Secrets of the Fire Sea (2 page)

Even the roof of the subterranean vaults seemed to burn brighter in the centre of the city, the diode plates shimmering above in an approximation of the sun the mist-shrouded island’s surface hardly ever saw, especially now, in the winter. Though the seasons mattered little to the Jagonese; not with their flash steam systems, powered by the underground water table warmed by volcanic action within, and the Fire Sea without. If only the island had more people. They could continue to live on Jago for another two thousand years – the machinations of the Archduchess of Pericur and the rising power of her nation on the opposite side of the Fire Sea be damned.

It wasn’t long before Hannah and Chalph reached the largest – and, some said, most elegantly carved vault in the city, the vast circular cavern of the Seething Round. Here, flanking the grand canal, buildings stood as high as twenty storeys, sash windows sparkling as brightly as jewels. And there at its centre, Jago Cathedral, the Grand Canal surrounding it like a moat, spanned by three bridges leading across to its chambers. The largest bridge – the south – lay opposite the steps leading up into the Horn of Jago itself, the mountain long ago hollowed out like a termite mound for the richest vaults and streets of the capital, topped by the senate and capped at its summit by their flare-house. Yes, the light of Jago had once burned with far more than the Fire Sea’s red glow reflected from its basalt cliffs. For those who ruled the city below from high inside the mountain, it probably seemed as if nothing had changed – and even Hannah, at her tender age, could see that that was part of the problem.

There were extra priests and vergers standing at all three bridges across to the cathedral now. Last month, Jago Cathedral
had been broken into at night and the altar raided for silver, its collection boxes smashed. The crime no doubt perpetrated by would-be emigrants desperate to scrape together enough coins to bribe the harbour workers to look the other way when the next supply vessel docked.

Hannah chose the smallest bridge to try to sneak across to the cathedral, but Chalph’s heavy six-foot figure following behind her was unmissable. A tonsured priest sucked on his teeth in a disapproving way as they passed. ‘You may be late, Damson Conquest, but I can’t be letting your friend into the cathedral.’

‘Because he’s ursine?’

‘Because he’s a believer, miss. In the scriptures of Pericur, unless you’ve renounced your faith, Chalph urs Chalph?’

‘My house may be of a reforming bent,’ said Chalph, ‘but I don’t believe we’re ready to renounce the scripture of the Divine Quad quite yet. Atheists are treated less kindly in my nation than in yours.’

‘Then you and your faith shall stay on this side of our good Circlist dwelling, my fine-furred wet-snout friend, while young Hannah can go and make her apologies to the archbishop for an appointment ill-kept.’

Chalph glanced knowingly at Hannah, who was looking annoyed that the priest had used the insulting Jagonese name for an ursine:
wet-snout
indeed. ‘This place is just like the rest of Jago, it’s a relic. You remember what you’re going inside there for…it’s your future.’

She shrugged. ‘I’ll meet you out in the park later. We’ll see what the future looks like then.’

Hannah walked inside. Jago Cathedral wasn’t a relic to her, it was
home
. Wheel windows a hundred feet across painted the nave of the cathedral with brightly coloured illumination, much of it speckled by lines of formulae traced across each
stained glass light. Formulae had always been important to the Circlist church – the church without a god. Some of them were scientific, outlining the known building blocks of creation. Others were the proofs and balances of synthetic morality – equations that proved society worked best when people worked together, that kindness to the weak was a thing of glory, to do unto others as you would have done unto you. The quantitative proof for the qualitative teachings of Circlism. Hannah’s eyes flicked across the stained glass. There, the elegant proof for the parable of the clear mind – openness of mind versus the infective vectors of a faith-based meme. Every koan and parable taught by the church was represented, through both equations and sublime rainbow-coloured images. Of all Jago’s arts, stained glass was the most celebrated: as was attested to by the double-lancet windows as tall as the cathedral’s spires, which adorned the island’s most important building, the senatorial palace.

Hannah found the archbishop lighting candles in the north transept where a simple steel hoop held a thousand red wax candles, one for each of the koans of the Circlist teachings. The candles were always going out, much as they did – so the archbishop said – in the hearts of the race of man that were meant to subscribe to them.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ announced Hannah.

