Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Hannah's mother would have been travelling out this way when Alice Gray had been trying to explain to a young child how her parents had moved along the Circle and wouldn't be coming back to collect her. How the church would be her family now. It can't have been an easy thing for the archbishop to have done, Hannah realized, and she still remembered her guileless response. One that only a child could make. That it was all right. If Hannah were taken to see her parent's bodies, she would kiss them on the forehead and they would come alive again, just like in the stories that her mother had read her. A kiss to bring them back to life. But the Fire Sea didn't leave bodies in the water, only ashes. And nor did Vardan Flail's schemes. Well, Hannah had cheated him of a life of servitude within the guild, and if she could follow her mother's trail in the footsteps of William of Flamewall, she would cheat Vardan Flail out of getting his filthy hands on the last piece of the god-formula, too.

  After they made camp in the foothills, Hannah saw why Tobias Raffold had been so particular about the location of their site – and discovered the purpose of the large steel components that two of the trappers had been lugging distributed across their suits, a heavy load even with a RAM suit's amplified strength. The parts were assembled into a circular frame holding a turbine vane, pieced together over a steam blowhole that had been previously marked by the trappers with a fluttering pennant. After heavy rubber cables had been attached to the device, the ends of the leads were plugged into their RAM suits' chemical batteries. With the portable turbine whining as the steam hole drove it into action, a stench of bad eggs began to circulate within the confines of Hannah's suit. Circling the disk-capped blowhole, connected by the cables, the twenty suits would have seemed to observers like some strange variety of iron flower, a night orchid emitting a bizarre stench as they recharged their batteries.

  The increased size of the trappers' RAM suits wasn't just to accommodate the larger batteries needed to cover great distances – it had other uses, too, such as allowing the pilot frame to rotate back into a sleeping position, the lightly cushioned spine making a serviceable, if not particularly comfortable, bed. Hannah was selfishly glad that the number of trappers the expedition had engaged was large enough that she wouldn't be required to stand a turn on sentry duty – not that the hard, taciturn trappers were likely to have trusted her even if she had offered. They stood duty two at a time, the sensing mechanisms in their suits set to violently judder the pilot cage if they detected a lack of movement consistent with sleep.

  After a hard day pushing the suit forward over endless miles of terrain – harder even than duty in the turbine halls – sleep was really not a problem. It swallowed Hannah up, rising out of the suit like a spinning vortex and cutting off the smell of sweat, oil and recharging battery packs.

  In the days that followed, most of the places where they made camp were the same: low rocky wolds with enough of a view of the surrounding landscape for them to ensure that stalking ursks weren't trying to crawl up on the resting RAM suits – although when the mist filled the low valleys, it was as if they were sitting on an island surrounded by smoking white rivers. And who knew what nightmares were swimming through their depths?

  There was one site that got Nandi excited, a hill where the blowhole they were using to tap the steam lay in a dip and the crest of the hill was a rock formation that resembled a cup melted along one side. The archaeologist swore that there were tell-tale signs the rock had once been the foundations of a building and pointed down into the valley to indicate contours which she said were further indications that there had once been constructions on the surface.

  'I'm not so sure, lass,' said the commodore, his RAM suit turned to face the ridges on the hill opposite. 'There's no bricks or mortar on this slab of rock – it looks as blasted and natural as the black cliffs on the coast to me – and those ridges could be where the storms have carved the soil away from the top of the hill.'

  'That's because you don't know what to look for,' insisted the archaeologist.

  'Well, I've spent more of my life sandwiched between the hull of a boat than I have between the shelves of the library at St Vines College and I'm no doubt the worse for it,' said the commodore, 'but old Blacky's seen the sunken streets of the city of Lost Angels on the seabed, and scoured by the tides though the ruins were, they still had the look of streets to his tired old eyes.' He called across to Ortin urs Ortin's RAM suit- their domes retracted as they took in the fresh cold air. 'What say you, ambassador?'

