Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Chalph flicked through the book, finding neat hand-lined pages inside, black ink on bamboo paper. 'It's a purchase ledger. Items by date – prices paid, sellers, estimated value. Detailed work. Accurate.'

  'You see, you were right, he was a careful man,' said Jethro. 'You can tell that by the fact that he printed off his own catalogues. A lazier fellow would have given the steal-sheets to a printer to run off and risked one of the ink mixers getting drunk at a tavern and boasting about their "special work" to someone who might have tried to profit from having heard it.'

  'But there's nothing in here about who Sworph sold the items to.'

  Jethro hummed and took back the book. 'No, the sales ledger is, I suspect, no longer under this roof. I believe whoever killed our Mister Sworph made him hand his sales ledger over. Then the poor fellow was murdered anyway to stop him from talking.' Jethro ran his furless fingers down the margins of the pages until he found what he was looking for. 'Here is the purchase record for what was stolen from the cathedral. Circlist silver. Meltable. Paid two marks and twelve pence. The good man certainly didn't believe in overpaying for what he received, did he?'

  'But the name of the seller has been crossed out,' observed Chalph. And there was something written in black ink above the crossings out. Hugh Sworph had written the word "Dead!!!"

  'Yes, he'd heard something,' said Jethro. 'My pennies would be placed on something unpleasantly fatal occurring to the thieves who broke into the cathedral and fenced him the altar ornaments. Our friend suspected he was the next in line to be silenced.'

  'What's so special about this damn painting,' asked Chalph, 'that people are willing to kill for it?'

  Jethro held up three of his fingers. 'Three paintings, good Pericurian. The rational trinity is composed of three paintings. Whoever killed Alice and tried to murder Hannah now has two of them.'

  Chalph's eyes narrowed in his bear-like face. Seeing what the killers had already done to get the first two paintings, Chalph didn't need to be an investigator like Jethro Daunt to know that they would be coming back for the last one.

  Coming back whoever or whatever stood in their way. While his minions called the pot-bellied man who ruled the guild's deep turbine halls the charge-master, Hannah quickly realized he might just as well have been the demon king of this buried dominion.

  Like everyone else down in the turbine halls he had shaved his head and he strutted around the induction vault with his cowl – unusually for the guild – folded down.

  The charge-master eyed the chain of new arrivals suspiciously and laid a hand on one of the great iron suits lined up behind him against the wall. 'Which of you grubs,' he boomed, 'can tell me what this is?'

  It seemed all the new recruits were 'grubs' until they graduated through sheer sweat and survival into fully-fledged turbine men, or 'termites'.

  'It's one of the machines the trappers use to ride outside the city,' announced someone from within their line – Hannah didn't see who had been brave enough to answer back.

  'Trappers, yes and city workers too when they have to clear the culverts and the aqueducts beyond the battlements.'

  It looked to Hannah's eyes like a massive version of Boxiron, or a rusty suit of armour made for a twenty-foot giant. She had heard the recruits talking about them before she came in. How you needed a lucky suit, one passed down through the generations that hadn't killed any of its owners. One that wasn't possessed by a suit-ghost.

  'To the trappers up top this is a Rigid Armour Motile suit, or RAM suit. But down here, it's just iron, and pushing iron is what keeps you healthy.' He rapped the legs of the metal giant. 'There's a thousand ways to die working the turbine halls – steam flash, gas build-up, false current reversals – but one thing you grubs won't get sick from is the electric field. Sick is what you get being tickled by constant background exposure to the transaction engines upstairs. But this is the guild's real work down here. We don't wear lined cowls inside the halls; we don't wear those toy lead chainmail vests the guild passes out to visiting senators. There's a foot of lead inside your iron, and that's thicker than your grub heads. And thick is what you are, or you wouldn't have been given to me.'

  The charge-master rested his foot on a platform and struck a rubber button, the platform lifting him out and up and towards the centre of the suit where a vault-like door had swivelled out, revealing a man shaped cockpit. Their master's suit was painted in a distinctive red and black chequerboard pattern.

