Secrets of the Fire Sea (24 page)

Nandi nodded. And if Hannah had remembered the egg’s code accurately, then they could discover what it was the guild had been so desperate to stop the three of them from finding out. Perhaps even use the research left by Hannah’s parents to force the guild to release the press-ganged girl from their service.

Chalph urs Chalph watched Jethro gently roll over the pawnshop’s murdered proprietor. It was definitely him – Hugh Sworph – but Chalph had been wrong about the man being dead, despite the dagger stuck in his spine.

The shop owner’s eyes flickered open and Chalph thought he saw a glint of recognition in them.

‘Who did this to you?’ Chalph demanded. ‘Old man, who—’

The pawnshop’s owner reached up and pressed something into Jethro Daunt’s fingers. He tried to speak, but bubbles of blood came out instead. The blade must have punctured his lungs. Chalph saw that there were other wounds on the man’s chest – the knife had seen plenty of work before being buried in his spine.

Jethro Daunt knelt in close and Hugh Sworph hissed something that started as a whisper but ended as a hacking cough. Then the shopkeeper groaned and Chalph sensed the last breath of life departing the man’s mangled body.

Jethro listened to the man’s chest then laid him back on the floor. ‘No, the poor fellow’s gone now, may serenity welcome his soul along the Circle’s turn.’

Chalph glanced around the room, sniffing at the air. Not a single active scent. They were alone in here. The murderer had left a good while before the two of them had entered the pawnshop. Poor Hugh. It was symptomatic of how long Chalph had been around the race of man that he could look at the corpse and not wonder at the strangeness of the furless
body, instead noting how pale the man had become. How lifeless. ‘How your people can see something like this and not believe in the scriptures, I’ll never understand.’

‘Life is all around, good ursine,’ said Jethro. ‘Energy is never lost, only its pattern changed. Hugh Sworph’s soul has poured back into the one sea of consciousness and will be re-cupped into all the lives yet to come. That is the true crime of murder, for whoever killed him has only succeeded in murdering themselves.’

Somehow, Chalph doubted that. ‘What did he whisper to you?’

‘Twelve ten,’ replied Jethro. He opened his hand to reveal what had been pressed into it. A tiny key made of iron, not much longer than a fingernail.

‘A tenement apartment number to go along with the key?’

‘Not with this type of key, good Pericurian,’ said Jethro. ‘It is too small. Did you tell anyone you were coming here?’

‘I informed some of the people in my house that I was going to see Sworph about a mistake I found in the books for the supplies we ran to him,’ said Chalph. ‘But it wasn’t one of us that did for him. The only scents in here are from the race of man. There’s been no ursine bodies inside this shop for at least a week.’

Jethro glanced around the store, rolling the tiny key between his fingers. ‘Well, there’s no dolls houses for sale here, but…’

He walked over to a brick wall lined with grandfather clocks, each as tall as the ex-parson himself. None of the timepieces appeared to be in working order, though. All of their clock faces were reading different times and their pendulum rods hung silent and unmoving behind trunk doors. Jethro tapped the wooden plinth of each pendulum clock until he got to one that made a slightly different sound. Then he went up to its glass dial plate and inserted the dead shop owner’s
tiny key in a small keyhole there, swinging open the glass door and twisting the hands to ten minutes past twelve. A second after he had readjusted the dial, a door in the grandfather clock’s base swung out revealing a crawl space little bigger than a chimney cut through the wall. Chalph could see that there was light at the other end of the short passage.

Chalph went through on all fours after Jethro Daunt, coming out of the claustrophobic passage just behind the man and into a workshop at least half the size of the shop front they had left behind. Shelves and cupboards lined the walls, filled with the fruits of Hugh Sworph’s real trade – fencing stolen goods for the capital’s thieves and its desperate poor, with a lucrative sideline in black-market commodities. Chalph suspected the only things missing among the jewels, gold watches, rare metals, silver cutlery and imported spirits he could see stored about here were their customs duty, the stained senate’s taxes and any genuine receipts.

Jethro went over to one of the work benches littered with the tools of a jeweller and picked up a metal block. ‘Something to stamp a false mark of provenance on re-smelted silver.’ He checked the drawers of the bench and lifted out a tray of silver ornaments, church candles and a Circlist hoop, a much larger version of the one that Jethro wore himself.