  'I say it may be,' said Ortin urs Ortin. 'The deeper we push into the island the more I see echoes from the scripture of the Divine Quad. The blasted plains of paradise and the crumbled cities that our people once inhabited.'

  'As I understand Pericurian scripture,' said Hannah, 'the race of man shouldn't be here at all.'

  The ambassador smiled. 'I see that the Circlist church has indoctrinated you well in its efforts to deny our gods, dear girl.' He quoted from the relevant passage. '"And the paradise that had fallen shall be forever more sealed in a sea of punishing fire, denied to all that would seek it. In sin was the land destroyed and only the wicked shall suffer its cursed acres." As we push deeper into Jago, a joke that is told in the court of the archduchess comes to mind. That inside every liberal's fur there are little conservative fleas waiting to climb out. The deeper we drive into this land, the closer this trip seems to blasphemy to me.'

  'Blasphemy is a good start,' said Hannah, quoting one of Alice's favourite sayings.

  'Perhaps to your peculiar church without gods, dear girl,' said the ambassador. 'But I would not tempt the wrath of Reckin urs Reckin so readily.'

  'Ah, we're all tempting fate by being here,' moaned the commodore. 'You would think the world had had enough of throwing poor old Blacky into peril, but no, it understands that by tricking me into promising I'll keep young Nandi Tibar-Wellking safe it can have me off chasing through Jago's dark wastes after some long-lost invention of the church, when all that I deserve is the chance to spend my last few miserable years gently revisiting the ports of my youth in my precious boat, hauling an honest cargo or two to help put a little beer in my flagon and a cut of roast beef on my table. This dark chase, this is my punishment.'

  'Punishment for what?' asked Hannah.

  'For supporting the ambassador's liberal friends on the other side of the Fire Sea,' whined Commodore Black. 'Running cargoes of Porterbrook steam engines and enough transaction engines to allow their great houses to count every tree in their forests twice over.'

  'Helping Pericur drag itself into the modern age hardly counts as a sin deserving punishment, dear boy,' said the ambassador.

  'So you say now. But let's see if you can look me in the eye and say as much in a generation or so – when you'll have petty rules and large taxes set by small minds with nothing but malice for what once made you great and unique. When your forests are felled and you're choking on the likes of a Middlesteel smog, when you've created a legion of jealous little shopkeepers who'll drag your archduchess to a scaffold, rogues who'll cut off the grand old lady's arms in case she shakes a fist at them and styles their stealing and scheming for what it really is.'

  'That is not Pericur,' protested the ambassador.

  'It wasn't the Kingdom of Jackals either, once,' said the commodore. 'But my great grandfather saw it happen there, just as I watched the revolution in Quatershift let fly across the Jackelian border. That's the way of a revolution; it's like the blessed circle of existence our church keeps banging on about, always turning round and round. It'll turn for your people too, and crush a mortal few of your nation under its rim I have no doubt.'

  The four friends fell to silence until Tobias Raffold called from behind that the portable steam tap was ready to begin charging, ordering them to seal their suits and drop their shield hoods. The trouble started shortly after they left the ridged valley the next morning. Tobias Raffold's men opened a cage built into the back of one of the RAM suits and started unloading crates of unfamili
ar-looking equipment.

  'Mister Raffold,' called Ortin urs Ortin. 'That's not what I think it is?'

  Raffold's RAM suit turned to face the Pericurian ambassador. 'If you're thinking it's an ab-lock snare, then you're bang on.'

  'I say, old fruit, this is hardly what my fee for this expedition was intended to cover.'

  The trapper jerked his head towards the commodore. 'Your fee and the sea-dog's u-boat are my ticket home, but I still owe the guild's stable-master one last catch of abs. They're bleeding sticky about contracts here, and I don't want the First Senator using the breech of one as an excuse to stick me and my crew in his dungeons when we get back. He's going to be narked enough at me and my lads when we get back for taking you outside the wall.'

  'We still have a long way to go to reach the Cade Mountains,' complained Ortin urs Ortin.

  'That's unknown territory,' said the trapper. 'These wolds I know, and they're prime ab-taking land.'

