by Stephen Hunt
'These are the docks for New Titus,' said the First Senator, his hand sweeping proudly over the diorama. 'U-boat pens with space enough to accept freighters from all over the world, for who will not want to visit us to see the wonders we will construct anew on Jago? And here-' he indicated a vast stretch of marble buildings lining the underwater harbour, '-will sit the new Pericurian trading mission. After you return home, you must spread word among your liberal allies in the baronial council that as Pericur is now becoming a great power in the world, we shall be building them a trade mission worthy of your people's ambitions. We shall prosper together, Jago and Pericur, as an apprentice and an old tradesman prosper in their shared labours, participating in the glory of the great venture we are planning here.'
There was an enthusiastic round of applause from Silvermain's favoured senators and courtiers as Baroness Laro urs Laro bowed her head in recognition of the First Senator's flattery.
'And will your trading boat from Pericur be bringing word of which house the archduchess has decided to favour with the new grant of the Jagonese commercial concession?'
'I do not think so,' said the Baroness, picking a string of bacon fat out of her teeth.
'But surely the archduchess will want to award it to one of her political allies? That is the way of patronage, is it not?'
'It is a matter of economics, not patronage,' said the baroness, with the same tone that a mother might use in telling a truculent child that there would be no supper for the night. 'Have you never been shown your trade minister's accounts? Since the opening of the southwest passage diverted all the shipping away from Jago, your coffers have been running down to empty over the last few years. There is simply no margin for us now here on Jago.'
'But,' the shocked First Senator had abandoned all pretence of nibbling at the pungent foreign dishes, 'we have been given assurances from the archduchess through your embassy. The trading license will be passed onto a new house just as it always has.'
'I would be surprised if she hadn't made such assurances to you,' said the baroness. 'Maybe she even believes her own words. But there is something else to consider…'
'What?' the First Senator pressed.
'It is a confidence,' said the baroness. 'I would like to share it with you, but first, I must admit, I am most curious. I have heard that you have the gift of reading the lines of your people's feet in the manner of a wise woman, that you can ascertain much about the person, even their future.'
'We do possess that gift,' said the First Senator, the anxiety in his voice mixed with a sliver of satisfaction that word of his second sight had passed as far as the foreign traders.
'I heard as much soon after I first arrived on Jago,' said the baroness, 'and ever since I discovered it, I have often wondered if your gift might extend to an ursine's feet as well as those of the race of man.' She clicked her fat furred fingers and one of her retainers jumped forward to slip off her enormous dark leather boots. 'Will you do me this honour, noble excellency? In return I shall pass on some small intelligence I have come into possession of, a morsel that will prove of great advantage to you'
'It is said that fair exchange is no robbery,' said the First Senator, kneeling down to run his hands along the two fur-covered slabs of flesh that had been revealed. The ranks of Jagonese courtiers suppressed their scandalized coughs and whispers at the lack of decorum in the situation, lest their dangerously erratic master overhear them. Silvermain examined the limbs of the baroness and poked and prodded at her soles for a minute before he appeared to give up. 'We fear these are too unlike the feet of our people for our talent to be brought to bear. We can see no future here.'
The baroness nodded thoughtfully and bent forward. 'Well, you tried, so I shall tell you the few facts I know. The assurances of the present archduchess are worthless. I fear her reign will be short. You see, she is close to being replaced.'
A shocked hush fell over the table at this sudden revelation.
'What faction could take power so quickly?' asked the First Senator. 'Who is to be installed as the new archduchess?'
Baroness Laro urs Laro looked distrustfully at the staring faces of the First Senator's lackeys around the table. 'I will whisper the name to you.'
The First Senator came forward, climbing up between the sprawling noble's legs as the baroness bent forward on her litter, pushing aside the politician's hair around his ears and drawing his head in close to her voluminous belly.
