Secrets of the Fire Sea (23 page)

A bell on a spring rang as the two of them entered the shop, but there was no sign of customers or staff inside. Just a maze of discarded debris from Jagonese life put up for sale amidst the swirls of dust and the rainbow illumination pouring in from the tall bay. Chalph and Jethro split up and searched through the crowded bric-a-brac, looking for the missing owner.

‘Mister Sworph,’ called the Pericurian. ‘It’s me, Chalph urs Chalph. I haven’t come about the extras from the boat, this time. I’ve got a friend here who would like to talk to you.’

Silence. Odd. The door hadn’t been locked and the sign was still twisted to read ‘open’.

‘Well, I’ll be bobbed. Over here, good ursine!’ exclaimed Jethro.

Chalph walked around a long rail hung with worn velvet jackets.

Jethro Daunt was kneeling by the proprietor’s body, Hugh Sworph recognizable even lying face down thanks to his hairless skull. A dagger emerged from his spine and a puddle of blood pooled across the faded bamboo floorboards.

Murder had been done here.

How odd it seemed to Hannah, to be back among the crimson-hooded ranks of the guild after having briefly returned to the streets of Hermetica City she knew so well. Exchanging the capital’s bright, open vaults for the dark corridors and valve-studded canyons of the order that had claimed Hannah as one of its own. But the urge to return to the guild and find out what had happened to her parents had proved even stronger than Nandi and Commodore Black’s urging not to risk her life to another sabotaged atmospheric carriage – or similar ‘accident’.

The three of them had returned to their allotted study cell. While there was no sign of any guildsmen investigating the matter of the recently overloaded systems, as Hannah had half expected, the valves outside their cell and down on the canyon floor were clearly new – clear as a freshly washed window, rather than stained brown with the dark energies that flowed through the vacuum tubes.

As before, Nandi sat herself in front of the stone screen
while Hannah manned the cell’s punch-card writer, typing a tattoo of retrieval commands to bring up the record set she had found before.

The commodore risked a quick glance outside the cell, standing by the balcony overlooking the massive canyon of valves. Then he stepped well back.

‘You don’t need to worry,’ said Hannah. ‘That switching storm last time was a freak occurrence. You could wait by that balcony for a century before you’d see another one out there.’

‘So you say, lass,’ hummed the commodore. ‘But fool me once and it’s shame on you. Fool me twice and it’s shame on me.’

There was a rattle as the injection system carried Hannah’s first punch card away. Nandi leant forward, the stone screen changing colour in front of her to show a green oblong filled with text.

‘This can’t be right,’ muttered the young academic.

Hannah turned on her bench. ‘What is it?’

‘See for yourself.’

Hannah left the punch-card writer and moved behind Nandi. There was a single line repeated over and over down the stone surface – the only response to Hannah’s query.

These records do not exist
.

‘That can’t be right,’ said Hannah, trying to fight down the impulse to panic.

‘Where is your parents’ research?’ asked Nandi.

‘It’s been deleted,’ said Hannah in shock. ‘But nothing is ever deleted from here.’

That was the cardinal rule of the guild. Nothing was
ever
deleted. Archived, yes. Assigned a middling document weight and forgotten along with a million similar records, certainly. But erased?
Never.
Hannah rushed back to the writer and composed another longer query. Injected it and awaited the results.

The stone screen began to fill up with primary code-level iconography similar to the symbols on the keyboard of Hannah’s punch-card writer.

‘There’s not even an audit trail of an erasure,’ gasped Hannah. ‘It’s as if the records were never there in the first place. Nobody can do this, it’s simply not possible.’

‘As impossible as that dark storm that shouldn’t have brewed up outside here,’ noted the commodore.

‘That’s almost a whole year of your parent’s work,’ uttered Nandi, her voice cracking. ‘Is it just the bookmarks assembling everything into a coherent project that have gone, or have the source documents also been destroyed?’

Hannah ran back to the card writer. ‘I’ll check.’

Hannah had nearly finished composing the query when Nandi called her over again. The image on the surface of the stone screen was reforming. The code-level iconography Hannah had called up was vanishing, to be replaced by a single line sitting in the middle of the green oblong.

Access denied.

‘This is outrageous,’ spluttered Nandi. ‘The college paid good—’

‘It’s not your line of access that’s been pulled,’ said Hannah. She grabbed one of the blank punch cards, turned it over and began to scribble across it with a pencil. ‘It’s mine!’

