Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

'I believe it would be fitting,' said Nandi. 'And now the professor is sitting on the High Table and she has the authority to spend the money to ensure it happens.'

'It's a wicked shame,' said the commodore, 'for a beautiful lass like yourself to be locked away in dusty archives studying the shadows of what has passed. What use is that to us, Nandi? Forget Jago, lass, stay on my boat and I'll show you all the mortal wonders of the oceans. There are wild, beautiful islands deep inside the Fire Sea untouched by the footsteps of the race of man; there are the seabed cities of the gill-necks carved from coral and shaped in living pearl. And if you've still got a taste for archaeology after you've seen all that, I'll show you some of the broken, flooded towers that lie collapsed along the sides of the Boltiana Trench. You can put on a diving suit and run your hand along marble statues that haven't been seen by anything apart from sharks for a hundred thousand years.'

Her dark skin seemed to blush, and Jethro wondered whether it was the attraction of the offer or the glow from the magma outside the porthole that was lighting her burnished features.

'Thank you,' said Nandi, 'but there is important work awaiting me on Jago. The Circlist church was kept alive on Jago when the Chimecan Empire were raising idols to their dark gods across the continent – without Jago there would be no rationalist enlightenment in the Kingdom today. We'd likely be dancing around maypoles on the solstice, wearing the masks of animals and our old gods like-' Nandi paused to recall a name.

'Like Badger-headed Joseph,' said Jethro.

'Exactly. You've studied prehistory, Mister Daunt?'

Jethro rubbed at his temples, which ached as if trapped in a vice. 'I used to be a parson, before I found a more accommodating line of work. But I can still disprove the existence of every god and goddess of every religion on the continent – current or historical. Some things you never forget.'

At the head of the table, the commodore narrowed his eyes; he obviously disapproved of Jethro Daunt's old career. 'There's five types of gentlemen I don't normally carry on the Purity Queen, sir. That's members of the House of Guardians, lawyers, spies, officers of Ham Yard, and last but not least, church crows – of any denomination. But seeing as you've taken up a new business now and come well-recommended by a fine lady like Amelia Harsh, I shall make an exception in your case.'

'Thank you, good captain,' said Jethro. 'I fear neither myself nor Boxiron would be comfortable swimming through the boils or trying to scramble over the flows of magma.'

But it wasn't the steaming waters of the sea that Jethro Daunt felt he was drowning in. It was the swirling currents of his thoughts. His case. The demands of the Inquisition. The visitations from gods he was trying to deny. And now tales of the history of Circlism on the island and the concerns of a long-dead university doctor and a venerable professor worried for the life of her student.

Jago, all the answers lay on Jago, smouldering lonely and dark amidst the angry solitude of the Fire Sea. Hannah glanced behind her as she ducked down the corridor leading to Tom Putt Park. She could have sworn one of the police militia had been following her through the vaults below. But it looked as though Hannah had lost the militiawoman in the maze of surface corridors that led to the constellation of greenhouses huddled around the foot of the Horn of Jago. She was clearly in class hours and the last thing she needed was to be dragged back to the cathedral just for heeding the urgent-sounding message that Chalph urs Chalph had left her.

Yes, heeding a friend's note – that sounded so much better than truancy. She found Chalph by the statues of the apple singers, the overgrown path to their clearing now trampled clear by the repair crew that had sealed the greenhouse, not to mention all the sightseers who had come to see the ursk corpse before the dead beast had been dragged away for incineration. It was strange, but the presence of the Jagonese in Tom Putt Park seemed more of a violation of her private space than the attack by the monsters that had scaled the city's wall. The wild beauty of the park had been hers and Chalph's alone, and now half of Hermetica City must have pressed through to gawp at the spot where she and Chalph had nearly met their deaths.

Chalph, when she laid eyes on him, had a hemp sack thrown over his shoulder and had been crouching down behind the statues as if he was one of them.

'It's me!' called Hannah. 'Didn't you smell me coming?'

'I have caught a flu,' said Chalph, coming out of hiding. 'I've been outside in the cold, pretending to be part of a free company detail escorting the Guild of Valvemen.'

'You've what?' Hannah was astonished at her friend's audacity. 'In the name of the Circle, why?'

'In the name of your godless faith, this.' Chalph held up his sack and pulled out some battered iron components. 'The guild's people were checking the machinery charging the battlements when they found it.' He showed her an iron box with holes in the side where a line of cables hung out like baby elephant trunks. Each rubber cable had been severed halfway down its length, the insulation sawn through to reveal the thick copper wiring underneath. 'The section of the battlements the ursks came over had been shorted deliberately. Someone wanted the wall's charge to fail.'

Hannah examined the box with her hands, feeling the cold metal, not believing what she was hearing. 'But who would want to do that?'

'I can tell you this much,' said Chalph. 'The Guild of Valvemen were half-expecting to find this. I was pretending I could only speak Pericurian and I heard what they were whispering. There were three sets of damaged transformers like this on the failed section of the wall, and the guild's workers were all for hiding the sabotaged parts and taking them back to their vaults.'

The guild were involved in this? Their job was to maintain the walls, the machines, keep the city powered and keep the transaction-engine rooms humming. But then, it was a guild that was run by Vardan Flail.

Chalph pointed in the direction of the park's domed surface, near to where the ursks had smashed their way down into the capital's flash steam channels. 'That's not all; I checked where the hole in the park dome had been repaired. There was broken glass scattered on the outside of the dome, as if it had been cracked open from the inside of the park.' He opened his fingers three inches wide from claw to claw. 'That's how thick the panels they were repairing this dome with are. I checked with one of the city's glass blowers: dome glass is designed to withstand steam storms and magma plume falls from the Fire Sea. An ursk would not be able to smash into the park without a very large hammer and chisel.'

'We're the only ones who use the park,' said Hannah, numb with the implications of what her friend had discovered.

'And it wasn't me they were after,' said Chalph. 'It was you, Hannah. It's just the same as how politics in the Baronial Council work back home when things cut up rough. You don't just poison the head of a house, you poison the aunts, the sons, the daughters, the brothers – you assassinate everyone at once! Leave no one alive able to come back and try to take revenge against your house. Tooth and claw, Hannah, tooth and claw.'

'This is Jago, not Pericur. We have the police, the stained senate, the accumulated law of a thousand generations.'

But there were Alice's mutilated remains lying in state inside her own cathedral. Had the failing of Hermetica's battlements simply been a distraction to ensure the entire city was otherwise engaged when she was murdered? One that should have also ensured her ward was ripped to pieces inside the abandoned park…