Secrets of the Fire Sea (4 page)

‘You did well enough, good friend,’ said Jethro, laying a hand on the steamman’s cold iron shoulder. ‘You prevented the doctor from escaping.’

‘I nearly killed him. My thoughts travel too fast for this body,’ said Boxiron, allowing only a small trace of self-pity to escape into his voice. ‘Stuck in a loop every time I overreach myself.’

‘The mind is willing but the flesh is weak,’ said Jethro, opening the front door onto the neat square in Middlesteel’s expensive western district, the railings of the crescent thoroughly polished, a thousand metal spears gleaming in the sunshine.

‘It’s not my flesh that is weak,’ said Boxiron, his legs pistoning down the wide porch steps to the cobbled pavement below. ‘That’s one burden I don’t carry.’

Jethro angled a nose that was too proud for his kind face towards the cab rank at the end of the street, and one of the drivers flicked his whip, sending a midnight-black mare clattering forwards. Just before the hansom cab could reach the two of them, though, it was cut up by a larger coach, this one a horseless carriage with iron wheels as tall as a man at the rear. As his horse spooked, the cab driver swore furiously, shaking his fist at the whining clockwork contraption. But the new vehicle wasn’t a rival in the carriage trade, for all that its black iron matched the sheen of the hansom cab’s dark walnut exterior.

Riveted iron doors swung open on each side of the horseless carriage, tall men dressed like Circlist monks with simple grey robes stepping out onto the street side and staring down the cabbie, who swapped his obscenities for a final scowl before driving off. On the pavement side of the carriage, a nun aged about sixty stepped out, dressed like her companions – although
she had not tonsured her greying hair, but had her locks tied back in two buns above her ears. The monks stood very still, with a calmness that hung in the air like the glint of sunlight on a brandished dagger.

Boxiron stomped noisily on the pavement, his hulking, unwieldy body swivelling to take in the ranks of monks now surrounding them – more exiting from the second iron room at the back of the horseless carriage. Some of the monks carried staffs and Jethro Daunt doubted they were intended to aid infirmities or for the long travels of a pilgrimage. He just hoped Boxiron didn’t slip a gear now.

‘I have been defrocked,’ said Jethro. ‘I’m no longer in the church.’

The woman’s head rocked to one side. Of course she would know that. It would have been people rather like these pressing the ecclesiastical court to throw him out of his parsonage.

‘I understand you have been operating as a consulting detective for the last few years,’ said the woman.

‘That is true,’ said Jethro.

‘Of course it is. I wish to
consult
with you.’ There was quite a tone of menace in that single word, for all the eerie calmness in her face.

‘Well, well,’ said Jethro. ‘I’ll be bobbed. Of all the people in the capital I might have expected to be conversing with about my current mode of employment, your people are the very last ones I would have expected to turn up.’

‘As it should be,’ noted the woman. ‘Of those that know of the existence of the League of the Rational Court, there are even fewer that should be aware when they are about to be touched by our hand.’

Jethro looked at the open door of the carriage and the woman pointing to the empty red leather seat opposite the one she had just vacated. An invitation with exceedingly little choice in it.
And carriage rides with these people were sometimes one-way affairs.

The hand of the Circlist church’s League of the Rational Court. The hand of the
Inquisition
.

Hannah Conquest pushed aside the thick brambles to try and find the path. Like all of the great domed greenhouses nestled in the shadows of the Horn of Jago, Tom Putt Park was named after its creator – or at least the merchant notable who had paid for it to be constructed. Nestling against the battlements, far from the city, Tom Putt Park had drawn the short straw when it came to maintenance from the dwindling band of park keepers and farm labourers. They were presently engaged in the serious business of feeding the capital, not pruning the wild-running hedges and copses under Tom Putt’s crystal geodesic canopy.

