Secrets of the Fire Sea

CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE


Down and down, every second closer to the sabre’s tip. Jethro was so close to the ursine soldier now that he could smell her breath. She was choking to death on her own blood as she drew him near to her, the matted fur on her face contorted with anger.

‘I forgive you,’ whispered Jethro, kissing the Pericurian’s brow as the sword’s tip began to press through his waistcoat.

Her eyes widened in shock at his words, as though the touch of his lips had loosed her dying soul to move along the Circle, freeing it into the one sea of consciousness to mingle with all life, waiting to be cupped out again into those yet to be born. She went limp; the stutter of her furnace breath growing silent, and her head fell back. Jethro pulled himself up and rolled off the ursine’s corpse. Strangely, he felt no happiness at being alive; he barely knew he was. Standing in the smoke from the rifle fire, the sounds of the melee washing over him, he felt outside of himself, protected by the gun smoke, an observer hovering above the buildings burning all down the street, covering him with soot. Now he was the Jagonese convict thrusting a bayonet forward. He was the Pericurian meeting the thrust with tooth and claw, with steel that had been sharpened in distant glades. He was the ursine lying dead at his feet. And he was himself again.

The sounds of battle slowly began to creep into his consciousness. The hiss of a steamman’s stacks burning too hot to handle, the crack of a warhammer answered by howling ursine.

Jethro came alive and entered the fog of war to find Boxiron.


Hannah followed the soldiers through the besieged city folk packed into the halls inside the Horn of Jago, coming to a lifting room, its once-opulent interior stained with the gore of wounded Jagonese borne down from the slopes being bombarded by the Pericurian artillery. While medical orderlies lifted out the wounded, Hannah was taken inside and the lifting room ascended up into the senatorial levels. The blood-spattered doors drew back to reveal a long corridor lined with statues of senators, massive busts familiar from the tedium of her history lessons and the annals the priests used to throw at her when she was daydreaming. This was the entrance to the senate, but it had found a new use now, transformed into the military headquarters for the defence of Jago. The famous windows had been smashed, the brightly coloured glass lying on the marble floor, and militiamen stood on makeshift fire steps, pointing rifles or telescopes down the peak, shouting orders to runners waiting behind them as they detailed where the Pericurians were massing, where the bombardment was falling, and which chambers of the mountainside below were likely to be assaulted next.

There was a canteen-style table laid out with maps and plans and Hannah recognized two of the people behind it. One was Colonel Knipe, the police commander looking haggard and tired, and the other was Father Blackwater, the acting archbishop wearing the same baffled expression she recalled from his synthetic morality lessons – as if the ability of any pupil to draw a meaningful equation might be a miracle beyond expectation.

Colonel Knipe glanced up at Hannah and wiped the weariness out of his eyes. ‘Your name is on the First Senator’s arrest list.’

Hannah looked askance.

‘Don’t worry,’ said the colonel. ‘That fool Silvermain’s head is on a pole down on the battlements now. Sometimes I take one of the spotter’s telescopes and look at his surprised eyes, just to help keep me going.’

A shell shook the slopes below the senatorial palace and the colonel pushed his maps aside. ‘But not, I suspect, for much longer. Your arrival is well timed, young Damson Conquest. Father Blackwater here was just explaining to me how he knew nothing about the Inquisition helping to finance an expedition by the Pericurian diplomatic service into the interior.’

‘The League of the Rational Court,’ protested the father, ‘does not answer to that vulgar—’

‘Enough!’ Colonel Knipe silenced the old priest. ‘I trust, damson, you too will not insult my intelligence by pretending that your presence with the Pericurian expedition was a coincidence.’

‘It was not,’ said Hannah, jumping slightly as a roar of voices rumbled down the corridor from the direction of two massive doors.

‘Excellent,’ said the colonel. ‘Don’t mind the noise. The senate is currently debating what to do about the crisis.’ He grimaced. ‘With any luck, we’ll have some legislation freezing all Pericurian trading assets on Jago within the hour. It’s something of a rump senate, however, given that many of their noble elected heads are on poles next to Silvermain’s, but we can but hope they overcome such trifles in time for victory.’

‘The Pericurian ambassador was looking for evidence of the truth of their scriptures out there,’ said Hannah. ‘It was an archaeological mission.’

‘To justify the war?’ said the colonel. ‘Most wet-snouts can find that drivel in their priests’ imaginations readily enough without resorting to archaeology. And the Inquisition’s involvement, damson?’

