Secrets of the Fire Sea (3 page)

‘The senate won’t need to exile me beyond the city walls. I can ship out for the Kingdom of Jackals any time I want.’

‘Legally perhaps,’ sneered Vardan Flail. ‘Although dual
nationality and the application of the draft is still a point of law that is open to examination; I should know, I checked the legality of the situation quite thoroughly before I came to see you, little lady. How many new anti-emigration bills have been passed this year? You can spend the few days before your service starts looking at the empty docks and wondering when the next Jackelian u-boat is going to come calling – because we both know there won’t be any. And there’s not a supply-boat captain this side of the Fire Sea willing to risk the senate’s wrath by smuggling out a passenger without official exit papers.’

‘This is outrageous!’ said the archbishop. ‘I will protest to the senate.’

‘Of course you will. Everyone who is called to our service protests,’ said Vardan Flail, sadly, as if the desire not to end up concealing a twisted body underneath crimson robes was a personal calumny against him. ‘The bleating of our chosen is as natural as a steam storm after rain. After every annual ballot the floor of the senate is fleetingly filled with the cries of rich merchants’ sons who are too good for our guild – or prelate’s daughters who are too fine and unblemished to toil inside our vaults.’ Vardan Flail reached out to stroke Hannah’s face and she flinched back as his warm, wrinkled skin brushed against her face. ‘This isn’t your true beauty, girl, it’s in there.’ He prodded a finger against her forehead. ‘Yes, it is in there, and we shall use it well…’

Hannah watched in horror as the valveman’s claw-like fingers vanished back inside the sleeve of his robe. This wasn’t happening to her. This wasn’t any future fit for her! She was going to follow her guardian into the church, a quiet, easy life of meditation and reflection in the still peace of the cathedral. Thinking great and noble thoughts. Not bonded into labour for a beast like Vardan Flail, her body swelling and
cracking and breaking until she too would have to scuttle through the streets of Hermetica City, hiding herself behind heavy robes from the gaze of everyone she knew on the island. Cursing mirrors, cursing her very reflection in the canal waters.

‘Off you go, Hannah,’ commanded the archbishop. ‘I think it’s time the high guild master and I continued our conversation alone in my chancellery office.’

Hannah waited in dread as the two of them left the testing room; the queuing would-be novices uncomfortably averting their gazes from the high guild master.

Then they were both gone and all Hannah could smell was the scent of mint in the air; mint and her cruelly crushed dreams.

‘What,’ asked archbishop Alice Gray as she shut the door to her chancellery office, ‘is this really about? I don’t come to the engine rooms and try to recruit your valvemen into the church orders. Is it too much to expect some of the same courtesy from a high guild master? Or is this what we have descended to now in Jago? So few people left to employ that we must poach labour from our neighbours’ staff?’

‘The courtesy is for a high guild master to take the time to come and serve a ballot notice personally,’ hissed Vardan Flail.

‘How gracious of you,’ said the archbishop. ‘Now, what’s your real motive? Is it Hannah you want, or…?’

‘There might be a way,’ replied Vardan Flail, ‘for me to forgo the services of your ward. A singular loophole in the statutes of the ballot of service that could be exploited.’

The archbishop’s green eyes narrowed. ‘Go on.’

‘The ballot is not allowed to fall on a high guild master’s own family. A very wise clause, don’t you think? You only have to see how the stained senate works – or rather, how it
doesn’t – to know the harm that nepotism and favouritism within a guild would create.’

‘But Hannah Conquest is not a member of your family.’

Vardan Flail dragged his body to the window looking over the cloister chamber below. ‘She would be if you married me, Alice. Your ward, my ward. Everything squared. Or should that be joined on the Circle?’

‘So that’s what this is really about. You’ve had my answer on that matter before.’

Vardan Flail looked out of the window, gazing down towards the albino-pink blossom falling from the trees lining the cloister, a rain of it drifting in the draughts from the ventilation grilles. ‘The unlikeliest things can blossom in the vaults of Jago, Alice. Look down there, the only trees that prosper well under diode light. Is it so unlikely that a union between the two of us might do the same? The tenets of Circlism set no store on the physical appearance of things, only our true selves. And we’re very good Circlists in the engine rooms.’ He pulled out a heavily pockmarked palm from underneath his sleeve’s crimson velvet folds. ‘The flesh fades and what remains is true.’

