Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

'No!' shouted Hannah. 'We've got to blow the remaining buildings, finish the work that William of Flamewall began. None of them can be allowed to stand, none of them!' Hannah watched the smoke rise out of the buildings on Bloodglass Island from the other side of the glassy plain. Their song had changed now, discordant and ugly after the last explosion had rocked the final building – the same structure that had recounted the tale of Jago's lost paradise to her. She still didn't know if it was the race of man or the ursine who had been in favour of advancing their minds into something so ingenious and alien that those that remained behind must have seemed as insignificant as insects.

It hardly mattered. That dream was an abomination and she, like William of Flamewall, had decided that the buildings had to be destroyed. Would Hannah have made the same decision if she had been able to pass through each building in turn, each one pushing her further and further away from the template she had been born to? Bel Bessant clearly hadn't. She had made a different choice. The rest of humanity must have appeared like drooling household pets to her as she worked on her god-formula – still not satisfied with being so far ahead of the rest of her kind. She had wanted to accelerate the process with another step-change of complexity and raise herself to the status of godhood without a backward glance to those she would have abandoned to their mortality. Following her course even having seen the wreckage of what had been lost. Would Hannah's mother have resisted the same temptation if her leg hadn't killed her before she could unlock the buildings' secrets? Hannah suspected not. Her mother couldn't have gone quite as far as Bel Bessant, not with William of Flamewall's vandalism of the last few chambers. But driven by revenge she might have gone far enough. Hannah looked sadly at her mother's grave. Perhaps the fever of that mangled leg had done her mother a favour after all?

The expedition's RAM suits needed to be charged on the other side of the mountain tunnel and they were finished here. Hannah had lived up to the trust that Jethro Daunt had placed in her, and the Pericurian ambassador was ecstatic that he had his fragments from a tabernacle to prove there were literal as well as spiritual dimensions to his people's liturgy. Hannah did not disabuse him. She did not tell him that the earliest writings of his people's faith were the distorted ramblings of sixth generation survivors of an ancient war, living like beasts in caves, poisoned and degenerate and not yet healed by their sleeping scientist-priests. Well, the Pericurian faith was as good as any other religion, she supposed. Power without wisdom. Science fallen to superstition. The ancients who had lived here had come so close. If only they had tempered their mastery of the world with an equal understanding of their own nature, what a world they might have built around them!

And Ortin urs Ortin wasn't the only happy one. Nandi now carried with her the ground-shaking revelation of a prior civilization that predated the migrant Jagonese by so many millennia that it was impossible even to calculate the time scale of their existence. The commodore was simply happy that Nandi's research had run its course and his precious u-boat would soon be able to sail away leaving the black cliffs of Jago behind him.

What Hannah still hadn't told any of her friends was that her dangerously quick new brain had worked out the final resting place of the missing third section of the god-formula, and it certainly wasn't ashes left over from an incineration centuries earlier, blowing as dust around the bones of William of Flamewall. It was back in Hermetica City. Tobias Raffold's RAM suit stopped under the wan light of the aqueduct's lamps, the other members of the expedition slowing to a halt behind the trapper.

Commodore Black was standing next to Hannah. The u-boat man's voice echoed around her pilot cabin. 'Not more beasts? Can they not leave us alone now that we're nearly out of the wilderness?'

'There's free company soldiers ahead, some in suits and some on foot,' announced the trapper, examining the scene through a magnification plate.

'Protecting the city's maintenance workers?' asked Hannah.

'I can just see the soldiers,' said the trapper, lowering the plate from his face. 'No workers.'

'Are they waiting for us, then?' wondered the commodore. 'With a warrant of arrest from the prickly madman that rules this place? Ah, that's too bad. No doubt one of his blessed new vaults has caved in while we've been off journeying and he wants to lock us all up as saboteurs.'

'I say we don't find out,' said Tobias Raffold, 'we bypass them through the forest and-'

His plan was interrupted by the hiss of a flare from the leg of one of the suits, a shimmering red umbrella of light extending over the expedition as the burning tube drifted in the mistfingered wind above their heads. There were shouts from lower down the aqueduct's course, the free company soldiers turning towards the expedition's position.

'Which bloody idiot…?' the trapper shouted.

'My apologies, dear boy,' called the ambassador. 'The flare handle caught on my sleeve as I was trying to bring my magnification plate up. These machines really aren't built for someone of my bulk.'

'You've paid for us to be out here,' said the trapper, angrily, 'and if Silvermain's pets are waiting for us, you might just have put paid to us too with your clumsiness.'

'Those were idle threats made against us before we left,' said the ambassador. 'I carry diplomatic immunity. I'm sure there is nothing here that cannot be reasonably negotiated.' He passed the trapper and walked down towards the advancing free company soldiers.

'Fine for him,' the commodore muttered to Hannah and Nandi. 'It's just the mortal rest of us that'll end up rotting in the senate's dungeons.'

A couple of minutes later the ambassador returned, followed by a free company officer in a RAM suit. 'There we are. Nobody has been posted to arrest us. An ursk pack has been carrying stones to the top of the aqueduct to block the water supply in the hope of luring out a meal from the city to fix it. This unit has arrived to clear the blockage. Not only shall we be back at Hermetica City shortly, we now have an armed escort to protect us on the remainder of our journey.'

'How far are we from the city? Hannah asked the free company officer.

'She only understands Pericurian, dear girl,' the ambassador answered for the soldier.

'Oh,' said Hannah. That was odd. Most of the free company soldiers had picked up at least a smattering of Jagonese during their time on the island.

'We're close enough to home,' said the trapper.

Close enough. Yes. How good it would be to leave the sweat-stained confines of her RAM suit's cabin behind at last. Stretch her legs on the streets of Hermetica. Sit down at a tea table and watch the traffic of the Grand Canal without worrying about ursks and ab-locks hiding in ambush around the corner. And to think she used to believe that her mattress back at the cathedral was hard.

As they moved past the unit of soldiers, Nandi's RAM suit slowed in front of Hannah, stopping in front of the aqueduct. The young archaeologist leaned in for a closer look before popping her skull dome to inspect a series of cords dangling from the construction.

'This is wrong!' Nandi called.

The others in the expedition halted, the free company soldiers at the front of the aqueduct backing away from them. Nandi indicated the hanging cords to the soldiers. 'You can't use this many blasting tubes to clear a blockage up there. You'll bring the whole thing down on top of you.'

The soldiers were shouting up at the archaeologist's open canopy. Hannah's grasp of Pericurian was shaky, but she was sure they were telling the archaeologist to step back.