Secrets of the Fire Sea

CHAPTER SIX


Boxiron’s silver skull swept left and right as he and Jethro walked towards the rendezvous, the steamman still uneasy that the note the ex-parson of Hundred Locks had found under the confessional booth’s seat might be a trap.

It was darker here than in the streets that ran along the Grand Canal, the sun-like plates on the vault’s roof poorly maintained and malfunctioning as a result. This vault, called the Mistrals, was still inhabited, but barely. Its paving was cracking, the albino stems of cavern bamboo starting to push out into the passages. This was the oldest part of the vault, too, a maze of buildings and narrow streets, the waters of the small canals the pair passed slow-moving and pungent with few working filters to clear them.

Boxiron and Jethro had to duck lines of drying clothes left drooping in the warm air by whoever still lived in the crumbling apartments. The directions they were following from one of the hotel’s porters appeared accurate, as was the observation that this part of the vault’s air recycling system had broken years ago – giving its passages a close humidity that was deeply unpleasant to walk through.

If the gloom and the dereliction of this area of the capital had been intended to disconcert the two of them, then those they were meeting would be disappointed. Boxiron didn’t have much of his old steamman knight’s body left, but his skull still had the proud vision plate of a knight of the Order of the Commando Militant. Boxiron switched to his ambient light profile and the shadows around them became a bright green patchwork of clear empty passages and deserted bridges, red targeting icons for weapon limbs he no longer possessed settling over any sign of movement – the scuttling of rats or the brief flutter of curtains in a fourth-storey window above.

‘I have calculated the chances this may be a trap,’ Boxiron warned Jethro.

‘So have I,’ said Jethro. ‘But I have a feeling about the message under the seat. The sort of murderous creature that did what was done to Alice isn’t the sort to shilly-shally around with slipped notes and uncertain ambushes.’

A narrow humped bridge led across the empty canal and Boxiron detected the mass of the vault’s eastern wall looming up ahead of them. In front of the wall, a long line of stone columns stood sentry. Not holding the distant roof up, but coiled with steaming copper pipes – bleeds that would, they’d been warned, erupt with fire when the pressure inside them grew too intense. This was one part of the vault’s systems that had to be kept in good repair – the alternative being the poisoning of the population from the veins of subterranean gas that bubbled beneath their feet. The steam from the pipes grew thicker, until they were wading through a river of fog that came up to Boxiron’s chest unit. This was fast turning into the ideal spot for the out-of-the-way murder of a couple of foreigners.

Boxiron’s combat instincts automatically overlaid the shifting steam with a grid that could differentiate between gaseous and organic movement: green lines running across the dancing haze, then suddenly deforming as a geyser of flame blew out ahead of them from one of the pipes, the heat-shock rippling over Boxiron and Jethro’s heads.

<So desperate.>

Boxiron twitched. The memory, the terrible memory of a mansion burning back in Middlesteel, flames licking out of the bay windows and sparks leaping across to light bushes in the sprawling, overgrown garden.

<So desperate.>

And there she was, Damson Aumerle, a black silhouette clawing at the curtains on her great house’s third floor, transformed into a demon capering in the flames of hell, the flames of—

<So desperate.>

Old Damson Aumerle, so desperate to resurrect the ancient human-milled butler that had been in her family for generations, so starved of affection that she had come to think of the stuttering automatic servant as her—

<So desperate.>

—that she pushed aside the grave robbers she had paid to loot the battlefield at Rivermarsh for the skull unit of a steamman knight, an advanced positronic brain to replace the decayed Catosian transaction engine in her beloved friend’s—

<So desperate.>

—the hearth lighter in his hand, his metal fingers releasing the blazing hot iron towards the dry grass of the grounds. Had he done this, had he started the fire because he had been—?

<So desperate.>

‘—to see you,’ cried Damson Aumerle, her ancient eyes ablaze with relief as Boxiron raised his arm to see the primitive machine fingers of his hand for the first time. Not his hand. His hand was that of a steamman knight, not this pathetic, human-created simulacrum—

<So desperate.>

Aumerle House going up in flames. The flames of—

<So desperate.>

Jago.

‘Are you alright?’ asked Jethro, steadying his steamman friend.

‘Looping,’ said Boxiron. ‘That’s all, Jethro softbody. My combat filter is drawing too much power for the pathetic boiler of this body I find myself trapped within.’

Jethro checked that Boxiron hadn’t slipped a gear, but the steamman could feel he was still only idling in first. ‘Don’t worry about me. Movement ahead.’

