Secrets of the Fire Sea
Stephen Hunt

You would not cling to his guiding hand if the way was always bright. And you would not care to walk by faith could you always walk by sight.

Anon

Table of Contents

Cover Page

Title Page

Epigraph

Chapter One

Chapter Two

Chapter Three

Chapter Four

Chapter Five

Chapter Six

Chapter Seven

Chapter Eight

Chapter Nine

Chapter Ten

Chapter Eleven

Chapter Twelve

Chapter Thirteen

Chapter Fourteen

Chapter Fifteen

Chapter Sixteen

Chapter Seventeen

Chapter Eighteen

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Twenty

Chapter Twenty-One

Chapter Twenty-Two

Chapter Twenty-Three

Chapter Twenty-Four

Chapter Twenty-Five

Chapter Twenty-Six

Epilogue

By Stephen Hunt

Copyright

About the Publisher

CHAPTER ONE

The Isle of Jago. Hermetica City

Watching the underwater craft carrying the ambassador away from Jago’s shores was as good a way as any to pass the afternoon, if you could ignore the distant thrum of the iron battlements keeping the hordes of prowling monsters out of Hermetica City.

Hannah turned as her friend Chalph joined her near the edge of the tall cliffs. Not so near the edge that she might be scalded by the boiling water lashing up from the Fire Sea, but near enough to glimpse the departing ambassador’s u-boat on the surface. The u-boat was meeting up with the Jagonese tug that had been assigned to escort it beyond the coral line, before it braved the maze of boiling passages of water that veined their way through the bubbling magma of the Fire Sea.

‘They’ve picked a good day for going,’ said Chalph, raising his black-furred arm to point to the u-boat on the surface, guide lines being tossed across to the tug. The sailors were wearing rubber scald suits, coloured yellow for visibility. ‘No steam storms today – and I can’t smell any cold fronts moving in.’

‘That’s a pity,’ said Hannah. She loved the violence of the arctic rain hitting the superheated waters of the Fire Sea and the parched coastlines of Jago. She felt alive when steam storms broke across the island’s shores, geysers erupting from the ocean, hot mists sliding across the basalts plains, lightning painting the landscape and the crack of thunder urging the monsters laying siege outside their battlements into a frenzy. Hannah felt more alive in a storm than she ever did down in the empty echoing streets of their capital’s vaults.

Chalph rubbed at his face with a paw-like hand. Like the rest of the ursine race, he had wonderfully expressive eyes – pupils that could narrow to a pinhead or expand out until the rim of yellow around the edges was driven out and the features of his face vanished in a mask of black. ‘I wonder how long I’ve got left on Jago now that the ambassador has gone?’

A blade of fear stabbed Hannah. That Chalph urs Chalph might depart back to his country across the sea, leaving her as good as friendless on the island. ‘But you’ve been brought up here, the same as me. Your house can’t just make you go back to Pericur.’

‘Oh, they can, alright,’ said Chalph. ‘Why do you think our ambassador is leaving? She supported the claim of the archduchess to the throne of Pericur. The ambassador being recalled back home is her reward. Our conservatives don’t like merchants operating on Jago. They believe Jago is sacred soil, that our trade here is an affront to the scriptures. You wait and see. The trade concession the House of Ush had been granted will be cancelled by the new archduchess, then we’ll all be back on Pericurian soil within the year.’

‘But I’ll still be here,’ said Hannah. ‘We’ll be here. The race of man…’

Chalph moved back as a spray of boiling water carried on the wind and hissed towards his boots. ‘The archduchess won’t need to force your people from the island.’ He clambered over a boulder and pointed to the nearest of the guard towers rising up behind the sloped iron battlements. A large ursine mercenary was just visible inside, the light glinting off the brass of the gas tank on his back.

‘Careful,’ said Hannah. ‘The soldiers might see us, report us for being out on the surface.’

‘They don’t care we’re here,’ replied Chalph. ‘They get paid for keeping the monsters out, not keeping us in. And that’s the nub of it. Your senate relies on our free company fighters to keep the capital safe, not your police militia. The free company may be mercenaries, but they will not dare disobey a direct order from the archduchess to leave Jago, and then who will protect your city?’

Hannah shrugged. ‘The militia hate your mercenaries. They never wanted free company fighters here, that was the senate’s choice. They’d throw a party on the docks and help load your mercenaries into a boat if the free company were ordered off Jago.’

‘And your senate would widen the draft to make up the numbers,’ said Chalph. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a guard tower, hoping that the power charging the battlements doesn’t fail on your watch?’

‘It won’t come to that,’ said Hannah. But she knew how optimistic her words sounded even as she spoke them. There were press gangs operating across the city now, and even the senate’s latest raft of anti-emigration legislation wasn’t going to fill all the empty vacancies in every trade from the tug service to clerks for the ministries. ‘In the cathedral they’re saying that the new ambassador from Pericur is going to be one of your modernizers. He’ll argue against any attempt to embargo Jago.’

‘Of course he’s a modernizer,’ laughed Chalph – although there was little humour in his growl of a voice. ‘Jago’s been a dead-end posting for embassy staff for centuries. The new ambassador is being sent here as a punishment! He was ambassador to the Kingdom of Jackals before. A bit of a demotion, don’t you think? From the most powerful nation in the world to this cold, dying place.’

‘How can you say that, Chalph? You were born here!’

‘You weren’t,’ said Chalph. ‘You should go home. Go anywhere there’s a future for you.’

‘This is my home.’

‘No,’ Chalph insisted. ‘The Kingdom of Jackals is your real home, this is just where you ended up.’

Hannah shook her head. ‘Jago is all I’ve known.’

‘It’s all I’ve known too,’ said Chalph. ‘But there’s more out there than this place.’ Chalph picked up a piece of rock and angrily tossed it in the direction of the Horn of Jago, the vast peak rising up behind them out of a cluster of the capital’s domed greenhouses. He threw the stone as if he might break one of the tall stained-glass windows along the senatorial palace circling the mountain. Hannah winced as the flare-house at the very top of the summit erupted with magnesium phosphorescence. A brief flash of light to help guide in the traders that had long ago stopped calling on the island.

‘It’s just that I don’t want you to go back to Pericur,’ said Hannah, trying to placate her quick-tempered friend. ‘Alice says there might be war between Pericur and the Kingdom of Jackals now there’s a new archduchess sitting on your throne.’

‘War? No, that’s foolish talk. I’m sure the archduchess would be happier if the Kingdom’s colonies disappeared from our southern border, but traditionalist though our new baronial council may be, they understand well enough the power of the Kingdom’s Royal Aerostatical Navy. The archduchess might close the border and hope the rest of the world goes away, but she won’t be invading Jackelian possessions anytime soon. Your people have airships, mine don’t.’

‘The Jagonese are my people,’ said Hannah.

‘Your parents were both Jackelian,’ said Chalph. ‘The senate can’t stop you leaving the island. You have a choice, at least. More of a choice than I have. I’m bonded in service to the House of Ush. I go where the baroness sends me, just like the baroness has to trade where the archduchess sells her the charter to operate. But you, you can travel to the Kingdom, to Concorzia, go to the Catosian city-states if the fancy takes you. But all you do is stay here. You’re wasting your life away on this island.’

‘It doesn’t feel like a waste to me.’

‘It should do,’ said Chalph. He pulled out a large Pericurian timepiece from a pocket in the heavy dark leather clothes that were the fashion among his nation. ‘You’re the cleverest person I know, but you’re surely one of the laziest too. The entrance exam is beginning now. You’re meant to be back at the cathedral, not watching steam shapes above the ocean.’

‘Yes,’ sighed Hannah, ‘I suppose I am.’ She pointed at one of the clouds of mist leaping up off the sea. ‘That one’s a lion.’

Chalph responded to the game and pointed at another wall of steaming mist rolling up behind the first. ‘And look, that one’s my future. Come on, let’s see if we can’t find you one too.’

It was a measure of how determined Chalph was to secure a life for Hannah off Jago that he had personally come to fetch her back to the cathedral. Ursine might be more or less the same height as their counterparts in the race of man, but the dense flesh and thick muscles of the bear-like people meant that a citizen of Pericur usually weighed twice as much as a similarly sized human. And Chalph urs Chalph had dragged his weight up every rung lining the air vent before wrestling open the heavy armoured door that opened out over the black cliffs of Jago.

Now both Hannah and Chalph had to descend hundreds of rungs back down to the subterranean city without slipping – always tricky the nearer you got to the surface; where the heat from the Fire Sea made sweaty, slippery hands – or paws – an occupational hazard when gripping the ladder. Ventilation passage ninety-two was a long way from the cathedral too, close to the submarine pens of the docks – like the rest of the capital, deep underground in the city’s machine-hewn vaults. But vent ninety-two’s isolation had an advantage. It was Hannah Conquest’s favourite way up to the surface. Without a single u-boat sitting moored in the underground pens among the hundreds of tugs waiting unmanned for trade that would probably never return to the island, there were rarely any adults around to see Hannah emerging from the vent shaft and report her to the police militia. It wasn’t so much that people feared Hannah and her friends might fall and break their necks – though that was often the stated concern that forbade them to leave the city – it was the fear that a careless child might leave open an armoured door up top, allowing in one of the beasts from the island’s cold interior.

Down below it was just as she had expected. Hannah and Chalph emerged from the vent watched only by the dark, empty eyes of passages that led to the underground water locks and lifting rooms up to the sea-bed. There were no tug crew about the docks; most of the sailors would be back home, drawing half-pay while their fire-breaker vessels sat equally idle tied up around the pens. Guiding the Pericurian ambassador’s u-boat out through the Fire Sea was a rare flurry of activity for the service this morning.

It was a long way back home through the Eliza Vaults – a lonely walk past empty warehouses and boarded-up taverns and guesthouses for sailors that no longer visited Jago’s shores, before Hannah and Chalph began to pass through the more inhabited parts of the capital, each vault larger than the last as they followed the connected chambers towards the heart of Hermetica City. The two friends travelled on foot, ignoring the cries from gondolas drifting along the city’s canals. Chalph was a junior apprentice in an increasingly impoverished foreign merchant house and Hannah a ward of the church, and neither had the little platinum pennies that a gondola owner would demand for a quick ride towards the cathedral.

It seemed to Hannah as if they had crossed every one of capital’s arched bridges by the time the waters widened out into the Grand Canal, and here at least Hermetica City still felt like a metropolis. Noise. Smells. Activity. People about the arcaded passages of shops, colonnaded walks that were still polished and cleaned by the district’s workers. People, it was always people that made a place. Little private skiffs moving down the canal, paddles turning under the power of chemical batteries with the whiff of eggs about them. Large oared barges moored for use as restaurants along the canal walls, bored kitchen staff leaning out of the windows to talk to idle gondola men. Hawkers’ cries filling the air, knife-grinding for a penny a blade, pig gelders offering their services to the increasing numbers of people keeping livestock in their canal-side houses and apartments. Not trusting to the scant food supplies coming down from the greenhouses on the surface, not now so many of their labourers had left for the fertile wheat plains of Concorzia. Where once civilization had clustered around the warm coastline of Jago as the glaciers moved south and enveloped the world under white sheets of ice, now the islanders were themselves clinging ever tighter to the noise and din of each other, leaving the fringes of their capital to the water rats, cavern bamboo and the shadows of their ancient glory.

Even the roof of the subterranean vaults seemed to burn brighter in the centre of the city, the diode plates shimmering above in an approximation of the sun the mist-shrouded island’s surface hardly ever saw, especially now, in the winter. Though the seasons mattered little to the Jagonese; not with their flash steam systems, powered by the underground water table warmed by volcanic action within, and the Fire Sea without. If only the island had more people. They could continue to live on Jago for another two thousand years – the machinations of the Archduchess of Pericur and the rising power of her nation on the opposite side of the Fire Sea be damned.

It wasn’t long before Hannah and Chalph reached the largest – and, some said, most elegantly carved vault in the city, the vast circular cavern of the Seething Round. Here, flanking the grand canal, buildings stood as high as twenty storeys, sash windows sparkling as brightly as jewels. And there at its centre, Jago Cathedral, the Grand Canal surrounding it like a moat, spanned by three bridges leading across to its chambers. The largest bridge – the south – lay opposite the steps leading up into the Horn of Jago itself, the mountain long ago hollowed out like a termite mound for the richest vaults and streets of the capital, topped by the senate and capped at its summit by their flare-house. Yes, the light of Jago had once burned with far more than the Fire Sea’s red glow reflected from its basalt cliffs. For those who ruled the city below from high inside the mountain, it probably seemed as if nothing had changed – and even Hannah, at her tender age, could see that that was part of the problem.

There were extra priests and vergers standing at all three bridges across to the cathedral now. Last month, Jago Cathedral had been broken into at night and the altar raided for silver, its collection boxes smashed. The crime no doubt perpetrated by would-be emigrants desperate to scrape together enough coins to bribe the harbour workers to look the other way when the next supply vessel docked.

Hannah chose the smallest bridge to try to sneak across to the cathedral, but Chalph’s heavy six-foot figure following behind her was unmissable. A tonsured priest sucked on his teeth in a disapproving way as they passed. ‘You may be late, Damson Conquest, but I can’t be letting your friend into the cathedral.’

‘Because he’s ursine?’

‘Because he’s a believer, miss. In the scriptures of Pericur, unless you’ve renounced your faith, Chalph urs Chalph?’

‘My house may be of a reforming bent,’ said Chalph, ‘but I don’t believe we’re ready to renounce the scripture of the Divine Quad quite yet. Atheists are treated less kindly in my nation than in yours.’

‘Then you and your faith shall stay on this side of our good Circlist dwelling, my fine-furred wet-snout friend, while young Hannah can go and make her apologies to the archbishop for an appointment ill-kept.’

Chalph glanced knowingly at Hannah, who was looking annoyed that the priest had used the insulting Jagonese name for an ursine: wet-snout indeed. ‘This place is just like the rest of Jago, it’s a relic. You remember what you’re going inside there for…it’s your future.’

She shrugged. ‘I’ll meet you out in the park later. We’ll see what the future looks like then.’

Hannah walked inside. Jago Cathedral wasn’t a relic to her, it was home. Wheel windows a hundred feet across painted the nave of the cathedral with brightly coloured illumination, much of it speckled by lines of formulae traced across each stained glass light. Formulae had always been important to the Circlist church – the church without a god. Some of them were scientific, outlining the known building blocks of creation. Others were the proofs and balances of synthetic morality – equations that proved society worked best when people worked together, that kindness to the weak was a thing of glory, to do unto others as you would have done unto you. The quantitative proof for the qualitative teachings of Circlism. Hannah’s eyes flicked across the stained glass. There, the elegant proof for the parable of the clear mind – openness of mind versus the infective vectors of a faith-based meme. Every koan and parable taught by the church was represented, through both equations and sublime rainbow-coloured images. Of all Jago’s arts, stained glass was the most celebrated: as was attested to by the double-lancet windows as tall as the cathedral’s spires, which adorned the island’s most important building, the senatorial palace.

Hannah found the archbishop lighting candles in the north transept where a simple steel hoop held a thousand red wax candles, one for each of the koans of the Circlist teachings. The candles were always going out, much as they did – so the archbishop said – in the hearts of the race of man that were meant to subscribe to them.

‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ announced Hannah.

Archbishop Alice Gray turned around with an appraising look at Hannah. What did she see before her? A young blonde girl with skin so pale it might as well be alabaster? The lazy blue-eyed youngster that hoped to follow the woman who had raised her into the Circlist church? A stubborn, slightly distant little dreamer who always seemed to cause mischief for the prelate who had taken her in as her ward after her parents’ death?

‘I don’t suppose you were off studying for the algebra test that Father Penley tells me he’s setting the church class at the end of the week?’ asked the archbishop.

‘I’ll pass it,’ said Hannah.

‘Yes, I’m sure you will. Then, undoubtedly you’ve been helping Damson Grosley fumigate the sleeping rooms for wall-louse.’

‘I tried,’ admitted Hannah. ‘But the brimstone was making me choke. I thought I was going to be sick.’

The archbishop rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not the only one who is being tried. That is the point of it, Hannah. That’s how you get rid of wall-louse.’

Sometimes, Hannah thought, the archbishop must have regretted taking her in aged three as a ward of the cathedral. If only Hannah’s parents’ boat hadn’t been incinerated in the Fire Sea. If only she’d had other relatives still alive in the Kingdom of Jackals, then they both might have been spared such perennial disappointments. If Archbishop Alice Gray had such thoughts, the perpetual look of concern that she wore on her face, whatever and whoever she was dealing with, effectively masked them.

Hannah followed the archbishop into a lifting room, past the belfry – then up into the rectory testing rooms, vestries, refectory, charterhouse and lodgings for the church staff that formed the cathedral’s highest level, but the lowest level of the Horn of Jago. Windowless at so low an elevation inside the mountain, and with nothing to look out on anyway except the frill of artillery tube placements waiting to drop mortar shells on anyone – or anything – foolish enough to try to storm either the capital’s walls or its harbour.

It was the rectory testing rooms that Hannah was interested in this afternoon, though; always more hopefuls waiting in front of testing tables than there were fathers with seminary experience to administer the tests. While every shop, mill and concern in Hermetica City perpetually displayed staff-wanted signs in their bow windows, the Circlist church had to turn away would-be novices queuing to enter its ranks. Or rather, sign up for the slim chance that the church might post them away from Jago and across the sea to one of the other Circlist nations.

The archbishop talked to the seminary head for a minute, before coming back towards Hannah.

‘Father Blackwater has had no message from the church council, nothing in the post sack that arrived with the boat from Pericur this morning.’

‘I need to sit the entrance exam,’ protested Hannah.

‘You are still two years away from being of age,’ said the archbishop. ‘You need special dispensation from the Rational Synod.’

‘Do I?’ asked Hannah. ‘You’re the Archbishop of Jago, you can grant me the dispensation.’

‘No.’ The archbishop shook her head, a stubborn glint in her green eyes that Hannah knew too well. ‘It would be wrong for me to intervene where I have a personal interest. You are my ward; I have to excuse myself from the examination process. It is the right and rational thing to do.’

Hannah lost her temper and jabbed a finger at the other hopefuls waiting for the Entick test, the measurement of their aptitude and mastery of synthetic morality. ‘So if I wasn’t your ward, if I was just one of them, you’d give me your dispensation to sit the church entrance exam early?’

‘You’re two years away from the age of testing,’ said the archbishop. ‘And any answer I have to give would be far too clouded by my feelings for you.’

‘I’m ready for it!’