'Me,' she whispered, pushing the First Senator's face down flat onto the great folds of furred flesh. Silvermain's yell of surprise was smothered by the vast tract of flesh blocking his nose and mouth, his spine pressed down by the full strength of the massive ursine female.
There was a moment when the courtiers lining the table opposite looked at the jerking, struggling body of the First Senator being suffocated as though this might be some surreal prank being played on them by their insane ruler. But there was little disguising the reality of Silvermain's violent spasms. A clang sounded through the hall as the door to the banqueting chamber was locked from inside.
The First Senator's rod bearer ran up to the advancing free company soldiers. 'She's lost her bloody mind, beat her off, bring her down. Kill her if you have to.'
'I am loath to do so,' said Stom urs Stom.
'But I'm ordering you,' spluttered the official. 'That's your sworn liege-lord!' He stumbled back, looking dumbfounded at the short sword thrust into his chest.
'That would depend,' said Stom, unhooking her turret rifle from the brass tank on her back, 'on who commanded the oath to start with.'
Rifles burst into action, courtiers and senators sent sprawling as heavy piton heads struck them. None of the Jagonese was permitted arms in the presence of their First Senator, and they scrambled away in terror from the table, ploughing into serving staff trying to escape down the passage to the kitchens, only to find its doors bolted by those that were meant to be guarding them. The serving staff died with more dignity than their politician masters, turning and throwing themselves at the guns of the mercenaries rather than clawing in useless desperation at the thick oak doors blocking their exit. In the narrow confines of the corridor concentrated weapons fire tore the fleeing throng to shreds without discrimination.
Great pawed hands reached under the stone table to pull out a few remaining, cowering senators, tossing more targets into the open. The politicians had hardly got to their feet when they were cut down again in a hail of heavy pitons. They lay twitching on the stone floor as the last few embers of life departed.
Laro urs Laro, Baroness of the House of Ush, pulled herself to her feet, casually discarding the blue-faced corpse of the First Senator as she surveyed with satisfaction the dozens of bodies strewn across the banqueting hall.
She addressed Stom urs Stom. 'I believe I won our wager.'
'Baroness?'
'It seems the First Senator had the gift after all.' Her foot stepped down on the scale model of Titus City abandoned on the floor, splintering a whole district with her weight.
We can see no future here. The feverish air on top of the coral rise surrounding Jago resounded to the crack of the work crew's sledgehammers chipping away at the growth. The Jagonese had long ago realized that the best way to control the width of their protective coral line was to prune the height of the great rise – topping it forced its growth out horizontally instead, thickening the defences.
Theirs was hard, hot, dirty work, judged vital by the lessons of history – the coral line had turned back the long wooden ships of the polar barbarians, the wheel-powered dreadnaughts of the Chimecan Empire – every foe who had been attracted by the wealth and power of the island nation in centuries past.
It was always a welcome part of the work gang's routine to take pause for a water break when the trading boat from Pericur arrived in front of the massive gates cut into the rise, the sight of the machines drawing open the doors below an awe-inspiring sight, as well as an excuse to halt their b
ackbreaking labours. But the crew knew enough about the comings and goings of the trading vessel to recognize that a thrashing in the water didn't normally precede its arrival as the thick-skinned dolphins that inhabited the boils tried to flee before the iron hull. And if the merchant u-boat below had an escort of dolphins, it was missing the accompanying tug that would have normally guaranteed it safe passage through the Fire Sea's shifting flows of magma.
The coral line's portcullis master and his workers must have shared the work crew's sense that something was out of place, as the gates that had started to open were now slowly shutting in the face of the trading boat. The work crew's feelings turned from apprehension to panic as they saw gate staff being tossed out of balconies along the gate's control cabins below, tiny bodies bouncing and tumbling off the coral line's slopes before being absorbed by the searing waters of the channel they were meant to be protecting.