‘Cavern bamboo also prospers like a weed down here. I don’t doubt your belief in Circlism,’ said the archbishop. ‘Sometimes it verges on
faith
—’ she pronounced the word like a curse ‘—but a meeting of minds is never enough for marriage, there must also be a meeting of hearts.’

‘There are other things I can offer you,’ said Vardan Flail. ‘Like immortality.’

‘A sketch of my face on paper isn’t me,’ said the archbishop, angrily. ‘And a simulacrum of myself sealed up in the valves of your transaction engines isn’t me, either. Our essence is cupped out into other lives after this. That’s the only permanence you can trust, all else exists only as currents in the stream.’

‘There must be someone else, another man,’ hissed Vardan Flail, ‘for you to keep rejecting me. Tell me who it is? Who has been courting you?’

‘A long time ago, maybe, but not now. I have the duties of my position and the needs of the people of Jago to serve and that is enough for me. It will need to be enough for you too, Vardan Flail.’

‘Then I will hold to them,’ spat the crimson-robed form, limping towards the door. ‘And I will hold to my duties with the fine mind of your ward added to the labours of the guild.’

‘Over my dead body!’

‘Your body really doesn’t matter,’ said Vardan Flail, menacingly as he departed. ‘Not any more.’

The Kingdom of Jackals. Middlesteel.

B
oxiron walked towards the drawing room, his heavy iron feet echoing on the polished, veined marble. There was a strip of carpet before the doorway and the clunking of his feet faded, muffled just enough to enable him to hear the voices from those gathered inside the drawing room through its closed door. It was luxuriously appointed, this Middlesteel townhouse, but then that was to be expected. Only the wealthy could afford the services of Jethro Daunt and his trusty servant, Boxiron.

The constable guarding the door looked at Boxiron advancing with a curious expression on her face. Steammen were a common enough sight in the Kingdom of Jackals, but they weren’t usually quite so ramshackle. Boxiron had none of the grace of the creatures of the metal that bowed their knee to King Steam inside his mountain state. The modern shining skull of a steamman knight was inexpertly welded to the primitive body of a man-milled mechanical, steam hissing out of loose plates as he walked on his awkwardly jerking hinged feet.

‘You been out looking for clues?’ asked the constable, a simple crusher wearing the black uniform of the city’s constabulary.

Boxiron gave a slight shake of his head, the movement amplified into a spastic jerking by his unsynchronized neck controls. No. What would be the point of looking for further evidence of misdoings now? Cuthbert Spicer, Lord Commercial of the Kingdom of Jackals, was just as dead as the finer sensory control servos running along Boxiron’s neck, and both their masters now stood inside the drawing room for the culmination of the investigation – Inspector Reason of Ham Yard giving official sanction to the presence of Jethro Daunt and his metal servant.

Not that there was much of a pretence by anyone that the ex-man of the cloth would have been called in to uncover the truth of Lord Spicer’s murder without the insistence of the victim’s estate. Jethro Daunt’s keen intellect might have been arguably better employed here than it ever had been when he was the parson of Hundred Locks, but it was not an argument that you would ever hear coming from the lips of any constable or police inspector, eager to keep amateurs out of their profession. It was not as if the capital’s police force needed to feel threatened: for every high profile murder like Lord Spicer’s, there were a hundred cases of garden variety grave robbing, kidnapping, counterfeiting and pick pocketing where the injured parties lacked the resources to engage a consulting detective.

‘So, what are you here for then?’ asked the policewoman on the door.

Before Boxiron could answer there was a shout from inside the room and the door was flung open with some vigour, knocking the constable off her feet, her hand – which had been resting on her police cutlass – flying out to steady herself.
Boxiron raised an arm and the exiting figure ran into it, crumpling as if a garden wall had dropped on top of his head. Knocked down to the carpet, the miscreant fumbled for the small pistol he had dropped and Boxiron took a step forward, his anvil-heavy foot smashing the gun and breaking at least three of the man’s fingers.

‘I am here for that,’ explained Boxiron to the constable. The steamman’s leg lashed out, kicking the villain in the ribs. ‘And that, and that, and that, and that…’

‘Good grief!’ came a bewildered shout from inside the drawing room. ‘Constable, stop that metal fellow, he’s beating Lord Spicer’s murderer to death.’