‘They’re smashed,’ said Chalph.

Jethro pointed to the metal kiln in the corner of the hidden storeroom. ‘They were being broken apart to fit inside his kiln. Except that this circle didn’t need to be sawn into pieces, it was meant to be opened.’ He held the ornament up, indicating how it could be split open on concealed hinges, pushing a hand into the hollow empty tubing inside. ‘These are the altar ornaments that were stolen from inside the cathedral.’

‘What was kept inside the circle?’

‘What indeed?’ echoed Jethro, putting the circle back down.
‘What indeed, to have acted as the catalyst for so many deaths. Yes, everything started with the theft of this from the cathedral.’ Jethro walked over to a lithographic printing press behind the bench and tapped the press bed. ‘Your Mister Sworph would have used this to print off catalogues of stolen items for sale for his clients. The criminals back in Jackals call them steal-sheets. Let’s see if we can’t find some of them while we’re here, and Mister Sworph’s real set of ledgers if he kept such a thing.’

‘I think he would have,’ said Chalph. ‘He struck me as a most careful man, he was meticulous about everything we sold to him.’

Chalph started opening drawers and cupboards, rummaging through coins and medals and assorted bric-a-brac. It was obvious that the Jackelian ex-parson had been expecting to find the cathedral’s stolen altar ornaments inside the shop. What was the canny foreigner playing at? He continued searching.

In one of the lower drawers, Chalph came across a pile of catalogues – stiff, bleached, white bamboo sheets hole-punched and held together with string ties – discovering them at the same time as Jethro came across the set of leather-bound ledgers. They laid them both down on the workbench. Jethro examined the catalogues first: daguerreotype images of items that were worth more intact than they were as smelted and recast silver and gold goblets, page after page of fine crystal decanters, priceless books, family heirlooms and antiques. Only the good stuff. As Jethro reached the final page his mouth cracked into a smile. Chalph leant in for a closer look. It was a painting, a Circlist illumination similar in style to any one of a thousand stained glass windows that could be found gracing the buildings inside Jago’s capital. The painting showed a mountain, clearly the Horn of Jago, surrounded by
a wall of druids. A group of Circlists had broken through the line, making room for one of their number, a pilgrim, to run through and approach the mountain. A Circlist priest was running after the pilgrim and pointing to the top of the Horn of Jago, indicating his way.

‘This painting, good ursine, is what was concealed inside the altar ornament,’ said Jethro.

‘It is just a Circlist image,’ said Chalph.

‘The illumination is based on the third belief of the rational trinity,’ said Jethro. ‘
You climb the mountain alone
.’

‘Why would your strange church without gods want to encourage its followers to climb to the top of a mountain?’ asked Chalph.

‘It is a metaphor, good Pericurian. Every religion the world has known places itself between the worshipper and the mountain – which in this illustration stands for enlightenment – ranks of priests demanding the right to interpret and impose their truths on you. In Circlism, you must find the truth yourself without help. You must climb the mountain alone, with your bare hands. Truth is never given to you, you can only seek it.’

‘Old Sworph did not think this painting was very valuable,’ snorted Chalph, reading the text underneath the image. ‘It is at the back of his catalogue. A miniature by William of Flamewall. Price on application. That means he would have accepted the best price for it, a low price.’

‘No, it had the highest price of all,’ said Jethro. ‘It cost him his life.’ The ex-parson rolled up the catalogue and slipped it inside his jacket. ‘But you are correct. Our poor Mister Sworph did not know the painting’s true value. But he suspected it had some, given he had found it hidden inside an expensive silver ornament stolen from the cathedral.’

Jethro opened the fence’s ledgers and scanned through them
for a couple of minutes before passing one to Chalph. ‘You help keep your house’s ledgers. What do you make of these?’

Chalph flicked through the book, finding neat hand-lined pages inside, black ink on bamboo paper. ‘It’s a purchase ledger. Items by date – prices paid, sellers, estimated value. Detailed work. Accurate.’

‘You see, you were right, he was a careful man,’ said Jethro. ‘You can tell that by the fact that he printed off his own catalogues. A lazier fellow would have given the steal-sheets to a printer to run off and risked one of the ink mixers getting drunk at a tavern and boasting about their “special work” to someone who might have tried to profit from having heard it.’

‘But there’s nothing in here about who Sworph sold the items to.’

