Secrets of the Fire Sea

CHAPTER TWELVE


‘I’ve never seen the like,’ said the commodore to Nandi as they emerged from the conning tower. He waved the punch card containing the Joshua Egg in the air as if he was still trying to clear the smoking ruin the card had left of his transaction engine’s navigation drums. ‘This blessed egg is jinxed, right enough. Raising a switching storm in the dark valves of those guild dogs, then roasting the transaction engine on my precious boat. It’ll take my crew weeks to repair this mess, and Jagonese tugs guiding us out or no, I won’t be sailing the Fire Sea blind without my navigation drums. We’re as good as beached here until the navigation room is fixed.’

‘It’s a coincidence,’ said Nandi. ‘I know that u-boat men are superstitious, but you can’t believe a few lines of code are cursed.’

‘I believe it, lass. This whole wicked isle is cursed. Jackelians find nothing but bad luck here, and look at the Jagonese. They were as good as us, once, and now see what they’ve become. Pale-faced lickspittles tending their infernal turbines and hiding in their mortal caves. Milksops raised on bamboo soup where once they would have swigged beer and eaten beef as proudly as any Jackelian.’

‘Just a coincidence,’ said Nandi again, trying to make herself believe it.

The commodore crossed the gantry over to the dock. ‘No, lass. This dark isle is a vampire land. It’s sucked the vigour out of a whole nation. Why do you think the Fire Sea surrounds it? There’s not one good island sitting in this whole damned sea and I’ve visited a few of them. Old Lord Tridentscale is the master of the oceans and he knew what he was doing when he sealed the black cliffs of Jago off behind the shifting magma. Yes, I’ll be right glad to swap the dark vaults of this place for the queer wooden towers and oak minarets of Pericur.’

Nandi started. Of course, the other end of the commodore’s voyage. Pericur.

‘That’s it!’ said Nandi. ‘I know how to run the Joshua Egg.’

‘Don’t be asking me to solve the numbers of its formula by hand,’ whined the u-boat man. ‘Not that my genius isn’t up to the task, mind, but I can feel it in my bones – anyone who attempts to solve that dark code will go mad. Don’t ask old Blacky to end up in an asylum for this lunatic chase you’re on.’

‘I’ll prove it to you,’ said Nandi. ‘That what we have here is only a complex code without a single supernatural expression in its formula; and I’ll do it with the help of Ambassador Ortin. Your cargo, Jared, transaction-engine parts bound for Pericur – and the ambassador took a good few crates of them for installation in his embassy.’

‘Ah, lass,’ said the commodore, ‘if that fur-skinned fellow has a need for processing power that’s not satisfied by the monstrous thinking machines of the guild, it is only because he doesn’t trust the Jagonese with what he’s handling. Cipher work, Nandi. You’ll find his blessed embassy’s transaction engines come with an officer of the Pericurian secret police attached to them.’

Nandi shrugged. She didn’t give a damn about Pericurian politics, and if the ambassador’s transaction engines came configured for cipher work, so much the better. What was in here was going to save Hannah from the guild and Nandi would burn out every transaction engine on Jago if it meant saving the young church girl from her tormentors.


The transaction-engine room inside the Pericurian embassy was a lot more advanced than Nandi had been expecting. In fact, it was a lot more advanced than it had any right to be. How many customs officials on the Jackelian docks had Commodore Black bribed to look the other way while their most advanced transaction-engine models were hustled out of the country for export to the rising power across the sea?

The rattling, steam-driven drums on the Jackelian machinery looked out of place in this chamber, decorated in the Pericurian style with richly carved hardwood panelling across the walls and floors. The windows here were in the circular wooden-framed style known as bulls’ eyes back in Jackals. The stained glass obscured the view beyond, but that had probably been intentional. All of the embassies were clustered together in a ring on the hollowed-out level of the Horn of Jago know as Embassy Circle, and had a clear view of the concrete artillery domes around the foot of the mountain. A not-so-subtle reminder of Hermetica City’s ability to drop a shell on any unauthorized boat trying to breach the coral line defending the island.

‘You’re a fine fellow, Ortin,’ said the commodore. ‘Helping your old shipmates out of a blessed tight spot like this. I’ll give you a free berth to Pericur for your troubles, Ambassador, when you want it.’

‘What I want is of little consequence, dear boy.’ The Pericurian ambassador was still dressed like a Jackelian squire. Perhaps the Jagonese tailor hadn’t come to see him yet. ‘The only way I’m getting out of my posting here is if the liberal houses come back into power, and I hardly judge that likely at the moment. Besides, annoying the ineptly disguised intelligence officer the archduchess has watching my every step by allowing you inside our embassy is worth every ill word in the report she’s furiously drafting right now.’