‘I don’t doubt your abilities in casting analytical proofs, Hannah,’ said the archbishop. ‘There’s too much of your mother in you for you to be anything other than a mathematical prodigy. But you need a basis of experience to apply what you learn in the church, that’s why there’s an age set to take the test. If the church merely wanted to indoctrinate fanatics, if we wanted to train preachers, we’d have snatched you from your cot and invented deities to terrify your mind into obedience. You need a clear mind and a wise heart to work with your parishioners, with the experience of humility to know when you’re falling short of either of those.’

‘I don’t even want to leave the island,’ argued Hannah. ‘I’d be happy to stay on Jago, not try to land the first vacant Jackelian vicarage or Concorzian parsonage that comes up.’

‘I’m not concerned about you leaving the island.’

‘You are,’ accused Hannah. ‘You want to keep me here, wallowing in the same ignorance you’re sworn to try to banish.’

The archbishop sighed. ‘We’re not exactly a pit of ignorance here at the cathedral. I think you’ve been spending too much time listening to your ursine friend Chalph urs Chalph, young lady.’

Hannah could see this was an argument she wasn’t going to win, and she was distracting the others taking the entrance exam. Some of the seminary fathers were looking up irritably from behind the piled leather tomes full of questions and equations to solve. A few of the candidates were trying to twist their heads around inside their rubber helmets, rattling the heavy lead-lined cables going back to the Entick machines. The goggles inside the hood measured the dilation of the iris in an attempt to ensure the questions were being answered truthfully, and her heated debate with the archbishop was probably skewing results across the testing room.

‘Chalph is no fool. He said I’m going to have to leave the island to have a future,’ retorted Hannah. ‘Perhaps he’s right.’

‘“The finger that points at the moon isn’t the moon,”’ quoted the archbishop.

‘Oh, please,’ said Hannah, ‘of all the koans…this is Jago. I haven’t seen a moon through the mist for months.’

Hannah didn’t hear the archbishop’s reply. Someone was coming through the testing room door and her heart sank as she saw who it was. Vardan Flail. The long red robe he wore disguised the high guild master’s awkward movements. The Circle knew what mutations he was hiding under that intricately embroidered crimson garb! If a foreigner were to enter the cathedral and see the archbishop standing next to Vardan Flail, they would lay eyes on his fancy red velvet mantle with all its woven transaction-engine symbols, note the archbishop’s simple chequerboard-pattern cassock, and come to the conclusion that it was Flail who was head of the church here on Jago, not the archbishop.

A shiver went down Hannah’s spine as she smelled the mint-like fragrance that had been infused into the valveman’s velvet robes – sprayed, it was said, to disguise the smell of putrid flesh.

‘I hope,’ said the archbishop, ‘that you aren’t here to complain about the additional processing cycles that the testing sessions are going to require of your transaction engines.’

‘Hope,’ came the grinding voice under the cowl, ‘or pray?’

‘I won’t tolerate that filthy language here in the cathedral!’

Which was precisely why he had said it.

‘If you had need of extra processing power, I would bring the matter up in the appropriate forum – in front of the stained senate,’ said Vardan Flail. ‘We have power enough. It’s not you that I have come to see, it is your young ward here.’

Her? Hannah looked with disgust at Flail’s red cowl, just enough of the high guild master’s pockmarked features visible in the shadow of the hood to turn her stomach. What in the name of the Circle did the most loathsome high guild master in the capital want with her?

‘I have the results of the ballot,’ said Vardan Flail.

The ballot? Hannah’s stomach felt as if it was dropping down the city’s deepest airshaft.

‘Damson Hannah Conquest is one of the names that has been randomly selected for service within the guild.’

‘Randomly selected by the programs running on your transaction engines,’ said the archbishop.

‘I don’t care for your tone,’ warned Vardan Flail. He pointed slowly to the testing equipment and then up towards the diode panels in the stone roof of the testing room. ‘You seem happy enough to utilize the processing cycles of the engine rooms and draw power for the lights to keep your cathedral illuminated, but like everyone else here, you flinch at the sacrifices necessary to keep our island’s mighty turbine halls humming.’

‘I won’t do it,’ spluttered Hannah.

‘Not turning up for balloted service is considered desertion,’ threatened Vardan Flail, ‘and you are far too clever to let yourself be exiled for that crime, young Hannah Conquest. With your mind you will settle in fine with us as an initiate cardsharp. We won’t have that beautiful intellect of yours wasted hauling sacks of broken valves to the smelt or crawling inside the turbine halls’ generators to oil the magnets. No, within a year you’ll be able to turn out punch cards like you were born to it. Punch cards to control the most powerful transaction engines we possess. You will be able to make a difference that can be measured in the efficiency of everything you code.’

‘And end up like you?’ spat Hannah.

‘These are my blessings,’ said Vardan Flail, touching his arm. ‘The sacred scars of duty.’

‘The senate won’t need to exile me beyond the city walls. I can ship out for the Kingdom of Jackals any time I want.’

‘Legally perhaps,’ sneered Vardan Flail. ‘Although dual nationality and the application of the draft is still a point of law that is open to examination; I should know, I checked the legality of the situation quite thoroughly before I came to see you, little lady. How many new anti-emigration bills have been passed this year? You can spend the few days before your service starts looking at the empty docks and wondering when the next Jackelian u-boat is going to come calling – because we both know there won’t be any. And there’s not a supply-boat captain this side of the Fire Sea willing to risk the senate’s wrath by smuggling out a passenger without official exit papers.’

‘This is outrageous!’ said the archbishop. ‘I will protest to the senate.’

‘Of course you will. Everyone who is called to our service protests,’ said Vardan Flail, sadly, as if the desire not to end up concealing a twisted body underneath crimson robes was a personal calumny against him. ‘The bleating of our chosen is as natural as a steam storm after rain. After every annual ballot the floor of the senate is fleetingly filled with the cries of rich merchants’ sons who are too good for our guild – or prelate’s daughters who are too fine and unblemished to toil inside our vaults.’ Vardan Flail reached out to stroke Hannah’s face and she flinched back as his warm, wrinkled skin brushed against her face. ‘This isn’t your true beauty, girl, it’s in there.’ He prodded a finger against her forehead. ‘Yes, it is in there, and we shall use it well…’

Hannah watched in horror as the valveman’s claw-like fingers vanished back inside the sleeve of his robe. This wasn’t happening to her. This wasn’t any future fit for her! She was going to follow her guardian into the church, a quiet, easy life of meditation and reflection in the still peace of the cathedral. Thinking great and noble thoughts. Not bonded into labour for a beast like Vardan Flail, her body swelling and cracking and breaking until she too would have to scuttle through the streets of Hermetica City, hiding herself behind heavy robes from the gaze of everyone she knew on the island. Cursing mirrors, cursing her very reflection in the canal waters.

‘Off you go, Hannah,’ commanded the archbishop. ‘I think it’s time the high guild master and I continued our conversation alone in my chancellery office.’

Hannah waited in dread as the two of them left the testing room; the queuing would-be novices uncomfortably averting their gazes from the high guild master.

Then they were both gone and all Hannah could smell was the scent of mint in the air; mint and her cruelly crushed dreams.

‘What,’ asked archbishop Alice Gray as she shut the door to her chancellery office, ‘is this really about? I don’t come to the engine rooms and try to recruit your valvemen into the church orders. Is it too much to expect some of the same courtesy from a high guild master? Or is this what we have descended to now in Jago? So few people left to employ that we must poach labour from our neighbours’ staff?’

‘The courtesy is for a high guild master to take the time to come and serve a ballot notice personally,’ hissed Vardan Flail.

‘How gracious of you,’ said the archbishop. ‘Now, what’s your real motive? Is it Hannah you want, or…?’

‘There might be a way,’ replied Vardan Flail, ‘for me to forgo the services of your ward. A singular loophole in the statutes of the ballot of service that could be exploited.’

The archbishop’s green eyes narrowed. ‘Go on.’

‘The ballot is not allowed to fall on a high guild master’s own family. A very wise clause, don’t you think? You only have to see how the stained senate works – or rather, how it doesn’t – to know the harm that nepotism and favouritism within a guild would create.’

‘But Hannah Conquest is not a member of your family.’

Vardan Flail dragged his body to the window looking over the cloister chamber below. ‘She would be if you married me, Alice. Your ward, my ward. Everything squared. Or should that be joined on the Circle?’

‘So that’s what this is really about. You’ve had my answer on that matter before.’

Vardan Flail looked out of the window, gazing down towards the albino-pink blossom falling from the trees lining the cloister, a rain of it drifting in the draughts from the ventilation grilles. ‘The unlikeliest things can blossom in the vaults of Jago, Alice. Look down there, the only trees that prosper well under diode light. Is it so unlikely that a union between the two of us might do the same? The tenets of Circlism set no store on the physical appearance of things, only our true selves. And we’re very good Circlists in the engine rooms.’ He pulled out a heavily pockmarked palm from underneath his sleeve’s crimson velvet folds. ‘The flesh fades and what remains is true.’

‘Cavern bamboo also prospers like a weed down here. I don’t doubt your belief in Circlism,’ said the archbishop. ‘Sometimes it verges on faith—’ she pronounced the word like a curse ‘—but a meeting of minds is never enough for marriage, there must also be a meeting of hearts.’

‘There are other things I can offer you,’ said Vardan Flail. ‘Like immortality.’

‘A sketch of my face on paper isn’t me,’ said the archbishop, angrily. ‘And a simulacrum of myself sealed up in the valves of your transaction engines isn’t me, either. Our essence is cupped out into other lives after this. That’s the only permanence you can trust, all else exists only as currents in the stream.’

‘There must be someone else, another man,’ hissed Vardan Flail, ‘for you to keep rejecting me. Tell me who it is? Who has been courting you?’

‘A long time ago, maybe, but not now. I have the duties of my position and the needs of the people of Jago to serve and that is enough for me. It will need to be enough for you too, Vardan Flail.’

‘Then I will hold to them,’ spat the crimson-robed form, limping towards the door. ‘And I will hold to my duties with the fine mind of your ward added to the labours of the guild.’

‘Over my dead body!’

‘Your body really doesn’t matter,’ said Vardan Flail, menacingly as he departed. ‘Not any more.’

CHAPTER TWO

The Kingdom of Jackals. Middlesteel.

Boxiron walked towards the drawing room, his heavy iron feet echoing on the polished, veined marble. There was a strip of carpet before the doorway and the clunking of his feet faded, muffled just enough to enable him to hear the voices from those gathered inside the drawing room through its closed door. It was luxuriously appointed, this Middlesteel townhouse, but then that was to be expected. Only the wealthy could afford the services of Jethro Daunt and his trusty servant, Boxiron.

The constable guarding the door looked at Boxiron advancing with a curious expression on her face. Steammen were a common enough sight in the Kingdom of Jackals, but they weren’t usually quite so ramshackle. Boxiron had none of the grace of the creatures of the metal that bowed their knee to King Steam inside his mountain state. The modern shining skull of a steamman knight was inexpertly welded to the primitive body of a man-milled mechanical, steam hissing out of loose plates as he walked on his awkwardly jerking hinged feet.

‘You been out looking for clues?’ asked the constable, a simple crusher wearing the black uniform of the city’s constabulary.

Boxiron gave a slight shake of his head, the movement amplified into a spastic jerking by his unsynchronized neck controls. No. What would be the point of looking for further evidence of misdoings now? Cuthbert Spicer, Lord Commercial of the Kingdom of Jackals, was just as dead as the finer sensory control servos running along Boxiron’s neck, and both their masters now stood inside the drawing room for the culmination of the investigation – Inspector Reason of Ham Yard giving official sanction to the presence of Jethro Daunt and his metal servant.

Not that there was much of a pretence by anyone that the ex-man of the cloth would have been called in to uncover the truth of Lord Spicer’s murder without the insistence of the victim’s estate. Jethro Daunt’s keen intellect might have been arguably better employed here than it ever had been when he was the parson of Hundred Locks, but it was not an argument that you would ever hear coming from the lips of any constable or police inspector, eager to keep amateurs out of their profession. It was not as if the capital’s police force needed to feel threatened: for every high profile murder like Lord Spicer’s, there were a hundred cases of garden variety grave robbing, kidnapping, counterfeiting and pick pocketing where the injured parties lacked the resources to engage a consulting detective.

‘So, what are you here for then?’ asked the policewoman on the door.

Before Boxiron could answer there was a shout from inside the room and the door was flung open with some vigour, knocking the constable off her feet, her hand – which had been resting on her police cutlass – flying out to steady herself. Boxiron raised an arm and the exiting figure ran into it, crumpling as if a garden wall had dropped on top of his head. Knocked down to the carpet, the miscreant fumbled for the small pistol he had dropped and Boxiron took a step forward, his anvil-heavy foot smashing the gun and breaking at least three of the man’s fingers.

‘I am here for that,’ explained Boxiron to the constable. The steamman’s leg lashed out, kicking the villain in the ribs. ‘And that, and that, and that, and that…’

‘Good grief!’ came a bewildered shout from inside the drawing room. ‘Constable, stop that metal fellow, he’s beating Lord Spicer’s murderer to death.’

‘Not like that, officer!’ sounded a voice in warning. Boxiron’s vision plate was already focusing on the palm of the constable reaching down for her black leather holster, and he began to calculate the arc his right arm would need to shatter her pistol hand. ‘The lever! The lever on his back.’

Jethro Daunt lunged out of the doorway and dragged the lever on the back of the steamman’s smoke stack down through its gear positions, slotting it back into its lower-leftmost groove. The little engraved brass plate placed there by the manufacturer read ‘idle’, but Boxiron’s previous employers had scratched a line through the script and painted it over with the words ‘slightly less-murderous’, instead.

‘Boxiron can’t reach his gears by himself,’ said Jethro Daunt, apologetically.

Or rather, no household in their right mind would ever buy a Catosian city-state manufactured automatic that left its regulation in its own iron hands. Boxiron’s leg crunched down and the suspect’s beating was over; at least, the one he was going to receive from the consulting detective and his assistant. What he was going to receive inside the cells of Ham Yard was another matter. The constable forced the suspected murderer roughly to his feet, translating her embarrassment at being taken by surprise while on duty into a rather rude handling of her prisoner.

Boxiron turned to see Jethro Daunt and the police detective at the door behind him. Inspector Reason standing a shade under Daunt’s six foot – the inspector’s hard cynical face the polar opposite of the erudite, distinguished features of Boxiron’s beak-nosed employer. The others in the drawing room – all potential suspects – were hovering nervously, watching as the suspect was manacled.

‘But the Circle damn it, Daunt, how did you know that it was Spicer’s own doctor who killed him?’ asked the inspector.

‘He bobbed us for fools,’ explained Jethro Daunt. ‘The smell of elderflower in the library we came across wasn’t the bottle of scent that had cracked when Lord Spicer fell down inside the room. Its label read Kittle and Abrams, and their firm sell no scent with elderflower as an ingredient. The scent was a decoy to mask the smell of something else…a sleeping draught administered by the doctor to make Damson Stow fall asleep, giving the doctor time to wind back the carriage clock and make us think that the murder happened half an hour earlier than it actually did.’

‘But how did you know about the clock?’ asked the inspector.

‘Because when the doctor slipped back to reset it to the correct time, he did so using Damson Stow’s own pocket watch, and that runs ten minutes fast – she told me she kept it like that, so that she would never miss her day’s deliveries coming into her kitchen. And that’s why she also had to die. When the damson realized what the doctor had done, she tried to blackmail him over Lord Spicer’s murder.’

‘Poor woman,’ said the inspector. ‘She probably never knew the doctor was the illegitimate child of Lord Spicer and her sister.’

‘Raised with enough money to pass through the royal college of medicine,’ said Jethro, ‘but not enough to paper over the grievances of the family fortune sliding away from him and towards his half-brothers and sister.’

‘You almost cheated the hangman out of a handsome crowd,’ the inspector said to Boxiron. ‘They’ll pay more than a penny a seat to see a respected doctor swing outside the walls of Bonegate.’

‘Sorry, inspector,’ apologized Boxiron. ‘My steam was up and my gears slipped.’

‘No harm done, eh, old steamer.’

Now securely restrained by the constable’s manacles, the murderer winced at the pressure his arms, bent around his back, were putting on the ribs the steamman had cracked. ‘My father said I was a god for curing him. But I cured him of everything that was wrong with him in the end. What sort of god does that make me?’

‘The only sort there are, I am afraid,’ said Jethro, sadly. ‘The rather dangerous kind.’

Behind the ex-parson, the other suspects had fallen into a staccato chattering – proclaiming that they had known all along the killer hadn’t been any of those left inside the drawing room.

Jethro Daunt shook his head at their naivety and caught up with Boxiron’s hulking form just before the heavy steamman departed the town house, his voicebox muttering to himself in machine-like echoes. When his friend’s steamman head had been attached to the centaur-like form of a steamman knight, his voicebox has possessed the power to cast a battle cry that could burst a human heart inside its chest. Now it was attached to an inferior piece of Catosian machinery, however, all Boxiron could do was whisper half-mad dialogues to himself – cursing the Steamo Loas and the cruel hand of fate for how he had ended up.

‘You did well enough, good friend,’ said Jethro, laying a hand on the steamman’s cold iron shoulder. ‘You prevented the doctor from escaping.’

‘I nearly killed him. My thoughts travel too fast for this body,’ said Boxiron, allowing only a small trace of self-pity to escape into his voice. ‘Stuck in a loop every time I overreach myself.’

‘The mind is willing but the flesh is weak,’ said Jethro, opening the front door onto the neat square in Middlesteel’s expensive western district, the railings of the crescent thoroughly polished, a thousand metal spears gleaming in the sunshine.

‘It’s not my flesh that is weak,’ said Boxiron, his legs pistoning down the wide porch steps to the cobbled pavement below. ‘That’s one burden I don’t carry.’

Jethro angled a nose that was too proud for his kind face towards the cab rank at the end of the street, and one of the drivers flicked his whip, sending a midnight-black mare clattering forwards. Just before the hansom cab could reach the two of them, though, it was cut up by a larger coach, this one a horseless carriage with iron wheels as tall as a man at the rear. As his horse spooked, the cab driver swore furiously, shaking his fist at the whining clockwork contraption. But the new vehicle wasn’t a rival in the carriage trade, for all that its black iron matched the sheen of the hansom cab’s dark walnut exterior.

Riveted iron doors swung open on each side of the horseless carriage, tall men dressed like Circlist monks with simple grey robes stepping out onto the street side and staring down the cabbie, who swapped his obscenities for a final scowl before driving off. On the pavement side of the carriage, a nun aged about sixty stepped out, dressed like her companions – although she had not tonsured her greying hair, but had her locks tied back in two buns above her ears. The monks stood very still, with a calmness that hung in the air like the glint of sunlight on a brandished dagger.

