Secrets of the Fire Sea

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN


Behind Hannah lay the rise of the Cade Mountains and the tunnel’s exit. In front of her lay a hundred yards of basalt rubble and rock, then perhaps a mile of smooth dark glassy material, as though a giant glass blower had discarded one of his works halfway through the process, leaving a slick of black frozen surf across the floor. But it was what lay beyond the band of glassy territory that caught Hannah’s attention as she stepped out of the dark tunnel.

The ground there was heavily fissured and in between the vast cracks stood a dense thorny maze of emerald green, almost a jungle, thriving in the heat and clinging to what looked like the ruins of a city. But if a city it had been, the place had fallen prey to some unknown malady – towers a hundred storeys high stood twisted and melted, the squares of windows distorted into disfigured orifices. Half-dissolved foundation pillars broke the canopy of the thick jungle, thousands of stone fingers branching out in a beseeching spread. The place had taken on the look of a sweep of colossal, malformed anthills, covered by bush, thorns and creepers while hissing waves of steam rose up from the land and channelled through its ruins.

Nandi’s voice sounded over the speakers. ‘There’s more behind us.’

Hannah turned and saw that the young academic was right. The slopes of the Cade Mountains were studded with buildings – not overgrown with vegetation like those on the steaming plain ahead of them, but still wrecked and mangled almost beyond recognition. The ruins looked to be made of the same queer ceramic that formed the interior of the tunnel, but twisted and distorted as if by intense heat. Rivers of the bone-white material had flowed down to the foot of the mountain as liquid, and then cooled back to rock, before being worn away to become the rim of rubble from which they were currently surveying the scene. Higher up the mountain the structures looked to be better preserved, closer perhaps to their original state.

‘What could melt stone like that?’ asked Tobias Raffold in amazement.

The ambassador swivelled his suit to face the trapper’s. ‘The wrath of Reckin urs Reckin. The same tears that formed the Fire Sea.’

Hannah sighed. The ambassador might make a good show of affecting the manners of a modern Jackelian gentleman, but his heart still belonged to the savage deep forests of his homeland, it seemed.

‘A prickly fellow to have done all of this, then,’ muttered the commodore.

‘The terrain across there looks volcanic,’ said Nandi. ‘I’ve never read of ruins in such a strange condition in any of the texts back in Saint Vine’s. The damage doesn’t match what I’ve read of pyroclastic flows.’

There were signs that someone had visited the foot of the mountains before their expedition, wooden planks laid like a pier across the band of glassy ground, stopping halfway out at an oval circle of ground, almost an island, formed of a lighter-coloured rock than the black surf. There were piles of discarded garbage to Hannah’s right, opened food cans rusting by the remains of a fire.

‘A decade old, I reckon’ said Tobias Raffold, examining the circle of rocks that had contained the fire. ‘Give or take.’

Hannah’s heart leapt. Around the same time her mother would have arrived here!

Nandi pointed back to the tunnel. ‘There might be more inside those side corridors we passed. I’m going to dismount and have a poke around on foot.’

Commodore Black reluctantly opened his suit and climbed down after her, a long-barrelled rifle slung over his shoulder, sabre and holstered pistol hanging from his wide girth. Hannah pushed open her canopy and joined them while Tobias Raffold ordered two suited trappers to stand guard at the mouth of the tunnel so nothing could slink after his clients, and a couple more to wait a hundred feet inside to ensure that their weapon arms’ firepower was available should they need it.

Hannah held a lantern she had unclipped from her suit, flickering light dancing from the tight featureless corridors and antechambers. She shivered. Was it fear, or excitement at what she might find?

A couple of chambers back from the tunnel the three of them discovered a pile of supplies that Nandi dated to the era of William of Flamewall. A barrel of dried food – little more than desiccated leather now – and spindly rifles with intricate engravings on their imported beech-wood butts that spoke of an age of wealth and opulence.

In the chamber behind they made another discovery, one that made Hannah recoil as her lantern revealed the shape of a camp table with a shining white skeleton sitting at a chair behind it, a silent sentinel watching the open arch they had just walked through. The remains of tattered clothes clung to its bones and there was a splint attached to the left leg. On the table in front of it were a dust-covered satchel and a pistol with crystal charges scattered about.

