Secrets of the Fire Sea (27 page)

Hannah rattled out another punch card with a more realistic set of pressure peaks and troughs for the control mechanism to follow – factoring in enough time for them to exit the shaft before the gate reopened. She had injected the punch card and re-corked the engine, but the self-congratulatory words of praise she was about to call across to Rudge were lost as one of the rivets exploded from the gate below – blasted away by a pressure front far more intense than the gate’s safety margins allowed for. A geyser of steam discharged through the tiny hole that had been opened – knocking the three of them swinging around the shaft on their rappel lines. There was a crashing sound as the spear of steam dislodged one of the RAM suits wedged in the shaft above. The suit came tumbling down like a landslide of metal and crashed into the gate. For a terrible moment Hannah thought the impact was going to smash the gate open, but it proved to be made of tougher stuff. The fallen RAM suit lay over the hole left by the dislodged rivet, temporarily sealing the leak. However, if sealing the leak had spared the three of them from steam burns, it had done no other favours for Rudge. The dislodged suit had brought his line down with it, and now the young navvy was pinned under the knee joins of his own suit, the arch of the leg trapping him with all the weight of a two-tonne foundry-forged tree trunk.

T-face was off his line, whining and pushing hopelessly at the massive suit’s leg. Rudge was still conscious enough to see Hannah trying to climb up into his downed suit’s pilot cage.

‘Suit – won’t work,’ he coughed up at her. ‘Not this – far down the – shaft.’

‘It might,’ Hannah called down. ‘I just need enough power to lift the leg off you.’

‘You’ll as like – crush me, grub. You’re the – only one with a line left tied to – a working suit. Climb back up and – take T-face with you.’

Hannah tried not to gag. She could smell Rudge’s skin burning where it was touching the gate. ‘I’ve found the fault, you idiot. The gate’s vanes are going to open up underneath you.’

‘Good job, girl. Then there’s only one – way me and my – suit are going, and that’s straight down.’

There was a loud creaking noise from underneath them. The gate wasn’t going to hold together long enough for Hannah to get out before the flow of super-pressurized steam resumed. It looked as if Vardan Flail had got his way. He was going to buy Hannah’s silence with her death after all.

Burning. Burning, as he rolled across the hotel room’s floor. Boxiron’s body was burning, but not as fiercely as his mind. The Steamo Loa that his people knew as Radius Patternmaster was reaching into his brain and filling it, preparing to swell and crack his nanomechanical neural channels and burn out each and every memory that Boxiron possessed. Not just the almost-decrypted code hidden inside Jethro’s church painting, but everything that made Boxiron a distinct being. His inferior, man-milled body was finally going to get the mind it deserved – that of an idiot savant.

Something deep inside Boxiron struggled and writhed in reaction to the pain – a vomit-like reflex that was trying to emerge and fight the possession of the Loa. What was it? A routine that had been hidden inside him by the flash mob? The cunning mechomancers who knew that there was always a danger that one of the steamman’s gods might strike at the
abomination they had created for their Jackelian criminal masters. But whatever defences the crime lords had secreted inside his body felt too far away and the weight of the Loa riding him too intense for him to connect with it—

—as he felt Jethro’s shadow falling over his body, the gear lever on his back slid squealing up to five.
Top gear
.

Now it was the Steamo Loa’s turn to shriek as the cobbled-together firewall the flash mob’s hirelings had inserted inside Boxiron connected with his mind. Blocks were raised on every circuit he possessed, the Loa that was trying to ride him cut into a million separate, self-aware splinters, steam leaking out of his joints. The manifestation of Radius Patternmaster tried to seethe out of Boxiron’s body, broken and mangled beyond recognition, attempting to reform…but merely dissipating in the air of the hotel room.

Boxiron pulled himself groggily to his feet, trying to avoid placing a heavy iron foot on Jethro’s toes as he swayed to and fro. Jethro was standing there before him, as was the young ursine Chalph urs Chalph.

‘That was one your people’s gods, was it not, old steamer?’

‘A Loa – I rejected him,’ said Boxiron, ‘much as you reject your gods.’

‘I am not much of a standard to aspire to,’ said Jethro.

‘You are more than they.’

