Secrets Of The Fire Sea Part 18

'As I understand Pericurian scripture,' said Hannah, 'the race of man shouldn't be here at all.'

The amba.s.sador smiled. 'I see that the Circlist church has indoctrinated you well in its efforts to deny our G.o.ds, dear girl.' He quoted from the relevant pa.s.sage. '"And the paradise that had fallen shall be forever more sealed in a sea of punis.h.i.+ng fire, denied to all that would seek it. In sin was the land destroyed and only the wicked shall suffer its cursed acres." As we push deeper into Jago, a joke that is told in the court of the archd.u.c.h.ess comes to mind. That inside every liberal's fur there are little conservative fleas waiting to climb out. The deeper we drive into this land, the closer this trip seems to blasphemy to me.'

'Blasphemy is a good start,' said Hannah, quoting one of Alice's favourite sayings.

'Perhaps to your peculiar church without G.o.ds, dear girl,' said the amba.s.sador. 'But I would not tempt the wrath of Reckin urs Reckin so readily.'

'Ah, we're all tempting fate by being here,' moaned the commodore. 'You would think the world had had enough of throwing poor old Blacky into peril, but no, it understands that by tricking me into promising I'll keep young Nandi Tibar-Wellking safe it can have me off chasing through Jago's dark wastes after some long-lost invention of the church, when all that I deserve is the chance to spend my last few miserable years gently revisiting the ports of my youth in my precious boat, hauling an honest cargo or two to help put a little beer in my flagon and a cut of roast beef on my table. This dark chase, this is my punishment.'

'Punishment for what?' asked Hannah.

'For supporting the amba.s.sador's liberal friends on the other side of the Fire Sea,' whined Commodore Black. 'Running cargoes of Porterbrook steam engines and enough transaction engines to allow their great houses to count every tree in their forests twice over.'

'Helping Pericur drag itself into the modern age hardly counts as a sin deserving punishment, dear boy,' said the amba.s.sador.

'So you say now. But let's see if you can look me in the eye and say as much in a generation or so when you'll have petty rules and large taxes set by small minds with nothing but malice for what once made you great and unique. When your forests are felled and you're choking on the likes of a Middlesteel smog, when you've created a legion of jealous little shopkeepers who'll drag your archd.u.c.h.ess to a scaffold, rogues who'll cut off the grand old lady's arms in case she shakes a fist at them and styles their stealing and scheming for what it really is.'

'That is not Pericur,' protested the amba.s.sador.

'It wasn't the Kingdom of Jackals either, once,' said the commodore. 'But my great grandfather saw it happen there, just as I watched the revolution in Quaters.h.i.+ft let fly across the Jackelian border. That's the way of a revolution; it's like the blessed circle of existence our church keeps banging on about, always turning round and round. It'll turn for your people too, and crush a mortal few of your nation under its rim I have no doubt.'

The four friends fell to silence until Tobias Raffold called from behind that the portable steam tap was ready to begin charging, ordering them to seal their suits and drop their s.h.i.+eld hoods.

The trouble started shortly after they left the ridged valley the next morning. Tobias Raffold's men opened a cage built into the back of one of the RAM suits and started unloading crates of unfamiliar-looking equipment.

'Mister Raffold,' called Ortin urs Ortin. 'That's not what I think it is?'

Raffold's RAM suit turned to face the Pericurian amba.s.sador. 'If you're thinking it's an ab-lock snare, then you're bang on.'

'I say, old fruit, this is hardly what my fee for this expedition was intended to cover.'

The trapper jerked his head towards the commodore. 'Your fee and the sea-dog's u-boat are my ticket home, but I still owe the guild's stable-master one last catch of abs. They're bleeding sticky about contracts here, and I don't want the First Senator using the breech of one as an excuse to stick me and my crew in his dungeons when we get back. He's going to be narked enough at me and my lads when we get back for taking you outside the wall.'

'We still have a long way to go to reach the Cade Mountains,' complained Ortin urs Ortin.

'That's unknown territory,' said the trapper. 'These wolds I know, and they're prime ab-taking land.'