Commodore Black picked up the pistol and rubbed its clockwork hammer mechanism clean. ‘A Buford and Armstrong lady’s pattern. This is a Jackelian gun.’

Nandi collected the satchel, and Hannah saw the young academic wince as she noticed something on the satchel’s flap. Nandi lifted out a number of books, placing them carefully on the tabletop.

Hannah was staring so intently at the satchel’s flap – the same arms of Saint Vine’s College that decorated Nandi’s own bag – that it took a couple of seconds for her to notice the young academic holding out one of the books to her in an almost apologetic fashion.

‘No!’

The initials on the diary’s leather cover.

Hannah’s eyes ran with tears, blurring the figure in the chair. In no way was this the reunion that she had been planning with her mother.

‘It’s all right.’ Hannah leant forward to kiss the skull’s forehead, but nothing happened: her mother’s skeleton was still a skeleton. A kiss to bring them back to life. But all the magic had fled.


Hannah’s hands were still gently trembling as she read the pages of her mother’s diary. She felt a mixture of shock and denial that the bones behind the camp table belonged to the woman who had given birth to her – denial even when Nandi had examined the pelvis and declared it was a woman’s, even when Hannah had come to the page in the diary that described the ursk attack on the other side of the Cade Mountains and the wound on her mother’s leg exactly where the skeleton’s splint had been set. The writing grew shakier page by page as the infection spread and the medicines Hannah’s mother was carrying failed to heal it.

Hannah’s mother, the redoubtable Doctor Jennifer Conquest, must have been feverish even as she arrived where the expedition was now camped. She described how she’d made friends with a gentle translucent flying creature in the tunnel under the mountain, and there were long rambling pages written to her husband whom she must have known was dead. More details on how she had found William of Flamewall’s remains on something she called Bloodglass Island, and then burnt the priest’s papers and notes so no one else could get them; her description of how the third part of the god-formula had not been among William’s possessions – the one thing she could have used to rise above her mortally fatal affliction. After that, the diary was filled with pages and pages of mathematics. Mad mathematics, symbols that Hannah didn’t recognize blended with formulae that seemed to run contrary to any of the accepted rules she had been taught. At first Hannah thought her mother must have been trying to recreate the third section of the god-formula herself, but as bizarre as the formulae in her mother’s diary were, their structure didn’t seem to match either of the first two parts of the god-formula she had seen. Had the fever sent her mother insane? Later, the lines of mathematics were interspersed with descriptions of songs of siren beauty, her mother’s hand getting scratchier and scratchier. They seemed to make a sense – but only in the way that you could gaze at abstract patterns on wallpapers and start to see meaningful pictures as you let your mind wonder.

Nandi came around the corner, the glow of her lantern announcing her presence long before she appeared. ‘It is done. Do you want to see where we buried her?’

‘That wasn’t my mother,’ said Hannah. ‘They were just the clothes she wore, is all.’ Hannah realized that the young academic had probably interpreted what she just said as a Circlist homily. ‘No, I mean this is her.’ Hannah raised the diary. ‘What she believed in. What she thought. Not the dust that’s left behind.’

Nandi lifted the satchel she had found. ‘I’ve been looking through your mother’s other notebooks. There are more complete descriptions of what she and your father discovered in the guild’s transaction-engine rooms – material she chose not to compress into the Joshua’s Egg she hid for us. Your mother believed that William of Flamewall came here to destroy something.’

‘Not the missing section of the god-formula,’ said Hannah. ‘William was a priest of the rational orders; the ritual of coming all the way out here to where his lover had preceded him to burn the last piece of Bel’s work wouldn’t have appealed to him.’

‘Well, Bel Bessant retrieved her fragments of Pericurian scripture from here, but the Circle knows where or how. I’ve just returned from climbing up to the buildings on the slopes above us – this place is an archaeologist’s worst nightmare. Just empty rooms, thousands of them, twisted out of shape. Whatever was hot enough to melt stone turned everything to ashes here. No furniture, no bones, no pottery, no doors or windows. Certainly no manuscripts.’

‘The city beyond the glass plain might be in better condition.’

