Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  'Why have I never heard anything about this?' asked Hannah, confused.

  'The college has written to you at least once a year, asking you to accept a benefactor's scholarship from us.'

  'I've never received a single letter from you,' said Hannah, sounding desperate.

  'Ah then,' said the commodore. 'An inheritance that hasn't come your way. A sad tale, right enough, and a story I have heard before. Normally attached to some poor young cabin boy or girl pressed into service against their will, while their money finds itself falling into someone else's wicked hands.'

  'I was a ward of the Circlist church,' spluttered Hannah. 'The church takes enough in tithes and stipends that they don't need to rob children of their pennies.'

  'But here you are all the same,' said the commodore, 'a fine Jackelian girl pressed into service on Jago with the terrible Guild of Valvemen. Say that you were pressed, lass. You did not volunteer for this terrible service?'

  Hannah gritted her teeth. 'I did not volunteer.'

  'Well, whatever the truth of it, there's mischief here, that much I can see.'

  Nandi nodded in agreement, as the capsule rattled through the atmospheric tunnel, bringing them closer to the Guild of Valvemen's distant vaults with every second.

  Someone had been trying to harm Doctor Conquest's daughter, and suddenly Professor Harsh's insistence that Nandi travel to Jago in the company of a swaggering privateer and his wild crew didn't seem so very strange after all. Jethro and Boxiron walked towards the confessional against the cathedral's wall. Jethro found it hard to imagine Alice Gray as the archbishop of this vast stone expanse, so different from the small warm seminary rooms where they had come to know each other. It was as far away from the green water meadows, ancient oak forests and shire villages of the Kingdom as it was possible to get. Which, along with filling the archbishop's seat, had been the point of coming here for Alice. As far away from him as she could travel. What would their life together have been like, Jethro mused, if the old gods had not appeared to haunt him and ruin his name within the church? Would he and Alice have had children and what would they have been like? It would have been wondrous, the life he had been cheated of. Wondrous.

  Jethro had decided not to present the Inquisition's seal to the cathedral staff just yet. If someone inside the church knew who had sent him here, then it was conceivable that Colonel Knipe would find out, and then, Jethro suspected, he and Boxiron would find their comfortable quarters at the hotel traded for armed confinement on the Purity Queen until the vessel left port. Or worse. And he had no desire to see the inside of the police militia's damp fortress cells at first hand.

  The old priest, Father Blackwater, showed them the confessional booth where the archbishop's body had first been discovered. 'You will find far more peace at her grave, Mister Daunt.'

  'I need to see where Alice died,' said Jethro.

  Father Blackwater pointed at the polished flagstones. 'She was lying there. That was her usual confessional just against the wall. The ursk must have dragged her out. There was so much blood. I've never seen anything like it before.'

  'That will happen when the head is removed from the body.'

  'May the Circle bring serenity to the savage creatures that did it,' coughed the father.

  'I believe I'm getting the offender's fur as a rug, if you are interested.'

  The old priest appeared quite ill at the thought.

  'Forgive me, good father,' said Jethro. 'I tend towards black humour these days.'

  'We never knew that the archbishop had been engaged to be married,' said the elderly priest.

  'The dissolution of our betrothal was an unhappy event for both of us,' said Jethro. 'You know what the great families are like: she was a highly cultivated lady and no one was ever going to be suitable enough for their daughter.' Certainly not a parson who had allowed himself to start believing in ancient Jackelian gods. 'A minute if you will, for me to meditate alone here.'

  'If only the archbishop had come with us into the city to help carry the torches,' added Father Blackwater.

  Jethro nodded as he slipped into the confessional booth. But how like Alice to have stayed. Stubborn and proud, unwilling to abandon the sacred duty of taking the rational confession. Upholding her first duty towards the people, to balance their minds and purge the troubles of the soul – keeping her patients clean of hostile memes and false beliefs.