Jethro hummed and took back the book. ‘No, the sales ledger is, I suspect, no longer under this roof. I believe whoever killed our Mister Sworph made him hand his sales ledger over. Then the poor fellow was murdered anyway to stop him from talking.’ Jethro ran his furless fingers down the margins of the pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘Here is the purchase record for what was stolen from the cathedral. Circlist silver. Meltable. Paid two marks and twelve pence. The good man certainly didn’t believe in overpaying for what he received, did he?’

‘But the name of the seller has been crossed out,’ observed Chalph. And there was something written in black ink above the crossings out. Hugh Sworph had written the word “
Dead!!!
”

‘Yes, he’d heard something,’ said Jethro. ‘My pennies would be placed on something unpleasantly fatal occurring to the thieves who broke into the cathedral and fenced him the altar ornaments. Our friend suspected he was the next in line to be silenced.’

‘What’s so special about this damn painting,’ asked Chalph, ‘that people are willing to kill for it?’

Jethro held up three of his fingers. ‘Three paintings, good Pericurian. The rational trinity is composed of three paintings. Whoever killed Alice and tried to murder Hannah now has two of them.’

Chalph’s eyes narrowed in his bear-like face. Seeing what the killers had already done to get the first two paintings, Chalph didn’t need to be an investigator like Jethro Daunt to know that they would be coming back for the last one.

Coming back whoever or whatever stood in their way.

While his minions called the pot-bellied man who ruled the guild’s deep turbine halls the
charge-master
, Hannah quickly realized he might just as well have been the demon king of this buried dominion.

Like everyone else down in the turbine halls he had shaved his head and he strutted around the induction vault with his cowl – unusually for the guild – folded down.

The charge-master eyed the chain of new arrivals suspiciously and laid a hand on one of the great iron suits lined up behind him against the wall. ‘Which of you grubs,’ he boomed, ‘can tell me what this is?’

It seemed all the new recruits were ‘grubs’ until they graduated through sheer sweat and survival into fully-fledged turbine men, or ‘termites’.

‘It’s one of the machines the trappers use to ride outside the city,’ announced someone from within their line – Hannah didn’t see who had been brave enough to answer back.

‘Trappers, yes and city workers too when they have to clear the culverts and the aqueducts beyond the battlements.’

It looked to Hannah’s eyes like a massive version of Boxiron, or a rusty suit of armour made for a twenty-foot giant. She had
heard the recruits talking about them before she came in. How you needed a lucky suit, one passed down through the generations that hadn’t killed any of its owners. One that wasn’t possessed by a suit-ghost.

‘To the trappers up top this is a Rigid Armour Motile suit, or RAM suit. But down here, it’s just
iron
, and pushing iron is what keeps you healthy.’ He rapped the legs of the metal giant. ‘There’s a thousand ways to die working the turbine halls – steam flash, gas build-up, false current reversals – but one thing you grubs won’t get sick from is the electric field. Sick is what you get being tickled by constant background exposure to the transaction engines upstairs. But this is the guild’s real work down here. We don’t wear lined cowls inside the halls; we don’t wear those toy lead chainmail vests the guild passes out to visiting senators. There’s a foot of lead inside your iron, and that’s thicker than your grub heads. And thick is what you are, or you wouldn’t have been given to me.’

The charge-master rested his foot on a platform and struck a rubber button, the platform lifting him out and up and towards the centre of the suit where a vault-like door had swivelled out, revealing a man shaped cockpit. Their master’s suit was painted in a distinctive red and black chequerboard pattern.

‘The suit is slaved to your movement,’ he called down to the line of initiates from inside the cockpit. ‘You move, it moves. All the extra controls are down by your right thumb.’

The door in the centre of the suit’s chest was closing, sealing the charge-master inside. The suit stomped forward, shaking the cavern floor and making the initiates jump back in fright and scatter before the towering metal creature. There was a thick dome on top of the suit and Hannah could just see the charge-master’s beady eyes gazing down at them through the crystal slit. His voice boomed out of a voicebox built into
the chest as he swung a massive arm to point to the hangar-style door at the opposite end of the cavern. ‘When that door lifts up in two minutes, any of you not inside your suits are going to fry. Any of you grubs who are too stupid to be able to copy what I just did are too dangerous to be allowed to work alongside me.’