  Hannah sighed to herself. It seemed the expedition wasn't going to be making as much headway this day as she'd hoped. Ortin urs Ortin appeared content to use the unlooked-for spare time to read the scriptures of the Divine Quad he had stored in his suit's pilot cabin, finding echoes of his people's ancient writings in the landscape all around them; while Nandi seemed happy to do much the same with the research Hannah's parents had gleaned from the guild archives.

  With nothing else to do, Hannah watched the trappers move out to set their snares. They used mats of rubber with surfaces that had been shaped and painted to mimic the coarse green alpine grass that grew in the soil between the ugly basalt rocks of the wolds. Onto this the trappers placed bricks of bone-white sugar, before connecting the rubber mats to a battery pack that they would then bury. More than enough power to shock an ab-lock cub into unconsciousness when the damp wind carried the smell of the sugar to them and sent them scurrying to locate its source. Sugar was something it appeared the creatures loved to gnaw away at. And whereas adult ab-locks were canny enough to recognize the rubber traps and remove the sugar with branches torn from nearby pine trees, their cubs had no such experience and would happily blunder onto the shock mats, triggering both the stunning charge and a whistle to announce a capture – of which there were quite a few. Tobias Raffold chuckled as his trappers piled the insensible ab-lock cubs in front of a man using a branding iron to stamp a guild mark and number on their backs, before moving the young abs into the cage.

  Hannah tried to imagine the confused cubs waking up in the charge-master's turbine halls, to be mercilessly drilled in the care and maintenance of the massive power plant's machinery until one day – if they lived long enough – they might end up like T-face: broken, obedient and grateful for any day that didn't end in a flogging. Hannah's brooding on the ab-locks' fate was broken by one of the distant snare's whistles combined with something she hadn't heard before – a shrieking like a wounded cat.

  'That's not an ab-lock!' Hannah called.

  'Too bleeding right it's not,' Tobias Raffold shouted back from the crest of the hill. He snapped shut his suit's skull dome and pulled down an amplification plate, peering in the direction of the caterwauling. 'It's a bloody ursk cub – the little runt's got one of its paws stuck through the mat and the charge is driving it wild. None of our snares are set for a catch of its bulk.'

  'You said we would be avoiding ursk territory,' said Hannah accusingly.

  'What is and isn't their territory is settled between the ursks and the abs by tooth and claw, girl,' spat the trapper. 'It's been a dry season, the ursks must be pushing up from the southern plains towards the lakes.' The trapper raised his RAM suit's right arm and the cantilevered steel of his magnetic catapult extended out to full rifle length. There was a clang on his arm's drum as a razored disk was fed into the breech, followed by the evil twang of a projectile cutting through the air. Tobias Raffold's aim was true, for the terrified screeching in the distance halted instantly. But it was too late; echoing from around the hills came an eerie throaty song that Hannah recognized only too well from the hordes of creatures drawn to the killing field of Hermetica's battlements. Ursk song.

  Tobias Raffold was screaming for his crew to come back from the snares and form a circle around the steam tap. One of his trappers came stamping past Hannah and clanged his left arm's manipulator hand against her suit, manually activating her magnetic catapult. Fixed on the end of a rod, an iron circle with a crosshair in its centre snapped down in front of Hannah's face, floating above the exterior of her skull dome in synchronization with her catapult arm's movement. A mechanical sight for the catapult! Something resembling a copper clock face extended out of the suit's control panel, a single hand pointing upwards on a dial of sharpened disk icons. A full drum of killing disks, for the moment.

  'Ah, this is wicked bad,' came the commodore's words inside Hannah's pilot frame. 'All this way for my brave bones to end up being gnawed by a pack of oversized bears. This is where staying true to an oath's course has landed poor old Blacky.'

  'Ursks know the weak spots of our RAM suits.' Tobias Raffold's warning cut in. 'They'll run in low and try to go for the rubberized seals around our legs. If they claw your seals open they can bite through the hydraulics and bring your suit down to the ground. They'll skirt the mists, circling to start with to try and make us waste our ammunition. Ambassador, you and your people save your fire until they're coming over the rise here and are bearing straight for you.'

