Secrets of the Fire Sea (15 page)

‘I’ll take a blessed suit anyway,’ said the commodore, wheezing as he lifted one out.

Nandi did likewise, struggling under the weight after she had belted the heavy lead apron around her.

‘I’ll escort you to the transaction-engine vaults,’ said Hannah, ‘I’ve already reserved a study cell for you with a card puncher and the access to the guild archives you’ve negotiated.’

Unlike the other guildsmen in the receiving station, Hannah kept her hood down, a small act of rebellion – or vanity, given her face was yet to be scarred by tumours.

‘You mentioned you weren’t planning to be here that long,’ Nandi said to Hannah as they followed her out of the atmospheric station, the protective plates of their lead aprons clunking as they walked.

‘I was put forward for the church entrance examinations before I was drafted by the guild,’ replied Hannah. ‘The guild have to let me sit the tests. And when I pass…’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s a wicked shame to see a fine Jackelian girl having to labour under the tyranny of these red-robed crows.’

‘I only wish I had more time to study for the examination,’ said Hannah, as the passage they were walking along widened into a barrel-vaulted chamber, stone pillars on their right supporting an open portal, voices echoing from within. Inside, row upon row of guild-robed figures were kneeling and humming a mantra.

Nandi frowned. The Circlist chanting contained little of the joy and warmth that was to be felt amongst the congregations back in the Kingdom. Here, there was a dour, plaintive edge to the sound.

Hannah poked her thumb towards the worshipping masses. ‘They actually lead a more ordered life here than back in the cathedral. Meditations every hour of the day when the guild’s duties aren’t being observed.’

Nandi peered around the pillar and into the long chapel hall. ‘So full.’

‘Circlism has a deep resonance within the guild.’ Hannah explained. ‘The irrelevance of the physical body, your soul poured back into the one sea of consciousness after death. Your life cupped out again into another, happier, life further along the circle.’

Nandi tugged at the young girl’s richly embroidered red robes. ‘These aren’t to protect you, are they? They’re not even to hide you from the sight of others. They’re to hide the sight of your body from yourself.’

‘You won’t find many mirrors here in the guild’s vaults,’ agreed Hannah.

Nandi listened to the voice of one the guildsmen at the front of the hall calling out to the crowd that they were all the cells of the liver, absorbing the poisons of the flesh, keeping the rest of the body alive. There was more than a grain of truth in that analogy, Nandi decided. She pointed to a figure lying in state on a podium at the front of the hall. ‘Is this a funeral?’

‘Of sorts,’ said Hannah. ‘That’s the body of a guild highman up there. Before his corpse is lowered into the Fire Sea, part of his essence will be transferred into the transaction engines to become a valve-mind, joining the council of ancestors in advising the guild.’

The commodore shook his head. ‘That’s little better than the steammen, lass, with the Loas of their ancestors appearing like blessed ghosts when they’re not invited, disturbing the rest of us innocent souls with their nagging.’

Nandi had to agree. Life working inside the Kingdom’s colleges was difficult enough for young faculty staff, with members of the High Table clinging to their positions on the academic council well into their dotage. And that was without the prospect of having simulacra of them echoing around the college’s halls long after they had passed away. She was just thankful they didn’t have valve technology back home.

‘It’s just hope,’ explained Hannah. ‘The hope of something beyond all of this. Without hope, I don’t think the guild could force anyone to work here.’

‘Let’s go on, lass,’ said the commodore, turning his back on the packed hall. ‘I’ve no taste for a sermon so early in the day.’

Nandi smiled. The commodore wasn’t so very different from the rest of his rough and ready crew. Voyaging away from the Kingdom for years at a time, exposed to heathen gods and the temples of foreign religions, the enclosed corridors of a u-boat brewing superstition. No wonder places like the guild’s vaults, clinging to Circlism, made him nervous.

