Secrets of the Fire Sea

CHAPTER THIRTEEN


Hannah tried to ignore the young navvy’s cries as the heat seeped through the pressure gate and scalded his back. She climbed over the fallen suit to reach the transaction engine. Time to find out if she had fixed it as well as she believed she had.

‘What are you doing?’ cried Rudge, his head barely able to follow her from his position wedged under the suit’s leg. ‘I told you to get back up the shaft. I ordered—’

‘Be quiet,’ retorted Hannah. ‘The charge-master sent me down here because I’ve got a brain and I’m going to use it.’

‘You’re not going to think a couple of tonnes of suit off me, grub. You’ve done the job we came down here to do, so get out of the shaft now!’

She was at the controls of the primitive steam-driven thinking machine, ignoring the navvy’s shouts while she put the small portable punch-card writer to good use. One more card. One last chance. There was another creak from the gate underneath them. It was getting noticeably noisier – the pressure building up below. ‘T-face,’ Hannah shouted down to the ab-lock pacing behind his fallen master. ‘Get ready to pull him out.’

‘You’re not going to do what I think you…?’

Hannah inserted the punch card. ‘What do you care? You’re going to die anyway if this doesn’t work.’

The drums in the transaction engine on the wall began to rotate as her punch card instructions were received and processed. Please, let there still be enough steam left in its reservoir to do the job.

Rudge was tearing the sleeve off his body suit, wrapping the material around his eyes. ‘Cover your face, grub.’

Hannah ripped a line of cotton material off her own body suit, bundling the makeshift sweat-soaked bandanna around her eyes.

The tolerances. It was all down to the tolerances now. Her best guess at the weight of the suit and the intense pressure of the steam tap below the gate, and…

The blast came like a lightning bolt cast from the gates of the hell they denied.

…how wide the opening of a single vane would have to be to shift the suit, and…

Hannah was thrown back into the wall, blind behind her bandanna, deafened by the crash of the displaced suit.

…how long to leave it open without cooking the three of them…

Hannah yelled as she realized she had fallen forward onto the oven-hot pressure gate, the thick iron burning into her hands as she pushed herself up and tore off her blindfold. It was like being inside a surface mist, now, but she could see that T-face was dragging Rudge away – his fallen suit shifted over to the other side of the shaft by the force of the volcano of steam Hannah had briefly allowed through that single open vane.

Some piece of gear on Rudge’s suit had smacked him when it had shifted, though. Rudge was bleeding from the head and unconscious. Hannah climbed back up to the transaction-engine platform, closely followed by T-face bearing the weight of his master’s body, and she was about to reach for the single dangling rappel line attached to her suit, when she realized that it had vanished. Oh, sweet Circle. It was on the metal gate below her – her line must have become dislodged when she steam-blasted Rudge’s suit away from his broken body. Hannah’s suit was still lodged far above them, though. Far enough that there was no way she was going to be able to climb up the shaft’s smooth walls to reach it. T-face was shifting from foot to foot, moaning as he took in their hopeless predicament. Hannah fought down the sense of mounting panic. How to get out? She couldn’t signal the turbine workers with the transaction engine to call for help. That was the whole point of it. An independent steam-driven node with only one purpose, controlling the gate. Could she open the pressure gate again, blast herself, Rudge and the ab-lock up to her suit, using Rudge’s suit as a lifting platform? No, that was suicide. Just a second with a single vane being opened had nearly killed them both. She might reach her suit, but it would be without her skin.

‘Damn you!’ Hannah yelled up the shaft. ‘Damn you for sending me down here to die.’ Was that for Vardan Flail? For the master of the turbine halls? For everyone on Jago who needed the dark energy that was going to end up killing her? It hardly mattered anymore. Rudge was starting to wake, but not to full sensibility, drifting in and out of a shivering half-awareness. He was muttering something, and Hannah bent down to hear him better.

‘Winch.’

She looked up at her suit, its flickering lantern signalling teasingly to her. There was a winch hook on the right leg of the suit. It was designed for dragging broken turbines out of the way on the floor of the halls above, but if she could get it to lower itself down, then they could shimmy up the line. The winch’s activation lever was up there too. Thirty feet above her head, but it might as well have been in the clouds for all that she could reach it. Unless…Leaping down onto the burning hot gate, Hannah retrieved Rudge’s tool kit and brought it back to her ledge. She rifled through the contents of until she found it, a lone signal flare.

‘One shot,’ mumbled Rudge.

One shot. She had better make it a good one. Hannah pointed the red tube up at the winch lever, aiming it as well as she could without a sight, and pressed down on the trigger, the recoil of the escaping firework nearly sending the tube leaping out of her sweating fingers. Arcing up, the flare hit near the winch drum and went spinning off to the side of the shaft, a useless sparking comet.

Hannah growled through gritted teeth. ‘Missed!’

But Rudge didn’t hear her, he had passed out again. If he was lucky, maybe he would stay unconscious through their deaths too. T-face howled in surprise as the hook of the winch came plummeting down from the suit’s leg and bounced off the pressure gate as the metal line whipped dangerously across the passage. Hannah stared up in amazement. She had missed the winch lever, missed it by a country mile, she could have sworn she had, and yet it had…the stories of the suit-ghosts came back to her.

She looked at the ab-lock, who seemed as spooked by the winch activating as she was. ‘Can you carry him up to my suit? You’ll need to hold onto him as I climb up the shaft – the cabin only fits one.’ Did he understand her? To emphasize the words, she pointed at Rudge and then mimicked climbing up the rope with the young man tossed over a shoulder.

Hannah realized how desperate she sounded and how dangerous the situation was. What did she know of ab-locks and their taming? If T-face turned feral now, she didn’t even have a suit whip to lash him into line.

