Secrets of the Fire Sea

CHAPTER ELEVEN


Boxiron sat in the middle of his hotel room in the lotus position, the inferior hydraulics of his legs trembling in protest. The steamman ignored the discomfort and concentrated on the task at hand – or rather, mind – running the stegeotext that he had found concealed in Jethro’s ancient painting through his brain, parcelling pieces of the code out to the additional specialized processing unit that the criminal lords of Jackals had outfitted him with.

It was an unfamiliar thing, deciphering something so ancient. The Jackelian transaction-engine locks he had cracked were all much of a muchness, but tackling the code hidden in the painting was like breaking an ancient safe – the maths that protected the cipher expressed with an antique elegance, and something else, something that remained intangible and just out of sight. He had been at it for most of the day, crunching and attacking, chipping away pieces of the puzzle. Half of the battle was trying to get inside the mind of the cipher’s creator. Pushing at the code to see what gave way and what held firm, modelling how he would have done it and following those avenues to their logical conclusions.

Boxiron was under no illusions about the difficulty of this job. It was as good as being a captain of the Free State’s militant orders once more, marshalling his forces and distributing them, testing the enemy, finding the weak spots to overwhelm. Every inch of Boxiron’s being knew it had been a member of the Circlist church who had secreted this code within the painting, and not just because the illustration came with the signature of William of Flamewall scrawled across it. The maths were of the highest order, everything balanced with the symmetry that the softbody faith attempted to incorporate into its formula-based moral rules. Yes, that was the weakness of the cipher’s creator. Too much symmetry.

Not enough chaos and randomness.

The randomness of—

—the steam from Boxiron’s stack drifted across the hotel room. Thickening. Reforming.

It had been so long since they had come. And he wasn’t even calling them today. Not a drop of his oil shed. Not a single cog thrown. For which of the Steamo Loas would come for Catosian cogs, which would visit for Jackelian oil? Which of the spirits of his ancestors would manifest themselves for such a desecrated body as was his now?

Radius Patternkeeper, Lord of the Ravenous Fire.

The words of the Loa came out like a snake’s hiss, echoing from the distant plane occupied by the people of the metal’s ancestors. ‘Do not attempt to do this thing.’

‘Who are you to make requests of me?’ spat Boxiron at the smoking form swaying in front of him. ‘I who am a desecration in your eyes. I who have gone unaided by King Steam in this living hell of a body my mind has been condemned to join with.’

‘Yet you have called us,’ said Radius Patternkeeper. ‘Filling a mind that was once of the people with the dark cipher that must not be decrypted. You have summoned me as surely as if you spilled your own oil and tossed your own cogs in the ritual of gear-gi-ju.’

The steamman got to his feet, angrily. ‘I am still of the people. I am Boxiron, even if I am a shadow of what I once was. I abide.’

‘No. Boxiron died well on the Fulven Fields,’ said the Loa. ‘His corpse piled with the bodies of our enemies, his knight’s lance broken through those that would have destroyed our land.’

‘Then you should not have allowed Jackelian grave robbers to staple his skull onto this mockery of a body they fashioned in a Catosian manufactory.’

‘The army searched,’ hissed the Loa. ‘But there were so many bodies, so many corpses. And the mechomancers’ grave robbers came like carrion on the wind after the battle.’

‘You should have searched better,’ retorted Boxiron. ‘And then we would surely not be having this discussion now.’

‘Erase the steganographic code within your mind,’ ordered the Loa. ‘Then destroy the painting you took it from.’

‘Tell me why I should.’ demanded Boxiron.

‘It is not upon you to question the will of the Steamo Loa.’

‘As it is not upon you to order me to do this. My friend Jethro Daunt requires the cipher to be broken.’

‘The softbody is called by his people’s gods. Ancient ones that have been long forgotten,’ hissed the twisting steam shape manifesting from his stack fumes. ‘Forgotten with good reason. The great pattern can only be woven forwards; it can never be woven backwards. Your friend cannot be trusted.’

