Secrets of the Fire Sea (32 page)

‘He’s got balls,’ hissed Chalph to Hannah. ‘I’ve never seen a Pericurian talk to her like that, let alone one of your people.’

Hannah shushed him – she wanted to hear this. They crept closer, near enough to see the shine on the massive Pericurian’s black leather armour. The outcome of this standoff might decide whether Hannah would find her mother or not.

Ambassador Ortin came over to attempt to mediate. ‘Now see here, Stom urs Stom, you know there’s as much chance that I’m going venturing into the wild to drop grenades down some empty cavern the First Senator thinks will be his new city, as there is of the archduchess selecting me to be one of her new husbands.’

‘What I believe is not of relevance here, ambassador,’ said
Stom. She produced a wax-sealed envelope addressed to Ortin urs Ortin. ‘You will acknowledge receipt of your express instructions from the First Senator. If you venture anywhere near the plains you and your staff will be immediately expelled from Jago, and the stained senate will request a new diplomatic mission be dispatched to the capital from Pericur.’

‘Please assure your master I am ever his servant,’ said Ortin. ‘I have no intention of leaving the island in disgrace. We won’t be heading anywhere close to the plains or the coast – quite the opposite, in fact. We are heading deep into the interior on a purely archaeological mission.’

Stom glanced doubtfully at the archaeologist, Nandi standing alongside her RAM suit. ‘If that is the case, ambassador, then I would say that your mission has a very slim chance of returning.’

Her warning delivered, the captain and her troops turned and left, the slow stamping of their march echoing around the gate yard. Hannah realized she had been holding her breath. She was going after her mother after all, as long as they could depart in the next few minutes while Tobias Raffold still had his papers to operate on Jago.

‘There was something strange about that,’ said Chalph.

Hannah glanced across and mistook her friend’s narrowed eyes for worry over her own chances of coming back. ‘She was just trying to intimidate us into not leaving.’

‘No, it was the letter, I think—’ Chalph shook his head. ‘I’m tired. I’ve been up since dawn checking the boat’s manifest. But it’s the last trading boat I’m ever going to have to wake up for on Jago.’

Hannah hugged her friend, his fur soft and silken against the skin of her arms. ‘I hope that Pericur is everything you thought it would be.’

‘You just stay alive,’ chided Chalph. ‘Stay away from Vardan
Flail and his people. What is it that your godless priests say to each other in your cathedral?’

‘May serenity find you,’ mouthed Hannah, her eyes moistening.

Yes. And it would only find her when she knew what had really happened to her mother, somewhere out there. In the cold dark heart of Jago.

P
erhaps naively, Hannah had assumed that climbing the capital’s air vents with Chalph to watch the u-boats from Jago’s black cliffs had made her into something of an expert on conditions above ground. Her first few days in the company of the trapper Tobias Raffold soon expunged any superiority she’d felt over the vast majority of Jagonese who were only too glad never to leave the regulated comfort of their vaults.

As the expedition pushed towards the interior, they left behind the heat of the Fire Sea, and Hannah came to realize that it was no accident that almost all of Jago’s cities had been cast like a necklace around the coastline, attracted to the warmth of the magma. Or how much of the tinted light on the surface came from the vast undulating currents of molten rock, painting the Horn of Jago crimson even when the steam storms had obliterated the milky sun behind the clouds.

Ironically, the worst of the danger seemed to have been awaiting the expedition immediately beyond the battlements – where hordes of animals appeared drawn to the wall’s electric
field like moths to a lantern’s flame. The trappers had exited the city with their magnetic catapult arms pointed upwards, and a few chattering bursts of razor-edged disks into the air had quickly marked their rights to the territory, sending the creatures lurking in the mists scampering back towards the dark, stunted pine forests. The beasts were intelligent enough to know the difference between Jagonese in RAM suits and the exiles that were thrown out on foot.

The expedition followed the iron girders of the great eastern aqueduct through the forests and up into the low foothills. Bright yellow lights embedded behind protective metal mesh lined the aqueduct’s high ridges, making it easy to follow despite the murkiness of the daylight.