They continued their journey through the guild’s heart. At one point they had to halt when a pair of thick iron doors in the side of a tunnel pulled open to reveal a switchback series of ramps disappearing lower into the guild’s depths. The three of them waited as a line of ab-locks filed through, the same simian-like creatures that Nandi had seen caged on the capital’s docks. These creatures bore little relation to the wild, unneutered animals captured by the stocky little Jackelian trapper whose demands for passage had been spurned by the commodore. Although each animal was the size of a man, the ab-locks in front of Hannah appeared somehow diminished as they slowly trudged, hunched, into the vault’s depths. They had been defanged and the claws on their fingers sliced off. The leathery skin on the front of their bodies hung swollen
and misshapen by the dark energies they had absorbed working the turbine halls, and the silver fur on their backs was left sticky and thinning compared to the lustrous sheen of the wild animals caged up on the docks. Whether it was due to the methods of taming employed by the guild, or their energy-sapping exposure to the power plant, these ab-locks seemed broken in every way, a state not helped by the guild handlers walking the line, prodding and threatening with toxin clubs whenever they detected some hesitance on the part of the exploited animals.

Commodore Black shook his head in anger at the sight. ‘There’s only one thing the wicked House of Guardians ever did right, and that’s chase off the slavers from Jackals’ coast. But it seems they didn’t send their warships out far enough.’

‘Does a shire horse in its harness look any different?’ said Hannah. ‘You might not say such things if you stayed here a season and heard the wild packs of ab-locks howling beyond the walls with the ursks and other creatures out there, probing our battlements for a break.’

The distant thrum of the turbine halls rising up from far below was cut off with a shudder as iron doors clanged down, locking into the floor. Only a few wisps of vapour from the flash steam system were left drifting along the passage.

‘I helped set up your access to the archives,’ said Hannah, moving the two visitors along the corridor. ‘I’m not an expert, but I had to pass very deep down the storage layers on your behalf. You must be researching amongst our earliest records.’

‘True enough,’ said Nandi. ‘Did your church guardian ever explain your parents’ work to you?’

‘Archaeology,’ said Hannah. ‘It was never my strongest subject. There’s a lot of history on Jago and I lost track of the First Senators’ names after the first five centuries’ worth.’

‘History. Well, that’s half the truth,’ said Nandi. ‘Your father
was an archaeologist, but your mother was a mathematician, and their area of study touched both disciplines.’

‘I had presumed she was using the transaction engines here to run mathematical proofs,’ said Hannah.

Nandi shook her head. ‘After Jago was first settled, the island survived as the only nation to remain free of the grip of the Chimecan Empire, although its early years were blighted by the constant threat of invasion.’

‘Ah, then, Nandi,’ whined the commodore, ‘let’s not talk of that ancient terror with its dark gods and human sacrifices. We’re well shot of the old empire. They’ve been dead a millennium and long may they stay that way.’

‘It was your father, Hannah, who dug up a book back in the Kingdom, a text dating from the centuries when Jackals was a slave state of the Chimecans and the early church was driven completely underground. It suggested that the reason Jago wasn’t invaded was that the church on the island had developed a weapon that threatened the empire’s gods, a mathematical weapon that would have disrupted their hold on the world if the empire had dared to invade Jago.’

‘A likely tale,’ said the commodore. ‘And where did the man discover this mortal account, in a Middlesteel drinking house?’

‘Sealed in a glass jar found buried in a village in Hamblefolk,’ Nandi went on, ignoring the old u-boat hand’s scepticism. ‘We dated the book at the college to the late Chimecan era, and it was dug out of a farmer’s field where one of the first Circlist churches was said to have been re-built after the end of the age of ice.’

‘The guild’s archives cover that period,’ said Hannah. ‘But I’ve never heard of such a thing inside the cathedral. A weapon that could slay gods? If our church had ever crafted something like that, I think it would be recorded and still remembered by the priests.’

‘Aye,’ said the commodore. ‘If you want to know why the old empire never took this dark, bleak place, you only have to look at the cannons on the monstrous coral walls surrounding the island and the flames of the Fire Sea lapping against its terrible cliffs. The shifting magma would claim the best part of any fleet fool enough to sail against Jago without the services of the island’s pilots to see them safely through the boils.’