Boxiron stomped noisily on the pavement, his hulking, unwieldy body swivelling to take in the ranks of monks now surrounding them – more exiting from the second iron room at the back of the horseless carriage. Some of the monks carried staffs and Jethro Daunt doubted they were intended to aid infirmities or for the long travels of a pilgrimage. He just hoped Boxiron didn’t slip a gear now.

‘I have been defrocked,’ said Jethro. ‘I’m no longer in the church.’

The woman’s head rocked to one side. Of course she would know that. It would have been people rather like these pressing the ecclesiastical court to throw him out of his parsonage.

‘I understand you have been operating as a consulting detective for the last few years,’ said the woman.

‘That is true,’ said Jethro.

‘Of course it is. I wish to consult with you.’ There was quite a tone of menace in that single word, for all the eerie calmness in her face.

‘Well, well,’ said Jethro. ‘I’ll be bobbed. Of all the people in the capital I might have expected to be conversing with about my current mode of employment, your people are the very last ones I would have expected to turn up.’

‘As it should be,’ noted the woman. ‘Of those that know of the existence of the League of the Rational Court, there are even fewer that should be aware when they are about to be touched by our hand.’

Jethro looked at the open door of the carriage and the woman pointing to the empty red leather seat opposite the one she had just vacated. An invitation with exceedingly little choice in it. And carriage rides with these people were sometimes one-way affairs.

The hand of the Circlist church’s League of the Rational Court. The hand of the Inquisition.

Hannah Conquest pushed aside the thick brambles to try and find the path. Like all of the great domed greenhouses nestled in the shadows of the Horn of Jago, Tom Putt Park was named after its creator – or at least the merchant notable who had paid for it to be constructed. Nestling against the battlements, far from the city, Tom Putt Park had drawn the short straw when it came to maintenance from the dwindling band of park keepers and farm labourers. They were presently engaged in the serious business of feeding the capital, not pruning the wild-running hedges and copses under Tom Putt’s crystal geodesic canopy.

It always felt a curious thing to Hannah, moving through the bush and the greenery of the park. In a very real sense she wasn’t walking on the soil of Jago. All the dirt here, and in every other park and farm dome, not to mention the tree beds in Hermetica’s vaults below, had been imported by traders’ barges in centuries past. Dirt from the Kingdom of Jackals on the far side of the Fire Sea, as well as from Pericur and the other nations on the opposite shores. The native top-soil beyond the capital’s battlements was fit only for growing stunted fruitless orchards, those and the island’s blackened forests of thorns that cut at travellers with the sharpness of the machetes needed to hack out a passage amongst them. Not that many dared to venture outside without wearing heavily armoured walking machines – RAM suits, as the trappers and city maintenance workers called them. The aging power tunnels that fed the city with the energy its people required always needed upkeep, as did the iron aqueducts carrying in fresh drinking water down from the hills. A job that was almost as unappealing as what Hannah suspected was in store for her with the guild…

Hannah found the path again and after a minute came to the flint wall that would lead her to the stone singers. Chalph urs Chalph was waiting by the circle of moss-stained marble statues when she came to the clearing, looking as if he might join in the fertility song the circle of carvings were said to be singing to the stone apple tree in their centre. A reminder of more prosperous times that had once paid for the park and its upkeep. There was little time for wassailing now. The city was lucky if its entire crop could be collected before it spoiled lying on the domes’ dirt.

‘I’ve just seen the ballot list posted,’ Chalph called to her. ‘Although if I hadn’t, the look on your face might tell me the tale by itself.’

‘Well, I’ve found my future,’ said Hannah. ‘Rotting away in the engine rooms as an initiate of the Guild of Valvemen.’

‘The draft ballot’s been nailed up everywhere in the city. The senate are calling more people than ever before this year for the protected professions.’ He licked at a paw-like hand. ‘But you have dual citizenship through your parents. You can just leave…’

‘How, by walking across the Fire Sea?’ asked Hannah. ‘That twisted jigger Vardan Flail seems to think the supply boat from Pericur isn’t going to be selling tickets out of here when it comes to me, not to anyone who’s been called by the draft, in fact.’

‘There must be something you can do…’

‘I don’t want to end up like them,’ said Hannah, almost sobbing. ‘Have you ever seen what’s under a valveman’s robes? Working in the engine rooms changes your body, kills you eventually.’

‘You can claim asylum,’ speculated Chalph. ‘The Jackelian ambassador, the short fellow with the red nose, he could grant you asylum in his embassy.’

‘That old fool? Sir Robert Cugnot is lucky to remember to stuff the cork back in his wine bottle before he turns in of a night. How are he and his staff going to keep me safe? Nobody can dodge the draft now, the militia always finds you. It doesn’t matter where you hide, in a friend’s house, in one of the empty quarters, they always track you down in the end.’

‘Then take the seminary vows like you wanted to,’ urged Chalph. ‘You’re clever enough to pass the examinations and the guild can’t draft you if you’re already working for the church.’

‘Alice won’t waive the age limit for me,’ said Hannah. ‘I begged her. But I’m her ward and proffering me for early advancement is not the right and rational thing to do.’

Chalph shook his heavy dark-furred head in anger. ‘And letting your body cook in the energies of the guild’s engine rooms is?’

‘That won’t be Alice’s choice; it’ll be Vardan Flail’s. Circle damn the man, I hate him. Always coming around the cathedral, trying to ingratiate himself with Alice, the stink of decay and death on his robes.’

‘I’ll get you out of here,’ promised Chalph. ‘The supply boat from Pericur is owned by the House of Ush. I’ll find one of our sailors willing to take on board a stowaway, there must be one of them who’ll help me.’

‘The militia search the boats now before they let them leave. But it won’t come to that,’ said Hannah, trying to sound more hopeful than she actually felt. ‘Alice will argue for me. She’s cleverer than the whole stained senate put together. If there’s a loophole…’

Chalph was about to answer when he turned his head and sniffed the air. ‘It – no!’

Hannah couldn’t smell anything, but she could hear the distant crackle of brambles as something heavy pushed through the undergrowth. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s an ursk,’ whispered Chalph.

‘How would the monster get inside the park? It should have been fried coming over the city wall,’ said Hannah, looking uncertainly in the direction of the noise. ‘Ursks are similar enough to your people, Chalph. You must have the scent of one of your house-men coming looking for you skiving.’

‘Ursks are nothing like my people,’ said Chalph, backing up. He seized Hannah’s arm. ‘Run! Back to the entrance now.’

Hannah let her friend break through the passage of greenery ahead of her, trampling bushes and breaking creepers with his mass. If it was an ursk…Chalph had a keen nose, but the monsters that inhabited the island’s interior depended on theirs for feeding. She heard the crashing behind them – a savage racket. Just the sort of clatter something twice as heavy as an ursine would make loping after them. How many times had Hannah heard people sitting at the tea-tables in the vaults below whispering that the killing charge running along the city’s battlements was failing now, predicting that something like this would happen sooner or later?

Chalph howled in fear and rage as he pushed forward, but there was no one else to hear it in Tom Putt Park. That was the point of coming here, you could be alone without being spotted by priests and housemen and assigned the kinds of tasks that often came to mind when faced with idling youngsters. Chalph’s howl was echoed by something similar-sounding, but louder, coming from behind them. That sound came from no ursine! Off to their side another roar answered the first, a quick bestial exchange of information. Two ursks, or more? How had the monsters got over the battlements alive? A section of Hermetica’s defences had to be down. Their sloping iron ramparts were over forty feet high, the electric charge they carried enough to hurl back the corpse of any creature unwise enough to touch them.

Hannah urged her cramping legs to hurry. Ursks, what did she know about ursks? Nothing that could help them here. Only stories from the men that ventured outside the walls: trappers, hunters, and city maintenance workers. Tales of bear-like monsters that prowled the basalt plains and volcanic mountains. Twice the size of a Pericurian and thrice the weight of anyone from the race of man. Monstrous, thick-furred killers that hunted in packs and could rip a Jagonese citizen apart in seconds with their claws. Almost – but not quite fully – sentient, with enough guile and cunning to plan ambushes and lure those travelling overland away from the safety of a well-armed caravan. Always hungry, always prowling the capital’s battlements.

Hannah tripped on part of the crumbling old path through the undergrowth just as a long, black-furred shape seemed to pass endlessly through the air where she had been standing; the stench of rotten, steam-slicked fur filling her nose. It didn’t matter how many of its pack had broken through the wall alongside this monster. Hannah and Chalph were unarmed. This single ursk would be more than enough to kill them a dozen times over.

Still on the ground, Hannah scrambled back in terror, gaping at the foul thing that landed snarling in front of her, a nightmare carved in flesh.

Jethro Daunt climbed into the horseless carriage’s forward compartment and Boxiron made to clamber up behind him, but the nun shook her head at the steamman and pointed across to an organ grinder entertaining a group of children in the crescent’s garden opposite. ‘Not you. We require the one playing, not the one dancing.’

The red light behind Boxiron’s vision plate flared in anger, but Jethro shook his head at his friend. ‘There’s really no call to be impolite, good sister.’

‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘My apologies, steamman. Your talents are not what I require presently.’

‘I use my talents to keep my softbody friend here safe,’ spat Boxiron.

The woman merely smiled in reply.

‘We’re in the open, it’s daylight and we’ve just walked out of a house filled with Ham Yard’s finest detectives,’ said Jethro to the steamman. ‘Save your top gear for the moment, good friend, I believe my life is safe.’

Boxiron looked at the large monks climbing back into the rear room of the carriage. ‘You may be without gods, but if I find a hair out of place on Jethro softbody’s head when next I see him, you will find cause to wish you had someone to pray to.’

Opposite Jethro, the nun shrugged nonchalantly. ‘The funny thing about those Steamo Loas you worship, creature of the metal, is that even on closer examination, they’re still mostly steam.’

As their carriage pulled away, Boxiron began to clump angrily back towards their lodgings at number ten Thompson Street.

‘He’s hardly subtle,’ said the nun, watching the gas lamps whisk past now that her horseless carriage was speeding up.

‘As you said,’ noted Jethro,’ it’s not what he’s for. He’s a topping old steamer, really.’

‘And what are you for, Jethro Daunt?’

‘I’m all for whiling away my remaining years on the Circle’s turn with as much serenity as I can find,’ said Jethro, rummaging around in his pocket to withdraw a crumpled paper bag filled with black and white-striped sweets. ‘Would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop? They’re quite wondrous.’

The nun looked at the bag with barely disguised disgust. ‘You realize those foul things are highly addictive? The sugar is mixed with poppy opiates. Parliament should have outlawed them years ago.’

‘Slander on the part of their competitors, I am sure,’ said Jethro. ‘They help me to think. I don’t suppose you are going to tell me your real name, or your rank within the Inquisition?’

‘Not if you insist on calling us by that vulgar name,’ said the woman. ‘You’re a little too educated to be reading the penny dreadfuls.’

‘The League of the Rational Court, then, if you prefer,’ replied Jethro. ‘I would say you are a mother superior.’

The woman picked up a heavy folder from her side, its contents protected by a wax seal. It put Jethro in mind of a ministry dispatch box, the kind you might spy from the visitors’ gallery at the House of Guardians, being carried by a politician on the floor below.

‘Deduced from my age or the size of my carriage?’

Jethro pulled out his pocket watch, the chain dangling from his green waistcoat. ‘From the time, good sister.’

The woman raised an eyebrow.

‘Half an hour to read the petitions a mother superior accepts before lunch, another half an hour to get here for midday.’

‘That would suggest you know where the league is based.’

‘You’ll be surprised at what can be whispered in dreams,’ said Jethro. ‘Even postal addresses, sometimes.’

‘Which gods do you hear the most, now?’

‘You mean the gods that don’t exist?’ smiled Jethro. ‘On balance, I would say Badger-headed Joseph is my most frequent visitor, although I find what Old Mother Corn whispers to me is often the most reliable.’

The woman broke the seal on the folder and opened it, lifting out a parcel of papers tied tightly with red cord. ‘It’s small bloody wonder we threw you out of the church.’

‘I wonder about it,’ said Jethro. ‘I wonder about it all the time. But haven’t I kept my end of the bargain? Not a hint of scandal, no stories about me in the penny sheets.’

‘Not as the ex-parson of Hundred Locks,’ said the woman. ‘But you’ve been keeping busy as the proprietor of Daunt’s Private Resolutions. Quite a reputation you’ve built up among the quality, solving cases, hunting down criminals.’

‘So you say.’

‘I find it slightly grubby, myself,’ muttered the woman. ‘All those years the church spent training you in synthetic morality and here you are now, applying your finely honed mind to uncovering sordid infidelities and unmasking common poisoners.’

‘There’s exceedingly little that’s common about such crimes. To keep the gods from the people’s hearts, you must first understand the people,’ quoted Jethro. ‘And while I acknowledge your disdain for my new calling, I believe expediency has driven you to seek out those same skills as much as it has pushed me towards a career outside the church to keep my coal scuttle full and the bailiffs from my door.’

‘The irony isn’t lost on me,’ said the mother superior, passing the parcel of papers across to Jethro.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘A murder,’ said the woman.

‘It must be important for you to come to me.’

‘Clearly.’

‘Important enough for you to give me back my parsonage if I asked for reinstatement in the rational orders as my payment?’

The reverend mother laughed heartedly, the first real emotion Jethro had seen her demonstrate. ‘We don’t let people inside the Circlist church who believe in gods. Not as parishioners, and certainly not as parsons. I do believe your ancient gods have driven you quite mad.’

‘As I told your people at my hearing, I don’t believe in them,’ retorted Jethro.

She shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps they believe in you, rather than vice versa. It doesn’t matter. The distinction is irrelevant and besides, we’re asking you to investigate precisely because you’re not in the church. Believe it or not, we do have a few minds in the league that are almost as proficient in synthetic morality as the much-vaunted Jethro Daunt. Aren’t you going to open the folder? You will quickly see why we believe this case would be of particular interest to you.’

‘No,’ said Jethro. ‘I’m not interested in your money, I’m not interested in working for the Inquisition, and most of all, I’m not interested in continuing this conversation.’

‘We can offer you a hundred guineas to take the case, triple that upon a successful conclusion.’

‘I’ve already got a hundred guineas,’ Jethro told the woman. ‘I get to choose the members of my flock now.’

The woman sniffed disapprovingly, then banged on the roof of her carriage for it to draw to a halt. ‘Keep the folder. Read the papers. It sounds as if you already know where to send your note indicating that you agree to be engaged.’

‘Not in a hundred years, good mother superior,’ said Jethro, opening the door and starting to climb down the steps extending towards the street with a clockwork clack. ‘Not even in a thousand.’

The nun leant out of the window. ‘Is it just the precepts of synthetic morality that have helped you solve all the cases you’ve taken, Jethro? Or do the voices you hear at night whisper other things, too? What do all those ranks of pagan gods really murmur to you?’

‘That the intellect is only a lie to make us realize the truth.’

‘Just send word,’ tutted the woman at Jethro’s blasphemy. Her carriage pulled away, the hum of the engine disappearing as it rounded a corner.

Jethro looked at the collection of papers in his hand and pulled his cloak tight against the cold of the afternoon. The folder’s contents would do for a five-minute crackle of kindling in his fire grate, if nothing else.

Jethro Daunt knew many things: the things that his finely tuned mind could extract from the pattern of life swirling around him, and the things that the ancient gods hissed at him in his dreams. But what he didn’t know was what in the name of the Circle had possessed the Inquisition to think that he could possibly be coerced, tricked or cajoled into working for the same organization that had hounded him out of the church.

Jethro ran his fingers thoughtfully through his long sideburns, the black running to silver now, and cleared his throat as he always did before he sucked on an aniseed ball and his brain began to whir.

‘How extremely diverting,’ he whispered to himself, balancing the papers in his hand.

Then he strode back towards his apartment.

Twisting on the overgrown path where she had fallen, Hannah flinched back from the snarling, intertwined forms – Chalph lost in the larger black mass of the ursk. Chalph, brave suicidal Chalph, who had charged the beast when they were cornered. Not only was the creature attacking them at least twice the weight of Hannah’s ursine friend, its fur was matted across a leather-thick skin hardened against the steam mists and geyser plumes of the volcanic landscape outside. You would be hard pressed to have opened its hide with a sabre, let alone the tooth and claw of a mere ursine cub.

But a turret rifle, that would do it. As the ursk angrily tossed Chalph off itself, throwing him back into the brambles and rearing up on all fours, its chest exploded open. Toppling backward, the ursk fell to the side of Hannah and landed like a collapsing mountain an inch shy of Chalph’s leather boots. Hannah glanced up to see a three-foot long rifle being lowered, the rotating ammunition drum clacking to a halt as the finger depressing the trigger uncurled and the clockwork-driven mechanism slowed. Hannah scrambled back as the cable attached to the shooter’s brass tank of compressed gas went limp and dropped past her nose.

Hannah pointed back through the brambles they had flattened while fleeing the ursk. ‘There’s at least one more over there.’

The free company fighter that had come to their rescue – at least a head taller than Chalph at seven foot – growled in acknowledgement. ‘And it knows what the bark of a turret gun sounds like, as it should.’ The soldier sniffed the air with her black nose. ‘It’s heading over to the other side of the park.’

Chalph picked himself up from the dirt. ‘Stom urs Stom, what are the free company doing inside the park?’

‘Our job,’ growled the over-sized soldier. She had a leather patch covering her left eye socket and looked like a brown-furred buccaneer as she scowled down at Hannah and her friend. ‘The guard post reported seeing ursks coming over the wall. It looks like a section of the battlements have lost their charge.’

‘How can that happen?’ demanded Hannah. It was a rhetorical question.

‘Lack of repairs would be my guess,’ said Stom. ‘Not enough people left on the island to maintain anything the way it should be kept. Now, stay close, this one’s friend might be circling around to take us from the rear.’

The soldier strode forward as Hannah and Chalph trailed in her wake, Chalph’s triangular black nose snuffling the air for a clue to the second monster’s whereabouts. ‘But its scent is coming from the other side.’

The soldier angrily raised her paw-like hand. ‘Hold your tongue, Chalph urs Chalph. It’s pissed on the undergrowth over there to draw us off in the wrong direction.’ She thrust a finger to the left. ‘I hunt that way. Stay behind my rifle to stay alive.’

‘Chalph was just trying to help,’ said Hannah.

‘When I want a price for grain I will ask a junior clerk from the House of Ush’s advice,’ said the soldier. ‘The first time you underestimate an ursk, little furless cub, is the last time you underestimate an ursk.’