A figure came out of the steam, wearing the robes of one of the cathedral’s priests.

‘And there is one still hiding back there…’ called Boxiron.

Another figure emerged, a dark leather-clad ursine. Barely an adult if Boxiron wasn’t mistaken.

‘You have good eyes,’ said the ursine.

‘My vision plate is one of the few parts of me that is good,’ replied Boxiron.

‘I saw you, good father,’ noted Jethro to the priest. ‘Back at the cathedral.’

‘I am Father Baine,’ said the priest. ‘I’m the archbishop’s clerk at the cathedral. My companion is Chalph urs Chalph, of the Pericurian trade concession here.’

Jethro drew out the message that had been left in the confessional booth. ‘I should have known from the elegance of your calligraphy. A scribe. What makes you think that we are with the League of the Rational Court?’

‘I knew the Inquisition would come when she died,’ said the young father.

‘Archbishop Alice Gray?’

‘Yes,’ said Father Baine. I nursed old Father Bell on his deathbed, the priest who was clerk to the archbishop’s office before me. He told me how it was here.’

‘That we would be coming?’ said Boxiron. ‘An exceptionally prescient member of your race, then.’

‘No, metal brother, he was the one who told me that all of the appointees to the archbishop’s chair on Jago have been ranking members of the Inquisition.’

That was news to Boxiron, and from the surprised look on Jethro’s face, news to him also.

‘I think if there was anyone the least likely to be an agent of the Inquisition, it would be Alice Gray,’ said Jethro. ‘Besides, there’s been hundreds of appointees since the island was settled. How can they all have been members of the Inquisition?’

‘I only know what I was told,’ said Father Baine. ‘And that the archbishop had a private encryption machine that wasn’t like any of the others in the cathedral. She was placing correspondence in the church bag addressed to the League of the Rational Court. You must have heard rumours that the Inquisition was first established here on the island.’

‘Rumours breed around the Inquisition,’ said Jethro. ‘And I suspect it suits their purpose for it to be so.’

‘Yet here you are,’ said Father Baine, ‘you and your friend. They sent you, didn’t they?’

‘Here we are, good father, at any rate.’

‘Tell them,’ urged the ursine cub. ‘Tell them what we’ve found out about the church woman’s death.’

Jethro listened while Boxiron focused in on the ursine and the priest’s eyes, measuring their blink response while they recounted what they had uncovered. About how Alice Gray and her ward Hannah Conquest had fallen prey to a high guild master and his terrible love for the archbishop, the premeditated investigation of the police militia cut to fit the cloth of their political infighting against the ursine mercenaries. The sabotaged wall, the sabotaged dome. A young woman snatched by the guild using the rule of the ballot draft. When the ursine and the young father at last fell silent, Jethro glanced towards Boxiron and the steamman raised an iron finger toward his inferior pressure-leaking boiler heart. His signal that the story was true. Jethro crossed his fingers in response, indicating that his church trickery and the body language of the pair in front of them was pointing to the same deduction.

‘There it is,’ concluded Father Baine. ‘Can you help us?’

‘My friend Hannah needs protection,’ added Chalph urs Chalph. ‘At the very least you can take her off Jago with you and back to your homeland.’

‘I believe your intentions are good,’ said Jethro, ‘and what you have discovered sheds some light on Alice’s death. It’s obvious to me that she wasn’t killed by ursks – allowing the monsters into the dome was indeed a diversion to throw the city into confusion.’

‘You’ll help us?’ asked Chalph.

‘I shall,’ confirmed Jethro. ‘At the very least, I know a few things about the church entrance exams that will give Alice’s ward, this Hannah Conquest, a fighting chance of escaping servitude to the guild.’

Boxiron listened as Jethro explained how the young priest and his ursine friend were to stay in contact using dead-letter drops under the bridge they had crossed to get here, with a cipher based on passages from the Book of Common Reflections. Then the young pair were gone; presumably relieved they had successfully engaged the services of Daunt and Boxiron.

‘Jethro softbody,’ said Boxiron, a suspicion itching at him. ‘If you had served in the militant order of your people’s church, you would tell me, wouldn’t you?’

‘I have never been a member of the Inquisition,’ said Jethro. He smiled and added, ‘Although if I had, I doubt I would be able to tell a heathen steamman who might pass such a secret to his pantheon of ancestors.’

‘I fear the Steamo Loas have forsaken me,’ said Boxiron.

‘Bob my soul, but I could do with a few less deities in my life, too,’ said Jethro. ‘What did you think of that pair’s theories on Alice’s murder?’