‘Not like that, officer!’ sounded a voice in warning. Boxiron’s vision plate was already focusing on the palm of the constable reaching down for her black leather holster, and he began to calculate the arc his right arm would need to shatter her pistol hand. ‘The lever! The lever on his back.’

Jethro Daunt lunged out of the doorway and dragged the lever on the back of the steamman’s smoke stack down through its gear positions, slotting it back into its lower-leftmost groove. The little engraved brass plate placed there by the manufacturer read ‘idle’, but Boxiron’s previous employers had scratched a line through the script and painted it over with the words ‘slightly less-murderous’, instead.

‘Boxiron can’t reach his gears by himself,’ said Jethro Daunt, apologetically.

Or rather, no household in their right mind would ever buy a Catosian city-state manufactured automatic that left its regulation in its own iron hands. Boxiron’s leg crunched down and the suspect’s beating was over; at least, the one he was going to receive from the consulting detective and his assistant. What he was going to receive inside the cells of Ham Yard was another matter. The constable forced the suspected
murderer roughly to his feet, translating her embarrassment at being taken by surprise while on duty into a rather rude handling of her prisoner.

Boxiron turned to see Jethro Daunt and the police detective at the door behind him. Inspector Reason standing a shade under Daunt’s six foot – the inspector’s hard cynical face the polar opposite of the erudite, distinguished features of Boxiron’s beak-nosed employer. The others in the drawing room – all potential suspects – were hovering nervously, watching as the suspect was manacled.

‘But the Circle damn it, Daunt, how did you know that it was Spicer’s own doctor who killed him?’ asked the inspector.

‘He bobbed us for fools,’ explained Jethro Daunt. ‘The smell of elderflower in the library we came across wasn’t the bottle of scent that had cracked when Lord Spicer fell down inside the room. Its label read Kittle and Abrams, and their firm sell no scent with elderflower as an ingredient. The scent was a decoy to mask the smell of something else…a sleeping draught administered by the doctor to make Damson Stow fall asleep, giving the doctor time to wind back the carriage clock and make us think that the murder happened half an hour earlier than it actually did.’

‘But how did you know about the clock?’ asked the inspector.

‘Because when the doctor slipped back to reset it to the correct time, he did so using Damson Stow’s own pocket watch, and that runs ten minutes fast – she told me she kept it like that, so that she would never miss her day’s deliveries coming into her kitchen. And that’s why she also had to die. When the damson realized what the doctor had done, she tried to blackmail him over Lord Spicer’s murder.’

‘Poor woman,’ said the inspector. ‘She probably never knew the doctor was the illegitimate child of Lord Spicer and her sister.’

‘Raised with enough money to pass through the royal college of medicine,’ said Jethro, ‘but not enough to paper over the grievances of the family fortune sliding away from him and towards his half-brothers and sister.’

‘You almost cheated the hangman out of a handsome crowd,’ the inspector said to Boxiron. ‘They’ll pay more than a penny a seat to see a respected doctor swing outside the walls of Bonegate.’

‘Sorry, inspector,’ apologized Boxiron. ‘My steam was up and my gears slipped.’

‘No harm done, eh, old steamer.’

Now securely restrained by the constable’s manacles, the murderer winced at the pressure his arms, bent around his back, were putting on the ribs the steamman had cracked. ‘My father said I was a god for curing him. But I cured him of everything that was wrong with him in the end. What sort of god does that make me?’

‘The only sort there are, I am afraid,’ said Jethro, sadly. ‘The rather dangerous kind.’

Behind the ex-parson, the other suspects had fallen into a staccato chattering – proclaiming that they had known all along the killer hadn’t been any of those left inside the drawing room.

Jethro Daunt shook his head at their naivety and caught up with Boxiron’s hulking form just before the heavy steamman departed the town house, his voicebox muttering to himself in machine-like echoes. When his friend’s steamman head had been attached to the centaur-like form of a steamman knight, his voicebox has possessed the power to cast a battle cry that could burst a human heart inside its chest. Now it was attached to an inferior piece of Catosian machinery, however, all Boxiron could do was whisper half-mad dialogues to himself
– cursing the Steamo Loas and the cruel hand of fate for how he had ended up.