Secrets of the Fire Sea (37 page)

Well, as bad as the task of keeping forward watch on this maintenance run was, Hester considered, at least she hadn’t yet been assigned the lonely duty of buoy keeper. Waiting on one of the stone platforms for non-existent trading vessels that hadn’t needed to be guided through the hellish sea since the southwest passage had opened up. How many solo hands of cards could you play in the confined quarters of one of the granite buoy platforms before you went mad? The service ran rich with the stories of insanity that its old hands were only too glad to inflict on a newly drafted unfortunate whose natural inclinations leaned towards fine embroidery. But the milliner’s shop that belonged to Hester’s mother wasn’t a protected profession, so here she was. Keeping watch for any of the myriad tell-tale signs of unpredicted magma shifts that had so recently been carefully drilled into her while the boils spat searing needles of water at her.

A pod of Fire Sea dolphins was following in the tug’s wake, drawn by the fish that the turbulence of the craft’s passage stirred up, their granite-thick skins slapping down as they arced through the boils to enjoy their supper.

Oddly, the tug was drawing to a halt, the paddles on her side slowing their rotation as the door to the pilothouse clanged open. The tug master himself stepped out in his bright orange scald suit slashed with the black bars of a captain – not that his manner ever left any doubt about who was master and commander of this vessel.

‘Nothing to report, sir,’ Hester ventured.

‘I’m not here to inspect the watch, tugman. This is where our way station should be anchored.’

Hester gazed out across the searing channel, thinking of all
the stories she had heard of buoy keepers who had gone mad and cut their moorings to allow their stations to be sucked into the flow of magma, welcoming the fury of the Fire Sea as if it was a warm blanket in winter.

‘Check to starboard for wreckage,’ ordered her skipper, scanning the bubbling boils on his side of the tug.

‘Nothing, sir. No wreckage in the water.’

But they expected that, the currents of the shifting molten rock sucked in everything not under power, which was why failing to make the mandatory engine checks before a voyage was a court martial offence.

‘Diving stations,’ barked the captain. ‘We need to check the seabed.’

Hester felt a twinge of fear. That was something else she’d had drummed into her – that these floating engines they piloted were safely submersible only in the vicinity of the docks – their craft weren’t full u-boats. If their tug’s seals failed this far from Jago, the way station wasn’t going to be the only thing missing from the service’s lists.

On the surface of the boils, the dolphins watched the craft that had been flushing fish towards them sink away, the pod’s disappointment turning to fear as a massive geyser of water erupted from the surface where the tug had been sinking out of sight moments before.

One of the dolphins curiously nosed Hester’s yellow rubber-skinned body when it came floating up to bob facedown on the steaming surface. The dolphin watched the body and the scattered burning metal that had been the tug rotating around, swirling into the wall of magma, before it noticed the angry clicks from the rest of the pod. There was a painful wall of sound flowing under the water, making their highly attuned sense of hearing pinch with irritation.
None of the dolphins had ever heard anything like the terrible resonance before and the entire pod fled back down the magma-walled channel.

There was a good reason the dolphins had never encountered anything quite like what they were hearing. The Fire Sea hadn’t heard the likes of
this
before, not once in two millennia.

B
ehind Hannah lay the rise of the Cade Mountains and the tunnel’s exit. In front of her lay a hundred yards of basalt rubble and rock, then perhaps a mile of smooth dark glassy material, as though a giant glass blower had discarded one of his works halfway through the process, leaving a slick of black frozen surf across the floor. But it was what lay beyond the band of glassy territory that caught Hannah’s attention as she stepped out of the dark tunnel.

The ground there was heavily fissured and in between the vast cracks stood a dense thorny maze of emerald green, almost a jungle, thriving in the heat and clinging to what looked like the ruins of a city. But if a city it had been, the place had fallen prey to some unknown malady – towers a hundred storeys high stood twisted and melted, the squares of windows distorted into disfigured orifices. Half-dissolved foundation pillars broke the canopy of the thick jungle, thousands of stone fingers branching out in a beseeching spread. The place had taken on the look of a sweep of colossal, malformed anthills, covered by bush, thorns and creepers while hissing waves of steam rose up from the land and channelled through its ruins.

