Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

'This is too easy!'

'Don't doubt my genius, lass.'

'Genius be hanged,' said Hannah. 'A punch card concealed within a heel? This is one of the transaction engines you supplied the Pericurians with from Jackals and it's been tampered with, hasn't it? What's going on here?'

'A fine church mind,' whispered the commodore, not taking his eyes off his task. 'As tight as a trap and wasted on all that Circlist cant. The state back home has something heavy on me, lass, and they've been using it to blackmail an old fool out of his much deserved rest. The great liberal houses in Pericur might have their hands on the Kingdom's transaction engines, but they're still the Kingdom's engines.'

'You're a spy!' said Hannah.

'Not a willing one,' said the commodore, grunting as he slipped his makeshift punch card into the lock's engine. 'A poor fool caught up in the great game. A dupe. Pericur would have got their hands on transaction engines anyway; if not from us, from the Cassarabians. And if the information that whispers across the drums of Pericur's engines can be picked up by card-sharps in the employ of the state's intelligencers, well, supplying the infernal contraptions still turned a little profit for me. A sorry recompense for what the wet-snouts would have done to me if they discovered I was playing them false.'

He finished his work with a flourish, the pick from his shoe briefly a conductor's baton, before he placed his ear to the bulkhead. 'I can hear the throb of the boat's engines. We're not on the blessed surface.' He picked up one of the drops of water crying from the rivets and let it roll down his thumb. 'And we're running not too shallow with it.'

Hannah looked horrified. 'We're not leaving Jago already?'

They couldn't! Everything depended on her being able to get to the final piece of the god-formula.

Commodore Black shook his head. 'No. You stay close to the surface of the boils to keep an eye on the magma shifting, never out of periscope depth. My guess is the Pericurians have sappers in dive gear working to clear the entrance to the harbour on the seabed. If they can sail this wicked fleet of theirs right into Hermetica City's submarine pens, then they can open up a second front, come at the poor blessed Jagonese from below and above at the same time.'

'If the fleet can get into the city that way,' said Hannah, 'then so can we.'

'I would not pick the waters of the Fire Sea to give you your first diving lesson, lass. We'll need insulated suits, heavy gear, and there will be Pericurian navy divers in the water, while the crabs on Jago's coast scuttle about as large as carts and as mean as a Jackelian mountain lion.'

He saw the look she gave him and moaned as if he was mired in the scalding waters already. 'Then it is to be duty. So be it and I've come to expect nothing better, curse my unlucky stars. I'll do it for you and the chance to bring poor Nandi back.'

Hannah listened carefully to the instructions the old u-boat man imparted to her. The commodore assured her that in the case of the Cassarabian-designed submarine they were imprisoned on, their uncomfortable brig would be located between the boat's orlop deck and the bilges, and that the diving chamber should lie just down the corridor from them. The two of them waited for the next meal of thin gruel to be slotted through the feeding vent in the bottom of the door. Not because, as Hannah first suspected, the commodore wanted to escape on a full belly – but as an indicator that the boat's mess would also be fully occupied, with as many of the Pericurian sailors off the decks as they could hope for.

Minutes after the footsteps of the sailor charged with feeding them had died away, the commodore sprang the lock and the door retracted into the ceiling. There were no marines inside the small brig office outside, nor a master of arms – all the fighters were otherwise occupied on Jago. The commodore managed to break open the locker where their belongings had been stowed, retrieving his sabre while cursing the thieving paws of the ursine that had stolen the expensive pistol he kept concealed inside his great coat.

As the commodore had promised, it was only a short way down the corridor to the diving chamber, both Hannah and the u-boat man's strength needed to spin the iron wheel on the door in the deck to reveal a simmering pool of water in the middle of the floor. There were diving costumes racked on the wall – triple-insulated canvas. The massive brass helmets shaped like shark heads had hard crystal lenses where the sharks' eyes would have been. Commodore Black lifted the complex arrangement of lead weighted belts, buoyancy compensators and auto-inflation hoses over Hannah after she had donned her ridiculously large suit – cut for an ursine, not for someone of her slight build. Then he bid Hannah sit on the edge of the frothing water as he lifted the tank and regulator onto her back; her spine almost crumpling from the weight of it.

Donning an arrangement similar in almost every way apart from the better fit on his almost ursine-sized frame, the commodore lifted a spear gun out of the rack and pilfered a couple of underwater flares, then, with a final check on the air hose's connection to the back of Hannah's helmet, they both dropped through the tight enclosure of the airlock pool. Circle's teeth, it was hot inside, even with the protective layers of the suit going rigid around Hannah's legs, arms and chest. Then they were dropping down into the burning waters of Jago proper, the dark hull of the Pericurian u-boat squatting ominously above them, the green fronds of an underwater forest rippling below. Forward of their position lay the basalt rocks of the island's submerged harbour, the alien-looking buildings fronting the tunnels that led away from the underwater harbour lit by the flares of enemy divers and u-boat lanterns. Dozens of vessels were suspended in the sea in front of the underwater cliffs, their lights making the beads of sweat rolling down Hannah's eyepieces glint like stars.

Hannah's breathing inside the helmet sounded unnaturally loud, echoed by the rasping of the regulator, as though she was sharing the suit with someone else. Distracted by the noise, she almost lost sight of the commodore, unused to the sensation of moving and locating someone in the three dimensions of this hot, viscous world. How unlike the experience of swimming in the city's public baths, or jumping off bridges into canals on festival days this was – it must be how a bird felt when flying. Hannah spotted the commodore below her. He was waving at her to move down, to follow the fronds of the strange underwater forest towards the harbour tunnels. As they got closer to the island's submerged base, the commodore slowly angled around and pointed to the dozens of Pericurian divers in front of them, tiny shapes marked by the flash of their underwater cutting gear, cables running back to the u-boats at their rear. Hannah followed the old u-boat man into the undulating seaweed that would cover their approach, colourful fish as large as shields dodging effortlessly out of their way. They emerged from the underwater forest at the foot of one of the metal carvings to the side of the ornamental entrance to the harbour created by the ancient Jagonese. It was a bronze devilfish, ninety feet tall, sitting on a row of scallops, each shell bearing the arms of an ancient senatorial seat. The devilfish's metal tentacles were rolled up around it and Hannah saw that the suckers of its arms were actually pipe-ends capped by grilles. The discoloration in the water told her exactly what this was – a sewage outlet for the city, Hermetica's machines still dumbly following the pattern of their creation even during the surprise assault of the holy war forced upon Jago.

Commodore Black tested one of the grilles with his diving suit's gloves, but despite using all his strength he wasn't able to dislodge the thing. Hannah nervously checked for Pericurian divers off to their right. She and the commodore hadn't been spotted yet. No, the Pericurians weren't interested in sewage outlets barely large enough to admit a single diver – they needed to open the way for their entire war fleet to enter the capital en masse.