T-face responded by slinging the passed-out navvy across his back, his leathery scarred face wobbling from side to side as he emitted a stream of growls. It almost sounded as if the creature was trying to say something back to her, the noises from its mangled throat rising and falling in a mockery of speech. The ab-lock seemed to grasp what was needed for them all to survive, though, seizing the winch line and shinning back up with his master.

Below Hannah’s ledge the gate gave a hungry anticipatory shudder.

Hannah leapt off the transaction-engine platform and caught the winch cable, clambering up the line after T-face and Rudge, abandoning the mobile punch-card writer, Rudge’s tools and his fallen suit down below. How far did the steam tap travel towards the centre of the earth? Hannah didn’t intend to be around to find out when the gate retracted.


Hannah pushed her suit out of the steam tap, into the turbine hall, the clangs of a dozen retracted pressure gates still ringing in her ears. Her hands were so sweaty now that the control cage inside her suit’s cabin had begun slipping off her skin. The chimney door was shutting behind her when the lights on the vault’s wall began to flash, the steam tap returning to operation. Blast doors pulled into the ceiling at the other end of the vault and a mob of suited workers returned from the safety of the adjoining turbine hall. She had done it. All around Hannah, the turbines were spinning back into life, the eerily silent hall filling with the racket of rotating blades. Fingers of vapour were already leaking from the pipes. Soon, the hall would once again be the steam-filled hell she had stepped out into earlier in the day.

T-face leapt down from the perch moulded onto the suit’s back, landing on the floor with the still-unconscious navvy.

At the head of the gang of returning guildsmen was the red chequerboard-patterned hull of the charge-master. ‘You’re down a suit.’ His bluff voice echoed from Hannah’s earphones.

‘A steam spill sent Rudge’s suit crashing down the shaft, well below the electric limit of its circuits, charge-master.’

The head of the turbine hall grunted and turned to one of his retinue. ‘Do you slackers think you’re still on a break? Take our lad down to the infirmary before the field begins to build back up.’ The charge-master swivelled his head dome down to stare at T-face and made a jabbing motion back to the other end of the chamber. ‘Return to stables. Chop-chop. Assigned to another hand while boss man in infirmary.’ He ejected his whip in case the ab-lock hadn’t got the message,

T-face bent his head sadly and trotted off.

Hannah thought she saw the charge-master’s eyes staring at her through the dome on top of his suit. ‘Adequate for your first day. For a coder.’

He walked off, leaving Hannah unsure whether she was meant to go back to the suiting hall or continue her training with the rest of the workers out here.

Something about the charge-master’s words stayed with her. Our lad.

Young Rudge never had got round to telling her who his father was in the turbine halls.

Our lad.


Nandi stepped out of the transport capsule and down onto the platform of the guild’s atmospheric station, the young priest from the cathedral, Father Baine, close on her heels.

Vardan Flail was waiting for them in front of the lockers holding the guild’s visitors’ suits, a retinue of red-cowled guildsmen standing behind the high guild master’s twisted form.

One of the guildsmen stepped forward as she approached. ‘Damson Tibar-Wellking, I will be your assistant for the rest of your research session within the great archive. I am archivist Trope.’

‘That’s very kind of you,’ smiled Nandi, looking meaningfully at the high guild master. ‘But I believe my research will be taking me a little further afield than the guild’s transaction-engine vaults. And that’s not why I’m here today, as I suspect you well know.’ She indicated the young priest following behind her.

Baine caught up with Nandi and stopped in front of Vardan Flail. ‘By the authority of the unified arch-diocese of Jago and the rational order of the Circlist church I present an examination notice for Damson Hannah Conquest.’

Vardan Flail looked irritated. ‘If it’s an observance of the formalities you want, perhaps the cathedral should have sent Father Blackwater to me rather than a mere pup.’

‘The examination notice duly ratified and sealed by order of the stained senate,’ added the young priest, not rising to the insult.

‘Oh, very well,’ snapped Vardan Flail. ‘Your examination notice is accepted and I do hereby authorize release of Initiate Conquest of the Guild of Valvemen into your custody.’ He clicked his fingers for one of his minions to fetch the girl. ‘The temporary release, pending the results of the church examination.’

‘The church examination which will be marked manually for this test,’ Nandi added. ‘Rather than by your transaction engines.’

‘Manually! Isn’t that quaint. I still expect to see the results myself,’ snapped Vardan Flail. ‘To ensure that there is no favouritism in the grading of one of my initiates.’

‘Perish the thought,’ said Father Baine.

‘You probably still remember the test yourself,’ said Vardan Flail. ‘You hardly look old enough to shave.’

‘I remember the test as being very easy. Anyone can pass, really.’

A group of staff-wielding guildsmen entered the station hall and parted to reveal Hannah Conquest, still wearing the grey cotton body suit of a turbine hall worker. She was soaked with sweat and swaying slightly on her feet.

‘What have you done to her?’ cried Father Baine. ‘She looks like she hasn’t slept in a week.’

‘The city demands much of the guild,’ retorted Vardan Flail. ‘It is only dedicated toil that keeps the turbine halls running. Perhaps the church authorities might remember that in future, rather than twisting the law to try to circumvent the draft ballot for their favourites.’

Nandi grabbed one of Hannah’s arms while Father Baine supported her other side, leading the girl stumbling towards the transport capsule.

‘Don’t worry,’ Vardan Flail sneered after them. ‘The church examinations are easy, anyone can pass them.’

Nandi shook her head in disgust and shut off her view of the high guild master’s hooded face with the closing of the carriage’s door.

Her arm still held by Father Baine, Hannah straightened up, wiping the sweat off her face as though she was a drunk who had suddenly transitioned into stone-cold sobriety.