‘Now you sound like the grey-hairs back at the college,’ said Nandi. She looked across at Hannah. ‘Don’t listen to him. Your father and mother believed enough in what they found in that book to come here with you and search for records of the weapon in the guild’s transaction-engine chambers. The foundations of the Circlist enlightenment were laid in mathematics, and around the edges that has a way of blurring into the sorceries of the world-song and our understanding of the universe.’

‘From knowledge comes enlightenment,’ Hannah quoted from the church’s book of common meditations.

‘I worry we’re on nothing but a fool’s errand here, Nandi,’ protested the commodore. ‘But old Blacky will be true to his word and stay with you all the same, to make sure you don’t linger here overlong and singe your fine academic mind in the depths of the guild’s dreadful vaults.’

Nandi caught her first glimpse of the vast depths of those vaults when the walls of their passage fell away and they found themselves crossing a bridge across a human-carved canyon, buffeted by waves of heat from the legendary thinking machines of Jago. Unlike the great transaction-engine rooms of the Kingdom’s civil service, these vaults were powered by electricity, not steam. No transaction-engine drums turning down there. Instead, millions of glass valves studded the walls of the subterranean canyon, pulsing and burning with light and information. Only when they reached the floor of the
first of the canyon-like vaults did the scale of the chamber truly become apparent. Guildsmen marched alongside a hundred ab-lock slaves pulling a cart heavy with valves, replacements for where the erratic course of the dark power had burnt out the thermionic tubes. Each glass bulb that made up the crystal forest of valves was as tall as an oak tree. Here was the true power of Jago. Not the dark energies of electricity generated by their turbine halls – that was just what it took to energize this incredible artificial mind fashioned out of cathodes, anode plates and glass.

The annals of over two thousand years of history were stored here; as well as the machines that kept the capital’s vaults illuminated and whispered fresh air down to its streets; that regulated the battlements’ killing force and pushed the transport capsules along the island’s atmospheric tubes. Not to mention machines which held the model of the shifting sea of magma and the safe channels of superheated water which allowed Jago’s tugs to navigate the boils outside. And Nandi was to be allowed to access it all. Humanity’s oldest surviving library.

She could hardly wait.

Entry into the Hall of Echoes was forbidden to all save the High Master of the Guild of Valvemen, and Vardan Flail couldn’t help but enjoy a little swell of pride each time he stepped forward to the entrance wall and the machinery inside detected his presence, confirmed his identity and admitted him to pass through to the dark chamber. Pride that it was he who had risen to this position over all his fellows through cleverness and guile and true understanding of the guild’s intricacies and needs.

It never stayed dark inside the chamber for long. When the high guild master started talking, squares of light would form
on the cold black stone wall, images from the memories of the hundreds of guild heads and high officials who had been judged worthy to become valve-minds. Freed from the weak needs of the body and the pain of decaying flesh, they were pure intellect, moving through the transaction engines with the speed of electricity itself.

‘I have raised my objections with the senate,’ announced Vardan Flail. ‘But they will not act in our favour this time, of that I am certain.’

In response to his words, lines of illuminated squares shot across the stone, pictures flowing almost too fast for him to follow. There a remembrance of the senate as it had existed centuries before, here an image of a nose smelling a plant. Beautiful, meaningless, wise and foolish – it was like staring at the firing synapses of a brain. Then the chain of pictures slowed and stopped while disembodied voices started echoing around the chamber. The wisdom of his ancestors within the guild.

The clamour grew louder and more discordant, then, as was the way, the suggestions started to slow and finally coalesce into the community view.

‘She will be allowed to sit the church entrance exam,’ said Vardan Flail, scratching with his left hand at the bleeding flesh of his elbow. ‘And she is clever, a mathematical prodigy. In the little time she had been with us she has already mastered every level of instruction set we possess for the transaction-engine core. She will pass the church’s entrance exam.’

Again the disembodied voices clamoured their way to a crescendo before coalescing into the majority opinion.