  'Their wicked teeth can't bite through this crystal noggin of mine, can they?' asked the commodore.

  'They're right good at waiting around a downed suit,' warned the trapper. 'They'll wait until your water runs out and you're desperate enough to pop your lid and make a bolt for the nearest spring.'

  'The ursks outside the battlements ran away when you shot in the air,' said Hannah.

  'The ursks around the battlements know what those artillery emplacements around the Horn of Jago are good for. This far out, we're all just canned food as far as an ursk pack is concerned.'

  But it wasn't a pack. Hannah saw the long wave of howling black crest the line of hills in front of them, throwing themselves down into the mists flowing along the valley. Not a pack. A migration!

  Hannah's fingers were trembling as they closed around the trigger of the catapult inside her suit's weapon arm. Her skill was mathematics, not gunnery, and she realized immediately that the expedition didn't have nearly enough razored disks to deal with such vast numbers. Hannah's ammunition drum would be empty long before the exodus heading directly for her suit abated.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Father Baine looked up as he heard footsteps coming down the corridor to the chancery office. The cathedral's architects had built the passage to specification, he suspected. Nobody could ever sneak up on the archbishop's office while it was occupied. Not that the owner of the approaching footsteps would find much if subterfuge was their intent. Only the unappreciated clerk working into the early evening to clear the backlog of paperwork that came from trying to run a cathedral without a sitting archbishop to oversee the dioceses' official bureaucracy.

  There was a knock and the door opened to admit one of the novices who was meant to be standing duty on the cathedral's main bridge.

  'Father,' said the novice, 'the ursine Chalph urs Chalph is outside asking for you.'

  Father Baine looked up at the carriage clock at the edge of his desk, just visible behind a pile of profiles of those who had recently passed the church's entrance exams, each mind as unique as the whorls of skin on their fingertips.

  'He said it was urgent,' noted the novice, 'and relating to a private matter between the two of you.'

  Father Baine cleared his throat and made to stand. 'Ha. So.'

  'He is a believer,' said the novice, as if this revelation wouldn't have occurred to Father Baine at some point.

  'We all believe in something,' sighed the father. 'Even if it's something slightly more sensible than the Divine Quad. Such as what is right
and rational.'

  Chalph was waiting at the edge of the Grand Canal. Father Baine left the novice at the midpoint of the main bridge and crossed to where the ursine was loitering – in some agitation, if he interpreted the creature's body language correctly.

  'Father Baine,' called Chalph, 'is Jethro Daunt with you?'

  'He was – but he left. He spent a good few hours poring over the records of the draft ballots in my office, although why he should bother escapes me. Even if Hannah's induction into the Guild of Valvemen was crooked, she is marked for the rational orders now.'

  'I have to see him immediately,' demanded Chalph. 'Where did he go?'

  'I think he went to see if his steamman friend was still working in the public records office, though much good will it do them. Everything filed with the office as paper documents is first released by and filtered through the guild's transaction engines. Vardan Flail is too canny to allow details of his feud with the archbishop to be openly catalogued. Is this urgency related to Alice Gray's death?'

  'No,' growled Chalph. 'It's far worse than that. I have to see him. Tell him I've been doing my own investigating and what I've found – it's unbelievable!'

  He was turning to jog away.

  'Can I help?' Father Baine called after him.

  'Only if you've started to work for your people's Inquisition,' Chalph shouted back. 'I don't even know if Jethro Daunt and his metal friend can do anything about this.'

  'Is there no more that I can tell him?'

  'Tell him it's about a letter that was given to the expedition.'

  Father Baine watched the young ursine run off, wondering if the foreign trader was entirely in possession of his senses. Jethro was walking alongside Boxiron across one of the waterways close to the Grand Canal, ignoring the hopeful cries of the street vendors, when the pair ran into a force they couldn't so readily ignore. Stom urs Stom, the commander of the mercenaries, flanked by four of her fighters.