Secrets of the Fire Sea

CHAPTER TEN


‘This is outrageous,’ protested Nandi as she and Commodore Black were hustled to the waiting atmospheric carriage. ‘You are impeding my research! Work you have been generously paid to assist.’

‘You will have a new archivist assigned to you tomorrow,’ said the guildsman heading the group of staff-wielding toughs escorting them out of the vaults. ‘And by that time we will have fully restored operations in the transaction engines outside your study cell.’

The commodore snarled, ‘I know the fixing you’re planning to do, and it’s more of the same rotten work you’ve already been at: erasing what we’ve already uncovered inside your wicked thinking machines.’

‘The valves hold all, nothing is ever lost,’ recited the guildsman.

‘Nothing but a poor helpless lass,’ said the commodore. ‘But you listen well, lad. We had better be finding Damson Hannah Conquest again, and hale with it, or I’ll be coming back down here with my crew and a fistful of hull hammers from my precious u-boat, and I’ll show you how it is we brew up a switching storm back home.’

The door on their atmospheric carriage slid open and the leader of their escort swept his hand towards its interior. ‘Goodbye, Jackelian. Come back tomorrow.’

Commodore Black let Nandi lead him inside the capsule. ‘I’ve marked you, you crow, red cowl or no, your vaults aren’t big enough to hide you from me.’

‘Take your own advice and leave it be,’ said Nandi. ‘You were right. If we start a fight with them they’ll have a pretext to ban us from the guild vaults permanently.’

‘Don’t worry, I know when to draw my sabre, lass. And when I do, someone’s going to die – either they or I. Not today, though. Those were just a few mortal threats to remind them that Hannah isn’t alone and forgotten in their dark vaults.’

The door shut on Nandi and the commodore. Their carriage juddered as it passed through the rubber vacuum curtain before accelerating to its full travel velocity.

‘Why did I listen to that fool Jethro Daunt?’ moaned the commodore, restlessly pacing the carriage. ‘Hannah will be safe enough in the guild, indeed. Just like a blessed churchman, thinking the best of everyone and everything. And now they’ve got their claws into the poor lass good and proper.’

‘But not before she gave me this.’ Nandi produced the punch card that Hannah had been scribbling on before the armed guildsmen arrived in their study cell.

Commodore Black twitched as he recognized the long lines of formulae scrawled across the card. ‘Ah, she’s a clever one, that Hannah is, with a churchwoman’s perfect memory. The second iteration of the Joshua Egg we teased out of the guild’s archives before the switching storm struck. We’ll crack it, Nandi. We’ll do it for the lass. I’ll run the blessed egg’s code through the Purity Queen’s navigation drums myself until we squeeze the truth from its fiendish symbols.’

Nandi nodded. And if Hannah had remembered the egg’s code accurately, then they could discover what it was the guild had been so desperate to stop the three of them from finding out. Perhaps even use the research left by Hannah’s parents to force the guild to release the press-ganged girl from their service.


Chalph urs Chalph watched Jethro gently roll over the pawnshop’s murdered proprietor. It was definitely him – Hugh Sworph – but Chalph had been wrong about the man being dead, despite the dagger stuck in his spine.

The shop owner’s eyes flickered open and Chalph thought he saw a glint of recognition in them.

‘Who did this to you?’ Chalph demanded. ‘Old man, who—’

The pawnshop’s owner reached up and pressed something into Jethro Daunt’s fingers. He tried to speak, but bubbles of blood came out instead. The blade must have punctured his lungs. Chalph saw that there were other wounds on the man’s chest – the knife had seen plenty of work before being buried in his spine.

Jethro Daunt knelt in close and Hugh Sworph hissed something that started as a whisper but ended as a hacking cough. Then the shopkeeper groaned and Chalph sensed the last breath of life departing the man’s mangled body.

Jethro listened to the man’s chest then laid him back on the floor. ‘No, the poor fellow’s gone now, may serenity welcome his soul along the Circle’s turn.’

Chalph glanced around the room, sniffing at the air. Not a single active scent. They were alone in here. The murderer had left a good while before the two of them had entered the pawnshop. Poor Hugh. It was symptomatic of how long Chalph had been around the race of man that he could look at the corpse and not wonder at the strangeness of the furless body, instead noting how pale the man had become. How lifeless. ‘How your people can see something like this and not believe in the scriptures, I’ll never understand.’