‘No,’ said Nandi. ‘I’ve studied it through my telescope; if anything, it’s in a far worse state. It was closer to whatever killed this civilization and there’s a whole new ecos clinging to the steam fissures across there. Nothing destroys a good dig site like weeds and creepers.’

There was a distant ringing from camp, a dinner call being sounded.

‘Do you want to eat?’

Hannah shook her head in answer.

‘Finding your mother’s bones makes it real, doesn’t it? The fact that she’s dead.’

‘I don’t want to talk about her.’

‘When my mother told me my father was dead, I never believed it. It never felt real to me – I would always catch myself expecting him to come through the door to our home.’

‘How did your father die?’ asked Hannah.

‘Much as your mother did,’ said Nandi. ‘About the business of St. Vines’ college. He was on an unauthorized dig in Cassarabia, and when the caliph’s soldiers found him there, they shot him as a grave robber.’

‘Did you ever stop thinking about him?’

‘Never,’ said Nandi. ‘But when I was older, the head of the school of archaeology took me down into the southern desert to show me where she had buried his body. I still think about him, but now I know he won’t be coming through the door.’

‘If we find the last piece of the god-formula here we could use it to bring him back…’

‘What would such a thing be but a poorly formed simulacra of how I remembered my father?’ Nandi tapped her head. ‘And he is already inside my mind like that now, in how I remember and honour him.’

‘I think it would be more than that,’ said Hannah. ‘If you had the powers of a god.’

‘My father had a near-perfect memory, crammed full of stories which I used to love to hear,’ said Nandi. ‘One of his favourites he would tell me many times. It’s from one of the Circlist books of koans: The Koan of the Wondrous Thing. Have you heard it?’

Hannah shook her head.

‘Then I shall tell it to you,’ said Nandi. ‘There was a young boy who was said to have been born enlightened, although many did not believe it and continually tested him. They would try to goad him by filling his shoes with crumpled pages torn out of the Book of Common Reflections.’

‘There’s a few like that in the cathedral school here,’ said Hannah.

‘Back at St. Vines, also,’ said Nandi. ‘Anyway, the day came when the boy had to attend the funeral of his grandmother and the Circlist vicar leading the service noticed that of all the mourners there, the boy was the only one not crying. So the vicar approaches the boy after the service and says to him, “Lad, why do you not cry? Did you not love your grandmother?”’

‘And what did the boy say?’ asked Hannah.

‘He said, “Of course I loved her, but this is a wondrous thing.” The vicar was naturally very curious about this and asked the boy to explain. The boy gave this explanation: if his grandmother had not died, she would have seen her sons and daughters die before her. If she had not died she would also have had to see her grandchildren die before her and borne the pain of that. She moved along the Circle in harmony with the natural order of the universe and that is a wondrous thing.’

Hannah nodded in understanding. At its core, Circlism was just a humanist way to underscore the mathematical truth that reality’s strings were so closely woven together that there was no difference between one person’s life and another’s. She and Nandi really were the same, both here to find the same thing, their fates intertwined and their future bound up in the same outcome. People are all you have, that was another of Alice’s favourite sayings. Her mother had come here alone, but Hannah hadn’t. She was with a young woman so alike they might have been sisters; there were the trappers and the commodore and Ambassador Ortin to watch over them. Her mother’s essence might have been cupped back into the one sea of consciousness, but she lived on in Hannah, and her daughter wasn’t done yet. Not by a long chalk.

‘I like your father’s story. But there is one thing – Koans normally make three points,’ said Hannah. ‘That one only had two. It feels as if there is something missing.’

‘Yes,’ said Nandi. ‘But that’s the thing about the death of someone you loved. It always leaves something missing.’

Hannah’s lips twisted into a small smile. And that too, perhaps, was a wondrous thing.

Hannah and Nandi left the tunnel chambers and emerged into the open. The expedition had fanned their RAM suits facing outwards towards the island’s newly discovered interior. It was the first time since they had left the battlements behind that their trapper guides had felt secure enough to pitch tents and sleep outside of the closed but safe confines of their suit armour. And little wonder. Hannah watched as a red cord was pegged in a wide circle around the camp. Then the trappers uncrated and assembled a portable transaction engine along with a series of brass boxes studded with flared trumpets that looked like steammen hearing manifolds, carefully placing the boxes down just inside the perimeter of the red line. Finally, they connected the RAM suits, transaction engine and trumpet boxes together with long black cables.