Hannah sighed to herself. It seemed the expedition wasn't going to be making as much headway this day as she'd hoped. Ortin urs Ortin appeared content to use the unlooked-for spare time to read the scriptures of the Divine Quad he had stored in his suit's pilot cabin, finding echoes of his people's ancient writings in the landscape all around them; while Nandi seemed happy to do much the same with the research Hannah's parents had gleaned from the guild archives.

With nothing else to do, Hannah watched the trappers move out to set their snares. They used mats of rubber with surfaces that had been shaped and painted to mimic the coa.r.s.e green alpine gra.s.s that grew in the soil between the ugly basalt rocks of the wolds. Onto this the trappers placed bricks of bone-white sugar, before connecting the rubber mats to a battery pack that they would then bury. More than enough power to shock an ab-lock cub into unconsciousness when the damp wind carried the smell of the sugar to them and sent them scurrying to locate its source. Sugar was something it appeared the creatures loved to gnaw away at. And whereas adult ab-locks were canny enough to recognize the rubber traps and remove the sugar with branches torn from nearby pine trees, their cubs had no such experience and would happily blunder onto the shock mats, triggering both the stunning charge and a whistle to announce a capture of which there were quite a few. Tobias Raffold chuckled as his trappers piled the insensible ab-lock cubs in front of a man using a branding iron to stamp a guild mark and number on their backs, before moving the young abs into the cage.

Hannah tried to imagine the confused cubs waking up in the charge-master's turbine halls, to be mercilessly drilled in the care and maintenance of the ma.s.sive power plant's machinery until one day if they lived long enough they might end up like T-face: broken, obedient and grateful for any day that didn't end in a flogging. Hannah's brooding on the ab-locks' fate was broken by one of the distant snare's whistles combined with something she hadn't heard before a shrieking like a wounded cat.

'That's not an ab-lock!' Hannah called.

'Too bleeding right it's not,' Tobias Raffold shouted back from the crest of the hill. He snapped shut his suit's skull dome and pulled down an amplification plate, peering in the direction of the caterwauling. 'It's a b.l.o.o.d.y ursk cub the little runt's got one of its paws stuck through the mat and the charge is driving it wild. None of our snares are set for a catch of its bulk.'

'You said we would be avoiding ursk territory,' said Hannah accusingly.

'What is and isn't their territory is settled between the ursks and the abs by tooth and claw, girl,' spat the trapper. 'It's been a dry season, the ursks must be pus.h.i.+ng up from the southern plains towards the lakes.' The trapper raised his RAM suit's right arm and the cantilevered steel of his magnetic catapult extended out to full rifle length. There was a clang on his arm's drum as a razored disk was fed into the breech, followed by the evil tw.a.n.g of a projectile cutting through the air. Tobias Raffold's aim was true, for the terrified screeching in the distance halted instantly. But it was too late; echoing from around the hills came an eerie throaty song that Hannah recognized only too well from the hordes of creatures drawn to the killing field of Hermetica's battlements. Ursk song.

Tobias Raffold was screaming for his crew to come back from the snares and form a circle around the steam tap. One of his trappers came stamping past Hannah and clanged his left arm's manipulator hand against her suit, manually activating her magnetic catapult. Fixed on the end of a rod, an iron circle with a crosshair in its centre snapped down in front of Hannah's face, floating above the exterior of her skull dome in synchronization with her catapult arm's movement. A mechanical sight for the catapult! Something resembling a copper clock face extended out of the suit's control panel, a single hand pointing upwards on a dial of sharpened disk icons. A full drum of killing disks, for the moment.

'Ah, this is wicked bad,' came the commodore's words inside Hannah's pilot frame. 'All this way for my brave bones to end up being gnawed by a pack of oversized bears. This is where staying true to an oath's course has landed poor old Blacky.'

'Ursks know the weak spots of our RAM suits.' Tobias Raffold's warning cut in. 'They'll run in low and try to go for the rubberized seals around our legs. If they claw your seals open they can bite through the hydraulics and bring your suit down to the ground. They'll skirt the mists, circling to start with to try and make us waste our ammunition. Amba.s.sador, you and your people save your fire until they're coming over the rise here and are bearing straight for you.'

'Their wicked teeth can't bite through this crystal noggin of mine, can they?' asked the commodore.