One of the controls inside Hannah’s suit was a set of temperature adjusters and she became engaged in a continual battle to keep the heater at its optimum level. Too cold and she would feel the tips of her toes growing numb from frostbite; too warm, and the transparent dome on top of the suit would mist up with condensation. The trappers leading them had either cracked the balance through long experience out here, or they were men of iron, impervious to the chill. Hannah could tell from the clear crystal on top which of the RAM suits held a trapper and which – misted up like her own – held Nandi, the commodore and the Pericurian ambassador.

Halfway along the aqueduct they had come across the rusting shell of an abandoned RAM suit – a more primitive model, larger and less streamlined than theirs – possibly hundreds of years old. Tobias Raffold had pointed to the top of the aqueduct and explained how ursks would climb the structure, block the water’s flow, and then wait for a group of maintenance workers to come out from the city before trying to smash their viewing domes with rocks. In this case they had obviously succeeded, cracking the suit like an egg.
The aqueduct maintenance workers still passed down the tales – an object lesson in never underestimating the animal cunning of the creatures of the interior. The trapper didn’t say what had happened to the unlucky city worker and Hannah was content not to know the person’s grisly fate – remembering the hot, foetid breath of the ursk that had broken into Tom Putt Park, she could imagine well enough.

Shortly after the expedition had reached the wolds, the aqueduct ended in a large sealed concrete pumping station and Hannah felt a twinge of unease that they were leaving behind the last visible sign of the race of man’s presence on the island. It was only an ugly iron construction, but she had become used to the aqueduct’s yellow lights leading the way through the mists. Now it really did feel as if they were entering the unknown. Had her mother followed the same route all those years ago? Had she felt the same twinge of fear when she looked back and saw that last yellow dot of civilization dwindling to nothing?

Hannah’s mother would have been travelling out this way when Alice Gray had been trying to explain to a young child how her parents had moved along the Circle and wouldn’t be coming back to collect her. How the church would be her family now. It can’t have been an easy thing for the archbishop to have done, Hannah realized, and she still remembered her guileless response. One that only a child could make. That it was all right. If Hannah were taken to see her parent’s bodies, she would kiss them on the forehead and they would come alive again, just like in the stories that her mother had read her. A
kiss to bring them back to life.
But the Fire Sea didn’t leave bodies in the water, only ashes. And nor did Vardan Flail’s schemes. Well, Hannah had cheated him of a life of servitude within the guild, and if she could follow her mother’s trail in the footsteps of William of Flamewall, she would cheat
Vardan Flail out of getting his filthy hands on the last piece of the god-formula, too.

After they made camp in the foothills, Hannah saw why Tobias Raffold had been so particular about the location of their site – and discovered the purpose of the large steel components that two of the trappers had been lugging distributed across their suits, a heavy load even with a RAM suit’s amplified strength. The parts were assembled into a circular frame holding a turbine vane, pieced together over a steam blowhole that had been previously marked by the trappers with a fluttering pennant. After heavy rubber cables had been attached to the device, the ends of the leads were plugged into their RAM suits’ chemical batteries. With the portable turbine whining as the steam hole drove it into action, a stench of bad eggs began to circulate within the confines of Hannah’s suit. Circling the disk-capped blowhole, connected by the cables, the twenty suits would have seemed to observers like some strange variety of iron flower, a night orchid emitting a bizarre stench as they recharged their batteries.

The increased size of the trappers’ RAM suits wasn’t just to accommodate the larger batteries needed to cover great distances – it had other uses, too, such as allowing the pilot frame to rotate back into a sleeping position, the lightly cushioned spine making a serviceable, if not particularly comfortable, bed. Hannah was selfishly glad that the number of trappers the expedition had engaged was large enough that she wouldn’t be required to stand a turn on sentry duty – not that the hard, taciturn trappers were likely to have trusted her even if she had offered. They stood duty two at a time, the sensing mechanisms in their suits set to violently judder the pilot cage if they detected a lack of movement consistent with sleep.

After a hard day pushing the suit forward over endless
miles of terrain – harder even than duty in the turbine halls – sleep was really not a problem. It swallowed Hannah up, rising out of the suit like a spinning vortex and cutting off the smell of sweat, oil and recharging battery packs.

