Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Soon the police militia would be fighting the Pericurians off the steps leading into the mountain as well as shooting down the assaults being led up the Horn's slopes. The only good news was that the Guild of Valvemen's forces had been sighted moving towards the city from the north.

  'Too little too late,' sighed Colonel Knipe. 'Damson,' he said, looking into Hannah's eyes. 'The third part of your church weapon, which vault is it hidden in?'

  'It's not in the city below,' said Hannah. 'It's here in the Horn of Jago. I know more or less where it is, but-'

  'Begin searching now,' said the colonel. He clicked his fingers and two of his officers stepped forward. 'Guard this girl's life as if all of our fortunes depended on it. I will join you after our final defences are put in place.' Colonel Knipe watched the young churchwoman leave with his two guards, and then he motioned his commanders to the table. 'It is time, gentlemen. Withdraw the militia units back to the mountain, then seal the doors below.'

  'There are still people fighting in the vaults, colonel.'

  'Convicts, the scrapings of our gutter,' said Colonel Knipe. 'Their deaths will give society the service their miserable lives did not.' He motioned for his staff of office to be brought to him and he pushed it into a socket, exposing the control keys running along its length. Colonel Knipe looked at his men and the edge of his mouth turned up into a grim smile. 'Those heathen savages put such faith in their scriptures; let us do the Pericurians one final kindness. Let us reunite the wet-snouts with their barbaric gods in the sky!'

  His fingers began to play across the keys. And everything changed.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  Boxiron shoulder-charged the two Pericurian soldiers who had stumbled out of the smoke, smashing in the skull of one with his warhammer while landing a large iron fist in the other's stomach, the black leather armour crumpling under the impact as the Pericurian soldier fell unconscious – or perhaps lifeless – under the brute strength of the massive steamman.

  'That way!' shouted Jethro, pointing over one of the bridges. The water level appeared to be rising now, the machines that regulated the water table of the subterranean city disabled in the fighting. Not even draining the water to fight the fires could halt the coming flood down here.

  'We must be close to the Horn of Jago,' wheezed the commodore as he wearily waved his sabre down the burning street. 'Let us rest a little, Jethro Daunt. I have a few years on your legs and lack the stout boiler heart of the old steamer here.'

  'I fear we cannot,' said Jethro. 'A minute may cost us our lives.'

  'So you say, so you say. Poor old Blacky, driven out of his rest by the corrupt officials of the Jackelian state, dragged through the evil wilds of Jago, burnt by the Fire Sea and crushed by rocks, crawling through turds for the sake of his precious duty, and now forced to run through a burning city while Pericurian brutes take pot-shots at him. Just a minute's respite, that's not much to ask for. A small rest while I hope for the fires of this flaming city to pass me by.'

  As if listening to his complaints, there was a sound almost like a sigh from the burning buildings along the street the three of them were heading down, the fires seeming to bank down, some of the flames in the upper windows winking out altogether.

  Commodore Black shook his head in amazement. 'Has Lord Tridentscale listened to an old seadrinker's prayers?'

  'If he has, then he has answered them with your death,' warned Jethro. 'Run! Run, good captain, run for your life!'

  All around them the fires were dying out, flickering away as the vault's air was replaced with something else, something that reeked of rot and their final demise. Ortin urs Ortin winced within the protection of the ring of fortifications surrounding the Horn of Jago. Deep, thick walls of concrete might be enough to protect its occupants from the police militia bullets flying down the slopes, but it wasn't enough to preserve those inside from the fury of Stom urs Stom berating her officers for failing to take the mountain.

  'Are you cubs?' she shouted at her lieutenants, 'When you have three divisions of artillery at your rear? No, you are the chosen, and a few furless devils with police rifles are stalling your advance. You dare give me such news!'

  'We have taken almost all of the city below,' protested one of her fighters. 'Their soft belly is nearly exposed to our claws.'

  Stom urs Stom shook her head in anger. 'Can you smell that scent? It is the fear of those inside the mountain. Have the guards of each house raise their standards and prepare to charge the slopes. I shall lead the final push myself.'

