Secrets of the Fire Sea

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.

Jethro indicated the racks. ‘For umbrellas, perhaps?’

Colonel Knipe shrugged. ‘For holding the senators’ rapiers and foils. Duelling was outlawed five hundred years ago on Jago. It may be hard to believe now, but our cities were incredibly overcrowded once. Settling matters of honour at the point of a sword was commonplace, and the senate considered duelling a useful mechanism for society to release pressure.’

Yes, Jethro could see how centuries before, the comforts of a warm city and dome-grown crops would have seemed a paradise when the alternative was freezing on the surface and possibly ending up as food for the ancient Chimecan empire’s plate. The memory of the Chimecans’ vicious heel on the continent’s throat had faded into the annals of history an age ago, and yet still Jago abided. Narrowly.

A line of Pericurian mercenaries stood sentry over a triangular-shaped door eighty feet high at the end of the corridor. After Jethro and Colonel Knipe had been thoroughly searched and the militia commander sufficiently humiliated – forced to un-belt his pistol and hand it over – one of the mercenaries behind a marble lectern threw a switch and the massive doors were powered slowly open.

‘Your staff of office, too, colonel,’ said one of the mercenaries, as the three of them were about to enter.

‘A colonel of the police militia is permitted their staff on the floor of the senate,’ barked Knipe.

The ursine guard shook his large furred head. ‘The tradition has changed now, by order of the First Senator.’

Colonel Knipe’s eyes narrowed at the insult, but he surrendered his staff anyway. ‘Why not, there are hardly any of our traditions left to honour. One more lost won’t make any difference.’

Inside, Jethro saw where the stained senate obtained its name: the mid-peak of the mountain was hollowed out into a vast octahedron-shaped chamber, the lower half filled with marble seats, public galleries and stands for the assembly’s functionaries. The upper half of the octahedron was a ring of sloped stained glass that bore testament to Jago’s lost greatness. Some of the scenes were historical, pictures of the great exodus from the continent to the island – galleons trapped frozen in ice while others burned in the Fire Sea, the surviving settlers standing tall on the shores of Jago and surveying the land. Ramparts being built and defended against rolling hordes of the island’s monstrous natives. Acres of rainbow glass paid tribute to the height of Jago’s mercantile era – docks spilling over with trade goods, food and spices from a hundred foreign nations. These scenes were interspersed with Circlist imagery, the illustrations of ancient koans and parables mixed with mathematical formulae so dense and elaborate the effect was of an illuminated manuscript set in glass. Light chased across the thousands of panes that had gone into each scene, and for a moment Jethro thought he was seeing lightning, but then he noted its regularity and realized it was the flare-house’s sodium glare high above them. Beckoning in a world that had laid Jago aside.

Jethro hadn’t known what to expect of this assembly, but it certainly wasn’t this. None of the rude, urgent jostling and violent ritual of parliament back in the Kingdom. This vast echoing senate was as depopulated as the city it ruled, elegantly robed politicians dotting the chamber here and there, like patrons arrived early at a Lump Street theatre for a play that had received scathing reviews the night before, scaring away the bulk of the audience. Jethro noted some of them were sleeping. There were more senators and officials standing in the centre of the chamber than sitting down, clustered around something, and, as Jethro drew closer, he saw that it was an architect’s model of a city built on top of a large round table.

‘First Senator Silvermain,’ announced the colonel. ‘I have the two visitors from the Kingdom you requested to see.’

‘Their presence was requested,’ announced a politician in his sixties, straightening up from his observation of the model. He had wild, white curly hair and a hangdog face, his neck hidden by a long scarf despite the comfortable warmth of the chamber. ‘Yours was not, Constantine Knipe.’

The police colonel gave a slight bow. ‘As the senate wishes.’

‘The senate wishes for you to go. You and your sly eyes, always watching.’ The First Senator pointed to the elaborately liveried servant standing behind him carrying a tall gold staff of office. ‘You think you’re fit to have a senatorial rod carrier following you with the First Senator’s staff? You’re not! You haven’t the breeding for it – and without the breeding you’re nothing, Knipe.’

The First Senator waited until the colonel had left, then beckoned Jethro and Boxiron to come towards the architect’s model. ‘We’re watching him. Watching him talk to senators who think they can fill our chair. But not when we’re cleverer than he is, with free company soldiers we trust. Protecting us. Take off your shoes.’

