Secrets of the Fire Sea j-4

by Stephen Hunt

  Hannah stared sadly at the priest's skeleton. So it seemed on the face of it, but then her mother had discovered the same scene of destruction over a decade ago, and she had still been trying to achieve something here, to – that was it! Hannah urgently flicked open her mother's diary, the meaning of the pages of badly scribbled mathematics becoming clear.

  It was a key. Her mother had been using the expressions on the tunnel walls that had echoes in modern Jackelian mathematics to guide her to the meaning of the unknown symbols. She had been translating the ancient mathematical language. Her mother had so nearly completed her work, too. But the fever had got to her, or perhaps she'd lacked the final insights that the codified structures of Circlist synthetic morality would have given her. This was bread and butter to Hannah.

  She could complete her mother's work after all! Alien numbers stirred around Hannah's fingers as she pushed the characters around the wall. She glanced down at her mother's notebook for reassurance; she had never attempted anything so difficult. It wasn't just that the characters were foreign – it was the fact that half of the mathematical concepts used in these underground passages seemed to have no comparative reference points in the Circlist doctrine that she'd had drummed into her during her cathedral studies. The base understanding appeared to be the same as synthetic morality – that everything that existed could be defined and modelled in numbers and that as you changed the inputs you changed the results – but, even given the difficulties of translation, what Hannah was attempting to grapple with was so much more advanced than anything else she had ever tackled. There were formulae for waves and strings that seemed to demand to be integrated into everything Hannah worked on, before being parsed into algorithms that rendered them into something else entirely. Layer upon layer of complexity – perversely growing simpler and simpler the higher up the layers these results of calculations were passed.

  Hannah knew what this wall was now – no different from the dials and mechanical switches on the pilot frame of her clunking RAM suit. But what a control panel it was – designed to be operated by minds so advanced it pained her to consider them. Already, Hannah had pushed far beyond her mother's work – come to grips with the concepts that had eluded her mother's fever-racked mind. But what Hannah couldn't grasp was what these structures were for – a tool, certainly, but a tool to what end? Each building had a slightly different purpose, that much Hannah had gleaned. And she suspected that they were linked, like a series of baths in one of Hermetica's public pools – starting cold with each steam chamber growing slightly warmer – each building more difficult to comprehend. William of Flamewall had started at the unfathomable end of the chain in the building he had selected to demolish first, working his way down the scale of complexity until he had died within his premature explosion inside one of the structures. His starting point had been no accident. William of Flamewall had chosen to wreck the most advanced art of this lost civilization first, working his way down to the constructions containing the most simple concepts. The material that had inspired his lover Bel Bessant to create her terrible work was lost to the world forever now. That much Hannah had already discovered for Jethro Daunt and the Circlist church – with the help of a long-dead priest of the rational orders.

  Hannah was toying with one of the symbols – something like a lightning flash that seemed to have different functions depending on the position of its insertion point within a formula. She whisked it around with her forefinger, allowing it to follow her like a curious goldfish in a pool tracking a hand. Then the idea struck her. What she was grappling with here wasn't flat: the underlying base of the characters was multi-relational – the symbols she had been puzzling over were links between the disparate formulae and functions. That was why their insertion points mattered so much – they were like the gates that controlled Hermetica's canals – shutting off or opening a single tributary would create knock-on effects all the way down the channels it opened out into!

  With almost frenzied haste Hannah began rearranging the concepts she had been lining up on the wall, setting up a structure of theoretical pipes and struts between the formulae to allow the results that had always seemed twisted beyond recognition to follow a logical sequence. A sequence that might prove she was intelligent enough to be allowed to operate this mysterious tool? Hannah thrust the little lightning-bolt symbol into the middle of the line of alien symbols as if it was a real bolt of power. The characters began to rearrange themselves around her finger as though they were insects performing a mating dance, then the symbols started swirling in a vortex and Hannah felt her knees buckle as the room dissolved. Her hands lurched out to grab at something solid, anything, but all of her physical reference points had vanished.

  Hannah was flying as if in a dream, skimming over mountains that clearly belonged to the Cade Range; but the land around her, below her, it was all so different – Jago's sky a brilliant diamond blue, the only clouds above her thin white fingers scratched high under a warm, inviting sun. Below Hannah lay well-tended woodland and a chequerboard of farms, dark arrow-straight roads leading to a city that was barely recognizable as the petrified jungle-covered anthills that Hannah had glimpsed after emerging from the tunnel. So many towers shining in the light, ethereal shapes so beautiful they were as much art as architecture – delicate arches and parapets with insubstantial transparent walkways bridging them – separated by sculpted parkland in rich emerald green. Hannah's course altered and she found herself swooping down across the city at ground level, a ghost observing a lost past.