  'Without too many casualties, dear captain,' added Ortin urs Ortin. 'We will not serve our purpose in the eyes of the other nations if Jago's fall becomes a massacre. We need live Jagonese to land on the colonies.'

  'We shall slay any of the cursed furless spawn of Amaja urs Amaja raising a weapon against us. For this I have the authority of the House of Ush.'

  'You must minimize the loss of life,' insisted Ortin.

  'You show weakness, Ambassador. Do you think this is a consular negotiation we are executing? We wage only one sort of war, and it comes with victory attached to it. Speak with the baroness if you would have it otherwise. She is waiting at the foot of the slopes with the general staff. Within the hour I shall hand her the reconquest of our sacred soil as if it was the coronation sceptre of the archduchess itself.'

  'That is precisely what it shall be,' said Ortin. 'But only if we do this thing well.'

  As Ortin started to follow the advance party out of the bunker he could hear the clanging of multiple blast doors closing throughout the fortifications. Pericurian soldiers locked on the other side of the steel doors Ortin had just exited began to bang and shout in confusion as the mechanical loading arms of the great mortars and cannon emplacements they had thought themselves masters of, instead proved to be subservient to the will of the automated machinery of the capital. Out on the surface, steel barrels jutting twenty feet high swivelled on hundreds of concrete domes and lowered into place.

  Ortin did not yet know it, but the automatic action of the bristling fortifications ringing the Horn of Jago was being mirrored by the massive gun emplacements out on the coral line, vast cannons that had scared away so many invaders in the past now lowering to face the hundreds of Pericurian u-boats anchored in the shadow of the black headland of Jago. Ortin was almost out of the fort's entrance when the shuddering of the ground knocked him off his feet, his eardrums near perforated as the titanic gunnery of Jago spoke in anger for the first time in close to a thousand years. The ambassador was left just about sensible enough to drag his shaking body upright in time to watch dark dots swelling larger in the sky above him.

  Being a subterranean civilization, the burghers of Jago hadn't needed to worry about the potential casualties that would be caused by shells as large as carts spitting out of their cannons and landing on their own soil. The blast from the bombardment's first wave threw Ortin back into the fort's entrance, as the air filled with shrapnel and pulverized basalt rock fragments. Boom after boom, fire and fury, intense enough to suck the air out of his lungs, the single minute of that salvo seemed like an entire day to the ambassador. Then silence. Everything still except for the sad pattering rain of smoking debris falling. Outside, one of the pennants that hadn't been shredded by the explosions fluttered through the air on fire, carried by the cold wind into the boils off the coast. There it landed, ignored by the hundreds of screaming sailors treading the boiling water, unnoticed by those jumping out of exploding, sinking, splitting u-boats. Some of the sailors were trying to swim towards the boats that hadn't been wrecked in the rain of hell, but the surviving vessels were submerging, a few trying to turn back towards the coral ring holding back the worst of the Fire Sea's lapping magma. Those that reached its shadow found the great gates of the harbour had been closed on them, trapping the u-boats inside the killing zone. Those that didn't soon discovered that the automated magazines of the coral line hadn't just been loaded with shells.

 
They contained depth charges too. 'I suppose,' said Colonel Knipe to his men, closing the panel on his staff of office, 'that to a savage, one set of buttons must look quite like another.'

  He walked to the fire step, mounted it, and then extended his telescope, scanning the smoking carnage below. Out on the walls, he noted that the severed heads of the First Senator and his lackeys hadn't been dislodged from the pikes where they had been mounted by the wet-snouts. But then the city's fire control systems were programmed never to directly hit the battlements, even if the basalt plains behind and in front of the wall had been reduced to smoking, cratered ruins littered with the invaders' carcasses.

  'A bigger fool than anyone suspected,' Knipe muttered to himself.