Jethro thought he had misheard the politician. ‘I’m sorry, Your Excellency?’

‘Off with your shoes, man, and your socks too.’ He tapped the round table. ‘Sit there and do it. Him too.’

‘I am a creature of the metal,’ said Boxiron. ‘A steamman. These are my feet, not iron boots.’

‘Capital,’ said the First Senator. ‘But your fleshy friend here is not, he is clearly of the race of man, we can all see that.’

Jethro did as he was bid, and as soon as his socks were off, the First Senator was kneeling down, performing a detailed inspection of his feet. ‘See, no calluses, neatly clipped nails, the feet of a gentleman – but not pedicured, not pampered, the feet of an honest man. These are wise feet.’ The First Senator indicated that Jethro should pull his socks and shoes back on while the courtiers and other senators standing about the table sounded rumbling notes of agreement; as if they had known this would be the case all along.

‘You were a Circlist priest,’ continued the First Senator. ‘You stared deep into the souls of men. As you can see, we possess that talent too.’

Jethro stood up from the edge of the table. ‘I was merely a humble country parson. But I fear my soles have given me away.’

The First Senator missed the irony in Jethro’s voice and fixed him with an earnest stare, his eyes as glassy as marbles. It was like staring into the shifting magma of the Fire Sea. Hypnotic and dangerous. ‘They have betrayed you to a good end. We have need of men like ourselves. We have need of the Jethro Daunt who was clever enough to solve the greatest theft ever to be reported from one of the Kingdom’s museums. We can read the future in the lines of your feet, and we see that you have been sent to help solve our robbery.’

‘Something has been stolen from you?’ inquired Jethro, remembering the militia colonel’s advice not to commit to anything in front of the First Senator.

‘Oh, they are planning it,’ said the First Senator, his hand sweeping grandly across the architect’s model on the table. ‘A conspiracy to steal this away from us. The future, the future of Jago. What is a mere missing oil painting compared to such a devious theft?’

Jethro was no architect, but even he could see there wasn’t enough marble in the Kingdom – let alone on Jago’s basalt wastes – to build the imposing boulevards of the city grid laid down on the table. Jethro tapped the table’s surface. ‘This scale must be wrong; from what I’ve seen there’s not enough space in the vaults of Hermetica City to contain even half of these constructions.’

‘There is no scale for the human imagination,’ laughed the First Senator. ‘This is not a reworking of Hermetica City you see laid out here, Jackelian. This is New Titus, the first of seventy new cities we are planning to circle the coast of our great island nation. A bright necklace of civilization ushering in a new age of enlightenment.’

Jethro thought of the atmospheric terminus he had passed, the forced relocation of the last refugees living outside the capital. ‘You have the people for such work?’

‘We sense the wheeze of old thinking, of departing life,’ said the First Senator. ‘You have only just arrived here, but already you are becoming infected by Jago’s curse. There is no place for old thinking in our new age. You Jackelians have shown us that, with your airships and your proud pneumatic towers pushing towards the heavens. But your Kingdom would be nothing without us. We passed the torch of civilisation to you when you needed it most; now your nation is to do the same for us. We are sending the creatures of the island’s interior to your Royal Zoological Society. They will find a way to breed them in captivity for us.’

‘Breed them?’

‘We already have ab-locks tamed and labouring for us in the Guild of Valvemen’s vaults. When we can breed them in captivity without having to trap their young outside, then we will have workers enough to achieve any task, any dream. And what if we should be able to tame the ursks, too? What need then to pay for our Pericurian friends to guard our battlements for us?’ The First Senator shifted excitedly between each foot and jabbed a finger towards Boxiron. ‘You have brought the future with you, Jethro Daunt, with your metal servant. You have shown us the way, as a man of wisdom often does. We have also placed an order for a hundred automatics with Dentley and Sons. Our mills here stand ready to disassemble them and learn the craft of their production.’

Jethro’s eyes narrowed and he noticed the juddering of Boxiron’s large arms growing more violent at the politician’s words. Dentley and Sons, indeed. The Kingdom of Jackals’ manufactories were less sophisticated even than those of the Catosian city-states when it came to creating their crude simulacra of the life metal, and if the First Senator had known the first thing about how a steamman knight’s skull had come to be welded onto the primitive frame of a human-manufactured butler, he would have all his imported metal servants tossed into the Fire Sea when they arrived.