It always felt a curious thing to Hannah, moving through the bush and the greenery of the park. In a very real sense she wasn’t walking on the soil of Jago. All the dirt here, and in every other park and farm dome, not to mention the tree beds in Hermetica’s vaults below, had been imported by traders’ barges in centuries past. Dirt from the Kingdom of Jackals on the far side of the Fire Sea, as well as from Pericur and the other nations on the opposite shores. The native top-soil beyond the capital’s battlements was fit only for growing stunted fruitless orchards, those and the island’s blackened forests of thorns that cut at travellers with the sharpness of the machetes needed to hack out a passage amongst them. Not that many dared to venture outside without wearing heavily armoured walking machines – RAM suits, as the trappers and city maintenance workers called them. The aging power tunnels that fed the city with the energy its people required always needed upkeep, as did the iron aqueducts
carrying in fresh drinking water down from the hills. A job that was almost as unappealing as what Hannah suspected was in store for her with the guild…

Hannah found the path again and after a minute came to the flint wall that would lead her to the stone singers. Chalph urs Chalph was waiting by the circle of moss-stained marble statues when she came to the clearing, looking as if he might join in the fertility song the circle of carvings were said to be singing to the stone apple tree in their centre. A reminder of more prosperous times that had once paid for the park and its upkeep. There was little time for wassailing now. The city was lucky if its entire crop could be collected before it spoiled lying on the domes’ dirt.

‘I’ve just seen the ballot list posted,’ Chalph called to her. ‘Although if I hadn’t, the look on your face might tell me the tale by itself.’

‘Well, I’ve found my future,’ said Hannah. ‘Rotting away in the engine rooms as an initiate of the Guild of Valvemen.’

‘The draft ballot’s been nailed up everywhere in the city. The senate are calling more people than ever before this year for the protected professions.’ He licked at a paw-like hand. ‘But you have dual citizenship through your parents. You can just leave…’

‘How, by walking across the Fire Sea?’ asked Hannah. ‘That twisted jigger Vardan Flail seems to think the supply boat from Pericur isn’t going to be selling tickets out of here when it comes to me, not to
anyone
who’s been called by the draft, in fact.’

‘There must be something you can do…’

‘I don’t want to end up like them,’ said Hannah, almost sobbing. ‘Have you ever seen what’s under a valveman’s robes? Working in the engine rooms changes your body, kills you eventually.’

‘You can claim asylum,’ speculated Chalph. ‘The Jackelian ambassador, the short fellow with the red nose, he could grant you asylum in his embassy.’

‘That old fool? Sir Robert Cugnot is lucky to remember to stuff the cork back in his wine bottle before he turns in of a night. How are he and his staff going to keep me safe? Nobody can dodge the draft now, the militia always finds you. It doesn’t matter where you hide, in a friend’s house, in one of the empty quarters, they always track you down in the end.’

‘Then take the seminary vows like you wanted to,’ urged Chalph. ‘You’re clever enough to pass the examinations and the guild can’t draft you if you’re already working for the church.’

‘Alice won’t waive the age limit for me,’ said Hannah. ‘I begged her. But I’m her ward and proffering me for early advancement is not the right and rational thing to do.’

Chalph shook his heavy dark-furred head in anger. ‘And letting your body cook in the energies of the guild’s engine rooms
is
?’

‘That won’t be Alice’s choice; it’ll be Vardan Flail’s. Circle damn the man, I hate him. Always coming around the cathedral, trying to ingratiate himself with Alice, the stink of decay and death on his robes.’

‘I’ll get you out of here,’ promised Chalph. ‘The supply boat from Pericur is owned by the House of Ush. I’ll find one of our sailors willing to take on board a stowaway, there must be one of them who’ll help me.’

‘The militia search the boats now before they let them leave. But it won’t come to that,’ said Hannah, trying to sound more hopeful than she actually felt. ‘Alice will argue for me. She’s cleverer than the whole stained senate put together. If there’s a loophole…’

Chalph was about to answer when he turned his head and sniffed the air. ‘It – no!’

Hannah couldn’t smell anything, but she could hear the distant crackle of brambles as something heavy pushed through the undergrowth. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s an
ursk
,’ whispered Chalph.

‘How would the monster get inside the park? It should have been fried coming over the city wall,’ said Hannah, looking uncertainly in the direction of the noise. ‘Ursks are similar enough to your people, Chalph. You must have the scent of one of your house-men coming looking for you skiving.’

‘Ursks are nothing like my people,’ said Chalph, backing up. He seized Hannah’s arm. ‘Run! Back to the entrance now.’

