Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Access denied.

  'This is outrageous,' spluttered Nandi. 'The college paid good-'

  'It's not your line of access that's been pulled,' said Hannah. She grabbed one of the blank punch cards, turned it over and began to scribble across it with a pencil. 'It's mine!'

  'What's happening, lass?' asked the commodore. 'Does the guild believe their wicked bomb on the atmospheric carriage did its black business after all and that you're no longer alive?'

  There was the sound of a commotion outside their cell, growing louder.

  'I knew we were fools for coming back here,' whined the commodore. 'Fearsome transaction engines tended to by equally monstrous guildsmen. We should have stayed in the capital. At least that prison of a hotel has a mortal drop of wine or two in its cellars that's fit to wet my blistering lips with.'

  The study cell's door burst open, a small crowd of burly guildsmen wielding discipline staffs rushing in, followed by the one valveman Hannah had been trying to avoid since she got here. Vardan Flail!

  'What is the meaning of this?' roared Nandi. 'You are interrupting my work. Work you've been handsomely paid to facilitate.'

  'And we are indeed happy to be facilitating it,' smirked the high guild master, 'Damson Tibar-Wellking, is it not? But we will be facilitating it with a different guild archivist from now on.'

  The guildsmen lowered their staffs in warning towards Commodore Black's chest as he barged forward shouting, 'Now you let her be!'

  'This is an internal guild matter,' warned Vardan Flail. 'We have traced the recent switching storm that took down this vault back to this young lady's sloppy work. An infinite loop hidden in the search layer to avoid detection upon injection.'

  'You're lying' accused Hannah. She hadn't written any such loop in any of her queries, let alone a hidden one. Such an act would be sabotage.

  'I had such high hopes for you,' said Vardan Flail. 'But now your transaction-engine privileges have been cancelled and we shall have to find an alternative task for you. Something manual, I think, seeing as you have proven yourself unworthy of more stimulating work.'

  Hannah slipped the punch card she had been scribbling into one of Nandi's hands behind the young academic's back, hoping that the guildsmen wouldn't notice. 'Don't let them take me.'

  'I need Hannah's help for my work,' protested Nandi.

  'Not this one,' laughed Vardan Flail. 'She has other engines to attend to now.'

  He didn't mean…they couldn't do that to her? On the high guild master's instructions, two of the valvemen grabbed Hannah and bundled her out of the room, while the others held the commodore and Nandi back with their staffs.

  'You can't do this!' shouted Hannah, as she was dragged down the passages that led towards the lower levels – the turbine halls, halls filled with the deadly electric energies that powered Jago. 'I only have days left until I sit the church exams.'

  'Really,' said Vardan Flail, as if this thought had only just occurred to him. 'Then you'll be glad of the chance to rest your brain. Although I understand working in the turbine halls can be quite physically exerting.'

  'You dirty little jigger,' yelled Hannah. 'You won't stop me. I'll see you hanged for what you've done.'

  The guild master shook his head sadly. 'But fortunately, you seem to have more than enough energy to spare.' He nodded to his brutes. 'Tell the charge-master that she's to work double shifts and have no more than two hours' sleep a night.' He smiled at Hannah. 'I understand that you have been boasting to the other guild initiates that you can pass the church exams in your sleep. Let's see how well you can put that into practice.' A pair of steel doors clanked open in front of Hannah, leading to a lifting-room with a mineshaft-long drop down to the guild's vast, heavily shielded turbine rooms. The burly men yanked her inside.

  'Do be careful down there, my dear. It can be quite treacherous work.'

  Then the doors shut and the lifting room began to descend towards the lowest levels of the guild's vaults. Right alongside the hell the Jagonese denied existed. 'We can't just let them take her!' Nandi shouted to the commodore, an overwhelming rush of panic overtaking her as she realized that she might never see Hannah again.

  'Leave it be, lass,' advised the commodore, glancing warily at the staff-wielding guildsmen penning them in the study cell. 'How many of these crows could we take down? The guild has the law on their side and a cruel mistress she can be. We won't be able to help Hannah from the inside of their police fortress's dungeons.'