Nandi’s voice sounded over the speakers. ‘There’s more behind us.’

Hannah turned and saw that the young academic was right. The slopes of the Cade Mountains were studded with buildings – not overgrown with vegetation like those on the steaming plain ahead of them, but still wrecked and mangled almost beyond recognition. The ruins looked to be made of the same queer ceramic that formed the interior of the tunnel, but twisted and distorted as if by intense heat. Rivers of the bone-white material had flowed down to the foot of the mountain as liquid, and then cooled back to rock, before being worn away to become the rim of rubble from which they were currently surveying the scene. Higher up the mountain the structures looked to be better preserved, closer perhaps to their original state.

‘What could melt stone like that?’ asked Tobias Raffold in amazement.

The ambassador swivelled his suit to face the trapper’s. ‘The wrath of Reckin urs Reckin. The same tears that formed the Fire Sea.’

Hannah sighed. The ambassador might make a good show of affecting the manners of a modern Jackelian gentleman, but his heart still belonged to the savage deep forests of his homeland, it seemed.

‘A prickly fellow to have done all of this, then,’ muttered the commodore.

‘The terrain across there looks volcanic,’ said Nandi. ‘I’ve never read of ruins in such a strange condition in any of the texts back in Saint Vine’s. The damage doesn’t match what I’ve read of pyroclastic flows.’

There were signs that someone had visited the foot of the mountains before their expedition, wooden planks laid like a pier across the band of glassy ground, stopping halfway out at an oval circle of ground, almost an island, formed of a
lighter-coloured rock than the black surf. There were piles of discarded garbage to Hannah’s right, opened food cans rusting by the remains of a fire.

‘A decade old, I reckon’ said Tobias Raffold, examining the circle of rocks that had contained the fire. ‘Give or take.’

Hannah’s heart leapt. Around the same time her mother would have arrived here!

Nandi pointed back to the tunnel. ‘There might be more inside those side corridors we passed. I’m going to dismount and have a poke around on foot.’

Commodore Black reluctantly opened his suit and climbed down after her, a long-barrelled rifle slung over his shoulder, sabre and holstered pistol hanging from his wide girth. Hannah pushed open her canopy and joined them while Tobias Raffold ordered two suited trappers to stand guard at the mouth of the tunnel so nothing could slink after his clients, and a couple more to wait a hundred feet inside to ensure that their weapon arms’ firepower was available should they need it.

Hannah held a lantern she had unclipped from her suit, flickering light dancing from the tight featureless corridors and antechambers. She shivered. Was it fear, or excitement at what she might find?

A couple of chambers back from the tunnel the three of them discovered a pile of supplies that Nandi dated to the era of William of Flamewall. A barrel of dried food – little more than desiccated leather now – and spindly rifles with intricate engravings on their imported beech-wood butts that spoke of an age of wealth and opulence.

In the chamber behind they made another discovery, one that made Hannah recoil as her lantern revealed the shape of a camp table with a shining white skeleton sitting at a chair behind it, a silent sentinel watching the open arch they had just walked through. The remains of tattered clothes clung to
its bones and there was a splint attached to the left leg. On the table in front of it were a dust-covered satchel and a pistol with crystal charges scattered about.

Commodore Black picked up the pistol and rubbed its clockwork hammer mechanism clean. ‘A Buford and Armstrong lady’s pattern. This is a Jackelian gun.’

Nandi collected the satchel, and Hannah saw the young academic wince as she noticed something on the satchel’s flap. Nandi lifted out a number of books, placing them carefully on the tabletop.

Hannah was staring so intently at the satchel’s flap – the same arms of Saint Vine’s College that decorated Nandi’s own bag – that it took a couple of seconds for her to notice the young academic holding out one of the books to her in an almost apologetic fashion.

‘No!’

The initials on the diary’s leather cover.

Hannah’s eyes ran with tears, blurring the figure in the chair. In no way was this the reunion that she had been planning with her mother.

‘It’s all right.’ Hannah leant forward to kiss the skull’s forehead, but nothing happened: her mother’s skeleton was still a skeleton. A
kiss to bring them back to life.
But all the magic had fled.

