Secrets of the Fire Sea (48 page)

It was true, Ortin could not deny it. Their people’s corpses littered the ground both inside and outside the capital’s walls, raked by shells from the coral line, the hail of bullets from
the defenders – the storm of fire – now passing over their prone, uncaring forms where they had fallen in the smoking rubble. Outside in the harbour the torn corpses bobbing in the steaming red waters were so thick the ambassador could have used their shrapnel-studded bodies as a carpet to walk between the burning wreckage of the fleet. This had been a trap and the ursine had walked blithely into it, naively counting themselves the new masters of Jago. All they had wanted to do was to free the people of the island from the shackles of their oppressors, allow them their freedom away from this god-cursed place. This was their reward for trying to follow the word of the Divine Quad. Sent to hell by those who believed in none. What fools they had been. The darkness here had changed the people of Jago, twisted them into something inhuman. The heathen beasts’ mortars were still peppering the harbour waters, the screams of exhausted survivors trying to struggle out of the bloodstained water echoing out of the scene of hell. Their fur burnt off their bodies by their sin. No, not their sins. The sins of the humans, of the race of
man
.

‘I was wrong,’ cried Ortin urs Ortin trying not to look at the staggering field of carnage behind him.

Stom urs Stom raised a massive blooded paw. ‘This is the world’s end and this is – your war – now.’

Ortin grasped the soldier’s fingers tight, but she was no longer there to feel his grip.

Moaning in dirge, one of Stom’s soldiers covered her body with the standard she had been carrying, but the ambassador growled and lifted the banner off her corpse. ‘You do not lower your flag to honour a Pericurian! Lift it up, lift them all!’

The ambassador slid Stom’s sabre out of her belt and stood up, letting the shots of the Jagonese ring off the rocks around
him like a bell calling the people to prayer. ‘Infidel!’ he yelled. ‘Infidel!’ He turned up towards the slope and lowered the sabre. ‘Put tooth and claw in every last one of them. Not one of the cursed of Amaja urs Amaja to be left alive. Salt their ruins and clean your wounds in their blood!’

Close to sixty thousand Pericurians had arrived at the island’s shores. The sole thousand that had survived rose up as one and followed their ambassador in his charge up the Horn of Jago.

T
he narrow windowless passage Hannah was taking opened up into a raised gantry crossing the side of the senate’s octagonal chamber, high above the heads of those debating Jago’s future below. Colonel Knipe had joined the guards protecting her, leading the way while his two militiamen took the rear. The sounds of the heated sitting of the senate carried up towards them, the oratory continuing apace despite the rattle of gunfire and explosions from outside the mountain.

‘Change with responsibility, responsible change.’

‘We will stand with every vault, with every district.’

‘Ideals given form with our sacrifice.’

‘Set up a committee, hold a hearing!’

Hannah stopped a second on the gantry, almost mesmerized by the hypnotic cadence of the sound. You could be tricked to sleep listening to such a surreal song.

‘They are not Jago,’ said Colonel Knipe, seeing that she had stopped. ‘Once, but no more. Now it is you, damson. You are the light that will lead us through the steam storms.’

‘Am I?’ said Hannah. If she was, she didn’t feel like it.
Uncertainties about her course of action were replacing the confidence she had felt as a prisoner of the Pericurian fleet.

She followed the clacking stamp of Colonel Knipe’s artificial leg across the gantry, into another maze of narrow service corridors, before they entered a long hall. It was old, floored with expensive imported wood dating from the capital’s halcyon days. But the hall hadn’t been dusted in a long time, spider webs hung between hundreds of marble statues and busts of senators and notables, removed from the city and stored away, assigned to obscurity with the shifts of political fashion. Walking down the aisle between their blank, unpainted eyes, it was as though all the island’s ghosts had lined up to pass judgement on Hannah’s decision to grasp the legacy of Bel Bessant. There were no windows in this hall, only an ancient LED panel that hadn’t been replaced for so long that its light had turned blue, washing the hall with its cold glow.