‘Our new cities won’t be built by us,’ continued the First Senator, oblivious to Jethro and Boxiron’s reaction. ‘Only populated by us. And how our people will live, like kings and queens, even the lowliest Jagonese commanding a legion of servants numerous enough to befit the Archduchess of Pericur herself. Servants of flesh and metal who will toil ceaselessly to please our every whim. Our people shall labour no more, but instead turn their minds to the arts and sciences, to the enjoyments of culture and leisure. It will be an age unlike any other. A perfect age. A paradise of ease and plenty.’

‘It is a most ambitious plan, Your Excellency.’

‘Only if it comes to fruition,’ said the First Senator. ‘Empty caverns have been surveyed, great plans – as you see before you – have been laid. But there is a conspiracy here to stop us; those who cling to the old ways that have failed us, those who fear change. We can trust the free company fighters to support us – the Pericurian soldiers know who pays the bills, but they are dull brutes. We must do their thinking for them. But the high guild masters, the senators in the opposition, many of the traders and the city councillors, they are beyond the pale, all of them. They live like princes already and would deny our people their chance to share in the age of glory we have planned for them.’

‘Such conspiracies often have a way of coming to light.’

The First Senator continued without acknowledging Jethro’s obtuse reply – neither a confirmation nor a denial, merely a statement of fact. ‘Move among our people, our Jackelian friend, uncover the conspirators.’ He winced as Boxiron shifted his weight and loud clunks echoed around the vast chamber’s stained glass walls. ‘But you must ask your friend to tread carefully.’ He indicated the handful of senators dozing in the benches above. ‘Some of our ministers are made of glass, too much noise from your servant’s iron boots will surely shatter them.’

Jethro and Boxiron left as quietly as they could, the excited shouts of the First Senator following them out, echoing around the empty senate hall. ‘Our new city isn’t a stolen painting, it is a stolen future! Find it for us, Jackelian, find what the traitors and schemers have stolen from us!’

‘Well,’ said Boxiron, after they had exited the vast triangular doors of the stained senate’s chamber, ‘you can stare into softbody souls. What did you see in there?’

‘Bob my poor soul,’ said Jethro. ‘A blasted echoing void, hollowed out by the fires of Jago.’

‘I claim no great understanding of your people,’ said Boxiron, ‘but even by the standards of this clumsy body I find myself grafted to, the ruler of Jago is clearly deeply defective.’


‘You,’ said Nandi, looking at the young girl wearing the robes of the Guild of Valvemen. ‘Damson Hannah Conquest! I was asked to try and find you, but when I visited the cathedral the priests told me you weren’t there.’

‘I don’t work for the church,’ said Hannah. ‘At least, not yet. I don’t even live there now. You’re from the same college my mother and father taught at, then, Saint Vines?’

‘A Jackelian girl, here?’ said the commodore, surprised. ‘You’re new to the guild, lass, that much I can see from how your body hasn’t been taken sick yet. What’s the likes of you doing in the guild? Don’t you know what happens to those that work in its cursed ranks?’

‘I know all too well,’ said Hannah. She hitched up the crimson robes around her legs, showing a line of red weals forming above her ankles. It looked as if someone had been rubbing at her skin with sanding paper. ‘But believe me, I’m not planning to stay inside the guild any longer than I have to. Why were you looking for me?’

‘My professor asked me to make a call on you,’ said Nandi. ‘I don’t think the college has ever been happy that the church made you its ward out here.’

‘My father was an only child, the same as my mother,’ said Hannah. ‘I have no uncles or aunts in the Kingdom of Jackals, no grandparents left alive.’

‘The college knows that,’ said Nandi. ‘Do you think we would have seen you turned out to a poorhouse back home? You are a living dependent of members of the college who died on duty. You should have become a ward of the Chancellor’s Court of Benefactors, like me. College service, the same as your parents, and my studies and board are paid for by the college. Even if you don’t want to study at Saint Vines, you have the rights to your parents’ accrued pension and death benefits. Double in fact, as your parents were both tenured doctors at the university.’

‘Why have I never heard anything about this?’ asked Hannah, confused.

‘The college has written to you at least once a year, asking you to accept a benefactor’s scholarship from us.’

‘I’ve never received a single letter from you,’ said Hannah, sounding desperate.

