between one person's life and another's. She and Nandi really were the same, both here to find the same thing, their fates intertwined and their future bound up in the same outcome. People are all you have, that was another of Alice's favourite sayings. Her mother had come here alone, but Hannah hadn't. She was with a young woman so alike they might have been sisters; there were the trappers and the commodore and Ambassador Ortin to watch over them. Her mother's essence might have been cupped back into the one sea of consciousness, but she lived on in Hannah, and her daughter wasn't done yet. Not by a long chalk.

  'I like your father's story. But there is one thing – Koans normally make three points,' said Hannah. 'That one only had two. It feels as if there is something missing.'

  'Yes,' said Nandi. 'But that's the thing about the death of someone you loved. It always leaves something missing.'

  Hannah's lips twisted into a small smile. And that too, perhaps, was a wondrous thing.

  Hannah and Nandi left the tunnel chambers and emerged into the open. The expedition had fanned their RAM suits facing outwards towards the island's newly discovered interior. It was the first time since they had left the battlements behind that their trapper guides had felt secure enough to pitch tents and sleep outside of the closed but safe confines of their suit armour. And little wonder. Hannah watched as a red cord was pegged in a wide circle around the camp. Then the trappers uncrated and assembled a portable transaction engine along with a series of brass boxes studded with flared trumpets that looked like steammen hearing manifolds, carefully placing the boxes down just inside the perimeter of the red line. Finally, they connected the RAM suits, transaction engine and trumpet boxes together with long black cables.

  'You don't mov
e beyond the red cord,' Tobias Raffold instructed Hannah, the commodore, Nandi and the ambassador, 'and here's for why…'

  He tossed a rock beyond the line and the trumpet-studded boxes made a series of whistling noise like kettles, the nearest RAM suit swivelling automatically, its magnetic catapult hissing once while the rock the trapper had tossed erupted into a shower of dust mid-air.

  'Anything bigger than a gnat comes towards us night or day, and the suits will put a disk right through its bleeding heart.'

  Commodore Black stared uncomfortably at the blinking valves on the Jagonese transaction engine controlling their suits' weapon arms. 'You'll be trusting our safety to that blinking box of lights?'

  'What am I, new to this?' retorted the trapper. 'We still post manual sentries, two at a time. But when you're sleeping outside your suit, you'll be glad you have old Bessie there as an extra pair of eyes.'

  Grumbling, the commodore accepted the presence of the machine picket. Hannah followed the ambassador's gaze out across the glass plain to the jungle-swallowed city. 'Is that the city of your scriptures?'

  Ortin urs Ortin polished his monocle, his eyes glinting sadly. 'I don't think any of us have found what we were expecting here, dear girl.'

  'No.'

  Hannah ignored the newly turned ground marked with a circle of boulders where her mother's bones lay and went inside her tent to try to puzzle some sense out of the pages of mathematics in the diary.

  Her mother's diary and the mind she had left Hannah were all the legacy she needed. When sleep came for Hannah, it was a hot claustrophobic thing. She was tumbling through waves of alien numbers until Tobias Raffold came into view and started catching the numbers and throwing them beyond the red cord, where rotating shards of deadly steel burst them into black dust.

  'What are you doing?' she demanded.

  'This is the only thing we're going to trap this trip, girl,' said Raffold. 'And they're no good to me. You can't put an equation in a zoo, or skin it for profit.'

  She tried to get him to stop, but he only laughed all the harder, throwing more numbers into the RAM suits' arc of fire. Then the tenor of the dream changed, a bright light expanding from the hail of falling formulae, clearing away the darkness – burning and burning – and out of the fiery nimbus Hannah saw the shape of a figure resolving, a familiar silhouette.

  Hannah held up a hand to protect her eyes from the glare. 'Chalph, is that you?'

  'It is,' answered the familiar voice. 'I am in the great forest of Azrar-bur, waiting for Reckin urs Reckin to lead me to his glades.'

  'But,' Hannah stumbled over the implication, 'that means you're dead?'

  'I found out too much, Hannah, and the knowing of it was not good for me.'

  'What was it, Chalph, what did you discover?'

  'That history repeats itself, much like the circle of existence your people's strange church puts so much faith in. Going round and round. It spun too fast for me and I fell off.'

  Hannah rushed forward as the light began to dwindle.

  'Don't leave me, Chalph. My mother's gone now – there's just you and me left.'

  'Your mother saw too little,' whispered the voice from the fading light. 'You need to see more, but not too much more. Not unless you want to join me. There's so much green here. Just like Pericur. Just like I imagined a real forest.'

  'Don't-' she begged.

  'Follow the song Hannah, but not too far.'

  '-go!'

  Hannah woke with a start. Light outside the tent canvas indicated morning had arrived.

  Oh Chalph! Chalph was dead, he had to be. Or why else was the alien melody of a song drifting outside Hannah's tent? Hannah stared in amazement. A series of small white structures had risen out of the ground on the island in the middle of the glassy plain. It was from these buildings that the song Hannah had heard in her tent seemed to issue – albeit with no voiceboxes visible to carry the eerie tune. The harmony sounded like a blend of voices from the races of man and ursine, though in no language that Hannah recognized.

  Ortin urs Ortin appeared, seemingly as entranced as Hannah by the strange melody drifting across the plain of glass. 'I say, it's a hymn, it has to be.'