They passed an overgrown gazebo built from flint sealed with white mortar. Chalph whispered to Hannah as the mercenary forged ahead through the abandoned park. ‘Stom urs Stom is the captain of the free company. Don’t ever cross her. Even the baroness is wary of her.’

In front, the soldier raised her paw and Hannah and Chalph stopped. Stom urs Stom peered suspiciously around a thicket of birch trees. They were almost at the edge of the park, the greenhouse’s crystal walls rising above their heads. Hannah could hear the wind from outside close by. They must be near where the ursk had cracked the dome to gain entry after scaling the battlements. Stom stalked forwards, her dark leather clothes disappearing through the trees. Hannah heard her curse and quickly followed. A manhole cover had been wrenched out of a stone conduit running around the base of the greenhouse wall, just large enough for an ursk to drop through. Hannah looked over the edge. She could just see a fast-flowing stream of water below, its heat striking her face. A flash-steam conduit, part of the city’s heating system – and it would eventually lead to the vaults of the capital below.

‘It’ll die down there,’ said Hannah.

‘An ursk can swim through superheated geyser water before diving for an hour in a frozen lake,’ said the soldier. ‘What’s down in those drains won’t kill it.’ She patted her rifle. ‘What’s in here will.’

Voices sounded from the break in the dome, ursine voices talking in the modulated growls of the Pericurian language. Stom urs Stom moved towards the smashed panels of the dome and barked orders at her fighters.

The reality of what had just occurred sank into Hannah. Ursks and the other creatures of the interior had occasionally breached the battlements before, when the wall’s killing power failed, but they had always been shot down outside. She couldn’t ever remember a time when they had got into Hermetica City’s vaults – it was the citizens’ greatest fear.

Hannah realized the fact that she and Chalph had been in the abandoned park – the same park the ursks had smashed into – would put them under suspicion of complicity in the creatures’ intrusion. Chalph, the apprentice merchant, one of the venal wet-snout foreigners profiting from Jago’s hard times. Hannah, the lazy church girl whose parents weren’t even Jagonese, the reckless outsider who was known to climb air vents to travel beyond the vaults.

They were both in a great deal of trouble now.

The streets were alive with people when Hannah and Chalph followed the hulking mercenary captain down into the central vaults of Hermetica City. The diode lamps in the roofs of the caverns had dimmed for the evening, while the street lamps burned a brilliant yellow. Mobs of citizenry ran around the canal-lined streets carrying chemical braziers, most clustering tightly around the green-uniformed police militia with their long rifles. Heavy free company soldiers swept their turret rifles’ barrels across the surface of the canal from gondolas running low in the water. The vaults were the territory of the Jagonese police militia. The fact that so many mercenary fighters had been allowed down from the battlements at all was a sign of how bad the situation was.

Stom urs Stom stopped on a bridge and one of her ursine fighters came running up alongside a Jagonese militiaman, halting to beat her chest with her paw in a salute. Stom looked at her fighter. ‘Why are the city lights still on evening time? We need full daylight to hunt properly.’

‘We have sent word to the Guild of Valvemen,’ the militiaman interjected defensively, ‘but it may not be possible to switch the city to daylight quickly enough to serve the search.’

‘Why should it be otherwise?’ growled Stom urs Stom. ‘When it seems the guild can’t even keep the battlements fully charged now?’

The militiaman snorted as he heard this. Hannah knew there was an intense rivalry between the local police militia and the foreign mercenaries who had usurped their ancient position as the battlements’ sentries, and this man did not take kindly to the city’s institutions being belittled by wet-snout savages. He slotted the base of his staff of office in a control socket on the highest point of the bridge, sliding up a panel to expose a line of keys enamelled with shorthand communication symbols, and began tapping out a message – no doubt a call for extra police to be dispatched towards their position.

From lower down the canal there were shouts from one of the gondolas, the guttural cry of a free company mercenary followed by the howl of depressurizing gas from the brass tank on the fighter’s back. As she fired her turret rifle spouts of water erupted where her pitons struck. A forest of bobbing torches and the insistent cries of the crowd up on the streets indicated that the mercenary had found one of the intruders.

‘There!’ cried Hannah as a black shape glided under another gondola. The gondola slammed into the air, unseating both the gondolier and his mercenary passenger. The man fell into the water screaming and disappeared thrashing inside a bubbling maelstrom, while the mercenary hit the water silently. She must know that she would be next, after the ursk swimming underneath finished off the weakest victim – the gondolier. She didn’t even try to swim to the side of the canal.

‘Shoot the water!’ the militiaman next to Hannah shouted at the mercenaries. ‘Shoot the water, she’s dead down there anyway.’

But none of the massive Pericurian mercenaries was listening. A couple of seconds after the gondolier had disappeared, the mercenary fighter was pulled under the water, vanishing as quickly as if she had just winked out of existence. Almost instantly a massive plume of water gushed up in her place, showering the bridge where Hannah stood with steaming water.

A guttural humming sounded from the mercenaries, and they raised their fists towards the vault’s roof as they sang the death hymn for their comrade. Hannah glanced down at her clothes. The water that had spattered her was tinged crimson with the blood of the ursk and of the dead foreign mercenary.

‘It was her kill,’ said Stom to the militiaman, patting the belt of spherical grenades looping around her waist. ‘That is why we did not fire. It was her kill. Turret rifle bolts are slowed by water. The ursk we hunted knew that.’

‘She killed herself,’ said the militiaman in disgust. ‘You people truly are savages.’

Hannah looked at the tall mercenary commander silently scanning the water. No. The ursine were a force of nature. Fractious, quick to temper, but magnificent. Quite magnificent.

‘There might be more monsters in the canals,’ said Hannah.

‘If there are, the presence of the crowds will keep them in the water,’ said Stom, grimly.

But word of the ursks infiltrating the city was to come quicker than any of them had anticipated. Another militiaman came running up to the bridge and after a brief exchange with his superior, the green-uniformed man turned to Stom. ‘Your fighters are requested to deploy in the Seething Round, wet-snout. There has been an attack there.’

Hannah looked with horror towards Chalph. An attack on the vault where she lived.

‘Where?’ demanded Hannah. ‘Where inside the Seething Round?’

‘The cathedral,’ replied the militiaman. ‘It’s the archbishop. She’s been torn apart by the bloody beasts.’

CHAPTER THREE

It was the same dream that Jethro Daunt always had. He was back inside the confessional of his parsonage at Hundred Locks. They didn’t even know – many of the refugees who came to him – what a Circlist church meant. Its stone didn’t look much different to that of the churches across the Kingdom of Jackals’ borders. It wasn’t as if the refugees could look at the flint walls and know there were no gods inside them. The churches in Quatérshift were filled with the paraphernalia of the Sun Child, and a light priest’s cassock wasn’t so different from a Circlist parson’s clothes – the golden sunburst of their deity replacing the silver circle. But there were no gods in this church, no gods.

Jethro sweated on his side of the confessional, his cubicle a claustrophobic trap. He heard a scratching on the other side of the grille, a claw dragging across the filigree of equations etched across the walls. Not one of the refugees, this time, then. One of the others. The ancient things that usually visited his dreams afterwards. Black and silver fur brushed against the grille, and a snorting like that of a bull wading in a water meadow sounded from the other side. Badger-headed Joseph. An ancient god that was meant to have lightning for sight, except Jethro never got to see its eyes.

‘Fiddle-faddle fellow,’ growled Badger-headed Joseph, in the kind of voice that you would expect to come from something half-man and half-beast. ‘Are you shy, Jethro Daunt, little man, little fiddle-faddle fellow? Too shy to open the Inquisition’s post?’

Jethro glanced down towards his lap. There was the package, still unopened, the gift of the Inquisition’s highly placed emissary. ‘It is not my business; it is the Inquisition’s. I reject it and I reject you, Badger-headed Joseph.’

More scratching sounded from the other side. ‘Do you reject curiosity, too, fiddle-faddle fellow? Part of you must want to know what’s in the folder. Whose name is in the folder? The same part of you that stuck your hand in the fire when you were a child. When your grandfather warned you to watch out for the embers.’

‘I am Jethro Daunt, I am my own man. I serve the rational order.’ He tried humming the algebra-heavy mantra of the first hymn that sprang to mind, but the scratching grew louder, breaking the concentration needed to enter a meditation.

‘Take care, little fiddle-faddle fellow. You make your intellect your god – it has powerful muscles but a poor personality. Not like me. Here comes the rain…’ There was a moaning noise of relief on the other side of the confessional booth and a powerful stench assailed Jethro’s nose. The ancient god was urinating against his side of the booth.

‘This is a rational house,’ shouted Jethro, retching. ‘It has no place for you, Badger-headed Joseph. No place for the old gods. I cast you out!’

‘You’re not a parson anymore,’ growled the voice behind the grille. ‘Make me happy, fiddle-faddle fellow; indulge your curiosity with the packet.’

Jethro Daunt woke with a start. His bedroom was dark save for the illumination of the triple-headed gas lamp in Thompson Street burning beyond his window. Just enough light to see the tightly bound folder from the Inquisition.

He looked at it, the echo of his grandfather’s warning as his hand reached for the fire grate whispering across the darkness.

Boxiron thumped along the corridor. He had trouble enough approximating sleep during the small hours, the hearing folds on the side of his head wired into the inferior routing mechanisms of the man-milled neck join randomly amplifying the sounds of the night.

Opening the door with far more vigour than he had expected – or requested – from his arm servos, Boxiron was faced with a sight strange even for their chambers at Thompson Street.

Jethro Daunt was in the middle of the floor, the folder from the Inquisition cut open with a letter knife. Papers and notes sodden with the consulting detective’s tears were scattered across a rug in the centre of the room.

Glancing up, Jethro noticed the steamman as he entered. ‘She’s dead. After all these years, she’s dead.’

The light in the centre of Boxiron’s vision plate flared with anger. This was the Inquisition’s work. It wasn’t just Jethro Daunt who was an expert at staring into a softbody’s soul. Curiosity. Curiosity could always be counted on to undermine Jethro’s resolve. Every time. The Loas damn the devious minds of the Inquisition.

‘You’re going to do what they want, aren’t you? You’re going to take their case.’

Jethro rested his spine against the foot of the bed and stared up at the ceiling, a blank look on his face. A mask. ‘Of course I am.’

And where Jethro went, Boxiron would inevitably follow. As he so often did, Jethro began to hum one of his mad little ballads as he leafed through the papers spread around him. He didn’t hum church hymns anymore, that pained him too much; but he had picked up many ditties from the drinking houses their informers frequented. ‘Well of all the dogs it stands confessed, your Jackelian bulldogs are the best.’

The steamman noticed the stack of unpaid bills on the table in the room, a little higher every day. Boxiron hoped that the League of the Rational Court could be counted upon to pay more promptly than Lord Spicer’s estate.

It was a terrible sight to see inside the cathedral – normally so tranquil and shaded – now lit by the brightly burning diode lamps of the police militia as they moved about the nave, throwing open the doors leading down to the crypt and checking the transept for any sign of ursks. Nobody was protesting the presence of the heavily armed free company soldiers with them. The green-uniformed police militia was interviewing the few monks and vergers left inside the cathedral. Hannah and Chalph pressed past for a view of the confessional booths along the side of the far wall.

‘We weren’t here,’ Hannah heard a verger telling a militia officer. ‘Hordes of people came across the cathedral’s bridges begging for help. We were out with the people carrying torches alongside the canals. Only she stayed behind.’

She. Hannah looked unbelievingly towards where the police were kneeling outside the confessional booths, blood flooded across the flagstones. Dear Circle, those were the archbishop’s robes on that stump. That decapitated stump.

‘Alice!’ yelled Hannah, trying to press forward.

‘Who let her in here?’ frowned Colonel Knipe. Jago’s imposing silver-headed police commander limped forward on his artificial leg.

‘Is it Alice?’

‘It is the archbishop’s body,’ said the colonel sadly, pushing Hannah and Chalph back.

‘Where’s her head? Where’s her head?’

‘Don’t look at the body, this isn’t something for you to see,’ ordered the colonel.

She couldn’t take it in. There wasn’t even a skull left on the woman who had raised Hannah as her own daughter. And some of their last words…The accusation that Alice had been trying to trap her here…

‘Where’s her head?’ Chalph demanded.

‘I wish I knew,’ said the colonel. ‘It’s not inside the cathedral. The ursk that did this must have ripped pieces off the archbishop to feed on later.’

Chalph sniffed the air. ‘I can’t smell any ursk scent in here.’

‘You think her head fell off of its own accord, sprouted legs and ran away?’ snapped the colonel. He tapped his metal leg, the clockwork-driven mechanism inside whirring back at him. ‘I know things about ursks, wet-snout. The only difference between filth like those monsters and your people is about twenty stone in weight and a leather shirt.’

‘Pericurian free company soldiers are the only thing keeping Hermetica City safe,’ cried Chalph in outrage.

‘What a good job your people are doing,’ sneered the colonel. ‘I told the senate that paying for free company mercenaries to patrol our walls was a mistake of the highest order. When you fight for money, money is all you value. You wet-snouts let this happen, cub. You want to scare us all off your sacred soil, but it’s not going to happen. We’ve been here for two thousand years and we’ll be here for another thousand before your damn archduchess holds one inch of Jago’s mud for her scriptures.’

‘But there’s no claw marks on the confessional’s walls,’ observed Hannah. ‘Let me see the body!’

Colonel Knipe snapped his fingers and two of his police militia came forward grabbing Hannah and Chalph.

‘I don’t have time for this! You can see her body at the funeral like everyone else – get these two out of here.’

Chalph snarled as the Jagonese militia pushed him rudely out of the cathedral, shoving with their lamp rods and rifle butts, no doubt venting the frustration they felt at the usurpation of their role manning the battlements by Chalph’s race. They were only slightly kinder in their handling of Hannah.

In the crowd that had begun to form outside on the bridge, Hannah spotted one of the junior priests – Father Baine – the young man who usually clerked for the archbishop.

‘Is it true?’ he called out, seeing Hannah. ‘The militia won’t even let us back into our own rooms.’

‘I think so,’ said Hannah. ‘There’s a dead body by the confessionals and it’s wearing Alice’s robes. Sweet Circle, I think she’s dead. The ursks…’

‘May serenity find her,’ mumbled the priest, shocked to the core by the confirmation of his prelate’s murder. ‘Have they shot the ursk that did it?’

Hannah shook her head. ‘They’re searching the crypt levels now.

Father Baine looked at Hannah and then more nervously at Chalph standing at her side – as if he was expecting the Pericurian trader’s apprentice to triple in size and transform into one of the bestial ursks in front of his eyes.

‘They may not find anything down there,’ whispered the young priest. ‘The archbishop told me before our afternoon meditations that Vardan Flail had threatened her life and that the high guild head was no longer to be admitted to the cathedral. Not even on Circle-day for the open service.’

Vardan Flail had threatened Alice? The brief heated conversation in the testing rooms between them leapt back to Hannah. The odious little man leaving for the archbishop’s chancellery two steps behind Alice.

‘Did she say if the argument was about me?’

‘Your call-up on the ballot list, yes.’ The priest ran a hand through his prematurely thinning hair. ‘But that’s not all that they argued over. Vardan Flail mentioned to her that if she married him, it would invalidate your draft, but the archbishop told me she’d spurned such a clumsy offer.’

Chalph growled in surprise by Hannah’s side. ‘Marry Vardan Flail? Who would want to mate with such a twisted creature?’

‘He was not always what you see limping through the vaults,’ said the priest. He looked at Hannah, eager to impress her with his knowledge. ‘Why do you think he was always making excuses to come to the cathedral? He had set his cap on the archbishop from the first day she arrived on Jago. In the early years, Vardan Flail was the only friend the archbishop had on Jago – everyone else’s noses having been put out of joint by the church thinking it could presume to appoint an outsider to the position, over all the Jagonese priests who had been waiting for preferment.’

Hannah was shocked. She had always seen Alice as an archbishop first and her guardian second – but never as a woman, a woman that might marry. Hannah had been going around all these years with her eyes closed. A well of despair opened up inside her. How little she really knew the woman who had raised her – how little she ever would, now.

Father Baine leant in close. ‘We turned Vardan Flail away, just as the archbishop had ordered us to. On the south bridge, about five minutes before the city’s breach bells started sounding. Flail was furious, cursing us and wishing a plague upon everyone who worked inside the cathedral. He could have slipped back after the alarm sounded, murdered the archbishop while we were out with the people keeping a watch on the canals.’

‘I knew there was no ursk scent inside the cathedral,’ said Chalph. ‘I tried to tell the colonel, but—’

‘The colonel loathes everyone from Pericur,’ said Hannah. ‘It suits him just fine to blame the ursks for Alice’s murder – he can stoke up more resentment against the free company soldiers now, point to how many years his militia stood watch on the walls without ever letting any of the creatures from outside break into the capital’s vaults.’

There was a crowd gathering on the bridge. Word of the archbishop’s murder was spreading through the Seething Round. Using their lamp rods as staffs, the militia were holding them back. Archbishop Alice Gray might not have started off as a Jagonese churchman, but she had been popular enough with the people of the island by the time she died.

‘I think the archbishop expected something like this would happen,’ said the priest.’

‘Had Alice talked to you before about Flail?’ asked Hannah.

‘It wasn’t what she said,’ explained Father Baine. ‘It was what she didn’t say. There were letters she was drafting; the ones she didn’t ask me to write for her. Some were composed in church cipher, but I saw who those were addressed to once – the League of the Rational Court.’

The Inquisition! Sweet Circle, that was one arm of the church Hannah had hoped never to encounter.

‘It’s not just bodies that are twisted in the guild’s turbine halls,’ said the priest. He tapped his prematurely thinning hair. ‘It’s their minds. The way they cling to Circlism out in their vaults, it’s almost faith!’

Heresy. Superstitions perverting the church without gods. The implications of the archbishop’s murder collided with the weight of emotional wreckage spinning around Hannah’s mind. And with the archbishop gone, Hannah would have no one to speak for her in front of the senate. She was going to end up an initiate of the Guild of Valvemen, indentured to a master who had murdered her guardian!

‘We have to prove that Vardan Flail killed the archbishop,’ said Chalph. ‘If we can do that, prove that your draft ballot was a personal matter in a vendetta, the senate will have no choice but to nullify it.’

Prove it when the colonel’s police militia wanted the very opposite finding. What hope did they have?

But it was the only way Hannah was going to survive – if the deadly energies of the guild’s vaults didn’t finish her off, then Vardan Flail would be only too eager to ensure an accident befell her and silenced her wagging tongue.

