Secrets of the Fire Sea (10 page)

‘We’re the only ones who use the park,’ said Hannah, numb with the implications of what her friend had discovered.

‘And it wasn’t me they were after,’ said Chalph. ‘It was
you
, Hannah. It’s just the same as how politics in the Baronial Council work back home when things cut up rough. You don’t just poison the head of a house, you poison the aunts, the sons, the daughters, the brothers – you assassinate everyone at once! Leave no one alive able to come back and try to take revenge against your house. Tooth and claw, Hannah, tooth and claw.’

‘This is Jago, not Pericur. We have the police, the stained senate, the accumulated law of a thousand generations.’

But there were Alice’s mutilated remains lying in state inside
her own cathedral. Had the failing of Hermetica’s battlements simply been a distraction to ensure the entire city was otherwise engaged when she was murdered? One that should have also ensured her ward was ripped to pieces inside the abandoned park…

‘It’s never fair,’ said Chalph. ‘They might not even care about you – you just happened to be the ward of the wrong person. A loose pawn to be tidied from the board.’

Hannah passed the sabotaged machinery back to Chalph. ‘We have to show this to someone, to Colonel Knipe.’

‘In a vendetta, you trust only your own house and family,’ said Chalph. ‘The militia wants to blame the free company for the ursk attack. The colonel’s not going to listen to either of us if we accuse the most powerful man on Jago outside of the First Senator.’

‘The church is my house, Alice was my family…’

‘I could tell the baroness, but I don’t think she will help us. No Jagonese is going to trust the word of a foreign trader from the House of Ush. Sentiment is already being whipped up against the ursine here in the capital – people have been shouting at me about food prices and shortages of grain down in the streets: accusing the house of profiteering. Calling us dirty wet-snouts. Saying that the archduchess is trying to starve the Jagonese off the island, saying that the free company fighters let the ursks into the city on purpose to scare the last of the Jagonese away.’

‘The Guild of Valvemen,’ said Hannah, a feeling of certainty rising within her. ‘Their people would know exactly where to strike to shut down a section of the battlements. That jigger Vardan Flail is behind all of this, I know he is.’

Her suspicions were silenced by a woman’s shout carrying down the park’s path. It was a police militiawoman, the same one Hannah thought she had seen following her earlier – but
she had company this time. Four individuals cloaked in the long robes of valvemen.

‘Damson Hannah Conquest,’ the militiawoman said in an accusatory tone. ‘You were not in the cathedral when we called.’

‘I finished early,’ lied Hannah.

‘You have not even started,’ hissed one of the valvemen.

‘Your ballot notice has been served,’ said the militiawoman.

Served? With a start, Hannah realized what day it was. Since Alice’s murder time hardly seemed to matter at all – one day, one hour, each much the same as the last – all of them blurring into a single amorphous mess. This was the day her service to the guild should have started!

Two of the valvemen advanced on Hannah, grabbing an arm apiece, the third seizing her behind her shoulders.

The militiawoman lowered her lamp staff to point menacingly at Chalph as he stepped forward to help Hannah. She brushed her cape back with her other hand to indicate the pistol hanging from her waist, and that she wouldn’t hesitate in drawing it if the ursine tried to stop them. ‘You don’t want to assist a draft dodger, Pericurian, you really don’t!’

‘I wasn’t trying to escape!’ Hannah protested, struggling. ‘I forgot, that is all.’

‘Set the example,’ one of the valvemen hissed from beneath his cowl, the smell of mint on his clothes making her gag.

The others took up the cry, the quiet stillness of the neglected park broken by their screeching mantra. ‘Set the example.
Set the example
.’

Hannah was dragged out of the dome, screaming and scuffling. Dragged towards the vaults of the guild. To serve the devil who had killed Alice Gray. The man who had already tried to murder her once.

As the
Purity Queen
approached the soaring coral line that ringed the island of Jago, Commodore Black ordered all of his passengers apart from Nandi to clear the bridge, keeping his word to the professor that he would keep an eye on her.

