Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Once inside the windowless capsule, the guildsman lowered a tool case to the floor, prised open a floor panel, and carefully lowered a bomb down inside, before setting the timer and resealing the floor. The carriage was ready for use again.

  Ready to be shunted back onto the turntable, ready for the bomb's circuit to be completed ten minutes into its journey. The journey reserved for the guild's guests and the young woman looking after them – Hannah Conquest. Nandi sat down where Hannah indicated, at a granite bench running in front of a featureless stone counter, with none of the hardware of the transaction-engine rooms she was used to back in the Kingdom of Jackals. No brass arrays, steam cables, iron panels or spinning drums. The only familiar-looking device inside the guild's study cell was the punch card injection tube and the card writer – and even there, Nandi was glad Hannah had been assigned to her side to translate the symbolic logic. She hardly recognized any of the foreign iconography on the writer's keys. Even the top cardsharps back home would, Nandi suspected, have been flummoxed if they had been sat down alongside such a machine.

  Behind them, Commodore Black was staring out of the window of the cell they had been allocated halfway up the wall of the canyon, a grand view over the sound and fury of the valves below. It was as though he was still standing on the turret of his u-boat, expecting the floor of the rock-hewn cavern to surge with tidal waters.

  'We've got the card writer to make queries,' Nandi said to Hannah. 'But how about receipt of the output? Is there a central spooler bank with runners to bring the tape to us?'

  Hannah shook her head and lifted Nandi's hand up, pressing it against the featureless rock wall above the counter. It felt cold, and there was a grainy texture to its surface that was not visible to the eye. Then it started to itch, as if she was pressing her palm against a hundred small needles. An image formed on the rock wall in front of Nandi as she felt the prickles warm her skin, a large black oblong filled with scrolling yellow words and shuffling icons on the right. Nandi noticed Hannah smile at her surprise.

  'There are quite a few advantages to using electricity rather than steam to power your transaction engines. The guild's stone screens will show you whatever you've requested from the archives.'

  It took a little getting used to, but Nandi was soon able to settle down to her studies when she realized she could just treat the cold silicate surface like a more sophisticated version of the spinning abacus-like squares on a Rutledge Rotator back home. It was strange to think that once, if the ancient legends were to be believed, the world's temper had been stable enough for the power electric to be tamed by every nation, not just on Jago. A reliable source of power for lamps and the unknowable half-petrified machines that archaeologists dug out when they burrowed far enough down into the rock's strata.

  As the day progressed – excavating deeper and deeper into the annals of Jago – Nandi got some inkling of why the man in whose footsteps she was following, Dr Conquest, had been so effective when paired up with a mathematician of his wife's calibre. The traits that made for a good archaeologist were rarely married to the mathematical prowess needed to code transaction-engine queries – one reason why Nandi still preferred the physical library at Saint Vine's to the steaming heat of their college's ancient transaction-engine room. But with Nandi's archaeologist's instinct paired with Hannah's diamond-sharp mathematical clarity, she could drill through the mountains of irrelevant material, stripping away the layers of dross to mine the seams of gold hidden inside the archive. Each record Nandi found contained a hundred links to related information – some direct, some inferred. Hannah's fingers were a blur across the punch card writer, the clack of keys a tattoo of symbolic search patterns and algorithmic re-indexing. There was a brief sucking noise as each finished punch card was drawn away down the tube in the wall like a miniature atmospheric carriage, then information began to crawl across the stone screen as the request was absorbed, processed and the matching records displayed.

