Secrets of the Fire Sea (29 page)

Below Hannah’s ledge the gate gave a hungry anticipatory shudder.

Hannah leapt off the transaction-engine platform and caught the winch cable, clambering up the line after T-face and Rudge, abandoning the mobile punch-card writer, Rudge’s tools and his fallen suit down below. How far did the steam tap travel towards the centre of the earth? Hannah didn’t intend to be around to find out when the gate retracted.

Hannah pushed her suit out of the steam tap, into the turbine hall, the clangs of a dozen retracted pressure gates still ringing in her ears. Her hands were so sweaty now that the control cage inside her suit’s cabin had begun slipping off her skin. The chimney door was shutting behind her when the lights on the vault’s wall began to flash, the steam tap returning to operation. Blast doors pulled into the ceiling at the other end of the vault and a mob of suited workers returned from the safety of the adjoining turbine hall. She had done it. All around Hannah, the turbines were spinning back into life, the eerily silent hall filling with the racket of rotating blades. Fingers of vapour were already leaking from the pipes. Soon, the hall
would once again be the steam-filled hell she had stepped out into earlier in the day.

T-face leapt down from the perch moulded onto the suit’s back, landing on the floor with the still-unconscious navvy.

At the head of the gang of returning guildsmen was the red chequerboard-patterned hull of the charge-master. ‘You’re down a suit.’ His bluff voice echoed from Hannah’s earphones.

‘A steam spill sent Rudge’s suit crashing down the shaft, well below the electric limit of its circuits, charge-master.’

The head of the turbine hall grunted and turned to one of his retinue. ‘Do you slackers think you’re still on a break? Take our lad down to the infirmary before the field begins to build back up.’ The charge-master swivelled his head dome down to stare at T-face and made a jabbing motion back to the other end of the chamber. ‘Return to stables. Chop-chop. Assigned to another hand while boss man in infirmary.’ He ejected his whip in case the ab-lock hadn’t got the message,

T-face bent his head sadly and trotted off.

Hannah thought she saw the charge-master’s eyes staring at her through the dome on top of his suit. ‘Adequate for your first day. For a
coder
.’

He walked off, leaving Hannah unsure whether she was meant to go back to the suiting hall or continue her training with the rest of the workers out here.

Something about the charge-master’s words stayed with her.
Our lad.

Young Rudge never had got round to telling her who his father was in the turbine halls.

Our lad.

Nandi stepped out of the transport capsule and down onto the platform of the guild’s atmospheric station, the young priest from the cathedral, Father Baine, close on her heels.

Vardan Flail was waiting for them in front of the lockers holding the guild’s visitors’ suits, a retinue of red-cowled guildsmen standing behind the high guild master’s twisted form.

One of the guildsmen stepped forward as she approached. ‘Damson Tibar-Wellking, I will be your assistant for the rest of your research session within the great archive. I am archivist Trope.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ smiled Nandi, looking meaningfully at the high guild master. ‘But I believe my research will be taking me a little further afield than the guild’s transaction-engine vaults. And that’s not why I’m here today, as I suspect you well know.’ She indicated the young priest following behind her.

Baine caught up with Nandi and stopped in front of Vardan Flail. ‘By the authority of the unified arch-diocese of Jago and the rational order of the Circlist church I present an examination notice for Damson Hannah Conquest.’

Vardan Flail looked irritated. ‘If it’s an observance of the formalities you want, perhaps the cathedral should have sent Father Blackwater to me rather than a mere pup.’

‘The examination notice duly ratified and sealed by order of the stained senate,’ added the young priest, not rising to the insult.

‘Oh, very well,’ snapped Vardan Flail. ‘Your examination notice is accepted and I do hereby authorize release of Initiate Conquest of the Guild of Valvemen into your custody.’ He clicked his fingers for one of his minions to fetch the girl. ‘The
temporary
release, pending the results of the church examination.’

‘The church examination which will be marked manually for this test,’ Nandi added. ‘Rather than by your transaction engines.’

‘Manually! Isn’t that quaint. I still expect to see the results
myself,’ snapped Vardan Flail. ‘To ensure that there is no favouritism in the grading of one of my initiates.’

‘Perish the thought,’ said Father Baine.

