Secrets of the Fire Sea (16 page)

‘I do,’ hissed Vardan Flail.

Hannah Conquest must not be allowed to pass the church tests. And there was one way he could make sure of that…

B
oxiron’s silver skull swept left and right as he and Jethro walked towards the rendezvous, the steamman still uneasy that the note the ex-parson of Hundred Locks had found under the confessional booth’s seat might be a trap.

It was darker here than in the streets that ran along the Grand Canal, the sun-like plates on the vault’s roof poorly maintained and malfunctioning as a result. This vault, called the Mistrals, was still inhabited, but barely. Its paving was cracking, the albino stems of cavern bamboo starting to push out into the passages. This was the oldest part of the vault, too, a maze of buildings and narrow streets, the waters of the small canals the pair passed slow-moving and pungent with few working filters to clear them.

Boxiron and Jethro had to duck lines of drying clothes left drooping in the warm air by whoever still lived in the crumbling apartments. The directions they were following from one of the hotel’s porters appeared accurate, as was the observation that this part of the vault’s air recycling system had broken years ago – giving its passages a close humidity that was deeply unpleasant to walk through.

If the gloom and the dereliction of this area of the capital had been intended to disconcert the two of them, then those they were meeting would be disappointed. Boxiron didn’t have much of his old steamman knight’s body left, but his skull still had the proud vision plate of a knight of the Order of the Commando Militant. Boxiron switched to his ambient light profile and the shadows around them became a bright green patchwork of clear empty passages and deserted bridges, red targeting icons for weapon limbs he no longer possessed settling over any sign of movement – the scuttling of rats or the brief flutter of curtains in a fourth-storey window above.

‘I have calculated the chances this may be a trap,’ Boxiron warned Jethro.

‘So have I,’ said Jethro. ‘But I have a feeling about the message under the seat. The sort of murderous creature that did what was done to Alice isn’t the sort to shilly-shally around with slipped notes and uncertain ambushes.’

A narrow humped bridge led across the empty canal and Boxiron detected the mass of the vault’s eastern wall looming up ahead of them. In front of the wall, a long line of stone columns stood sentry. Not holding the distant roof up, but coiled with steaming copper pipes – bleeds that would, they’d been warned, erupt with fire when the pressure inside them grew too intense. This was one part of the vault’s systems that had to be kept in good repair – the alternative being the poisoning of the population from the veins of subterranean gas that bubbled beneath their feet. The steam from the pipes grew thicker, until they were wading through a river of fog that came up to Boxiron’s chest unit. This was fast turning into the ideal spot for the out-of-the-way murder of a couple of foreigners.

Boxiron’s combat instincts automatically overlaid the shifting steam with a grid that could differentiate between gaseous and
organic movement: green lines running across the dancing haze, then suddenly deforming as a geyser of flame blew out ahead of them from one of the pipes, the heat-shock rippling over Boxiron and Jethro’s heads.

Boxiron twitched. The memory, the terrible memory of a mansion burning back in Middlesteel, flames licking out of the bay windows and sparks leaping across to light bushes in the sprawling, overgrown garden.

And there she was, Damson Aumerle, a black silhouette clawing at the curtains on her great house’s third floor, transformed into a demon capering in the flames of hell, the flames of—

Old Damson Aumerle, so desperate to resurrect the ancient human-milled butler that had been in her family for generations, so starved of affection that she had come to think of the stuttering automatic servant as her—

—that she pushed aside the grave robbers she had paid to loot the battlefield at Rivermarsh for the skull unit of a steamman knight, an advanced positronic brain to replace the decayed Catosian transaction engine in her beloved friend’s—

—the hearth lighter in his hand, his metal fingers releasing the blazing hot iron towards the dry grass of the grounds. Had he done this, had he started the fire because he had been—?

‘—to see you,’ cried Damson Aumerle, her ancient eyes ablaze with relief as Boxiron raised his arm to see the primitive machine fingers of his hand for the first time. Not his
hand. His hand was that of a steamman knight, not this pathetic, human-created simulacrum—

Aumerle House going up in flames. The flames of—

Jago.