  As promised, Jethro emerged from the booth a couple of moments later. He stared up at the vast circular rose windows, the shadows of the mathematical patterns depicted there falling across his face. 'A thought, good father. Without a head attached to the corpse, how did you know the body wearing the archbishop's clothes was actually that of the archbishop herself?'

  'Our police militia are very thorough,' said the old priest. 'I saw them fill a syringe from the body and it was later matched to her blood code held in the guild archives.'

  'What form did their thoroughness take?'

  'The police interviewed everyone, they matched the archbishop's blood code, they sealed off and inspected the area where you are standing – the gentlemen officers of your kingdom's Ham Yard could not have done a more exacting job. We are an advanced nation, Mister Daunt, not a backward isle of secluded bumpkins.'

  'Please do not take my morbid curiosity as any such slight,' said Jethro. 'The grandness of the cathedral's walls and the beauty of your stained glass speaks deeply to me of the sophistication of your people and the seriousness with which you treat the Circlist enlightenment. I understand the Jagonese way is to cremate the bodies of the deceased, not to bury them as we do back in the Kingdom?'

  'In the old days the archbishop's body would have been placed in a boat and pushed out into the Fire Sea to burn,' said the old priest. 'We never dig a grave on the surface – the creatures out there violate them all too readily. Our present tradition is to lower the body on a granite platform close to the magma. The ashes that are left behind are then buried in the Vault of Remembrance. The cathedral fathers and sisters have their own wall there, which is where Alice Gray's remains are interred. I can walk you across there in a minute…'

  'Another day, good father,' said Jethro. 'I think I need to remember Alice as I knew her in happier times, before I am ready to visit your remembrance vault and say goodbye for the last time.'

  'As you wish. May serenity find you, Mister Daunt.'

  Boxiron watched the priest walk away to greet a party arriving for the first cathedral service. 'It is not serenity I sense within you, Jethro softbody. What did you discover inside the confessional booth?'

  'There was a note slipped under the pillow; curiously it is addressed to us. Also, something had been written inside on the wall. Written in blood, before it had been scrubbed off.'

  'The note?'

  Jethro cleared his throat. 'An anonymous request for a meeting late at night. A request addressed to the two foreign agents of the Inquisition. I can only presume that means us.'

  'A trap?'

  'Possibly,' said Jethro.

  Boxiron's steam stacks coughed a pungent black cloud out above their heads, the smoke dispersing into the apsidal chapels behind them. 'And could you discern what the writing in blood said?'

  'No. Only that someone had tried to remove it and I was lucky to find the traces. Blood had been splashed over the words to look like spray from the slaying, then rubbed off quite thoroughly.'

  Someone who is being clawed to death by an ursk is unlikely to have written "the black-furred monster did it" on the walls of the confessional,' observed Boxiron.

  'As unlikely as a decapitated corpse being capable of reaching out and scratching a last denouncement at all,' said Jethro. He cleared his throat and tapped the side of his cheek with a finger. 'I think it is time we put your special skills to some practical use on Jago, my steamman friend.'

  'Yes,' Boxiron agreed. 'I believe I agree with you. I am meant for other things than padding around senatorial chambers and cathedral
vestries.'

  Jethro knelt down to the place where Alice's corpse had been discovered, running his fingers across the stone. It felt warm to the touch, as though the passing of her life had burnt an indelible mark inside the cathedral. What had she written inside the confessional booth before she died, what in the world could have been that important to her?

  Yes. It was time for affairs to be pushed up a gear. Without windows, the only way Nandi could tell that the atmospheric capsule had arrived at its final destination was the sense of deceleration followed by a gentle bump as they cleared the rubber curtain of the receiving station's lock. The young academic wasn't sure what she should have been expecting outside the capsule's confines, but it wasn't a man-made waterfall cascading down the Guild of Valvemen's entrance chamber.