In the days that followed, most of the places where they made camp were the same: low rocky wolds with enough of a view of the surrounding landscape for them to ensure that stalking ursks weren’t trying to crawl up on the resting RAM suits – although when the mist filled the low valleys, it was as if they were sitting on an island surrounded by smoking white rivers. And who knew what nightmares were swimming through their depths?

There was one site that got Nandi excited, a hill where the blowhole they were using to tap the steam lay in a dip and the crest of the hill was a rock formation that resembled a cup melted along one side. The archaeologist swore that there were tell-tale signs the rock had once been the foundations of a building and pointed down into the valley to indicate contours which she said were further indications that there had once been constructions on the surface.

‘I’m not so sure, lass,’ said the commodore, his RAM suit turned to face the ridges on the hill opposite. ‘There’s no bricks or mortar on this slab of rock – it looks as blasted and natural as the black cliffs on the coast to me – and those ridges could be where the storms have carved the soil away from the top of the hill.’

‘That’s because you don’t know what to look for,’ insisted the archaeologist.

‘Well, I’ve spent more of my life sandwiched between the hull of a boat than I have between the shelves of the library at St Vines College and I’m no doubt the worse for it,’ said the commodore, ‘but old Blacky’s seen the sunken streets of the city of Lost Angels on the seabed, and scoured by the tides
though the ruins were, they still had the look of streets to his tired old eyes.’ He called across to Ortin urs Ortin’s RAM suit– their domes retracted as they took in the fresh cold air. ‘What say you, ambassador?’

‘I say it may be,’ said Ortin urs Ortin. ‘The deeper we push into the island the more I see echoes from the scripture of the Divine Quad. The blasted plains of paradise and the crumbled cities that our people once inhabited.’

‘As I understand Pericurian scripture,’ said Hannah, ‘the race of man shouldn’t be here at all.’

The ambassador smiled. ‘I see that the Circlist church has indoctrinated you well in its efforts to deny our gods, dear girl.’ He quoted from the relevant passage. ‘“And the paradise that had fallen shall be forever more sealed in a sea of punishing fire, denied to all that would seek it. In sin was the land destroyed and only the wicked shall suffer its cursed acres.” As we push deeper into Jago, a joke that is told in the court of the archduchess comes to mind. That inside every liberal’s fur there are little conservative fleas waiting to climb out. The deeper we drive into this land, the closer this trip seems to blasphemy to me.’

‘Blasphemy is a good start,’ said Hannah, quoting one of Alice’s favourite sayings.

‘Perhaps to your peculiar church without gods, dear girl,’ said the ambassador. ‘But I would not tempt the wrath of Reckin urs Reckin so readily.’

‘Ah, we’re all tempting fate by being here,’ moaned the commodore. ‘You would think the world had had enough of throwing poor old Blacky into peril, but no, it understands that by tricking me into promising I’ll keep young Nandi Tibar-Wellking safe it can have me off chasing through Jago’s dark wastes after some long-lost invention of the church, when all that I deserve is the chance to spend my last few
miserable years gently revisiting the ports of my youth in my precious boat, hauling an honest cargo or two to help put a little beer in my flagon and a cut of roast beef on my table. This dark chase, this is my punishment.’

‘Punishment for what?’ asked Hannah.

‘For supporting the ambassador’s liberal friends on the other side of the Fire Sea,’ whined Commodore Black. ‘Running cargoes of Porterbrook steam engines and enough transaction engines to allow their great houses to count every tree in their forests twice over.’

‘Helping Pericur drag itself into the modern age hardly counts as a sin deserving punishment, dear boy,’ said the ambassador.

‘So you say now. But let’s see if you can look me in the eye and say as much in a generation or so – when you’ll have petty rules and large taxes set by small minds with nothing but malice for what once made you great and unique. When your forests are felled and you’re choking on the likes of a Middlesteel smog, when you’ve created a legion of jealous little shopkeepers who’ll drag your archduchess to a scaffold, rogues who’ll cut off the grand old lady’s arms in case she shakes a fist at them and styles their stealing and scheming for what it really is.’