They were halfway along the hall when two guildsmen stepped out of the shadows. To the side of Hannah, the pair of militia guards pushed their cloaks back to pull out their pistols, but they had barely cleared their holsters before double arcs of forked lightning leapt out of the dark between the statues, striking the police officers and sending them hurtling back into the masonry, jerking and twitching as electric energy chased over their bodies. As more initiates of the Guild of Valvemen stepped out, Hannah saw they were holding onto steel lances with oversized rubber gloves, the lances connected to large capacitor packs strapped over their robes. They were followed out of the shadows by a bent, hobbling figure. Vardan Flail!

Colonel Knipe pushed Hannah behind him, shielding her from the guildsmen’s deadly weapons. ‘Flail!’ spat the colonel. ‘I might have known a rodent like you would have secret maintenance tunnels to carry you into the Horn of Jago.’

‘Tunnels to repair the machines,’ hissed Vardan Flail. ‘Machines to track you. The Guild are the blood of this city, our transaction engines its brain, our turbine halls its heart.’

‘So much power and yet still you want more.’

Vardan Flail stuck a deformed finger out of his robes, pointing it at Hannah. ‘You know what I want.’

‘Yes,’ said the colonel.

Hannah only just heard the click from underneath the militia commander’s cloak, his left hand hidden behind his back.

One second.

‘And I know what you deserve.’

Two seconds.

Hannah saw the whirring clockwork detonator on the round glass grenade as the colonel hurled it towards the guildsmen before throwing his weight at her, carrying the two of them behind the marble shield of some centuries-dead senator.

Three seconds.

There was a lash of energy burning the stone as Knipe’s grenade detonated, the charge of the guildsmen’s electric weapons lashing out in a single burst as their backpacks ripped apart, the rain of shrapnel jouncing off the statue shielding Hannah and the colonel. Then there was silence.

Colonel Knipe stepped out from behind the smoking statues, his pistol drawn, and prodded the torn robed bodies lying there. It was hard to distinguish what had been ruined by the corpses’ labours in the guild’s vaults and what the grenade had wrecked. The pungent scent of mint from their robes mixed with sulphur from the explosion.

Hannah saw that Vardan Flail was still moving across the floor, partially shielded by his men’s bodies – but he wouldn’t last long, not in the state he was in.

‘Sacrifice,’ hissed Vardan Flail, ‘the god-formula.’

The colonel pointed his pistol at the dying man as if to fire, then he tapped his artificial leg with the gun and holstered it. ‘I’ve sacrificed more than everyone, you rodent. May you live long enough to see the guild’s power dwindle to an ember on Jago.’

Colonel Knipe helped Hannah to her feet. ‘He can’t hurt you now, but there might be more of his guildsmen following him. Are we close?’

Hannah looked at the robed body crawling like a slug across the dusty oak floor, his groans growing more intermittent. Was Alice Gray’s ghost resting easier now that the man who had murdered her was passing along the Circle’s turn? Not if Hannah’s own feelings were any compass. She felt no satisfaction, only pity. That was a surprise. Wasn’t this something she had dreamt of when she was a slave of the Guild of Valvemen? Nothing felt quite like it should.

‘Yes,’ said Hannah. ‘It’s close.’

Jethro, Boxiron and the commodore were moving through the crowded floor of an assembly room where hundreds of children were sitting cross-legged and frightened on the floor, when Jethro heard panicked shouts from the corridor at the other end of the chamber. Out of the passage a townsman emerged using his rifle as a crutch and moving so fast that he was treading on the hands of the children cowering on the floor.

‘Careful, man,’ cried the commodore, grabbing the townsman by the jacket.

‘Let me go! They’re coming! The wet-snouts have breached the slopes. They’re inside the mountain vaults now, inside!’

The townsman pulled away and resumed his sprint through the huddling crowd of refugee children. Jethro saw the commodore looking at his hands. The u-boat man’s palms
were covered in the blood that had been soaking the man’s dark frock coat.

‘Stay and fight, you mortal fool,’ the commodore shouted after him. ‘There’s nowhere left to run to.’

Jethro looked around. There was just himself, the commodore and Boxiron trying to get through the assembly room. No defenders to protect the hundreds of children hiding here. The other fighters had already gone to man the firing lines, leaving the three of them to work their way up ever higher into the honeycombed passages of the Horn of Jago in pursuit of Hannah Conquest.