Hannah winked towards the shocked young priest and Nandi. ‘Well, my suit was logging double shifts down in the turbine halls, but it doesn’t mean that it always had to be me inside it.’ With a shudder, the carriage entered the airless atmospheric tunnel, leaving the guild’s vaults. ‘It’s good to have friends, isn’t it?’


‘Quick,’ Jethro said to Hannah, ‘your favourite hymn from the cathedral…?’

‘My knowledge, my soul,’ said Hannah, looking at the books spread across the table in the inquisition agent’s hotel room. ‘Will that be part of the church’s entrance exam?’

‘No,’ said Jethro. ‘I just wanted to see which hymn you liked best. That question can reveal a lot about a candidate.’

And he could see; he could see Alice’s mark all over the young girl, little reflections of the things he remembered and loved about his ex-fiancée. The way Hannah thought, the way she acted. Truly, Alice had been the mother than Hannah had lost, and for Alice, perhaps, the daughter that Jethro’s defrocking and the breaking of their engagement had denied her. Denied them.

‘Then it won’t help me pass,’ said Hannah. ‘I hear you sing to yourself all the time, Mister Daunt. But only tavern songs, never Circlist hymns.’

‘No, I don’t sing those any more,’ admitted the ex-parson. ‘I don’t feel I have the right to them. And you should call me Jethro.’ He picked up the books they had been cramming from, borrowed from the acting archbishop’s office. ‘You have an exceedingly good mind – first rate, in fact. The way you can pick apart the components of synthetic morality and put them back together again puts me in mind of Alice.’

‘Alice was the cleverest person I’d ever met.’

‘Myself also,’ said Jethro. Until now, that is, his mind silently retorted. ‘But she had her weaknesses and I think you share them too. Circlism is not just about knowledge and enlightenment. It is about embracing our humanity. Each of us is cupped out from the one sea of consciousness and poured into these mortal vessels. You – I – everyone we know is the same. It is only the nature of reality that makes us feel alone, which tricks us into seeing difference where none exists. But it is a false illusion, for when you pour a cup of water back into the river, where do the cup’s contents end and the river’s begin? All is motion, all is the river.’

‘Even for Alice’s killers?’ asked Hannah.

‘A Circlist would say the killer only killed themselves. Lack of knowledge tends to do that.’

‘I don’t think I can ever see them as part of me enough to forgive them.’

‘We are all but human,’ said Jethro.

‘What they did to Alice,’ said Hannah quietly, looking down at the tome in front of her as if it was all of her world. ‘It wasn’t just to make it look like an ursk attack, was it? She was tortured to try and find out something.’

‘I won’t let the killer touch you,’ promised Jethro. ‘I arrived here too late to save Alice, but I’m just in time for you.’ The girl that Alice had raised as her own, the child that should have been theirs. ‘Isn’t that right, old steamer?’

The steamman was standing in the doorway bearing a tray of steaming tea cups procured from the hotel’s staff.

‘Indeed it is, Hannah softbody,’ said Boxiron. ‘We have faced evil and criminals many times together, yet by combining my intellect and Jethro Daunt’s famous brawn, we have always triumphed.’

‘You are exceedingly obliging,’ said Jethro, taking the tray. ‘With both your refreshments and your humour.’

Boxiron tapped the armour on his chest, the transaction-engine drum buried there slowly rotating. ‘My ‘intellect’ is, I fear, a little scratched by the Jackelian underworld’s pistols. I’m sure you will forgive me.’

‘Let’s get back to your studying,’ said Jethro, tapping the tomes in front of Hannah. For if Hannah failed to gain entrance to the church, the next place she would be going was straight back to the Guild of Valvemen and into the clutches of Vardan Flail.

And that was no longer something Jethro could allow – not for Alice’s sake or his own.


Jethro Daunt found it hard to suppress a smile when he saw the number of people gathered in the cathedral’s testing room – rarely, he suspected, would it have been busier than this. Not just with those sitting the examination, their heads swelled to gargantuan size by the Entick machinery, but with the observers trying not to trip over the trailing cables or get in the way of the priests behind the testing tables. There were twelve examinees sitting the tests this day, but only one of them was responsible for drawing in all these extra people. Commodore Black, Nandi, Boxiron, Chalph urs Chalph, Ortin urs Ortin, half the cathedral’s off-duty staff – all to see if Damson Hannah Conquest could throw off the guild’s shackles – with a few of the crimson-robed crows sitting silently in the corner. Briefed, Jethro was sure, to try and detect the slightest deviation from the usual form of the church’s examination. Anything that would allow the guild to nullify the results of the test.

And the results were hardly in doubt, for Hannah Conquest had both nature and nurture on her side. The offspring of two of the brightest scholars Jackelian academia had ever produced, tutored by Alice in every mathematical nuance of synthetic morality. Even so, Jethro could sense the amazement the priests testing Hannah felt at the speed she was going through the large leather-bound tomes of questions piled on top of each table. Knocking down their questions as fast as they could fire them at her. And the scariest thing of all was that it was obvious to him that she wasn’t even trying. This was just what Hannah Conquest needed, to earn what she believed would be a life of quiet contemplation. To get everyone off her back for good.

Jethro glanced across at Nandi and the commodore. Of course, the young academic had been right. None of them could tell Hannah what they had discovered in the Pericurian embassy, not before she’d sat the exam. There was no telling how Hannah would react, and she needed her head clear and focused right now. Able to conjure up, as she was at the moment, a formula to prove how allocation of food to female children during a time of famine would prove the optimum stabilising force within a democracy – with a sidebar question on how the allocation would need to change for a classic autocracy.

Jethro winced. He remembered that question from his own examination. So, the priests administering the Entick test had reached the nineteenth book of synthetic morality, Saint Solomon and the Questions of Functional Savagery. There were no easy answers in that book, and the trick was often to reply with the heart as much as the head. Sometimes the wrong answer was the right answer, and sometimes it was better not to ask the question at all.

