Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

'I've used blasting tubes to open up tombs,' Nandi insisted, waving at them. Their shouts were getting louder and angrier, as was the young archaeologist's tone. 'You fools, you're going to be showering pieces of aqueduct down for miles if you detonate this.'

Striding towards Nandi, the free company officer in the RAM suit raised her arm and the air hissed as a razored disk slashed into Nandi's open pilot cabin, a splash of blood spitting across the visor of Hannah's canopy. Hannah stood still, transfixed as Nandi's blood rolled down her glass, hardly hearing the shouts of the free company soldiers surrounding the expedition, or the yells of the trappers they aimed their guns at. Inside the pilot cage of Nandi's machine, the young academic's body had fallen back and the suit translated its occupant's motion, tumbling back and collapsing onto the hard, snow-covered ground.

'I am sorry,' called Ortin urs Ortin, his RAM suit returning from the head of the column. 'They did not understand what she was trying to do. It was an accident!'

Hannah was out of her suit and down beside the fallen machine before she was aware of what she was doing, clambering up towards Nandi's cockpit. She found that Commodore Black was already on the ground and there before her.

'Don't be looking inside, lass.' He pushed Hannah back, shaking himself – whether in anger or shock she couldn't say.

'Nandi!'

'Her head's been taken off. Ah my oath, my word to the professor and this brave girl here with her head taken off. All this way, all this way for this. Nandi Tibar-Wellking, you poor blessed thing.'

'You jiggers!' Hannah screamed at the free company troops advancing on them. 'She was just trying to help you!'

Commodore Black had his empty palms in the air, showing the soldiers he was holding no weapons. 'Quiet now, Hannah. The blood of these brutes is running hot on a hair trigger and you can't help Nandi by joining her along the Circle's turn.'

Ortin urs Ortin was barking at the soldiers in Pericurian, but whatever the ambassador was shouting didn't seem to be calming them down.

'I want this wet-snout on charges,' Tobias Raffold yelled, thrusting his suit's fist towards the free company officer. 'I want this-'

His demands ended as a volley of turret-rifle fire jounced off his suit's armour, the canopy shattering in a storm of crystal as the free company fighters opened up on the trapper from all directions. Hannah was left scrambling over the cold ground, the whine of metal pitons mixed with the sound of splintering iron from the aqueduct behind her. The commodore knocked Hannah down to the icy soil as she was desperately weighing up her options – running for the cover of the ursk-haunted forest or the relative safety of her own RAM suit – a piton flying across where she'd just been standing.

Jared Black was trying to help Hannah to her feet when the hulking free company soldiers overtook them and they both went down in a flurry of blows from the iron grips of turret rifle butts. Hannah was still reeling from the pain when a blunt weapon connected with her head and she lost consciousness. Hannah had a variety of agonies to choose from when she began to regain consciousness, and it was a few seconds before she was able to separate the throbbing in her head from the thud of explosions she could hear around her. She was next to Commodore Black in a cage on the back of one of the trapper's RAM suits, the machine lurching heavily over the landscape.

Then Hannah remembered Nandi and the swollen bruised skin around her eyes stung with tears. Nandi, poor Nandi. She was gone. Her corpse abandoned behind them somewhere in the wilderness. Hannah had never had that many friends on Jago, and now she was left with one less – except that the pain of the memory stung worse, like losing a sister she had never had. Nandi had risked her life to save Hannah from service in the guild, and how badly fate had rewarded the young academic. One second alive and vibrant, the next shot dead. Was this their deadly punishment for disobeying the senatorial will and mounting an expedition to Jago's interior in spite of the insane First Senator's opposition to it? It should have been Hannah who had died, but then, the secret of the final part of the god-formula would have died with her. The secret she could use to fix all this, to bring Nandi back to life. The memory of Nandi's voice echoed in her mind over the sounds of battle outside. 'What would such a thing be but a poorly formed simulacra?'

'Those noises,' Hannah coughed.

'Mortars, rifles and cannons. We're in a shooting war, lass. And I think I know whose…'

Whose soon became clear. The plain outside Hermetica City's battlements was full of Pericurian soldiery, the capital's wall standing silent without the killing hum of electricity that usually flowed along its surface. Rows of tents and makeshift palisades were being raised in its lee. Massive iron cranes had been driven into the top of the black cliffs of Jago, lifting up more Pericurian formations and supplies onto the dark basalt plain from a fleet that lay out of sight below. Every gate in the sloped iron battlements that Hannah could see was wide open, ursine troops marching through.

Commodore Black pointed to a line of new pennants raised from one of the wall's sentry stations. Dozens of triangles of fabric fluttered in the chill arctic wind, each a different colour, each bearing a different tree-oaks, sycamores, blackthorns, camwoods.

'There's the blessed answer, flapping in the breeze. Pericur!'

But the capital was yet to fall entirely. Whatever the state of affairs above ground, there were puffs of rifle smoke rising from the structures built into the slopes of the Horn of Jago, answered by the roar of cannon fire from the Pericurian siege below.

Reaching the lee of the capital's silent battlements, Hannah and the commodore's cage was lowered towards the ground and when the door was sprung, they found themselves facing Ortin urs Ortin, with a ring of Pericurian soldiers pointing turret rifles at them.

'Put your guns down now,' wheezed the commodore. 'There's just me and the girl and I've no weapons nor fight left in me besides.'

'Where's everyone else?' asked Hannah. 'Where are the trappers?'

'They opened fire when Tobias Raffold went down,' whispered the commodore. 'The wet-snouts killed them all. We were only spared because we were out of our suits and already beaten into the snow for our troubles. The ursine weren't there to clear the aqueduct, Hannah. They were there to cut off the city's drinking water supply. The brutes blew it to pieces after they shoved you and me into the cage.'

Hannah looked angrily at the ambassador. 'This is badly done.'

'It is necessary,' said Ortin urs Ortin, motioning at the troops to lower their massive weapons.

Commodore Black indicated the pennants raised above the capital's battlements. 'Those are the flags of the great liberal houses, ambassador. Not the wicked firebrands that follow the archduchess, but your people!'

'It is the only way to secure our fortunes, dear boy,' said the ambassador. 'We will present the baronial council with something no one in history had been able to do before – the removal of all interlopers from the sacred soil of Jago.'

'How can you do this?' Hannah pleaded. 'To Nandi, to the Jagonese?'

'How could we not, young lady?' The ambassador pointed at the lead tabernacle that had been recovered from the chamber deep under the Cade Mountains. 'How can you even ask that after everything that we saw on the other side of the mountains? This land is cursed, nothing can prosper here. Its poisons have infected the Jagonese and your society has been on its deathbed for centuries. Pericur is not here to conquer; we are here as liberators. When we've defeated the nobles who are your jailors, do you think we will need to drag the common people out of their vaults, crying, kicking and fighting at the tips of our sabres? No, we will point to the empty holds of our freighters and offer your people free passage to the colonies across the sea and they will flood away. No more ballot, no more protected professions, no more exile into the wastes for those caught trying to stow away for just the chance of a better life.'