‘What’s happening, lass?’ asked the commodore. ‘Does the guild believe their wicked bomb on the atmospheric carriage did its black business after all and that you’re no longer alive?’

There was the sound of a commotion outside their cell, growing louder.

‘I knew we were fools for coming back here,’ whined the commodore. ‘Fearsome transaction engines tended to by equally monstrous guildsmen. We should have stayed in the capital. At least that prison of a hotel has a mortal drop of
wine or two in its cellars that’s fit to wet my blistering lips with.’

The study cell’s door burst open, a small crowd of burly guildsmen wielding discipline staffs rushing in, followed by the one valveman Hannah had been trying to avoid since she got here. Vardan Flail!

‘What is the meaning of this?’ roared Nandi. ‘You are interrupting my work. Work you’ve been handsomely paid to facilitate.’

‘And we are indeed happy to be facilitating it,’ smirked the high guild master, ‘Damson Tibar-Wellking, is it not? But we will be facilitating it with a different guild archivist from now on.’

The guildsmen lowered their staffs in warning towards Commodore Black’s chest as he barged forward shouting, ‘Now you let her be!’

‘This is an internal guild matter,’ warned Vardan Flail. ‘We have traced the recent switching storm that took down this vault back to this young lady’s sloppy work. An infinite loop hidden in the search layer to avoid detection upon injection.’

‘You’re lying’ accused Hannah. She hadn’t written any such loop in any of her queries, let alone a hidden one. Such an act would be sabotage.

‘I had such high hopes for you,’ said Vardan Flail. ‘But now your transaction-engine privileges have been cancelled and we shall have to find an alternative task for you. Something manual, I think, seeing as you have proven yourself unworthy of more stimulating work.’

Hannah slipped the punch card she had been scribbling into one of Nandi’s hands behind the young academic’s back, hoping that the guildsmen wouldn’t notice. ‘Don’t let them take me.’

‘I need Hannah’s help for my work,’ protested Nandi.

‘Not this one,’ laughed Vardan Flail. ‘She has other engines to attend to now.’

He didn’t mean…they couldn’t do
that
to her? On the high guild master’s instructions, two of the valvemen grabbed Hannah and bundled her out of the room, while the others held the commodore and Nandi back with their staffs.

‘You can’t do this!’ shouted Hannah, as she was dragged down the passages that led towards the lower levels – the turbine halls, halls filled with the deadly electric energies that powered Jago. ‘I only have days left until I sit the church exams.’

‘Really,’ said Vardan Flail, as if this thought had only just occurred to him. ‘Then you’ll be glad of the chance to rest your brain. Although I understand working in the turbine halls can be quite physically exerting.’

‘You dirty little jigger,’ yelled Hannah. ‘You won’t stop me. I’ll see you hanged for what you’ve done.’

The guild master shook his head sadly. ‘But fortunately, you seem to have more than enough energy to spare.’ He nodded to his brutes. ‘Tell the charge-master that she’s to work double shifts and have no more than two hours’ sleep a night.’ He smiled at Hannah. ‘I understand that you have been boasting to the other guild initiates that you can pass the church exams in your sleep. Let’s see how well you can put that into practice.’ A pair of steel doors clanked open in front of Hannah, leading to a lifting-room with a mineshaft-long drop down to the guild’s vast, heavily shielded turbine rooms. The burly men yanked her inside.

‘Do be careful down there, my dear. It can be quite treacherous work.’

Then the doors shut and the lifting room began to descend towards the lowest levels of the guild’s vaults. Right alongside the hell the Jagonese denied existed.

‘We can’t just let them take her!’ Nandi shouted to the commodore, an overwhelming rush of panic overtaking her as she realized that she might never see Hannah again.

‘Leave it be, lass,’ advised the commodore, glancing warily at the staff-wielding guildsmen penning them in the study cell. ‘How many of these crows could we take down? The guild has the law on their side and a cruel mistress she can be. We won’t be able to help Hannah from the inside of their police fortress’s dungeons.’

‘Forget what you promised the professor back in the Kingdom,’ said Nandi. ‘It’s not my safety you need to look after; it’s Hannah’s. You just have to lift the robes of any of these dolts to see what the radiation of the turbine halls will do to her.’