‘Life is all around, good ursine,’ said Jethro. ‘Energy is never lost, only its pattern changed. Hugh Sworph’s soul has poured back into the one sea of consciousness and will be re-cupped into all the lives yet to come. That is the true crime of murder, for whoever killed him has only succeeded in murdering themselves.’

Somehow, Chalph doubted that. ‘What did he whisper to you?’

‘Twelve ten,’ replied Jethro. He opened his hand to reveal what had been pressed into it. A tiny key made of iron, not much longer than a fingernail.

‘A tenement apartment number to go along with the key?’

‘Not with this type of key, good Pericurian,’ said Jethro. ‘It is too small. Did you tell anyone you were coming here?’

‘I informed some of the people in my house that I was going to see Sworph about a mistake I found in the books for the supplies we ran to him,’ said Chalph. ‘But it wasn’t one of us that did for him. The only scents in here are from the race of man. There’s been no ursine bodies inside this shop for at least a week.’

Jethro glanced around the store, rolling the tiny key between his fingers. ‘Well, there’s no dolls houses for sale here, but…’

He walked over to a brick wall lined with grandfather clocks, each as tall as the ex-parson himself. None of the timepieces appeared to be in working order, though. All of their clock faces were reading different times and their pendulum rods hung silent and unmoving behind trunk doors. Jethro tapped the wooden plinth of each pendulum clock until he got to one that made a slightly different sound. Then he went up to its glass dial plate and inserted the dead shop owner’s tiny key in a small keyhole there, swinging open the glass door and twisting the hands to ten minutes past twelve. A second after he had readjusted the dial, a door in the grandfather clock’s base swung out revealing a crawl space little bigger than a chimney cut through the wall. Chalph could see that there was light at the other end of the short passage.

Chalph went through on all fours after Jethro Daunt, coming out of the claustrophobic passage just behind the man and into a workshop at least half the size of the shop front they had left behind. Shelves and cupboards lined the walls, filled with the fruits of Hugh Sworph’s real trade – fencing stolen goods for the capital’s thieves and its desperate poor, with a lucrative sideline in black-market commodities. Chalph suspected the only things missing among the jewels, gold watches, rare metals, silver cutlery and imported spirits he could see stored about here were their customs duty, the stained senate’s taxes and any genuine receipts.

Jethro went over to one of the work benches littered with the tools of a jeweller and picked up a metal block. ‘Something to stamp a false mark of provenance on re-smelted silver.’ He checked the drawers of the bench and lifted out a tray of silver ornaments, church candles and a Circlist hoop, a much larger version of the one that Jethro wore himself.

‘They’re smashed,’ said Chalph.

Jethro pointed to the metal kiln in the corner of the hidden storeroom. ‘They were being broken apart to fit inside his kiln. Except that this circle didn’t need to be sawn into pieces, it was meant to be opened.’ He held the ornament up, indicating how it could be split open on concealed hinges, pushing a hand into the hollow empty tubing inside. ‘These are the altar ornaments that were stolen from inside the cathedral.’

‘What was kept inside the circle?’

‘What indeed?’ echoed Jethro, putting the circle back down. ‘What indeed, to have acted as the catalyst for so many deaths. Yes, everything started with the theft of this from the cathedral.’ Jethro walked over to a lithographic printing press behind the bench and tapped the press bed. ‘Your Mister Sworph would have used this to print off catalogues of stolen items for sale for his clients. The criminals back in Jackals call them steal-sheets. Let’s see if we can’t find some of them while we’re here, and Mister Sworph’s real set of ledgers if he kept such a thing.’

‘I think he would have,’ said Chalph. ‘He struck me as a most careful man, he was meticulous about everything we sold to him.’

Chalph started opening drawers and cupboards, rummaging through coins and medals and assorted bric-a-brac. It was obvious that the Jackelian ex-parson had been expecting to find the cathedral’s stolen altar ornaments inside the shop. What was the canny foreigner playing at? He continued searching.

