Secrets Of The Fire Sea Part 7

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 gla.s.sy as marbles. It was like staring into the s.h.i.+fting 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 s.p.a.ce 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 t.i.tus, 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 pa.s.sed, 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 airs.h.i.+ps and your proud pneumatic towers pus.h.i.+ng towards the heavens. But your Kingdom would be nothing without us. We pa.s.sed 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 s.h.i.+fted 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 disa.s.semble 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 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 Archd.u.c.h.ess 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 s.h.i.+fted his weight and loud clunks echoed around the vast chamber's stained gla.s.s 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 gla.s.s, 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, la.s.s, 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 scholars.h.i.+p 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 t.i.thes 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, la.s.s. 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 s.h.i.+re 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 him as she could travel. What would their life together have been like, Jethro mused, if the old G.o.ds 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. as she could travel. What would their life together have been like, Jethro mused, if the old G.o.ds 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 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. 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 G.o.ds. '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 b.u.mpkins.'

'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 gla.s.s 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 pa.s.sing 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 b.u.mp 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 gus.h.i.+ng 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 sc.r.a.ped 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, la.s.s.'

'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-encompa.s.sing leather ap.r.o.ns sewn with hundreds of dark lead squares. 'I'm not planning to be around long enough to find out. It's the acc.u.mulated 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 ap.r.o.n 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 ap.r.o.ns 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 pa.s.s...'

'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 pa.s.sage 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 wors.h.i.+pping ma.s.ses. '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.'