Secrets of the Fire Sea (50 page)

Jared Black had turned and put a bullet through the skull of the soldier carrying a turret rifle before he had even realized that the wet-snout wielding a sabre next to the falling ursine corpse was that of Ortin urs Ortin.

‘Spawn of Amaja urs Amaja!’ the ambassador yelled. The children crowding the floor scrambled away in panic from this huge monster that had suddenly invaded the assembly room, a fur-covered demon bearing a sword slicked in the blood of their parents.

Commodore Black lowered his sabre at Ortin urs Ortin. ‘That and worse, ambassador.’

Ortin charged, pure animal savagery bearing down upon the old u-boat man. Commodore Black stepped forward and met him with a clash of steel.

‘You trapped us, tricked us!’ Ortin bayed. ‘You butchered half the great houses!’

‘No, lad, not me.’ The commodore fell back, grunting. Ortin’s strength was far beyond that of any fighter from the race of man. ‘But I’m going to settle for you all the same. For Nandi.’

Ortin struck the commodore’s sabre with his steel, again and again, making the commodore’s arm ring with the wicked pain of it. There was little room for sophistication in this battle, his parries blunted by the raw swinging power of the Pericurian’s massive frame. The commodore’s rare bones turned into an anvil from the battering.

As their fight stumbled back and forth across the assembly room, Commodore Black caught a brief glimpse of the barricade where the front line of cadets was thrusting bayonets against the crush of the Pericurian advance, the second line unable to shoot now without hitting their own side. Children, blessed children asked to fight and die like this. To fight for their lives. Their stronghold at the centre of the mountain was seconds away from falling…

Commodore Black yelled in surprise as he slipped on the blood of a dead Pericurian soldier and sprawled backwards, his sabre sliding away across the floor. He was weaponless. Ortin urs Ortin moved in and the commodore met the ambassador’s insane, glazed eyes as the huge beast raised his blade upwards for the killing stroke.

‘Leave…me…to die.’ Jethro coughed.

The steamman shook his visored head at Jethro’s wounded form and dropped the warhammer with a clang, mounting
the rungs up to the circle of stained glass windows. ‘No, I cannot. You must trust me.’

Hannah watched the huge steamman stop in front of the stained glass, drinking in the final hidden section of Bel Bessant’s terrible creation. ‘Don’t do this, Boxiron. I would only have used the god-formula to fix what wasn’t meant to be broken. What sort of god will you create by giving such a thing to Knipe? For the love of the Circle, he killed my father, Nandi, Chalph, Alice, he—’

‘Be quiet, damson,’ threatened the colonel. ‘The Inquisition was good enough to send us a machine to break codes, it’s only fitting that we use it as they intended.’

‘What sort of thing will you be?’ Hannah cried.

‘A better thing than your precious Circlism,’ spat the colonel. ‘All this time the church knew what it had here – the means to save our land! And your people buried it away; you forgot it along with our greatness! And the church claims to care for the needs of the people…’

‘I have completed the steganographic key,’ said Boxiron. ‘I am ready to begin deciphering the main code.’

Colonel Knipe picked up the first two sections of the god-formula that Hannah had dropped and threw them towards the steamman. ‘Pick up the girl’s pencil and begin writing on that paper. Quickly! Your Inquisition friend only has a few minutes of life left in him.’

Hannah looked down. Jethro Daunt had fallen silent and was lying with his back against the flare-house cannon, as still as a corpse bar for the trembling of one single leg. The floor below was awash with his blood.

‘Jethro Daunt is not a member of the Inquisition,’ said Boxiron as he worked. ‘He is not even a churchman anymore.’

‘So you say. For hire, then. A mercenary, no better than the dirty wet-snouts the senate believed they were buying.’

Boxiron continued to write out the equations of the final piece of the god-formula, his iron fingers moving several times more rapidly than any human hand could. ‘Not for hire, for love.’

‘He really was going to marry the archbishop?’ said Colonel Knipe, sounding surprised. ‘Well, I never did get around to checking if that part of his story was true. More fool him. Everything that you love you end up losing. That is the way of life.’

‘What will you do with this, colonel?’ asked Boxiron. His voicebox sounded as if it was vibrating with pain, as if the mere effort of translating the final section of the god-formula burned at the core of his being.

‘I will save your Jackelian friend. I have never broken my word.’

‘
Afterwards
.’

‘I shall restore Jago to its natural position at the head of the world’s nations, just as I shall burn the last wet-snout left on the island into ashes. Fire, then ice!’