‘There is a weapon, a mathematical weapon, devised by the church over a thousand years ago,’ said Hannah. ‘Its pieces are scattered. With it we can turn back the Pericurians.’

‘Oh, please,’ said the colonel. ‘It’ll take more than a church formula to disprove the force of the legions the wet-snouts have landed on Jago.’

‘It’s true!’ insisted Hannah. ‘We’ve already found two pieces of the weapon. We call it the god-formula, and when it’s completed, the invasion could be turned back in the second it takes to think of it. The Inquisition’s agent – Jethro Daunt – financed the expedition so we could track down the last missing piece.’

‘And did you find it?’ asked Colonel Knipe.

‘No,’ said Hannah ‘It wasn’t there, but—’

Colonel Knipe waved her away. ‘This fancy is madness! We need soldiers, cannons, charges, not ancient church legends.’ He motioned a militiaman patiently waiting behind Hannah to step forward. The soldier carried a large leather backpack and a dangling speaker-tube. ‘I have contact with the guild, colonel.’

‘Good man; so, let us see what that fool Vardan Flail has to say.’

Vardan Flail! Hannah’s eyes narrowed. That was all she needed.

‘Do you have good news for me, guildsman?’ barked the colonel into the speaking trumpet.

‘I will not transfer the First Senator’s command functions to your staff of office,’ said an obsequious voice issuing from speakers on the side of the backpack. ‘Not without the due ratification of the senate.’

‘Don’t you play politics here, you little worm,’ spat the colonel. ‘I need those functions to prosecute the war. With them I can seal fire-doors on vaults the wet-snouts have overrun, I can—’

‘You get the senate to vote for it,’ replied the warbling voice, ‘and the functions will be yours.’

‘Do you think you are safe in your deep hole?’ shouted the colonel. ‘When the wet-snouts have finished with us here, they’ll be straight over to the guild’s vaults and turbine halls – down after you like weasels in a rabbit warren.’

‘We are not in our vaults,’ came the voice. ‘We are marching on Hermetica City in our RAM suits and we will be with you within the hour!’

Colonel Knipe cut the voice off and slammed the speaking trumpet into the table. ‘Worm. Filthy worm. Vardan Flail thinks that if he comes here with his guildsmen the senate we be so relieved they’ll hail him as the new First Senator.’

‘The turbine workers are a tough crew, colonel,’ said the communications officer.

‘RAM suits are fine for turning aside ursk claws and the poison of an electric field,’ said the colonel, ‘but not a shell from a wet-snout howitzer.’

‘Please,’ Hannah begged the head of the capital’s militia. ‘I can fix this, all of this. The war, everyone who has died. I have two pieces of the god-formula and I know where the third part is hidden. It’s here in the city, Bel Bessant hid it here in the capital! The ambassador and his people don’t know about the existence of the third piece.’

Father Blackwater’s eyes widened in shock. ‘Bel Bessant! You mean the horror she wanted to develop to use against the Chimecan gods? It doesn’t exist, it is just a legend.’

‘But it does,’ said Hannah. ‘The Inquisition knew. Alice Gray was an agent of the League of the Rational Court! She knew about the god-formula before any of us did. The Inquisition has been protecting the secret for centuries.’

‘You know better than this,’ said the priest. ‘If that horror exists you must swear silence on the matter. You must allow yourself to be tortured rather than pass it over to hands touched by mortal weakness.’

‘But I can fix it, stop the war and the deaths,’ begged Hannah. ‘I can see so clearly now. Everything the Circlist church has taught me, all of synthetic morality. I’m strong enough to endure being given the godhead. I won’t stay a god long, just long enough to stop the war and bring back the dead that didn’t have to—’

‘Enough, child!’ Father Blackwater slapped her. ‘This is vanity. Your grief has unbalanced you.’

‘The archbishop was a member of the Inquisition?’ Colonel Knipe mouthed the words, hardly believing them. ‘I can see there has been a merry dance being played here on Jago behind our backs. Girl, if you really know of something that will stop the wet-snouts, you must use it. To do otherwise would be madness.’

Father Blackwater tried to grab Hannah’s arm, but the colonel barked and his militiamen grabbed the Circlist priest, dragging him away as he begged them not to do this terrible thing.

There was a whisper in the corridor, lost in the rattle of a falling shell across the slopes outside. If Hannah had listened harder she might have heard the triumphant hiss of Badger-headed Joseph.

