Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

'It's never fair,' said Chalph. 'They might not even care about you – you just happened to be the ward of the wrong person. A loose pawn to be tidied from the board.'

Hannah passed the sabotaged machinery back to Chalph. 'We have to show this to someone, to Colonel Knipe.'

'In a vendetta, you trust only your own house and family,' said Chalph. 'The militia wants to blame the free company for the ursk attack. The colonel's not going to listen to either of us if we accuse the most powerful man on Jago outside of the First Senator.'

'The church is my house, Alice was my family…'

'I could tell the baroness, but I don't think she will help us. No Jagonese is going to trust the word of a foreign trader from the House of Ush. Sentiment is already being whipped up against the ursine here in the capital – people have been shouting at me about food prices and shortages of grain down in the streets: accusing the house of profiteering. Calling us dirty wet-snouts. Saying that the archduchess is trying to starve the Jagonese off the island, saying that the free company fighters let the ursks into the city on purpose to scare the last of the Jagonese away.'

'The Guild of Valvemen,' said Hannah, a feeling of certainty rising within her. 'Their people would know exactly where to strike to shut down a section of the battlements. That jigger Vardan Flail is behind all of this, I know he is.'

Her suspicions were silenced by a woman's shout carrying down the park's path. It was a police militiawoman, the same one Hannah thought she had seen following her earlier – but she had company this time. Four individuals cloaked in the long robes of valvemen.

'Damson Hannah Conquest,' the militiawoman said in an accusatory tone. 'You were not in the cathedral when we called.'

'I finished early,' lied Hannah.

'You have not even started,' hissed one of the valvemen.

'Your ballot notice has been served,' said the militiawoman.

Served? With a start, Hannah realized what day it was. Since Alice's murder time hardly seemed to matter at all – one day, one hour, each much the same as the last – all of them blurring into a single amorphous mess. This was the day her service to the guild should have started!

Two of the valvemen advanced on Hannah, grabbing an arm apiece, the third seizing her behind her shoulders.

The militiawoman lowered her lamp staff to point menacingly at Chalph as he stepped forward to help Hannah. She brushed her cape back with her other hand to indicate the pistol hanging from her waist, and that she wouldn't hesitate in drawing it if the ursine tried to stop them. 'You don't want to assist a draft dodger, Pericurian, you really don't!'

'I wasn't trying to escape!' Hannah protested, struggling. 'I forgot, that is all.'

'Set the example,' one of the valvemen hissed from beneath his cowl, the smell of mint on his clothes making her gag.

The others took up the cry, the quiet stillness of the neglected park broken by their screeching mantra. 'Set the example. Set the example.'

Hannah was dragged out of the dome, screaming and scuffling. Dragged towards the vaults of the guild. To serve the devil who had killed Alice Gray. The man who had already tried to murder her once. As the Purity Queen approached the soaring coral line that ringed the island of Jago, Commodore Black ordered all of his passengers apart from Nandi to clear the bridge, keeping his word to the professor that he would keep an eye on her.

Now they were bobbing in front of the coral line's iron gate and Nandi had to stop herself from gasping. Of course, she had seen illustrations of the gates in the texts back at Saint Vine's, but the scale was totally different watching them slowly draw back above her to reveal the cauldron-like barrels of cannons on the fortress. The fortifications were wedged between the coral peaks above, a frill of gunnery ominously tracking their vessel – a silent presence and ancient reminder of why the Jagonese had never fallen to the predations of the Chimecan Empire.

Jago, the fortress of learning and the last redoubt of the Circlist enlightenment during the long age of ice. All this and more, once. But the world turned, and the retreat of the glaciers had undermined her pre-eminent position in the world. Studying history at the college, first as a student, then as Professor Harsh's assistant, the single thing that had struck Nandi most was that nations, civilizations, empires, all had a lifespan, much the same as any person. They grew from seeds, they blossomed, they aged, and finally they passed away into the twilight. When you were a citizen of a proud nation like the Kingdom of Jackals, living in its summer years – when you trod the wide streets of Middlesteel feeling the throb of commerce and could turn your eye to the sky and see only the slow-moving sweep of the Royal Aerostatical Navy's airships – it was exceptionally easy to forget that the show of permanence all around you was just an illusion from the perspective of history. The same feeling of immortality a legionnaire of the Chimecan Empire would have felt millennia ago. The same deceptive feeling of durability that a Jagonese burgher would have experienced in centuries past, cosseted by achievements drawn around them like a blanket while the rest of the world huddled and froze in the ice. But the wider world's summer had become Jago's winter. Nandi would be studying a failing civilization on Jago while there was still some flesh clinging to its bones, and that was quite a privilege. It grated on her nerves that she had to travel here in near secrecy, bypassing the jealous fools who would have seen her place on the expedition cancelled. Just because she was a poor scholarship girl.

Passing through the coral line, their u-boat remained on the surface for the short approach through the coastal waters, cutting through a broken haze thrown up by the collision of the boils and the residual lava. This, she remembered reading in the college's text, was what the weather of Jago would always be like. The coastline of the island was a scorched wasteland burned by the Fire Sea, but travel a few miles inland, and Jago's true position in arctic latitudes became apparent, a dangerous night-cold wilderness of ice haunted by creatures as fierce as the freezing landscape they inhabited. What civilization there was left on Jago clung to the fiery coastline, leaving its glacial interior to monstrous beasts. Nandi saw a final flash of magnesium light through the mists, shimmering out from the flare-house on top of the Horn of Jago, and then the mountain disappeared and boiling water covered the bridge's armoured viewing window. As they sank beneath the Fire Sea, Nandi could see the tug that had guided the Purity Queen in sinking before them, bubbles fleeting towards the surface from its pressure seals.

The Purity Queen followed the tug down, the water outside turning darker with every league of their increasing depth. As they neared the seabed, the commodore ordered his two steersmen to follow the tug's example and head for the mouth of one of the titanic brass carvings of octopi, cuttlefish and nautili wrought into the underwater base of the island's submerged basalt cliff-line. Nandi saw that they were entering a long tunnel illuminated by a strip of green lights running along its side. The tunnel ended in a door which irised open to admit the Purity Queen into a large dark space which started to drain of water and descend at the same time, a lifting room and dry-dock combined. As their descent drew to an end, the front of their lifting room opened out onto an underwater anchorage giving Nandi her first look at the great harbour vault of Hermetica City. The warm green stretch of the underwater pool was bounded by the concrete arc of the harbour at the opposite end of the chamber where hundreds of tugs similar to the one that had guided them were moored inside gated locks. From above glowing yellow plates partially hidden by wisps of condensation cast a diffuse light over the port's warm waters. If Nandi hadn't actually been present during their underwater approach, she might have taken the subterranean vault's walls for a cliff-side and believed that they had simply sailed into one of the mountainous harbours back in the Kingdom's uplands rather than entering Jago's underground civilization.