‘You probably still remember the test yourself,’ said Vardan Flail. ‘You hardly look old enough to shave.’

‘I remember the test as being very easy. Anyone can pass, really.’

A group of staff-wielding guildsmen entered the station hall and parted to reveal Hannah Conquest, still wearing the grey cotton body suit of a turbine hall worker. She was soaked with sweat and swaying slightly on her feet.

‘What have you done to her?’ cried Father Baine. ‘She looks like she hasn’t slept in a week.’

‘The city demands much of the guild,’ retorted Vardan Flail. ‘It is only dedicated toil that keeps the turbine halls running. Perhaps the church authorities might remember that in future, rather than twisting the law to try to circumvent the draft ballot for their favourites.’

Nandi grabbed one of Hannah’s arms while Father Baine supported her other side, leading the girl stumbling towards the transport capsule.

‘Don’t worry,’ Vardan Flail sneered after them. ‘The church examinations are easy, anyone can pass them.’

Nandi shook her head in disgust and shut off her view of the high guild master’s hooded face with the closing of the carriage’s door.

Her arm still held by Father Baine, Hannah straightened up, wiping the sweat off her face as though she was a drunk who had suddenly transitioned into stone-cold sobriety.

Hannah winked towards the shocked young priest and Nandi. ‘Well, my suit was logging double shifts down in the turbine halls, but it doesn’t mean that it always had to be me inside it.’ With a shudder, the carriage entered the airless
atmospheric tunnel, leaving the guild’s vaults. ‘It’s good to have friends, isn’t it?’

‘Quick,’ Jethro said to Hannah, ‘your favourite hymn from the cathedral…?’

‘
My knowledge, my soul
,’ said Hannah, looking at the books spread across the table in the inquisition agent’s hotel room. ‘Will that be part of the church’s entrance exam?’

‘No,’ said Jethro. ‘I just wanted to see which hymn you liked best. That question can reveal a lot about a candidate.’

And he could see; he could see Alice’s mark all over the young girl, little reflections of the things he remembered and loved about his ex-fiancée. The way Hannah thought, the way she acted. Truly, Alice had been the mother than Hannah had lost, and for Alice, perhaps, the daughter that Jethro’s defrocking and the breaking of their engagement had denied her. Denied
them
.

‘Then it won’t help me pass,’ said Hannah. ‘I hear you sing to yourself all the time, Mister Daunt. But only tavern songs, never Circlist hymns.’

‘No, I don’t sing those any more,’ admitted the ex-parson. ‘I don’t feel I have the right to them. And you should call me Jethro.’ He picked up the books they had been cramming from, borrowed from the acting archbishop’s office. ‘You have an exceedingly good mind – first rate, in fact. The way you can pick apart the components of synthetic morality and put them back together again puts me in mind of Alice.’

‘Alice was the cleverest person I’d ever met.’

‘Myself also,’ said Jethro.
Until now
,
that is
, his mind silently retorted. ‘But she had her weaknesses and I think you share them too. Circlism is not just about knowledge and enlightenment. It is about embracing our humanity. Each of us is cupped out from the one sea of consciousness and poured into these
mortal vessels. You – I – everyone we know is the same. It is only the nature of reality that makes us feel alone, which tricks us into seeing difference where none exists. But it is a false illusion, for when you pour a cup of water back into the river, where do the cup’s contents end and the river’s begin? All is motion, all is the river.’

‘Even for Alice’s killers?’ asked Hannah.

‘A Circlist would say the killer only killed themselves. Lack of knowledge tends to do that.’

‘I don’t think I can ever see them as part of me enough to forgive them.’

‘We are all but human,’ said Jethro.

‘What they did to Alice,’ said Hannah quietly, looking down at the tome in front of her as if it was all of her world. ‘It wasn’t just to make it look like an ursk attack, was it? She was tortured to try and find out something.’

‘I won’t let the killer touch you,’ promised Jethro. ‘I arrived here too late to save Alice, but I’m just in time for you.’ The girl that Alice had raised as her own, the child that should have been theirs. ‘Isn’t that right, old steamer?’

The steamman was standing in the doorway bearing a tray of steaming tea cups procured from the hotel’s staff.

‘Indeed it is, Hannah softbody,’ said Boxiron. ‘We have faced evil and criminals many times together, yet by combining my intellect and Jethro Daunt’s famous brawn, we have always triumphed.’