In one of the lower drawers, Chalph came across a pile of catalogues – stiff, bleached, white bamboo sheets hole-punched and held together with string ties – discovering them at the same time as Jethro came across the set of leather-bound ledgers. They laid them both down on the workbench. Jethro examined the catalogues first: daguerreotype images of items that were worth more intact than they were as smelted and recast silver and gold goblets, page after page of fine crystal decanters, priceless books, family heirlooms and antiques. Only the good stuff. As Jethro reached the final page his mouth cracked into a smile. Chalph leant in for a closer look. It was a painting, a Circlist illumination similar in style to any one of a thousand stained glass windows that could be found gracing the buildings inside Jago’s capital. The painting showed a mountain, clearly the Horn of Jago, surrounded by a wall of druids. A group of Circlists had broken through the line, making room for one of their number, a pilgrim, to run through and approach the mountain. A Circlist priest was running after the pilgrim and pointing to the top of the Horn of Jago, indicating his way.

‘This painting, good ursine, is what was concealed inside the altar ornament,’ said Jethro.

‘It is just a Circlist image,’ said Chalph.

‘The illumination is based on the third belief of the rational trinity,’ said Jethro. ‘You climb the mountain alone.’

‘Why would your strange church without gods want to encourage its followers to climb to the top of a mountain?’ asked Chalph.

‘It is a metaphor, good Pericurian. Every religion the world has known places itself between the worshipper and the mountain – which in this illustration stands for enlightenment – ranks of priests demanding the right to interpret and impose their truths on you. In Circlism, you must find the truth yourself without help. You must climb the mountain alone, with your bare hands. Truth is never given to you, you can only seek it.’

‘Old Sworph did not think this painting was very valuable,’ snorted Chalph, reading the text underneath the image. ‘It is at the back of his catalogue. A miniature by William of Flamewall. Price on application. That means he would have accepted the best price for it, a low price.’

‘No, it had the highest price of all,’ said Jethro. ‘It cost him his life.’ The ex-parson rolled up the catalogue and slipped it inside his jacket. ‘But you are correct. Our poor Mister Sworph did not know the painting’s true value. But he suspected it had some, given he had found it hidden inside an expensive silver ornament stolen from the cathedral.’

Jethro opened the fence’s ledgers and scanned through them for a couple of minutes before passing one to Chalph. ‘You help keep your house’s ledgers. What do you make of these?’

Chalph flicked through the book, finding neat hand-lined pages inside, black ink on bamboo paper. ‘It’s a purchase ledger. Items by date – prices paid, sellers, estimated value. Detailed work. Accurate.’

‘You see, you were right, he was a careful man,’ said Jethro. ‘You can tell that by the fact that he printed off his own catalogues. A lazier fellow would have given the steal-sheets to a printer to run off and risked one of the ink mixers getting drunk at a tavern and boasting about their “special work” to someone who might have tried to profit from having heard it.’

‘But there’s nothing in here about who Sworph sold the items to.’

Jethro hummed and took back the book. ‘No, the sales ledger is, I suspect, no longer under this roof. I believe whoever killed our Mister Sworph made him hand his sales ledger over. Then the poor fellow was murdered anyway to stop him from talking.’ Jethro ran his furless fingers down the margins of the pages until he found what he was looking for. ‘Here is the purchase record for what was stolen from the cathedral. Circlist silver. Meltable. Paid two marks and twelve pence. The good man certainly didn’t believe in overpaying for what he received, did he?’

‘But the name of the seller has been crossed out,’ observed Chalph. And there was something written in black ink above the crossings out. Hugh Sworph had written the word “Dead!!!”

‘Yes, he’d heard something,’ said Jethro. ‘My pennies would be placed on something unpleasantly fatal occurring to the thieves who broke into the cathedral and fenced him the altar ornaments. Our friend suspected he was the next in line to be silenced.’

‘What’s so special about this damn painting,’ asked Chalph, ‘that people are willing to kill for it?’

Jethro held up three of his fingers. ‘Three paintings, good Pericurian. The rational trinity is composed of three paintings. Whoever killed Alice and tried to murder Hannah now has two of them.’

Chalph’s eyes narrowed in his bear-like face. Seeing what the killers had already done to get the first two paintings, Chalph didn’t need to be an investigator like Jethro Daunt to know that they would be coming back for the last one.

Coming back whoever or whatever stood in their way.


While his minions called the pot-bellied man who ruled the guild’s deep turbine halls the charge-master, Hannah quickly realized he might just as well have been the demon king of this buried dominion.