‘And every so often, it’s time for you to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions.’

Jethro’s eyes darted around the testing room. That voice. The stench of sulphur and wet animal hide in the room. Was that a glimpse of fur he saw slipping behind Boxiron? The people around him to seemed to slow down, as if moving through treacle, as the exotic presence forced its way into their world.

‘I take responsibility for my own actions!’

‘But do you?’ hissed the voice of Badger-headed Joseph from somewhere on the other side of the room. ‘All that death and misery in your little kingdom, and now the Jackelians can’t even be bothered to pray to us to make it better. What have you done of late to make the world a better place?’

‘Life is lived by the one and one.’

‘Oh, that’s pat,’ laughed the voice. ‘And all of your trite Circlist excuses appear to be made the same way. You know what your people created here on Jago now, you must know what you could do with the god-formula. The good that you could achieve.’

‘What Bel Bessant was creating was wrong,’ insisted Jethro. ‘No mortal mind is meant to have that level of understanding of the universe. Not without going insane.’

‘Oh, but that’s the twist: the world’s already insane. If you understood it a little better, maybe you could do something about it. Put your world towards the mend, instead of hiding yourself away from life with the all distractions of your investigations and the smugness of your false humanist cleverness. Maybe you could stop and pull your cowardly head out of the sand just the once.’

‘Leave me alone.’

‘Time is just a tree to be pruned, all the infinite possibilities branching out. The whisper of a butterfly’s wings on the other side of the world and a good king takes the throne rather than his evil uncle. Plenty rather than famine. Health rather than plague. A little push here, a little nudge there. It’s so very easy to do. You could do it, you could use the god-formula to remake your world as a paradise.’

‘No one has that right.’

‘One branch of potential, another branch next door, you’re going to have to travel down one of them in the end anyway. The tree’s always growing, even we can’t stop that. All the branches look much the same from a higher perspective. Why not pick the road that leads to a nice warm bed rather than a swamp? A comfortable parsonage back in the Kingdom, the cosy fire stoked by Alice Gray. Isn’t that the world you always wanted?’

‘Those are words of temptation. I refuse you.’

‘Refuse us? I expect you to join us, fiddle-faddle man. Time to step up. Time to be like your funny half-steamman friend – time for you to go all the way up to top gear!’

Time lurched forward again and Jethro felt Boxiron’s metal fingers on his shoulder. ‘Didn’t you hear me, Jethro softbody? Hannah Conquest has finished her tests. It is time.’

‘Yes,’ coughed Jethro, ‘that it most certainly is, old steamer.’

Jethro stepped over to the table where the priest was storing away the pile of tomes filled with questions that Hannah had finished answering. The examinees were slipping off their Entick helmets and wiping away the grease marks the brass goggles had left on their faces, looking groggy from the intensity of the questioning and sudden influx of light.

‘Father?’ Jethro coughed.

‘There is little doubt,’ said the priest behind the examination table. ‘Our result tabulation is just a formality now. Hannah Conquest had passed the entrance threshold by the third book. Even the Guild of Valvemen will not be able to gainsay these results.’

Jethro shook the priest’s hand in thanks and went over to where Hannah was using a tissue lent to her by Nandi to remove the grease from her cheeks.

It was time for young Damson Hannah Conquest to hear the truth…


Hannah took the chair that Jethro Daunt offered her with trepidation, sitting just behind Boxiron. After what Father Baine had told her about how the cathedral fathers believed she had done in the tests, this should have been a time of celebration, but instead there was an almost funereal air of expectation on the faces of the commodore, Nandi and Chalph. And what was the large ursine she had been introduced to as the new Pericurian ambassador doing in the ex-parson’s hotel room? Her escape from the guild’s draft was surely not the business of Jago’s distant neighbours on the opposite shores of the Fire Sea…

‘The guild hasn’t found a way to forbid me to enter the church?’ asked Hannah.

‘No,’ said Jethro. ‘You are free of the guild’s call on you. But we have discovered some important things while you have been in their servitude.’

‘The evidence that it was Vardan Flail who murdered Alice?’

‘Why she was murdered, at least,’ said Jethro. He reached into his pocket and drew out a paper bag of boiled sweets, popping one in his mouth before offering the bag to Hannah.

Hannah demurred. ‘The senate banned the import of those from the Kingdom years ago.’

‘Lucky I never offered one to the colonel, then,’ said Jethro, patting Hannah’s hand. ‘The weapon that Bel Bessant was developing to defend Jago from the Chimecan Empire’s gods was not designed to push them beyond the walls of our world as we thought, but to transform Bel Bessant into a god, to allow her to meet the dark deities on the gods’ own terms. That is what the cipher on the painting inside your locket was…it was one third of such a weapon, a god-formula. I believe the second piece of the god-formula was inside Alice’s missing locket. The third was concealed in the silver infinity circle that was stolen from the cathedral’s altar. These three paintings were uncovered by your parents during their research in the guild’s vaults.’

Hannah was left reeling from the ex-parson’s words. To become a god! There were people of power in the world who thought they already were. And murder would be the least of what they would stoop to, to make their delusions a reality beyond the confines of their own twisted minds. Dogs like Vardan Flail.

Chalph stopped prowling the hotel room. ‘But the painting that was stolen from the cathedral did not contain a cipher?’

‘Precisely,’ said Jethro. ‘Yet it was that theft that led to Alice being murdered. And who would be in a position to know what that picture meant? Only someone who already had possession of one or more of the paintings with Bel Bessant’s god-formula concealed inside them. Someone who had pursued your parents for the copies of the images they found in the guild’s archives.’

‘I am not sure I understand,’ said Chalph.

Hannah shook her head. She didn’t either.