  The history of Jago could be read by Nandi in the shifting patterns of the world's climate: the short flourishing of trade after the island was first settled written in a thousand bills of exchange for wire, grain, dyes, spices; then the dwindling of commerce as the age of ice turned crueller, glaciers extending further south, and the Chimecan Empire rising like a vampire out of the world's ruins, devouring all the kingdoms struggling to survive. At last there was only the desperate struggle to remain alive, Jago standing alone, huddling in the warmth of its subterranean cities as the organized cannibalism of the Chimecans saw the peoples of Jago's old trading partners farmed for food. This was the period Nandi focused on, opening links to as many layers of the archives as she could, trying to gather up as much of the period as was possible within her grasp. Everything she came across had been erased from the other libraries of the world – books tossed onto fires by desperate freezing citizens living wild and trying to escape the tribute in living flesh demanded by the empire. She almost felt like one of them, an ancient Jackelian serf scrabbling around the forest floor for branches to burn, one eye on the darks between the trees in case she needed to flee. There had always been an edge of snobbery to how the students from families wealthy enough to pay for their studies regarded Nandi and the scholarship undergraduates from the wards of the Chancellor's Court of Benefactors. Brass spoons, that was their nickname in the halls and quads of the college – unable to afford a silver one, the obvious unkind inference. Nandi could hardly believe she was here, that the college had paid the guild's access fees and it was she who had been allowed to come. There were moments when this all seemed like a dream, about to disappear around her at any moment.

  Nandi moved onto the work of sifting through the material, each new record, document and scroll opening up as many avenues as reading them closed. Finally, she struck pay dirt. A document where the annotation layers had actually been filled in by Hannah's father. There was a quick flurry of activity as Hannah designed a punch-card query for them to cross-reference the other records edited by the same access code, then the trail followed by Dr George Conquest opened up before Nandi. Six months of painstaking work by the Conquests laid out for her edification. Hannah gave a yelp of excitement, saving Nandi the job of giving voice to identical feelings.

  Nandi plunged into the documents, earnestly at first, but then with an increasing sense of unease at what she was reading. By the time she had finished, her elation had evaporated to such an extent that even the commodore had noticed the change in her mood.

  'What have you found in there, lass, to steal the wind from your sails so?'

  Nandi tapped the screen on the black wall of stone in front of her. 'It seems that there was indeed an undertaking by the early church to create a weapon capable of undermining the Chimecan Empire's dark gods.' She looked across at Hannah. 'Your father pieced the story together from thousands of records. It seems a single female priest, Bel Bessant, conceived the idea. She must have been a prodigy, even by the standards of those who've mastered synthetic morality.'

  'Why so blessed glum them?' asked the commodore. 'You have the beginnings of the history you sought to tease out from this dark place.'

  'The beginnings and the end of it, both,' said Nandi. 'The undertaking never amounted to anything. Here's one of the final findings Hannah's father made, the record of a criminal prosecution carried out by the stained senate's judiciary. Bel Bessant was murdered. It gives her murderer's name as that of her lover, a priest known as William of Flamewall.'

  'A Circlist priest killing another priest?' said Hannah, clearly shocked by the notion.

  'A mortal priest's heart is as prone to the passions of love's malady as any other,' said the commodore. 'The curse of love can make the best of us forget our minds.'

  Hannah got up from behind the card puncher. 'What did this William of Flamewall say when they caught him?'

  'They never did,' said Nandi. 'Read the bottom of the document. He was tried in absentia.'

  'There's nothing else?
' said Hannah, clearly not believing what she was reading. 'No transcripts from witnesses as to why he might have killed her?'

  'Not in your father's records. We could try to find them ourselves, but your father spent six months here researching the archives. If he and your mother couldn't find them…' Nandi sighed. 'All this way for nothing. Read your father's notes in the annotation layer. His final conclusion was that the rumours were just a bluff. Bel Bessant had developed enough of a sketch of the possibilities of a god-slaying weapon that the Jagonese only had to leak their plans to the empire's agents for the Chimecans to forget all about bringing the island under the heel of imperial rule. All this way out to Jago, for what? For nothing.'

  'Let me see, please,' said Hannah, swapping places with the young academic on the granite bench and scrolling the pages of retrieved documents down the stone screen. 'This document was annotated the day before my father left Jago to return to Jackals.'

  'So it seems,' agreed Nandi.