'They're right good at waiting around a downed suit,' warned the trapper. 'They'll wait until your water runs out and you're desperate enough to pop your lid and make a bolt for the nearest spring.'

'The ursks outside the battlements ran away when you shot in the air,' said Hannah.

'The ursks around the battlements know what those artillery emplacements around the Horn of Jago are good for. This far out, we're all just canned food as far as an ursk pack is concerned.'

But it wasn't a pack. Hannah saw the long wave of howling black crest the line of hills in front of them, throwing themselves down into the mists flowing along the valley. Not a pack. A migration!

Hannah's fingers were trembling as they closed around the trigger of the catapult inside her suit's weapon arm. Her skill was mathematics, not gunnery, and she realized immediately that the expedition didn't have nearly enough razored disks to deal with such vast numbers. Hannah's ammunition drum would be empty long before the exodus heading directly for her suit abated.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN.

Father Baine looked up as he heard footsteps coming down the corridor to the chancery office. The cathedral's architects had built the pa.s.sage to specification, he suspected. n.o.body could ever sneak up on the archbishop's office while it was occupied. Not that the owner of the approaching footsteps would find much if subterfuge was their intent. Only the unappreciated clerk working into the early evening to clear the backlog of paperwork that came from trying to run a cathedral without a sitting archbishop to oversee the dioceses' official bureaucracy.

There was a knock and the door opened to admit one of the novices who was meant to be standing duty on the cathedral's main bridge.

'Father,' said the novice, 'the ursine Chalph urs Chalph is outside asking for you.'

Father Baine looked up at the carriage clock at the edge of his desk, just visible behind a pile of profiles of those who had recently pa.s.sed the church's entrance exams, each mind as unique as the whorls of skin on their fingertips.

'He said it was urgent,' noted the novice, 'and relating to a private matter between the two of you.'

Father Baine cleared his throat and made to stand. 'Ha. So.'

'He is a believer,' said the novice, as if this revelation wouldn't have occurred to Father Baine at some point.

'We all believe in something,' sighed the father. 'Even if it's something slightly more sensible than the Divine Quad. Such as what is right and rational.'

Chalph was waiting at the edge of the Grand Ca.n.a.l. Father Baine left the novice at the midpoint of the main bridge and crossed to where the ursine was loitering in some agitation, if he interpreted the creature's body language correctly.

'Father Baine,' called Chalph, 'is Jethro Daunt with you?'

'He was but he left. He spent a good few hours poring over the records of the draft ballots in my office, although why he should bother escapes me. Even if Hannah's induction into the Guild of Valvemen was crooked, she is marked for the rational orders now.'

'I have to see him immediately,' demanded Chalph. 'Where did he go?'

'I think he went to see if his steamman friend was still working in the public records office, though much good will it do them. Everything filed with the office as paper doc.u.ments is first released by and filtered through the guild's transaction engines. Vardan Flail is too canny to allow details of his feud with the archbishop to be openly catalogued. Is this urgency related to Alice Gray's death?'

'No,' growled Chalph. 'It's far worse than that. I have to see him. Tell him I've been doing my own investigating and what I've found it's unbelievable!'

He was turning to jog away.

'Can I help?' Father Baine called after him.

'Only if you've started to work for your people's Inquisition,' Chalph shouted back. 'I don't even know if Jethro Daunt and his metal friend can do anything about this.'

'Is there no more that I can tell him?'

'Tell him it's about a letter that was given to the expedition.'

Father Baine watched the young ursine run off, wondering if the foreign trader was entirely in possession of his senses.

Jethro was walking alongside Boxiron across one of the waterways close to the Grand Ca.n.a.l, ignoring the hopeful cries of the street vendors, when the pair ran into a force they couldn't so readily ignore. Stom urs Stom, the commander of the mercenaries, flanked by four of her fighters.

'They look as if they mean business,' whispered Boxiron.

'None that is good for us, I fear, old steamer,' said Jethro.

Stom urs Stom raised a large paw to stop them, close enough to Jethro's face that he could smell the well-worn leather of her Pericurian war jacket. It would have been a mildly pleasant smell under other circ.u.mstances.