‘Ah then,’ said the commodore. ‘An inheritance that hasn’t come your way. A sad tale, right enough, and a story I have heard before. Normally attached to some poor young cabin boy or girl pressed into service against their will, while their money finds itself falling into someone else’s wicked hands.’

‘I was a ward of the Circlist church,’ spluttered Hannah. ‘The church takes enough in tithes and stipends that they don’t need to rob children of their pennies.’

‘But here you are all the same,’ said the commodore, ‘a fine Jackelian girl pressed into service on Jago with the terrible Guild of Valvemen. Say that you were pressed, lass. You did not volunteer for this terrible service?’

Hannah gritted her teeth. ‘I did not volunteer.’

‘Well, whatever the truth of it, there’s mischief here, that much I can see.’

Nandi nodded in agreement, as the capsule rattled through the atmospheric tunnel, bringing them closer to the Guild of Valvemen’s distant vaults with every second.

Someone had been trying to harm Doctor Conquest’s daughter, and suddenly Professor Harsh’s insistence that Nandi travel to Jago in the company of a swaggering privateer and his wild crew didn’t seem so very strange after all.


Jethro and Boxiron walked towards the confessional against the cathedral’s wall. Jethro found it hard to imagine Alice Gray as the archbishop of this vast stone expanse, so different from the small warm seminary rooms where they had come to know each other. It was as far away from the green water meadows, ancient oak forests and shire villages of the Kingdom as it was possible to get. Which, along with filling the archbishop’s seat, had been the point of coming here for Alice. As far away from him as she could travel. What would their life together have been like, Jethro mused, if the old gods had not appeared to haunt him and ruin his name within the church? Would he and Alice have had children and what would they have been like? It would have been wondrous, the life he had been cheated of. Wondrous.

Jethro had decided not to present the Inquisition’s seal to the cathedral staff just yet. If someone inside the church knew who had sent him here, then it was conceivable that Colonel Knipe would find out, and then, Jethro suspected, he and Boxiron would find their comfortable quarters at the hotel traded for armed confinement on the Purity Queen until the vessel left port. Or worse. And he had no desire to see the inside of the police militia’s damp fortress cells at first hand.

The old priest, Father Blackwater, showed them the confessional booth where the archbishop’s body had first been discovered. ‘You will find far more peace at her grave, Mister Daunt.’

‘I need to see where Alice died,’ said Jethro.

Father Blackwater pointed at the polished flagstones. ‘She was lying there. That was her usual confessional just against the wall. The ursk must have dragged her out. There was so much blood. I’ve never seen anything like it before.’

‘That will happen when the head is removed from the body.’

‘May the Circle bring serenity to the savage creatures that did it,’ coughed the father.

‘I believe I’m getting the offender’s fur as a rug, if you are interested.’

The old priest appeared quite ill at the thought.

‘Forgive me, good father,’ said Jethro. ‘I tend towards black humour these days.’

‘We never knew that the archbishop had been engaged to be married,’ said the elderly priest.

‘The dissolution of our betrothal was an unhappy event for both of us,’ said Jethro. ‘You know what the great families are like: she was a highly cultivated lady and no one was ever going to be suitable enough for their daughter.’ Certainly not a parson who had allowed himself to start believing in ancient Jackelian gods. ‘A minute if you will, for me to meditate alone here.’

‘If only the archbishop had come with us into the city to help carry the torches,’ added Father Blackwater.

Jethro nodded as he slipped into the confessional booth. But how like Alice to have stayed. Stubborn and proud, unwilling to abandon the sacred duty of taking the rational confession. Upholding her first duty towards the people, to balance their minds and purge the troubles of the soul – keeping her patients clean of hostile memes and false beliefs.

As promised, Jethro emerged from the booth a couple of moments later. He stared up at the vast circular rose windows, the shadows of the mathematical patterns depicted there falling across his face. ‘A thought, good father. Without a head attached to the corpse, how did you know the body wearing the archbishop’s clothes was actually that of the archbishop herself?’

‘Our police militia are very thorough,’ said the old priest. ‘I saw them fill a syringe from the body and it was later matched to her blood code held in the guild archives.’

‘What form did their thoroughness take?’

‘The police interviewed everyone, they matched the archbishop’s blood code, they sealed off and inspected the area where you are standing – the gentlemen officers of your kingdom’s Ham Yard could not have done a more exacting job. We are an advanced nation, Mister Daunt, not a backward isle of secluded bumpkins.’

