Secrets of the Fire Sea (20 page)

Slipping open a panel on the side of the gold staff, the
servant revealed a line of keys, and sent the order to the machines that controlled the battlement systems. Jethro heard a rusty-sounding ratcheting as a concealed door in the battlements opened, a ramp extending down to the black rock in front of the wall.

Stumbling out across the ramp and onto the dark, mist-shrouded plain below, a group of seven Jagonese were roughly shoved out into the wilderness. They milled around looking confused for a second while the light from the door disappeared behind them. The ramp was pulling back, the door closing.

‘What are you doing?’ demanded Jethro. ‘There are women and children down there…’

‘They look the same as other citizens, don’t they?’ said the First Senator. ‘But they’re not. That’s what you’re up against with this cursed conspiracy; the enemy could be anyone – anyone at all.’

‘They’re Jagonese? In the name of the Circle…’

The First Senator shook his head. ‘They were, until the Senatorial Court stripped them of their citizenship. These villains put themselves beyond society, now society is putting these criminals beyond it. Turnaround is always regarded as fair play back in Jackals, is it not? The most natural form of justice. The two tall ones down there were forgers, producing false papers of travel to Concorzia. The other dogs you can see below were named as the criminals that paid them for the forged documents.’

‘Exile,’ said Jethro.

‘A death sentence,’ said Boxiron, hissing out the words.

‘What they do beyond the city walls is up to them,’ said the First Senator. He leant over the parapet and yelled down. ‘They are no longer our society’s concern. Off with you. We don’t need your kind here. Corrupt filth!’

‘For pity’s sake,’ begged Jethro.

‘Some we are told even make it as far as the closest of the abandoned cities,’ said the First Senator. ‘If they can run fast enough.’

Down below, the shifting currents of steam had swallowed the two forgers as they ran towards a black forest rising out of the sea of white. In the distance there was a muffled drumming. It sounded to the ex-parson of Hundred Locks as though it was coming from the direction of the trees.

‘Ursks,’ said a mercenary officer walking down the battlements towards the politician. ‘They smash bones against the sides of the trees when they smell city folk coming.’

‘But not our bones, Stom urs Stom,’ said the First Senator. ‘Not while we have our loyal Pericurian soldiers protecting the true citizens of Jago.’

Down below, the group of would-be émigrés began yelling as screams sounded from the direction of the forest. Jethro couldn’t hear what the exiles were shouting, but the dark shapes he spotted fleeting though the mist spoke volumes for what their cries might be.

‘Your bones!’ the First Senator yelled down jubilantly. ‘It’s your bones today!’

The large Pericurian officer jerked a paw towards her soldiers and they unshouldered their turret rifles.

‘You are not to shoot them,’ shrieked the First Senator. ‘Their sentence is exile, not execution.’

‘There are cubs down there,’ protested the officer as her fighters lowered their rifles. ‘The ursks will drag them away alive for burial in their larder caves.’

‘They wanted to leave us all behind,’ cried the First Senator. ‘Well, they have! They’re getting exactly what they wanted.’

With a scream, one of the exiled citizens was pulled back into the white vapour, vanishing while dark shapes cut through
the mist where he had been standing. Jethro tried to shut his ears to the group’s panicked, pleading cries, though he had no choice but to listen to the screams of grief as the remaining adults picked up their children and tossed them into the sloped city battlements, the explosion of energy carrying up past Jethro’s face, so intense it almost stopped him seeing the remaining exiles grasping their hands together and hurling themselves forward to create a second blast. They had committed suicide rather than try to outrun what was waiting hungrily for them in the mists.

‘You’re cheating the exile law,’ shrieked the First Senator, his face pursing petulantly.

Jethro leant forward, his knees buckling and involuntarily emptied the contents of his stomach across the insulated grey tiles along the rampart. By the time Boxiron helped him back onto his feet, all that remained of the exiles was the charred smell in his nostrils. Their burnt corpses had already been dragged out of sight by the horrific things prowling through the steam mists.

‘We expected a stronger stomach from you,’ said the First Senator. ‘We know you have sent men and women to the gallows back in Jackals.’

‘They were murderers,’ coughed Jethro. ‘All of them.’