‘Easy words,’ Boxiron growled. ‘But I choose to judge on actions. Jethro Daunt helped save me from what I had become when my own people would not even look me in the vision plate as I begged for high-grade boiler coke outside our temples. I will trust his judgement over yours, Radius Patternkeeper. You who will not even trust me with the truth when you would order my obedience.’

The shape in the smoke danced from side to side like an angry cobra. ‘You are beyond the pale, desecration, that is the truth I see in your defiance!’ Spears of smoke hardened in the air between them, darting threateningly towards Boxiron.

‘You,’ swore the hulking steamman, ‘can go back to the flaming furnace of Lord Two-Tar and suck on his pipe.’

‘I shall ride!’ the Loa’s voice exploded from the smoke like a banshee scream and the manifestation hurled itself at Boxiron, the steamman stumbling back and flailing at the powerful ancestral spirit as it entered through the ill-fitting joins of his body, curling into his metal as though he were a magnet and the Loa a cloud of metallic filings. Filling him, possessing him. His inferior body becoming a host for the Steamo Loa to ride.

Boxiron was left caulked, blundering across the room. Burning. Burning. The Loa was reaching for his mind, reaching for his brain’s nanomechanical network swirling with the fruit of so many long hours of cipher breaking. Reaching to burn the last traces of his mind from the face of the world.

The steammen gods had finally come to bring Boxiron his second, final death.


Even the young guild navvy Hannah was following down the oblong-shaped shaft seemed impressed at how easily she had taken to the art of shaft walking – pushing the back of her RAM suit against one wall and using the leverage of her armoured legs against the opposite one to ease her way slowly and steadily downwards. Yet this whole situation seemed odd to Hannah; it was almost as if her suit was anticipating her needs and helping her. Though unless the ghost of some guildsman who had died inside the suit’s cockpit had possessed it, she didn’t know how that could be. Their suits were inanimate; they relied on their occupants to provide direction and intelligence. She shivered as she recalled the tales the other grubs had told each other. They were just stories, surely.

There was still the occasional spear of steam rising up past them from tiny cracks in the shaft, but the regulator gate they were heading for looked to be well and truly immobilized. They had already passed several working gates – iron frames containing motorized vanes that could be opened or shut depending on how much superheated steam was rising up from the island’s depths. The power needs of the turbine halls were carefully balanced with the pressure from below and the engineering tolerance of the gates themselves.

‘My first day,’ Hannah muttered, ‘and he’s already trying to kill me.’

‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ the young navvy’s voice sounded inside her helmet. ‘The charge-master thinks a lot more about keeping the turbine halls intact than he does about teaching some fancy-piece a lesson, just because she thinks she should be chopping punch cards upstairs rather than pushing iron with the lads down below.’

‘Then why’s he sending me down here with a—’ Hannah had to stop herself from saying a boy. ‘A navvy.’

‘Because I’m the best he’s got for shaft work,’ said young Rudge. ‘And he must think you’re the best he’s got for transaction-engine work, or you wouldn’t be here, either.’ The navvy pointed at the small transaction engine attached to the gate they were passing through – still functional enough to close its vanes and withdraw into the wall when they triggered it.

Hannah looked more closely at the transaction engine on the gate, blinking in surprise. It was the kind of thing she had seen in Jackelian picture books. ‘It’s got no valves. That’s a transaction-engine drum rotating inside it – it’s steam-driven!’

‘Isn’t that just like a cardsharp,’ snorted Rudge. ‘You love your head games with numbers, but you haven’t got a clue about the iron you need to run them on. This shaft is normally full of superheated steam. How long do you think a glass valve would last down here? Primitive works just fine inside a steam tap, especially given there’s usually enough steam flowing past here to power every paddle steamer in the world. Our pressure regulator gates operate autonomously. They’re not on the guild’s network, understand?’