‘I have seen your race commit the darkest deeds in the name of love, but I can sense that you have your own theory on this matter.’

‘I have some thoughts,’ admitted Jethro. ‘I used to know about passion. What happened back in the cathedral, in the confessional, that was cold. I think it would be good to discover what Colonel Knipe and his police really know about Alice’s murder, not just what they’ve cooked up to find fault with the mercenaries from Pericur. Luckily for us, we now have the acquaintance of a young ursine who I believe might be able to help us.’

‘Then it’s time,’ said Boxiron.

‘Yes.’

Time for him to go all the way up to five.

Top gear.


Nobody noticed the figure moving through the atmospheric station. Just another crimson-robed guildsman whose footsteps were lost in the roar of the water cascading down the sloped iron walls of the station. When he accessed the terminal that indicated which transport capsules on the turntable were allocated to which team on the duty roster, it was the most normal thing in the world. Just another valveman checking what time he would be departing to the capital’s central vaults, and which piece of machinery he would be overhauling, repairing or maintaining when he got to Hermetica. And when his eyes alighted on a particular capsule and it was temporarily shunted into a maintenance bay, nobody would have thought to challenge a guildsman who then purposefully strode towards said capsule, overriding the door controls and entering it.

Once inside the windowless capsule, the guildsman lowered a tool case to the floor, prised open a floor panel, and carefully lowered a bomb down inside, before setting the timer and resealing the floor. The carriage was ready for use again.

Ready to be shunted back onto the turntable, ready for the bomb’s circuit to be completed ten minutes into its journey. The journey reserved for the guild’s guests and the young woman looking after them – Hannah Conquest.


Nandi sat down where Hannah indicated, at a granite bench running in front of a featureless stone counter, with none of the hardware of the transaction-engine rooms she was used to back in the Kingdom of Jackals. No brass arrays, steam cables, iron panels or spinning drums. The only familiar-looking device inside the guild’s study cell was the punch card injection tube and the card writer – and even there, Nandi was glad Hannah had been assigned to her side to translate the symbolic logic. She hardly recognized any of the foreign iconography on the writer’s keys. Even the top cardsharps back home would, Nandi suspected, have been flummoxed if they had been sat down alongside such a machine.

Behind them, Commodore Black was staring out of the window of the cell they had been allocated halfway up the wall of the canyon, a grand view over the sound and fury of the valves below. It was as though he was still standing on the turret of his u-boat, expecting the floor of the rock-hewn cavern to surge with tidal waters.

‘We’ve got the card writer to make queries,’ Nandi said to Hannah. ‘But how about receipt of the output? Is there a central spooler bank with runners to bring the tape to us?’

Hannah shook her head and lifted Nandi’s hand up, pressing it against the featureless rock wall above the counter. It felt cold, and there was a grainy texture to its surface that was not visible to the eye. Then it started to itch, as if she was pressing her palm against a hundred small needles. An image formed on the rock wall in front of Nandi as she felt the prickles warm her skin, a large black oblong filled with scrolling yellow words and shuffling icons on the right. Nandi noticed Hannah smile at her surprise.

‘There are quite a few advantages to using electricity rather than steam to power your transaction engines. The guild’s stone screens will show you whatever you’ve requested from the archives.’

It took a little getting used to, but Nandi was soon able to settle down to her studies when she realized she could just treat the cold silicate surface like a more sophisticated version of the spinning abacus-like squares on a Rutledge Rotator back home. It was strange to think that once, if the ancient legends were to be believed, the world’s temper had been stable enough for the power electric to be tamed by every nation, not just on Jago. A reliable source of power for lamps and the unknowable half-petrified machines that archaeologists dug out when they burrowed far enough down into the rock’s strata.

As the day progressed – excavating deeper and deeper into the annals of Jago – Nandi got some inkling of why the man in whose footsteps she was following, Dr Conquest, had been so effective when paired up with a mathematician of his wife’s calibre. The traits that made for a good archaeologist were rarely married to the mathematical prowess needed to code transaction-engine queries – one reason why Nandi still preferred the physical library at Saint Vine’s to the steaming heat of their college’s ancient transaction-engine room. But with Nandi’s archaeologist’s instinct paired with Hannah’s diamond-sharp mathematical clarity, she could drill through the mountains of irrelevant material, stripping away the layers of dross to mine the seams of gold hidden inside the archive. Each record Nandi found contained a hundred links to related information – some direct, some inferred. Hannah’s fingers were a blur across the punch card writer, the clack of keys a tattoo of symbolic search patterns and algorithmic re-indexing. There was a brief sucking noise as each finished punch card was drawn away down the tube in the wall like a miniature atmospheric carriage, then information began to crawl across the stone screen as the request was absorbed, processed and the matching records displayed.