Jethro and Boxiron waited in the shipping office for the agent behind the wooden counter to flick through his box of yellowed cards. This was the last shipping agent on the harbour, and it looked as if they were about to receive the same answer they had been given by every other office they had visited.

‘Sorry, Mister Daunt,’ said the clerk. ‘I hate to turn away custom, but there ain’t no call for passage to Jago no more.’

‘There must be at least one vessel on your roster that makes regular stops there?’

‘Not since the southwest passage fully opened,’ said the clerk. ‘They’re dangerous waters, the Fire Sea, and there are easier ways to get across to the colonies now. It’s their own fault, bloody Jagonese. Their tugs used to charge skippers a small fortune to see us safely through the boils. Now there’s another way to sail to Concorzia, who’ll pay their fees, eh? Not any of the vessels on my lists, that I can tell you.’

‘Myself and my good steamman friend here need to get to Jago,’ insisted Jethro.

‘Well, you won’t be going direct, fellow, that’s the truth of it. Last I heard, Pericur still runs a service out to the island once a month. Take a steam ship across the Sepia Sea to Concorzia and travel north overland to the ursine lands, and then you can wait there for your boat to the island. That’s how I’d do it.’

‘What about a direct passage to Pericur?’

‘Not on my list either,’ said the clerk. ‘Their great and mighty archduchess hoards their trade routes for her kin, and it don’t seem like I got the furry hide to qualify for her graces, do I? Like I say, travel to the colonies and then head north overland for the Pericurian border. I can sell you an airship berth rather than a steamer cabin if you’re in a hurry. You’ll be walking the streets of New Alban in three days and there’s plenty of wagon trains from there up towards Pericur.’

‘We are on church business,’ said Boxiron. ‘Is there really nothing you can do?’

The clerk traced an ironic little circle across his waistcoat and shrugged. ‘Then may serenity find you.’ He walked away leaving the two of them to their own devices.

‘Then may it find us on a luckier day.’ Jethro shook his head and made to leave the dusty little room, but a younger female clerk – seeing her master had left the front office – stopped scribbling in a ledger and waved her inky nib in Jethro Daunt’s direction.

‘There is a way for you to travel directly to Pericur. There’s a free trader with a trading licence from the archduchess moored down in the submarine pens. No shipping agent here will recommend him to you, though. He’s an awkward bugger and he’s not registered with any of us.’

Jethro eased a coin out of his pocket and slipped it across to the girl. ‘Thank you. I would have paid you a commission on the recommendation, whether the boat was a free trader or not.’

‘It’s not just the lack of a fee for us,’ warned the girl. ‘There’s talk about this boat and the kind of cargoes it’s been known to handle. You’ll be shipping out with a right crew of rascals. A gentleman of your quality, sir, you might want to take a berth on an airship of the merchant marine and go the rest of the way overland from the colonies like was suggested to you.’

Jethro tapped the iron shoulder of his hulking steamman companion. ‘Have no fear, good damson. Boxiron and I can both be persuasive, in our own different ways.’

‘Then count your fingers after shaking hands with any of the crew, sir, and ask for the Purity Queen down on the docks. You won’t miss her when you see her lines.’

She was correct in that, there was no chance of missing the craft. The u-boat in question was a double-hulled affair, lying low in the waters of the pens like a giant metal catamaran, a single conning tower rising out of her middle, the bridge low and square and home to a flock of screeching seagulls. The bowsprit of the closer hull ended in a snarling moulding of a boar, her companion hull an iron lion’s head, the ferocity of both figures diminished somewhat by the spattering of guano from the cloud of noisy seagulls above her.

‘Look at the carvings of the mouths,’ noted Boxiron, his voicebox quivering. ‘That vessel has real teeth: those are torpedo tubes inside the jaws.’

‘Ex-fleet sea arm,’ said a familiar-sounding voice behind them. ‘Decommissioned and sold off into private hands. There’s empty gun mounts on the fantail behind her bridge, and the torpedo tubes have been deactivated. Allegedly.’

Jethro turned and was startled to see a face he knew standing behind them; a middle-aged woman with gorilla-sized arms, and next to her a girl half her age whom Jethro didn’t recognize. ‘Professor Harsh,’ said Jethro. ‘Bob me sideways; I haven’t seen you since, what, that business with the tomb of Kitty Kimbaw? Are you mounting another expedition, good lady?’

‘Not this time,’ said the professor. ‘I’m head of the department of archaeology at Saint Vine’s College now. I’m reluctantly leaving the fieldwork to my more youthful associates these days.’ She indicated the young woman standing next to her. ‘This is Nandi Tibar-Wellking, my assistant, about to embark on the solemn task of adding some extra letters after her name, and these—’ she indicated Jethro and Boxiron ‘—are the two dears who helped me prove that the curse of Kitty Kimbaw’s tomb owed more to a heavily bejewelled statue that had been stolen from a side-passage than it did to supernatural vengeance from the disturbed mummified remains of its occupant. Mister Jethro Daunt, ex of the church, and Boxiron, ex of the Steamman Free State and various other parts.’

‘It is good to see you again, Amelia softbody,’ Boxiron nodded towards the professor. ‘Would your assistant be shipping out on the Purity Queen? We’ve been led to believe that this vessel has something of an unsavoury reputation.’

‘Yes,’ hummed the professor, ‘knowing her skipper, I would be surprised if it were otherwise.’

‘Do you know her commander well enough to recommend us for berths?’ asked Jethro.

‘I don’t think you’ll have much of a problem in that regard. Tramp freighters are lucky to get whatever cargo they can, and there are no bigger tramps than—’ she pointed towards a figure weaving out of the conning tower and crossing the gantry to the quayside, followed by a pair of submariners in striped shirts ‘—him!’

‘Ah, lass,’ said the figure as he got within earshot. ‘I can tell by the mortal twinkle in your eye that you’re either slandering Jared Black or defaming my fine boat’s reputation.’

‘One of the two, commodore,’ said the professor.

‘It’s a terrible thing, the malicious tittle-tattle in Spumehead that has attached itself to an honest fellow like me. A fellow who, as you well know, Amelia, has done nothing but sacrifice himself for the blessed Kingdom of Jackals. A war hero who has had little out of the state but the wicked attentions of her revenue men and false accusations of smuggling from lesser skippers jealous of old Blacky’s genius and skill at navigating the perilous courses of the oceans.’ He looked at the professor’s young assistant and indicated her baggage to his two u-boat men. ‘And this must be your Damson Tibar-Wellking. A pretty rose to be carried by the hard lines of my old war-boat, but we’ll see you safe to your destination, lass.’

It seemed to Jethro that the young academic nodded rather nervously towards the commodore. Whether it was the ruffians acting as porters, the military lines of the freighter, or the declarations of the vessel’s master about his honesty that made her apprehensive, Jethro was uncertain. He didn’t need his church training in reading the souls of men to know that upright people very rarely needed to proclaim their honesty. Young Nandi kissed goodbye to her mentor and was led away inside the u-boat. The commodore watched her walk away, scratching his thick black beard. There was a speckling of white on its fringes that made it look as if snow had recently fallen and settled there.

‘I’ve bumped into a couple of old acquaintances I wasn’t expecting to see,’ said the professor to the old u-boat man, indicating Boxiron and Jethro. ‘They seem also to be in need of a vessel.’

‘I am led to believe you have Pericurian trading papers, good captain,’ said Jethro. ‘Myself and my steamman friend here need to reach Pericur to catch the supply boat to Jago.’

‘Jago is it now?’ said the commodore. ‘Well then, I can save you the bother of the extra leg. I’m calling at the dark isle before I head on out to Pericur.’

‘Someone’s paying you to go to Jago?’ said Boxiron, surprised.

‘The college is,’ commented the professor. ‘We’re paying for the voyage and access to their great transaction-engine vaults both.’

‘And a more durable craft nor a more knowledgeable skipper you could not have picked to look after your young college flower,’ said the commodore. ‘There’s not a vessel in port better qualified to navigate the perilous currents of the Fire Sea.’

‘I’m trusting you with Nandi’s life, Jared,’ said the professor, seriously. ‘Her mother has never forgiven me for getting her father killed down south. I don’t know whether it would be her mother or the high table back at the college that would be more upset if they knew my assistant was heading for Jago to do this research.’

‘Nobody’s sailed deeper into the Fire Sea than brave old Blacky,’ said the commodore. ‘I’ll get your lovely lass there as smartly as if my beautiful boat was still part of the fleet sea arm. And you two fine fellows, also, if you need to reach the blasted coast of that terrible isle.’

‘Our voyage requires discretion,’ said Jethro. ‘We are travelling on a somewhat delicate matter.’

The commodore tapped the side of his nose knowingly. ‘My discretion is legendary in this port, sir.’

Jethro Daunt did not point out the contradiction. ‘And when will your u-boat sail, good captain?’

‘As soon as my cargo and last passenger turns up, but I can see them both now. One having caught a lift with the other, so to speak. We should be away directly with the tide.’

Out on the docks, threading their way through the fishermen spreading their drying nets, four flatbed wagons drawn by shire horses rattled into sight, their beds piled with wooden crates and a single passenger. The passenger was ursine, a large ginger male wearing Jackelian clothes – looking for all the world as if he might be a country squire out for a day’s hunting with his hounds. All he lacked was a birding rifle and beagles to complete the picture.

‘Ah now,’ waved the commodore as the carts halted in front of the Purity Queen and the bear-like figure on the back jumped down, landing on a fine pair of knee-length riding boots. The Pericurian moved through the crowd of stevedores coming over to haul the crates down to the u-boat’s hold, and walked towards the commodore. ‘I received your baggage yesterday, so I thought you might be arriving in a grand old fashion this morning, Ambassador Ortin, rather than helping keep your cargo safe.’

The ursine creature blinked in surprise and adjusted a monocle resting in front of his left eye. ‘Technically speaking, dear boy, I am not presently an ambassador, as I no longer hold the position here in the Kingdom and haven’t yet been sworn in on Jago. A point the new incumbent at the Jackelian embassy was only too keen to underline by ensuring my airship berth to Spumehead was cancelled and replaced by a cheap narrowboat ticket.’

‘Well, however you’ve arrived Mister Ortin urs Ortin, you’re here now right enough and I’ll make good on my contract to deliver you to your new posting. Just as soon as the transaction-engine parts your arse was so kindly keeping warm are loaded on board my boat.’

The commodore barked a flurry of orders at the stevedores shouldering the cargo towards his u-boat, and then with a nod to the professor, Jethro and Boxiron, he led the Pericurian diplomat across to his vessel.

Professor Harsh leant in close to speak quietly to Jethro. ‘I won’t ask what you’ll be doing on Jago, but I would be grateful if you kept an eye out for Nandi on the island.’

‘In addition to the eyes of the good commodore?’

‘I trust Jared Black,’ said the professor. ‘That is, I trust him well enough to guard my spine when sabres are drawn and pistols are pulled, but the commodore has an unhealthy knack for getting into mischief and you’re not the only ones trying to arrange a discreet passage to Jago.’

‘Your young assistant’s work, good professor, it isn’t the sort of archaeology that involves jewelled artefacts and murderous dispute over precisely who has the rights to secure them?’

‘Nandi will simply be trawling Jago’s records in their transaction-engine vaults,’ said the professor. ‘But a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.’

‘So it can,’ agreed Jethro.

After the academic had extracted a promise of safe-keeping for her assistant and was walking away, the transaction-engine drum in the centre of Boxiron’s chest began to rumble as it turned – usually a sign that the steamman was drawing down extra processing power for his ruminations.

‘What are you thinking?’ asked Jethro.

‘Much the same as you, I expect,’ answered the steamman.

‘Yes,’ Jethro hummed thoughtfully.

That the good professor knew their business on Jago must be an investigation, and if she was asking for the help of Jethro Daunt and Boxiron, it was only because she suspected her assistant’s dealings was likely to put her in even more danger than consorting with the pair of them.

Bob his soul, but not all the truth of the academic’s business on Jago had been told here.

CHAPTER FOUR

Hannah was about to go into the archbishop’s chancellery when a monk stopped her with a message. ‘Your friend Chalph is waiting for you outside on the north bridge.’

‘Thank you, father. Could you tell him I’ll be finished here in a little while?’

He nodded and departed as she entered the office. It was still strange seeing someone else sitting behind Alice’s desk, even if Father Blackwater – the head of the testing rooms – was only acting as their senior priest until another archbishop was appointed. A fiercely clever man who hid his true thoughts behind the odd veiled comment or dry remark, Father Blackwater was a Jagonese priest through and through. Which was precisely why the Rational Synod would never confirm him to the archbishop’s post he obviously thought he deserved.

Hannah entered and took the seat where she had sat opposite Alice Gray so many times over the years. Meeting an ursk wearing the robes of a priest would not have seemed as alien to her.

‘I have mixed blessings to report,’ said the father. ‘As I feared, the senate will not allow me to oppose your draft ballot. I am not regarded as having the seniority to even speak on the floor on your behalf.’

Her heart sank. ‘Then I am finished.’

‘Not yet, my dear,’ said the priest. ‘On the other side of the equation, we have found this—’ he flourished an envelope ‘—among the personal effects of the late archbishop. It stipulates that in the event of her demise preceding your majority, you receive her grant of authority to sit our entrance exam early.’

Her waiver! Alice had granted her dispensation after all. Hannah was overwhelmed, the grief over losing her guardian momentarily lifted. But…Hannah did the calculation in her head, working out the date of the next church board examination. ‘I’ll already be drafted into the guild’s service by then, father!’

‘We can’t nullify the guild’s draft order,’ said Father Blackwater, ‘but Vardan Flail can’t nullify a written waiver from the archbishop that precedes your ballot notification, either. Her letter was written weeks before your name was ever posted on the draft ballot.’

Weeks before? It was as Alice Gray’s clerk had said: almost as if she had been preparing for her own death. How many run-ins had there been between Vardan Flail and Alice in the previous months that Hannah hadn’t been around to witness, before Hannah’s name was ‘coincidently’ teased out at ‘random’ for entry into the lists of the Guild of Valvemen?

Father Blackwater pointed to the chess set waiting lonely on the table in the corner of the chancellery, and Hannah remembered the gentle snorts that Alice would make while planning her next move. ‘Stalemate, Hannah. You will unfortunately be in service with the guild for a while, but the guild cannot forbid you to take our tests, and if you pass, you will be free of the curse of the draft for the rest of your life. You will be part of the church.’

He said the words with satisfaction, as if there could be no higher honour. A couple of days ago Hannah would have agreed with him; that life had seemed almost inevitable to her. But with the death of Alice Gray, the cathedral’s bright stained glass seemed so much dimmer, the formulae and lessons of the Circlist teachings mere parroting of the echo of great thinking done by minds long since dead. In their stead grew the cold hard seed of something else planted in a ground far more fertile than the volcanic basalt outside the capital’s battlements. Vengeance, vengeance and the fell craving for it.

To Hannah’s surprise, vengeance could be like one of the mathematical puzzles of synthetic morality. You could lose yourself considering it, studying its shape. Vengeance could become as much an obsession as some of the paradoxes that had driven church priests insane when pondered for too long. There was a beauty in vengeance’s pursuit and gratification to be gained in solving the riddle of the murder. Gratification that would climax in Vardan Flail being led by a hooded executioner across Snapman’s Bridge and made to stand on the trapdoor while the crowds gathered on each side of the black canal.

It took a heinous crime to earn a death sentence that wasn’t commuted to banishment or life indenture by the senate judiciary, but Hannah was determined to see that Vardan Flail was one of the few that received it. And if she had to serve that twisted monster in the guild’s own vaults, then that would just take her a step or two closer to realizing her new goal.

Jethro Daunt pulled himself up the final few rungs of the u-boat’s conning tower and emerged onto the observation deck, almost immediately finding the goggles of his rubber scald suit misting up from the heat of the Fire Sea.

Standing against the rail wearing a battered greatcoat and holding a telescope was Commodore Black, his black-bearded face tinged orange from the glow of the magma. ‘Come up for your turn of fresh air, Mister Daunt?’

‘That I have, good captain, and I’m already regretting not bringing my coat.’

It was a curious, unhealthy mix outside, the intense waves of heat from the Fire Sea’s magma interspersed with jabbing arrows of a freezing artic wind from the north. Too much exposure to this was likely to bring any passenger – or sailor – down with a fever.

‘A savage, strange sea,’ said the commodore. ‘But old Blacky has got used to it. I’ve sailed further and deeper inside it than any other skipper, and left many a good friend’s bones on the shores of its wild islands while doing so.’

‘I’m hoping for a rather more pedestrian voyage.’ Jethro looked down at the boiling waters their u-boat was pushing through on the surface – boils in nautical parlance – searing, shifting channels of water veined through the bubbling magma. He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a paper bag filled with striped sweets. ‘Would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop, good captain?’

Commodore Black put aside the telescope he had been using to sweep the burning waves. ‘I won’t be troubling you for one of those wicked things. You know what they put in them…?’

‘Defamation on the part of their commercial rivals, I am certain.’

‘I’ll stick to eating what goes well with a drop of wine. No need to suck those blessed things for your nerves, Mister Daunt – a nice boring voyage is what you’ll get aboard the Purity Queen. Jago barely lies inside the rim of the Fire Sea and The Garurian Boils here are settled waters. The magma keeps to its course and so do the boils we sail through.’ Commodore Black pointed to the north. ‘One hundred and seventy miles ahead is a buoy station of the Jagonese tug service. That’s when the magma gets unpredictable and choppy, but the island’s sailors will lead us through the safe channels – for a price.’

Jethro stared where the old u-boat man was pointing, but all he could see from the conning tower was a burning ocean of red seamed by black cooling rock, the passages of superheated water they were following marked out by curtains of rising steam.

‘You’ve never sailed the Fire Sea before, Mister Daunt? Never been to Jago. I can see it in the way the flames are casting a mortal spell on your gaze.’

‘My business has occasionally seen me travel across the nations of the continent,’ said Jethro, ‘but never over the ocean.’

‘Yes, now, your discreet business,’ said the commodore, teasingly. ‘But you’ve travelled widely enough to know that a master of a boat is rightly addressed as captain, be they an admiral or a commodore.’

A cracking sounded in the distance and a geyser of molten rock and gas fumed into the air, adding to the chemical stench of the place – sulphur, by its reek.

‘Someone told me that at the docks,’ Jethro dissembled. ‘An ocean this wild, it seems hard to believe that the people on Jago can predict where the ebbs and flows of the magma and the passages of water through them will lie within an hour’s time, let alone days and weeks ahead. It’s a wonder anyone can follow the boils back to Jago.’