'No need to go any further, Jackelian.'

'Good captain,' said Jethro. 'I presume your employer is interested in another update on our progress?'

'Not this time,' said the hulking ursine. Two of her mercenary fighters stepped forward, seizing Jethro while the other two levelled their ma.s.sive weapons at Boxiron, the copper segments of the gas pipes on their turret guns jangling as loudly as the steamman's limbs jerking in surprise. Boxiron scanned the soldiers intently, looking for any break in their concentration.

'Do not attempt to interfere,' the mercenary officer warned Boxiron. 'You may possess the strength of the life metal, but the steel pitons in our rifles will drive through your body as easily as they would man-flesh.'

'What is the meaning of this?' demanded Jethro.

'Your letter of credit was found lodged with a merchant in support of the outfitting of a recent expedition which left the capital. One led by the Jackelian trapper Tobias Raffold and crewed by various Jackelians who arrived with you here.'

'Yes,' said Jethro resignedly, adding, 'what of it?'

'Your letter of credit has the backing of your church, and more specifically, the militant order known as the Circlist League of the Rational Court.'

Jethro groaned to himself. He was a fool. Of course someone with the First Senator's resources could trace the origin of Jethro's funds within the capital's banking system.

'The recent expedition is on a mission of sabotage, one which the First Senator has discovered is acting as a tool of foreign interests.'

'This is ludicrous,' spluttered Jethro. 'You have my word that my friends have embarked on an archaeological expedition, no more. You cannot believe these accusations...'

'What I believe is not at issue,' said the mercenary commander. 'The First Senator has requested that I sever both your arms as a statement of his disappointment and displeasure at your betrayal of his trust.'

Jethro struggled in the grip of the two soldiers while the other two jabbed Boxiron back with their turret rifles' barrels.

'Where is the process of law in this?' demanded Boxiron.

'The First Senator is invoking the ancient law of extraterritorial reciprocity,' said the mercenary commander. 'In this case, the Jackelian law where the ruling monarch has their arms incapacitated to stop them being raised against the people.'

Jethro groaned in agony. The ma.s.sive paws were pinning his arms in place, as tight as iron bands. Extra-territorial reciprocity was intended to automatically trigger corresponding trade duties when a foreign power slapped extra tariffs on a category of goods, but the mad ruler of Jago had obviously found a loophole to stretch a particularly nasty Jackelian tradition to him.

A curious crowd had gathered on the ca.n.a.l-side street. There would be no shortage of witnesses to the First Senator's savage revenge even if it wasn't going to be quite up to the standards of the baying mob that a.s.sembled in Parliament Square to see the surgeon royal remove the new Jackelian monarch's arms.

'I demand to see an official from my emba.s.sy.'

'My apologies, Jackelian,' said Stom. 'This is not personal. You may crawl up to the emba.s.sy circle after we have fulfilled our liege-lord's orders.'

The two mercenaries on either side of Jethro shoved him down onto the cobbles and Stom drew out her short sword from the scabbard strapped to her leg. She raised it high. It looked every bit as sharp as the First Senator's wrath.

Drifting clouds of steam distorted the terrifying howls of the ursks circling around the expedition, as though a siren tied to a cable was being spun around their camp on the hilltop. Tobias Raffold's trappers held their nerves and their fire, not expending ammunition into the white sea that surrounded them, waiting until the ursks exploded roaring from the mist, launching themselves at the camp from multiple directions.

Then the noise was unbelievable the shouts of the trappers intermingled with Raffold's barked orders through the speakers in Hannah's suit as magnetic catapults exploded into action all around her. Hannah held her fire as she had been ordered, but tried to direct her target sight onto the ursks breaking out of the mist. There were fractional seconds when the crosshairs coincided with the position of one of the ma.s.sive black shapes leaping towards their camp but they were more accidental than intentional, despite her best efforts. Short of holding down the trigger and keeping it depressed until the ammunition drum on her arm was depleted, Hannah wasn't going to hit a thing with her magnetic catapult.

The wolds opposite their camp ran dark with loping ursks diving down into the mist of the surrounding valley. Again and again they came at the camp, heedless of the whining arcs of flying steel cutting them down and sending them flying back into the mists. The expedition's defiance just seemed to enrage the ursks more, as if they expected the trappers simply to lie down and let the horde overwhelm them.