Behind the Pericurian trading boat, the bowsprit of a u-boat broke the steaming water's surface, then another and another, ugly black lines of men-o'war masked by the steaming wash flowing off a forest of conning towers; hundreds of submersibles rising up from the depths of the channel leading to Jago's entrance. And to the work crew's horror, the gate's closure had now halted, the rumble of the machines accelerating as they powered up again to open the gates wide, admitting the dark-hulled armada into their realm. None of the snub-nosed mortars and cannons on the bastions of the coral line's gun emplacements were moving into position, let alone shaking the air with the ear-splitting fury of their weekly gunnery practice. The free company soldiers that the work crew could see on the emplacements below seemed unconcerned by the massive fleet's arrival.
Impotently clutching their sledgehammers, the workers on the summit could only look on in stunned disbelief as the first successful breach of Jago's sea defences sailed through the coral line completely unopposed.
CHAPTER TWENTY
Hannah groaned, gasping for breath as Tobias Raffold withdrew a foully reeking bottle of smelling salts from under her nose.
'Ah, lass,' wheezed the commodore, coming into blurred view and offering her a canteen of water. 'I thought you'd had it there for sure. But old Blacky was near enough to hear your screams and pull you out of your tunnel, covered though you were in wicked lights dancing around you like a swarm of angry hornets.'
She was lying down on the ground outside one of the singing buildings, her head aching – not with pain, but with perfect clarity. 'Nandi and the ambassador, get them out of the buildings.'
'They're not inside,' said the trapper's leader. 'It was only you in there.'
'Nandi and Ortin are off. They've made another discovery, lass,' explained the commodore. 'A set of stairs under the floor of one of the tunnel chambers in the mountain, corkscrewing deep underground. There's a lead-lined tabernacle down there filled with scraps of Ortin urs Ortin's blessed scripture and a circle of coffins that looks like a pack of bloodsuckers could have made their nest inside the hall.'
'Not vampires,' coughed Hannah. 'Only forgotten dreams and dust down there now. She went into the buildings, she went inside them all.'
'Who, lass?'
'Bel Bessant. She passed through every last one of these buildings. The machines thought they were healing her, but they were changing her, making her intelligent enough to be able to create something as obscene as the god-formula.'
'You're not making any blessed sense.'
Hannah grabbed the commodore's jacket. 'That's because I can see more clearly now. Don't you see! They destroyed paradise over this, over whether it was right to alter your mind and your body – raise yourself so far and fast ahead of everyone else you wouldn't even be able to recognize yourself by the time you'd finished. Changing the template of your creation. Their minds, new minds, building weapons, so terrible.'
'Your forehead, now,' said the commodore extending a worried palm. 'Your temperature is running wild.'
'Connections, more connections,' spluttered Hannah.' But they're settling down, the density, cooling.'
'Let's take her back to her tent,' Tobias Raffold said to the commodore, looking around nervously. 'Hang me, but I'm getting as superstitious about this damn place as you are.'
'No!' shouted Hannah. 'We've got to blow the remaining buildings, finish the work that William of Flamewall began. None of them can be allowed to stand, none of them!' Hannah watched the smoke rise out of the buildings on Bloodglass Island from the other side of the glassy plain. Their song had changed now, discordant and ugly after the last explosion had rocked the final building – the same structure that had recounted the tale of Jago's lost paradise to her. She still didn't know if it was the race of man or the ursine who had been in favour of advancing their minds into something so ingenious and alien that those that remained behind must have seemed as insignificant as insects.