‘Ah now,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s an easy enough matter predicting a safe passage when you have caverns filled with mortal clever transaction engines. Machines that could give King Steam a run for his money when it comes to the thinking game. And when we get to the buoy station and the master there summons up a tug to see us safe to their black shores, we’ll no doubt pay for every penny of their engine room’s power and the model of the Fire Sea they have sealed up down there with them.’

‘That will be a sight to see on Jago, good captain,’ said Jethro. ‘Cities where they have actually tamed the wild power.’

‘Electricity,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Yes, nowhere else in the world, only on Jago.’ He pointed to the currents of magma sliding past the watery channel of the boils they were navigating. ‘Something to do with all that blessed molten iron swirling around out there, or so a fine steamman friend of mine would have it.’

‘You sound like you don’t approve, good captain.’

‘I’ve used the wild energy to tickle the armour of wicked savages trying to break their way into my hull and had cause to thank it,’ said the commodore. ‘But for more practical purposes I’ll take the thump of good honest steam power, the hum of high-tension clockwork and the burn of a little expansion-engine gas any day of the week. The kind of dark power the Jagonese use is as good for your blessed health as taxes.’

Jethro nodded. The commodore was as superstitious as most u-boat men. It was small wonder when a small metal bubble of air was all that stood between them and death under the darks of the ocean. The Circlist church always did have its work cut out in the harbour towns of the Kingdom. U-boat men were almost as bad as airship sailors with their strange rituals and their profession’s cant.

He raised a hand to shield his hair from a few rogue cinders drifting across from a fire plume that looked to be erupting ten miles to starboard. It was no wonder that no airship could cross above the Fire Sea intact – the combination of plumes, wild thermals and fierce artic storms made an aerial crossing a one-way bet: with a grinning skeleton drawn on the reverse of every card in the deck. Jethro remembered reading about a few foolhardy Jack Cloudies who were never seen again after attempting the voyage in the early days of Jackelian aviation.

Commodore Black pressed the telescope back to the brass goggles protecting his face and Jethro looked on as the whistle of a magma fountain off their starboard became the whisper of Badger-headed Joseph. ‘The blood, the blood of the earth is your sea.’

Jethro gritted his teeth. The old gods never normally bothered him during the day, only within his dreams. He wiped the steam off his goggles and unnoticed by the commodore, stepped back and rubbed at the side of his head. This was his choice, sailing to Jago. His. Not the Inquisition’s, not theirs. Only his.

An invitation to dinner at the captain’s table wasn’t something that Jethro expected, but perhaps for Commodore Black it mitigated the guilt he felt at the extortionate rates he was charging his passengers to travel through the inhospitable currents of the Fire Sea. Although looking at the square navigation table in the captain’s cabin that had been pressed into service for dinner, Jethro suspected the location of their supper had more to do with the wishes of the coarse men and woman that served as the u-boat’s crew – desiring to make free with their ribald table manners in the mess, rather than feeling they had to be on good behaviour in front of the ‘cargo’.

The Pericurian ambassador-in-transit – Ortin urs Ortin – demonstrated the highest manners at their table, every facet of Jackelian etiquette smoothly performed in almost mocking counterpoint to Boxiron’s jerky shovelling of high-grade boiler coke into his furnace trap and the noisy siphoning of the water the steamman needed to feed his boiler heart. The young academic Nandi Tibar-Wellking was a fairly neutral observer of the two polar extremes at the table, but recalling his own time in the company of her professor, Jethro rightly guessed that Nandi had been well taught and exposed to the intricacies of dining at foreign tables. If the cabin boy acting as steward had served them sheep’s eyes and fried scorpion tails rather than their usual fare of scrambled duck eggs, Spumehead rock crab and pot-roasted lamb, he doubted she would have even blinked.

Commodore Black’s appetite tipped the table’s balance back towards the ribald; he ripped apart the meats with gusto and matched Boxiron’s siphoning of water with an equal capacity for sweet wines, jinn and beer. If the boat’s master had an excuse for his thirst, it was that even with the Purity Queen’s cooling systems running on maximum, it was hard not to drip sweat onto their food as they maintained their course through the outer boils of the Fire Sea.

Ortin urs Ortin tactfully overlooked the rattling from Boxiron and instead addressed the young academic, his Jackelian accent so polished he might have been born a squire to its acres. ‘You mentioned that you have not been to Jago before, damson, but I am interested to know what your book learning in the college suggests the island’s people will be like?’

‘Very similar to the Jackelian citizenry,’ answered Nandi, balancing a soup spoon between her fingers as if she was penning a dissertation on the subject. ‘And with good reason, ambassador, when we look back to what classical history texts have to say on the matter. The two largest tribes settled on the northwest of the continent were the Jackeni and the Jagoli, but when the cold time arrived, the Jagoli fled the advancing glaciers and journeyed to a new island home, whereas the Kingdom’s ancestors stayed put. Prior to that, the early Circlist church had converted both tribes, and there were plenty of intermarriages between the two peoples. In many ways, the modern Jagonese are truer to the traditions of our ancestors than we are – as, unlike the Jackelians, their civilization never fell to the Chimecan Empire. When all else was darkness and ice, their island kept the traditions of democracy burning. They kept their freedom when our kingdom was a vassal province of the empire and our people were being farmed for food. Jago kept their science through the age of ice, and they kept their history.’

‘The people of Pericur hold the island in some reverence, I believe, good ambassador,’ said Jethro.

‘The scripture of the Divine Quad,’ said Ortin, adjusting his monocle, ‘teaches that the island was once a paradise, where the ursine were shaped and breathed into life by the whisper of the world. There we lived on the Island of the Blessed until the two male members of the quad, Reckin urs Reckin and Amaja urs Amaja, fell to bickering between themselves and had to leave the island for the crime of destroying their home. And the whisper of the world became tears of fire at their fall from grace, filling the sea with all its flames.’

‘Then you believe Jago is sacred soil and that neither the Jagonese nor your people should be there?’

‘That is a conservative view. I am certainly not one of those who believe that, but I do believe there must be some practical truth to the scriptures. That the ursine once lived on Jago before we lived on Pericur.’

Nandi took another mouthful of soup. ‘And why would that be?’

‘Let me show you,’ said Ortin. The ambassador ducked out of the commodore’s quarters and returned a minute later having retrieved a leather-bound tome of Pericurian scripture from his cabin. ‘In the scriptures, Reckin urs Reckin was unfairly cast out of paradise for the covetousness and lusts of his ravening brother, Amaja urs Amaja.’

The ambassador opened the holy book to a beautifully illuminated page showing the two couples of the Divine Quad. The two deities on the left were clearly ursine, glowing in beatific purity, while the pair to the right – a furless male and female – were almost definitely from the race of man. ‘“And the fur of Amaja urs Amaja and his wife was singed from their bodies as they waded into the fires of the sea, begging Reckin urs Reckin and his beloved to forgive their brother his foolishness in destroying their home, the selfish Amaja urs Amaja watching his brother and his wife borne away by the Angels of Airdia to new lands.” The people of Pericur had followed the scriptures of the Divine Quad for thousands of years before we ever laid eyes on someone from your nation, Damson Tibar-Wellking. It came as quite a surprise when we discovered the same covetous devils painted on the walls of our temples colonizing the territory to our south in Concorzia, not to mention trampling the sacred soil of Jago deep inside the Fire Sea.’

‘But the timescales are all wrong, you must see that?’ said Nandi, perplexed. ‘The Jagonese settled the island long before we first established contact with your people in Pericur. Your race and ours have never lived alongside each other: the Jagonese migrated from the freezing wastes of our continent – they were never native to the island.’

‘Aye,’ interrupted the commodore, ‘and the only time the black blasted rock of Jago looked like a paradise was when sheets of ice covered the rest of the world and the people there had the blessed heat of the Fire Sea to keep their greenhouses warm and their vaults heated from the cold.’

Ortin urs Ortin tapped his book. ‘And yet here your people are, and here we are too, just as the scriptures say. I am a reformer, damson and gentlemen. The great liberal houses of the Baronial Council have paid for this u-boat’s hold to be filled with the latest transaction engines from the Kingdom’s workshops. I would see our archduchess’s rule tempered by a properly elected council of her peers; I would see our cities pushing towards the heavens with the sway of pneumatic towers; I would see the best of your Jackelian science and culture being used to improve our nation; but for all that, there are still some things you must take on faith.’

‘Don’t be so quick to change, lad,’ warned the commodore. ‘I have visited Pericur, and I say that your cities of oak with their strange blessed wooden minarets wouldn’t be much improved by the smogs of our mills and the beating engines of our industry. Your scriptures say that Jago is a dark isle where only those who would be cursed abide. You walk down the streets of Hermetica City after we have docked and tell me that you don’t feel cursed just being there, and then ask yourself why their land is locked away behind the Fire Sea.’

Ortin urs Ortin raised his glass in salute towards the commodore. ‘May I always be reminded of the scriptures’ truth by my Jackelian friends without any gods at all.’

Jethro winced. Without any gods at all. If only the Pericurian ambassador knew the truth of that.

‘There are other books than your people’s scriptures that must be considered,’ said Nandi kindly, her voice coming alive with the passion of her quest. ‘Jago is not just the oldest democracy in the world; their transaction-engine archives are the oldest in the world, too. When the rest of the continent was burning encyclopaedias to stay warm, Jagonese traders were preserving what knowledge they could find, keeping the Circlist enlightenment alive during the depths of the long age of ice.’

‘Their transaction engines may be ancient, lass,’ said the commodore, ‘but they’re dangerous. They don’t run things on steam out there. The Jagonese will poison your lovely head with their knowledge.’

‘I am aware of the dangers, but I’ll take precautions,’ said Nandi. ‘New knowledge is never acquired easily. The island has historical records stretching back unbroken for two millennia that have never been properly mined.’

‘Aye, and now our boats can bypass the Fire Sea to get to the colonies it’s all they have to sell,’ spat the commodore. ‘That and safe passage to a fat fool like Blacky who’s still generous enough to come a-calling to their bleak isle.’

Jethro didn’t comment that the commodore seemed only too willing to pass the cost onto his passengers.

‘Saint Vine’s college must consider your research worth funding, Nandi softbody,’ said Boxiron. ‘If it wasn’t for the college’s share of this voyage’s cost, I suspect Jethro softbody and I would be heading to Jago via Pericur by way of a colony boat.’

‘I won’t argue with you on that,’ said Nandi. ‘But I don’t think my research can take all the credit. When my sponsor at the college, Professor Harsh, was my age, she studied under a Doctor George Conquest. He later travelled to Jago with his wife to pursue a similar vein of research to mine, but his boat sank in the Fire Sea as he returned back home to the Kingdom. All his work was lost.’

‘And the good professor wants his work finished,’ said Jethro.

‘I believe it would be fitting,’ said Nandi. ‘And now the professor is sitting on the High Table and she has the authority to spend the money to ensure it happens.’

‘It’s a wicked shame,’ said the commodore, ‘for a beautiful lass like yourself to be locked away in dusty archives studying the shadows of what has passed. What use is that to us, Nandi? Forget Jago, lass, stay on my boat and I’ll show you all the mortal wonders of the oceans. There are wild, beautiful islands deep inside the Fire Sea untouched by the footsteps of the race of man; there are the seabed cities of the gill-necks carved from coral and shaped in living pearl. And if you’ve still got a taste for archaeology after you’ve seen all that, I’ll show you some of the broken, flooded towers that lie collapsed along the sides of the Boltiana Trench. You can put on a diving suit and run your hand along marble statues that haven’t been seen by anything apart from sharks for a hundred thousand years.’

Her dark skin seemed to blush, and Jethro wondered whether it was the attraction of the offer or the glow from the magma outside the porthole that was lighting her burnished features.

‘Thank you,’ said Nandi, ‘but there is important work awaiting me on Jago. The Circlist church was kept alive on Jago when the Chimecan Empire were raising idols to their dark gods across the continent – without Jago there would be no rationalist enlightenment in the Kingdom today. We’d likely be dancing around maypoles on the solstice, wearing the masks of animals and our old gods like—’ Nandi paused to recall a name.

‘Like Badger-headed Joseph,’ said Jethro.

‘Exactly. You’ve studied prehistory, Mister Daunt?’

Jethro rubbed at his temples, which ached as if trapped in a vice. ‘I used to be a parson, before I found a more accommodating line of work. But I can still disprove the existence of every god and goddess of every religion on the continent – current or historical. Some things you never forget.’

At the head of the table, the commodore narrowed his eyes; he obviously disapproved of Jethro Daunt’s old career. ‘There’s five types of gentlemen I don’t normally carry on the Purity Queen, sir. That’s members of the House of Guardians, lawyers, spies, officers of Ham Yard, and last but not least, church crows – of any denomination. But seeing as you’ve taken up a new business now and come well-recommended by a fine lady like Amelia Harsh, I shall make an exception in your case.’

‘Thank you, good captain,’ said Jethro. ‘I fear neither myself nor Boxiron would be comfortable swimming through the boils or trying to scramble over the flows of magma.’

But it wasn’t the steaming waters of the sea that Jethro Daunt felt he was drowning in. It was the swirling currents of his thoughts. His case. The demands of the Inquisition. The visitations from gods he was trying to deny. And now tales of the history of Circlism on the island and the concerns of a long-dead university doctor and a venerable professor worried for the life of her student.

Jago, all the answers lay on Jago, smouldering lonely and dark amidst the angry solitude of the Fire Sea.

Hannah glanced behind her as she ducked down the corridor leading to Tom Putt Park. She could have sworn one of the police militia had been following her through the vaults below. But it looked as though Hannah had lost the militiawoman in the maze of surface corridors that led to the constellation of greenhouses huddled around the foot of the Horn of Jago. She was clearly in class hours and the last thing she needed was to be dragged back to the cathedral just for heeding the urgent-sounding message that Chalph urs Chalph had left her.

Yes, heeding a friend’s note – that sounded so much better than truancy. She found Chalph by the statues of the apple singers, the overgrown path to their clearing now trampled clear by the repair crew that had sealed the greenhouse, not to mention all the sightseers who had come to see the ursk corpse before the dead beast had been dragged away for incineration. It was strange, but the presence of the Jagonese in Tom Putt Park seemed more of a violation of her private space than the attack by the monsters that had scaled the city’s wall. The wild beauty of the park had been hers and Chalph’s alone, and now half of Hermetica City must have pressed through to gawp at the spot where she and Chalph had nearly met their deaths.

Chalph, when she laid eyes on him, had a hemp sack thrown over his shoulder and had been crouching down behind the statues as if he was one of them.

‘It’s me!’ called Hannah. ‘Didn’t you smell me coming?’

‘I have caught a flu,’ said Chalph, coming out of hiding. ‘I’ve been outside in the cold, pretending to be part of a free company detail escorting the Guild of Valvemen.’

‘You’ve what?’ Hannah was astonished at her friend’s audacity. ‘In the name of the Circle, why?’

‘In the name of your godless faith, this.’ Chalph held up his sack and pulled out some battered iron components. ‘The guild’s people were checking the machinery charging the battlements when they found it.’ He showed her an iron box with holes in the side where a line of cables hung out like baby elephant trunks. Each rubber cable had been severed halfway down its length, the insulation sawn through to reveal the thick copper wiring underneath. ‘The section of the battlements the ursks came over had been shorted deliberately. Someone wanted the wall’s charge to fail.’

Hannah examined the box with her hands, feeling the cold metal, not believing what she was hearing. ‘But who would want to do that?’

‘I can tell you this much,’ said Chalph. ‘The Guild of Valvemen were half-expecting to find this. I was pretending I could only speak Pericurian and I heard what they were whispering. There were three sets of damaged transformers like this on the failed section of the wall, and the guild’s workers were all for hiding the sabotaged parts and taking them back to their vaults.’

The guild were involved in this? Their job was to maintain the walls, the machines, keep the city powered and keep the transaction-engine rooms humming. But then, it was a guild that was run by Vardan Flail.

Chalph pointed in the direction of the park’s domed surface, near to where the ursks had smashed their way down into the capital’s flash steam channels. ‘That’s not all; I checked where the hole in the park dome had been repaired. There was broken glass scattered on the outside of the dome, as if it had been cracked open from the inside of the park.’ He opened his fingers three inches wide from claw to claw. ‘That’s how thick the panels they were repairing this dome with are. I checked with one of the city’s glass blowers: dome glass is designed to withstand steam storms and magma plume falls from the Fire Sea. An ursk would not be able to smash into the park without a very large hammer and chisel.’

‘We’re the only ones who use the park,’ said Hannah, numb with the implications of what her friend had discovered.

‘And it wasn’t me they were after,’ said Chalph. ‘It was you, Hannah. It’s just the same as how politics in the Baronial Council work back home when things cut up rough. You don’t just poison the head of a house, you poison the aunts, the sons, the daughters, the brothers – you assassinate everyone at once! Leave no one alive able to come back and try to take revenge against your house. Tooth and claw, Hannah, tooth and claw.’

‘This is Jago, not Pericur. We have the police, the stained senate, the accumulated law of a thousand generations.’

But there were Alice’s mutilated remains lying in state inside her own cathedral. Had the failing of Hermetica’s battlements simply been a distraction to ensure the entire city was otherwise engaged when she was murdered? One that should have also ensured her ward was ripped to pieces inside the abandoned park…

‘It’s never fair,’ said Chalph. ‘They might not even care about you – you just happened to be the ward of the wrong person. A loose pawn to be tidied from the board.’

Hannah passed the sabotaged machinery back to Chalph. ‘We have to show this to someone, to Colonel Knipe.’

‘In a vendetta, you trust only your own house and family,’ said Chalph. ‘The militia wants to blame the free company for the ursk attack. The colonel’s not going to listen to either of us if we accuse the most powerful man on Jago outside of the First Senator.’

‘The church is my house, Alice was my family…’

‘I could tell the baroness, but I don’t think she will help us. No Jagonese is going to trust the word of a foreign trader from the House of Ush. Sentiment is already being whipped up against the ursine here in the capital – people have been shouting at me about food prices and shortages of grain down in the streets: accusing the house of profiteering. Calling us dirty wet-snouts. Saying that the archduchess is trying to starve the Jagonese off the island, saying that the free company fighters let the ursks into the city on purpose to scare the last of the Jagonese away.’

‘The Guild of Valvemen,’ said Hannah, a feeling of certainty rising within her. ‘Their people would know exactly where to strike to shut down a section of the battlements. That jigger Vardan Flail is behind all of this, I know he is.’

Her suspicions were silenced by a woman’s shout carrying down the park’s path. It was a police militiawoman, the same one Hannah thought she had seen following her earlier – but she had company this time. Four individuals cloaked in the long robes of valvemen.