The history of Jago could be read by Nandi in the shifting patterns of the world’s climate: the short flourishing of trade after the island was first settled written in a thousand bills of exchange for wire, grain, dyes, spices; then the dwindling of commerce as the age of ice turned crueller, glaciers extending further south, and the Chimecan Empire rising like a vampire out of the world’s ruins, devouring all the kingdoms struggling to survive. At last there was only the desperate struggle to remain alive, Jago standing alone, huddling in the warmth of its subterranean cities as the organized cannibalism of the Chimecans saw the peoples of Jago’s old trading partners farmed for food. This was the period Nandi focused on, opening links to as many layers of the archives as she could, trying to gather up as much of the period as was possible within her grasp. Everything she came across had been erased from the other libraries of the world – books tossed onto fires by desperate freezing citizens living wild and trying to escape the tribute in living flesh demanded by the empire. She almost felt like one of them, an ancient Jackelian serf scrabbling around the forest floor for branches to burn, one eye on the darks between the trees in case she needed to flee. There had always been an edge of snobbery to how the students from families wealthy enough to pay for their studies regarded Nandi and the scholarship undergraduates from the wards of the Chancellor’s Court of Benefactors. Brass spoons, that was their nickname in the halls and quads of the college – unable to afford a silver one, the obvious unkind inference. Nandi could hardly believe she was here, that the college had paid the guild’s access fees and it was she who had been allowed to come. There were moments when this all seemed like a dream, about to disappear around her at any moment.

Nandi moved onto the work of sifting through the material, each new record, document and scroll opening up as many avenues as reading them closed. Finally, she struck pay dirt. A document where the annotation layers had actually been filled in by Hannah’s father. There was a quick flurry of activity as Hannah designed a punch-card query for them to cross-reference the other records edited by the same access code, then the trail followed by Dr George Conquest opened up before Nandi. Six months of painstaking work by the Conquests laid out for her edification. Hannah gave a yelp of excitement, saving Nandi the job of giving voice to identical feelings.

Nandi plunged into the documents, earnestly at first, but then with an increasing sense of unease at what she was reading. By the time she had finished, her elation had evaporated to such an extent that even the commodore had noticed the change in her mood.

‘What have you found in there, lass, to steal the wind from your sails so?’

Nandi tapped the screen on the black wall of stone in front of her. ‘It seems that there was indeed an undertaking by the early church to create a weapon capable of undermining the Chimecan Empire’s dark gods.’ She looked across at Hannah. ‘Your father pieced the story together from thousands of records. It seems a single female priest, Bel Bessant, conceived the idea. She must have been a prodigy, even by the standards of those who’ve mastered synthetic morality.’

‘Why so blessed glum them?’ asked the commodore. ‘You have the beginnings of the history you sought to tease out from this dark place.’

‘The beginnings and the end of it, both,’ said Nandi. ‘The undertaking never amounted to anything. Here’s one of the final findings Hannah’s father made, the record of a criminal prosecution carried out by the stained senate’s judiciary. Bel Bessant was murdered. It gives her murderer’s name as that of her lover, a priest known as William of Flamewall.’

‘A Circlist priest killing another priest?’ said Hannah, clearly shocked by the notion.

‘A mortal priest’s heart is as prone to the passions of love’s malady as any other,’ said the commodore. ‘The curse of love can make the best of us forget our minds.’

Hannah got up from behind the card puncher. ‘What did this William of Flamewall say when they caught him?’

‘They never did,’ said Nandi. ‘Read the bottom of the document. He was tried in absentia.’

‘There’s nothing else?’ said Hannah, clearly not believing what she was reading. ‘No transcripts from witnesses as to why he might have killed her?’

‘Not in your father’s records. We could try to find them ourselves, but your father spent six months here researching the archives. If he and your mother couldn’t find them…’ Nandi sighed. ‘All this way for nothing. Read your father’s notes in the annotation layer. His final conclusion was that the rumours were just a bluff. Bel Bessant had developed enough of a sketch of the possibilities of a god-slaying weapon that the Jagonese only had to leak their plans to the empire’s agents for the Chimecans to forget all about bringing the island under the heel of imperial rule. All this way out to Jago, for what? For nothing.’