It hardly mattered. That dream was an abomination and she, like William of Flamewall, had decided that the buildings had to be destroyed. Would Hannah have made the same decision if she had been able to pass through each building in turn, each one pushing her further and further away from the template she had been born to? Bel Bessant clearly hadn't. She had made a different choice. The rest of humanity must have appeared like drooling household pets to her as she worked on her god-formula – still not satisfied with being so far ahead of the rest of her kind. She had wanted to accelerate the process with another step-change of complexity and raise herself to the status of godhood without a backward glance to those she would have abandoned to their mortality. Following her course even having seen the wreckage of what had been lost. Would Hannah's mother have resisted the same temptation if her leg hadn't killed her before she could unlock the buildings' secrets? Hannah suspected not. Her mother couldn't have gone quite as far as Bel Bessant, not with William of Flamewall's vandalism of the last few chambers. But driven by revenge she might have gone far enough. Hannah looked sadly at her mother's grave. Perhaps the fever of that mangled leg had done her mother a favour after all?
The expedition's RAM suits needed to be charged on the other side of the mountain tunnel and they were finished here. Hannah had lived up to the trust that Jethro Daunt had placed in her, and the Pericurian ambassador was ecstatic that he had his fragments from a tabernacle to prove there were literal as well as spiritual dimensions to his people's liturgy. Hannah did not disabuse him. She did not tell him that the earliest writings of his people's faith were the distorted ramblings of sixth generation survivors of an ancient war, living like beasts in caves, poisoned and degenerate and not yet healed by their sleeping scientist-priests. Well, the Pericurian faith was as good as any other religion, she supposed. Power without wisdom. Science fallen to superstition. The ancients who had lived here had come so close. If only they had tempered their mastery of the world with an equal understanding of their own nature, what a world they might have built around them!
And Ortin urs Ortin wasn't the only happy one. Nandi now carried with her the ground-shaking revelation of a prior civilization that predated the migrant Jagonese by so many millennia that it was impossible even to calculate the time scale of their existence. The commodore was simply happy that Nandi's research had run its course and his precious u-boat would soon be able to sail away leaving the black cliffs of Jago behind him.
What Hannah still hadn't told any of her friends was that her dangerously quick new brain had worked out the final resting place of the missing third section of the god-formula, and it certainly wasn't ashes left over from an incineration centuries earlier, blowing as dust around the bones of William of Flamewall. It was back in Hermetica City. Tobias Raffold's RAM suit stopped under the wan light of the aqueduct's lamps, the other members of the expedition slowing to a halt behind the trapper.
Commodore Black was standing next to Hannah. The u-boat man's voice echoed around her pilot cabin. 'Not more beasts? Can they not leave us alone now that we're nearly out of the wilderness?'
'There's free company so
ldiers ahead, some in suits and some on foot,' announced the trapper, examining the scene through a magnification plate.
'Protecting the city's maintenance workers?' asked Hannah.
'I can just see the soldiers,' said the trapper, lowering the plate from his face. 'No workers.'
'Are they waiting for us, then?' wondered the commodore. 'With a warrant of arrest from the prickly madman that rules this place? Ah, that's too bad. No doubt one of his blessed new vaults has caved in while we've been off journeying and he wants to lock us all up as saboteurs.'
'I say we don't find out,' said Tobias Raffold, 'we bypass them through the forest and-'
His plan was interrupted by the hiss of a flare from the leg of one of the suits, a shimmering red umbrella of light extending over the expedition as the burning tube drifted in the mistfingered wind above their heads. There were shouts from lower down the aqueduct's course, the free company soldiers turning towards the expedition's position.
'Which bloody idiot…?' the trapper shouted.
'My apologies, dear boy,' called the ambassador. 'The flare handle caught on my sleeve as I was trying to bring my magnification plate up. These machines really aren't built for someone of my bulk.'
'You've paid for us to be out here,' said the trapper, angrily, 'and if Silvermain's pets are waiting for us, you might just have put paid to us too with your clumsiness.'
'Those were idle threats made against us before we left,' said the ambassador. 'I carry diplomatic immunity. I'm sure there is nothing here that cannot be reasonably negotiated.' He passed the trapper and walked down towards the advancing free company soldiers.
'Fine for him,' the commodore muttered to Hannah and Nandi. 'It's just the mortal rest of us that'll end up rotting in the senate's dungeons.'