Secrets of the Fire Sea (30 page)

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Time is just a tree to be pruned, all the infinite possibilities branching out. The whisper of a butterfly’s wings on the other side of the world and a good king takes the throne rather than his evil uncle. Plenty rather than famine. Health rather than plague. A little push here, a little nudge there. It’s so very easy to do. You could do it, you could use the god-formula to remake your world as a paradise.’

‘No one has that right.’

‘One branch of potential, another branch next door, you’re going to have to travel down one of them in the end anyway. The tree’s always growing, even we can’t stop that. All the branches look much the same from a higher perspective.
Why not pick the road that leads to a nice warm bed rather than a swamp? A comfortable parsonage back in the Kingdom, the cosy fire stoked by Alice Gray. Isn’t that the world you always wanted?’

‘Those are words of temptation. I refuse you.’

‘Refuse us? I expect you to join us, fiddle-faddle man. Time to step up. Time to be like your funny half-steamman friend – time for you to go all the way up to top gear!’

Time lurched forward again and Jethro felt Boxiron’s metal fingers on his shoulder. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Jethro softbody? Hannah Conquest has finished her tests. It is time.’

‘Yes,’ coughed Jethro, ‘that it most certainly is, old steamer.’

Jethro stepped over to the table where the priest was storing away the pile of tomes filled with questions that Hannah had finished answering. The examinees were slipping off their Entick helmets and wiping away the grease marks the brass goggles had left on their faces, looking groggy from the intensity of the questioning and sudden influx of light.

‘Father?’ Jethro coughed.

‘There is little doubt,’ said the priest behind the examination table. ‘Our result tabulation is just a formality now. Hannah Conquest had passed the entrance threshold by the third book. Even the Guild of Valvemen will not be able to gainsay these results.’

Jethro shook the priest’s hand in thanks and went over to where Hannah was using a tissue lent to her by Nandi to remove the grease from her cheeks.

It was time for young Damson Hannah Conquest to hear the truth…

Hannah took the chair that Jethro Daunt offered her with trepidation, sitting just behind Boxiron. After what Father Baine had told her about how the cathedral fathers believed
she had done in the tests, this should have been a time of celebration, but instead there was an almost funereal air of expectation on the faces of the commodore, Nandi and Chalph. And what was the large ursine she had been introduced to as the new Pericurian ambassador doing in the ex-parson’s hotel room? Her escape from the guild’s draft was surely not the business of Jago’s distant neighbours on the opposite shores of the Fire Sea…

‘The guild hasn’t found a way to forbid me to enter the church?’ asked Hannah.

‘No,’ said Jethro. ‘You are free of the guild’s call on you. But we have discovered some important things while you have been in their servitude.’

‘The evidence that it was Vardan Flail who murdered Alice?’

‘Why she was murdered, at least,’ said Jethro. He reached into his pocket and drew out a paper bag of boiled sweets, popping one in his mouth before offering the bag to Hannah.

Hannah demurred. ‘The senate banned the import of those from the Kingdom years ago.’

‘Lucky I never offered one to the colonel, then,’ said Jethro, patting Hannah’s hand. ‘The weapon that Bel Bessant was developing to defend Jago from the Chimecan Empire’s gods was not designed to push them beyond the walls of our world as we thought, but to transform Bel Bessant into a god, to allow her to meet the dark deities on the gods’ own terms. That is what the cipher on the painting inside your locket was…it was one third of such a weapon, a god-formula. I believe the second piece of the god-formula was inside Alice’s missing locket. The third was concealed in the silver infinity circle that was stolen from the cathedral’s altar. These three paintings were uncovered by your parents during their research in the guild’s vaults.’

Hannah was left reeling from the ex-parson’s words.
To become a god! There were people of power in the world who thought they already were. And murder would be the least of what they would stoop to, to make their delusions a reality beyond the confines of their own twisted minds. Dogs like Vardan Flail.

Chalph stopped prowling the hotel room. ‘But the painting that was stolen from the cathedral did not contain a cipher?’

‘Precisely,’ said Jethro. ‘Yet it was that theft that led to Alice being murdered. And who would be in a position to know what that picture meant? Only someone who already had possession of one or more of the paintings with Bel Bessant’s god-formula concealed inside them. Someone who had pursued your parents for the copies of the images they found in the guild’s archives.’