  'Forget what you promised the professor back in the Kingdom,' said Nandi. 'It's not my safety you need to look after; it's Hannah's. You just have to lift the robes of any of these dolts to see what the radiation of the turbine halls will do to her.'

  'I'm not abandoning any Jackelian lass to swing on the guild's yardarm,' said the commodore. 'But there's a time to cut the enemy's line and there's a time to tack for a better position, and we need to aim for the latter if we're to winkle Hannah out of their wicked clutches.'

  'What if I decide to do what's right?' said Nandi. 'Here. Now. Will you still follow me?'

  'My blade is sharp for it, lass,' said the commodore, 'but don't be confusing winning a battle with winning the war.'

  'They'll work her until she drops, she'll have no chance of passing the church's entrance exam. And then they'll have all the time in the world to kill her slowly. You saw what they did to our atmospheric carriage, nearly blowing us all up to get to her…' Nandi tried to yell down the corridor, the guild's sentries holding her back. 'We'll get you out of here, Hannah, I promise. We'll get you out of here!'

  'As long as we're still alive to do it,' said the commodore, 'you and me both. Still alive to help her.'

  The old u-boat man was right, curse him. Every fibre of Nandi's being was crying at her to push into the corridor and grab Hannah back from Vardan Flail, but they were in the heart of the guild's power here, and a long way from the capital. They had to leave Hannah – at least for now – and try to work for her release through the cathedral, maybe through the Jackelian embassy. Jethro Daunt would know what to do. He had to.

  Back home, Nandi had the professor to look after her – and her protector had dispatched the commodore in her stead to fulfil a similar role on Jago. Hannah had nobody now that the woman who had acted as her mother had been murdered, and that wouldn't do, not for a ward of the college.

  Nandi was going to save Hannah from the guild, whatever it took and however perilous the price.

  CHAPTER TEN

  'This is outrageous,' protested Nandi as she and Commodore Black were hustled to the waiting atmospheric carriage. 'You are impeding my research! Work you have been generously paid to assist.'

  'You will have a new archivist assigned to you tomorrow,' said the guildsman heading the group of staff-wielding toughs escorting them out of the vaults. 'And by that time we will have fully restored operations in the transaction engines outside your study cell.'

  The commodore snarled, 'I know the fixing you're planning to do, and it's more of the same rotten work you've already been at: erasing what we've already uncovered inside your wicked thinking machines.'

  'The valves hold all, nothing is ever lost,' recited the guildsman.

  'Nothing but a poor helpless lass,' said the commodore. 'But you listen well, lad. We had better be finding Damson Hannah Conquest again, and hale with it, or I'll be coming back down here with my crew and a fistful of hull hammers from my precious u-boat, and I'll show you how it is we brew up a switching storm back home.'

  The door on their atmospheric carriage slid open and the leader of their escort swept his hand towards its interior. 'Goodbye, Jackelian. Come back tomorrow.'

  Commodore Black let Nandi lead him inside the capsule. 'I've marked you, you crow, red cowl or no, your vaults aren't big enough to hide you from me.'

  'Take your own advice and leave it be,' said Nandi. 'You were right. If we start a fight with them they'll have a pretext to ban us from the guild vaults permane
ntly.'

  'Don't worry, I know when to draw my sabre, lass. And when I do, someone's going to die – either they or I. Not today, though. Those were just a few mortal threats to remind them that Hannah isn't alone and forgotten in their dark vaults.'

  The door shut on Nandi and the commodore. Their carriage juddered as it passed through the rubber vacuum curtain before accelerating to its full travel velocity.

  'Why did I listen to that fool Jethro Daunt?' moaned the commodore, restlessly pacing the carriage. 'Hannah will be safe enough in the guild, indeed. Just like a blessed churchman, thinking the best of everyone and everything. And now they've got their claws into the poor lass good and proper.'

  'But not before she gave me this.' Nandi produced the punch card that Hannah had been scribbling on before the armed guildsmen arrived in their study cell.