‘That is because you don’t yet see all of the picture,’ explained Jethro. ‘But Damson Tibar-Wellking, I believe, holds some of the missing pieces of the puzzle.’

Nandi produced the punch card with Hannah’s writing on the reverse side. ‘You did a very good job remembering your mother’s Joshua Egg from the guild’s archive. We ran its remaining iterations on Ambassador Ortin’s transaction engines and recovered the final pieces of your parents’ research.’

‘I knew it,’ said Hannah. Hope rose within her. ‘I knew there would be more.’

‘Much of what was compressed inside the Joshua Egg your mother left us concerns the priest, William of Flamewall,’ explained Jethro. ‘Although the most important items your parents left behind for us are the first two parts of the god-formula. It seems your parents found images of all three paintings of the rational trinity within the guild’s transaction engines and your mother broke the steganography concealed within the images. Like us, they found that the first two paintings contained parts of the god-formula, and that the third was a ruse, blank of steganographic code.’

Hannah gasped. ‘So it was Vardan Flail who destroyed my parents’ records on the guild’s engines. The jigger realized that my mother had left hidden copies of the god-formula. Destroying my mother’s secret backup was just removing the evidence of his crimes.’

‘The evidence may have gone, but we now have two of the three parts of the god-formula,’ said Jethro.

‘Which of the three paintings of the rational trinity did you recover from the Joshua Egg?’ asked Hannah.

‘The second,’ said Jethro. ‘Discard your beliefs.’

Hannah murmured in appreciation. That image was captured in stained glass back in the cathedral. A man sitting cross-legged in a hall surrounded by the broken idols of a thousand religions, prophets and messiahs. ‘So we have two pieces of the god-formula. But why would Bel Bessant leave two pieces of the code for us to find but not the third?’

‘You will get there shortly. Once you understand what Bel Bessant was creating,’ Jethro continued, ‘you will understand why even a Circlist priest could be driven to commit murder – why William felt he had no choice but to kill his lover when he found out. I have little doubt that just developing the god-formula would have left Bel Bessant dangerously deranged. She may even have started manifesting supernatural powers as a side effect of her work. By the time William realized what Bel was doing, physical violence was probably the only way he could have stopped her before she ascended towards godhood. I fear that towards her end she was no longer right or rational. Your parents uncovered more facts about William in their research, history they decided to bury extremely proficiently. For example, William of Flamewall never actually went on the run from the police when his crime was discovered; he had already set off into the wilderness, acting as the priest on an expedition into Jago’s interior. He was following in the footsteps of Bel Bessant, who had filled much the same position herself with a party of trappers before she began developing the god-formula.’

‘Going outside the city walls with the trappers? That’s dangerous work,’ said Hannah. ‘Was William trying to get himself killed out of some sense of guilt for what he did to Bel?’

‘A little more than that. One of the documents your parents left us was transcribed in something distantly related to ancient Pericurian. It was discovered among Bel Bessant’s possessions during the militia’s investigation into her murder.’ Jethro pointed to Ortin. ‘The good ambassador here was kind enough to have it translated for us.’

‘Yes,’ said Ortin, excitedly. ‘It appears to be the text of a previously unknown tablet from the scripture of the Divine Quad.’

‘We know what it is,’ added Nandi, ‘and your father with his skills would probably have been able to translate it, but the text would have been a complete mystery to William of Flamewall and Bel Bessant. The Jagonese of their era weren’t to lay eyes on an actual Pericurian until many centuries later. Ortin and Chalph’s ancestors believed that Jago was a lost paradise sealed away by their gods somewhere inside the Fire Sea.’ Nandi dug into her satchel and pulled out a reel of paper that looked as if it had been spooled off a transaction engine. Dusting it off, she handed it hesitantly to Hannah. ‘Please read this. It was also among the contents of the Joshua Egg and will clear up a great deal for you, I think. It’s the last document your mother wrote for us, taken from her journal.’

Hannah unfurled the tape and began reading.


This is my last entry before I must leave Hermetica City. It seems as if our fears about who to trust were well-founded and not mere paranoia. George’s boat has been reported lost in the Fire Sea. I can only thank the Circle that our decision to keep Hannah safe here on the island with me was the right one.

The local newspapers say it was an unpredicted peristaltic flow that cut off the boat and then overwhelmed the craft. If that were true, then it would have been a very easy thing for the guild here to arrange. A small alteration in their model of the lava flows, and my darling husband would have been murdered as smoothly as sliding a stiletto blade into his back.

But I am not so sure that this is how the murder was done. I could swear that I saw the face of Tomas Maggs today, the skipper of the boat we had paid to take George back home. It was the look of astonishment on his face at seeing me alive, no doubt mirroring my own, that confirmed it was indeed the same treacherous little jigger. If Maggs was paid to abandon his vessel to the lava flows, then those who gave him the coin to do it must now know that I am not a sea-sick corpse locked in my cabin as George was pretending, but that I am very much alive and still on Jago, albeit as a widow.

Maggs will no doubt have stolen all three paintings and the first two parts of the god-formula from George before abandoning his boat to the Fire Sea, and Maggs’ paymasters will seek my death to put an end to the affair. If they realize quickly enough that William of Flamewall’s last painting was a hoax, then they will surely try to take me alive to torture the true location of Bel Bessant’s terrible creation from me. The first two parts of the god-formula are worthless without the third, so it seems I must follow William of Flamewall’s trail into the dark heart of Jago, towards the Cade Mountains and beyond. I wonder if he ever found the corpses of Bel Bessant’s original expedition at Amajanur? I wonder if I will find William of Flamewall’s own body frozen out there? But most of all, I wonder if I will find the third part of Bel Bessant’s horrific legacy – and what I shall do with it when I do?

