Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

There was a moment when the courtiers lining the table opposite looked at the jerking, struggling body of the First Senator being suffocated as though this might be some surreal prank being played on them by their insane ruler. But there was little disguising the reality of Silvermain's violent spasms. A clang sounded through the hall as the door to the banqueting chamber was locked from inside.

The First Senator's rod bearer ran up to the advancing free company soldiers. 'She's lost her bloody mind, beat her off, bring her down. Kill her if you have to.'

'I am loath to do so,' said Stom urs Stom.

'But I'm ordering you,' spluttered the official. 'That's your sworn liege-lord!' He stumbled back, looking dumbfounded at the short sword thrust into his chest.

'That would depend,' said Stom, unhooking her turret rifle from the brass tank on her back, 'on who commanded the oath to start with.'

Rifles burst into action, courtiers and senators sent sprawling as heavy piton heads struck them. None of the Jagonese was permitted arms in the presence of their First Senator, and they scrambled away in terror from the table, ploughing into serving staff trying to escape down the passage to the kitchens, only to find its doors bolted by those that were meant to be guarding them. The serving staff died with more dignity than their politician masters, turning and throwing themselves at the guns of the mercenaries rather than clawing in useless desperation at the thick oak doors blocking their exit. In the narrow confines of the corridor concentrated weapons fire tore the fleeing throng to shreds without discrimination.

Great pawed hands reached under the stone table to pull out a few remaining, cowering senators, tossing more targets into the open. The politicians had hardly got to their feet when they were cut down again in a hail of heavy pitons. They lay twitching on the stone floor as the last few embers of life departed.

Laro urs Laro, Baroness of the House of Ush, pulled herself to her feet, casually discarding the blue-faced corpse of the First Senator as she surveyed with satisfaction the dozens of bodies strewn across the banqueting hall.

She addressed Stom urs Stom. 'I believe I won our wager.'

'Baroness?'

'It seems the First Senator had the gift after all.' Her foot stepped down on the scale model of Titus City abandoned on the floor, splintering a whole district with her weight.

We can see no future here. The feverish air on top of the coral rise surrounding Jago resounded to the crack of the work crew's sledgehammers chipping away at the growth. The Jagonese had long ago realized that the best way to control the width of their protective coral line was to prune the height of the great rise – topping it forced its growth out horizontally instead, thickening the defences.

Theirs was hard, hot, dirty work, judged vital by the lessons of history – the coral line had turned back the long wooden ships of the polar barbarians, the wheel-powered dreadnaughts of the Chimecan Empire – every foe who had been attracted by the wealth and power of the island nation in centuries past.

It was always a welcome part of the work gang's routine to take pause for a water break when the trading boat from Pericur arrived in front of the massive gates cut into the rise, the sight of the machines drawing open the doors below an awe-inspiring sight, as well as an excuse to halt their backbreaking labours. But the crew knew enough about the comings and goings of the trading vessel to recognize that a thrashing in the water didn't normally precede its arrival as the thick-skinned dolphins that inhabited the boils tried to flee before the iron hull. And if the merchant u-boat below had an escort of dolphins, it was missing the accompanying tug that would have normally guaranteed it safe passage through the Fire Sea's shifting flows of magma.

The coral line's portcullis master and his workers must have shared the work crew's sense that something was out of place, as the gates that had started to open were now slowly shutting in the face of the trading boat. The work crew's feelings turned from apprehension to panic as they saw gate staff being tossed out of balconies along the gate's control cabins below, tiny bodies bouncing and tumbling off the coral line's slopes before being absorbed by the searing waters of the channel they were meant to be protecting.

Behind the Pericurian trading boat, the bowsprit of a u-boat broke the steaming water's surface, then another and another, ugly black lines of men-o'war masked by the steaming wash flowing off a forest of conning towers; hundreds of submersibles rising up from the depths of the channel leading to Jago's entrance. And to the work crew's horror, the gate's closure had now halted, the rumble of the machines accelerating as they powered up again to open the gates wide, admitting the dark-hulled armada into their realm. None of the snub-nosed mortars and cannons on the bastions of the coral line's gun emplacements were moving into position, let alone shaking the air with the ear-splitting fury of their weekly gunnery practice. The free company soldiers that the work crew could see on the emplacements below seemed unconcerned by the massive fleet's arrival.

Impotently clutching their sledgehammers, the workers on the summit could only look on in stunned disbelief as the first successful breach of Jago's sea defences sailed through the coral line completely unopposed.

Hannah groaned, gasping for breath as Tobias Raffold withdrew a foully reeking bottle of smelling salts from under her nose.

'Ah, lass,' wheezed the commodore, coming into blurred view and offering her a canteen of water. 'I thought you'd had it there for sure. But old Blacky was near enough to hear your screams and pull you out of your tunnel, covered though you were in wicked lights dancing around you like a swarm of angry hornets.'

She was lying down on the ground outside one of the singing buildings, her head aching – not with pain, but with perfect clarity. 'Nandi and the ambassador, get them out of the buildings.'

'They're not inside,' said the trapper's leader. 'It was only you in there.'

'Nandi and Ortin are off. They've made another discovery, lass,' explained the commodore. 'A set of stairs under the floor of one of the tunnel chambers in the mountain, corkscrewing deep underground. There's a lead-lined tabernacle down there filled with scraps of Ortin urs Ortin's blessed scripture and a circle of coffins that looks like a pack of bloodsuckers could have made their nest inside the hall.'

'Not vampires,' coughed Hannah. 'Only forgotten dreams and dust down there now. She went into the buildings, she went inside them all.'

'Who, lass?'

'Bel Bessant. She passed through every last one of these buildings. The machines thought they were healing her, but they were changing her, making her intelligent enough to be able to create something as obscene as the god-formula.'

'You're not making any blessed sense.'

Hannah grabbed the commodore's jacket. 'That's because I can see more clearly now. Don't you see! They destroyed paradise over this, over whether it was right to alter your mind and your body – raise yourself so far and fast ahead of everyone else you wouldn't even be able to recognize yourself by the time you'd finished. Changing the template of your creation. Their minds, new minds, building weapons, so terrible.'

'Your forehead, now,' said the commodore extending a worried palm. 'Your temperature is running wild.'

'Connections, more connections,' spluttered Hannah.' But they're settling down, the density, cooling.'

'Let's take her back to her tent,' Tobias Raffold said to the commodore, looking around nervously. 'Hang me, but I'm getting as superstitious about this damn place as you are.'