  Water was gushing out of the ceiling, flowing down sloped iron walls and hitting the floor like thunder before disappearing down sluice gates running along a concrete channel in the floor. The iron had gone green and was streaked with calcium deposits which were being scraped away by guild workers dangling down the iron slope on ropes.

  Commodore Black wiped away the sheen of fine water dampening his cheeks and addressed Hannah. 'That's a mighty cascade, lass.'

  'Condensed water from the turbine halls below,' said Hannah. 'After the flash steam has been tapped from the bedrock to feed the turbines' rotors and generate the electricity, it's pumped up through a cooling system and comes out as water.'

  Commodore Black looked in horror at the water on his hand, regarding it as if it might be poisonous. Hannah shook her head and took them to a bank of lockers next to the atmospheric station's platform. 'The water's not dangerous, the electric field is strongest in the turbine halls and they're buried as deep as anything in the guild's vaults.'

  'Dark power to supply the capital,' said the commodore.

  'More than just Hermetica City,' noted Hannah, opening the locker with a key tied onto her robe's belt. 'The power plant beneath here used to supply all the cities of Jago and could again if needed. The steam taps below provide free energy.'

  'Free if you discount the damage done to your bodies,' said Nandi.

  Hannah indicated the suits hanging up in the lockers, all-encompassing leather aprons sewn with hundreds of dark lead squares. 'I'm not planning to be around long enough to find out. It's the accumulated background charge of an electric field that disfigures your body. These-' she indicated the suits '-are for outsiders, but they're really for show, to make you feel better when visiting. You're not going to be around long enough for your body to start changing, and even if you were, these wouldn't help you. You might as well walk around here naked for all the protection such suits will offer.'

  'I'll take a blessed suit anyway,' said the commodore, wheezing as he lifted one out.

  Nandi did likewise, struggling under the weight after she had belted the heavy lead apron around her.

  'I'll escort you to the transaction-engine vaults,' said Hannah, 'I've already reserved a study cell for you with a card puncher and the access to the guild archives you've negotiated.'

  Unlike the other guildsmen in the receiving station, Hannah kept her hood down, a small act of rebellion – or vanity, given her face was yet to be scarred by tumours.

  'You mentioned you weren't planning to be here that long,' Nandi said to Hannah as they followed her out of the atmospheric station, the protective plates of their lead aprons clunking as they walked.

  'I was put forward for the church entrance examinations before I was drafted by the guild,' replied Hannah. 'The guild have to let me sit the tests. And when I pass…'

  'That's the spirit,' said the commodore. 'It's a wicked shame to see a fine Jackelian girl having to labour under the tyranny of these red-robed crows.'

  'I only wish I had more time to study for the examination,' said Hannah, as the passage they were walking along widened into a barrel-vaulted chamber, stone pillars on their right supporting an open portal, voices echoing from within. Inside, row upon row of guild-robed figures were kneeling and humming a mantra.

  Nandi frowned. The Circlist chanting contained little of the joy and warmth that was to be felt amongst the congregations back in the Kingdom. Here, there was a dour, plaintive edge to the sound.

  Hannah poked her thumb towards the worshipping masses. 'They actually lead a more ordered life here than back in the cathedral. Meditations every hour of the day when the guild's duties aren't being observed.'

  Nandi peered around the pillar and into the long chapel hall. 'So full.'

  'Circlism has a deep resonance within the guild.' Hannah explained. 'The irrelevance of the physical body, your soul poured back into the one sea of consciousness after death. Your life cupped out again into another, happier, life further along the circle.'

  Nandi tugged at the young girl's richly embroidered red robes. 'These aren't to protect you, are they? They're not even to hide you from the sight of others. They're to hide the sight of your body from yourself.'

  'You won't find many mirrors here in the guild's vaults,' agreed Hannah.