‘You don’t move beyond the red cord,’ Tobias Raffold instructed Hannah, the commodore, Nandi and the ambassador, ‘and here’s for why…’

He tossed a rock beyond the line and the trumpet-studded boxes made a series of whistling noise like kettles, the nearest RAM suit swivelling automatically, its magnetic catapult hissing once while the rock the trapper had tossed erupted into a shower of dust mid-air.

‘Anything bigger than a gnat comes towards us night or day, and the suits will put a disk right through its bleeding heart.’

Commodore Black stared uncomfortably at the blinking valves on the Jagonese transaction engine controlling their suits’ weapon arms. ‘You’ll be trusting our safety to that blinking box of lights?’

‘What am I, new to this?’ retorted the trapper. ‘We still post manual sentries, two at a time. But when you’re sleeping outside your suit, you’ll be glad you have old Bessie there as an extra pair of eyes.’

Grumbling, the commodore accepted the presence of the machine picket. Hannah followed the ambassador’s gaze out across the glass plain to the jungle-swallowed city. ‘Is that the city of your scriptures?’

Ortin urs Ortin polished his monocle, his eyes glinting sadly. ‘I don’t think any of us have found what we were expecting here, dear girl.’

‘No.’

Hannah ignored the newly turned ground marked with a circle of boulders where her mother’s bones lay and went inside her tent to try to puzzle some sense out of the pages of mathematics in the diary.

Her mother’s diary and the mind she had left Hannah were all the legacy she needed.


When sleep came for Hannah, it was a hot claustrophobic thing. She was tumbling through waves of alien numbers until Tobias Raffold came into view and started catching the numbers and throwing them beyond the red cord, where rotating shards of deadly steel burst them into black dust.

‘What are you doing?’ she demanded.

‘This is the only thing we’re going to trap this trip, girl,’ said Raffold. ‘And they’re no good to me. You can’t put an equation in a zoo, or skin it for profit.’

She tried to get him to stop, but he only laughed all the harder, throwing more numbers into the RAM suits’ arc of fire. Then the tenor of the dream changed, a bright light expanding from the hail of falling formulae, clearing away the darkness – burning and burning – and out of the fiery nimbus Hannah saw the shape of a figure resolving, a familiar silhouette.

Hannah held up a hand to protect her eyes from the glare. ‘Chalph, is that you?’

‘It is,’ answered the familiar voice. ‘I am in the great forest of Azrar-bur, waiting for Reckin urs Reckin to lead me to his glades.’

‘But,’ Hannah stumbled over the implication, ‘that means you’re dead?’

‘I found out too much, Hannah, and the knowing of it was not good for me.’

‘What was it, Chalph, what did you discover?’

‘That history repeats itself, much like the circle of existence your people’s strange church puts so much faith in. Going round and round. It spun too fast for me and I fell off.’

Hannah rushed forward as the light began to dwindle.

‘Don’t leave me, Chalph. My mother’s gone now – there’s just you and me left.’

‘Your mother saw too little,’ whispered the voice from the fading light. ‘You need to see more, but not too much more. Not unless you want to join me. There’s so much green here. Just like Pericur. Just like I imagined a real forest.’

‘Don’t—’ she begged.

‘Follow the song Hannah, but not too far.’

‘—go!’

Hannah woke with a start. Light outside the tent canvas indicated morning had arrived.

Oh Chalph! Chalph was dead, he had to be. Or why else was the alien melody of a song drifting outside Hannah’s tent?


Hannah stared in amazement. A series of small white structures had risen out of the ground on the island in the middle of the glassy plain. It was from these buildings that the song Hannah had heard in her tent seemed to issue – albeit with no voiceboxes visible to carry the eerie tune. The harmony sounded like a blend of voices from the races of man and ursine, though in no language that Hannah recognized.

Ortin urs Ortin appeared, seemingly as entranced as Hannah by the strange melody drifting across the plain of glass. ‘I say, it’s a hymn, it has to be.’

Nandi appeared from her tent. ‘Where did those buildings come from?’

‘Like a Catosian city-state reconfiguring its streets for war, lass,’ said the commodore. ‘I saw them. They just rose out of the ground at dawn.’

