Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

So, young Hannah Conquest was safely returned. Perhaps the gods had been looking after her.

'All she needs now is to see her people as they really are, and there's nothing like a good war to put a shine on your kind's true nature.'

There was a moment's silence as Badger-headed Joseph waited for a reaction from the ex-parson. But the ancient spirit was to be disappointed. 'Have you not even the breath to deny us?'

'Not today, good emissary,' said Jethro. 'This day, I'm going to do the one thing your kind truly can't suffer. I'm going to forget you, and by the time I'm finished on this island, you're going to be just another echo lost in history, your idols threepenny curiosities in an antique shop – good for a bookend or a doorstop.' Jethro started laughing and the voice hissed in anger at his mockery, the hiss transforming into the steam escaping from Boxiron's stack.

The steamman was shaking Jethro awake. 'I'm glad you can find some amusement in our confinement. Clear your eyes of sleep. Something is happening outside. Cell doors are being opened up along the corridor and I have heard gunfire in the distance.'

Jethro rubbed his tired eyes. 'It's a war.'

'Jago is unassailable, Jethro softbody,' said Boxiron. 'If I wore my old war frame and had every steamman knight that ever served King Steam given to my command, I would still not wish to assault this place.'

'Perhaps,' said Jethro, touching his heart. 'But that's not where the war that matters is going to be fought.'

From outside their cell came a clanking, then the door was pushed inward and the space filled by a fat militiaman. 'It's your lucky day, my bucks. Follow the others up the stairs to the courtyard level. Draw a rifle. You're going to get to fight for your freedom.'

'I'm not a soldier,' said Jethro.

'Everyone's a soldier today, friend.'

'Who is the foe?' asked Boxiron.

'It's the wet-snouts, metal shanks. Seems they got tired of bleeding us dry slowly with their trading boats. Now they're here to finish the job fast with their armies.'

'We are Jackelian citizens,' protested Jethro.

'The wet-snouts are climbing down the shafts and killing everyone they come across,' said the militiaman, impatiently jingling his keys and kicking straw on the floor at them. 'When they find you they won't see a kingdom man, they'll see meat to decorate the end of their bayonet. Now get out – any prisoner who's not joining up today, we're hanging.'

Jethro noted the evidence of that in front of the police fortress, a gallows erected between two statues of mastiffs, the granite hunting hounds carved with leather hoods covering their eyes. The statues might have been symbolically blinded to the status of those the police pursued, but Jethro needed to turn his face away from the figures hanging in warning from their ropes – militiamen tugging at the boots of one of the recent thrashing additions, a recalcitrant who clearly hadn't been cleanly finished by the drop from the trapdoor. Was Jethro's reaction hypocritical, he wondered? He had worked with Ham Yard back in Jackals to send many a killer to such a fate. But he had never joined the crowds outside Bonegate Prison on a hanging day to see the final result of his labours.

Filing to a table set up in the shadow of the gallows with the other prisoners, Jethro found a long rifle pushed into his hands, an ugly length of steel with an intricate clockwork firing mechanism mounted on an engraved brass lock-plate.

'This still has oil on it,' Jethro said to the bald militiaman lifting the long guns out of wooden crates piled behind the table.

'It's new. Wipe the barrel clean on your sleeve and then sod off.'

Jethro was shoved forward by one of the militiamen guarding them, the slippery gun almost falling out of his hands. Yes. New rifles for a surprise attack by Pericur.

Behind him, Boxiron was thrusting his rifle back at the militiaman behind the table. 'The trigger will not accommodate my fingers. Your weapons mill has made them too small.'

'Beg your pardon, my lord,' spat the militiaman. 'We'll get our gunsmith to commission you your own personal piece in gold. In the meantime, you'll bloody fight like everyone else.'

Boxiron reached behind the table and picked up one of the sledgehammers the militiamen had been using to crack open the wooden rifle crates.

'That's just a hammer,' said the militiaman.

'In your hands, perhaps,' corrected Boxiron, his body hulking above the militiaman's frame. 'In mine it is a warhammer.'

'You are too eager, old steamer,' Jethro said to Boxiron as they cleared the line. 'This is not our fight and you know your hands shake too much for a gun to be of use to you.'

'I will not let us die here, Jethro softbody. I know you won't raise your rifle to protect yourself, there is too much of the parson left in you.'

'As I fear there is too much of a steamman knight left in you.'

'I still have a head for war,' agreed Boxiron.

That was what Jethro feared, that and a hulking body that had been used for murder before Boxiron had allowed himself to be saved from the flash mob's clutches by a young ex-parson recently defrocked from the rational orders.

'I have exceedingly few friends left who do not shun me,' said Jethro. 'I would not see that number dwindle still further, good steamman.'

'Avert your eyes, Jethro softbody. You will find this distasteful.' The steamman fell to his knees, his voicebox echoing in machine song with the names of his ancestors, the Loas of his people – Steelbhalah Waldo, Legba of the Valves, Magnet-e-rouge. But he never prayed to his Loas anymore, not to those that had forsaken him…

'They did not come,' said Jethro as his friend fell silent and stood up.

'I did not ask them to,' said Boxiron. 'For all your studies of religions to deny, I think you still do not understand what it is to believe.'

All around them, the lines of released prisoners were being formed into companies and dispatched to various vaults, given the names of streets where barricades had been set up and airshafts where the police militia expected the Pericurians to strike next. The two of them were assigned to a group of perhaps twenty convicts who – with the exception of the hammer-wielding steamman – were each given a pouch of rifle charges. Then they marched through the streets to their position. Along all of the canal sides, the capital's inhabitants were being led away in the opposite direction – women carrying wailing infants, old men with sacks filled with hastily collected family silver, money and whatever other valuables they could snatch before the militiamen banging on their doors lost patience.

'They are heading back towards the stairs leading up into the Horn of Jago,' said Jethro.

'A sound strategy,' said Boxiron, 'considering the foe have control of the surface. Once the surface is gained, the vaults of this city are not defensible. The Pericurians can strike at will through the airshafts and if the invaders blocked the vents, the city's inhabitants would slowly suffocate. Inside the mountain the defenders have air, windows to snipe from and a high slope that must be stormed. They will not be easily taken there.'

'You needn't sound so pleased about it,' said one of the convicts shuffling alongside them. 'We're the poor buggers they're asking to hold the vaults. What did you two foreign lads get taken for? Killing a sailor, smuggling, taking on board stowaways?'

'Nothing,' said Jethro. 'We are innocent.'

'Me too,' guffawed the convict. 'It's just that one of the police fell on a knife when I was filling my pockets. Clumsy bastard. The very best I had waiting for me if a judge took pity on me was the senator's picnic outside the walls. But now? I reckon they'll give me a medal if I stick a few wet-snouts the same as I did Knipe's man.' He flicked the bayonet fitted on the end of his rifle and made a crude slurping noise as he imagined his blade piercing an ursine body.