Like everyone else down in the turbine halls he had shaved his head and he strutted around the induction vault with his cowl – unusually for the guild – folded down.

The charge-master eyed the chain of new arrivals suspiciously and laid a hand on one of the great iron suits lined up behind him against the wall. ‘Which of you grubs,’ he boomed, ‘can tell me what this is?’

It seemed all the new recruits were ‘grubs’ until they graduated through sheer sweat and survival into fully-fledged turbine men, or ‘termites’.

‘It’s one of the machines the trappers use to ride outside the city,’ announced someone from within their line – Hannah didn’t see who had been brave enough to answer back.

‘Trappers, yes and city workers too when they have to clear the culverts and the aqueducts beyond the battlements.’

It looked to Hannah’s eyes like a massive version of Boxiron, or a rusty suit of armour made for a twenty-foot giant. She had heard the recruits talking about them before she came in. How you needed a lucky suit, one passed down through the generations that hadn’t killed any of its owners. One that wasn’t possessed by a suit-ghost.

‘To the trappers up top this is a Rigid Armour Motile suit, or RAM suit. But down here, it’s just iron, and pushing iron is what keeps you healthy.’ He rapped the legs of the metal giant. ‘There’s a thousand ways to die working the turbine halls – steam flash, gas build-up, false current reversals – but one thing you grubs won’t get sick from is the electric field. Sick is what you get being tickled by constant background exposure to the transaction engines upstairs. But this is the guild’s real work down here. We don’t wear lined cowls inside the halls; we don’t wear those toy lead chainmail vests the guild passes out to visiting senators. There’s a foot of lead inside your iron, and that’s thicker than your grub heads. And thick is what you are, or you wouldn’t have been given to me.’

The charge-master rested his foot on a platform and struck a rubber button, the platform lifting him out and up and towards the centre of the suit where a vault-like door had swivelled out, revealing a man shaped cockpit. Their master’s suit was painted in a distinctive red and black chequerboard pattern.

‘The suit is slaved to your movement,’ he called down to the line of initiates from inside the cockpit. ‘You move, it moves. All the extra controls are down by your right thumb.’

The door in the centre of the suit’s chest was closing, sealing the charge-master inside. The suit stomped forward, shaking the cavern floor and making the initiates jump back in fright and scatter before the towering metal creature. There was a thick dome on top of the suit and Hannah could just see the charge-master’s beady eyes gazing down at them through the crystal slit. His voice boomed out of a voicebox built into the chest as he swung a massive arm to point to the hangar-style door at the opposite end of the cavern. ‘When that door lifts up in two minutes, any of you not inside your suits are going to fry. Any of you grubs who are too stupid to be able to copy what I just did are too dangerous to be allowed to work alongside me.’

There was a mad scramble towards their suits as the initiates realized they only had seconds left to emulate the charge-master or be cooked by the violence of the turbine halls. Hannah was barely into her suit, slipping her arms and legs through a cantilevered iron frame surrounded by soft red leather in the centre of the chest, when lanterns on the vault wall behind them began to flash in warning.

She was not the only one cutting it fine judging by the cries of alarm in the chamber – but luckily for the initiates, simply occupying the suit was enough to trigger the closure mechanism and Hannah found herself sealed inside her cockpit, trying to ignore the stale smell of the previous occupant, her view of the outside world abbreviated to what she could see through the glass slit of the dome that had lowered over her head. The iron suit really was designed for the lowest common denominator of operator, Hannah realised; moving her limbs within the cage inside the suit dragged the massive legs and arms clunking around outside. But it was strenuous work. Everywhere around her, the other initiates were taking faltering steps and the cavern floor echoed with the crash of feet carrying a tonne of metal with each step.

‘Move away from the wall,’ ordered the charge-master’s voice sounding inside her helmet. ‘Nobody is to try anything fancy today. Just follow my lead and learn fast. Your suit is dialled down so you’re moving heavy and slow. Stay away from each other’s feet. Anyone who puts a dent in their suit today will have me to answer to.’