‘I am not sure I understand,’ said Chalph.

Hannah shook her head. She didn’t either.

‘That is because you don’t yet see all of the picture,’ explained Jethro. ‘But Damson Tibar-Wellking, I believe, holds some of the missing pieces of the puzzle.’

Nandi produced the punch card with Hannah’s writing on the reverse side. ‘You did a very good job remembering your mother’s Joshua Egg from the guild’s archive. We ran its remaining iterations on Ambassador Ortin’s transaction engines and recovered the final pieces of your parents’ research.’

‘I knew it,’ said Hannah. Hope rose within her. ‘I knew there would be more.’

‘Much of what was compressed inside the Joshua Egg your mother left us concerns the priest, William of Flamewall,’ explained Jethro. ‘Although the most important items your parents left behind for us are the first two parts of the god-formula. It seems your parents found images of all three paintings of the rational trinity within the guild’s transaction engines and your mother broke the steganography concealed
within the images. Like us, they found that the first two paintings contained parts of the god-formula, and that the third was a ruse, blank of steganographic code.’

Hannah gasped. ‘So it was Vardan Flail who destroyed my parents’ records on the guild’s engines. The jigger realized that my mother had left hidden copies of the god-formula. Destroying my mother’s secret backup was just removing the evidence of his crimes.’

‘The evidence may have gone, but we now have two of the three parts of the god-formula,’ said Jethro.

‘Which of the three paintings of the rational trinity did you recover from the Joshua Egg?’ asked Hannah.

‘The second,’ said Jethro. ‘
Discard your beliefs
.’

Hannah murmured in appreciation. That image was captured in stained glass back in the cathedral. A man sitting cross-legged in a hall surrounded by the broken idols of a thousand religions, prophets and messiahs. ‘So we have two pieces of the god-formula. But why would Bel Bessant leave two pieces of the code for us to find but not the third?’

‘You will get there shortly. Once you understand what Bel Bessant was creating,’ Jethro continued, ‘you will understand why even a Circlist priest could be driven to commit murder – why William felt he had no choice but to kill his lover when he found out. I have little doubt that just developing the god-formula would have left Bel Bessant dangerously deranged. She may even have started manifesting supernatural powers as a side effect of her work. By the time William realized what Bel was doing, physical violence was probably the only way he could have stopped her before she ascended towards godhood. I fear that towards her end she was no longer right or rational. Your parents uncovered more facts about William in their research, history they decided to bury extremely proficiently. For example, William of Flamewall never actually went on the
run from the police when his crime was discovered; he had already set off into the wilderness, acting as the priest on an expedition into Jago’s interior. He was following in the footsteps of Bel Bessant, who had filled much the same position herself with a party of trappers before she began developing the god-formula.’

‘Going outside the city walls with the trappers? That’s dangerous work,’ said Hannah. ‘Was William trying to get himself killed out of some sense of guilt for what he did to Bel?’

‘A little more than that. One of the documents your parents left us was transcribed in something distantly related to ancient Pericurian. It was discovered among Bel Bessant’s possessions during the militia’s investigation into her murder.’ Jethro pointed to Ortin. ‘The good ambassador here was kind enough to have it translated for us.’

‘Yes,’ said Ortin, excitedly. ‘It appears to be the text of a previously unknown tablet from the scripture of the Divine Quad.’

‘
We
know what it is,’ added Nandi, ‘and your father with his skills would probably have been able to translate it, but the text would have been a complete mystery to William of Flamewall and Bel Bessant. The Jagonese of their era weren’t to lay eyes on an actual Pericurian until many centuries later. Ortin and Chalph’s ancestors believed that Jago was a lost paradise sealed away by their gods somewhere inside the Fire Sea.’ Nandi dug into her satchel and pulled out a reel of paper that looked as if it had been spooled off a transaction engine. Dusting it off, she handed it hesitantly to Hannah. ‘Please read this. It was also among the contents of the Joshua Egg and will clear up a great deal for you, I think. It’s the last document your mother wrote for us, taken from her journal.’

Hannah unfurled the tape and began reading.