Hannah pulled herself up, clutching her bleeding scalp. If that meant what she thought! ‘You can’t.’

‘My will shall be done,’ shouted the colonel. ‘The world’s winter shall be Jago’s summer. Our civilization will rise once more. Everyone will want to dwell here again and those who do not will consider themselves cursed.
And they shall be
!’

No. A new age of ice. A winter without end, never the spring again as the world turned.

‘Please!’ Hannah begged Boxiron to stop what he was doing, but instead the steamman slid the final completed section of the god-formula back towards Colonel Knipe.

‘We gave the world everything, little girl,’ snarled the colonel. ‘And they turned their backs on us, believed us fit
only for use as a rock to break the rising wet-snout tide. A mere pawn in the game of our betters. We passed the world the light once, after the age of ice ended, now the torch of their civilizations shall be ours to snuff out again.’

Seizing the completed god-formula, the colonel vaulted over the railing, landing on the lower walkway, then sprinted into the flare-house instrument room and sealed its door behind him.

Hannah was on her feet, groggily climbing down the ladder to the lower level. She picked up Boxiron’s hammer and smashed at the door to the instrument room, but its head bounced uselessly off. She screamed for Boxiron to help, but he was standing on the upper gantry as immobile as an iron statue. Had the enormity of what he had done finally begun to sink in? The terrible cost of his friendship with the man who had saved him? She tried to batter the crystal panel in the door, but it had been hardened to withstand a flare misfiring inside the launch barrel. Hannah’s strength was draining away. On the other side of the glass, a haze of twisting, turning diamond-sharp panes of light surrounded Colonel Knipe as he read the god-formula, enveloped by energies that were too exotic to be contained by the mortal world. His body was growing translucent, his organs pulsing with light. He was shedding his mortal shell.

Hannah felt fingers circling her ankle.

‘Don’t…let…him.’

‘It’s no good,’ said Hannah, kneeling beside the ex-parson. ‘The colonel’s in there changing. He’s taken the godhead.’

‘Boxiron! Boxiron!’

‘He’s frozen,’ cried Hannah. ‘Please, Jethro, Boxiron’s not even moving anymore.’

There was an awful ripping sound behind the instrument
room door, something alien and terrible, the fabric of matter itself tearing.

It was the laughter of a new demigod striding the earth.

Commodore Black heard the cadet commander’s yell as she scooped up his sabre and tossed it across to him. He rolled through the blood on the flagstones and speared Ortin urs Ortin squarely through the stomach, the tip of his sabre emerging through the back of the Pericurian ambassador’s jacket.

Commodore Black was on his knees, the ambassador looming over him, still trying to move forward despite the wound. At first the commodore could barely hold the ambassador back, but gradually the realization of his imminent death seemed to sink into Ortin urs Ortin, his eyes losing their glare of insanity.

‘Well – played – dear – boy.’

The commodore nodded, trying to rise, still keeping both hands on the sabre’s grip and preserving the gap between them.

‘I – am –
not
– a – savage.’

Commodore Black pulled out his sabre and the ambassador swayed. The old u-boat man raised the steel to his nose in salute as the ambassador crashed onto the flagstones, his monocle rolling away across the floor.

‘Just two blessed nobles,’ said the commodore, ‘living through a savage age as best we can.’

But the ambassador was beyond hearing him.

Commodore Black turned as the barricade cracked open to admit a wave of ab-locks, tools jangling from leather belts, bayonet-fitted rifles at the ready, followed by a pair of men in guildsmen’s robes. They looked for all of the world like a couple of hunters taking their hounds out for a walk through the vaults of the mountain.

‘Our RAM suits wouldn’t fit through the Horn’s corridors,’ said the nearest of the guildsmen.

‘There’s a pity,’ answered the commodore. He watched the ab-locks fan out across the assembly rooms towards the stairs to the higher levels, followed by the guildsmen. Hunting down creatures that looked and smelt like ursk cubs was something that no doubt came quite naturally to the pack.

‘On, T-face,’ cried the younger of the two valve-men. ‘Smell them out for us, up the stairs, up.’

Commodore Black drew out his mumbleweed pipe and searched for a packet of leaves to light, standing next to the white-faced cadet commander who was starting to tremble in shock now that the combat had ended. He took her rifle from her clenched fingers and set it down on the ground.

‘Is this war?’ she murmured in horror.

‘Not for us, lass,’ said the commodore. His eyes moved across the heaps of dead cadets and ursine, bodies locked together in death, mourned by the cries of the shivering children behind them.