They say it is cold beyond the capital’s walls, far beyond the shoreline of the Fire Sea and the steam storms, but it is as nothing compared to the coldness inside my heart for those that have murdered George. If I can find the god-formula, they will have reason to fear my fury and regret having threatened my family. They all will.


Hannah found her hand was trembling as she got to the end of the entry; tears dripping against the rough transaction-engine tape it had been printed out on.

‘She’s alive!’ And the converse was also true. Hannah’s father was truly dead. But her mother hadn’t been on the u-boat when it was crushed by the shifting walls of magma – scuttled by Maggs, who was no doubt paid to do the terrible deed by Vardan Flail.

‘Your mother was alive,’ cautioned Jethro. ‘A decade ago. That is the only hope you can trust.’

‘What was the expedition at Amajanur she mentioned?’ asked Hannah.

‘Amajanur was spoken of in the Pericurian scripture found in Bel Bessant’s possession, dear girl,’ said Ambassador Ortin, enthusiastically. ‘It sounds exceedingly similar to one of the chapters in my people’s scriptures: The Gateway of Amaja, the tunnel that Reckin urs Reckin and his wife used to escape his treacherous brother and sister-in-law’s city after the war of the heavens.’

‘It’s a gateway to trouble, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘That much I know – and you so happy, ambassador, you’d think you’d found a long-lost uncle’s will and discovered yourself rich from it.’

‘It is indeed a legacy,’ said the ambassador. ‘But one for all of my people. Proof that our scriptures have a historical basis as well as a religious one will allow the reformers to gain the upper hand in the court once more.’

‘The Jagonese have been living on this island for thousands of years,’ said Nandi. ‘If we can find evidence of a Pericurian settlement on Jago that predates settlement by the race of man, then our history books will have to be completely rewritten.’

‘History, dear girl, I will leave to the sweep of time and the pens of archaeologists such as yourself,’ said the ambassador. ‘But if I can change the present of my nation for the better, then I must seize the chance.’

The commodore shook his head ruefully. ‘You want to seize the chance, but I can see that it’s poor old Blacky that’s going to be asked to do the bleeding for Pericur’s bright new future.’

‘You’re going after my mother!’ exclaimed Hannah.

‘Ah, lass, it’s a pretty pickle,’ complained the commodore. ‘William of Flamewall goes off exploring after the trail of his murdered lover, your mother follows him, and now we’re to be emulating the whole pack of them – when not a blessed soul ever came back to boast of it.’

‘I’m coming too,’ Hannah blurted. ‘My mother’s still hiding out there somewhere, I can feel it.’

‘Yes, you are,’ said Jethro.

Hannah was about to start arguing when she actually processed the words and gawped in amazement at the ex-parson.

‘Going will be no less dangerous for you than staying here,’ said Jethro. ‘Alice wasn’t holding onto the two active pieces of the god-formula because she wanted to use them. She was keeping them in case the Inquisition needed to develop a counter-weapon against anyone who actually tried to use the code to attain godhood. She was murdered to stop her doing that, and her killer came after you on the mere chance that you had seen what was inside your locket. There is a ruthlessness and coldness to these acts that is rare to see, even by such as Boxiron and myself with the cases that we have worked on. That peril still holds true. In fact, it now holds true for all of us. Each of us is in terrible danger every day that we stay here.’

There was something in Jethro Daunt’s voice that unsettled Hannah. ‘You’re not coming with us, are you?’

Jethro shook his head. ‘There’s something about sitting the church’s exams – you’re already thinking in the manner of a Circlist priest, Hannah. You are correct. I must stay here in the capital with Boxiron. I was sent to Jago to uncover Alice’s murderer, and that is what I intend to do. We have a great advantage over her killer, or killers, now. We know that William of Flamewall and your mother both travelled into the island’s interior. They don’t. Alice’s murderer is still here in the capital and this is where I must stay to uncover them.’

Hannah was surprised to find the ex-parson was right – insights did seem to be forming more quickly ever since she’d sat the cathedral’s exams. It was as if the grease in the Entick helmet had lubricated the cogs of her mind; her brain running so much faster, with a diamond-sharp clarity. Hannah stopped. Jethro Daunt wasn’t saying everything. He—he didn’t trust himself with the god-formula.

Jethro fixed her with his sad eyes. ‘If you find the third piece of the god-formula, you must destroy it. We are all weak, Hannah. A dead child or a sick wife, which of us wouldn’t be tempted to change such a misfortune? You’d just bring them back and then instantly relinquish your power, that’s what you’d tell yourself. Do that one small thing and then you could go back to the way things were before. Except—’

Hannah thought she understood. ‘Until the first time you saw a hungry urchin in the Lugus Vaults, until you saw an act of cruelty you knew you could stop, a war you could halt, a leader elected to the senate you didn’t agree with.’

‘There would be no end to it,’ agreed Jethro. ‘Everything fixed to your will, more and more to be rectified, growing angrier and angrier with those that defied you. Until you started acting as a real god, and then you wouldn’t be able to stop, not without abandoning your absolute grip on your perfect, burning world. The first two parts of the god-formula will have to be enough for us to preserve in case the Inquisition ever needs to develop a counter-weapon. The third part must be destroyed forever.’

Hannah nodded. It had taken both her parents from her, Alice too. The god-formula deserved to be destroyed. Unless, whispered a nagging voice from somewhere deep within her, she could use it. Use it to bring Alice back, to right all that was wrong with Jago.

‘Alice’s killer,’ said Hannah, ‘they want to be become more than just human. They would use the god-formula to gain ultimate knowledge and ultimate power.’

‘Just human,’ sighed Jethro. ‘And they would be wrong. Infinitely folded in on themselves and out into the universe, the ultimate paradox given living expression. But lacking the wisdom of an infinite lifetime. Just human with ultimate knowledge. What an angel of fire that would be, and what a hell they would make of Earth if they chose to stay here.’