‘Please do not take my morbid curiosity as any such slight,’ said Jethro. ‘The grandness of the cathedral’s walls and the beauty of your stained glass speaks deeply to me of the sophistication of your people and the seriousness with which you treat the Circlist enlightenment. I understand the Jagonese way is to cremate the bodies of the deceased, not to bury them as we do back in the Kingdom?’

‘In the old days the archbishop’s body would have been placed in a boat and pushed out into the Fire Sea to burn,’ said the old priest. ‘We never dig a grave on the surface – the creatures out there violate them all too readily. Our present tradition is to lower the body on a granite platform close to the magma. The ashes that are left behind are then buried in the Vault of Remembrance. The cathedral fathers and sisters have their own wall there, which is where Alice Gray’s remains are interred. I can walk you across there in a minute…’

‘Another day, good father,’ said Jethro. ‘I think I need to remember Alice as I knew her in happier times, before I am ready to visit your remembrance vault and say goodbye for the last time.’

‘As you wish. May serenity find you, Mister Daunt.’

Boxiron watched the priest walk away to greet a party arriving for the first cathedral service. ‘It is not serenity I sense within you, Jethro softbody. What did you discover inside the confessional booth?’

‘There was a note slipped under the pillow; curiously it is addressed to us. Also, something had been written inside on the wall. Written in blood, before it had been scrubbed off.’

‘The note?’

Jethro cleared his throat. ‘An anonymous request for a meeting late at night. A request addressed to the two foreign agents of the Inquisition. I can only presume that means us.’

‘A trap?’

‘Possibly,’ said Jethro.

Boxiron’s steam stacks coughed a pungent black cloud out above their heads, the smoke dispersing into the apsidal chapels behind them. ‘And could you discern what the writing in blood said?’

‘No. Only that someone had tried to remove it and I was lucky to find the traces. Blood had been splashed over the words to look like spray from the slaying, then rubbed off quite thoroughly.’

Someone who is being clawed to death by an ursk is unlikely to have written “the black-furred monster did it” on the walls of the confessional,’ observed Boxiron.

‘As unlikely as a decapitated corpse being capable of reaching out and scratching a last denouncement at all,’ said Jethro. He cleared his throat and tapped the side of his cheek with a finger. ‘I think it is time we put your special skills to some practical use on Jago, my steamman friend.’

‘Yes,’ Boxiron agreed. ‘I believe I agree with you. I am meant for other things than padding around senatorial chambers and cathedral vestries.’

Jethro knelt down to the place where Alice’s corpse had been discovered, running his fingers across the stone. It felt warm to the touch, as though the passing of her life had burnt an indelible mark inside the cathedral. What had she written inside the confessional booth before she died, what in the world could have been that important to her?

Yes. It was time for affairs to be pushed up a gear.


Without windows, the only way Nandi could tell that the atmospheric capsule had arrived at its final destination was the sense of deceleration followed by a gentle bump as they cleared the rubber curtain of the receiving station’s lock. The young academic wasn’t sure what she should have been expecting outside the capsule’s confines, but it wasn’t a man-made waterfall cascading down the Guild of Valvemen’s entrance chamber.

Water was gushing out of the ceiling, flowing down sloped iron walls and hitting the floor like thunder before disappearing down sluice gates running along a concrete channel in the floor. The iron had gone green and was streaked with calcium deposits which were being scraped away by guild workers dangling down the iron slope on ropes.

Commodore Black wiped away the sheen of fine water dampening his cheeks and addressed Hannah. ‘That’s a mighty cascade, lass.’

‘Condensed water from the turbine halls below,’ said Hannah. ‘After the flash steam has been tapped from the bedrock to feed the turbines’ rotors and generate the electricity, it’s pumped up through a cooling system and comes out as water.’

Commodore Black looked in horror at the water on his hand, regarding it as if it might be poisonous. Hannah shook her head and took them to a bank of lockers next to the atmospheric station’s platform. ‘The water’s not dangerous, the electric field is strongest in the turbine halls and they’re buried as deep as anything in the guild’s vaults.’

‘Dark power to supply the capital,’ said the commodore.

‘More than just Hermetica City,’ noted Hannah, opening the locker with a key tied onto her robe’s belt. ‘The power plant beneath here used to supply all the cities of Jago and could again if needed. The steam taps below provide free energy.’