‘For us, this was campaign experience. For us it’s the chance of a medal. It’s only war for them.’

Hannah had hold of Jethro’s hand, the tremor of his fingers growing weaker as the alien gale of laughter behind the iron door became a storm. The energies being unleashed inside that chamber were leaking through the seals as little flickers of ball lightning.

‘Boxiron. He…’ Jethro gasped. ‘Top. Gear.’

Hannah glanced up. The steamman was standing statue-still, transfixed by the scene below. What was the point, what was the point of anything now?

‘Bel. Bessant.’ Jethro’s fingers tightened around Hannah’s hand. ‘How. Do. You. Fight. Gods?’

Hannah stopped. She could see something moving down the corridor, a shadow, the blur of a rooting animal. Or a badger.

She heard the words hiss from the shadows. ‘Oh, he’s a good one. A real doozy you’re brewing up inside there. Your people will all be so glad to come back to us when they see him. You’ll beg us. You’ll
pray
to us!’

Hannah was desperately pulling herself up the rungs in the wall towards Boxiron, when a diamond-blue figure composed of burning angled planes forming the silhouette of a man walked through the instrument house door as if its steel was as insubstantial as the steam off the sea. Each of its steps turned the stone of the passage into a puddle of hissing liquid magma. The heat on Hannah’s back became intense, the nape of her neck burning as she pulled herself up onto the second gantry. Vivid panes of gem-coloured stained glass shook in their frames with the alien pressure of the creature below – a demigod fit for the dark, blasted heart of Jago. Lord of the ruins.

The thing that had been Colonel Knipe looked down at Jethro as if noticing a slug crawling across the dirt. The pond of blood surrounding the ex-parson boiled and frothed on the stone as the demigod knelt down and ran a hand along the man’s side. Jethro screamed and jerked in a wild fit as his body re-wove itself under that supernatural touch.

The ripping storm around the silhouette modulated into speech. ‘MY WORD.’ It raised an arm and Jethro was spun up off the ground and slammed against the steel of the flare-house cannon. ‘I NEED PRIESTS TO CARRY MY WORD.’

‘No,’ groaned Jethro, jowls buffeted by the force emanating from the being that had been Colonel Knipe. ‘I deny you.’

There was an increase in the gale’s intensity, the rippling skin of the universe moving in terrible amusement. ‘DID I ASK IF IT PLEASE YOU?’

Jethro’s lips started moving in prayer, the words – provided by the colonel – torn unwilling from his lips. But his eyes were his own. Fixed on Hannah, who clutched the railings on the gantry opposite him, with pained urgency. ‘My – lord – save – me – who gives – me – life – and – resurrection.’

Hannah lurched towards Boxiron, noting the red dot flaring on the steamman’s vision plate, one second a ruby pinprick, the next expanding to fill the whole vision plate with crimson. The steamman’s weak, human-milled shell was looping in paralysis. Too weak to contain…Bel Bessant knew. She had got that much right. The only way to fight a god. Hannah’s hand gripped the lever on the back of the steamman’s spine-box and threw it up, all the way. Top gear. Hannah’s eyes momentarily fell on the gear panel as the force of the unholy squall below carried her beyond the newly trembling steamman. She saw for the first time the words that had been scratched against the highest of the steamman’s gear positions.
Circle save you jiggers
.

Hannah was blown over the railings, landing on the lower gantry with a painful wallop. As the whirling energies carried her further down the gantry she could see Jethro Daunt slide across the cannon’s barrelling in front of her, still pinned by the terrible demigod, but his lips and voice his own again. ‘A god, so powerful. Truly, a god?’

‘YES.’

‘Then,’ Jethro said, as the skull of the burning silhouette bent forwards towards him, ‘it’s time for you to go to hell!’

Jago’s new dark demigod was pulled back, dragged by the
white tentacles of steam emerging from Boxiron’s stacks, the steamman’s body vibrating at such a speed that it blurred in and out of sight. The blue figure of fire raised its arms and waves of energy lashed out, only to be absorbed by the steam enveloping it, diluting and ultimately mingling with the demigod, becoming one with it. The flare-house was filled with a scream so primeval that it tore at Hannah’s chest, an unholy ripping sound. Hannah was backing away but Jethro was actually crawling towards the agonized demigod. Tighter and tighter the thing that had been Colonel Knipe was compressed, its force becoming brighter and more radiant, shaking with the power of a sun fashioned into a spear of primordial energy.