  Especially if Silvermain had thought that any commander of the police militia would voluntarily surrender the real master control functions of the capital's defences to a bunch of dirty wet-snouts for hire. Even Boxiron was starting to falter, stumbling under the weight of the commodore's Pericurian dive tank. Jethro and the old u-boat man were sharing the regulator at the end of the air hose as they coughed and blundered their way through the Seething Round. It wasn't smoke they were pushing through now. It was thick, choking clouds of gas, forcing the air out of the vaults and entering Jethro's lungs as a rasping fire between each sweet suck on the diving tank's reserves. They had been luckier than the bodies they were nearly tripping over, though, Pericurian soldiers and Jagonese alike. Luckier than them.

  Boxiron was stalling, Jethro could tell that. It wasn't just the weight of the tank. The steamman might lack lungs, but his powerful boiler heart needed to inject supercharged air into his valves, not this poisonous soup suffocating the city.

  Jethro was sucking on the regulator when the commodore grunted, still holding his breath and pointed to their right. Beyond the great inverted spires of Jago's cathedral hanging from the vault's ceiling, lost in the swirling clouds of poison, was the large stone staircase that led up into the wealthy centre of Hermetica City, up into the hollowed mountain. They were almost too late. At the staircase's top, vast fire doors were rolling shut, a dwindling strip of light left by the doors' rumbling closure.

  As the three companions redoubled their speed in a last desperate sprint towards the top of the stairs, each tread an agony, Jethro heard the shouts of police militiamen from inside the mountain heart of the capital.

  Boxiron had abandoned the heavy air tank and was dragging Jethro now, the commodore ahead of both of them, developing a turn of speed that was quite unexpected from a man of his bulk. Jethro and Boxiron crashed through the closing gap, Jethro feeling the door barge painfully into his shoulder as they cleared the closing wall of steel with barely an inch to spare. There was a resounding clang from behind them as the doors sealed shut. The three of them collapsed onto their knees, Jethro and Commodore Black hacking and coughing their guts out while the lid of Boxiron's stacks spat out great swathes of dirty smoke as he opened up all his bodily systems again.

  One of the militiamen pushed his pistol back into his holster and helped Jethro to his feet. 'I won't be playing cards against any of you three. You're the luckiest bastards on Jago.'

  'Lucky is it?' hacked the commodore, pulling himself up. He stopped for a second to catch another clean breath. 'Is that what you call it, to be smoked out of the city like a wicked swarm of wasps?'

  'Gas,' said the militiaman, 'not smoke. The colonel worked out a way to tank the gas bleeds and pump the whole lot of it back into the vaults.'

  'How fortunate,' said Jethro, 'for such a work to be completed quickly enough – and with the majority of the Pericurian army bottled up inside the city.'

  Boxiron's voicebox shook as the steamman found his feet too. 'As fortunate as you insisting I carry the burden of a diver's tank through the heart of a battle.'

  'Quite so,' Jethro attempted a smile, wiping the spittle away from the corner of his mouth with a trembling hand. 'You never know when one will come in useful.'

  Boxiron looked up at the shaking ceiling of the magnificent entrance chamber they found themselves in. 'What is going on here, Jethro softbody? Those are the reports of the fortress-mounted guns above us.'

  Before the ex-parson of Hundred Locks could answer, a pair of militiamen rapidly descended one of staircases leading up into the mountain, pushing past the refugees huddling on the steps. 'All able to fight!' the soldiers shouted. 'All able to fight, up to the fourth-level galleries.'

  'We've locked the invaders out,' called back the militiaman by Jethro's side. 'They're trapped in the vaults.'

  'Tell that to the wet-snouts that have reached the slopes,' his compatriot called down the staircase. 'What's left of their army is beyond the arc of our cannons and out of range of the coral line's guns. They're charging up the slopes and they don't look happy. All able to fight, with us now. Defend the Horn. For your city, for your freedom, for your lives!'

  'I'll have you lucky lads with me,' said the militiaman, as all around them the police and armed citizens peeled away from the entrance's barricades. 'And may some of it rub off on me.' He joined the others clearing a way up the stairs.

  'I'm too old for this,' wheezed the commodore.