  'The suit is slaved to your movement,' he called down to the line of initiates from inside the cockpit. 'You move, it moves. All the extra controls are down by your right thumb.'

  The door in the centre of the suit's chest was closing, sealing the charge-master inside. The suit stomped forward, shaking the cavern floor and making the initiates jump back in fright and scatter before the towering metal creature. There was a thick dome on top of the suit and Hannah could just see the charge-master's beady eyes gazing down at them through the crystal slit. His voice boomed out of a voicebox built into the chest as he swung a massive arm to point to the hangar-style door at the opposite end of the cavern. 'When that door lifts up in two minutes, any of you not inside your suits are going to fry. Any of you grubs who are too stupid to be able to copy what I just did are too dangerous to be allowed to work alongside me.'

  There was a mad scramble towards their suits as the initiates realized they only had seconds left to emulate the charge-master or be cooked by the violence of the turbine halls. Hannah was barely into her suit, slipping her arms and legs through a cantilevered iron frame surrounded by soft red leather in the centre of the chest, when lanterns on the vault wall behind them began to flash in warning.

  She was not the only one cutting it fine judging by the cries of alarm in the chamber – but luckily for the initiates, simply occupying the suit was enough to trigger the closure mechanism and Hannah found herself sealed inside her cockpit, trying to ignore the stale smell of the previous occupant, her view of the outside world abbreviated to what she could see through the glass slit of the dome that had lowered over her head. The iron suit really was designed for the lowest common denominator of operator, Hannah realised; moving her limbs within the cage inside the suit dragged the massive legs and arms clunking around outside. But it was strenuous work. Everywhere around her, the other initiates were taking faltering steps and the cavern floor echoed with the crash of feet carrying a tonne of metal with each step.

  'Move away from the wall,' ordered the charge-master's voice sounding inside her helmet. 'Nobody is to try anything fancy today. Just follow my lead and learn fast. Your suit is dialled down so you're moving heavy and slow. Stay away from each other's feet. Anyone who puts a dent in their suit today will have me to answer to.'

  The door lifted up into the ceiling and Hannah's view opened out onto a short metal ramp down to hell. A vast cavern floor littered with turbines and massive machinery barely visible through the sea of hissing steam. It was as bad as on the surface after a storm had blown in off the Fire Sea. Guildsmen in their heavy suits cut through the mist as though they were ships, navigating around the condensers, core-cooling pumps, pressurizers and borated-water storage tanks. And this – she had been told – was just one of dozens of turbine halls buried on this level. The experienced termites' suits had been painted a chequerboard yellow and black, a bright contrast to the green and black that Hannah and the other initiates wore.

  It was only because the charge-master was able to speak inside Hannah's dome that she could hear him above the roar of the turbines and generators. 'Follow me to the stables.'

  Circle, but it was hard pushing her suit after the charge-master. Hannah hoped that when the suits were dialled up to full strength, the simple act of moving around wouldn't be so similar to lifting weights.

  'I see you there, initiate Conquest,' whispered the charge-master inside her suit's earpiece. 'You think you're too good for us. You think you can escape the guild just because you've got well-pla
ced friends inside the church. What do you think that does for the morale of everyone else that has to work with you? You're a walking disaster waiting to happen. I know your sort, girl. Soft. Pampered. The high guild master should have sent you down to us on the first day you stepped into our vaults.'

  If the charge-master was so concerned with morale, then maybe he shouldn't have kicked one of the initiates to the floor earlier in the day just because they had sniggered at something he had been barking. Hannah said nothing. She had already noted the temper on this beast.

  What the charge-master called the stables was no more than a low tunnel sealed with an iron door. As the group approached it, the door opened and six ab-locks emerged from the near darkness, the stunted simian creatures loping out and blinking up at the machine suits in front of them.