A coldness flowed through Boxiron, as if every crystal board and node inside his body was hardening after being freed of the corrupting hold of the Loa. But it was not the aftershock of cleansing himself of the possession he felt.
It was the cipher from the painting
.

Assembling. Assembling. The last of the flash mob’s crooked processing units came back online passing him the final clue he needed to crack the steganographic code – one third of the mathematical weapon that the priest Bel Bessant had
crafted so many centuries earlier. It was like nothing that Boxiron had been expecting.

But then, neither was the explosion of pain as the terrible, cold, alien thing unfolded within his consciousness…

‘I
’ve never seen the like,’ said the commodore to Nandi as they emerged from the conning tower. He waved the punch card containing the Joshua Egg in the air as if he was still trying to clear the smoking ruin the card had left of his transaction engine’s navigation drums. ‘This blessed egg is jinxed, right enough. Raising a switching storm in the dark valves of those guild dogs, then roasting the transaction engine on my precious boat. It’ll take my crew weeks to repair this mess, and Jagonese tugs guiding us out or no, I won’t be sailing the Fire Sea blind without my navigation drums. We’re as good as beached here until the navigation room is fixed.’

‘It’s a coincidence,’ said Nandi. ‘I know that u-boat men are superstitious, but you can’t believe a few lines of code are cursed.’

‘I believe it, lass. This whole wicked isle is cursed. Jackelians find nothing but bad luck here, and look at the Jagonese. They were as good as us, once, and now see what they’ve become. Pale-faced lickspittles tending their infernal turbines and hiding in their mortal caves. Milksops raised on bamboo soup where once they would have swigged beer and eaten beef as proudly as any Jackelian.’

‘Just a coincidence,’ said Nandi again, trying to make herself believe it.

The commodore crossed the gantry over to the dock. ‘No, lass. This dark isle is a vampire land. It’s sucked the vigour out of a whole nation. Why do you think the Fire Sea surrounds it? There’s not one good island sitting in this whole damned sea and I’ve visited a few of them. Old Lord Tridentscale is the master of the oceans and he knew what he was doing when he sealed the black cliffs of Jago off behind the shifting magma. Yes, I’ll be right glad to swap the dark vaults of this place for the queer wooden towers and oak minarets of Pericur.’

Nandi started. Of course, the other end of the commodore’s voyage. Pericur.

‘That’s it!’ said Nandi. ‘I know how to run the Joshua Egg.’

‘Don’t be asking me to solve the numbers of its formula by hand,’ whined the u-boat man. ‘Not that my genius isn’t up to the task, mind, but I can feel it in my bones – anyone who attempts to solve that dark code will go mad. Don’t ask old Blacky to end up in an asylum for this lunatic chase you’re on.’

‘I’ll prove it to you,’ said Nandi. ‘That what we have here is only a complex code without a single supernatural expression in its formula; and I’ll do it with the help of Ambassador Ortin. Your cargo, Jared, transaction-engine parts bound for Pericur – and the ambassador took a good few crates of them for installation in his embassy.’

‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore, ‘if that fur-skinned fellow has a need for processing power that’s not satisfied by the monstrous thinking machines of the guild, it is only because he doesn’t trust the Jagonese with what he’s handling. Cipher work, Nandi. You’ll find his blessed embassy’s transaction engines come with an officer of the Pericurian secret police attached to them.’

Nandi shrugged. She didn’t give a damn about Pericurian politics, and if the ambassador’s transaction engines came configured for cipher work, so much the better. What was in here was going to save Hannah from the guild and Nandi would burn out every transaction engine on Jago if it meant saving the young church girl from her tormentors.

The transaction-engine room inside the Pericurian embassy was a lot more advanced than Nandi had been expecting. In fact, it was a lot more advanced than it had any right to be. How many customs officials on the Jackelian docks had Commodore Black bribed to look the other way while their most advanced transaction-engine models were hustled out of the country for export to the rising power across the sea?

The rattling, steam-driven drums on the Jackelian machinery looked out of place in this chamber, decorated in the Pericurian style with richly carved hardwood panelling across the walls and floors. The windows here were in the circular wooden-framed style known as bulls’ eyes back in Jackals. The stained glass obscured the view beyond, but that had probably been intentional. All of the embassies were clustered together in a ring on the hollowed-out level of the Horn of Jago know as Embassy Circle, and had a clear view of the concrete artillery domes around the foot of the mountain. A not-so-subtle reminder of Hermetica City’s ability to drop a shell on any unauthorized boat trying to breach the coral line defending the island.