‘I’m here because I’m the best,’ Hannah repeated the words, hardly believing them. And not because Vardan Flail had instructed the charge-master to ensure that she was dropped down the first conveniently deep shaft.

‘The charge-master comes across as a right bastard, but that’s only because unless you temper young metal well, it breaks before it becomes steel. If you’re not made into the best you can be down here, you’ll never survive to get your own suit, and you’ll as like take more than a few good people with you when you die. What the charge-master does, he does for a reason.’

The deeper they travelled down the shaft towards the jammed gate, the more erratic her suit appeared to get, the frame that surrounded her body inside the cabin juddering and getting harder to control.

‘My suit’s stopping working,’ called Hannah.

‘Mine too,’ said the navvy. ‘We’re going to crack the doors on our armour manually and tie an abseil line to our suits’ legs and then rappel the rest of the way down. I’ll distribute the gate gear between you, me and T-face.’

‘Both our suits can’t be malfunctioning at the same time,’ Hannah protested.

The navvy’s reply came as if he was talking to an idiot. ‘It’s not a malfunction, grub. We’re reaching the electric limit.’ He grunted in annoyance at Hannah’s silence and continued. ‘We’re too deep, girl. Whatever spells the Fire Sea casts on the power electric topside don’t stretch this far down. A couple more yards further and you might as well be back in the Kingdom of Jackals. The current in our suits is getting irregular, it’s spiking and cascading in random amplifications. If we go any deeper wearing our armour, we’ll burn out both our suits, and then we’ll have one hell of a climb getting back up to the turbine halls.’

Hannah swore at the insanity of what she was being asked to do. ‘Maybe you could find a way to run one of these suits on steam for the next time we come down.’

The navvy laughed. ‘That’s not a bad idea, grub. But then I heard you’re the girl that’s got Jackelian blood. Using steam should be second nature to you. And we need to tame the steam down here too, if we’re going to make it back up to the turbine halls.’

When Hannah cracked the door to her suit, the heat came rushing in like a flood. Even with the concrete shaft clear of steam, it was still as febrile as a kettle outside. Hannah’s plain cotton skin-garb was quickly soaked through with humid moisture while her nose was dripping itching beads of sweat onto the burning hot exterior of her RAM suit.

They had halted their suits next to each other like two bridges wedged in the shaft, and as Hannah climbed from her cockpit she looked nervously across to where Rudge was slinging equipment around himself and his ab-lock, tying up his abseiling lines as securely as if their lives depended in it – which they surely did. Out of his cockpit and standing on the chest of his horizontal suit, Rudge was a burly-looking six-foot – with a poorly cropped mop of ginger hair soaked by sweat. The ab-lock was making a low crooning sound beside him, as it too was loaded down with satchels and equipment.

‘T-face doesn’t sound much like the ab-locks outside the wall,’ said Hannah.

‘They have their vocal chords removed when they’re caught by the trappers,’ Rudge called back as he sorted out the gear that Hannah was no doubt to carry the rest of the way down. ‘Good job, too, the racket they’d make in the stables otherwise. But T-face is all right; I was with my father when a current reversal blew out a turbine and half the pipes in hall four. It was us that pulled T-face out of there. We saved his life and he knows it right enough.’

‘Father? You don’t bear children in the turbine halls do you?’

Rudge snorted. ‘Of course not. The plating in our suits might be enough to hold off the worst of the deformities, but working in the turbine halls removes the lead from your pencil right enough. No, you have to get a double on the ballot – two from the same family called into the guild. It’s less rare than you’d think now there’s so few names in the cities to be called.’

Cities. He had been labouring down here long enough not to hear, then. It was just the capital now on Jago. Hermetica. The last city.

Rudge jumped across the gap between the two RAM suits wedged next to each other in the shaft, bringing Hannah’s load across.