‘Are you alright?’ asked Jethro, steadying his steamman friend.

‘Looping,’ said Boxiron. ‘That’s all, Jethro softbody. My combat filter is drawing too much power for the pathetic boiler of this body I find myself trapped within.’

Jethro checked that Boxiron hadn’t slipped a gear, but the steamman could feel he was still only idling in first. ‘Don’t worry about me. Movement ahead.’

A figure came out of the steam, wearing the robes of one of the cathedral’s priests.

‘And there is one still hiding back there…’ called Boxiron.

Another figure emerged, a dark leather-clad ursine. Barely an adult if Boxiron wasn’t mistaken.

‘You have good eyes,’ said the ursine.

‘My vision plate is one of the few parts of me that is good,’ replied Boxiron.

‘I saw you, good father,’ noted Jethro to the priest. ‘Back at the cathedral.’

‘I am Father Baine,’ said the priest. ‘I’m the archbishop’s clerk at the cathedral. My companion is Chalph urs Chalph, of the Pericurian trade concession here.’

Jethro drew out the message that had been left in the confessional booth. ‘I should have known from the elegance of your calligraphy. A scribe. What makes you think that we are with the League of the Rational Court?’

‘I knew the Inquisition would come when she died,’ said the young father.

‘Archbishop Alice Gray?’

‘Yes,’ said Father Baine. I nursed old Father Bell on his deathbed, the priest who was clerk to the archbishop’s office before me. He told me how it was here.’

‘That we would be coming?’ said Boxiron. ‘An exceptionally prescient member of your race, then.’

‘No, metal brother, he was the one who told me that all of the appointees to the archbishop’s chair on Jago have been ranking members of the Inquisition.’

That was news to Boxiron, and from the surprised look on Jethro’s face, news to him also.

‘I think if there was anyone the least likely to be an agent of the Inquisition, it would be Alice Gray,’ said Jethro. ‘Besides, there’s been hundreds of appointees since the island was settled. How can they all have been members of the Inquisition?’

‘I only know what I was told,’ said Father Baine. ‘And that the archbishop had a private encryption machine that wasn’t like any of the others in the cathedral. She was placing correspondence in the church bag addressed to the League of the Rational Court. You must have heard rumours that the Inquisition was first established here on the island.’

‘Rumours breed around the Inquisition,’ said Jethro. ‘And I suspect it suits their purpose for it to be so.’

‘Yet here you are,’ said Father Baine, ‘you and your friend. They sent you, didn’t they?’

‘Here we are, good father, at any rate.’

‘Tell them,’ urged the ursine cub. ‘Tell them what we’ve found out about the church woman’s death.’

Jethro listened while Boxiron focused in on the ursine and the priest’s eyes, measuring their blink response while they recounted what they had uncovered. About how Alice Gray and her ward Hannah Conquest had fallen prey to a high
guild master and his terrible love for the archbishop, the premeditated investigation of the police militia cut to fit the cloth of their political infighting against the ursine mercenaries. The sabotaged wall, the sabotaged dome. A young woman snatched by the guild using the rule of the ballot draft. When the ursine and the young father at last fell silent, Jethro glanced towards Boxiron and the steamman raised an iron finger toward his inferior pressure-leaking boiler heart. His signal that the story was true. Jethro crossed his fingers in response, indicating that his church trickery and the body language of the pair in front of them was pointing to the same deduction.

‘There it is,’ concluded Father Baine. ‘Can you help us?’

‘My friend Hannah needs protection,’ added Chalph urs Chalph. ‘At the very least you can take her off Jago with you and back to your homeland.’

‘I believe your intentions are good,’ said Jethro, ‘and what you have discovered sheds some light on Alice’s death. It’s obvious to me that she wasn’t killed by ursks – allowing the monsters into the dome was indeed a diversion to throw the city into confusion.’

‘You’ll help us?’ asked Chalph.

‘I shall,’ confirmed Jethro. ‘At the very least, I know a few things about the church entrance exams that will give Alice’s ward, this Hannah Conquest, a fighting chance of escaping servitude to the guild.’