‘Free if you discount the damage done to your bodies,’ said Nandi.

Hannah indicated the suits hanging up in the lockers, all-encompassing leather aprons sewn with hundreds of dark lead squares. ‘I’m not planning to be around long enough to find out. It’s the accumulated background charge of an electric field that disfigures your body. These—’ she indicated the suits ‘—are for outsiders, but they’re really for show, to make you feel better when visiting. You’re not going to be around long enough for your body to start changing, and even if you were, these wouldn’t help you. You might as well walk around here naked for all the protection such suits will offer.’

‘I’ll take a blessed suit anyway,’ said the commodore, wheezing as he lifted one out.

Nandi did likewise, struggling under the weight after she had belted the heavy lead apron around her.

‘I’ll escort you to the transaction-engine vaults,’ said Hannah, ‘I’ve already reserved a study cell for you with a card puncher and the access to the guild archives you’ve negotiated.’

Unlike the other guildsmen in the receiving station, Hannah kept her hood down, a small act of rebellion – or vanity, given her face was yet to be scarred by tumours.

‘You mentioned you weren’t planning to be here that long,’ Nandi said to Hannah as they followed her out of the atmospheric station, the protective plates of their lead aprons clunking as they walked.

‘I was put forward for the church entrance examinations before I was drafted by the guild,’ replied Hannah. ‘The guild have to let me sit the tests. And when I pass…’

‘That’s the spirit,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s a wicked shame to see a fine Jackelian girl having to labour under the tyranny of these red-robed crows.’

‘I only wish I had more time to study for the examination,’ said Hannah, as the passage they were walking along widened into a barrel-vaulted chamber, stone pillars on their right supporting an open portal, voices echoing from within. Inside, row upon row of guild-robed figures were kneeling and humming a mantra.

Nandi frowned. The Circlist chanting contained little of the joy and warmth that was to be felt amongst the congregations back in the Kingdom. Here, there was a dour, plaintive edge to the sound.

Hannah poked her thumb towards the worshipping masses. ‘They actually lead a more ordered life here than back in the cathedral. Meditations every hour of the day when the guild’s duties aren’t being observed.’

Nandi peered around the pillar and into the long chapel hall. ‘So full.’

‘Circlism has a deep resonance within the guild.’ Hannah explained. ‘The irrelevance of the physical body, your soul poured back into the one sea of consciousness after death. Your life cupped out again into another, happier, life further along the circle.’

Nandi tugged at the young girl’s richly embroidered red robes. ‘These aren’t to protect you, are they? They’re not even to hide you from the sight of others. They’re to hide the sight of your body from yourself.’

‘You won’t find many mirrors here in the guild’s vaults,’ agreed Hannah.

Nandi listened to the voice of one the guildsmen at the front of the hall calling out to the crowd that they were all the cells of the liver, absorbing the poisons of the flesh, keeping the rest of the body alive. There was more than a grain of truth in that analogy, Nandi decided. She pointed to a figure lying in state on a podium at the front of the hall. ‘Is this a funeral?’

‘Of sorts,’ said Hannah. ‘That’s the body of a guild highman up there. Before his corpse is lowered into the Fire Sea, part of his essence will be transferred into the transaction engines to become a valve-mind, joining the council of ancestors in advising the guild.’

The commodore shook his head. ‘That’s little better than the steammen, lass, with the Loas of their ancestors appearing like blessed ghosts when they’re not invited, disturbing the rest of us innocent souls with their nagging.’

Nandi had to agree. Life working inside the Kingdom’s colleges was difficult enough for young faculty staff, with members of the High Table clinging to their positions on the academic council well into their dotage. And that was without the prospect of having simulacra of them echoing around the college’s halls long after they had passed away. She was just thankful they didn’t have valve technology back home.

‘It’s just hope,’ explained Hannah. ‘The hope of something beyond all of this. Without hope, I don’t think the guild could force anyone to work here.’

‘Let’s go on, lass,’ said the commodore, turning his back on the packed hall. ‘I’ve no taste for a sermon so early in the day.’

Nandi smiled. The commodore wasn’t so very different from the rest of his rough and ready crew. Voyaging away from the Kingdom for years at a time, exposed to heathen gods and the temples of foreign religions, the enclosed corridors of a u-boat brewing superstition. No wonder places like the guild’s vaults, clinging to Circlism, made him nervous.