‘A punch card writer for you,’ said the navvy, slinging her a heavy sack. ‘In case it’s a coding problem on the gate.’ He tapped the two glass torpedoes slung under his arm, filled with swirling liquid explosives separated by an ignition membrane and a clockwork timer. ‘Charges to blow the gate open if it’s a physical jam that can’t be cleared with my tools.’

He wound a line of powdered tape around Hannah’s hands and fitted a climber’s sling across her chest, making sure that it was properly connected to the line that she was going to use to abseil down.

‘What if the lines aren’t long enough?’

The navvy shook his head in annoyance. ‘This is your first time, grub, not mine or T-face’s. I’ve been counting the distance all the way down here. You just hold onto your line and keep your gear secure.’

He cast her line off the side of her suit, jumped back to his own machine and then lit a chemical flare belted onto his sling to augment the light of the suits’ lanterns.

Down the three of them went, another thirty foot, the powdered bandages on Hannah’s hand gripping the abseil line’s pulley-like mechanism, the machine droning as she fell. Rudge’s calculations were right on the money, though, the three lines playing out a foot above the jammed pressure gate below them.

‘Don’t touch the surface, grub, and stay on your line. It’s burning hot.’

Hannah hardly needed his shouted warning. The gate below was trembling under the pressure of the superheated steam building up on the other side of its heavy vanes, metal plates steaming with moisture from the incredible heat being held back.

Rudge pointed to the stone handholds laddering down the shaft and indicated that Hannah should use them to get to the transaction engine built into the wall. At close quarters the thinking machine was every bit as primitive looking as Hannah had been told by the navvy. A flared trumpet sucked in the passing steam, while a bank of transaction-engine drums rotated to perform the basic calculations needed to help regulate the flow. Under the machine was a tiny stone platform where maintenance work could be done. This must be what working with transaction engines back in the Kingdom of Jackals was like.

‘See if the fault’s inside there,’ ordered Rudge, as he and T-face lowered themselves further down towards the metal gate. ‘We’re going to check each vane for rusted bearings.’ He removed a small hammer and began to tap across the gate’s surface, listening to the returning clangs with all the intent of a safe cracker, while T-face held his line steady above him.

Hannah brought out the portable punch card writer that she had been given and rattled out a basic diagnostics query then levered off the cork plug that protected the brutish machine’s injection reader from the steam that would usually be powering up this shaft. She quickly became absorbed into her work, forgetting there were others in the tap working alongside her. Checking the transaction engine carefully, Hannah calculated there was enough residual steam in its reservoir for about ten minutes worth of operation time. The inconvenience of having to read the symbolic results directly off the rotating drums was going to be the least of her problems down here.

In the end, it was the garbled nature of the symbols coming up on the transaction-engine drums that gave the fault away and Hannah allowed herself a brief thrill of elation. The gate’s transaction engine had recorded a spike of steam well beyond the bounds its guild programmer had originally allowed, so the engine had tried to cope by resetting its ceiling values itself. But it had set them too far beyond the normal parameters, and now the gate that the thinking machine controlled was permanently locked, convinced that the killing pressure building up below was only a slight up-draft that it wasn’t even worth the bother of harnessing.

Hannah rattled out another punch card with a more realistic set of pressure peaks and troughs for the control mechanism to follow – factoring in enough time for them to exit the shaft before the gate reopened. She had injected the punch card and re-corked the engine, but the self-congratulatory words of praise she was about to call across to Rudge were lost as one of the rivets exploded from the gate below – blasted away by a pressure front far more intense than the gate’s safety margins allowed for. A geyser of steam discharged through the tiny hole that had been opened – knocking the three of them swinging around the shaft on their rappel lines. There was a crashing sound as the spear of steam dislodged one of the RAM suits wedged in the shaft above. The suit came tumbling down like a landslide of metal and crashed into the gate. For a terrible moment Hannah thought the impact was going to smash the gate open, but it proved to be made of tougher stuff. The fallen RAM suit lay over the hole left by the dislodged rivet, temporarily sealing the leak. However, if sealing the leak had spared the three of them from steam burns, it had done no other favours for Rudge. The dislodged suit had brought his line down with it, and now the young navvy was pinned under the knee joins of his own suit, the arch of the leg trapping him with all the weight of a two-tonne foundry-forged tree trunk.