  'But that doesn't make sense,' said Hannah. 'The church told me I was left in their care on Jago because my parents were going back to the college to secure extra funding for continued access to the archives – and they didn't want to expose me to the dangers of an additional return trip through the Fire Sea. If this was as far as their research went, if they were really finished here, then why leave me behind on the island?'

  Nandi leant over Hannah's shoulder to stare at the screen. The words of wisdom once given to Nandi by her mentor at Saint Vine's echoed back at her. 'If it's too neat, if it's wrapped in a box and left for you to find like a gift, then keep your eye open for a trapdoor and a long drop down to some sharp sticks.'

  But why in the world would either of the doctors Conquest have wanted to make people think their work here was finished, when it wasn't? One reason leapt suddenly to mind. If the pair from the college had enemies sniffing around their heels and had been laying a false trail, would they perhaps have hidden some clues for friends from Saint Vine's to follow in their footsteps?

  'Hannah,' said Nandi. 'These comments are all from your father. If your mother had left any notes behind, where would they be?'

  'In the search strata,' said Hannah. 'You can write comments on how you arrived at a particular record there; that's where you store reminders of the search algorithms you used in case you need to repeat them.'

  'See if there's anything accompanying this chain of documents, made on or around the same date as your father's last access.'

  Hannah went back to her card puncher and rattled out a query to peel back the underlying layer of her parent's findings. There was a sucking noise as the tube carried the product of her labours away into the injection system, then the stone screen started to flash and the image on the cold silicate surface reformed as a green block covered in mathematical sigils. Nandi couldn't even begin to scratch the surface of understanding this, but Hannah craned her neck out of the heavy guild robes and the wrinkling of the girl's nose and the dance of her eyes across the wall seemed to indicate she could follow the mathematics well enough.

  'This,' Hannah tapped a lone stretch of code near the bottom of the image formed on the stone wall, 'this isn't anything to do with how my mother navigated to these files or her bookmark set – it's a Joshua Egg.'

  Nandi looked blankly at Hannah.

  'Ah now,' said the commodore. 'That's a rare piece of cleverness.'

  Hannah shot a glance towards the commodore, which seemed to be a mix of surprise and admiration at his knowledge. 'You wouldn't have much occasion to use a Joshua Egg on a u-boat.'

  'No lass, but if a lock's secured by a transaction engine and it's well-designed enough, the locksmith will usually throw one inside to encrypt their key for opening the bolts, and if there's one thing old Blacky's got, it's an aversion to being locked up.'

  'This is a lock?' Nandi asked their guide.

  'A Joshua Egg is transformative maths,' said Hannah. 'Highly recursive. When you solve it, you get another Joshua Egg and a piece of encoded information spat out. It's like a game of pass the parcel – you rip a layer off the package and you find another smaller parcel and maybe a present waiting inside for you. This is about as long as I've seen one, though, so there must be quite a few iterations inside.'

  Nandi's eyes narrowed. The commodore was full of surprises, and so, it seemed, was the work of the doctors Conquest. 'Can you solve it?'

  'It would take days by hand,' said Hannah. 'Maybe weeks if it's particularly tricky, but-' she waved towards the window and the wall of valves glowing on the other side of the artificial ravine, '-I don't have to do it by hand. With enough raw power I bet I can crack the first iteration in a couple of minutes.'

  'Get to it,' said Nandi, trying to keep the hunger – or was it desperation – out of her voice.

  Hannah jumped back on the card writer and transcribed the Joshua Egg and her method for solving it, filling up at least twenty punch cards with a tattoo of holes; the injection tube to the massive transaction engines patiently carrying each card away until the suction tube seemed to be hissing angrily back at them like a maltreated cat. Her volley of instructions released, Hannah leant back from the counter and the three of them waited for the girl's cards to find their mark.