  Nandi listened to the voice of one the guildsmen at the front of the hall calling out to the crowd that they were all the cells of the liver, absorbing the poisons of the flesh, keeping the rest of the body alive. There was more than a grain of truth in that analogy, Nandi decided. She pointed to a figure lying in state on a podium at the front of the hall. 'Is this a funeral?'

  'Of sorts,' said Hannah. 'That's the body of a guild highman up there. Before his corpse is lowered into the Fire Sea, part of his essence will be transferred into the transaction engines to become a valve-mind, joining the council of ancestors in advising the guild.'

  The commodore shook his head. 'That's little better than the steammen, lass, with the Loas of their ancestors appearing like blessed ghosts when they're not invited, disturbing the rest of us innocent souls with their nagging.'

  Nandi had to agree. Life working inside the Kingdom's colleges was difficult enough for young faculty staff, with members of the High Table clinging to their positions on the academic council well into their dotage. And that was without the prospect of having simulacra of them echoing around the college's halls long after they had passed away. She was just thankful they didn't have valve technology back home.

  'It's just hope,' explained Hannah. 'The hope of something beyond all of this. Without hope, I don't think the guild could force anyone to work here.'

  'Let's go on, lass,' said the commodore, turning his back on the packed hall. 'I've no taste for a sermon so early in the day.'

  Nandi smiled. The commodore wasn't so very different from the rest of his rough and ready crew. Voyaging away from the Kingdom for years at a time, exposed to heathen gods and the temples of foreign religions, the enclosed corridors of a u-boat brewing superstition. No wonder places like the guild's vaults, clinging to Circlism, made him nervous.

  They continued their journey through the guild's heart. At one point they had to halt when a pair of thick iron doors in the side of a tunnel pulled open to reveal a switchback series of ramps disappearing lower into the guild's depths. The three of them waited as a line of ab-locks filed through, the same simian-like creatures that Nandi had seen caged on the capital's docks. These creatures bore little relation to the wild, unneutered animals captured by the stocky little Jackelian trapper whose demands for passage had been spurned by the commodore. Although each animal was the size of a man, the ab-locks in front of Hannah appeared somehow diminished as they slowly trudged, hunched, into the vault's depths. They had been defanged and the claws on their fingers sliced off. The leathery skin on the front of their bodies hung swollen and misshapen by the dark energies they had absorbed working the turbine halls, and the silver fur on their backs was left sticky and thinning compared to the lustrous sheen of the wild animals caged up on the docks. Whether it was due to the methods of taming employed by the guild, or their energy-sapping exposure to the power plant, these ab-locks seemed broken
in every way, a state not helped by the guild handlers walking the line, prodding and threatening with toxin clubs whenever they detected some hesitance on the part of the exploited animals.

  Commodore Black shook his head in anger at the sight. 'There's only one thing the wicked House of Guardians ever did right, and that's chase off the slavers from Jackals' coast. But it seems they didn't send their warships out far enough.'

  'Does a shire horse in its harness look any different?' said Hannah. 'You might not say such things if you stayed here a season and heard the wild packs of ab-locks howling beyond the walls with the ursks and other creatures out there, probing our battlements for a break.'

  The distant thrum of the turbine halls rising up from far below was cut off with a shudder as iron doors clanged down, locking into the floor. Only a few wisps of vapour from the flash steam system were left drifting along the passage.

  'I helped set up your access to the archives,' said Hannah, moving the two visitors along the corridor. 'I'm not an expert, but I had to pass very deep down the storage layers on your behalf. You must be researching amongst our earliest records.'

  'True enough,' said Nandi. 'Did your church guardian ever explain your parents' work to you?'

  'Archaeology,' said Hannah. 'It was never my strongest subject. There's a lot of history on Jago and I lost track of the First Senators' names after the first five centuries' worth.'

  'History. Well, that's half the truth,' said Nandi. 'Your father was an archaeologist, but your mother was a mathematician, and their area of study touched both disciplines.'

  'I had presumed she was using the transaction engines here to run mathematical proofs,' said Hannah.