Hannah’s hands were still gently trembling as she read the pages of her mother’s diary. She felt a mixture of shock and denial that the bones behind the camp table belonged to the woman who had given birth to her – denial even when Nandi had examined the pelvis and declared it was a woman’s, even when Hannah had come to the page in the diary that described the ursk attack on the other side of the Cade Mountains and the wound on her mother’s leg exactly where the skeleton’s
splint had been set. The writing grew shakier page by page as the infection spread and the medicines Hannah’s mother was carrying failed to heal it.

Hannah’s mother, the redoubtable Doctor Jennifer Conquest, must have been feverish even as she arrived where the expedition was now camped. She described how she’d made friends with a gentle translucent flying creature in the tunnel under the mountain, and there were long rambling pages written to her husband whom she must have known was dead. More details on how she had found William of Flamewall’s remains on something she called Bloodglass Island, and then burnt the priest’s papers and notes so no one else could get them; her description of how the third part of the god-formula had not been among William’s possessions – the one thing she could have used to rise above her mortally fatal affliction. After that, the diary was filled with pages and pages of mathematics. Mad mathematics, symbols that Hannah didn’t recognize blended with formulae that seemed to run contrary to any of the accepted rules she had been taught. At first Hannah thought her mother must have been trying to recreate the third section of the god-formula herself, but as bizarre as the formulae in her mother’s diary were, their structure didn’t seem to match either of the first two parts of the god-formula she had seen. Had the fever sent her mother insane? Later, the lines of mathematics were interspersed with descriptions of songs of siren beauty, her mother’s hand getting scratchier and scratchier. They seemed to make a sense – but only in the way that you could gaze at abstract patterns on wallpapers and start to see meaningful pictures as you let your mind wonder.

Nandi came around the corner, the glow of her lantern announcing her presence long before she appeared. ‘It is done. Do you want to see where we buried her?’

‘That wasn’t my mother,’ said Hannah. ‘They were just the clothes she wore, is all.’ Hannah realized that the young academic had probably interpreted what she just said as a Circlist homily. ‘No, I mean
this
is her.’ Hannah raised the diary. ‘What she believed in. What she thought. Not the dust that’s left behind.’

Nandi lifted the satchel she had found. ‘I’ve been looking through your mother’s other notebooks. There are more complete descriptions of what she and your father discovered in the guild’s transaction-engine rooms – material she chose not to compress into the Joshua’s Egg she hid for us. Your mother believed that William of Flamewall came here to destroy something.’

‘Not the missing section of the god-formula,’ said Hannah. ‘William was a priest of the rational orders; the ritual of coming all the way out here to where his lover had preceded him to burn the last piece of Bel’s work wouldn’t have appealed to him.’

‘Well, Bel Bessant retrieved her fragments of Pericurian scripture from here, but the Circle knows where or how. I’ve just returned from climbing up to the buildings on the slopes above us – this place is an archaeologist’s worst nightmare. Just empty rooms, thousands of them, twisted out of shape. Whatever was hot enough to melt stone turned everything to ashes here. No furniture, no bones, no pottery, no doors or windows. Certainly no manuscripts.’

‘The city beyond the glass plain might be in better condition.’

‘No,’ said Nandi. ‘I’ve studied it through my telescope; if anything, it’s in a far worse state. It was closer to whatever killed this civilization and there’s a whole new ecos clinging to the steam fissures across there. Nothing destroys a good dig site like weeds and creepers.’

There was a distant ringing from camp, a dinner call being sounded.

‘Do you want to eat?’

Hannah shook her head in answer.

‘Finding your mother’s bones makes it real, doesn’t it? The fact that she’s dead.’

‘I don’t want to talk about her.’

‘When my mother told me my father was dead, I never believed it. It never felt real to me – I would always catch myself expecting him to come through the door to our home.’

‘How did your father die?’ asked Hannah.

‘Much as your mother did,’ said Nandi. ‘About the business of St. Vines’ college. He was on an unauthorized dig in Cassarabia, and when the caliph’s soldiers found him there, they shot him as a grave robber.’