‘Damson Hannah Conquest,’ the militiawoman said in an accusatory tone. ‘You were not in the cathedral when we called.’

‘I finished early,’ lied Hannah.

‘You have not even started,’ hissed one of the valvemen.

‘Your ballot notice has been served,’ said the militiawoman.

Served? With a start, Hannah realized what day it was. Since Alice’s murder time hardly seemed to matter at all – one day, one hour, each much the same as the last – all of them blurring into a single amorphous mess. This was the day her service to the guild should have started!

Two of the valvemen advanced on Hannah, grabbing an arm apiece, the third seizing her behind her shoulders.

The militiawoman lowered her lamp staff to point menacingly at Chalph as he stepped forward to help Hannah. She brushed her cape back with her other hand to indicate the pistol hanging from her waist, and that she wouldn’t hesitate in drawing it if the ursine tried to stop them. ‘You don’t want to assist a draft dodger, Pericurian, you really don’t!’

‘I wasn’t trying to escape!’ Hannah protested, struggling. ‘I forgot, that is all.’

‘Set the example,’ one of the valvemen hissed from beneath his cowl, the smell of mint on his clothes making her gag.

The others took up the cry, the quiet stillness of the neglected park broken by their screeching mantra. ‘Set the example. Set the example.’

Hannah was dragged out of the dome, screaming and scuffling. Dragged towards the vaults of the guild. To serve the devil who had killed Alice Gray. The man who had already tried to murder her once.

As the Purity Queen approached the soaring coral line that ringed the island of Jago, Commodore Black ordered all of his passengers apart from Nandi to clear the bridge, keeping his word to the professor that he would keep an eye on her.

Now they were bobbing in front of the coral line’s iron gate and Nandi had to stop herself from gasping. Of course, she had seen illustrations of the gates in the texts back at Saint Vine’s, but the scale was totally different watching them slowly draw back above her to reveal the cauldron-like barrels of cannons on the fortress. The fortifications were wedged between the coral peaks above, a frill of gunnery ominously tracking their vessel – a silent presence and ancient reminder of why the Jagonese had never fallen to the predations of the Chimecan Empire.

Jago, the fortress of learning and the last redoubt of the Circlist enlightenment during the long age of ice. All this and more, once. But the world turned, and the retreat of the glaciers had undermined her pre-eminent position in the world. Studying history at the college, first as a student, then as Professor Harsh’s assistant, the single thing that had struck Nandi most was that nations, civilizations, empires, all had a lifespan, much the same as any person. They grew from seeds, they blossomed, they aged, and finally they passed away into the twilight. When you were a citizen of a proud nation like the Kingdom of Jackals, living in its summer years – when you trod the wide streets of Middlesteel feeling the throb of commerce and could turn your eye to the sky and see only the slow-moving sweep of the Royal Aerostatical Navy’s airships – it was exceptionally easy to forget that the show of permanence all around you was just an illusion from the perspective of history. The same feeling of immortality a legionnaire of the Chimecan Empire would have felt millennia ago. The same deceptive feeling of durability that a Jagonese burgher would have experienced in centuries past, cosseted by achievements drawn around them like a blanket while the rest of the world huddled and froze in the ice. But the wider world’s summer had become Jago’s winter. Nandi would be studying a failing civilization on Jago while there was still some flesh clinging to its bones, and that was quite a privilege. It grated on her nerves that she had to travel here in near secrecy, bypassing the jealous fools who would have seen her place on the expedition cancelled. Just because she was a poor scholarship girl.

Passing through the coral line, their u-boat remained on the surface for the short approach through the coastal waters, cutting through a broken haze thrown up by the collision of the boils and the residual lava. This, she remembered reading in the college’s text, was what the weather of Jago would always be like. The coastline of the island was a scorched wasteland burned by the Fire Sea, but travel a few miles inland, and Jago’s true position in arctic latitudes became apparent, a dangerous night-cold wilderness of ice haunted by creatures as fierce as the freezing landscape they inhabited. What civilization there was left on Jago clung to the fiery coastline, leaving its glacial interior to monstrous beasts. Nandi saw a final flash of magnesium light through the mists, shimmering out from the flare-house on top of the Horn of Jago, and then the mountain disappeared and boiling water covered the bridge’s armoured viewing window. As they sank beneath the Fire Sea, Nandi could see the tug that had guided the Purity Queen in sinking before them, bubbles fleeting towards the surface from its pressure seals.

The Purity Queen followed the tug down, the water outside turning darker with every league of their increasing depth. As they neared the seabed, the commodore ordered his two steersmen to follow the tug’s example and head for the mouth of one of the titanic brass carvings of octopi, cuttlefish and nautili wrought into the underwater base of the island’s submerged basalt cliff-line. Nandi saw that they were entering a long tunnel illuminated by a strip of green lights running along its side. The tunnel ended in a door which irised open to admit the Purity Queen into a large dark space which started to drain of water and descend at the same time, a lifting room and dry-dock combined. As their descent drew to an end, the front of their lifting room opened out onto an underwater anchorage giving Nandi her first look at the great harbour vault of Hermetica City. The warm green stretch of the underwater pool was bounded by the concrete arc of the harbour at the opposite end of the chamber where hundreds of tugs similar to the one that had guided them were moored inside gated locks. From above glowing yellow plates partially hidden by wisps of condensation cast a diffuse light over the port’s warm waters. If Nandi hadn’t actually been present during their underwater approach, she might have taken the subterranean vault’s walls for a cliff-side and believed that they had simply sailed into one of the mountainous harbours back in the Kingdom’s uplands rather than entering Jago’s underground civilization.

‘We’re the only vessel in harbour,’ said Nandi, staring around her at the quiet lock gates, power houses, travelling dock cranes, sheds and warehouses. At least, they were if she discounted the idle tugs of the Jagonese home fleet. It was a lonely feeling.

After the Purity Queen had moored up, the commodore ordered all hatches open and reached for his jacket. ‘Best take yours too, lass. It’s warm enough during the day in the vaults, but at night they vent in air from the plains above to make it cooler underground.’

‘Just like the real world,’ said Nandi.

‘It’s different enough in Jago, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve never had a liking for this place. If it wasn’t for your blessed professor twisting my arm, I’d be Pericur-bound and leaving Hermetica City’s underground vaults to the Jagonese with a welcome-they-be for them.’

Nandi looked at the customs officials joining the tug crew on the dockside outside the bridge, a gaggle of velvet-cloaked functionaries pushing past the sailors in their rubber scald suits. ‘You don’t like living underground?’

‘You can’t be claustrophobic in my trade, lass. Maybe it’s the crackle of the wild energy they’ve tamed to power this place, or the dark creatures from the interior you’ll hear singing and whining outside the city walls up on the surface. Maybe it’s just that the more they try and make this place seem like home, the stranger it seems to me, but I’ve no love for this island or the shiver I feel when I walk its sealed-up streets.’

Out on the dockside the collection of velvet-cloaked officials had been joined by green-uniformed militiamen whose main function seemed to be to keep back the townspeople filtering through the otherwise deserted harbour front. Nandi and the commodore were the first out onto the gantry that swung across to the Purity Queen’s deck, Nandi fishing in the pockets of her short tweed jacket for the letter of introduction she had been given. Sealed in red wax with the crest of Saint Vine’s college.

By the time the police had finished warning the commodore of the penalties if he were to take onboard any Jagonese passengers without senate-stamped exit visas, Jethro Daunt and his curious jerking steamman friend had followed Nandi out, no doubt enjoying their first taste of solid land for weeks. More and more Jagonese were heading for the line formed by the police, presumably the hopeful emigrants that the Purity Queen’s master had just been warned of, waving and calling at the crew coming out of the u-boat, brandishing money, papers, or just their empty hands. The tug service’s sailors must have spread word among their friends and family. A rare chance to get off Jago.

One of the men standing by the custom officials strolled over to Nandi and Commodore Black. Judging by his dark frock coat and stovepipe hat, he was Jackelian rather than a local. He nodded at Nandi and the commodore before clearing his throat. ‘I am Mister Walsingham, an officer attached to the Jackelian consul here. I have cleared your arrival with the Jagonese Board of Aliens.’ He passed each of them a wax-sealed wallet. ‘You have full papers, captain, your crew and passengers have subsidiary visas attached to your own – Jagonese law can be swift and severe, do try to make sure they don’t start any brawls in taverns.’ He smiled weakly towards Nandi. ‘The crew, that is to say, not your passengers.’

‘Any that do will answer to me before they answer to the Jagonese magistrates,’ said the commodore, balling a fist.

‘A tight ship, eh. Good, good. If you need us, the Jackelian embassy is inside the Horn of Jago. But do try to stay out of trouble here, there’s a good fellow. We don’t have much leverage with the locals these days, so if any of your sailors end up in the police militia’s fortress, they’re rather on their own I’m afraid.’

‘A grey little suit,’ said the commodore as the officer walked away, ‘and just the same as a thousand of his friends in the civil service back home, no imagination for anything save creating new taxes to lighten my pocket-book. As much use as a blunt stick in a sabre duel. We’re on our own here, lass.’

But not quite as alone as would suit Nandi. ‘You don’t have to wait for me, whatever the professor told you. I’m hardly likely to get into trouble researching ancient history. You can leave me here in the capital, deliver your cargo to Pericur, and then pick me up on the return leg of your voyage. The more time I have to root through Jago’s archives, the better I shall like it.’

The commodore scratched at his dark, forked beard. ‘A promise is a promise, now. Your fine professor has gone out on a limb for me more times than I care to count and I wouldn’t want her to use those great big arms of hers on my noggin. Old Blacky’s crew and the Purity Queen will stay here and feed pennies to a suitably grateful tavern owner while you avail yourself of the archive access Saint Vine’s College has so handsomely paid for.’ He winked at her. ‘Besides, shipping to Pericur and back via the island will mean double navigation fees for these Jagonese pirates and they’ve had their thieving hands deep enough inside my pockets as it is.’

Nandi felt a brief stiffening of the same hackles that Professor Harsh so frequently raised. Wrapped in cotton wool, handled with kid gloves, overlooked for any foreign archaeological dig where there was even a hint of danger. Where else were you going to find sand-buried cities but in Cassarabia, with its bandits and wild nomads? Creeper-covered temples were two-a-penny in the jungles of Liongeli – but so were sharp-clawed thunder lizards, feral tribesman and river pirates. And here it was again. Jago, the heart of the enlightenment, but Commodore Black was still going to wait around while she poked through the Guild of Valvemen’s archives. What were he and his crude, lewd crew of rascals and brawlers going to do for her? Start a fight with the guild if it didn’t grant her the complete access the college had paid for?

What no one else seemed to realize was that every dig, every position she was barred from, was just another reminder of the hole left in her life by the death of her father, his bones lost in the sands outside the Diesela-Khan’s tomb thanks to a single poisoned rifle ball. Nandi had ostensibly come to Jago to fulfil Doctor Conquest’s work, but in reality she was completing another expedition. One that had ended disastrously in the great southern desert. When she was finished here and standing back on the soil of the Kingdom of Jackals, her work circulating through the corridors of the college, then her father’s restless spirit would finally have his grief eased. Perhaps if she took her own sweet time in her studies, the commodore might grow bored and make for Pericur anyway, giving her an extra month or two alone here in Jago’s capital.

Nandi moved aside as the Pericurian ambassador led a delegation of Jagonese dockers forward towards the u-boat’s cargo hold. It looked as if he was unloading some of the crates carrying the transaction-engine parts. His embassy, Nandi suspected, was about to be upgraded with the fruits of the latest Jackelian science.

Commodore Black walked away to present the papers he had been given by Mister Walsingham to the local customs officials, and by the time he had finished with them, he looked to be in a dark mood. ‘The raw-faced cheek of it, lass. We’ve been allocated rooms in city-centre lodgings with not a choice in the matter, and we’re to be escorted there by these green-uniformed popinjays as if we were prisoners being given our afternoon constitutional by the warders.’

‘Maybe they don’t trust us,’ said Nandi.

‘They trust sailors well enough,’ said a voice behind them. ‘They trust them to act like sailors in any port and they’d rather not have Jagonese men and women claiming marriage rights with any of your lads or lasses when you sail out of here.’

Nandi looked at the short, broad man that had spoken – dressed in a Jackelian waistcoat with a battered leather trapper’s coat over it, rather than the brocaded velvet clothes of the islanders. No local, this, and too scruffy to be one of the Jackelian embassy staff.

‘Ah well,’ said the commodore. ‘Lucky that my friend is here to study and not to find her fine self a husband.’

‘I’ve been married twice,’ said the man. ‘But never to anyone on Jago. I’m an outsider and they only tolerate me because they find my skills useful.’ He pointed to a set of cages on the side of the docks, iron bars holding back snarling, hooting specimens of the local wildlife. Nandi recognized the giant bear-like ursks from the illustrations in her college tomes, huge feral versions of the Pericurian ambassador who had travelled here with them. And by their side a cage filled with something else she had only glimpsed in books before, ab-locks. Leathery-skinned bipedal creatures with ape-like faces. They were a head or two under a man’s height, furless on the front but with a silver mane striped down their stooped backs.

‘My name is Tobias Raffold,’ said the trapper, ‘and I’ve been contracted by the Jackelian Zoological Society to deliver these creatures back to the Kingdom.’

Nandi noted the metre-long gap between the ursks’ cage and the one holding the ab-locks, the inhabitants of each crate snarling furiously at one another.

Tobias Raffold picked up a crowbar from the floor and drew it along the bars, turning the creatures’ growling attention towards him, hands snapping at the bars and trying to reach through to claw at him. ‘The only thing they bleeding loathe more than us is each other. Ursks and ab-locks rip each other apart when they cross onto each other’s territory.’

Nandi watched the ab-locks’ fierce red eyes burning as they pushed up against the bars. ‘They can be tamed, can’t they?’

‘Not at this age,’ said Tobias Raffold. ‘Trap ab-locks when they’re young and geld them and they can be taught basic orders well enough. They’re used in the Guild of Valvemen’s vaults to porter for them. Ab-locks last longer than us before they’re killed by the energies of the turbine halls.’

‘Feral or tamed, I’m not carrying the likes of these in the Purity Queen, Mister Raffold,’ said the commodore. ‘I don’t transport live cargoes. They can die, they can escape, and even if they don’t their stench and racket will make my crew restless. They’re not a lucky cargo for old Blacky.’

The trapper waved a wad of money at the two of them. Jackelian paper notes drawn on Lords Bank. ‘I can make it lucky enough for you.’

‘Not with those you can’t,’ said the commodore. ‘I’ve been paid well enough to sail here and I already have an outbound cargo for Pericur. Taking these mortal whining things on board is a mite too close to slaving for my tastes.’

‘Don’t give me that cant,’ said the trapper. ‘You’ve got a cat on board your bloody boat to keep down the rats, haven’t you? Abs and ursks are nothing more than dumb beasts.’

Commodore Black wrinkled his nose and turned his head away from the whining ab-locks’ clamour. ‘Not dumb enough for me, Mister Raffold. You can wait for your regular Pericurian boat to put in and ship your pets away for the mortal Jackelian Zoological Society. I’ll not be taking them with me.’

‘I’ll have to wait a month for the next Pericurian boat, man. I just missed the last one!’

Nandi and the commodore left the Jackelian trapper on the dockside, cursing the old u-boat skipper for a superstitious fool.

As the two of them caught up with the other u-boat passengers and their guard, the gathering crowds coming to see the u-boat parted to allow another police escort to pass in the opposite direction. The second group of police militia were pulling an ursine towards the harbour, heavy chains bound across long leather robes inscribed with the symbols of the Pericurian religion. They passed closed enough to Nandi and the others for Ambassador Ortin to take a quizzical interest in one of his fellow nationals being so rudely manhandled.

‘That is a preacher of the Divine Quad you are mistreating,’ Ortin urs Ortin protested to the officer leading the way. ‘Dear boy, can you not—’

Nandi and the ambassador lurched back as the ursine priest threw herself at the new arrivals, the police struggling to hold her. ‘You filthy heretic, you’ll burn in hell for this! Your presence here is hastening the apocalypse. This is sacred soil – sacred soil that you defile. Your fur will be burnt away with the wrath of Reckin urs Reckin. You will be left as hairless as these twisted, dirty infidels, the foul descendents of Amaja urs Amaja. You will burn along with all those malignant traders with their blind eyes that can see only profit, standing on the cursed soil where our ancient temples once stood. Their eyes will burn in their sockets for their sins, then they will know true blindness!’

‘You’ve had your answer, sir,’ said the officer in charge of the group as his men fought to bundle the giant priest away. ‘Now move along.’

‘What is going to happen to that lady?’ demanded the ambassador.

‘She stowed away on the boat from Pericur,’ said the officer. ‘Now she’s going back. She attacked some of your own traders down in the main market, turning over their stalls. You know we deport any of your preachers that try to sneak in. We could have arrested her for the damage she did.’

‘A zealot,’ said Ortin, sadly. ‘Treat her as kindly as you can.’

‘Nothing for the archduchess to complain about, sir.’

Nandi watched the disappearing figure of the preacher, still yelling about the end-times and the fall of paradise, railing against the laughing Jagonese crowds who were jeering and taunting her. ‘Does all of the race of man look like devils to you, ambassador?’

‘I think there is a little bit of the devil in all of us, dear girl,’ said Ortin. ‘Whether you have a fine pelt like we do, or even if you don’t.’

Nandi nodded in agreement. So many tensions came from the misreading of history. All so avoidable.

The preacher’s voice grew fainter as they walked towards the capital.

‘The last judgement is coming, all of you…doomed!’

Jethro looked out of the window of their lodgings while Boxiron finished unpacking the last of the travel cases he had been too tired to start the day before. It was a grand hotel, the Westerkerk, but the fact that the connected rooms they had been given were almost as large as their lodgings back at Thompson Street did not disguise the fact that this place was as a good as a prison cell for them. As soon as they’d arrived they had noticed the police militia posted at all the hotel’s entrances, and while the soldiers were obviously busy turning away Jagonese claiming they had business with the Purity Queen’s crew, Jethro knew that their presence was a double-edged blade.

‘We have quite a view of the cathedral across the Grand Canal,’ noted Boxiron.

‘A view,’ said Jethro, ‘but not an unobserved way to present the Inquisition’s credentials to the cathedral staff.’

‘The law enforcers here are not like your friends back in Ham Yard,’ said Boxiron.

‘Indeed they are not,’ said Jethro. ‘If they changed the colour of their green uniforms for a redcoat’s cherry attire, they might almost be taken for a military force.’

‘You marked the coral defences ringing the island on the way in,’ said Boxiron. ‘The commodore told me they have battlements surrounding the capital’s surface structures almost as impressive.’

