Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

A fist as strong as steel gripped the back of Jethro's neck, pulling him off his knees. It was one of the Pericurians. A fierce scarred grey-furred face stared into his own. The beast was lying on the ground with a sabre driven through her back – mortally wounded, no doubt, but still with enough strength left to crush him. Blood was streaming out of the corner of her mouth. 'This – is – war!'

She dragged Jethro astride her, her arms pulling him down towards the bloody blade jutting out of her own dark leather armour.

'For me – and – you!'

Jethro grunted in agony as he tried to resist his stomach's inevitable inching descent onto the sabre's tip. He was being pulled down to join her in death. Hannah woke up to a darkness filled with spots of light. Was she blind, lying on the seabed with a dwindling reservoir of air, perhaps? No, she could hear the water, but it sounded like the gentle splash of a paddle on the surface. As she stirred, a hand reached out and covered her mouth. A hand covered with rough, bare skin, not ursine fur.

'Keep your voice down,' whispered the silhouette in the darkness. 'There are Pericurian soldiers on these streets.'

Hannah realized she was staring up at the LED panels of a vault roof, malfunctioning by the look of them, dark except for a few flares of light dancing along what was left of the imitation sky. 'Where am I?'

'The Augustine Vault,' said the shadow bending over her. Was that a police militiaman's cloak she could see behind the figure? 'The wet-snouts have taken most of the city now. We're following the Augustine canal east to get to the Seething Round and the Horn of Jago.'

Hannah tried to move, but her shoulder felt as though someone had been using it for a pincushion and left the pins inside. Gradually, her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She was horizontal on the deck of a gondola, warm canal water soaking her clothes. Her diving suit had gone. The crew were using oars rather than poles to move the gondola forward, keeping their profile low down on the water.

'Commodore,' she whispered. 'Are you here?'

'Just you,' said the silhouette, his cloak shifting behind him as he continued to paddle. 'One of the tugmen found you and brought you inside Hermetica. We were expecting a wet-snout to interrogate. Got quite a surprise when we found a missing church girl.'

'My friend,' mumbled Hannah. 'He was in the water with me. We had escaped from the Pericurian fleet.'

'We just found you,' repeated the shadowed figure. 'There's a lot of bodies off the coast now, our and theirs. Our divers got a few mines into their fleet and sent a couple of wet-snout boats down onto the coral. Hah.'

Was the commodore dead? She remembered seeing the torpedo go past, and Commodore Black would have been closer to the underwater blast than her. Another stupid, useless death served up to the altar of religious-motivated conflict? She had to get to the final piece of the god-formula! If she could just do that, she could put everything right. Hannah was distracted by screams in the distance carrying to the canal, followed by a burst of turret-rifle fire.

'Poor fools,' hissed the militiaman. 'People hiding in their houses even after we told them to withdraw back to the Horn.'

'Why is it so dark in here?' Hannah asked quietly.

'Wet-snouts have blown the power lines. Half the city is in darkness now, or running on battery light.'

But it was a darkness that protected the boat from the sentries set by the Pericurian army. Slowly but silently their gondola followed the course of the canal through the blacked-out vault, lit only by the malfunctioning ceiling and the occasional fire from a burning street in the distance. Under empty bridges and past deserted boulevards and squares. Hannah had never seen the city so empty. Even in the near-deserted quarters of Hermetica you could always hear the barking of a dog or smell the distant oven of some solitary resident still living in the home their family had occupied for generations. A lone holdout. There was always the chance of meeting a policeman on patrol, or the city workers out cropping bamboo to ensure it didn't overrun a near-empty vault. But this. This wasn't emptiness, this was desolation. A grim reminder of how Pericur would abandon the capital to the ursks and the ab-locks and the other monsters of the wilds once they had evicted the race of man. Hannah remembered the dusty, empty atmospheric station of the mining town at Worleyn where she, Nandi and the commodore had nearly died; icy winds blowing through cracked roof domes. Was this to be their fate now? She might have been better off staying a prisoner on the Pericurian fleet after all. At least she would have been left with her memories of Hermetica City, as it had been when she and Chalph played across its streets. When Alice Gray had been there to admonish her for missing lessons in the cathedral's school.

Sliding through the darkness, not even daring to cough, Hannah squatted low as the gondola took her across what had once been the city she had known as home. Eventually they entered a tunnel carrying a bad reek, one of the sanitation passages that kept the canal waters moving and clear of refuse that fell in. When the channel became too narrow, the gondola men lifted their vessel out of the water and hauled it up onto one of the walkways, following the dark tunnel on foot to an opening in the next chamber across, before laying the craft down in the next canal and recommencing their voyage.

If seeing the empty war-ravaged vaults had come as a shock, Hannah found the sight of the familiar streets of the Seething Round even more painful, filled with barricades and terrified volunteers pointing rifles towards the increasingly loud explosions and weapons' fire from the neighbouring vaults. Here at least there was light, and all pretence at stealth was abandoned. The chemical battery on the back of the gondola was given noisy life and the prow of their vessel tilted up as they sailed past wrecked canal boats and skips scuppered by their hundred to deny them to the invaders. There at last was the cathedral, but its magnificent stained-glass windows were dark and the bridge over the Grand Canal part-fortified and manned by what appeared to be anyone willing to carry a gun, pike or sabre.

Tying up the boat outside her home, the militiamen led Hannah up the steps into the Horn of Jago and here too was something she had never thought to see on Jago. Crowds. Corridors and passageways crammed with miserable-looking citizens, squatting and sitting, filling up every available space in the once-exclusive district that had belonged to the capital's wealthy, its merchants and administrators and politicians. Now it was home to refugees and everyone who had heeded the call to abandon the vaults below. Almost the entire city was squeezed into its chambers and corridors. She stepped over squabbling children, their mothers shouting at them, and the shell-shocked huddles of the elderly that made up so much of their population. Here was the real face of war, in the grim hopelessness of lined old faces wondering if their few grandchildren would live to see tomorrow.

Hannah was home, but it had never looked so different.

Down and down, every second closer to the sabre's tip. Jethro was so close to the ursine soldier now that he could smell her breath. She was choking to death on her own blood as she drew him near to her, the matted fur on her face contorted with anger.

'I forgive you,' whispered Jethro, kissing the Pericurian's brow as the sword's tip began to press through his waistcoat.

Her eyes widened in shock at his words, as though the touch of his lips had loosed her dying soul to move along the Circle, freeing it into the one sea of consciousness to mingle with all life, waiting to be cupped out again into those yet to be born. She went limp; the stutter of her furnace breath growing silent, and her head fell back. Jethro pulled himself up and rolled off the ursine's corpse. Strangely, he felt no happiness at being alive; he barely knew he was. Standing in the smoke from the rifle fire, the sounds of the melee washing over him, he felt outside of himself, protected by the gun smoke, an observer hovering above the buildings burning all down the street, covering him with soot. Now he was the Jagonese convict thrusting a bayonet forward. He was the Pericurian meeting the thrust with tooth and claw, with steel that had been sharpened in distant glades. He was the ursine lying dead at his feet. And he was himself again.