They continued their journey through the guild’s heart. At one point they had to halt when a pair of thick iron doors in the side of a tunnel pulled open to reveal a switchback series of ramps disappearing lower into the guild’s depths. The three of them waited as a line of ab-locks filed through, the same simian-like creatures that Nandi had seen caged on the capital’s docks. These creatures bore little relation to the wild, unneutered animals captured by the stocky little Jackelian trapper whose demands for passage had been spurned by the commodore. Although each animal was the size of a man, the ab-locks in front of Hannah appeared somehow diminished as they slowly trudged, hunched, into the vault’s depths. They had been defanged and the claws on their fingers sliced off. The leathery skin on the front of their bodies hung swollen and misshapen by the dark energies they had absorbed working the turbine halls, and the silver fur on their backs was left sticky and thinning compared to the lustrous sheen of the wild animals caged up on the docks. Whether it was due to the methods of taming employed by the guild, or their energy-sapping exposure to the power plant, these ab-locks seemed broken in every way, a state not helped by the guild handlers walking the line, prodding and threatening with toxin clubs whenever they detected some hesitance on the part of the exploited animals.

Commodore Black shook his head in anger at the sight. ‘There’s only one thing the wicked House of Guardians ever did right, and that’s chase off the slavers from Jackals’ coast. But it seems they didn’t send their warships out far enough.’

‘Does a shire horse in its harness look any different?’ said Hannah. ‘You might not say such things if you stayed here a season and heard the wild packs of ab-locks howling beyond the walls with the ursks and other creatures out there, probing our battlements for a break.’

The distant thrum of the turbine halls rising up from far below was cut off with a shudder as iron doors clanged down, locking into the floor. Only a few wisps of vapour from the flash steam system were left drifting along the passage.

‘I helped set up your access to the archives,’ said Hannah, moving the two visitors along the corridor. ‘I’m not an expert, but I had to pass very deep down the storage layers on your behalf. You must be researching amongst our earliest records.’

‘True enough,’ said Nandi. ‘Did your church guardian ever explain your parents’ work to you?’

‘Archaeology,’ said Hannah. ‘It was never my strongest subject. There’s a lot of history on Jago and I lost track of the First Senators’ names after the first five centuries’ worth.’

‘History. Well, that’s half the truth,’ said Nandi. ‘Your father was an archaeologist, but your mother was a mathematician, and their area of study touched both disciplines.’

‘I had presumed she was using the transaction engines here to run mathematical proofs,’ said Hannah.

Nandi shook her head. ‘After Jago was first settled, the island survived as the only nation to remain free of the grip of the Chimecan Empire, although its early years were blighted by the constant threat of invasion.’

‘Ah, then, Nandi,’ whined the commodore, ‘let’s not talk of that ancient terror with its dark gods and human sacrifices. We’re well shot of the old empire. They’ve been dead a millennium and long may they stay that way.’

‘It was your father, Hannah, who dug up a book back in the Kingdom, a text dating from the centuries when Jackals was a slave state of the Chimecans and the early church was driven completely underground. It suggested that the reason Jago wasn’t invaded was that the church on the island had developed a weapon that threatened the empire’s gods, a mathematical weapon that would have disrupted their hold on the world if the empire had dared to invade Jago.’

‘A likely tale,’ said the commodore. ‘And where did the man discover this mortal account, in a Middlesteel drinking house?’

‘Sealed in a glass jar found buried in a village in Hamblefolk,’ Nandi went on, ignoring the old u-boat hand’s scepticism. ‘We dated the book at the college to the late Chimecan era, and it was dug out of a farmer’s field where one of the first Circlist churches was said to have been re-built after the end of the age of ice.’

‘The guild’s archives cover that period,’ said Hannah. ‘But I’ve never heard of such a thing inside the cathedral. A weapon that could slay gods? If our church had ever crafted something like that, I think it would be recorded and still remembered by the priests.’

‘Aye,’ said the commodore. ‘If you want to know why the old empire never took this dark, bleak place, you only have to look at the cannons on the monstrous coral walls surrounding the island and the flames of the Fire Sea lapping against its terrible cliffs. The shifting magma would claim the best part of any fleet fool enough to sail against Jago without the services of the island’s pilots to see them safely through the boils.’