Now they were bobbing in front of the coral line’s iron gate and Nandi had to stop herself from gasping. Of course, she had seen illustrations of the gates in the texts back at Saint Vine’s, but the scale was totally different watching them slowly draw back above her to reveal the cauldron-like barrels of cannons on the fortress. The fortifications were wedged between the coral peaks above, a frill of gunnery ominously tracking their vessel – a silent presence and ancient reminder of why the Jagonese had never fallen to the predations of the Chimecan Empire.

Jago, the fortress of learning and the last redoubt of the Circlist enlightenment during the long age of ice. All this and more, once. But the world turned, and the retreat of the glaciers had undermined her pre-eminent position in the world. Studying history at the college, first as a student, then as Professor Harsh’s assistant, the single thing that had struck Nandi most was that nations, civilizations, empires, all had a lifespan, much the same as any person. They grew from seeds, they blossomed, they aged, and finally they passed away into the twilight. When you were a citizen of a proud nation like the Kingdom of Jackals, living in its summer years – when you trod the wide streets of Middlesteel feeling the throb of commerce and could turn your eye to the sky and see only the slow-moving sweep of the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s airships – it was exceptionally easy to forget that the show of permanence all around you was just an illusion from the perspective of history. The same feeling of immortality a legionnaire of the Chimecan Empire would have felt millennia ago. The same deceptive feeling of durability that a Jagonese
burgher would have experienced in centuries past, cosseted by achievements drawn around them like a blanket while the rest of the world huddled and froze in the ice. But the wider world’s summer had become Jago’s winter. Nandi would be studying a failing civilization on Jago while there was still some flesh clinging to its bones, and that was quite a privilege. It grated on her nerves that she had to travel here in near secrecy, bypassing the jealous fools who would have seen her place on the expedition cancelled. Just because she was a poor scholarship girl.

Passing through the coral line, their u-boat remained on the surface for the short approach through the coastal waters, cutting through a broken haze thrown up by the collision of the boils and the residual lava. This, she remembered reading in the college’s text, was what the weather of Jago would always be like. The coastline of the island was a scorched wasteland burned by the Fire Sea, but travel a few miles inland, and Jago’s true position in arctic latitudes became apparent, a dangerous night-cold wilderness of ice haunted by creatures as fierce as the freezing landscape they inhabited. What civilization there was left on Jago clung to the fiery coastline, leaving its glacial interior to monstrous beasts. Nandi saw a final flash of magnesium light through the mists, shimmering out from the flare-house on top of the Horn of Jago, and then the mountain disappeared and boiling water covered the bridge’s armoured viewing window. As they sank beneath the Fire Sea, Nandi could see the tug that had guided the
Purity Queen
in sinking before them, bubbles fleeting towards the surface from its pressure seals.

The
Purity Queen
followed the tug down, the water outside turning darker with every league of their increasing depth. As they neared the seabed, the commodore ordered his two steersmen to follow the tug’s example and head for the mouth
of one of the titanic brass carvings of octopi, cuttlefish and nautili wrought into the underwater base of the island’s submerged basalt cliff-line. Nandi saw that they were entering a long tunnel illuminated by a strip of green lights running along its side. The tunnel ended in a door which irised open to admit the
Purity Queen
into a large dark space which started to drain of water and descend at the same time, a lifting room and dry-dock combined. As their descent drew to an end, the front of their lifting room opened out onto an underwater anchorage giving Nandi her first look at the great harbour vault of Hermetica City. The warm green stretch of the underwater pool was bounded by the concrete arc of the harbour at the opposite end of the chamber where hundreds of tugs similar to the one that had guided them were moored inside gated locks. From above glowing yellow plates partially hidden by wisps of condensation cast a diffuse light over the port’s warm waters. If Nandi hadn’t actually been present during their underwater approach, she might have taken the subterranean vault’s walls for a cliff-side and believed that they had simply sailed into one of the mountainous harbours back in the Kingdom’s uplands rather than entering Jago’s underground civilization.

‘We’re the only vessel in harbour,’ said Nandi, staring around her at the quiet lock gates, power houses, travelling dock cranes, sheds and warehouses. At least, they were if she discounted the idle tugs of the Jagonese home fleet. It was a lonely feeling.

After the
Purity Queen
had moored up, the commodore ordered all hatches open and reached for his jacket. ‘Best take yours too, lass. It’s warm enough during the day in the vaults, but at night they vent in air from the plains above to make it cooler underground.’