‘Some of the words in the song sound familiar,’ said Nandi. ‘I think there might be phonetic germs to some modern words in their roots. Those buildings are too small to contain much, though, unless they’re shrines.’

‘Let’s have a look,’ said Hannah, but Tobias Raffold grabbed her arm and pointed down to the glassy plain she was about to step onto.

‘You don’t have to stop me. You’ve switched your gun control off, Mister Raffold, I can see that the transaction engine’s valves are powered down.’

‘Not our guns, girl,’ said the trapper. ‘There’s something under the glass. I’ve seen shadows moving beneath it and whatever they are, I’m betting it’s the reason there’s planks laid out to that land. Go out along the walkway.’

A couple of the trappers mounted up and trained their suits’ magnetic catapult arms on the glass while Commodore Black led the way across the shaky planking using his rifle for balance. Nandi, Hannah and the ambassador followed, with Tobias Raffold at the rear, his long-barrelled Jackelian hunting gun sweeping over the crystallized ground. There were things moving under the glass. Long sinuous shapes like grubs, and they appeared to be circling higher towards the expedition members’ shadows on the surface. What had her mother called this place in her diary? Bloodglass Island. Hannah carefully kept her footing lest she discover why her mother had labelled it with such an ominous name.

Reaching the island, Hannah saw that it was filled with seven single-storey structures, windowless and constructed of a light-blue material patterned with thin grey lattices. The ground of the island seemed to be made of a solidified puddle of the same material and walking on the surface sent a gentle tingle through the soles of Hannah’s boots. The notes of the song were definitely coming from the structures, louder as the expedition approached them. When they were a couple of feet from the nearest structure a hole suddenly appeared in its side, expanding to a size capable of admitting a single member of the expedition within.

‘Ah, we’re blessed mice now,’ said Commodore Black. ‘And here stands the trap that’s been set for us.’

Hannah wasn’t so certain. Her mother had come here before their expedition and she had died alone in one of the chambers off the mountain tunnel, not out here.

Follow the song.

‘It’s led me here, Chalph,’ Hannah whispered to herself.

As Hannah approached the threshold, she could hear panicked shouts behind her. Ignoring them, she stepped through and found herself standing in a windowless corridor that might have been one of tunnel’s anterooms underneath the Cade Mountains; except that the structure she had stepped into was far too small to contain this space she had entered – but somehow the building had taken her here all the same. Hannah was deep below the ground; she knew that, could sense the weight of the world pressing down above her. The walls around Hannah were as black as night, but when she laid a hand on one of them, they turned translucent and alien calligraphy began to crawl down their surface. No, not writing. Numbers. The same alien characters that were interspersed across her mother’s diary. Hannah walked along the corridor, until she came to its end, the whole structure no more than a hundred feet in length.

Commodore Black came running up behind her. ‘You’re taking your life in your hands, Hannah Conquest. Jumping into this dark black tomb as if there’s a warm meal and a soft bed waiting for you in here.’

‘This isn’t a tomb,’ said Hannah, running her fingers across the surface while formulae floated around them like ripples in a lake. ‘I think these structures are tools.’

‘Tools? Tools to work what mortal terrible labours?’

‘I think that’s what my mother was trying to find out, but her bad leg finished her before she managed to complete the work. Someone came here and uncovered their secret, though, and that person was Bel Bessant. This is where she got the inspiration to create the god-formula, I know it was! I can feel the strangeness of these alien characters in the weave of her work. These corridors were the muse for her creation.’

Commodore Black looked around the tight walls, horrified, as if Hannah had just told him they had jumped into a plague pit. ‘Let’s be out of here then, lass, before the same queer sickness leaps into my noggin and I start trying to raise the spirit of Lord Tridentscale and take it upon myself to declare old Blacky the Monarch of the Seas.’

Reassured by Hannah and the commodore’s safe return from inside the structure, the other members of the expedition set about exploring the remaining buildings. The interiors of two of them had not survived the wear of ages; they were filled with rubble, their dark walls dead. Inside the fourth structure the reason for the destruction of the previous two become clear. The cave-in here had only affected two-thirds of the corridor’s length and under its rubble lay a half-buried human skeleton, not a trace of clothes left.