‘Let me see, please,’ said Hannah, swapping places with the young academic on the granite bench and scrolling the pages of retrieved documents down the stone screen. ‘This document was annotated the day before my father left Jago to return to Jackals.’

‘So it seems,’ agreed Nandi.

‘But that doesn’t make sense,’ said Hannah. ‘The church told me I was left in their care on Jago because my parents were going back to the college to secure extra funding for continued access to the archives – and they didn’t want to expose me to the dangers of an additional return trip through the Fire Sea. If this was as far as their research went, if they were really finished here, then why leave me behind on the island?’

Nandi leant over Hannah’s shoulder to stare at the screen. The words of wisdom once given to Nandi by her mentor at Saint Vine’s echoed back at her. ‘If it’s too neat, if it’s wrapped in a box and left for you to find like a gift, then keep your eye open for a trapdoor and a long drop down to some sharp sticks.’

But why in the world would either of the doctors Conquest have wanted to make people think their work here was finished, when it wasn’t? One reason leapt suddenly to mind. If the pair from the college had enemies sniffing around their heels and had been laying a false trail, would they perhaps have hidden some clues for friends from Saint Vine’s to follow in their footsteps?

‘Hannah,’ said Nandi. ‘These comments are all from your father. If your mother had left any notes behind, where would they be?’

‘In the search strata,’ said Hannah. ‘You can write comments on how you arrived at a particular record there; that’s where you store reminders of the search algorithms you used in case you need to repeat them.’

‘See if there’s anything accompanying this chain of documents, made on or around the same date as your father’s last access.’

Hannah went back to her card puncher and rattled out a query to peel back the underlying layer of her parent’s findings. There was a sucking noise as the tube carried the product of her labours away into the injection system, then the stone screen started to flash and the image on the cold silicate surface reformed as a green block covered in mathematical sigils. Nandi couldn’t even begin to scratch the surface of understanding this, but Hannah craned her neck out of the heavy guild robes and the wrinkling of the girl’s nose and the dance of her eyes across the wall seemed to indicate she could follow the mathematics well enough.

‘This,’ Hannah tapped a lone stretch of code near the bottom of the image formed on the stone wall, ‘this isn’t anything to do with how my mother navigated to these files or her bookmark set – it’s a Joshua Egg.’

Nandi looked blankly at Hannah.

‘Ah now,’ said the commodore. ‘That’s a rare piece of cleverness.’

Hannah shot a glance towards the commodore, which seemed to be a mix of surprise and admiration at his knowledge. ‘You wouldn’t have much occasion to use a Joshua Egg on a u-boat.’

‘No lass, but if a lock’s secured by a transaction engine and it’s well-designed enough, the locksmith will usually throw one inside to encrypt their key for opening the bolts, and if there’s one thing old Blacky’s got, it’s an aversion to being locked up.’

‘This is a lock?’ Nandi asked their guide.

‘A Joshua Egg is transformative maths,’ said Hannah. ‘Highly recursive. When you solve it, you get another Joshua Egg and a piece of encoded information spat out. It’s like a game of pass the parcel – you rip a layer off the package and you find another smaller parcel and maybe a present waiting inside for you. This is about as long as I’ve seen one, though, so there must be quite a few iterations inside.’

Nandi’s eyes narrowed. The commodore was full of surprises, and so, it seemed, was the work of the doctors Conquest. ‘Can you solve it?’

‘It would take days by hand,’ said Hannah. ‘Maybe weeks if it’s particularly tricky, but—’ she waved towards the window and the wall of valves glowing on the other side of the artificial ravine, ‘—I don’t have to do it by hand. With enough raw power I bet I can crack the first iteration in a couple of minutes.’

‘Get to it,’ said Nandi, trying to keep the hunger – or was it desperation – out of her voice.

Hannah jumped back on the card writer and transcribed the Joshua Egg and her method for solving it, filling up at least twenty punch cards with a tattoo of holes; the injection tube to the massive transaction engines patiently carrying each card away until the suction tube seemed to be hissing angrily back at them like a maltreated cat. Her volley of instructions released, Hannah leant back from the counter and the three of them waited for the girl’s cards to find their mark.

The results came suddenly, and not in the form of a new display on the stone screen, but with an angry yelp of surprise from Commodore Black as a fork of static lightning flashed past the balcony behind him, searing the back of his neck. Hannah ran to the study cell’s balcony rail, followed by Nandi. Hooded figures were jutting out from balconies on either side of their study cell, staring in disbelief at the sight. Glass valves on both sides of the ravine were ablaze with light, a nimbus of static electricity cascading down to the forest of valves on the floor. Intense bolts of energy danced between the giant glass bulbs, ricocheting among the relays.