‘Just like the real world,’ said Nandi.

‘It’s different enough in Jago, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve never had a liking for this place. If it wasn’t for your blessed professor twisting my arm, I’d be Pericur-bound and leaving Hermetica City’s underground vaults to the Jagonese with a welcome-they-be for them.’

Nandi looked at the customs officials joining the tug crew on the dockside outside the bridge, a gaggle of velvet-cloaked functionaries pushing past the sailors in their rubber scald suits. ‘You don’t like living underground?’

‘You can’t be claustrophobic in my trade, lass. Maybe it’s the crackle of the wild energy they’ve tamed to power this place, or the dark creatures from the interior you’ll hear singing and whining outside the city walls up on the surface. Maybe it’s just that the more they try and make this place seem like home, the stranger it seems to me, but I’ve no love for this island or the shiver I feel when I walk its sealed-up streets.’

Out on the dockside the collection of velvet-cloaked officials had been joined by green-uniformed militiamen whose main function seemed to be to keep back the townspeople filtering through the otherwise deserted harbour front. Nandi and the commodore were the first out onto the gantry that swung across to the
Purity Queen
’s deck, Nandi fishing in the pockets of her short tweed jacket for the letter of introduction she had been given. Sealed in red wax with the crest of Saint Vine’s college.

By the time the police had finished warning the commodore of the penalties if he were to take onboard any Jagonese passengers without senate-stamped exit visas, Jethro Daunt and his curious jerking steamman friend had followed Nandi out, no doubt enjoying their first taste of solid land for weeks. More and more Jagonese were heading for the line formed by the police, presumably the hopeful emigrants that the
Purity
Queen
’s master had just been warned of, waving and calling at the crew coming out of the u-boat, brandishing money, papers, or just their empty hands. The tug service’s sailors must have spread word among their friends and family. A rare chance to get off Jago.

One of the men standing by the custom officials strolled over to Nandi and Commodore Black. Judging by his dark frock coat and stovepipe hat, he was Jackelian rather than a local. He nodded at Nandi and the commodore before clearing his throat. ‘I am Mister Walsingham, an officer attached to the Jackelian consul here. I have cleared your arrival with the Jagonese Board of Aliens.’ He passed each of them a wax-sealed wallet. ‘You have full papers, captain, your crew and passengers have subsidiary visas attached to your own – Jagonese law can be swift and severe, do try to make sure they don’t start any brawls in taverns.’ He smiled weakly towards Nandi. ‘The crew, that is to say, not your passengers.’

‘Any that do will answer to me before they answer to the Jagonese magistrates,’ said the commodore, balling a fist.

‘A tight ship, eh. Good, good. If you need us, the Jackelian embassy is inside the Horn of Jago. But do try to stay out of trouble here, there’s a good fellow. We don’t have much leverage with the locals these days, so if any of your sailors end up in the police militia’s fortress, they’re rather on their own I’m afraid.’

‘A grey little suit,’ said the commodore as the officer walked away, ‘and just the same as a thousand of his friends in the civil service back home, no imagination for anything save creating new taxes to lighten my pocket-book. As much use as a blunt stick in a sabre duel. We’re on our own here, lass.’

But not quite as alone as would suit Nandi. ‘You don’t have to wait for me, whatever the professor told you. I’m hardly likely to get into trouble researching ancient history.
You can leave me here in the capital, deliver your cargo to Pericur, and then pick me up on the return leg of your voyage. The more time I have to root through Jago’s archives, the better I shall like it.’

The commodore scratched at his dark, forked beard. ‘A promise is a promise, now. Your fine professor has gone out on a limb for me more times than I care to count and I wouldn’t want her to use those great big arms of hers on my noggin. Old Blacky’s crew and the
Purity Queen
will stay here and feed pennies to a suitably grateful tavern owner while you avail yourself of the archive access Saint Vine’s College has so handsomely paid for.’ He winked at her. ‘Besides, shipping to Pericur and back via the island will mean double navigation fees for these Jagonese pirates and they’ve had their thieving hands deep enough inside my pockets as it is.’