  Nandi appeared from her tent. 'Where did those buildings come from?'

  'Like a Catosian city-state reconfiguring its streets for war, lass,' said the commodore. 'I saw them. They just rose out of the ground at dawn.'

  'Some of the words in the song sound familiar,' said Nandi. 'I think there might be phonetic germs to some modern words in their roots. Those buildings are too small to contain much, though, unless they're shrines.'

  'Let's have a look,' said Hannah, but Tobias Raffold grabbed her arm and pointed down to the glassy plain she was about to step onto.

  'You don't have to stop me. You've switched your gun control off, Mister Raffold, I can see that the transaction engine's valves are powered down.'

  'Not our guns, girl,' said the trapper. 'There's something under the glass. I've seen shadows moving beneath it and whatever they are, I'm betting it's the reason there's planks laid out to that land. Go out along the walkway.'

  A couple of the trappers mounted up and trained their suits' magnetic catapult arms on the glass while Commodore Black led the way across the shaky planking using his rifle for balance. Nandi, Hannah and the ambassador followed, with Tobias Raffold at the rear, his long-barrelled Jackelian hunting gun sweeping over the crystallized ground. There were things moving under the glass. Long sinuous shapes like grubs, and they appeared to be circling higher towards the expedition members' shadows on the surface. What had her mother called this place in her diary? Bloodglass Island. Hannah carefully kept her footing lest she discover why her mother had labelled it with such an ominous name.

  Reaching the island, Hannah saw that it was filled with seven single-storey structures, windowless and constructed of a light-blue material patterned with thin grey lattices. The ground of the island seemed to be made of a solidified puddle of the same material and walking on the surface sent a gentle tingle through the soles of Hannah's boots. The notes of the song were definitely coming from the structures, louder as the expedition approached them. When they were a couple of feet from the nearest structure a hole suddenly appeared in its side, expanding to a size capable of admitting a single member of the expedition within.

  'Ah, we're blessed mice now,' said Commodore Black. 'And here stands the trap that's been set for us.'

  Hannah wasn't so certain. Her mother had come here before their expedition and she had died alone in one of the chambers off the mountain tunnel, not out here.

  Follow the song.

  'It's led me here, Chalph,' Hannah whispered to herself.

  As Hannah approached the threshold, she could hear panicked shouts behind her. Ignoring them, she stepped through and found herself standing in a windowless corridor that might have been one of tunnel's anterooms underneath the Cade Mountains; except that the structure she had stepped into was far too small to contain this space she had entered – but somehow the building had taken her here all the same. Hannah was deep below the ground; she knew that, could sense the weight of the world pressing down above her. The walls around Hannah were as black as night, but when she laid a hand on one of them, they turned translucent and alien calligraphy began to crawl down their surface. No, not writing. Numbers. The same alien characters that were interspersed across her mother's diary. Hannah walked along the corridor, until she came to its end, the whole structure no more than a hundred feet in length.

  Commodore Black came running up behind her. 'You're taking your life in your hands, Hannah Conquest. Jumping into this dark black tomb as if there's a warm meal and a soft bed waiting for you in here.'

  'This isn't a tomb,' said Hannah, running her fingers across the surface while formulae floated around them like ripples in a lake. 'I think these structures are tools.'

  'Tools? Tools to work what mortal terrible labours?'

  'I think that's
what my mother was trying to find out, but her bad leg finished her before she managed to complete the work. Someone came here and uncovered their secret, though, and that person was Bel Bessant. This is where she got the inspiration to create the god-formula, I know it was! I can feel the strangeness of these alien characters in the weave of her work. These corridors were the muse for her creation.'

  Commodore Black looked around the tight walls, horrified, as if Hannah had just told him they had jumped into a plague pit. 'Let's be out of here then, lass, before the same queer sickness leaps into my noggin and I start trying to raise the spirit of Lord Tridentscale and take it upon myself to declare old Blacky the Monarch of the Seas.'

  Reassured by Hannah and the commodore's safe return from inside the structure, the other members of the expedition set about exploring the remaining buildings. The interiors of two of them had not survived the wear of ages; they were filled with rubble, their dark walls dead. Inside the fourth structure the reason for the destruction of the previous two become clear. The cave-in here had only affected two-thirds of the corridor's length and under its rubble lay a half-buried human skeleton, not a trace of clothes left.

  Commodore Black kicked the shards of broken glass on the floor. 'The bones are male. Whoever this poor soul was, he was no expert with blasting tubes. He mixed the liquid explosives too early and brought the mortal place crashing down around him.'

  Hannah knelt down by the bones, spotting something hidden under the dust. It was a church infinity circle on a chain. 'William of Flamewall, I presume. So, this is what he came here to do – demolish the source of Bel Bessant's inspiration, the genesis that he blamed for his lover's transfiguration.'

  'He's done that alright,' said the commodore looking at the debris. 'Whatever secrets were scrawled on the walls of this tunnel and those other two buildings have been scuppered good and proper, just as the third part of the god-formula died with William of Flamewall. That rascal Jethro Daunt is the only one who is going to be happy with the results of this wicked trek into danger. The secrets his Inquisition woman strove to keep untold have been erased. These melted anthills of a city are of no use to Nandi Tibar-Wellking, and if there were ever holy Pericurian tablets in these tunnels, William of Flamewall blew them to bits centuries ago.'