Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

Father Blackwater tried to grab Hannah's arm, but the colonel barked and his militiamen grabbed the Circlist priest, dragging him away as he begged them not to do this terrible thing.

There was a whisper in the corridor, lost in the rattle of a falling shell across the slopes outside. If Hannah had listened harder she might have heard the triumphant hiss of Badger-headed Joseph.

'Soon. Soon.' Jethro Daunt stumbled along the street after Boxiron, the steamman's stacks releasing spears of smoke into the water cascading down around them. When a serious fire gripped the streets at the centre of their vault, a line of brass nozzles had pushed up and out of the canals, raining water down across the buildings, while canals refilled with boiling seawater pumped in from the harbour to enhance the flows of the seeping water table.

The ex-parson of Hundred Locks knew little of war, little beyond the antiquarian history texts he had inherited from an uncle long passed away. Their coloured plates full of manoeuvring oblongs and squares, arrows indicating the sweep of companies and cavalry units, bore little resemblance to the confusion of war on the ground. No illustration could convey the taste of gun smoke or the acrid churning pit of fear in each fighter's gut. In this environment, of falling water and billowing steam, Jethro was little more than bait, the scent of the race of man necessary to bring the Pericurians running into the blunt end of Boxiron's warhammer. They were lost in a surreal nightmare. Separated from the other convict fighters in the confusion, they ran from forces large enough to rout the two of them, attacking smaller groups, once glimpsing a marching column of militiamen through the smoke, a ghost company whose existence Jethro was beginning to doubt.

Almost as strange a sight as the familiar-looking figure revealed when the smoke parted in the breeze, a man sitting by the canal side, legs dangling down as though he was waiting for someone to bring him an angler's rod and tackle.

'Commodore Black!' said Jethro. 'Dear Circle, good captain, what are you doing here?'

The commodore turned towards them and Jethro noted that the old u-boat man's left arm was in a makeshift sling, the remains of a torn diving costume shredded around his shoulder. Boxiron followed after Jethro, the steamman's gear assembly slipping back into second naturally, without the ex-parson having to intervene as he so often had in the past.

'Trying to get my breathing tank off, Mister Daunt,' said the commodore. 'A wicked hard task with the use of only one arm, and me hoping I can do it before a Pericurian spots me and puts a sharp bolt through my ill-starred skull.'

'You are wounded,' said Boxiron.

'My diving suit was torn out in the boils beyond the harbour, leaving my arm here as rare as I have my roast beef served back home.'

'The harbour?' Jethro helped Boxiron to unstrap the large air tank from the commodore's back. 'But the expedition, Hannah and Nandi – what were you doing at sea?'

'Trying to get out of it, lad. That jigger Ortin urs Ortin handed us over to the great fleet of Pericur. Poor Nandi and the others didn't have the luck to survive our greeting by the wet-snouts. Hannah Conquest is alive, though. I saw her dragged away by Jagonese divers – taken back into the city. Poor old Blacky would have had it away with them too, were it not for being half-buried under the Black Cliffs of Jago thanks to a wet-snout torpedo. But there's a game or two left for fate to play against me, or she wouldn't have blown the grille off a sewer pipe and laughed at me as I dug myself out from under the rubble and then swam through most of the shit of this city.'

'Did you find William of Flamewall's body?' said Jethro, desperately. 'The third part of the god-formula?'

'Ah, we found your murdering runaway priest for you,' said the commodore. 'And a lot more besides. But not your church's wicked weapon.'

Jethro listened as the commodore explained all that had happened to the expedition in the wilds, and made the stunning revelation that the secret of the third piece of the god-formula had been concealed in the final painting of the rational trinity all the time.

'It cannot be,' interrupted Boxiron. 'I scanned the image of the third painting – it was blank of any concealed steganography. It was merely a hoax by William of Flamewall.'

'I only know what Hannah said, old steamer,' wheezed the commodore, rotating his wounded arm now that it was out from under his air tank's weight. 'We just didn't look deep enough. Who's to say it's not a fancy of young Hannah's mind after all that we've been through, eh? Surviving the terrors of the wilds beyond the wall, the poor girl finding her mother's bones and Nandi being added to the butcher's bill. And for what? Just so the wet-snouts can call time on the last Jagonese clinging onto their terrible isle. Maybe the existence of this mortal fancy is only what she needs to make the world make sense? Poor mad Hannah, crying that she's going to save us all from our troubles.'

'We just didn't look deep enough,' said Jethro. He slapped his forehead in annoyance. 'Of course! She saw it and I should have too. The painting doesn't contain the third section of the god-formula, it's a clue to the location of the missing piece. Here in the capital, all this time, hang my foolishness.'

'Then I'm a fool along with you,' said the commodore, 'for I still don't see it.'

'Jethro softbody,' said Boxiron. 'If she is close to the third section of the god-formula and she intends to try to use it…'

'She is in danger, greater even than she knows,' said Jethro. 'The third section of the god-formula will be encrypted in a steganographic cipher similar to that of the first two. We have as long as it takes her to find and decrypt the missing piece to stop this thing!'

Jethro touched Boxiron's shoulder and pointed to the tank of air they had removed from the commodore's back. 'Lift that cylinder up if you please. I fear we will have use for it soon.'

'I'm done diving, Mister Daunt,' said the commodore.

'We have the Circle's work to do,' said Jethro, 'but it's not at sea.'

Boxiron and the commodore followed the ex-parson of Hundred Locks as he sprinted off into the billowing smoke. Coming along the corridor leading up to the stained senate, the militiaman saluted Colonel Knipe and held out a pouch of papers – the first two parts of the god-formula that had been locked up by Jethro Daunt in the safe of the Hotel Westerkerk. 'It was where the damson said it would be, colonel.'

Colonel Knipe's eyes narrowed. 'So, it's true after all. Damn the Inquisition's eyes. All this time they knew, playing us for fools.'

'The church was guarding the first two parts,' said Hannah, feeling that she had to explain on behalf of her dead guardian. 'And those only kept for a counter-weapon to be developed.'

'Damn Circlist fools,' said the colonel. 'They are as bad as the city guilds with their plotting and scheming and secrets.' He saw the hurt look in Hannah's eyes and placed a hand on her shoulder. 'I know the church was to be your calling and what I am asking you to do is not an easy thing. You may not have been born in our vaults, but your heart is Jagonese, and by your actions here you have declared yourself as much a patriot as any of us here fighting for our liberty.'

'I just want to save us,' said Hannah. 'To bring back those that didn't need to be hurt by this stupid war.'

'We must trust that you can,' said the colonel. 'I lost my wife and children during the collapse of one of our cities. You, I, our people, we have all paid too much to stay on Jago to allow ourselves to become slaves of those bloody savages on the surface.'

As if underlining his words, the booming thunder of the invaders' bombardment grew heavier. Pieces of cracked glass crashed down from the lintels that had been turned into fire steps for the riflemen. At the other end of the corridor the lifting room doors opened and three runners emerged, their militia uniforms torn and covered in dust and blood. They ran up to the colonel and delivered their reports. Hannah listened intently to the grim news. Almost all of the vaults were cut off from each other and overrun, the bulk of the Pericurian legions down inside Hermetica City now, the Seething Round itself being assaulted, the officer below advising that they needed to make a staged retreat to the mountain fastness of the Horn of Jago and seal the mountain levels off while they still could.