  The results came suddenly, and not in the form of a new display on the stone screen, but with an angry yelp of surprise from Commodore Black as a fork of static lightning flashed past the balcony behind him, searing the back of his neck. Hannah ran to the study cell's balcony rail, followed by Nandi. Hooded figures were jutting out from balconies on either side of their study cell, staring in disbelief at the sight. Glass valves on both sides of the ravine were ablaze with light, a nimbus of static electricity cascading down to the forest of valves on the floor. Intense bolts of energy danced between the giant glass bulbs, ricocheting among the relays.

  'What mortal dark gale is this?' shouted the commodore over the roar from outside.

  'I think it's a switching storm,' Hannah called back. 'One of the oldest guildsmen described them to me once, but he said we'd never see their like again. The transaction engines are overloading, but we're only handling the capital's needs down here now. There's enough spare processing capacity in the guild's chambers to support eleven abandoned cities. This shouldn't be happening!'

  The clash and clack of the jumping lines of energy were joined by a rumbling noise from huge iron pipes running along the ravine's walls, cold water from the frozen wastes above ground being pumped down to cool the overheating machinery.

  'This is our doing,' whined the commodore. 'Trying to prise open a nest of wicked secrets that were never intended to be known.'

  Hannah shook her head vehemently. 'It's not us. It can't be. It doesn't take that much processing power to solve a Joshua Egg, however complex it is.'

  Nandi stared out, fascinated and horrified by the leaping forks of energy. It was as though the valve-minds were gods whose rest had been disturbed, and this their rage. The study cell door flew open suddenly, diverting Nandi's attention, and a male guild worker sprinted inside waving an ebony-coloured punch card. 'Black card! Everything from vault nine to twenty-two.'

  Hannah ran over and snatched the black card, feeding it into their injection tube.

  'Why is your hood down?' demanded the guildsman from inside his own cowl. 'In the presence of outsiders. You shame us.'

  'Shut up,' replied Hannah, almost casually.

  The punch card disappeared inside the wall, bouncing back seconds later, followed by the dimming of the valve-light immediately outside their window.

  Grabbing his black punch card back, the guildsman ran frantically out of the room without another comment on Hannah's state of undress.

  Nandi saw that the image on the stone screen was freezing in place. 'We're finished for the day then, I take it?'

  'They're freezing all non-critical processes in several transaction-engine vaults including this one,' said Hannah. 'They'll have the guild's senior card sharps and
engine men down here all day and night, trying to work out why the chamber outside was overloading.'

  Nandi looked at the stone screen, the image of a document half-formed on the rock surface. This was something new! The first layer of the Joshua Egg had been packed with a present after all! She ran her fingers across the archaic words on the document, translating them to the modern form. Could it be? Yes.

  'This is part of the church's record of the trial of William of Flamewall,' announced Nandi excitedly to Hannah and the commodore. 'Look! It states that he poisoned Bel Bessant with metal oxides from the dyes he had access to. He was an illuminator of manuscripts and a stained-glass artist. That's how the militia discovered he was the murderer – they traced the poison in Bel Bessant's blood back to her lover's own dye mix, but William of Flamewall had already fled the capital by then.'

  There was nothing more; the document's image had frozen mid-scroll on the cold stone. What else might they have found if Jago's legendary transaction-engine rooms hadn't failed them in quite so catastrophic and spectacular a fashion?

  'An ancient murder,' said the commodore. 'With a good many more in the centuries since to trouble the island's police, no doubt. But it's not the capital we need to flee, it's these terrible guild vaults with their sick transfiguring energies and fearful storms of energy. If you've finished here, Nandi, let's head back to the safety of our prison of a hotel.'

  'Finished for the day,' said Nandi.

  And the day only. There were still a good few questions Nandi had about the work of the two doctors Conquest. Standing close to the cascade of water down the iron walls, a robed figure watched Hannah Conquest, the aging u-boat man and Nandi Tibar-Wellking board the transport capsule and waited for it to safely clear the rubber curtain, leaving the guild's atmospheric station. The circuit of the bomb he had placed on board would have been completed now the carriage was under power.