‘I’m not abandoning any Jackelian lass to swing on the guild’s yardarm,’ said the commodore. ‘But there’s a time to cut the enemy’s line and there’s a time to tack for a better position, and we need to aim for the latter if we’re to winkle Hannah out of their wicked clutches.’

‘What if I decide to do what’s right?’ said Nandi. ‘Here. Now. Will you still follow me?’

‘My blade is sharp for it, lass,’ said the commodore, ‘but don’t be confusing winning a battle with winning the war.’

‘They’ll work her until she drops, she’ll have no chance of passing the church’s entrance exam. And then they’ll have all the time in the world to kill her slowly. You saw what they did to our atmospheric carriage, nearly blowing us all up to get to her…’ Nandi tried to yell down the corridor, the guild’s sentries holding her back. ‘We’ll get you out of here, Hannah, I promise. We’ll get you out of here!’

‘As long as we’re still alive to do it,’ said the commodore, ‘you and me both. Still alive to help her.’

The old u-boat man was right, curse him. Every fibre of
Nandi’s being was crying at her to push into the corridor and grab Hannah back from Vardan Flail, but they were in the heart of the guild’s power here, and a long way from the capital. They had to leave Hannah – at least for now – and try to work for her release through the cathedral, maybe through the Jackelian embassy. Jethro Daunt would know what to do. He had to.

Back home, Nandi had the professor to look after her – and her protector had dispatched the commodore in her stead to fulfil a similar role on Jago. Hannah had nobody now that the woman who had acted as her mother had been murdered, and that wouldn’t do, not for a ward of the college.

Nandi was going to save Hannah from the guild, whatever it took and however perilous the price.

‘T
his is outrageous,’ protested Nandi as she and Commodore Black were hustled to the waiting atmospheric carriage. ‘You are impeding my research! Work you have been generously paid to assist.’

‘You will have a new archivist assigned to you tomorrow,’ said the guildsman heading the group of staff-wielding toughs escorting them out of the vaults. ‘And by that time we will have fully restored operations in the transaction engines outside your study cell.’

The commodore snarled, ‘I know the fixing you’re planning to do, and it’s more of the same rotten work you’ve already been at: erasing what we’ve already uncovered inside your wicked thinking machines.’

‘The valves hold all, nothing is ever lost,’ recited the guildsman.

‘Nothing but a poor helpless lass,’ said the commodore. ‘But you listen well, lad. We had better be finding Damson Hannah Conquest again, and hale with it, or I’ll be coming back down here with my crew and a fistful of hull hammers from my precious u-boat, and I’ll show you how it is we brew up a switching storm back home.’

The door on their atmospheric carriage slid open and the leader of their escort swept his hand towards its interior. ‘Goodbye, Jackelian. Come back tomorrow.’

Commodore Black let Nandi lead him inside the capsule. ‘I’ve marked you, you crow, red cowl or no, your vaults aren’t big enough to hide you from me.’

‘Take your own advice and leave it be,’ said Nandi. ‘You were right. If we start a fight with them they’ll have a pretext to ban us from the guild vaults permanently.’

‘Don’t worry, I know when to draw my sabre, lass. And when I do, someone’s going to die – either they or I. Not today, though. Those were just a few mortal threats to remind them that Hannah isn’t alone and forgotten in their dark vaults.’

The door shut on Nandi and the commodore. Their carriage juddered as it passed through the rubber vacuum curtain before accelerating to its full travel velocity.

‘Why did I listen to that fool Jethro Daunt?’ moaned the commodore, restlessly pacing the carriage. ‘Hannah will be safe enough in the guild, indeed. Just like a blessed churchman, thinking the best of everyone and everything. And now they’ve got their claws into the poor lass good and proper.’

‘But not before she gave me this.’ Nandi produced the punch card that Hannah had been scribbling on before the armed guildsmen arrived in their study cell.

Commodore Black twitched as he recognized the long lines of formulae scrawled across the card. ‘Ah, she’s a clever one, that Hannah is, with a churchwoman’s perfect memory. The second iteration of the Joshua Egg we teased out of the guild’s archives before the switching storm struck. We’ll crack it, Nandi. We’ll do it for the lass. I’ll run the blessed egg’s code through the
Purity Queen’s
navigation drums myself until we squeeze the truth from its fiendish symbols.’