‘You are exceedingly obliging,’ said Jethro, taking the tray. ‘With both your refreshments and your humour.’

Boxiron tapped the armour on his chest, the transaction-engine drum buried there slowly rotating. ‘My ‘intellect’ is, I fear, a little scratched by the Jackelian underworld’s pistols. I’m sure you will forgive me.’

‘Let’s get back to your studying,’ said Jethro, tapping the
tomes in front of Hannah. For if Hannah failed to gain entrance to the church, the next place she would be going was straight back to the Guild of Valvemen and into the clutches of Vardan Flail.

And that was no longer something Jethro could allow – not for Alice’s sake or his own.

Jethro Daunt found it hard to suppress a smile when he saw the number of people gathered in the cathedral’s testing room – rarely, he suspected, would it have been busier than this. Not just with those sitting the examination, their heads swelled to gargantuan size by the Entick machinery, but with the observers trying not to trip over the trailing cables or get in the way of the priests behind the testing tables. There were twelve examinees sitting the tests this day, but only one of them was responsible for drawing in all these extra people. Commodore Black, Nandi, Boxiron, Chalph urs Chalph, Ortin urs Ortin, half the cathedral’s off-duty staff – all to see if Damson Hannah Conquest could throw off the guild’s shackles – with a few of the crimson-robed crows sitting silently in the corner. Briefed, Jethro was sure, to try and detect the slightest deviation from the usual form of the church’s examination. Anything that would allow the guild to nullify the results of the test.

And the results were hardly in doubt, for Hannah Conquest had both nature and nurture on her side. The offspring of two of the brightest scholars Jackelian academia had ever produced, tutored by Alice in every mathematical nuance of synthetic morality. Even so, Jethro could sense the amazement the priests testing Hannah felt at the speed she was going through the large leather-bound tomes of questions piled on top of each table. Knocking down their questions as fast as they could fire them at her. And the scariest thing of all
was that it was obvious to him that she wasn’t even trying. This was just what Hannah Conquest needed, to earn what she believed would be a life of quiet contemplation. To get everyone off her back for good.

Jethro glanced across at Nandi and the commodore. Of course, the young academic had been right. None of them could tell Hannah what they had discovered in the Pericurian embassy, not before she’d sat the exam. There was no telling how Hannah would react, and she needed her head clear and focused right now. Able to conjure up, as she was at the moment, a formula to prove how allocation of food to female children during a time of famine would prove the optimum stabilising force within a democracy – with a sidebar question on how the allocation would need to change for a classic autocracy.

Jethro winced. He remembered that question from his own examination. So, the priests administering the Entick test had reached the nineteenth book of synthetic morality,
Saint Solomon and the Questions of Functional Savagery
. There were no easy answers in that book, and the trick was often to reply with the heart as much as the head. Sometimes the wrong answer was the right answer, and sometimes it was better not to ask the question at all.

‘And every so often, it’s time for you to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions.’

Jethro’s eyes darted around the testing room. That voice. The stench of sulphur and wet animal hide in the room. Was that a glimpse of fur he saw slipping behind Boxiron? The people around him to seemed to slow down, as if moving through treacle, as the exotic presence forced its way into their world.

‘I take responsibility for my own actions!’

‘But do you?’ hissed the voice of Badger-headed Joseph
from somewhere on the other side of the room. ‘All that death and misery in your little kingdom, and now the Jackelians can’t even be bothered to pray to us to make it better. What have you done of late to make the world a better place?’

‘Life is lived by the one and one.’

‘Oh, that’s pat,’ laughed the voice. ‘And all of your trite Circlist excuses appear to be made the same way. You know what your people created here on Jago now, you must know what you could do with the god-formula. The good that you could achieve.’

‘What Bel Bessant was creating was wrong,’ insisted Jethro. ‘No mortal mind is meant to have that level of understanding of the universe. Not without going insane.’

‘Oh, but that’s the twist: the world’s already insane. If you understood it a little better, maybe you could do something about it. Put your world towards the mend, instead of hiding yourself away from life with the all distractions of your investigations and the smugness of your false humanist cleverness. Maybe you could stop and pull your cowardly head out of the sand just the once.’