With the machine’s operator dismissed from the room, Ortin urs Ortin took an almost childish delight in taking charge of the transaction engine himself, his eyes glinting with manic glee as he transcribed the Joshua Egg’s second iteration and sprayed water onto the rotating drums when they started running hot. He put Nandi in mind of her mother watering the roses that wound around the trellises at the back of her cottage, all concentration, lost to the world.

As Nandi had predicted, if there was a curse on the Joshua Egg, it was a particularly Jackelian one, because the engine room in the Pericurian embassy seemed markedly unaffected by it. The results came rattling back on a large Rutledge Rotator, an abacus-like board of rotating squares. A more detailed breakdown appeared on a winding reel of paper tape, its wheels poorly oiled and squealing like suckling piglets competing for a mother’s teat.

When the results were flowing back from the third iteration of the Joshua Egg, Nandi didn’t hesitate. She urged the ambassador to toss the newly reformed code back into the decryption run – she would have enough time later to leaf through the data spooling out. Nandi might not be as convinced of a curse as the commodore, but she didn’t want to tempt fate if there was some mathematical quirk in the code that led to transaction engines overloading as they were teasing meaning out of it.

Again the next level of the Joshua Egg was solved, more data thrown out along with another iteration and she tossed the new code back like a fish that was too small. By the fifth iteration, the Joshua Egg was exhausted. No more iterative pearls to be uncovered, no more compressed data to be drawn out.

Nandi spread the unfurled rolls of printed data across a heavy table meant for use by the engine’s cardsharps. Here it was, then. The last legacy of the two Doctors Conquest. Would there be anything in the pages of records they had printed out to help save the daughter they had hardly known? Would there be anything in them to allow Nandi to prove she was at least the equal of every one of the pampered popinjays who had bought their way into Saint Vine’s rarefied halls of academia? As Nandi started reading, she was calmly intent on finding out what the guild was so bent on preventing her from discovering. By the time she had finished, though, her hands were shaking and her skin was cold with sweat.

‘What is it, lass?’ asked the commodore. ‘Say this blessed evil code hasn’t given you a fever…’

‘Not the code,’ said Nandi. ‘What is inside it. We have to get to Hannah, Jared. We have to get her out of the guild’s vaults to hear what I’ve found here…’

The superstitious commodore was backing away without even realizing it, nearly treading on the riding boots of the large Pericurian ambassador.

‘…because she’s not going to believe this,’ said Nandi.


Jethro Daunt came running back into the hotel room with more thick cream bamboo paper to replace the pile that Boxiron had already used up. The pencil clutched in the steamman’s iron fingers moved across the paper so fast it was as if the numbers of the formula he was writing were flowing out of a breached dam. Chalph urs Chalph was gathering up the completed papers, standing back from Boxiron as the steamman moaned about the pain of holding whatever he had found in the painting in his head before it vomited across the papers.

At last the steamman stopped scribbling. He rolled across the floor, whimpering, his stack emitting wheezing bursts of smoke. ‘It is gone. It is gone.’

‘It has,’ reassured Jethro. ‘It is all down here, now. On paper.’

‘Such a thing is not meant to be held within a mind,’ hissed Boxiron.

‘Not held incomplete,’ said Jethro. ‘Not without being balanced by the other two parts.’

‘No!’ said the steamman, so loudly it was almost a warning. ‘It is not what you think it is. I should have listened to the Steamo Loa when it came to me. Read the formula, Jethro softbody, see the symmetry of what has been wrought here.’

Jethro took the papers being neatly piled by Chalph urs Chalph and started to read through them, slowly at first, then more frantically – almost disbelieving – flicking through the sheets and turning them over, tracing the formulae between pages and jumping back and forth until the ex-parson was perspiring. ‘This cannot be!’

‘What is it?’ asked Chalph. ‘Is it something to do with the machine spirit that was trying to possess your metal friend?’

‘So obscene,’ said Jethro. ‘So obvious. Such a fearful symmetry.’

‘What was hidden in the painting?’ demanded Chalph.

‘How do you slay a god?’ asked Jethro, pushing the formula-strewn papers back, sadly, towards Chalph. ‘Why, the easiest way in the world. By becoming a god yourself, a stronger god.’

‘Become a god?’ Chalph sounded shocked. ‘Such a thing is not possible.’

Boxiron cleared his voicebox. ‘It should not be. Yet I was burning with just a third of this horror held within my mind.’

‘Sentience is a function of complexity,’ said Jethro, regretfully. ‘To an ant, good ursine, you would look like a god. To an animalcule living on a slide under a microscope, the ant would seem like a god. The purpose of this god-formula would appear to be to focus the complexity of the universe inside a mortal mind and keep on folding it in an infinite loop: infinitely wise, infinitely knowing, and the Circle preserve us, I have no doubt, infinitely mad. And what would emerge from such a fearful recursion would be as far beyond that which we are, as we are beyond an unthinking mote of dust.’