  Moving walkways underneath Hannah were filled with ursine and the race of man, both peoples happily intermingling and wearing the same style of flimsy clothes – silks and muslins in a rainbow assortment of pastel hues, arms and shoulders left bare. Many of the crowd had illustrations printed on their clothes and amazingly the pictures were moving and changing in an animated dance. Hannah was so taken aback by the sight that she nearly didn't notice that there were other races mixed in on the walkways – less numerous that the ursine and men, but walking proudly through the masses nevertheless. Tall feline-faced creatures with legs so long and bony they could have been walking on stilts, and a crimson-coloured race that had an insectoid appearance with compound eyes, were just two of the species she spotted. This was a true multiracial society, as diverse and as vibrant as that of the Kingdom of Jackals today. The invisible currents pulling Hannah tugged her towards the centre of the vast city, over a temple with priests leading a ritual in front of a sea of worshippers – the crowd and the priests made up of the same scattering of races she had already noted. But this was no worship of gods or ancestors Hannah was seeing. The ancient mass these priests were leading was more in the way of a public science experiment.

  Understanding filtered through Hannah, rising to her unbidden from the ancient machines of Bloodglass Island. Science, power, the control of nature – but mastery of the outer untempered by any understanding of the inner. Dear Circle, she could have told these ancients they were walking a dangerous path, she could have called out to them over the ages. Understand your own nature before you understand the world. But there was no time for any warning, nor voice to be found within Hannah's throat.

  The scene changed, moving forward in time – the fashions subtly altered. The manicured parks between the towers had fallen into disrepair, while the energies of the city's inhabitants were now diverted into the skirmishing of street battles as gangs of ursine clashed with thugs from the race of man, youths on both sides raised to hatred while the priests of science hectored and cursed their rivals as heretics. More time passed. The violence grew increasingly organized, bands of cloth tied around heads transforming into uniforms, fists and sticks replaced by dart-firing pistols and rifles – sedatives inside the crystal ammunition giving way to fatal toxins.

  Then there was war. Full war, total war, long years of it, growing darker and more desperate. But what a war. Artificially created death spores and sicknesses and blights.
Thousands of soldiers in armour rising from trenches and running at each other in clouds of killing particles that attempted to melt and destroy their protective suits, hideous monsters brought to life by dark science leaping out from craters like spiders to impale troops. Other creatures gliding down from the dark poison clouds to disgorge sacks of acids across the helmets of their foe, ursine and man writhing in agony, shooting and hacking at each other with blades as hot as furnaces, weapons easily capable of chopping each other's armour into pieces.

  It was only ursine versus man now, the other less fecund races exterminated after being caught on one side of the conflict or the other. The war on the island continent lasted centuries until, in a final orgy of destruction, one of the sides unleashed truly terrible weapons – hell-fire impacting the earth, storms that melted stone and incinerated both races, forces that cracked the ground and warped the fabric of the world; great tracts of land turned to liquid flame, the sea itself burning as magma seeped out of the world's wounds.

  Hannah was left floating above a land blanketed by eternal winter, and then she noticed the Cade Mountains. There were eyes there, identical to the hideous sentinel that had observed her enter the tunnel, but these eyes were on the other side of the slope, still watching: watching the melted, steaming city as drain covers and survival centre doors lifted up and those who by accident or design had been fortunate enough to be underground when the sun storms scoured the land above them emerged.

  Time flickered forward again and Hannah watched as each generation that succeeded the survivors of the conflict fell further from the condition of civilization their forefathers had reached. Scrabbling simply to eke out an existence in the freezing lands about them. But then, something completely unexpected. Hannah was whisked deep under the mountains to a machine-lined chamber filled with ice-covered coffins, their lids retracting to reveal a group of healthy, full-sized ursine. As the cloud of frost dissipated, these last scientist-priests rose as though they were gods returning from an earlier age. A breakaway ursine faction planted like drought seeds to reawaken and rebuild civilization.

  However, the land the scientist-priests found waiting for them was far beyond repair, beyond even their worst predictions of the ravages the war would wreak. They tried to resettle the island but it proved too difficult. The tunnel was the sole remaining legacy of that time, leading from nowhere and going nowhere. A fresh start in a new land was the only way their society could live again. Many of the creatures of war given life by their twisted science had become predators preying on the primitive descendents clinging onto the land; a land too barren to support meaningful agriculture. And there was a worse revelation still to come. Dark energies released in the war had poisoned the very soil that once supported its people. Those that subsisted on the land were poisoned in turn, their flesh twisting and mutating, and in response the scientist-priests did the only thing they could. They created a centre of healing using the last of their hoarded science. Bloodglass Island. With a small handful of ursine descendents healed, the priests summoned the flying scouts that had once served them. Their last loyal servants. The Angels of Airdia arrived and bore the healed ursine away to a domain far beyond their ruined home, across the sea to a nation that would become Pericur.

  Still the hideous eyes on the mountain watched, recording the march of ages, filling the machines hidden far underground with their recordings of the slow sweep of history. Century upon century – millennia upon millennia. The twisted, broken race of man hammered into primitive, voiceless savages, poison seeping across the generations until the dark energies dissipated and only the ab-locks were left. Tears fell from Hannah's eyes. And while the race of man shrank and became wizened ab-locks, the unhealed ursine left behind had swollen and grown bestial, larger and larger, claws and fangs replacing reasoning and morality. They had become the monstrous race of ursks. Both of those races that had once completely mastered nature fallen victim to the random whittling of an untram-melled creation run wild and merciless. The sole legacy left by their civilization was a deep revulsion between the two races, an ancient war without end turned to nothing more than savage territorial instinct. That and a land locked in fire and circled by a sea of burning magma, its ground echoing to the clashing howls of their devolved descendents.