Jethro rubbed his chin. ‘An interesting frame of mind, don’t you think? All your enemies are external, all your defences facing out to protect you. But what do you do if you find there is a rot within? How would you cope with that?’

Boxiron did not get a chance to reply – there was a knock at their door and when the steamman opened it, Ortin urs Ortin stood there, filling the doorframe with his impressive furred bulk.

‘Good ambassador,’ said Jethro. ‘You’re not rooming in the hotel, are you? I thought your embassy would have taken you in.’

‘The deputy ambassador claims that she wasn’t told I was coming and that she’s taken the opportunity of my predecessor’s departure to remodel my apartments. I won’t be able to move into my embassy rooms for weeks.’

Jethro frowned. ‘You suspect a slight?’

‘Of course I suspect a slight, dear boy,’ said Ortin urs Ortin. ‘I am a rare male office-holder in a matriarchal society, and it seems my banishment here is not to be made a comfortable one. But even they can’t stop me taking up my duties. I have a summons to present myself to the stained senate this morning, as do you…’

‘Me? I’m a private party, good ambassador, not a representative of the Kingdom’s foreign office.’

‘There’s still a couple of reformers left on my staff here, despite the best efforts of the archduchess’s conservatives, and my house’s friends have caught wind of a few worrying circumstances brewing here,’ said the ambassador, moving to the window. ‘And that’s one of them.’

Jethro followed the direction of the large furred finger and saw an officer of the police militia striding towards the hotel.

‘Colonel Constantine Knipe, a particularly charmless fellow who seems to hold a low opinion of my appointment here that’s not far removed from that of my own enemies in Pericur. He’s already intercepted me and warned me to restrict my duties to a bare minimum and now I suspect it’s your turn. Well, at least I’ve beaten the old fruit here to you. I counsel saying little…’

True to the ambassador’s words, Colonel Knipe arrived outside their rooms a minute later, his appearance preceded by the clump-hiss of his mechanical leg. He glowered at Ortin urs Ortin as though his presence implied that all three of them were involved in some plot. Then Knipe turned his attention towards Jethro, his eyes skipping briefly past Boxiron – the steamman surely an exotic oddity on the island – and waved a sheet of paper at the ex-parson. ‘Jethro Daunt, citizen of the Kingdom of Jackals. The same Jethro Daunt, I am presuming, who was the consulting detective that retrieved the Twelve Works of Charity when the painting was stolen from the Middlesteel Museum.’

‘The same, good colonel. Although it would be truer to say that the painting never actually left the museum, it was merely switched and falsely identified as a forgery by the thief. You are exceedingly well informed.’

‘Our representatives in the Kingdom still collect your penny sheets,’ said the colonel. ‘And our transaction-engine vaults are still one of the wonders of the world.’

‘So I have heard,’ smiled Jethro. ‘And I see from the paper in your hand that their retrieval speeds match all that I have heard about their superiority.’

‘Why have you been summoned to the senate floor, Daunt?’

‘That, I’m afraid, only your stained senate can answer,’ said Jethro.

‘Your services have not been engaged by them?’

‘No,’ sighed Jethro. ‘Sadly, my visit here is of a private nature.’

‘There is nothing private on Jago when it comes to keeping our people safe,’ said the colonel. ‘I will have the reason for your appearance on our shores. We haven’t had a Jackelian u-boat call for over thirteen months.’

‘If you will,’ said Jethro, stiffly. ‘I have come here to pay my respects to a recent grave. That of Damson Alice Gray.’

‘The archbishop?’ said the colonel, surprised. ‘What is she to you?’

‘She and I were engaged to be married, although sadly the loss of my original living prevented our union.’

Colonel Knipe looked shocked, as though he wouldn’t have been more disturbed if Jethro had admitted he and Boxiron were grave robbers come to whisk the woman’s corpse out of her grave for sale to medical students in need of surgical practice meat.

‘If the Jagonese embassy back home have been thorough in sending you copies of the Middlesteel Illustrated News, you will find the posting of our banns in your archives, I am sure. A little relic of my personal history buried among so much of yours, good colonel.’

‘You have missed the funeral,’ noted the colonel.

‘Word travels slowly from Jago these days,’ said Jethro. ‘But I am here now.’

‘Better for you to have missed the funeral,’ said the colonel, his manner softening slightly now that he thought he understood the rationale for Jethro’s presence on Jago. He pointed at Ortin urs Ortin. ‘One of your friend’s primitive cousins was released into the city thanks to the incompetence of the Pericurian mercenaries the senate has seen fit to hire to protect us. You have your memories of the archbishop as she was, not as she was left after the ursk attack. It is better that way.’

‘A terrible accident,’ said Jethro. He did not say that he hadn’t been able to properly remember Alice Gray’s face for many years. He could recall their courtship, the places they had visited together, but the cruelty of time had erased her features from his memories. He was a different man now. Like so many men, he had defined himself by his relationship with her. What she had left behind would have been wretched, wrecked and worse even without the old gods’ touch of madness.

‘We killed four ursks in the canals that night,’ said the colonel. ‘Not much of a recompense for a life lost, but some consolation. I believe we still have one of the furs on the wall in the militia fortress. I could let you have it, if you think the use of it as a rug would bring you peace when you look at it.’

Jethro nodded. ‘You are exceedingly obliging, good colonel.’

‘I shall take you to the senate,’ decided the colonel, graciously. He waved Ortin away, noting that the ambassador was expected to present himself first. Jethro watched the Pericurian leave eagerly enough, happy to be out of the militia officer’s company with all his talk of skinning ursks. When the ambassador had left, the colonel shook his head knowingly. ‘And on the way I will tell you what you need to know to keep you safe here.’

‘Safe?’ said Jethro. ‘I understood the Jagonese were exemplars of courtesy and the abidance of laws.’

‘By nature, our people are,’ said the colonel. ‘But the wheel has turned and things on Jago are not as they once were.’ He stared at Boxiron, ‘Is it safe to talk in front of this one?’

‘I trust Boxiron with my life,’ said Jethro. ‘And despite the best efforts of the Jackelian underworld, as my living presence here attests, I have yet to be disappointed.’

‘Are you from the Steammen Free State?’ the colonel asked Boxiron. ‘Or an automatic milled by the race of man? You are not as I imagined you.’

‘I am a little of both,’ replied Boxiron, his voicebox juddering.

‘My friend’s is a sad and difficult story,’ said Jethro, ‘and it would pain him to relate it. Suffice it to say, Boxiron is a better and more reliable friend than all others have proven over the years. He’s a topping old steamer.’

Satisfied, the colonel led Jethro and Boxiron out of the hotel, across the square and towards the imposing steps that led into the passages and vaults hollowed out of the mountainous Horn of Jago itself. Jethro was quite glad the colonel didn’t suspect what Boxiron really was, or he wouldn’t have been so happy to lead the two of them in front of the senate.

Jethro glanced across at the cathedral before the steps took him inside the mountain, the church building rising stalagmite-like to join the roof of the capital’s vast central vault. That was where his business lay, not in front of the rulers of Jago.

What could the senate possibly want of Jethro Daunt that he had to give them?

CHAPTER FIVE

The thing that disconcerted Nandi the most about Hermetica City’s atmospheric station was how clean she found it compared to stations such as Guardian Fairfax back in Middlesteel. None of the smoke, the dust, the grime, no ceaseless thump from the constant labour of steam engines to keep the transport tunnels under vacuum. This system was powered by electricity. She shivered at the thought.

There weren’t many people in the station – but then, this line only served the distant vaults of the Guild of Valvemen, their chambers buried many miles away at the foot of the hills that served as the gateway to the cold, dark interior of the country. Outside the battlements and no doubt out of mind, too. Practically a city by itself. No farm or park domes out there, nothing on the surface. All buried deep and far enough away from the capital for Jago’s citizens not to be concerned about being poisoned by the power electric the guild’s turbine halls generated.

Nandi stood by a cluster of statues in the centre of the concourse, watching the crimson-robed valvemen moving over the polished stone floor like red ghosts – waiting for the capsule that would take them to their vaults to arrive. She was puzzling over the inscription at the foot of a sculpture of three Jagonese women hugging each other – Here lays Eli, still and old, who died because he was cold – when she spotted the commodore coming towards her.

‘I thought you might have forgotten I was due to make my first visit to the guild’s transaction-engine rooms today,’ she said by way of greeting.

‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore, ‘I would have come sooner, but for the curiosity of that colonel of police, Knipe, and his insistence I satisfy it with every petty little detail of our voyage here. As if the Jagonese shouldn’t be grateful that there is still an honest skipper willing to brave the perils of the Fire Sea to pay them a call.’

‘I had my turn yesterday evening,’ said Nandi. ‘After they escorted us to the hotel. What was my research, why was Saint Vine’s paying the guild’s fees of access so eagerly? How I am to immediately report anyone offering me large amounts of money as a dowry to marry them. What I know of Mister Daunt and the old steamer that follows him around…’

‘You see now,’ declaimed the commodore in triumph, ‘why it is old Blacky avoids this blasted port. They are an insular, suspicious bunch on Jago. They have dug themselves a pit here, pulled themselves in and let themselves stew in their own juices for a few centuries too long.’ He indicated the guild workers on the concourse around them. ‘And these red crows are the worst of all, their bodies crumbling under the wicked weight of the dark energies they tame. But this is where you’ve come to study, and so I’ll wait with you to see you safely away from the cursed place.’

‘I’m not your daughter,’ said Nandi. ‘I don’t need protecting.’

‘Nobody will ever be my daughter,’ said Commodore Black.

‘I’m sorry,’ Nandi apologized. ‘I should not have said that. I asked one of your crew back on the submarine who your boat was named after.’

‘You’re not my daughter, Nandi, but you have more than a little of her fire. She died doing what was right. I wish I could say I taught her that, but I’d be a wicked liar if I did.’

‘I’ll be safe enough here,’ said Nandi.

‘This city, this whole island, is a mortal tomb,’ said the commodore. ‘It just hasn’t sunk in with the locals here yet. And I know your Professor Harsh well enough to know that she would have lectured you all about the dangers of tombs.’

‘There are no stake-covered pits here,’ said Nandi.

‘Not the kind that you can see, lass,’ said the old u-boat man. ‘Which makes them even more dangerous in my book.’

‘What if I need to do what I feel is right?’ asked Nandi. ‘Will you try to stop me?’

‘I’m not that big a fool, lass.’ He patted the sabre by his side. ‘But I’ll be close by, waiting to take up the point with any blackguards that do.’

Nandi shook her head and accepted the inevitable. It seemed that in convincing the professor that she could manage the expedition to Jago on her own, she had merely swapped one would-be protector for another. If her father had been alive, he would have come here with her. Nandi couldn’t have stopped him, though perhaps he would have used his influence over the professor to stop her. The commodore and the man her father had been were as different as the sun and the moon, but they shared one thing – they would both die for her, that much she knew. Nandi shifted the leather satchel she was carrying, inscribed with the double-headed crane seal of Saint Vine’s college and weighed down with her papers, blank notebooks and pens and ink. ‘You won’t have to wait much longer, look…’

Three iron capsules arrived in quick succession, whipping through the rubber curtain to be caught by the turntable at the far end of the concourse, then rotated in front of the passenger platform as if they were offerings to those waiting. Nandi and the commodore had been sent a capsule all to themselves, to spare them the guild workers’ company – or perhaps the converse. Their capsule also came with a guide; a single valveman in the same intricately embroidered crimson robes worn by the guild workers boarding the other capsules.

‘No one on the platform to check for tickets,’ remarked Nandi.

‘Ah, anyone who wants to go where we’re going is mortal welcome to it,’ said the commodore. ‘If there was any justice in the world, the guild would be paying us to visit their dark lair, not the other way around.’

Their guide led them into their windowless capsule and in a female voice told the two of them to make themselves comfortable on the red leather bench seats running along one side. When they were seated, the valve worker touched a button and the door irised shut with a clang, followed by a slight thump as the loading arm pushed them forward – into the atmospheric system. Then a whoosh. An increasing sense of acceleration as the pressure differential built up, sending them hurtling along the airless tunnels towards the great engine rooms of Jago.

Commodore Black turned to their guide. ‘Tell me, lass, is there no pilot on this blessed contraption of yours?’

There was a slight shake of her heavy red hood. ‘No. The atmospheric capsules are controlled by the machines.’

‘Machines, always more machines on Jago,’ said the commodore. ‘Machines to open the gates on the great ring of coral that circles your island, machines to heat and light your vaults, and yet more of the blessed things to bring down the air from the terrible land above. You’ve more machines down here in your city than in King Steam’s land.’

‘And transaction engines,’ added Nandi, expectantly. ‘Filled with the lost knowledge of the ages.’

‘It’s never been lost to us,’ said their guide.

‘Archived away unstudied, then,’ said Nandi. She rummaged around in her bag and brought out her letters of admittance and travel. ‘Your colonel of police has already seen my papers, but my college is very insistent the right people receive these and I get access to all of the records we paid for.’

The valvewoman took the grant of access, and as she read her previously steady hand began to shake. Did she have the palsy? Had one of the engine-room afflictions weakened her arm?

‘Are you well, lass?’ asked the commodore. ‘Do you need a tot from old Blacky’s hipflask to steady your hand?’

‘The names on these papers,’ said their guide, ‘the two original names listed under the prior grant of access.’ Hannah Conquest pulled her crimson hood down. ‘They’re the names of my mother and father!’

As Jethro walked towards the senate, the combination of noises produced by Colonel Knipe’s artificial leg and Boxiron’s clumping footsteps on the iron gantry seemed to merge into one rhythm. Down below lay an atmospheric station almost identical to those of Middlesteel, save for the presence of Pericurian mercenaries waiting for the capsule-like trains. A large turntable in the centre of the concourse was retrieving new capsules emerging through the rubber curtains that sealed the airless tubes the carriages travelled along.

Struggling in the shadow of the bear-like mercenaries were Jagonese loaded down with bundles, crates and chests of possessions, pushing, pulling and hauling their burdens off the transport capsules and out into the vaults of the capital below.

Colonel Knipe noted the direction of Jethro’s gaze. ‘You must feel Alice Gray’s loss, Mister Daunt, to have travelled all the way to Jago to see her grave?’

Jethro nodded.

‘There,’ said the colonel, ‘is our loss. The senate has ordered the closure of Tarramack, the second city of Jago. Her people are being relocated here to the capital, whether they care to come or not. When the evacuation is complete, the atmospheric line out to Tarramack will be blown and the tunnels caved in to keep us safe in the capital. Then there will only be us left. Our loss is not as sudden as the one you feel so keenly, it has been happening over centuries. Slowly, like a disease, or like old age, dying a little more each year.’

‘Those people couldn’t stay in their homes?’ asked Jethro.

‘A couple of thousand in a city built for hundreds of thousands?’ The colonel drew a circle in the air. ‘There were twelve great cities looping around our coast, connected by the atmospheric line. In a week’s time Hermetica City will be all that is left of them. When your city’s population is reduced beyond a workable level, things break down faster than there are people with the time or knowledge to fix them. I was in the city of Flamewall when we discovered that the hard way, manning a tower on its battlements. I left my leg behind there along with the graves of the woman I married and our two young sons.’

‘I am sorry,’ said Jethro.

Colonel Knipe hardly seemed to have heard him. ‘No, better an orderly withdrawal and the planned decommissioning of Tarramack. The refugees hate us now, but they have their choice of homes in the deserted quarters here in Hermetica City.’

‘Does everyone come?’ asked Jethro.

‘Some hide,’ said the colonel. ‘Holdouts that don’t want to be resettled. A few turn outlaw. They won’t last long on their own, not when the creatures outside the walls get into a city.’

‘These are the problems you said you would warn me about, good colonel?’

‘Partly,’ said Knipe. ‘And those that follow as a consequence of it. There are parents here, proud people, good people, who’ll thrust their daughters at you as if their children were two-penny bawdy house girls in the hope you’ll take them away from Jago – their sons, too, if they thought you had a taste for it. There are others who would slit your throat if they suspected you carried the foreign coins needed to bribe a u-boat man to look the other way on hatch duty. And as for the Pericurian mercenaries that guard us, you’ve had a taste of the misery those brutes’ incompetence can bring you, with Alice Gray’s death. This is what Jago has come to, our ancient redoubt of civilization. The world has forgotten who we are, and now it’s just waiting for the last of us to forget too. Then there’ll just be the ursks and the ab-locks and the other monsters of the interior hunting each other by the flames of the Fire Sea, amongst our broken ruins.’

‘It is never too late to change,’ noted Boxiron, stumbling along nosily behind Jethro. ‘There are many threads of the great pattern, many paths that may yet be taken by your people.’

‘Yes,’ agreed Jethro. ‘What about the senate you’re taking us to see, what course do those that you’ve voted for favour in this matter?’

‘Voted for?’ laughed Colonel Knipe, grimly. ‘They’re the main part of what I wanted to warn you about, Jackelian. Jago’s other cities may have been abandoned, but their political wards remain, controlled by one or two voters with ancient property titles. Our senators’ seats have been as good as hereditary since long before I was born. When you speak to the First Senator, make no promises. Dissemble if the fool presses you. If you are lucky and his functionaries don’t get your words on paper, he will have forgotten what he asked you to do by the next time you see him. His mind will have flitted onto a new fancy.’

Jethro nodded and continued walking, humming a tune under his breath. ‘The bulldog as well as to bark may go whistle, just as an upland pup is doomed to be flogged with a thistle.’

The Jagonese may have chosen to site the bulk of their capital in the warm subterranean caverns along the coast, but the vaults hollowed out within the Horn of Jago followed the usual laws of wealth – the higher they travelled inside the burrowed mountain, the greater the prosperity of its citizens, until the clothing of the merchants and mill-owners became so baroque that Jethro thought it a wonder they could still move under the weight of elaborate brocaded jackets and velvet cloaks. Each zone of wealth within the mountain seemed to have its own lifting room and territory, every guild and organization represented with their routes jealousy guarded, and although the passages’ guards would not bar the colonel of the police militia, Knipe led them through the horn using a circuitous route to avoid unnecessary antagonism. By the time they had reached the senatorial levels inside the mountain, the public lifting rooms had become hall-sized, the padded crimson leather of their walls reflected in crystal mirrors and manned by public servants in senate livery. The last such lifting room they rode upwards deposited Jethro, Boxiron and the colonel in a long, echoing corridor lined with busts of First Senators long since departed. Each bust was as tall as a man and created the eerie impression that a company of invading stone giants had been captured and decapitated, their heads left here as a warning. In each of the gaps between the busts a waist-high wooden rack waited.

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