This is my last entry before I must leave Hermetica City. It seems as if our fears about who to trust were well-founded and not mere paranoia. George’s boat has been reported lost in the Fire Sea. I can only thank the Circle that our decision to keep Hannah safe here on the island with me was the right one.

The local newspapers say it was an unpredicted peristaltic flow that cut off the boat and then overwhelmed the craft. If that were true, then it would have been a very easy thing for the guild here to arrange. A small alteration in their model of the lava flows, and my darling husband would have been murdered as smoothly as sliding a stiletto blade into his back.

But I am not so sure that this is how the murder was done. I could swear that I saw the face of Tomas Maggs today, the skipper of the boat we had paid to take George back home. It was the look of astonishment on his face at seeing me alive, no doubt mirroring my own, that confirmed it was indeed the same treacherous little jigger. If Maggs was paid to abandon his vessel to the lava flows, then those who gave him the coin to do it must now know that I am not a sea-sick corpse locked in my cabin as George was pretending, but that I am very much alive and still on Jago, albeit as a widow.

Maggs will no doubt have stolen all three paintings and the first two parts of the god-formula from George before abandoning his boat to the Fire Sea, and Maggs’ paymasters will seek my death to put an end to the affair. If they realize quickly enough that William of Flamewall’s last painting was a hoax, then they will surely try to take me alive to torture the true location of Bel Bessant’s terrible creation from me. The first two parts of the god-formula are worthless without the third, so it seems I must follow William of Flamewall’s trail into the dark heart of Jago, towards the Cade Mountains and beyond. I wonder if he ever found the corpses of Bel Bessant’s
original expedition at Amajanur? I wonder if I will find William of Flamewall’s own body frozen out there? But most of all, I wonder if I will find the third part of Bel Bessant’s horrific legacy – and what I shall do with it when I do?

They say it is cold beyond the capital’s walls, far beyond the shoreline of the Fire Sea and the steam storms, but it is as nothing compared to the coldness inside my heart for those that have murdered George. If I can find the god-formula, they will have reason to fear my fury and regret having threatened my family. They
all
will.

Hannah found her hand was trembling as she got to the end of the entry; tears dripping against the rough transaction-engine tape it had been printed out on.

‘She’s alive!’ And the converse was also true. Hannah’s father was truly dead. But her mother hadn’t been on the u-boat when it was crushed by the shifting walls of magma – scuttled by Maggs, who was no doubt paid to do the terrible deed by Vardan Flail.

‘Your mother
was
alive,’ cautioned Jethro. ‘A decade ago. That is the only hope you can trust.’

‘What was the expedition at Amajanur she mentioned?’ asked Hannah.

‘Amajanur was spoken of in the Pericurian scripture found in Bel Bessant’s possession, dear girl,’ said Ambassador Ortin, enthusiastically. ‘It sounds exceedingly similar to one of the chapters in my people’s scriptures:
The Gateway of Amaja
, the tunnel that Reckin urs Reckin and his wife used to escape his treacherous brother and sister-in-law’s city after the war of the heavens.’

‘It’s a gateway to trouble, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘That much I know – and you so happy, ambassador, you’d think you’d found a long-lost uncle’s will and discovered yourself rich from it.’

‘It is indeed a legacy,’ said the ambassador. ‘But one for all of my people. Proof that our scriptures have a historical basis as well as a religious one will allow the reformers to gain the upper hand in the court once more.’

‘The Jagonese have been living on this island for thousands of years,’ said Nandi. ‘If we can find evidence of a Pericurian settlement on Jago that predates settlement by the race of man, then our history books will have to be completely rewritten.’

‘History, dear girl, I will leave to the sweep of time and the pens of archaeologists such as yourself,’ said the ambassador. ‘But if I can change the present of my nation for the better, then I must seize the chance.’

The commodore shook his head ruefully. ‘You want to seize the chance, but I can see that it’s poor old Blacky that’s going to be asked to do the bleeding for Pericur’s bright new future.’

‘You’re going after my mother!’ exclaimed Hannah.

‘Ah, lass, it’s a pretty pickle,’ complained the commodore. ‘William of Flamewall goes off exploring after the trail of his murdered lover, your mother follows him, and now we’re to be emulating the whole pack of them – when not a blessed soul ever came back to boast of it.’