  'Once you're trained, each of you will get six ab-locks,' said the charge-master. 'What we call a hand. After your suit they're your next most important possession. Treat the abs well and they'll live up to nine years before the electric field down here kills them. We have to trap them young, break them, and train them in basic turbine lore, and that's an art none of you grubs will ever appreciate. If I hear from the stable-master that you're responsible for unnecessary wastage of abs then I'll have you crawling around the steam lines in a scald suit and see how long you last before you get sick. But-' the charge-master triggered a flail to emerge dangling from his suit's right arm, its lashes crackling with raw electricity, '-that doesn't mean you spare the rod with them. Abs are natural shirkers.'

  His own hand of abs seemed to know what they could expect from their master right enough. Hannah watched as they fanned out before him, picking up pieces of equipment racked outside the stable.

  The rest of the day's training was a blur of swirling mists and the brutal lessons. How to get ab-locks to crawl under, over and inside the massive turbines, steam lines and block valves. Which pieces of turbine equipment needed lubricants applied by the abs' spray guns to stop them burning up, where the electric energies were dangerously high and how to read the trip recorders that would indicate rogue current reversals. Which jobs were too heavy for the abs – such as turning the vast wheels in the water injection pumps – and which ones automatically required the intervention of the guildsmen. And through it all the charge-master's contempt for the guildsmen who tended the transaction engines above them was apparent: puny coders. The real power was down here. Here were the muscles of Jagonese society and here were to be found the real men and women that worked them. The turbines that kept the vaults of Hermetica City powered with light, that charged their very defences and kept the island's monsters at bay.

  Now that Hannah could see what the ab-locks had to put up with, she began to regret having defended their employment in front of Nandi and the commodore. On some of the abs she couldn't even see the numbers branded onto their spines, so bad were the flail burns. These weren't beasts of burden, these were slaves. Jago's position in the shifting ocean of magma might mean the island was the one place in the world where the power electric could be tamed enough to be used for mundane purposes rather than merely as a weapon of war, but its taming had a cost. And down here in the turbine halls was where society paid the price for the miracle of their free energy.

  Hannah tried to ignore the agonized yells of the ab-lock that lost a leg to the twisting fan of a turbine, or the one that was blinded by a stray squirt of superheated water from a condenser running over-pressurized. Observing how many times the heavy suit she was wearing saved her and the other initiates from similar accidents during her training in the turbine halls, Hannah could see why the charge-master was so obsessive about the care the grubs took of their suits.

  The first sign that anything was amiss towards the end of their first shift was the claxon sounding from a bank of machinery against the wall of the vault; the needles on their dials twisting in a paralytic dance as screeching sirens filled the turbine hall.

  Hannah and the other grubs were left twisting their necks inside their suits as the guildsmen quickly stomped to their emergency positions in response to the unholy caterwauling, switching turbines to idle while their ab-locks swarmed around the hall, past the suits' iron legs, weaving in and out of the steam as their master's flails goaded them into a frenzy of activity.

  The charge-master's suit had clanked into a huddle of senior turbine workers, debating who knows what between themselves on a private channel. Whatever emergency they were discussing, they reached their decision in moments. Worryingly, the charge-master came cutting through the sea of steam towards the initiates.

  'You,' he thundered towards Hannah, 'with me. The rest of you grubs bugger off back to the suit hall.'

  'What's happening, charge-master?' Hannah asked, being careful to keep up with the man while she was talking. 'Why are the claxons sounding?'

  'Hell's happening, grub,' spat the charge-master, leading her across the vault and towards a line of towering brick chimneys that occupied the far end of the machine-carved cavern. Another guildsman was bearing towards the chimneys, a navvy by the look of his suit, covered with slings loaded with equipment crates and strange-looking devices.

  'You're going down with him,' the charge-master's voice barked.

  'Down?' Hannah looked around. An iron door in one of the chimneys was opening inwards, revealing darkness inside. 'But the turbine halls are as deep as the guild's vaults go.'

  'You think?' The charge-master turned towards the other guildsman. 'The grub's supposedly got a brain; they were using her as a cardsharp upstairs. But if you don't bring her back, don't worry, it's one less for training.' He turned and stomped away, shouting orders for everyone to evacuate to the next turbine hall over and seal the blast doors behind them.