Boxiron listened as Jethro explained how the young priest and his ursine friend were to stay in contact using dead-letter drops under the bridge they had crossed to get here, with a cipher based on passages from the
Book of Common Reflections
. Then the young pair were gone; presumably relieved they had successfully engaged the services of Daunt and Boxiron.

‘Jethro softbody,’ said Boxiron, a suspicion itching at him.
‘If you had served in the militant order of your people’s church, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’

‘I have never been a member of the Inquisition,’ said Jethro. He smiled and added, ‘Although if I had, I doubt I would be able to tell a heathen steamman who might pass such a secret to his pantheon of ancestors.’

‘I fear the Steamo Loas have forsaken me,’ said Boxiron.

‘Bob my soul, but I could do with a few less deities in my life, too,’ said Jethro. ‘What did you think of that pair’s theories on Alice’s murder?’

‘I have seen your race commit the darkest deeds in the name of love, but I can sense that you have your own theory on this matter.’

‘I have some thoughts,’ admitted Jethro. ‘I used to know about passion. What happened back in the cathedral, in the confessional, that was cold. I think it would be good to discover what Colonel Knipe and his police really know about Alice’s murder, not just what they’ve cooked up to find fault with the mercenaries from Pericur. Luckily for us, we now have the acquaintance of a young ursine who I believe might be able to help us.’

‘Then it’s time,’ said Boxiron.

‘Yes.’

Time for him to go all the way up to five.

Top gear.

Nobody noticed the figure moving through the atmospheric station. Just another crimson-robed guildsman whose footsteps were lost in the roar of the water cascading down the sloped iron walls of the station. When he accessed the terminal that indicated which transport capsules on the turntable were allocated to which team on the duty roster, it was the most normal thing in the world. Just another valveman checking what time
he would be departing to the capital’s central vaults, and which piece of machinery he would be overhauling, repairing or maintaining when he got to Hermetica. And when his eyes alighted on a particular capsule and it was temporarily shunted into a maintenance bay, nobody would have thought to challenge a guildsman who then purposefully strode towards said capsule, overriding the door controls and entering it.

Once inside the windowless capsule, the guildsman lowered a tool case to the floor, prised open a floor panel, and carefully lowered a bomb down inside, before setting the timer and resealing the floor. The carriage was ready for use again.

Ready to be shunted back onto the turntable, ready for the bomb’s circuit to be completed ten minutes into its journey. The journey reserved for the guild’s guests and the young woman looking after them – Hannah Conquest.

Nandi sat down where Hannah indicated, at a granite bench running in front of a featureless stone counter, with none of the hardware of the transaction-engine rooms she was used to back in the Kingdom of Jackals. No brass arrays, steam cables, iron panels or spinning drums. The only familiar-looking device inside the guild’s study cell was the punch card injection tube and the card writer – and even there, Nandi was glad Hannah had been assigned to her side to translate the symbolic logic. She hardly recognized any of the foreign iconography on the writer’s keys. Even the top cardsharps back home would, Nandi suspected, have been flummoxed if they had been sat down alongside such a machine.

Behind them, Commodore Black was staring out of the window of the cell they had been allocated halfway up the wall of the canyon, a grand view over the sound and fury of the valves below. It was as though he was still standing on
the turret of his u-boat, expecting the floor of the rock-hewn cavern to surge with tidal waters.

‘We’ve got the card writer to make queries,’ Nandi said to Hannah. ‘But how about receipt of the output? Is there a central spooler bank with runners to bring the tape to us?’

Hannah shook her head and lifted Nandi’s hand up, pressing it against the featureless rock wall above the counter. It felt cold, and there was a grainy texture to its surface that was not visible to the eye. Then it started to itch, as if she was pressing her palm against a hundred small needles. An image formed on the rock wall in front of Nandi as she felt the prickles warm her skin, a large black oblong filled with scrolling yellow words and shuffling icons on the right. Nandi noticed Hannah smile at her surprise.

‘There are quite a few advantages to using electricity rather than steam to power your transaction engines. The guild’s stone screens will show you whatever you’ve requested from the archives.’