Archbishop Alice Gray turned around with an appraising look at Hannah. What did she see before her? A young blonde girl with skin so pale it might as well be alabaster? The lazy blue-eyed youngster that hoped to follow the woman who had raised her into the Circlist church? A stubborn, slightly distant little dreamer who always seemed to cause mischief for the prelate who had taken her in as her ward after her parents’ death?

‘I don’t suppose you were off studying for the algebra test
that Father Penley tells me he’s setting the church class at the end of the week?’ asked the archbishop.

‘I’ll pass it,’ said Hannah.

‘Yes, I’m sure you will. Then, undoubtedly you’ve been helping Damson Grosley fumigate the sleeping rooms for wall-louse.’

‘I tried,’ admitted Hannah. ‘But the brimstone was making me choke. I thought I was going to be sick.’

The archbishop rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not the only one who is being tried. That is the point of it, Hannah. That’s how you get rid of wall-louse.’

Sometimes, Hannah thought, the archbishop must have regretted taking her in aged three as a ward of the cathedral. If only Hannah’s parents’ boat hadn’t been incinerated in the Fire Sea. If only she’d had other relatives still alive in the Kingdom of Jackals, then they both might have been spared such perennial disappointments. If Archbishop Alice Gray had such thoughts, the perpetual look of concern that she wore on her face, whatever and whoever she was dealing with, effectively masked them.

Hannah followed the archbishop into a lifting room, past the belfry – then up into the rectory testing rooms, vestries, refectory, charterhouse and lodgings for the church staff that formed the cathedral’s highest level, but the lowest level of the Horn of Jago. Windowless at so low an elevation inside the mountain, and with nothing to look out on anyway except the frill of artillery tube placements waiting to drop mortar shells on anyone – or anything – foolish enough to try to storm either the capital’s walls or its harbour.

It was the rectory testing rooms that Hannah was interested in this afternoon, though; always more hopefuls waiting in front of testing tables than there were fathers with seminary experience to administer the tests. While every shop, mill and concern in Hermetica City perpetually displayed
staff-wanted signs in their bow windows, the Circlist church had to turn away would-be novices queuing to enter its ranks. Or rather, sign up for the slim chance that the church might post them away from Jago and across the sea to one of the other Circlist nations.

The archbishop talked to the seminary head for a minute, before coming back towards Hannah.

‘Father Blackwater has had no message from the church council, nothing in the post sack that arrived with the boat from Pericur this morning.’

‘I need to sit the entrance exam,’ protested Hannah.

‘You are still two years away from being of age,’ said the archbishop. ‘You need special dispensation from the Rational Synod.’

‘Do I?’ asked Hannah. ‘You’re the Archbishop of Jago, you can grant me the dispensation.’

‘No.’ The archbishop shook her head, a stubborn glint in her green eyes that Hannah knew too well. ‘It would be wrong for me to intervene where I have a personal interest. You are my ward; I have to excuse myself from the examination process. It is the right and rational thing to do.’

Hannah lost her temper and jabbed a finger at the other hopefuls waiting for the Entick test, the measurement of their aptitude and mastery of synthetic morality. ‘So if I wasn’t your ward, if I was just one of
them
, you’d give me your dispensation to sit the church entrance exam early?’

‘You’re two years away from the age of testing,’ said the archbishop. ‘And any answer I have to give would be far too clouded by my feelings for you.’

‘I’m ready for it!’

‘I don’t doubt your abilities in casting analytical proofs, Hannah,’ said the archbishop. ‘There’s too much of your mother in you for you to be anything other than a mathematical
prodigy. But you need a basis of experience to apply what you learn in the church, that’s why there’s an age set to take the test. If the church merely wanted to indoctrinate fanatics, if we wanted to train
preachers
, we’d have snatched you from your cot and invented deities to terrify your mind into obedience. You need a clear mind and a wise heart to work with your parishioners, with the experience of humility to know when you’re falling short of either of those.’

‘I don’t even want to leave the island,’ argued Hannah. ‘I’d be happy to stay on Jago, not try to land the first vacant Jackelian vicarage or Concorzian parsonage that comes up.’