‘Soon. Soon.’


Jethro Daunt stumbled along the street after Boxiron, the steamman’s stacks releasing spears of smoke into the water cascading down around them. When a serious fire gripped the streets at the centre of their vault, a line of brass nozzles had pushed up and out of the canals, raining water down across the buildings, while canals refilled with boiling seawater pumped in from the harbour to enhance the flows of the seeping water table.

The ex-parson of Hundred Locks knew little of war, little beyond the antiquarian history texts he had inherited from an uncle long passed away. Their coloured plates full of manoeuvring oblongs and squares, arrows indicating the sweep of companies and cavalry units, bore little resemblance to the confusion of war on the ground. No illustration could convey the taste of gun smoke or the acrid churning pit of fear in each fighter’s gut. In this environment, of falling water and billowing steam, Jethro was little more than bait, the scent of the race of man necessary to bring the Pericurians running into the blunt end of Boxiron’s warhammer. They were lost in a surreal nightmare. Separated from the other convict fighters in the confusion, they ran from forces large enough to rout the two of them, attacking smaller groups, once glimpsing a marching column of militiamen through the smoke, a ghost company whose existence Jethro was beginning to doubt.

Almost as strange a sight as the familiar-looking figure revealed when the smoke parted in the breeze, a man sitting by the canal side, legs dangling down as though he was waiting for someone to bring him an angler’s rod and tackle.

‘Commodore Black!’ said Jethro. ‘Dear Circle, good captain, what are you doing here?’

The commodore turned towards them and Jethro noted that the old u-boat man’s left arm was in a makeshift sling, the remains of a torn diving costume shredded around his shoulder. Boxiron followed after Jethro, the steamman’s gear assembly slipping back into second naturally, without the ex-parson having to intervene as he so often had in the past.

‘Trying to get my breathing tank off, Mister Daunt,’ said the commodore. ‘A wicked hard task with the use of only one arm, and me hoping I can do it before a Pericurian spots me and puts a sharp bolt through my ill-starred skull.’

‘You are wounded,’ said Boxiron.

‘My diving suit was torn out in the boils beyond the harbour, leaving my arm here as rare as I have my roast beef served back home.’

‘The harbour?’ Jethro helped Boxiron to unstrap the large air tank from the commodore’s back. ‘But the expedition, Hannah and Nandi – what were you doing at sea?’

‘Trying to get out of it, lad. That jigger Ortin urs Ortin handed us over to the great fleet of Pericur. Poor Nandi and the others didn’t have the luck to survive our greeting by the wet-snouts. Hannah Conquest is alive, though. I saw her dragged away by Jagonese divers – taken back into the city. Poor old Blacky would have had it away with them too, were it not for being half-buried under the Black Cliffs of Jago thanks to a wet-snout torpedo. But there’s a game or two left for fate to play against me, or she wouldn’t have blown the grille off a sewer pipe and laughed at me as I dug myself out from under the rubble and then swam through most of the shit of this city.’

‘Did you find William of Flamewall’s body?’ said Jethro, desperately. ‘The third part of the god-formula?’

‘Ah, we found your murdering runaway priest for you,’ said the commodore. ‘And a lot more besides. But not your church’s wicked weapon.’

Jethro listened as the commodore explained all that had happened to the expedition in the wilds, and made the stunning revelation that the secret of the third piece of the god-formula had been concealed in the final painting of the rational trinity all the time.

‘It cannot be,’ interrupted Boxiron. ‘I scanned the image of the third painting – it was blank of any concealed steganography. It was merely a hoax by William of Flamewall.’

‘I only know what Hannah said, old steamer,’ wheezed the commodore, rotating his wounded arm now that it was out from under his air tank’s weight. ‘We just didn’t look deep enough. Who’s to say it’s not a fancy of young Hannah’s mind after all that we’ve been through, eh? Surviving the terrors of the wilds beyond the wall, the poor girl finding her mother’s bones and Nandi being added to the butcher’s bill. And for what? Just so the wet-snouts can call time on the last Jagonese clinging onto their terrible isle. Maybe the existence of this mortal fancy is only what she needs to make the world make sense? Poor mad Hannah, crying that she’s going to save us all from our troubles.’

‘We just didn’t look deep enough,’ said Jethro. He slapped his forehead in annoyance. ‘Of course! She saw it and I should have too. The painting doesn’t contain the third section of the god-formula, it’s a clue to the location of the missing piece. Here in the capital, all this time, hang my foolishness.’