‘And so are the members of the conspiracy and their puppets,’ said the First Senator. ‘The enemy are murdering our society. Every year, every month, we are a little deader on Jago. A little bit emptier, a little nearer being finished. But we will stop them, we will reverse all of their schemes, we will smash their plots, and so—’ he jabbed a finger at Jethro, ‘—will you, my Jackelian friend. Don’t bring us the little people, the draft dodgers and the deserters. They are all the colonel’s incompetent militia are able to catch to feed our courts, the pathetic stowaways dragged off the boats heading
to Pericur. We want the ones organizing the great plot. Find us the cabal behind this evil so we can toss them out of our city before they corrupt any more of our people.’ The First Senator pulled a silk handkerchief out of his jacket pocket and tenderly wiped a trace of vomit away from Jethro’s mouth as his voice turned threatening. ‘And you must work fast. We would hate to see you fall victim to the conspirators’ filthy lies, our Jackelian friend. You must prove where your loyalties lie.’

Jethro swayed on his feet, the cold winds mixed with the warm fog from the Fire Sea playing across his face. He was rock. It was as if he was becoming part of Jago here. Merging with its black basalt plains and the fire-warmed cliffs.

‘We should come out to the wall more,’ said the First Senator, his voice turning sugary again. ‘To see the enemy. To remind ourselves of what they look like. It’s better when the weather’s not so misty, you can see more of what the ursks do to the criminals. And it’s so warm when the mists are rising, so warm.’

Jethro watched the First Senator collapse into a sedan chair waiting on the parapet for him, four Jagonese bearers lifting him away. Another man ran alongside the chair with a large fan, energetically cooling the ruler and trying to avoid his feet becoming entangled with the robes of the richly liveried senatorial rod carrier trotting after his master.

‘Yes, but who is the enemy?’

‘A free company fighter does not ask such a question,’ said Stom urs Stom, thinking Jethro’s remark was addressed to her. ‘We only need to know who is paying us to take to the field.’

‘There should always be honour in war,’ said Boxiron.

The large mercenary stared at Boxiron, as if seeing the steamman for the first time – a steamman knight’s skull
incongruously welded to the rattling body of a Catosian mechanical. A broken fighter.

‘Yes,’ said Stom. ‘Yes, you are right. There should be that.’

The mercenary officer followed after the departing retinue, leaving Jethro and Boxiron alone looking into the shifting mist and listening to the distant victorious howling of the ursks.

Jethro was no soldier, but he was bobbed if he could see any honour out there.

‘W
ait here,’ commanded the house’s chamberlain, brushing the white-tipped fur on his ancient chin; easily one of the more supercilious of the ursine representatives that comprised the trading mission to Jago. ‘I shall check the baroness is ready to receive you.’

Chalph resisted the urge to click his teeth – the ursine equivalent of a tut. Of course the baroness was ready to receive him. If Chalph hadn’t shown up exactly on time this evening to present the week’s completed trading ledgers, the Master Clerk of Accounts would have had him whipped for his tardiness. Luckily for the young ursine, he was far cleverer than the elders he served usually gave him credit for – able to do his work, and squeeze enough time out of his far-ranging errands to help Hannah. Chalph, isn’t he at the docks this morning? No, then he must be out visiting the merchants for returns. Really, but I thought he was with you this afternoon?

Chalph rebalanced the pile of heavy ledgers under his arm as his eyes flicked across to the large double doors the chamberlain had disappeared through into the baroness’s receiving room. Above the doors were the crests of each Pericurian house that
had held the Jagonese trading licence – the House of Ush’s single legendary white oak occupying the right-most position – that line of heraldry a living testament to the twists and turns of politics in their homeland. In much the same way as the Jagonese had managed to capture a slice of their old lives in the deep vaults of the island, the interior of the building the trading mission had occupied since time immemorial boasted the oak flooring, panelling and engraved woodwork of a typical Pericurian dwelling. If the baroness could have got away with adding onion-shaped minarets to the mission’s roof, she would have. Then again, perhaps not. These days there was a value in being discreet. There was enough bad feeling towards the Pericurian traders ‘getting rich’ as the islanders’ own fortunes waned, without the house flaunting expensive imported timbers on the outside of their compound.