‘What mortal dark gale is this?’ shouted the commodore over the roar from outside.

‘I think it’s a switching storm,’ Hannah called back. ‘One of the oldest guildsmen described them to me once, but he said we’d never see their like again. The transaction engines are overloading, but we’re only handling the capital’s needs down here now. There’s enough spare processing capacity in the guild’s chambers to support eleven abandoned cities. This shouldn’t be happening!’

The clash and clack of the jumping lines of energy were joined by a rumbling noise from huge iron pipes running along the ravine’s walls, cold water from the frozen wastes above ground being pumped down to cool the overheating machinery.

‘This is our doing,’ whined the commodore. ‘Trying to prise open a nest of wicked secrets that were never intended to be known.’

Hannah shook her head vehemently. ‘It’s not us. It can’t be. It doesn’t take that much processing power to solve a Joshua Egg, however complex it is.’

Nandi stared out, fascinated and horrified by the leaping forks of energy. It was as though the valve-minds were gods whose rest had been disturbed, and this their rage. The study cell door flew open suddenly, diverting Nandi’s attention, and a male guild worker sprinted inside waving an ebony-coloured punch card. ‘Black card! Everything from vault nine to twenty-two.’

Hannah ran over and snatched the black card, feeding it into their injection tube.

‘Why is your hood down?’ demanded the guildsman from inside his own cowl. ‘In the presence of outsiders. You shame us.’

‘Shut up,’ replied Hannah, almost casually.

The punch card disappeared inside the wall, bouncing back seconds later, followed by the dimming of the valve-light immediately outside their window.

Grabbing his black punch card back, the guildsman ran frantically out of the room without another comment on Hannah’s state of undress.

Nandi saw that the image on the stone screen was freezing in place. ‘We’re finished for the day then, I take it?’

‘They’re freezing all non-critical processes in several transaction-engine vaults including this one,’ said Hannah. ‘They’ll have the guild’s senior card sharps and engine men down here all day and night, trying to work out why the chamber outside was overloading.’

Nandi looked at the stone screen, the image of a document half-formed on the rock surface. This was something new! The first layer of the Joshua Egg had been packed with a present after all! She ran her fingers across the archaic words on the document, translating them to the modern form. Could it be? Yes.

‘This is part of the church’s record of the trial of William of Flamewall,’ announced Nandi excitedly to Hannah and the commodore. ‘Look! It states that he poisoned Bel Bessant with metal oxides from the dyes he had access to. He was an illuminator of manuscripts and a stained-glass artist. That’s how the militia discovered he was the murderer – they traced the poison in Bel Bessant’s blood back to her lover’s own dye mix, but William of Flamewall had already fled the capital by then.’

There was nothing more; the document’s image had frozen mid-scroll on the cold stone. What else might they have found if Jago’s legendary transaction-engine rooms hadn’t failed them in quite so catastrophic and spectacular a fashion?

‘An ancient murder,’ said the commodore. ‘With a good many more in the centuries since to trouble the island’s police, no doubt. But it’s not the capital we need to flee, it’s these terrible guild vaults with their sick transfiguring energies and fearful storms of energy. If you’ve finished here, Nandi, let’s head back to the safety of our prison of a hotel.’

‘Finished for the day,’ said Nandi.

And the day only. There were still a good few questions Nandi had about the work of the two doctors Conquest.


Standing close to the cascade of water down the iron walls, a robed figure watched Hannah Conquest, the aging u-boat man and Nandi Tibar-Wellking board the transport capsule and waited for it to safely clear the rubber curtain, leaving the guild’s atmospheric station. The circuit of the bomb he had placed on board would have been completed now the carriage was under power.

He had followed his orders to the letter. The figure allowed himself a sliver of a smile – not that anyone could see it under his hood. He would be boarding a capsule with the other guild workers soon, but he wouldn’t be going where those three were heading.

Oblivion’s eternal embrace. In about ten minute’s time.


Given his two companions’ distant evolutionary origins as forest-dwelling primates, it was ironic, Boxiron considered, that it should be his inferior cobbled-together body that experienced the least trouble ascending the air vent to the surface of Hermetica City.

Chalph urs Chalph had the advantage of youth, though, the young ursine climbing the rungs ahead of Jethro without the sweat that was now soaking the ex-parson’s face. The three of them were getting near to the cliffs overlooking the Fire Sea, Boxiron steadily pulling his not inconsiderable metal weight up behind Chalph and Jethro. Then the ledge was in sight, giving onto a bare stone passage that led to a heavy steel door with a wheel-shaped handle to open it that wouldn’t have looked out of place on the commodore’s u-boat.