T-face was off his line, whining and pushing hopelessly at the massive suit’s leg. Rudge was still conscious enough to see Hannah trying to climb up into his downed suit’s pilot cage.

‘Suit – won’t work,’ he coughed up at her. ‘Not this – far down the – shaft.’

‘It might,’ Hannah called down. ‘I just need enough power to lift the leg off you.’

‘You’ll as like – crush me, grub. You’re the – only one with a line left tied to – a working suit. Climb back up and – take T-face with you.’

Hannah tried not to gag. She could smell Rudge’s skin burning where it was touching the gate. ‘I’ve found the fault, you idiot. The gate’s vanes are going to open up underneath you.’

‘Good job, girl. Then there’s only one – way me and my – suit are going, and that’s straight down.’

There was a loud creaking noise from underneath them. The gate wasn’t going to hold together long enough for Hannah to get out before the flow of super-pressurized steam resumed. It looked as if Vardan Flail had got his way. He was going to buy Hannah’s silence with her death after all.


Burning. Burning, as he rolled across the hotel room’s floor. Boxiron’s body was burning, but not as fiercely as his mind. The Steamo Loa that his people knew as Radius Patternmaster was reaching into his brain and filling it, preparing to swell and crack his nanomechanical neural channels and burn out each and every memory that Boxiron possessed. Not just the almost-decrypted code hidden inside Jethro’s church painting, but everything that made Boxiron a distinct being. His inferior, man-milled body was finally going to get the mind it deserved – that of an idiot savant.

Something deep inside Boxiron struggled and writhed in reaction to the pain – a vomit-like reflex that was trying to emerge and fight the possession of the Loa. What was it? A routine that had been hidden inside him by the flash mob? The cunning mechomancers who knew that there was always a danger that one of the steamman’s gods might strike at the abomination they had created for their Jackelian criminal masters. But whatever defences the crime lords had secreted inside his body felt too far away and the weight of the Loa riding him too intense for him to connect with it—

—as he felt Jethro’s shadow falling over his body, the gear lever on his back slid squealing up to five. Top gear.

Now it was the Steamo Loa’s turn to shriek as the cobbled-together firewall the flash mob’s hirelings had inserted inside Boxiron connected with his mind. Blocks were raised on every circuit he possessed, the Loa that was trying to ride him cut into a million separate, self-aware splinters, steam leaking out of his joints. The manifestation of Radius Patternmaster tried to seethe out of Boxiron’s body, broken and mangled beyond recognition, attempting to reform…but merely dissipating in the air of the hotel room.

Boxiron pulled himself groggily to his feet, trying to avoid placing a heavy iron foot on Jethro’s toes as he swayed to and fro. Jethro was standing there before him, as was the young ursine Chalph urs Chalph.

‘That was one your people’s gods, was it not, old steamer?’

‘A Loa – I rejected him,’ said Boxiron, ‘much as you reject your gods.’

‘I am not much of a standard to aspire to,’ said Jethro.

‘You are more than they.’

A coldness flowed through Boxiron, as if every crystal board and node inside his body was hardening after being freed of the corrupting hold of the Loa. But it was not the aftershock of cleansing himself of the possession he felt. It was the cipher from the painting.

Assembling. Assembling. The last of the flash mob’s crooked processing units came back online passing him the final clue he needed to crack the steganographic code – one third of the mathematical weapon that the priest Bel Bessant had crafted so many centuries earlier. It was like nothing that Boxiron had been expecting.

But then, neither was the explosion of pain as the terrible, cold, alien thing unfolded within his consciousness…