Commodore Black kicked the shards of broken glass on the floor. ‘The bones are male. Whoever this poor soul was, he was no expert with blasting tubes. He mixed the liquid explosives too early and brought the mortal place crashing down around him.’

Hannah knelt down by the bones, spotting something hidden under the dust. It was a church infinity circle on a chain. ‘William of Flamewall, I presume. So, this is what he came here to do – demolish the source of Bel Bessant’s inspiration, the genesis that he blamed for his lover’s transfiguration.’

‘He’s done that alright,’ said the commodore looking at the debris. ‘Whatever secrets were scrawled on the walls of this tunnel and those other two buildings have been scuppered good and proper, just as the third part of the god-formula died with William of Flamewall. That rascal Jethro Daunt is the only one who is going to be happy with the results of this wicked trek into danger. The secrets his Inquisition woman strove to keep untold have been erased. These melted anthills of a city are of no use to Nandi Tibar-Wellking, and if there were ever holy Pericurian tablets in these tunnels, William of Flamewall blew them to bits centuries ago.’

Hannah stared sadly at the priest’s skeleton. So it seemed on the face of it, but then her mother had discovered the same scene of destruction over a decade ago, and she had still been trying to achieve something here, to – that was it! Hannah urgently flicked open her mother’s diary, the meaning of the pages of badly scribbled mathematics becoming clear.

It was a key. Her mother had been using the expressions on the tunnel walls that had echoes in modern Jackelian mathematics to guide her to the meaning of the unknown symbols. She had been translating the ancient mathematical language. Her mother had so nearly completed her work, too. But the fever had got to her, or perhaps she’d lacked the final insights that the codified structures of Circlist synthetic morality would have given her. This was bread and butter to Hannah.

She could complete her mother’s work after all!


Alien numbers stirred around Hannah’s fingers as she pushed the characters around the wall. She glanced down at her mother’s notebook for reassurance; she had never attempted anything so difficult. It wasn’t just that the characters were foreign – it was the fact that half of the mathematical concepts used in these underground passages seemed to have no comparative reference points in the Circlist doctrine that she’d had drummed into her during her cathedral studies. The base understanding appeared to be the same as synthetic morality – that everything that existed could be defined and modelled in numbers and that as you changed the inputs you changed the results – but, even given the difficulties of translation, what Hannah was attempting to grapple with was so much more advanced than anything else she had ever tackled. There were formulae for waves and strings that seemed to demand to be integrated into everything Hannah worked on, before being parsed into algorithms that rendered them into something else entirely. Layer upon layer of complexity – perversely growing simpler and simpler the higher up the layers these results of calculations were passed.

Hannah knew what this wall was now – no different from the dials and mechanical switches on the pilot frame of her clunking RAM suit. But what a control panel it was – designed to be operated by minds so advanced it pained her to consider them. Already, Hannah had pushed far beyond her mother’s work – come to grips with the concepts that had eluded her mother’s fever-racked mind. But what Hannah couldn’t grasp was what these structures were for – a tool, certainly, but a tool to what end? Each building had a slightly different purpose, that much Hannah had gleaned. And she suspected that they were linked, like a series of baths in one of Hermetica’s public pools – starting cold with each steam chamber growing slightly warmer – each building more difficult to comprehend. William of Flamewall had started at the unfathomable end of the chain in the building he had selected to demolish first, working his way down the scale of complexity until he had died within his premature explosion inside one of the structures. His starting point had been no accident. William of Flamewall had chosen to wreck the most advanced art of this lost civilization first, working his way down to the constructions containing the most simple concepts. The material that had inspired his lover Bel Bessant to create her terrible work was lost to the world forever now. That much Hannah had already discovered for Jethro Daunt and the Circlist church – with the help of a long-dead priest of the rational orders.

Hannah was toying with one of the symbols – something like a lightning flash that seemed to have different functions depending on the position of its insertion point within a formula. She whisked it around with her forefinger, allowing it to follow her like a curious goldfish in a pool tracking a hand. Then the idea struck her. What she was grappling with here wasn’t flat: the underlying base of the characters was multi-relational – the symbols she had been puzzling over were links between the disparate formulae and functions. That was why their insertion points mattered so much – they were like the gates that controlled Hermetica’s canals – shutting off or opening a single tributary would create knock-on effects all the way down the channels it opened out into!