They exited via a concrete bunker topped with rusted iron ventilation grilles, to find themselves on top of a black cliff with a view down to the boiling waters lapping against the shores of Jago far below. Chalph raised a finger to his lips and pointed to the massive iron battlements to their right, then indicated that they should proceed through the plain of boulders and concrete air vents towards the garden domes nesting under the towering presence of the Horn of Jago. It wasn’t too hard for the three of them to stay hidden from the guard posts dotting the battlements – the ravages of a steam storm had recently passed, leaving behind a warm mist that cloaked them from the eyes of the Pericurian mercenaries – which should be focused on the monsters prowling outside the capital’s walls anyway.

Chalph took them to a concrete building standing a little taller than the steamman’s own height, wedged in between two air vents. There were three iron circles stamped into the wall around the back of the structure, each the size of a drain hole cover.

‘This is it?’ asked Jethro, his beak-nosed face swivelling about to make sure they hadn’t been spotted by any of the sentries.

Boxiron judged they were safe enough. The nearest of the geodesic domes was one of the abandoned overgrown parks that dotted the outskirts of the capital. There wasn’t likely to be anyone inside.

‘This is what you asked for,’ said Chalph. He lifted a steel tool out of his leather pocket and inserted it into a hole in the centre of one of the covers, levering the tool around until there was a muffled clunk – and then he heaved the cover out, pulling it away and resting it down on the stony ground.

Jethro looked meaningfully at Boxiron and the steamman lurched forward to check the machinery inside. It was a nest of cables, clicking mechanics and etched steel circuits lit by a bank of flickering valves hanging from the roof like lanterns. It appeared primitive to Boxiron, but no doubt it served its purpose, allowing the guild’s transaction engines to control this stretch of the battlement’s defences.

‘What do you think, old steamer?’ asked Jethro. ‘Can it be cracked?’

‘All in all, I prefer the locks and systems of a Jackelian transaction engine.’ But it would do. There was a connection from the guild’s vaults to the wall’s control system and what was sauce for the goose could easily become sauce for the gander.

There really hadn’t been many options open to a desecration like Boxiron after he had burnt down Aumerle House during his brief fit of madness. Shunned by his people, no longer a steamman knight, only a grave-robbed hybrid wandering the rookeries of Middlesteel begging for high-grade coke and water for his boiler heart. But desecration or no, Boxiron still had the mind of a steamman knight, a mind far superior to the Jackelians’ primitive transaction-engine locks. And after the flash mob had found him and enlisted him into their criminal ranks, they had outfitted Boxiron’s human-milled shell with many useful extras. There weren’t many locks, doors or transaction-engine safeguards – physical or artificial – that could stand up to his talents.

Boxiron sprung the concealed hatch on his chest and pulled out the highly illegal cables he would need for this piece of work, adjusting the variable heads to match the Jagonese non-standard sockets. Once he had patched in a workaround to bypass the machinery’s obviously hostile protective valves, he pushed the other jack into the transaction engine’s diagnostics system. Why, this old steamer, officer? He’s just checking the jeweller’s here for a malfunction on their doorway. Move along now. Nothing to see here.

Boxiron dialled back the power to his body, trying to limit the spasms of his twitching iron fingers. It was like holding his breath, painful and potentially dangerous if the retained smog from his boiler heart started contaminating the rest of his systems. There. The connection was made, and Boxiron smashed through the protocols limiting the battlement’s diagnostics to reporting only – establishing a two-way connection.

‘If you can’t find anything in ten minutes,’ said Jethro, ‘you need to return. This mist looks like it could burn off soon.’

‘You worry too much, Jethro softbody,’ said Boxiron. ‘This is what I’m for.’

The one function he could still perform with excellence. No more for him the honour of the battlefield, or whatever mundane tasks his body had performed for Damson Aumerle that had so endeared his frame to her. All that he had left to him was this.

Boxiron noted Jethro’s hand on his gear stick, a gentle yank and a squealing navigation though the rusty slots on his back, before he felt it reach the final groove with all the impact of running into a brick wall. Top gear.

The light flickering across Boxiron’s vision plate pulsed off as his consciousness entered the transaction engine like a bullet, hurtling towards the guild’s vaults at the speed of electricity.