‘I have never encountered such mathematics before,’ admitted Boxiron, his voicebox trembling with awe. ‘The clarity of it, using paradoxes to refocus the great pattern and turn the threads of existence inwards on themselves.’

Jethro sighed. ‘Oh, Bel Bessant. Such genius. But such arrogance to believe her mind could have held the entirety of such a thing and not ended up as dangerous as the divine monsters she had been asked to protect Jago from. A god-formula, of all the things for a Circlist priest to want to create. A god-formula.’

‘She had to die,’ said the steamman, simply.

‘Poor William of Flamewall. Close enough to his lover to see what she wanted to become. Close enough to poison Bel Bessant before she could use the formula on herself. Loving enough to take the blame for a crime of passion rather than circulating the dangerous truth behind her work any wider. To go on the run as a murderer rather than being hailed as the hero he deserved to be.’

‘William of Flamewall, he is the one that concealed the code in the painting?’ asked Chalph.

Jethro nodded.

‘If he was willing to murder his own mate to stop the god-formula being used, why preserve it within a series of paintings, why not destroy it instead?’

‘Once created, weapons are never uninvented, they are never forgotten’ said Jethro. ‘If someone was to use this or something similar to raise themselves to godhood, the understanding of the god-formula would be the sole way to stop them – it is virus and vaccine both.’

Boxiron picked up one of the sheets and waved it angrily ‘The Inquisition knew this abomination was here.’

‘It is possible, good steamman. The Inquisition might have held onto this terrible secret for millennia. Why else would they ensure the archbishop of Jago was always one of their officers? But I rather think the recent rediscovery of the god-formula, its unearthing, was the work of the two Doctors Conquest. And Alice was involved somehow; dear Circle, I do hope it wasn’t her that killed Hannah’s parents.’

Chalph shook his head. ‘Come on Jackelian, the archbishop was strict, but—’

Jethro interrupted. ‘You can only ever know yourself, and then barely. Alice was an officer of the Inquisition. If it meant protecting William of Flamewall’s secret, I have little doubt she would have killed everyone in this room to achieve that end.’

‘I have never voiced misgivings about the work you have accepted before,’ said Boxiron, ‘but…’

Jethro spread the sheets containing their painting’s third of the god-formula out in front of him. ‘There is something about this. Something wrong.’

‘Beyond the alarming concept of a completely unworthy mortal transfiguring themselves into a god?’ asked Boxiron.

‘Yes indeed, but bob me sideways, what is it?’ Jethro looked as if he had remembered something, and pulled out the catalogue he had found in the murdered fence’s hidden storeroom, passing it to his friend. ‘You will find a painting on the last page, old steamer. Another of William of Flamewall’s works.’

‘This is a picture of a picture,’ complained the steamman, leafing to the end of the catalogue. ‘A third-generation copy.’

‘Your best efforts, if you please.’

Boxiron raised the page in front of his vision plate and waited a couple of seconds while he resolved its details. After a moment’s stillness he shuddered back to life. ‘There is nothing there. No sign of steganographic concealment within the image. It is just a simple painting.’

‘You are certain?’

‘As certain as the signature of William of Flamewall scrawled in its right-hand corner. The print quality of the catalogue is such that I would not be able to resolve the detail of a code in the painting, but I can see there is no trace of one hidden anywhere on this canvas.’

Jethro smiled. ‘Of course, why would there be?’

‘Old man Sworph was killed for this and there isn’t even a code in it?’ said Chalph, disbelievingly.

‘Not a steganographic code,’ continued Jethro, ‘which makes a strange kind of sense to me. What did you do with the last part of the god-formula, William? Where did you hide it?’

‘I’m glad this affair makes sense to you, Jackelian,’ said Chalph. ‘Because the only thing that makes sense to me right now is getting off Jago before one of the locals skins me for a rug.’

‘This painting is blank,’ explained Jethro, ‘because if it wasn’t, our murderous adversary would have all three parts of the code in his possession and would have already used it to transmigrate, to ascend towards the godhead.’

‘Is it possible that the Inquisition destroyed the third part of the god-formula?’ asked Boxiron. ‘If they were only keeping the god-formula as a potential counter weapon, then could not two thirds of it have served that purpose? Destroying the third component would ensure the god-formula was never used.’

‘That is so,’ admitted Jethro. ‘But I rather fear the Inquisition was only holding onto two parts of the god-formula because that is all they ever had. The third part has been lost to them, to the world, since its creator was killed.’

‘Your logic is faultless, yet I have to concur with our Pericurian friend,’ said Boxiron. ‘What do you owe the Inquisition that would mean we need to stay here on Jago? It is time, as your people say, to let discretion be the better part of valour. We should leave the island.’

‘This isn’t for them anymore. No, I need just a little longer,’ said Jethro, almost pleading. ‘Just long enough to slay a god.’