  'Bob my soul, but we have to find Hannah like the deuce,' Jethro told Boxiron and the commodore. 'Or this is all going to change, and not for the better!'

  'Ah, lad,' said the commodore, 'tell me that Hannah can survive using the god-formula on herself if it comes to it. Tell me that she'll bring Nandi and Chalph back to life, scare this wicked war to a stop and then go back to being just a mortal lass again.'

  'Nothing will survive of anyone who uses the god-formula,' said Jethro, 'not as we know them. But there is more at stake than a single life. No man or woman was meant to take on the powers of a god.'

  'There's gods a-plenty out in the world,' said the commodore. 'You can't sail for a yard without tripping over them – the Steamo Loas of our metal friend here, the gods of the wind the lashlites bend their knee to, the grand smiting fellow that the Cassarabian sects worship. What's one more or one less?'

  'Those are merely manifestations of our belief in them,' warned Jethro. 'What power they have is received through our belief, it is limited by our humanity – but this thing, a creature raised in our pattern, given absolute power so as to corrupt absolutely…no, the person who takes such a thing will not survive within that burning fire, and I fear that neither will the rest of us.' His ears still ringing, Ortin urs Ortin left the cover of the large basalt boulder he was sheltering behind and ran across the gap to the next rock, angry hornets buzzing past his ears as the rifles of the slope's defenders tried to bring him down.

  The ambassador might have been beyond the arc of fire of the emplacements below, the guns and barrels of the vast cannons ringing the mountain set in the wrong direction, but there was a long stretch of near coverless ground above him before he reached the first buildings and windows carved out of the Horn of Jago. The Pericurian advance had stalled, their own artillery rendered silent, cannons and gun trains left scattered across the blasted, cratered surface. Not even the damned weather favoured them – no cover from the steam storms off the sea. As though the weather and the world was holding its breath to see who won this day.

  Ortin braved the open ground, still slippery with his people's blood, sprinting beyond his boulder to reach the standard bearer's party kneeling under the next ridge, the wounded figure of Stom urs Stom lying spread-eagled below the rocks.

  'Do you see,' Stom urs Stom hissed at the ambassador, 'where your weakness has led us? A trap. We thought it was ours, but it was theirs! Theirs!'

  'Be still,' commanded the medical orderly trying to stem the blood gushing out of the officer's torn leather armour.

  Ortin looked at her and the orderly shook her head. 'The surgeon's tents were in front of the walls with the camp. Gone with everything else.'

  'Gone with the baroness,' coughed Stom. 'All gone. This is your pity's harvest; this is your compassion'
s prize. Their dark hearts, the cursed spawn of Amaja urs Amaja. They brought us here to slaughter us, to pave the road to Armageddon with the bones of all those pure enough to try to stop them!'

  It was true, Ortin could not deny it. Their people's corpses littered the ground both inside and outside the capital's walls, raked by shells from the coral line, the hail of bullets from the defenders – the storm of fire – now passing over their prone, uncaring forms where they had fallen in the smoking rubble. Outside in the harbour the torn corpses bobbing in the steaming red waters were so thick the ambassador could have used their shrapnel-studded bodies as a carpet to walk between the burning wreckage of the fleet. This had been a trap and the ursine had walked blithely into it, naively counting themselves the new masters of Jago. All they had wanted to do was to free the people of the island from the shackles of their oppressors, allow them their freedom away from this god-cursed place. This was their reward for trying to follow the word of the Divine Quad. Sent to hell by those who believed in none. What fools they had been. The darkness here had changed the people of Jago, twisted them into something inhuman. The heathen beasts' mortars were still peppering the harbour waters, the screams of exhausted survivors trying to struggle out of the bloodstained water echoing out of the scene of hell. Their fur burnt off their bodies by their sin. No, not their sins. The sins of the humans, of the race of man.

  'I was wrong,' cried Ortin urs Ortin trying not to look at the staggering field of carnage behind him.

  Stom urs Stom raised a massive blooded paw. 'This is the world's end and this is – your war – now.'