‘Where are you going, good captain?’ Jethro called to the commodore as he moved towards the passage. ‘We have to keep moving higher.’

‘I’m too tired to chase about the tunnels of this blessed mountain, Jethro Daunt. I’m going to sit myself down in this chamber and rest awhile.’

‘These children are not our concern,’ said Boxiron. ‘We have a greater mission.’

‘One man and a sabre will make no difference here,’ agreed Jethro. ‘All the armies of the world will make no difference unless we can get to Hannah before she finds the final section of the god-formula.’

‘Does the Circlist church have a formula for that, Mister Daunt? Some equations wrapped up in a homily about the power of the common good?’

They did, but Jethro could sense that the old u-boat man had made up his mind. Not everyone could pick where they died. There were hundreds of children here, hiding terrified in the heart of the Horn of Jago, as safe from the bombardment and fighting outside as they could be.

‘Off with you, lad. You and the old steamer have your god-formula to protect and I have my own code I must uphold.’

‘May serenity find you, good captain,’ said Jethro, passing the commodore his rifle and satchel of charges.

‘Maybe she will at that.’

Commodore Black watched Jethro and Boxiron climb up one of the side passages before laying aside his sabre. Sitting wearily down in the assembly room, he raised the barrel of the ex-parson’s rifle to his nose and sniffed it. ‘As new as a freshly minted coin,’ he muttered.

The commodore pulled out a cloth he used for his mumbleweed pipe and began cleaning the grease off the barrel. Two of the children came up to him, a brother and sister perhaps, the girl holding a tiny horse carved out of a single piece of volcanic stone.

‘Why did the man run off?’ asked the boy.

‘He had forgotten to give his wife a kiss before he left home,’ said the commodore. ‘She’ll be blessed angry at him if he doesn’t get back to her quickly.’

‘We’ve left home too,’ said the sister.

‘I thought you had, now. You had that look about you.’

There was a sound down the passage, an echo of rattling brass, and coming out of the flickering artificial light was as bizarre a sight as the commodore had ever expected to see here on Jago. A line of children, but children in militia uniforms, miniature cloaks and full-sized rifles on their shoulders. Most of them barely looked to be in their teens, although the girl marching at their head might have had a year or two on that, along with a good few gangling inches over the troops in her company.

‘Cadets, halt!’ ordered the girl. She looked suspiciously at the commodore’s tattered foreign naval uniform. ‘We are here to protect you.’

‘That’s grand,’ said the commodore.

‘We wanted to stay on the slopes and fight but the major ordered us back here. She said that the evacuated classes needed to be defended.’

Commodore Black sighed. In the Jackelian New Pattern Army these greenhorns might have passed as drummers. In the Royal Aerostatical Navy, they might have passed as midshipmen or catwalk monkeys for the sailors. Here in the mountain vaults, though, they were just frightened children in stiff uniforms trying to ignore the gestures and calls from the youngsters they had been studying next to the week before.

‘Captain Jared Black,’ said the commodore, wearily raising his full bulk to his feet. ‘You might forget to salute, cadet,’ he blustered, leaning over to lock the bayonet under her rifle barrel in place, ‘but when you forget to turn-and-twist your cutlery, the first wet-snout you stick with that bayonet is going to end up keeping it in their gut.’

‘Sir!’ she barked.

Commodore Black stared back down the assembly rooms, calculating the meagre options for their defence. There was the corridor at the rear where he had entered with Jethro and the steamman. That led to the lower levels of the Horn of Jago and those grand doors out onto the subterranean city – that should be safe enough. There was the stairway on the side up to the next level – too narrow for a good assault, but maybe good for flanking with a skirmisher or two, he’d have to keep an eye on that. Then there was the entrance in front of them, leading onto the main corridor the cadets had retreated down. Yes, the main corridor, that’s where he would assault from, and that’s where the mortal Pericurian troops would show their snouts in force.

‘Turn over those tables in front of this passage and form two lines behind them. First line kneels and loads, second line fires on command, then you change position. Don’t sight your
rifles; the passage’s width will do your blessed aiming for you. Clear your broken charges cleanly and watch you don’t burn yourself on the wadding and residue.’

She saluted. ‘We will do our duty, captain.’