Hannah let her friend break through the passage of greenery ahead of her, trampling bushes and breaking creepers with his mass. If it was an ursk…Chalph had a keen nose, but the monsters that inhabited the island’s interior depended on
theirs
for feeding. She heard the crashing behind them – a savage racket. Just the sort of clatter something twice as heavy as an ursine would make loping after them. How many times had Hannah heard people sitting at the tea-tables in the vaults below whispering that the killing charge running along the city’s battlements was failing now, predicting that something like this would happen sooner or later?

Chalph howled in fear and rage as he pushed forward, but there was no one else to hear it in Tom Putt Park. That was the point of coming here, you could be alone without being spotted by priests and housemen and assigned the kinds of tasks that often came to mind when faced with idling youngsters. Chalph’s howl was echoed by something similar-sounding, but louder, coming from behind them. That sound came from no ursine! Off to their side another roar answered the first, a quick bestial exchange of information. Two ursks, or more? How had the monsters got over the battlements alive? A section
of Hermetica’s defences had to be down. Their sloping iron ramparts were over forty feet high, the electric charge they carried enough to hurl back the corpse of any creature unwise enough to touch them.

Hannah urged her cramping legs to hurry. Ursks, what did she know about ursks? Nothing that could help them here. Only stories from the men that ventured outside the walls: trappers, hunters, and city maintenance workers. Tales of bear-like monsters that prowled the basalt plains and volcanic mountains. Twice the size of a Pericurian and thrice the weight of anyone from the race of man. Monstrous, thick-furred killers that hunted in packs and could rip a Jagonese citizen apart in seconds with their claws. Almost – but not quite fully – sentient, with enough guile and cunning to plan ambushes and lure those travelling overland away from the safety of a well-armed caravan. Always hungry, always prowling the capital’s battlements.

Hannah tripped on part of the crumbling old path through the undergrowth just as a long, black-furred shape seemed to pass endlessly through the air where she had been standing; the stench of rotten, steam-slicked fur filling her nose. It didn’t matter how many of its pack had broken through the wall alongside this monster. Hannah and Chalph were unarmed. This single ursk would be more than enough to kill them a dozen times over.

Still on the ground, Hannah scrambled back in terror, gaping at the foul thing that landed snarling in front of her, a nightmare carved in flesh.

Jethro Daunt climbed into the horseless carriage’s forward compartment and Boxiron made to clamber up behind him, but the nun shook her head at the steamman and pointed across to an organ grinder entertaining a group of children
in the crescent’s garden opposite. ‘Not you. We require the one playing, not the one dancing.’

The red light behind Boxiron’s vision plate flared in anger, but Jethro shook his head at his friend. ‘There’s really no call to be impolite, good sister.’

‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘My apologies, steamman. Your talents are not what I require presently.’

‘I use my talents to keep my softbody friend here safe,’ spat Boxiron.

The woman merely smiled in reply.

‘We’re in the open, it’s daylight and we’ve just walked out of a house filled with Ham Yard’s finest detectives,’ said Jethro to the steamman. ‘Save your top gear for the moment, good friend, I believe my life is safe.’

Boxiron looked at the large monks climbing back into the rear room of the carriage. ‘You may be without gods, but if I find a hair out of place on Jethro softbody’s head when next I see him, you will find cause to wish you had someone to pray to.’

Opposite Jethro, the nun shrugged nonchalantly. ‘The funny thing about those Steamo Loas you worship, creature of the metal, is that even on closer examination, they’re still mostly steam.’

As their carriage pulled away, Boxiron began to clump angrily back towards their lodgings at number ten Thompson Street.

‘He’s hardly subtle,’ said the nun, watching the gas lamps whisk past now that her horseless carriage was speeding up.

‘As you said,’ noted Jethro,’ it’s not what he’s for. He’s a topping old steamer, really.’

‘And what are you for, Jethro Daunt?’

‘I’m all for whiling away my remaining years on the Circle’s turn with as much serenity as I can find,’ said Jethro,
rummaging around in his pocket to withdraw a crumpled paper bag filled with black and white-striped sweets. ‘Would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop? They’re quite wondrous.’

The nun looked at the bag with barely disguised disgust. ‘You realize those foul things are highly addictive? The sugar is mixed with poppy opiates. Parliament should have outlawed them years ago.’