‘But a truly good person might be able to control it?’ asked Hannah, hopefully. ‘Couldn’t they change things for the better?’

Jethro smiled grimly. ‘It’s a temptation, isn’t it? Thousands of years ago, Bel Bessant thought she was pure enough to survive it and still be human enough to end the dark reign of terror the Chimecan Empire and their bloodthirsty gods were threatening Jago with. Thank the Circle she had a man who loved her enough to kill her. I doubt that the person who killed Alice has such a love in their life. No, the third part of the weapon must be destroyed, never used. The Inquisition was always sure to appoint its officers to the archbishop’s seat on Jago, Hannah, but I suspect that they never knew the full details of the secret. Only that a terrible weapon existed here and that their incomplete portion of it had to be kept hidden by their brightest and their best. Alice was such a woman. The secret would have been passed from archbishop to archbishop, limiting the temptation of taking the godhead to a bare minimum. We know Alice’s killer is seeking the god-formula and so now it must be extinguished forever. Do this for the church you’re about to be sworn into, Hannah, and do it for me.’

And she would do it for her father. Her dead father.


It was going to be strange to be in one of the giant iron walking machines with the open sky above her head, rather than the roof of the turbine halls, Hannah mused. The trapper Tobias Raffold and his men moved with the same easy confidence in their RAM suits that the charge-master’s staff had shown in theirs. The expedition was lucky to have secured Raffold’s services, thanks to the significant financial backing of Ambassador Ortin and some truly magnificent humble-pie eating on the part of Commodore Black – the old u-boat captain muttering under his breath about the fact that his precious boat would be hauling animals across the seas for Raffold for the next decade to satisfy the trapper’s bargain.

Including herself, Nandi, the commodore and Ortin urs Ortin, there would be twenty members of the expedition to find the final resting places of her mother and William of Flamewall. Most of those men were lounging around behind the safety of Hermetica City’s main gates, rolling dice on the rocky ground while their RAM suits received their final checks from the city’s lodge of mechomancers. Bales of supplies and crates of victuals were being winched up and belted around the hulls of their machines by a crowd of merchants.

The iron plating of the RAM suits had been painted with a geometric patchwork of purple, white and grey mottling to blend in with the territory outside. And if their camouflage failed its purpose, the right arm of each suit would be brought to bear – mounted with a magnetic catapult and circular ammunition drums of sharpened disks. There were other subtle differences between these suits and the ones used down in the turbine halls. The domes that covered the pilot’s heads contained more glass for better visibility in the mist-shrouded wilds, but the suits had less armour plating since they were not being exposed to the electric fields that dominated life in the turbine halls. And these suits were bigger and taller, the better to cover rough terrain quickly.

Chalph urs Chalph emerged from the gatehouse and Hannah waved to attract his attention as he glanced up at the Pericurian mercenaries patrolling the battlements above.

‘I’m glad to see you managed to get here in the end,’ Hannah called.

‘One last chance to try to convince you not to go,’ said Chalph. ‘You’ve got everything you wanted – entry into the church, a chance to be free. Why do you need to go on this fool expedition?’

‘You know why,’ said Hannah. ‘My mother’s out there.’

Chalph shook his large furred heard in irritation. ‘She didn’t come back. Just like your ancient phantom, William of Flamewall. Neither of them ever returned.’

‘I will,’ Hannah promised. ‘You’ll see.’

‘I might not be around to see.’

‘What do you mean?’ Hannah demanded.

Chalph’s lips cracked into a ferocious smile, flashing his ursine fangs. ‘The house’s boat from Pericur has just docked and I got the news straight from its first officer. They’ve couriered the baroness an order from the archduchess herself. Our house’s trading licence for Jago has been cancelled. We’re going home, Hannah Conquest! A few weeks to settle our commercial affairs and the next boat that comes here will be to take us all off.’

So much change, so quickly. The happiness that Hannah felt for her friend was tempered by the knowledge that things would never be the same for him – or her – again.

‘Then you’ve got what you wanted, too.’

‘Don’t look so glum,’ said Chalph. ‘Even the archduchess and her new conservative-packed council can’t deny the House of Ush a new trading licence somewhere. Most of our people here speak your furless tongue better than we do our own. We’ll end up with the trading caravans down south, doing business overland with the settlers in Concorzia. You could find yourself a parsonage down that way after your training…’

Leave Jago? Well, it wouldn’t be the same without Chalph or Alice, with herself in the seminary of the rational orders. And when all the visitors like Jethro, Nandi and the commodore had gone home, what would be left? Dour old Father Blackwater and the resentment of every member of the Guild of Valvemen she happened across? Perhaps a new start had its attractions after all. And there wasn’t much of a seminary programme on Jago any more. She might well find herself assigned to a cathedral in the Kingdom of Jackals, or to one of the fledgling orders in Concorzia, whether she wanted to stay on Jago or not.

‘I still have to go out there,’ said Hannah. ‘I have to know!’

Chalph didn’t look as if he understood, but then ursines had large litters and only female cubs were truly prized by the mother – the father was uninvolved beyond his initial contribution. It was the house that mattered in Pericurian society, not the parents.

‘I don’t want to leave this damn island without knowing whether you’re even dead or alive,’ said Chalph.

‘But you’ll leave anyway,’ said Hannah. ‘You won’t have any choice and soon enough you won’t have much to complain about. Not the smell of the canals or the taste of dome-grown food or being called a dirty wet-snout by the Jagonese.’

‘That’ll be a thing to see,’ agreed Chalph. ‘Real forests, with a real sky above filled with stars you can actually glimpse at night. Cities raised from Pericurian oak and streets teeming with hundreds of thousands of ursine. And you could see them too…’

‘I will, one day.’