The door lifted up into the ceiling and Hannah’s view opened out onto a short metal ramp down to hell. A vast cavern floor littered with turbines and massive machinery barely visible through the sea of hissing steam. It was as bad as on the surface after a storm had blown in off the Fire Sea. Guildsmen in their heavy suits cut through the mist as though they were ships, navigating around the condensers, core-cooling pumps, pressurizers and borated-water storage tanks. And this – she had been told – was just one of dozens of turbine halls buried on this level. The experienced termites’ suits had been painted a chequerboard yellow and black, a bright contrast to the green and black that Hannah and the other initiates wore.

It was only because the charge-master was able to speak inside Hannah’s dome that she could hear him above the roar of the turbines and generators. ‘Follow me to the stables.’

Circle, but it was hard pushing her suit after the charge-master. Hannah hoped that when the suits were dialled up to full strength, the simple act of moving around wouldn’t be so similar to lifting weights.

‘I see you there, initiate Conquest,’ whispered the charge-master inside her suit’s earpiece. ‘You think you’re too good for us. You think you can escape the guild just because you’ve got well-placed friends inside the church. What do you think that does for the morale of everyone else that has to work with you? You’re a walking disaster waiting to happen. I know your sort, girl. Soft. Pampered. The high guild master should have sent you down to us on the first day you stepped into our vaults.’

If the charge-master was so concerned with morale, then maybe he shouldn’t have kicked one of the initiates to the floor earlier in the day just because they had sniggered at something he had been barking. Hannah said nothing. She had already noted the temper on this beast.

What the charge-master called the stables was no more than a low tunnel sealed with an iron door. As the group approached it, the door opened and six ab-locks emerged from the near darkness, the stunted simian creatures loping out and blinking up at the machine suits in front of them.

‘Once you’re trained, each of you will get six ab-locks,’ said the charge-master. ‘What we call a hand. After your suit they’re your next most important possession. Treat the abs well and they’ll live up to nine years before the electric field down here kills them. We have to trap them young, break them, and train them in basic turbine lore, and that’s an art none of you grubs will ever appreciate. If I hear from the stable-master that you’re responsible for unnecessary wastage of abs then I’ll have you crawling around the steam lines in a scald suit and see how long you last before you get sick. But—’ the charge-master triggered a flail to emerge dangling from his suit’s right arm, its lashes crackling with raw electricity, ‘—that doesn’t mean you spare the rod with them. Abs are natural shirkers.’

His own hand of abs seemed to know what they could expect from their master right enough. Hannah watched as they fanned out before him, picking up pieces of equipment racked outside the stable.

The rest of the day’s training was a blur of swirling mists and the brutal lessons. How to get ab-locks to crawl under, over and inside the massive turbines, steam lines and block valves. Which pieces of turbine equipment needed lubricants applied by the abs’ spray guns to stop them burning up, where the electric energies were dangerously high and how to read the trip recorders that would indicate rogue current reversals. Which jobs were too heavy for the abs – such as turning the vast wheels in the water injection pumps – and which ones automatically required the intervention of the guildsmen. And through it all the charge-master’s contempt for the guildsmen who tended the transaction engines above them was apparent: puny coders. The real power was down here. Here were the muscles of Jagonese society and here were to be found the real men and women that worked them. The turbines that kept the vaults of Hermetica City powered with light, that charged their very defences and kept the island’s monsters at bay.

Now that Hannah could see what the ab-locks had to put up with, she began to regret having defended their employment in front of Nandi and the commodore. On some of the abs she couldn’t even see the numbers branded onto their spines, so bad were the flail burns. These weren’t beasts of burden, these were slaves. Jago’s position in the shifting ocean of magma might mean the island was the one place in the world where the power electric could be tamed enough to be used for mundane purposes rather than merely as a weapon of war, but its taming had a cost. And down here in the turbine halls was where society paid the price for the miracle of their free energy.

Hannah tried to ignore the agonized yells of the ab-lock that lost a leg to the twisting fan of a turbine, or the one that was blinded by a stray squirt of superheated water from a condenser running over-pressurized. Observing how many times the heavy suit she was wearing saved her and the other initiates from similar accidents during her training in the turbine halls, Hannah could see why the charge-master was so obsessive about the care the grubs took of their suits.

The first sign that anything was amiss towards the end of their first shift was the claxon sounding from a bank of machinery against the wall of the vault; the needles on their dials twisting in a paralytic dance as screeching sirens filled the turbine hall.