‘You’re a fine fellow, Ortin,’ said the commodore. ‘Helping your old shipmates out of a blessed tight spot like this. I’ll give you a free berth to Pericur for your troubles, Ambassador, when you want it.’

‘What I want is of little consequence, dear boy.’ The Pericurian ambassador was still dressed like a Jackelian squire.
Perhaps the Jagonese tailor hadn’t come to see him yet. ‘The only way I’m getting out of my posting here is if the liberal houses come back into power, and I hardly judge that likely at the moment. Besides, annoying the ineptly disguised intelligence officer the archduchess has watching my every step by allowing you inside our embassy is worth every ill word in the report she’s furiously drafting right now.’

With the machine’s operator dismissed from the room, Ortin urs Ortin took an almost childish delight in taking charge of the transaction engine himself, his eyes glinting with manic glee as he transcribed the Joshua Egg’s second iteration and sprayed water onto the rotating drums when they started running hot. He put Nandi in mind of her mother watering the roses that wound around the trellises at the back of her cottage, all concentration, lost to the world.

As Nandi had predicted, if there was a curse on the Joshua Egg, it was a particularly Jackelian one, because the engine room in the Pericurian embassy seemed markedly unaffected by it. The results came rattling back on a large Rutledge Rotator, an abacus-like board of rotating squares. A more detailed breakdown appeared on a winding reel of paper tape, its wheels poorly oiled and squealing like suckling piglets competing for a mother’s teat.

When the results were flowing back from the third iteration of the Joshua Egg, Nandi didn’t hesitate. She urged the ambassador to toss the newly reformed code back into the decryption run – she would have enough time later to leaf through the data spooling out. Nandi might not be as convinced of a curse as the commodore, but she didn’t want to tempt fate if there was some mathematical quirk in the code that led to transaction engines overloading as they were teasing meaning out of it.

Again the next level of the Joshua Egg was solved, more
data thrown out along with another iteration and she tossed the new code back like a fish that was too small. By the fifth iteration, the Joshua Egg was exhausted. No more iterative pearls to be uncovered, no more compressed data to be drawn out.

Nandi spread the unfurled rolls of printed data across a heavy table meant for use by the engine’s cardsharps. Here it was, then. The last legacy of the two Doctors Conquest. Would there be anything in the pages of records they had printed out to help save the daughter they had hardly known? Would there be anything in them to allow Nandi to prove she was at least the equal of every one of the pampered popinjays who had bought their way into Saint Vine’s rarefied halls of academia? As Nandi started reading, she was calmly intent on finding out what the guild was so bent on preventing her from discovering. By the time she had finished, though, her hands were shaking and her skin was cold with sweat.

‘What is it, lass?’ asked the commodore. ‘Say this blessed evil code hasn’t given you a fever…’

‘Not the code,’ said Nandi. ‘What is inside it. We have to get to Hannah, Jared. We have to get her out of the guild’s vaults to hear what I’ve found here…’

The superstitious commodore was backing away without even realizing it, nearly treading on the riding boots of the large Pericurian ambassador.

‘…because she’s not going to believe this,’ said Nandi.

Jethro Daunt came running back into the hotel room with more thick cream bamboo paper to replace the pile that Boxiron had already used up. The pencil clutched in the steamman’s iron fingers moved across the paper so fast it was as if the numbers of the formula he was writing were flowing out of a breached dam. Chalph urs Chalph was gathering up
the completed papers, standing back from Boxiron as the steamman moaned about the pain of holding whatever he had found in the painting in his head before it vomited across the papers.

At last the steamman stopped scribbling. He rolled across the floor, whimpering, his stack emitting wheezing bursts of smoke. ‘It is gone. It is gone.’

‘It has,’ reassured Jethro. ‘It is all down here, now. On paper.’

‘Such a thing is not meant to be held within a mind,’ hissed Boxiron.

‘Not held incomplete,’ said Jethro. ‘Not without being balanced by the other two parts.’