With almost frenzied haste Hannah began rearranging the concepts she had been lining up on the wall, setting up a structure of theoretical pipes and struts between the formulae to allow the results that had always seemed twisted beyond recognition to follow a logical sequence. A sequence that might prove she was intelligent enough to be allowed to operate this mysterious tool? Hannah thrust the little lightning-bolt symbol into the middle of the line of alien symbols as if it was a real bolt of power. The characters began to rearrange themselves around her finger as though they were insects performing a mating dance, then the symbols started swirling in a vortex and Hannah felt her knees buckle as the room dissolved. Her hands lurched out to grab at something solid, anything, but all of her physical reference points had vanished.

Hannah was flying as if in a dream, skimming over mountains that clearly belonged to the Cade Range; but the land around her, below her, it was all so different – Jago’s sky a brilliant diamond blue, the only clouds above her thin white fingers scratched high under a warm, inviting sun. Below Hannah lay well-tended woodland and a chequerboard of farms, dark arrow-straight roads leading to a city that was barely recognizable as the petrified jungle-covered anthills that Hannah had glimpsed after emerging from the tunnel. So many towers shining in the light, ethereal shapes so beautiful they were as much art as architecture – delicate arches and parapets with insubstantial transparent walkways bridging them – separated by sculpted parkland in rich emerald green. Hannah’s course altered and she found herself swooping down across the city at ground level, a ghost observing a lost past.

Moving walkways underneath Hannah were filled with ursine and the race of man, both peoples happily intermingling and wearing the same style of flimsy clothes – silks and muslins in a rainbow assortment of pastel hues, arms and shoulders left bare. Many of the crowd had illustrations printed on their clothes and amazingly the pictures were moving and changing in an animated dance. Hannah was so taken aback by the sight that she nearly didn’t notice that there were other races mixed in on the walkways – less numerous that the ursine and men, but walking proudly through the masses nevertheless. Tall feline-faced creatures with legs so long and bony they could have been walking on stilts, and a crimson-coloured race that had an insectoid appearance with compound eyes, were just two of the species she spotted. This was a true multiracial society, as diverse and as vibrant as that of the Kingdom of Jackals today. The invisible currents pulling Hannah tugged her towards the centre of the vast city, over a temple with priests leading a ritual in front of a sea of worshippers – the crowd and the priests made up of the same scattering of races she had already noted. But this was no worship of gods or ancestors Hannah was seeing. The ancient mass these priests were leading was more in the way of a public science experiment.

Understanding filtered through Hannah, rising to her unbidden from the ancient machines of Bloodglass Island. Science, power, the control of nature – but mastery of the outer untempered by any understanding of the inner. Dear Circle, she could have told these ancients they were walking a dangerous path, she could have called out to them over the ages. Understand your own nature before you understand the world. But there was no time for any warning, nor voice to be found within Hannah’s throat.

The scene changed, moving forward in time – the fashions subtly altered. The manicured parks between the towers had fallen into disrepair, while the energies of the city’s inhabitants were now diverted into the skirmishing of street battles as gangs of ursine clashed with thugs from the race of man, youths on both sides raised to hatred while the priests of science hectored and cursed their rivals as heretics. More time passed. The violence grew increasingly organized, bands of cloth tied around heads transforming into uniforms, fists and sticks replaced by dart-firing pistols and rifles – sedatives inside the crystal ammunition giving way to fatal toxins.

Then there was war. Full war, total war, long years of it, growing darker and more desperate. But what a war. Artificially created death spores and sicknesses and blights. Thousands of soldiers in armour rising from trenches and running at each other in clouds of killing particles that attempted to melt and destroy their protective suits, hideous monsters brought to life by dark science leaping out from craters like spiders to impale troops. Other creatures gliding down from the dark poison clouds to disgorge sacks of acids across the helmets of their foe, ursine and man writhing in agony, shooting and hacking at each other with blades as hot as furnaces, weapons easily capable of chopping each other’s armour into pieces.