‘Now you sound like the grey-hairs back at the college,’ said Nandi. She looked across at Hannah. ‘Don’t listen to him. Your father and mother believed enough in what they found in that book to come here with you and search for records of the weapon in the guild’s transaction-engine chambers. The foundations of the Circlist enlightenment were laid in mathematics, and around the edges that has a way of blurring into the sorceries of the world-song and our understanding of the universe.’

‘From knowledge comes enlightenment,’ Hannah quoted from the church’s book of common meditations.

‘I worry we’re on nothing but a fool’s errand here, Nandi,’ protested the commodore. ‘But old Blacky will be true to his word and stay with you all the same, to make sure you don’t linger here overlong and singe your fine academic mind in the depths of the guild’s dreadful vaults.’

Nandi caught her first glimpse of the vast depths of those vaults when the walls of their passage fell away and they found themselves crossing a bridge across a human-carved canyon, buffeted by waves of heat from the legendary thinking machines of Jago. Unlike the great transaction-engine rooms of the Kingdom’s civil service, these vaults were powered by electricity, not steam. No transaction-engine drums turning down there. Instead, millions of glass valves studded the walls of the subterranean canyon, pulsing and burning with light and information. Only when they reached the floor of the first of the canyon-like vaults did the scale of the chamber truly become apparent. Guildsmen marched alongside a hundred ab-lock slaves pulling a cart heavy with valves, replacements for where the erratic course of the dark power had burnt out the thermionic tubes. Each glass bulb that made up the crystal forest of valves was as tall as an oak tree. Here was the true power of Jago. Not the dark energies of electricity generated by their turbine halls – that was just what it took to energize this incredible artificial mind fashioned out of cathodes, anode plates and glass.

The annals of over two thousand years of history were stored here; as well as the machines that kept the capital’s vaults illuminated and whispered fresh air down to its streets; that regulated the battlements’ killing force and pushed the transport capsules along the island’s atmospheric tubes. Not to mention machines which held the model of the shifting sea of magma and the safe channels of superheated water which allowed Jago’s tugs to navigate the boils outside. And Nandi was to be allowed to access it all. Humanity’s oldest surviving library.

She could hardly wait.


Entry into the Hall of Echoes was forbidden to all save the High Master of the Guild of Valvemen, and Vardan Flail couldn’t help but enjoy a little swell of pride each time he stepped forward to the entrance wall and the machinery inside detected his presence, confirmed his identity and admitted him to pass through to the dark chamber. Pride that it was he who had risen to this position over all his fellows through cleverness and guile and true understanding of the guild’s intricacies and needs.

It never stayed dark inside the chamber for long. When the high guild master started talking, squares of light would form on the cold black stone wall, images from the memories of the hundreds of guild heads and high officials who had been judged worthy to become valve-minds. Freed from the weak needs of the body and the pain of decaying flesh, they were pure intellect, moving through the transaction engines with the speed of electricity itself.

‘I have raised my objections with the senate,’ announced Vardan Flail. ‘But they will not act in our favour this time, of that I am certain.’

In response to his words, lines of illuminated squares shot across the stone, pictures flowing almost too fast for him to follow. There a remembrance of the senate as it had existed centuries before, here an image of a nose smelling a plant. Beautiful, meaningless, wise and foolish – it was like staring at the firing synapses of a brain. Then the chain of pictures slowed and stopped while disembodied voices started echoing around the chamber. The wisdom of his ancestors within the guild.

<Keep her.>

<Let her go.>

<Kill her.>

<Protect her.>

The clamour grew louder and more discordant, then, as was the way, the suggestions started to slow and finally coalesce into the community view.

<She must not be allowed to leave.>

‘She will be allowed to sit the church entrance exam,’ said Vardan Flail, scratching with his left hand at the bleeding flesh of his elbow. ‘And she is clever, a mathematical prodigy. In the little time she had been with us she has already mastered every level of instruction set we possess for the transaction-engine core. She will pass the church’s entrance exam.’

<Stop her.>

<Fail her.>

<Work her.>

<Keep her. >

Again the disembodied voices clamoured their way to a crescendo before coalescing into the majority opinion.

<She must not pass the church’s entrance exam. You know what must be done.>

‘I do,’ hissed Vardan Flail.

Hannah Conquest must not be allowed to pass the church tests. And there was one way he could make sure of that…