‘I’m not concerned about you leaving the island.’

‘You are,’ accused Hannah. ‘You want to keep me here, wallowing in the same ignorance you’re sworn to try to banish.’

The archbishop sighed. ‘We’re not exactly a pit of ignorance here at the cathedral. I think you’ve been spending too much time listening to your ursine friend Chalph urs Chalph, young lady.’

Hannah could see this was an argument she wasn’t going to win, and she was distracting the others taking the entrance exam. Some of the seminary fathers were looking up irritably from behind the piled leather tomes full of questions and equations to solve. A few of the candidates were trying to twist their heads around inside their rubber helmets, rattling the heavy lead-lined cables going back to the Entick machines. The goggles inside the hood measured the dilation of the iris in an attempt to ensure the questions were being answered truthfully, and her heated debate with the archbishop was probably skewing results across the testing room.

‘Chalph is no fool. He said I’m going to have to leave the island to have a future,’ retorted Hannah. ‘Perhaps he’s right.’

‘“The finger that points at the moon isn’t the moon,”’ quoted the archbishop.

‘Oh, please,’ said Hannah, ‘of all the koans…this is Jago. I haven’t seen a moon through the mist for months.’

Hannah didn’t hear the archbishop’s reply. Someone was coming through the testing room door and her heart sank as she saw who it was. Vardan Flail. The long red robe he wore disguised the high guild master’s awkward movements. The Circle knew what mutations he was hiding under that intricately embroidered crimson garb! If a foreigner were to enter the cathedral and see the archbishop standing next to Vardan Flail, they would lay eyes on his fancy red velvet mantle with all its woven transaction-engine symbols, note the archbishop’s simple chequerboard-pattern cassock, and come to the conclusion that it was Flail who was head of the church here on Jago, not the archbishop.

A shiver went down Hannah’s spine as she smelled the mint-like fragrance that had been infused into the valveman’s velvet robes – sprayed, it was said, to disguise the smell of putrid flesh.

‘I hope,’ said the archbishop, ‘that you aren’t here to complain about the additional processing cycles that the testing sessions are going to require of your transaction engines.’

‘Hope,’ came the grinding voice under the cowl, ‘or pray?’

‘I won’t tolerate that filthy language here in the cathedral!’

Which was precisely why he had said it.

‘If you had need of extra processing power, I would bring the matter up in the appropriate forum – in front of the stained senate,’ said Vardan Flail. ‘We have power enough. It’s not you that I have come to see, it is your young ward here.’

Her?
Hannah looked with disgust at Flail’s red cowl, just enough of the high guild master’s pockmarked features visible in the shadow of the hood to turn her stomach. What in the name of the Circle did the most loathsome high guild master in the capital want with her?

‘I have the results of the ballot,’ said Vardan Flail.

The ballot? Hannah’s stomach felt as if it was dropping down the city’s deepest airshaft.

‘Damson Hannah Conquest is one of the names that has been randomly selected for service within the guild.’

‘
Randomly
selected by the programs running on your transaction engines,’ said the archbishop.

‘I don’t care for your tone,’ warned Vardan Flail. He pointed slowly to the testing equipment and then up towards the diode panels in the stone roof of the testing room. ‘You seem happy enough to utilize the processing cycles of the engine rooms and draw power for the lights to keep your cathedral illuminated, but like everyone else here, you flinch at the sacrifices necessary to keep our island’s mighty turbine halls humming.’

‘I won’t do it,’ spluttered Hannah.

‘Not turning up for balloted service is considered desertion,’ threatened Vardan Flail, ‘and you are far too clever to let yourself be exiled for that crime, young Hannah Conquest. With your mind you will settle in fine with us as an initiate cardsharp. We won’t have that beautiful intellect of yours wasted hauling sacks of broken valves to the smelt or crawling inside the turbine halls’ generators to oil the magnets. No, within a year you’ll be able to turn out punch cards like you were born to it. Punch cards to control the most powerful transaction engines we possess. You will be able to make a difference that can be measured in the efficiency of everything you code.’

‘And end up like you?’ spat Hannah.

‘These are my blessings,’ said Vardan Flail, touching his arm. ‘The sacred scars of duty.’