  Hannah turned towards the navvy. He might be wearing a termite's colours on his hull, but the sweat-slicked face staring at her through the slit of his suit's dome looked awfully young. There was a name stencilled above the eye slit – Rudge Haredale.

  'What is this?' demanded Hannah, pointing to the open door in the massive chimney.

  'Tap nine,' replied the navvy, not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice.

  'Tap? As in steam tap?'

  'Well, it surely ain't the tap for our bathhouse's hot water, grub.' The servos in his iron legs ground away as he ducked down through the open door, then he was inside the chimney, lanterns across his suit flickering on in reaction to the darkness. 'You waiting for an invite?'

  Was he insane? This was an actual steam tap. A shaft tunnelling down for miles to funnel the superheated steam rising out of Jago's depths – the same force that powered the erupting geysers across the volcanic island, harnessed to turn the guild's turbines. The only thing that would be waiting for them inside that chimney was a mile-long drop to a char-broiled death. Even their suits couldn't protect the two of them from the violence inside a steam tap. Hannah's cooling mechanism would be overwhelmed and her pilot cabin transformed into a human baking oven.

  The navvy called through the voicebox on his chest and an ab-lock came trotting out of the steam and leapt up to take hold of a specially-designed grip on the back of Rudge's suit. Suddenly Hannah realized the words she had just heard the navvy call had been correct after all. T-face. Not the number branded on the ab-lock's back, but a nickname based on the steam burns on its face in the shape of a letter 'T'. This creature must have received them young, for they were almost a mottled tan now, in adulthood.

  'This ab knows shaft work,' said the navvy. 'Best we got, aren't you, T-face?'

  It murmured a whine in response.

  'What about the other abs?' asked Hannah. 'I still have room on the back of my suit.'

  'One's enough when it's T-face – the rest of the hand would just spook down there.'

  They weren't the only ones. Seeing Hannah's hesitation at entering the chimney, Rudge Haredale leant forward and yanked her suit across the portal into the steam tap. 'The shaft's not carrying super-pressure r
ight now, grub. That's the problem. One of the regulator gates deep down inside the shaft is jammed and we've got to fix it.'

  Hannah knew the answer to the question even as she asked it. 'And if we don't?'

  'Then the bloody pressure builds up behind the gate until it takes the gate off and about a tenth of the guild's turbine capacity with it in the explosion.'

  Hannah didn't need any of her church training in mathematics to do the calculations on that sum. A tenth of the guild's turbine capacity, but a hundred per cent of Damson Hannah Conquest.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Boxiron sat in the middle of his hotel room in the lotus position, the inferior hydraulics of his legs trembling in protest. The steamman ignored the discomfort and concentrated on the task at hand – or rather, mind – running the stegeotext that he had found concealed in Jethro's ancient painting through his brain, parcelling pieces of the code out to the additional specialized processing unit that the criminal lords of Jackals had outfitted him with.

  It was an unfamiliar thing, deciphering something so ancient. The Jackelian transaction-engine locks he had cracked were all much of a muchness, but tackling the code hidden in the painting was like breaking an ancient safe – the maths that protected the cipher expressed with an antique elegance, and something else, something that remained intangible and just out of sight. He had been at it for most of the day, crunching and attacking, chipping away pieces of the puzzle. Half of the battle was trying to get inside the mind of the cipher's creator. Pushing at the code to see what gave way and what held firm, modelling how he would have done it and following those avenues to their logical conclusions.

  Boxiron was under no illusions about the difficulty of this job. It was as good as being a captain of the Free State's militant orders once more, marshalling his forces and distributing them, testing the enemy, finding the weak spots to overwhelm. Every inch of Boxiron's being knew it had been a member of the Circlist church who had secreted this code within the painting, and not just because the illustration came with the signature of William of Flamewall scrawled across it. The maths were of the highest order, everything balanced with the symmetry that the softbody faith attempted to incorporate into its formula-based moral rules. Yes, that was the weakness of the cipher's creator. Too much symmetry.