It was only ursine versus man now, the other less fecund races exterminated after being caught on one side of the conflict or the other. The war on the island continent lasted centuries until, in a final orgy of destruction, one of the sides unleashed truly terrible weapons – hell-fire impacting the earth, storms that melted stone and incinerated both races, forces that cracked the ground and warped the fabric of the world; great tracts of land turned to liquid flame, the sea itself burning as magma seeped out of the world’s wounds.

Hannah was left floating above a land blanketed by eternal winter, and then she noticed the Cade Mountains. There were eyes there, identical to the hideous sentinel that had observed her enter the tunnel, but these eyes were on the other side of the slope, still watching: watching the melted, steaming city as drain covers and survival centre doors lifted up and those who by accident or design had been fortunate enough to be underground when the sun storms scoured the land above them emerged.

Time flickered forward again and Hannah watched as each generation that succeeded the survivors of the conflict fell further from the condition of civilization their forefathers had reached. Scrabbling simply to eke out an existence in the freezing lands about them. But then, something completely unexpected. Hannah was whisked deep under the mountains to a machine-lined chamber filled with ice-covered coffins, their lids retracting to reveal a group of healthy, full-sized ursine. As the cloud of frost dissipated, these last scientist-priests rose as though they were gods returning from an earlier age. A breakaway ursine faction planted like drought seeds to reawaken and rebuild civilization.

However, the land the scientist-priests found waiting for them was far beyond repair, beyond even their worst predictions of the ravages the war would wreak. They tried to resettle the island but it proved too difficult. The tunnel was the sole remaining legacy of that time, leading from nowhere and going nowhere. A fresh start in a new land was the only way their society could live again. Many of the creatures of war given life by their twisted science had become predators preying on the primitive descendents clinging onto the land; a land too barren to support meaningful agriculture. And there was a worse revelation still to come. Dark energies released in the war had poisoned the very soil that once supported its people. Those that subsisted on the land were poisoned in turn, their flesh twisting and mutating, and in response the scientist-priests did the only thing they could. They created a centre of healing using the last of their hoarded science. Bloodglass Island. With a small handful of ursine descendents healed, the priests summoned the flying scouts that had once served them. Their last loyal servants. The Angels of Airdia arrived and bore the healed ursine away to a domain far beyond their ruined home, across the sea to a nation that would become Pericur.

Still the hideous eyes on the mountain watched, recording the march of ages, filling the machines hidden far underground with their recordings of the slow sweep of history. Century upon century – millennia upon millennia. The twisted, broken race of man hammered into primitive, voiceless savages, poison seeping across the generations until the dark energies dissipated and only the ab-locks were left. Tears fell from Hannah’s eyes. And while the race of man shrank and became wizened ab-locks, the unhealed ursine left behind had swollen and grown bestial, larger and larger, claws and fangs replacing reasoning and morality. They had become the monstrous race of ursks. Both of those races that had once completely mastered nature fallen victim to the random whittling of an untram-melled creation run wild and merciless. The sole legacy left by their civilization was a deep revulsion between the two races, an ancient war without end turned to nothing more than savage territorial instinct. That and a land locked in fire and circled by a sea of burning magma, its ground echoing to the clashing howls of their devolved descendents.

A geological age later, other offshoots of the race of man had returned to Jago, eventually reencountering the people of Pericur across the sea – the hairless devils of ursine mythology, scorched of all fur by their sins. Another of Alice Gray’s sayings came back to Hannah. Those who failed to learn history are doomed to repeat it. The Pericurians scheming to evict the Jagonese from their sacred soil, the Jagonese hostility towards their nearest neighbours across the sea, all just a mirror to the thoughtless skirmishes of the ab-locks and ursks. A circle turning and repeating, a memory distorted through Pericurian scripture. That was all that was left of their legacy now. That and – Hannah took a step backwards. The ancient healing centre on Bloodglass Island. Capable of restoring degenerate flesh – but Hannah was neither an ab-lock nor an ursk. Her mind was no simple poisoned husk that needed evolving back to full sentience. She tried to will away the ancient vision of knowledge that had possessed her, to return to the walls of the chamber crawling with ancient formulae, but she was firmly held in the tool’s grasp now and it had not finished with her. It had barely even started.

Hannah screamed as her brain began to heat up, her every thought a burning dagger as molten as the fires of Jago. Changing her, remaking her. Healing her and killing her…