‘Then I’m a fool along with you,’ said the commodore, ‘for I still don’t see it.’

‘Jethro softbody,’ said Boxiron. ‘If she is close to the third section of the god-formula and she intends to try to use it…’

‘She is in danger, greater even than she knows,’ said Jethro. ‘The third section of the god-formula will be encrypted in a steganographic cipher similar to that of the first two. We have as long as it takes her to find and decrypt the missing piece to stop this thing!’

Jethro touched Boxiron’s shoulder and pointed to the tank of air they had removed from the commodore’s back. ‘Lift that cylinder up if you please. I fear we will have use for it soon.’

‘I’m done diving, Mister Daunt,’ said the commodore.

‘We have the Circle’s work to do,’ said Jethro, ‘but it’s not at sea.’

Boxiron and the commodore followed the ex-parson of Hundred Locks as he sprinted off into the billowing smoke.


Coming along the corridor leading up to the stained senate, the militiaman saluted Colonel Knipe and held out a pouch of papers – the first two parts of the god-formula that had been locked up by Jethro Daunt in the safe of the Hotel Westerkerk. ‘It was where the damson said it would be, colonel.’

Colonel Knipe’s eyes narrowed. ‘So, it’s true after all. Damn the Inquisition’s eyes. All this time they knew, playing us for fools.’

‘The church was guarding the first two parts,’ said Hannah, feeling that she had to explain on behalf of her dead guardian. ‘And those only kept for a counter-weapon to be developed.’

‘Damn Circlist fools,’ said the colonel. ‘They are as bad as the city guilds with their plotting and scheming and secrets.’ He saw the hurt look in Hannah’s eyes and placed a hand on her shoulder. ‘I know the church was to be your calling and what I am asking you to do is not an easy thing. You may not have been born in our vaults, but your heart is Jagonese, and by your actions here you have declared yourself as much a patriot as any of us here fighting for our liberty.’

‘I just want to save us,’ said Hannah. ‘To bring back those that didn’t need to be hurt by this stupid war.’

‘We must trust that you can,’ said the colonel. ‘I lost my wife and children during the collapse of one of our cities. You, I, our people, we have all paid too much to stay on Jago to allow ourselves to become slaves of those bloody savages on the surface.’

As if underlining his words, the booming thunder of the invaders’ bombardment grew heavier. Pieces of cracked glass crashed down from the lintels that had been turned into fire steps for the riflemen. At the other end of the corridor the lifting room doors opened and three runners emerged, their militia uniforms torn and covered in dust and blood. They ran up to the colonel and delivered their reports. Hannah listened intently to the grim news. Almost all of the vaults were cut off from each other and overrun, the bulk of the Pericurian legions down inside Hermetica City now, the Seething Round itself being assaulted, the officer below advising that they needed to make a staged retreat to the mountain fastness of the Horn of Jago and seal the mountain levels off while they still could.

Soon the police militia would be fighting the Pericurians off the steps leading into the mountain as well as shooting down the assaults being led up the Horn’s slopes. The only good news was that the Guild of Valvemen’s forces had been sighted moving towards the city from the north.

‘Too little too late,’ sighed Colonel Knipe. ‘Damson,’ he said, looking into Hannah’s eyes. ‘The third part of your church weapon, which vault is it hidden in?’

‘It’s not in the city below,’ said Hannah. ‘It’s here in the Horn of Jago. I know more or less where it is, but—’

‘Begin searching now,’ said the colonel. He clicked his fingers and two of his officers stepped forward. ‘Guard this girl’s life as if all of our fortunes depended on it. I will join you after our final defences are put in place.’


Colonel Knipe watched the young churchwoman leave with his two guards, and then he motioned his commanders to the table. ‘It is time, gentlemen. Withdraw the militia units back to the mountain, then seal the doors below.’

‘There are still people fighting in the vaults, colonel.’

‘Convicts, the scrapings of our gutter,’ said Colonel Knipe. ‘Their deaths will give society the service their miserable lives did not.’ He motioned for his staff of office to be brought to him and he pushed it into a socket, exposing the control keys running along its length. Colonel Knipe looked at his men and the edge of his mouth turned up into a grim smile. ‘Those heathen savages put such faith in their scriptures; let us do the Pericurians one final kindness. Let us reunite the wet-snouts with their barbaric gods in the sky!’

His fingers began to play across the keys. And everything changed.