  Commodore Black twitched as he recognized the long lines of formulae scrawled across the card. 'Ah, she's a clever one, that Hannah is, with a churchwoman's perfect memory. The second iteration of the Joshua Egg we teased out of the guild's archives before the switching storm struck. We'll crack it, Nandi. We'll do it for the lass. I'll run the blessed egg's code through the Purity Queen's navigation drums myself until we squeeze the truth from its fiendish symbols.'

  Nandi nodded. And if Hannah had remembered the egg's code accurately, then they could discover what it was the guild had been so desperate to stop the three of them from finding out. Perhaps even use the research left by Hannah's parents to force the guild to release the press-ganged girl from their service. Chalph urs Chalph watched Jethro gently roll over the pawnshop's murdered proprietor. It was definitely him – Hugh Sworph – but Chalph had been wrong about the man being dead, despite the dagger stuck in his spine.

  The shop owner's eyes flickered open and Chalph thought he saw a glint of recognition in them.

  'Who did this to you?' Chalph demanded. 'Old man, who-'

  The pawnshop's owner reached up and pressed something into Jethro Daunt's fingers. He tried to speak, but bubbles of blood came out instead. The blade must have punctured his lungs. Chalph saw that there were other wounds on the man's chest – the knife had seen plenty of work before being buried in his spine.

  Jethro Daunt knelt in close and Hugh Sworph hissed something that started as a whisper but ended as a hacking cough. Then the shopkeeper groaned and Chalph sensed the last breath of life departing the man's mangled body.

  Jethro listened to the man's chest then laid him back on the floor. 'No, the poor fellow's gone now, may serenity welcome his soul along the Circle's turn.'

  Chalph glanced around the room, sniffing at the air. Not a single active scent. They were alone in here. The murderer had left a good while before the two of them had entered the pawnshop. Poor Hugh. It was symptomatic of how long Chalph had been around the race of man that he could look at the corpse and not wonder at the strangeness of the furless body, instead noting how pale the man had become. How lifeless. 'How your people can see something like this and not believe in the scriptures, I'll never understand.'

  'Life is all around, good ursine,' said Jethro. 'Energy is never lost, only its pattern changed. Hugh Sworph's soul has poured back into the one sea of consciousness and will be re-cupped into all the lives yet to come. That is the true crime of murder, for whoever killed him has only succeeded in murdering themselves.'

  Somehow, Chalph doubted that. 'What did he whisper to you?'

  'Twelve ten,' replied Jethro. He opened his hand to reveal what had been pressed into it. A tiny key made of iron, not much longer than a fingernail.

  'A tenement apartment number to go along with the key?'

  'Not with this type of key, good Pericurian,' said Jethro. 'It is too small. Did you tell anyone you were coming here?'

  'I informed some of the people in my house that I was going to see Sworph about a mistake I found in the books for the supplies we ran to him,' said Chalph. 'But it wasn't one of us that did for him. The only scents in here are from the race of man. There's been no ursine bodies inside this shop for at least a week.'

  Jethro glanced around the store, rolling the tiny key between his fingers. 'Well, there's no dolls houses for sale here, but…'

  He walked over to a brick wall lined with grandfather clocks, each as tall as the ex-parson himself. None of the timepieces appeared to be in working order, though. All of their clock faces were reading different times and their pendulum rods hung silent and unmoving behind trunk doors. Jethro tapped the wooden plinth of each pendulum clock until he got to one that made a slightly different sound. Then he went up to its glass dial plate and inserted the dead shop owner's tiny key in a small keyhole there, swinging open the glass door and twisting the hands to ten minutes past twelve. A second after he had readjusted the dial, a door in the grandfather clock's base swung out revealing a crawl space little bigger than a chimney cut through the wall. Chalph could see that there was light at the other end of the short passage.

  Chalph went through on all fours after Jethro Daunt, coming out of the claustrophobic passage just behind the man and into a workshop at least half the size of the shop front they had left behind. Shelves and cupboards lined the walls, filled with the fruits of Hugh Sworph's real trade – fencing stolen goods for the capital's thieves and its desperate poor, with a lucrative sideline in black-market commodities. Chalph suspected the only things missing among the jewels, gold watches, rare metals, silver cutlery and imported spirits he could see stored about here were their customs duty, the stained senate's taxes and any genuine receipts.