Just then, the man engaged to make sure she lived long enough to keep that promise stepped out of the gatehouse behind Chalph. Tobias Raffold’s bulldog face was set in its habitual frown as he strode up to Ortin urs Ortin and the commodore.

‘We can’t wait for the last of the supplies,’ said the trapper. ‘We have to bleeding leave now.’

‘I’m sure the expedition’s letters of credit are good for the required provisions, dear boy,’ said Ortin urs Ortin, tipping out his monocle to clean it.

‘You just worry about my bleeding payment,’ warned the trapper. ‘First Senator Silvermain is trying to get my hunting concession revoked, but he needs a sitting of the senate to do it. He’s putting one together as we speak.’

‘We’re not just paying you for your skills, lad,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s your connections we need. I thought you and the lord of this dark place were meant to be firm shipmates.’

‘He’s heard about your expedition and the paranoid old bugger thinks that it’s a foreign plot to scout out where his new cities are going to be built, a conspiracy between Jackals and Pericur to nip his plans in the bud, the rest of the world being jealous of the island’s greatness’n all. I don’t think he wants me to lead you outside the city.’

‘I say,’ coughed the ambassador, ‘you’re not convinced by that lunacy, I trust?’

‘It don’t matter to me, matey. It’s lunacy to go as deep into the island’s interior as you’re set on, and frankly, I don’t give a tinker’s cuss if you’re going out there to toss bombs down into his empty city caverns or you’re looking to find the lost tomb of some bleeding heathen Pericurian deity. You’re paying me enough to be able to get off Jago and never worry about coming back again. I was in Quatérshift before the revolution, working in the forests for their king, and that country had the same bad stink in the air as this, right before the nobles started getting tossed into the mincer.’

‘Old Blacky can see that you’re nobody’s fool, Tobias Raffold. You can smell the way the wind’s turning out here. Once this little jaunt’s done, I’ll be only too happy to cast off from Jago with you and never set foot on these black shores again.’

A flurry of activity followed the trapper’s warning, the mechomancers making final checks to the suits being shooed away lest the expedition fold before it had even departed. Chalph helped Hannah raise her supplies up to the loading platform behind her RAM suit, pulleys squealing as sacks flew upwards. Hannah slipped the harness belts over her suit as though she had been born a trapper.

Hannah thought they had beaten the senate leader’s mad whim to cancel their journey when the captain of the Pericurian mercenaries, Stom urs Stom, came jogging out of the gatehouse towards them, a line of her soldiers following, each ursine weighed down by a turret gun, with its massive ammunition drum and brass tank of compressed air.

‘There’s no bleeding way there’s been a full and legal sitting of the senate yet!’ the trapper growled at Stom urs Stom.

‘There has not,’ said the captain, ‘but you would be well advised to consider who your master is on Jago.’

‘The difference between you and me, matey, is that I get to hunt for more than one person.’

‘First Senator Silvermain considers the contract between you and he to be of an exclusive nature.’

‘He can consider what he likes,’ spat the trapper, placing himself squarely between the officer and her massive troops. ‘I’ve brought in abs for him and for the guild and for anyone else with the coin to pay me. Now, unless you’re carrying a legal revocation of my fully paid-up hunting concession, you can sod off back to guarding the ramparts.’

‘He’s got balls,’ hissed Chalph to Hannah. ‘I’ve never seen a Pericurian talk to her like that, let alone one of your people.’

Hannah shushed him – she wanted to hear this. They crept closer, near enough to see the shine on the massive Pericurian’s black leather armour. The outcome of this standoff might decide whether Hannah would find her mother or not.

Ambassador Ortin came over to attempt to mediate. ‘Now see here, Stom urs Stom, you know there’s as much chance that I’m going venturing into the wild to drop grenades down some empty cavern the First Senator thinks will be his new city, as there is of the archduchess selecting me to be one of her new husbands.’

‘What I believe is not of relevance here, ambassador,’ said Stom. She produced a wax-sealed envelope addressed to Ortin urs Ortin. ‘You will acknowledge receipt of your express instructions from the First Senator. If you venture anywhere near the plains you and your staff will be immediately expelled from Jago, and the stained senate will request a new diplomatic mission be dispatched to the capital from Pericur.’

‘Please assure your master I am ever his servant,’ said Ortin. ‘I have no intention of leaving the island in disgrace. We won’t be heading anywhere close to the plains or the coast – quite the opposite, in fact. We are heading deep into the interior on a purely archaeological mission.’

Stom glanced doubtfully at the archaeologist, Nandi standing alongside her RAM suit. ‘If that is the case, ambassador, then I would say that your mission has a very slim chance of returning.’

Her warning delivered, the captain and her troops turned and left, the slow stamping of their march echoing around the gate yard. Hannah realized she had been holding her breath. She was going after her mother after all, as long as they could depart in the next few minutes while Tobias Raffold still had his papers to operate on Jago.

‘There was something strange about that,’ said Chalph.

Hannah glanced across and mistook her friend’s narrowed eyes for worry over her own chances of coming back. ‘She was just trying to intimidate us into not leaving.’

‘No, it was the letter, I think—’ Chalph shook his head. ‘I’m tired. I’ve been up since dawn checking the boat’s manifest. But it’s the last trading boat I’m ever going to have to wake up for on Jago.’

Hannah hugged her friend, his fur soft and silken against the skin of her arms. ‘I hope that Pericur is everything you thought it would be.’

‘You just stay alive,’ chided Chalph. ‘Stay away from Vardan Flail and his people. What is it that your godless priests say to each other in your cathedral?’

‘May serenity find you,’ mouthed Hannah, her eyes moistening.

Yes. And it would only find her when she knew what had really happened to her mother, somewhere out there. In the cold dark heart of Jago.