Hannah and the other grubs were left twisting their necks inside their suits as the guildsmen quickly stomped to their emergency positions in response to the unholy caterwauling, switching turbines to idle while their ab-locks swarmed around the hall, past the suits’ iron legs, weaving in and out of the steam as their master’s flails goaded them into a frenzy of activity.

The charge-master’s suit had clanked into a huddle of senior turbine workers, debating who knows what between themselves on a private channel. Whatever emergency they were discussing, they reached their decision in moments. Worryingly, the charge-master came cutting through the sea of steam towards the initiates.

‘You,’ he thundered towards Hannah, ‘with me. The rest of you grubs bugger off back to the suit hall.’

‘What’s happening, charge-master?’ Hannah asked, being careful to keep up with the man while she was talking. ‘Why are the claxons sounding?’

‘Hell’s happening, grub,’ spat the charge-master, leading her across the vault and towards a line of towering brick chimneys that occupied the far end of the machine-carved cavern. Another guildsman was bearing towards the chimneys, a navvy by the look of his suit, covered with slings loaded with equipment crates and strange-looking devices.

‘You’re going down with him,’ the charge-master’s voice barked.

‘Down?’ Hannah looked around. An iron door in one of the chimneys was opening inwards, revealing darkness inside. ‘But the turbine halls are as deep as the guild’s vaults go.’

‘You think?’ The charge-master turned towards the other guildsman. ‘The grub’s supposedly got a brain; they were using her as a cardsharp upstairs. But if you don’t bring her back, don’t worry, it’s one less for training.’ He turned and stomped away, shouting orders for everyone to evacuate to the next turbine hall over and seal the blast doors behind them.

Hannah turned towards the navvy. He might be wearing a termite’s colours on his hull, but the sweat-slicked face staring at her through the slit of his suit’s dome looked awfully young. There was a name stencilled above the eye slit – Rudge Haredale.

‘What is this?’ demanded Hannah, pointing to the open door in the massive chimney.

‘Tap nine,’ replied the navvy, not bothering to hide the irritation in his voice.

‘Tap? As in steam tap?’

‘Well, it surely ain’t the tap for our bathhouse’s hot water, grub.’ The servos in his iron legs ground away as he ducked down through the open door, then he was inside the chimney, lanterns across his suit flickering on in reaction to the darkness. ‘You waiting for an invite?’

Was he insane? This was an actual steam tap. A shaft tunnelling down for miles to funnel the superheated steam rising out of Jago’s depths – the same force that powered the erupting geysers across the volcanic island, harnessed to turn the guild’s turbines. The only thing that would be waiting for them inside that chimney was a mile-long drop to a char-broiled death. Even their suits couldn’t protect the two of them from the violence inside a steam tap. Hannah’s cooling mechanism would be overwhelmed and her pilot cabin transformed into a human baking oven.

The navvy called through the voicebox on his chest and an ab-lock came trotting out of the steam and leapt up to take hold of a specially-designed grip on the back of Rudge’s suit. Suddenly Hannah realized the words she had just heard the navvy call had been correct after all. T-face. Not the number branded on the ab-lock’s back, but a nickname based on the steam burns on its face in the shape of a letter ‘T’. This creature must have received them young, for they were almost a mottled tan now, in adulthood.

‘This ab knows shaft work,’ said the navvy. ‘Best we got, aren’t you, T-face?’

It murmured a whine in response.

‘What about the other abs?’ asked Hannah. ‘I still have room on the back of my suit.’

‘One’s enough when it’s T-face – the rest of the hand would just spook down there.’

They weren’t the only ones. Seeing Hannah’s hesitation at entering the chimney, Rudge Haredale leant forward and yanked her suit across the portal into the steam tap. ‘The shaft’s not carrying super-pressure right now, grub. That’s the problem. One of the regulator gates deep down inside the shaft is jammed and we’ve got to fix it.’

Hannah knew the answer to the question even as she asked it. ‘And if we don’t?’

‘Then the bloody pressure builds up behind the gate until it takes the gate off and about a tenth of the guild’s turbine capacity with it in the explosion.’

Hannah didn’t need any of her church training in mathematics to do the calculations on that sum. A tenth of the guild’s turbine capacity, but a hundred per cent of Damson Hannah Conquest.