  Jethro went over to one of the work benches littered with the tools of a jeweller and picked up a metal block. 'Something to stamp a false mark of provenance on re-smelted silver.' He checked the drawers of the bench and lifted out a tray of silver ornaments, church candles and a Circlist hoop, a much larger version of the one that Jethro wore himself.

  'They're smashed,' said Chalph.

  Jethro pointed to the metal kiln in the corner of the hidden storeroom. 'They were being broken apart to fit inside his kiln. Except that this circle didn't need to be sawn into pieces, it was meant to be opened.' He held the ornament up, indicating how it could be split open on concealed hinges, pushing a hand into the hollow empty tubing inside. 'These are the altar ornaments that were stolen from inside the cathedral.'

  'What was kept inside the circle?'

  'What indeed?' echoed Jethro, putting the circle back down. 'What indeed, to have acted as the catalyst for so many deaths. Yes, everything started with the theft of this from the cathedral.' Jethro walked over to a lithographic printing press behind the bench and tapped the press bed. 'Your Mister Sworph would have used this to print off catalogues of stolen items for sale for his clients. The criminals back in Jackals call them steal-sheets. Let's see if we can't find some of them while we're here, and Mister Sworph's real set of ledgers if he kept such a thing.'

  'I think he would have,' said Chalph. 'He struck me as a most careful man, he was meticulous about everything we sold to him.'

  Chalph started opening drawers and cupboards, rummaging through coins and medals and assorted bric-a-brac. It was obvious that the Jackelian ex-parson had been expecting to find the cathedral's stolen altar ornaments inside the shop. What was the canny foreigner playing at? He continued searching.

  In one of the lower drawers, Chalph came across a pile of catalogues – stiff, bleached, white bamboo sheets hole-punched and held together with string ties – discovering them at the same time as Jethro came across the set of leather-bound ledgers. They laid them both down on the workbench. Jethro examined the catalogues first: daguerreotype images of items that were worth more intact than they were as smelted and recast silver and gold goblets, page after page of fine crystal decanters, priceless books, family heirlooms and antiques. Only the good stuff. As Jethro reached the final page his mouth cracked into a smile. Chalph leant in for a closer look. It was a painting, a Circlist illumination similar in style to any one of
a thousand stained glass windows that could be found gracing the buildings inside Jago's capital. The painting showed a mountain, clearly the Horn of Jago, surrounded by a wall of druids. A group of Circlists had broken through the line, making room for one of their number, a pilgrim, to run through and approach the mountain. A Circlist priest was running after the pilgrim and pointing to the top of the Horn of Jago, indicating his way.

  'This painting, good ursine, is what was concealed inside the altar ornament,' said Jethro.

  'It is just a Circlist image,' said Chalph.

  'The illumination is based on the third belief of the rational trinity,' said Jethro. 'You climb the mountain alone.'

  'Why would your strange church without gods want to encourage its followers to climb to the top of a mountain?' asked Chalph.

  'It is a metaphor, good Pericurian. Every religion the world has known places itself between the worshipper and the mountain – which in this illustration stands for enlightenment – ranks of priests demanding the right to interpret and impose their truths on you. In Circlism, you must find the truth yourself without help. You must climb the mountain alone, with your bare hands. Truth is never given to you, you can only seek it.'

  'Old Sworph did not think this painting was very valuable,' snorted Chalph, reading the text underneath the image. 'It is at the back of his catalogue. A miniature by William of Flamewall. Price on application. That means he would have accepted the best price for it, a low price.'

  'No, it had the highest price of all,' said Jethro. 'It cost him his life.' The ex-parson rolled up the catalogue and slipped it inside his jacket. 'But you are correct. Our poor Mister Sworph did not know the painting's true value. But he suspected it had some, given he had found it hidden inside an expensive silver ornament stolen from the cathedral.'

  Jethro opened the fence's ledgers and scanned through them for a couple of minutes before passing one to Chalph. 'You help keep your house's ledgers. What do you make of these?'