He encountered a diagnostics handler at the guild’s destination gate, sleepy at first, then outraged that the battlements had malfunctioned so badly they had sent it this. And what was this? Boxiron sent the diagnostics handler insane while it was still wondering how it could possibly report this oddity, making the handler’s corruption look as if it had accidentally fallen into a recursive loop. The guildsman who had programmed the handler so many centuries before had templated portions of the diagnostics’ code from the main core, and the lights of shared developer tokens sparkled like open doorways throughout the system as Boxiron traced them across the guild’s transaction engines.

Boxiron squeezed himself through one of the more central tokens, just far enough to observe the hundreds of handler functions shuttling back and forth outside, some carrying pieces of data from the archives in response to guildsmen’s queries, far more shifting regular data streams between the capital’s many systems: air circulation, gas leakage, temperature, the mortars and gunnery telemetry from emplacements around the foot of the Horn of Jago, power fluctuations from the distant, deep turbine halls. Boxiron changed his appearance to mimic one of the handlers, and then carried himself – looking for all the world as if he completely belonged there – towards the goal of his little foray.

He didn’t even need to rip into one of the catalogues of port addresses to find the militia’s hub – squatting there so similar to Ham Yard back home, bristling with privacy guards and firewalls that spoke more of the self importance of the bureaucrats that maintained its routines than its effectiveness against a steamman mentality. Boxiron circled it. Oh yes, all of this would be fine for stopping a human card sharp bent on creating a little mischief, but how long could it stand against a mind such as his?

Well, longer than it would have if Boxiron didn’t need to be unobtrusive. A diagnostics handler bent out of shape would just be written off as one of those annoyances sent to plague the Guild of Valvemen’s coders. But the central store for the police militia smashed to pieces? That was quite another thing altogether. Boxiron presented himself to the police store like a good little handler, and while the archive was extending itself across to him, he isolated the handshake protocol and extended a virtual environment around it so realistic that the protocol never realized that what it was experiencing was a subsection of Boxiron’s own mentality. After it was safely cut off and isolated, it was a matter of simplicity to break the protocol apart and reverse engineer it, then push his own tame copy back towards the police archives. The next bit was where Boxiron was going to get clever – he had even agreed with Jethro exactly how it needed to be done. He wasn’t actually going to steal all the police records pertaining to the archbishop’s murder. He wasn’t even going to copy them and try to make off with them in his memory. This was going to be a clean job. So clean, in fact, that the Jagonese civil service were going to do the work for him.

Boxiron found the police militia’s case file for Alice Gray’s murder and, seizing control of the archiving function, reset the clock on its timing synchronization forward five hundred years of their present date – long enough for the facts of the archbishop’s murder to naturally declassify themselves. Then he sent a copy of the open files to the Jagonese public records office, along with instructions that they were to be immediately output onto paper, stamped and sealed inside an envelope as importation paperwork, then set aside for a certain Chalph urs Chalph of the Pericurian trade delegation to collect. Once Boxiron had reset the clock on the archive back to its original date, the record was automatically reclassified and all references to the copy automatically deleted as if they had never existed. Just to be on the safe side, Boxiron traced the physical bank of valves where the militia information had been stored in the guild’s transaction-engine vaults and rotated that wall of valves to the top of the physical cleaning rota. The valves would be decharged, cleaned, re-powered up and not even a residual imprint of his crime would be left.

Boxiron was on his way back to the destination gate when he saw it; a rotating green force, half cyclone and half frenzied spinning top. It was throwing itself down one of the major query channels; upending the clearly terrified data handlers and absorbing them into its gyrating mass before spitting them back out again to shakily resume their transit. By the Steamo Loas, this was something new – something sentient and dangerous scouring the transaction engines for an intruder. It could only be one of the valve-minds he had heard about. It must have discovered the breach and realized the collapsed diagnostics handler was not the result of a bug. Boxiron’s chameleon-like exterior couldn’t withstand the likes of that whirling monstrosity. If it got hold of him it would instantly realize he was an intruder and the chances of his mentality making its way back to his clunking, human-milled body would be minimal.

Throwing caution to the wind, Boxiron selected an alternative query channel and sped towards the destination gate he had originally broken through, moving far faster than any mere data handler could possibly manage. It almost felt good; to be in a realm where the pathetic joke of a body that his steamman head had been joined to was not an encumbrance. But it would have felt a lot better if the green cyclone hadn’t immediately changed course and come roaring after him.

Boxiron increased speed and the valve-mind matched him. The gate was too far away and the distance between the steamman and the valve-mind too slight – and growing slighter with each millisecond.

He was never going to outrun this enraged behemoth.