Hannah heard the warning yell over her speakers just as a dark shape covered her skull dome. The ursks must have found a weak spot in the circled RAM suits! Hannah could feel the extra weight of the suit's left leg as she swivelled, trying to throw off the beasts clawing at her and she remembered the head trapper's warning. One of the creatures was trying to gnaw through the rubber seal of her knee joins, trying to bring her suit cras.h.i.+ng down onto the rocks.

Someone else's suit came lumbering past Hannah, a leg las.h.i.+ng out and briefly clanging off hers. The ursk on her leg was sent flying and then the dark ma.s.s clambering over her head unit was picked off and tossed flailing into the mist of the valley. Hannah saw the pilot in the RAM suit that had rescued her. It was Ortin urs Ortin. She mumbled shocked thanks into the voicebox on her pilot frame, but the sound was lost in the roar of stone chips flying up and ricocheting off both their suits' armour. More ursks had broken through and the trappers were firing their magnetic catapults down towards them. Hannah joined in the shooting in a mixture of panic and revulsion; as though madly brus.h.i.+ng off insects crawling up her legs. Was she hitting anything? It was impossible to tell, but there was shrieking as her razored disks found targets among the river of maddened fur flowing around her legs.

Tobias Raffold shouted a command to cease fire and a relative silence fell, leaving only the muted growls and whines of dying ursks and the crackle of recharging catapult arms. Ursks were still circling them down in the mist-covered valley, but their attempt to overrun the camp had failed. Hannah looked over at the distant wolds and saw more and more ursks flooding towards them. The next attack couldn't be far away.

'Retreat back to the steam tap, la.s.s,' urged the commodore's voice. 'You too, Nandi.'

'Ammunition count,' ordered Tobias Raffold.

Shouts rang out with the number of disks each suit had left in their ammunition drums. Hannah glanced at her dial its hand had rotated around to red. She was empty! And she wasn't the only one.

'The ammunition crates are next to the steam tap,' announced Tobias Raffold.

Hannah glanced back to the pile of supply bales and crates that had been slung around the trappers' suits during their march.

'Lowest charge goes down.'

The truth of the situation dawned on Hannah. They were going to have to send someone down there, out of their suit, to crack open the crates and load up the drums. The manipulator claws that acted as the RAM suits' hands were fine for lifting heavy loads, but the claws didn't have the flexibility needed to break open the crates and slide the rolls of steel disks into their ammunition drums. There was a cruel logic to the choice of the poor unfortunate who was going to have to slide their canopy open the RAM suit with the lowest battery charge was least likely to survive being pursued by the ursks.

Their luckless candidate selected one of the trappers the other RAM suits formed a tight circle around the crates, giving the trapper as little ground to cover as possible.

Then Tobias Raffold shouted a command that Hannah didn't catch, but the cage on the back of one of the RAM suits sprang open and a handful of terrified ab-lock cubs leapt for the ground and scattered in all directions. As the mad diversion was released, the selected trapper slid his canopy open and began scrambling down the handholds on his suit's chest, leaping the last few feet towards the supplies below. The tenor of the ursk song rising up through the mist changed, indicating their confusion as the sudden outbreak of ab-locks pelted past them in the valley. There was a truly hideous screeching sound as some of the young ab-locks fell to the claws of their much larger adversaries.

'Hold fire,' Tobias Raffold ordered. 'Let's keep the ursks focused on the b.l.o.o.d.y abs, not us.'

Once the first of the ammunition crates was cracked open, the RAM suits lowered their catapult arms towards the ground, the trapper on foot striking the top of each drum to spring them open, then frantically pus.h.i.+ng rolls of razored disks into the rotation feeders that lay exposed inside. The trapper had reloaded perhaps half of his colleague's catapults when the feint came, three ursks running in from the west side of the hill. The suits' catapult rails roared in answer, spitting spinning steel at the charging beasts. Seconds later, and almost too quickly to follow, another black shape flashed between their legs and the loader vanished without even a cry. Hannah moaned. The ursks' second a.s.sault began in earnest.