  A geological age later, other offshoots of the race of man had returned to Jago, eventually reencountering the people of Pericur across the sea – the hairless devils of ursine mythology, scorched of all fur by their sins. Another of Alice Gray's sayings came back to Hannah. Those who failed to learn history are doomed to repeat it. The Pericurians scheming to evict the Jagonese from their sacred soil, the Jagonese hostility towards their nearest neighbours across the sea, all just a mirror to the thoughtless skirmishes of the ab-locks and ursks. A circle turning and repeating, a memory distorted through Pericurian scripture. That was all that was left of their legacy now. That and – Hannah took a step backwards. The ancient healing centre on Bloodglass Island. Capable of restoring degenerate flesh – but Hannah was neither an ab-lock nor an ursk. Her mind was no simple poisoned husk that needed evolving back to full sentience. She tried to will away the ancient vision of knowledge that had possessed her, to return to the walls of the chamber crawling with ancient formulae, but she was firmly held in the tool's grasp now and it had not finished with her. It had barely even started.

  Hannah screamed as her brain began to heat up, her every thought a burning dagger as molten as the fires of Jago. Changing her, remaking her. Healing her and killing her…

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  With eight bearers on either side, strapping ursine adults all, the litter belonging to Baroness Laro urs Laro of the House of Ush, head of the Pericurean trade mission, was borne with careful dignity and some difficulty through the tight entrance to the cavernous senatorial banqueting hall and towards the senate's best imitation of a Pericurian feast.

  Despite their best efforts at courtliness, the bearers deposited the Baroness in front of the piled food as if she were another haunch of meat being added to the feast. First Senator Silvermain's free company mercenaries took position along the wall, guns and armour jangling, two food tasters emerging from a doorway to flank the politician and his noble guest – both the food tasters kin of the kitchen staff, as was the Jagonese tradition. The possibility of poison aside, the two food tasters looked as happy to be sampling the foreign food as the First Senator's favoured courtiers and cronies. They were trying not to make it too obvious as they covered their noses with silk handkerchiefs in distaste at the fare in front of them. There were a few disgusted mutters of wet-snout food whispered by the courtiers forced to sit down with this foreign savage.

  Banging the First Senator's staff of office on the stone floor, the senatorial rod carrier declared the state occasion open with all the flowery language expected of him and extended the senate's official leave-taking to the baroness of Pericur, expressing the senate's deep regret at her recall to her noble homeland. As the man's last words echoed away, waiting staff emerged in force to remove heavy glass domes from platters of food, revealing roast meats spread across beds of sugared rice, all smothered with a pungent honeyed sauce made from rotting fish entrails. Steam rose up towards the stained glass windows in the arches above.

  'Remind us, how long has the House of Ush held the trading licence for Jago, baroness?' First Senator Silvermain solicitously enquired as he waved sweet wine towards his guest of honour, who had already started pulling honey-soaked baked hams off the table and towards her razor sharp teeth.

  'Seventeen years, noble excellency,' said the baroness from the horizontal comfort of her litter, wiping her face with the fur on the back of her huge wrists.

  'Yes, we remember now,' said the First Senator. 'It seems like only yesterday we assumed the mantle of our position – a couple of years before the House of Ush replaced the incumbent trading house. And now the wheel has turned. Your house's boat is due today, is it not? By tomorrow you shall be s
ailing for your homeland.'

  'The boat will be here by this afternoon,' agreed the baroness, holding out one of her people's traditional leather cups for the senatorial staff to fill with sweet wine.

  'You seem to be bearing your house's loss of its trading licence with admirable equanimity,' said Silvermain.

  'Life is change.'

  'Change, indeed,' said the First Senator. 'A good Circlist sentiment. Your previous archduchess was a great reformer; ruling with ambition and vision, cut much from our own cloth. The loss of your patron is not just mourned by the House of Ush; it is Jago's loss also.'

  The baroness shrugged, sending great ripples of fur rolling down her body. 'Forests have been felled and mills built, with many minor merchant houses raised on the tide of their industry. Not even the conservatives can so easily turn the clock back on our advances. There is a time for everything and our house's star will be resurgent again.'

  'Capital. If only you had been born within the race of man, baroness,' trilled the First Senator. 'Such vim! No whining or complaining. If we had a hundred such as you sitting by our side in the hall of the stained senate, then our future could not be denied!'

  The baroness raised her overflowing wine cup in a toast. 'To futures that cannot be denied.'

  The First Senator was delighted to join in the toast, before calling out for Stom urs Stom. The mercenary officer appeared and was dispatched with a company of her hulking soldiers to bring back the architect's model of the planned new capital. The mercenaries returned, struggling under the immense weight of a section of the scale model, and lowered it to the floor in front of the table.