‘Enter now,’ said the chamberlain with a false tone of awe, reappearing through the doors and making it sound as if Chalph had just been given news of a large legacy.

The baroness’s chamber was dark, the wooden slats of the blinds turned to admit only a half-light from the vault outside – the kind of perpetual twilight you were meant to be able to feel walking through the great forests of Pericur. And there, lying on a low, cushion-lined couch of monstrous proportions was the great dark mass of Laro urs Laro, the twenty-second Baroness of the House of Ush, most humble servant of the nation of Pericur. Among those of her house, those on Jago, she was known simply as the baroness, as if there were no others sitting on the Baronial Council. And as far as Chalph and his fellow bonded workers were concerned, that might have been the scripture’s own truth.

‘I have the week’s accounts, my baroness,’ Chalph announced.

‘So you do, Chalph urs Chalph,’ warbled the baroness from her couch, the silvery black fur around her large belly
undulating as she spoke. Here was a true ursine female in all of her middle-aged glory. So heavy that she had to be borne through Hermetica City on a litter carried by eight footmen. A noble mountain of flesh carved in the traditional manner, and the absolute ruler of her realm.

Chalph bowed and stepped forward, placing the ledgers between bowls of honeyed fruit on a low table. Her command of detail and concentration bordered on the supernatural, and woe betide the clerk who came forward with errors in the books after having supposedly double-checked the results that week. The baroness took the first of the ledgers and languidly turned its pages, interspersing her reading of the profit and loss columns with murmured demands for the contents of the table’s bowls, stirring little apoplexies of anxiety among the retainers on all sides as they competed to fulfil her whims.

After the baroness had consumed half his ledgers and the same proportion of the honeyed fruit in front of her, she snorted and laid a massive furred finger on one of the line items. ‘This charge, my clerk. Three days ago. Six gallons of paint…irregular?’

‘For the walls of our wholesaler in the Seething Round, my baroness,’ explained Chalph. ‘It was attacked at night and the building daubed with anti-Pericurian graffiti.’

A sigh emanated from the large mass sprawled across the couch. ‘The Seething Round used to be a good neighbourhood.’

Chalph shrugged and he heard the chamberlain cough in annoyance behind him.

‘Speak, my clerk. Do not leave things unsaid,’ ordered the baroness.

‘There are no good neighbourhoods now in Hermetica City, my baroness. Not for the people of Pericur.’

‘Oh ho. So that is the way it is, Chalph urs Chalph? I have
ears enough to hear the gibes and insults that are thrown at my chair when I am carried outside the walls of the house.’

‘Things are growing worse in the city as the harvest from the domes dwindles, my baroness,’ said Chalph, choosing his words carefully. ‘If you travelled without the mission’s guards, I fear you might have worse than insults thrown at you.’

‘I see the counsel you would offer me in the way that you stand and the tone of your voice, even though you don’t suggest it.’

‘From a clerk who should mind his manners,’ hissed the chamberlain behind Chalph.

The baroness raised a slow-moving paw in Chalph’s defence. ‘I must know what all my people are thinking, not just those in the house’s council. It is the trader’s curse, my clerk. The wanderer’s curse. All those of your age and younger have been raised in this strange foreign city – and you think as much like the Jagonese as you do a proud member of the House of Ush. If the harvest is poor this season, then we shall just make much of the opportunity by bringing in grain from Pericur.’

Chalph bit his tongue. Every coin in profit the house made just fuelled Jagonese resentment against them. There would be no gratitude from the locals for bellies fed that would otherwise have gone empty, just more enmity against the Pericurian ambitions to drive the Jagonese off the island and grow fat off the islanders while they did so. Why couldn’t the baroness see that she was imperilling them all by staying here? They would end up selling the Jagonese the same oil and kindling that would be used to burn the mission out when things turned to the worse here. Would she treat a pogrom against them as just another part of the trader’s curse?

‘Patience, my clerk,’ commanded the baroness. ‘You will feel the soil of the homeland between your toes before your soul is called; but the House of Ush will not hand the
conservatives back home a famous victory by voluntarily forsaking our trading licence here and sailing back to the new archduchess with our tails between our legs. That is
not
how I will meet her.’