Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

Her? Hannah looked with disgust at Flail's red cowl, just enough of the high guild master's pockmarked features visible in the shadow of the hood to turn her stomach. What in the name of the Circle did the most loathsome high guild master in the capital want with her?

'I have the results of the ballot,' said Vardan Flail.

The ballot? Hannah's stomach felt as if it was dropping down the city's deepest airshaft.

'Damson Hannah Conquest is one of the names that has been randomly selected for service within the guild.'

'Randomly selected by the programs running on your transaction engines,' said the archbishop.

'I don't care for your tone,' warned Vardan Flail. He pointed slowly to the testing equipment and then up towards the diode panels in the stone roof of the testing room. 'You seem happy enough to utilize the processing cycles of the engine rooms and draw power for the lights to keep your cathedral illuminated, but like everyone else here, you flinch at the sacrifices necessary to keep our island's mighty turbine halls humming.'

'I won't do it,' spluttered Hannah.

'Not turning up for balloted service is considered desertion,' threatened Vardan Flail, 'and you are far too clever to let yourself be exiled for that crime, young Hannah Conquest. With your mind you will settle in fine with us as an initiate cardsharp. We won't have that beautiful intellect of yours wasted hauling sacks of broken valves to the smelt or crawling inside the turbine halls' generators to oil the magnets. No, within a year you'll be able to turn out punch cards like you were born to it. Punch cards to control the most powerful transaction engines we possess. You will be able to make a difference that can be measured in the efficiency of everything you code.'

'And end up like you?' spat Hannah.

'These are my blessings,' said Vardan Flail, touching his arm. 'The sacred scars of duty.'

'The senate won't need to exile me beyond the city walls. I can ship out for the Kingdom of Jackals any time I want.'

'Legally perhaps,' sneered Vardan Flail. 'Although dual nationality and the application of the draft is still a point of law that is open to examination; I should know, I checked the legality of the situation quite thoroughly before I came to see you, little lady. How many new anti-emigration bills have been passed this year? You can spend the few days before your service starts looking at the empty docks and wondering when the next Jackelian u-boat is going to come calling – because we both know there won't be any. And there's not a supply-boat captain this side of the Fire Sea willing to risk the senate's wrath by smuggling out a passenger without official exit papers.'

'This is outrageous!' said the archbishop. 'I will protest to the senate.'

'Of course you will. Everyone who is called to our service protests,' said Vardan Flail, sadly, as if the desire not to end up concealing a twisted body underneath crimson robes was a personal calumny against him. 'The bleating of our chosen is as natural as a steam storm after rain. After every annual ballot the floor of the senate is fleetingly filled with the cries of rich merchants' sons who are too good for our guild – or prelate's daughters who are too fine and unblemished to toil inside our vaults.' Vardan Flail reached out to stroke Hannah's face and she flinched back as his warm, wrinkled skin brushed against her face. 'This isn't your true beauty, girl, it's in there.' He prodded a finger against her forehead. 'Yes, it is in there, and we shall use it well…'

Hannah watched in horror as the valveman's claw-like fingers vanished back inside the sleeve of his robe. This wasn't happening to her. This wasn't any future fit for her! She was going to follow her guardian into the church, a quiet, easy life of meditation and reflection in the still peace of the cathedral. Thinking great and noble thoughts. Not bonded into labour for a beast like Vardan Flail, her body swelling and cracking and breaking until she too would have to scuttle through the streets of Hermetica City, hiding herself behind heavy robes from the gaze of everyone she knew on the island. Cursing mirrors, cursing her very reflection in the canal waters.

'Off you go, Hannah,' commanded the archbishop. 'I think it's time the high guild master and I continued our conversation alone in my chancellery office.'

Hannah waited in dread as the two of them left the testing room; the queuing would-be novices uncomfortably averting their gazes from the high guild master.

Then they were both gone and all Hannah could smell was the scent of mint in the air; mint and her cruelly crushed dreams. 'What,' asked archbishop Alice Gray as she shut the door to her chancellery office, 'is this really about? I don't come to the engine rooms and try to recruit your valvemen into the church orders. Is it too much to expect some of the same courtesy from a high guild master? Or is this what we have descended to now in Jago? So few people left to employ that we must poach labour from our neighbours' staff?'

'The courtesy is for a high guild master to take the time to come and serve a ballot notice personally,' hissed Vardan Flail.

'How gracious of you,' said the archbishop. 'Now, what's your real motive? Is it Hannah you want, or…?'

'There might be a way,' replied Vardan Flail, 'for me to forgo the services of your ward. A singular loophole in the statutes of the ballot of service that could be exploited.'

The archbishop's green eyes narrowed. 'Go on.'

'The ballot is not allowed to fall on a high guild master's own family. A very wise clause, don't you think? You only have to see how the stained senate works – or rather, how it doesn't – to know the harm that nepotism and favouritism within a guild would create.'

'But Hannah Conquest is not a member of your family.'

Vardan Flail dragged his body to the window looking over the cloister chamber below. 'She would be if you married me, Alice. Your ward, my ward. Everything squared. Or should that be joined on the Circle?'

'So that's what this is really about. You've had my answer on that matter before.'

Vardan Flail looked out of the window, gazing down towards the albino-pink blossom falling from the trees lining the cloister, a rain of it drifting in the draughts from the ventilation grilles. 'The unlikeliest things can blossom in the vaults of Jago, Alice. Look down there, the only trees that prosper well under diode light. Is it so unlikely that a union between the two of us might do the same? The tenets of Circlism set no store on the physical appearance of things, only our true selves. And we're very good Circlists in the engine rooms.' He pulled out a heavily pockmarked palm from underneath his sleeve's crimson velvet folds. 'The flesh fades and what remains is true.'

'Cavern bamboo also prospers like a weed down here. I don't doubt your belief in Circlism,' said the archbishop. 'Sometimes it verges on faith-' she pronounced the word like a curse '-but a meeting of minds is never enough for marriage, there must also be a meeting of hearts.'

'There are other things I can offer you,' said Vardan Flail. 'Like immortality.'

'A sketch of my face on paper isn't me,' said the archbishop, angrily. 'And a simulacrum of myself sealed up in the valves of your transaction engines isn't me, either. Our essence is cupped out into other lives after this. That's the only permanence you can trust, all else exists only as currents in the stream.'

'There must be someone else, another man,' hissed Vardan Flail, 'for you to keep rejecting me. Tell me who it is? Who has been courting you?'

'A long time ago, maybe, but not now. I have the duties of my position and the needs of the people of Jago to serve and that is enough for me. It will need to be enough for you too, Vardan Flail.'