Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

Soon the police militia would be fighting the Pericurians off the steps leading into the mountain as well as shooting down the assaults being led up the Horn's slopes. The only good news was that the Guild of Valvemen's forces had been sighted moving towards the city from the north.

'Too little too late,' sighed Colonel Knipe. 'Damson,' he said, looking into Hannah's eyes. 'The third part of your church weapon, which vault is it hidden in?'

'It's not in the city below,' said Hannah. 'It's here in the Horn of Jago. I know more or less where it is, but-'

'Begin searching now,' said the colonel. He clicked his fingers and two of his officers stepped forward. 'Guard this girl's life as if all of our fortunes depended on it. I will join you after our final defences are put in place.' Colonel Knipe watched the young churchwoman leave with his two guards, and then he motioned his commanders to the table. 'It is time, gentlemen. Withdraw the militia units back to the mountain, then seal the doors below.'

'There are still people fighting in the vaults, colonel.'

'Convicts, the scrapings of our gutter,' said Colonel Knipe. 'Their deaths will give society the service their miserable lives did not.' He motioned for his staff of office to be brought to him and he pushed it into a socket, exposing the control keys running along its length. Colonel Knipe looked at his men and the edge of his mouth turned up into a grim smile. 'Those heathen savages put such faith in their scriptures; let us do the Pericurians one final kindness. Let us reunite the wet-snouts with their barbaric gods in the sky!'

His fingers began to play across the keys. And everything changed.

Boxiron shoulder-charged the two Pericurian soldiers who had stumbled out of the smoke, smashing in the skull of one with his warhammer while landing a large iron fist in the other's stomach, the black leather armour crumpling under the impact as the Pericurian soldier fell unconscious – or perhaps lifeless – under the brute strength of the massive steamman.

'That way!' shouted Jethro, pointing over one of the bridges. The water level appeared to be rising now, the machines that regulated the water table of the subterranean city disabled in the fighting. Not even draining the water to fight the fires could halt the coming flood down here.

'We must be close to the Horn of Jago,' wheezed the commodore as he wearily waved his sabre down the burning street. 'Let us rest a little, Jethro Daunt. I have a few years on your legs and lack the stout boiler heart of the old steamer here.'

'I fear we cannot,' said Jethro. 'A minute may cost us our lives.'

'So you say, so you say. Poor old Blacky, driven out of his rest by the corrupt officials of the Jackelian state, dragged through the evil wilds of Jago, burnt by the Fire Sea and crushed by rocks, crawling through turds for the sake of his precious duty, and now forced to run through a burning city while Pericurian brutes take pot-shots at him. Just a minute's respite, that's not much to ask for. A small rest while I hope for the fires of this flaming city to pass me by.'

As if listening to his complaints, there was a sound almost like a sigh from the burning buildings along the street the three of them were heading down, the fires seeming to bank down, some of the flames in the upper windows winking out altogether.

Commodore Black shook his head in amazement. 'Has Lord Tridentscale listened to an old seadrinker's prayers?'

'If he has, then he has answered them with your death,' warned Jethro. 'Run! Run, good captain, run for your life!'

All around them the fires were dying out, flickering away as the vault's air was replaced with something else, something that reeked of rot and their final demise. Ortin urs Ortin winced within the protection of the ring of fortifications surrounding the Horn of Jago. Deep, thick walls of concrete might be enough to protect its occupants from the police militia bullets flying down the slopes, but it wasn't enough to preserve those inside from the fury of Stom urs Stom berating her officers for failing to take the mountain.

'Are you cubs?' she shouted at her lieutenants, 'When you have three divisions of artillery at your rear? No, you are the chosen, and a few furless devils with police rifles are stalling your advance. You dare give me such news!'

'We have taken almost all of the city below,' protested one of her fighters. 'Their soft belly is nearly exposed to our claws.'

Stom urs Stom shook her head in anger. 'Can you smell that scent? It is the fear of those inside the mountain. Have the guards of each house raise their standards and prepare to charge the slopes. I shall lead the final push myself.'

'Without too many casualties, dear captain,' added Ortin urs Ortin. 'We will not serve our purpose in the eyes of the other nations if Jago's fall becomes a massacre. We need live Jagonese to land on the colonies.'

'We shall slay any of the cursed furless spawn of Amaja urs Amaja raising a weapon against us. For this I have the authority of the House of Ush.'

'You must minimize the loss of life,' insisted Ortin.

'You show weakness, Ambassador. Do you think this is a consular negotiation we are executing? We wage only one sort of war, and it comes with victory attached to it. Speak with the baroness if you would have it otherwise. She is waiting at the foot of the slopes with the general staff. Within the hour I shall hand her the reconquest of our sacred soil as if it was the coronation sceptre of the archduchess itself.'

'That is precisely what it shall be,' said Ortin. 'But only if we do this thing well.'

As Ortin started to follow the advance party out of the bunker he could hear the clanging of multiple blast doors closing throughout the fortifications. Pericurian soldiers locked on the other side of the steel doors Ortin had just exited began to bang and shout in confusion as the mechanical loading arms of the great mortars and cannon emplacements they had thought themselves masters of, instead proved to be subservient to the will of the automated machinery of the capital. Out on the surface, steel barrels jutting twenty feet high swivelled on hundreds of concrete domes and lowered into place.

Ortin did not yet know it, but the automatic action of the bristling fortifications ringing the Horn of Jago was being mirrored by the massive gun emplacements out on the coral line, vast cannons that had scared away so many invaders in the past now lowering to face the hundreds of Pericurian u-boats anchored in the shadow of the black headland of Jago. Ortin was almost out of the fort's entrance when the shuddering of the ground knocked him off his feet, his eardrums near perforated as the titanic gunnery of Jago spoke in anger for the first time in close to a thousand years. The ambassador was left just about sensible enough to drag his shaking body upright in time to watch dark dots swelling larger in the sky above him.

Being a subterranean civilization, the burghers of Jago hadn't needed to worry about the potential casualties that would be caused by shells as large as carts spitting out of their cannons and landing on their own soil. The blast from the bombardment's first wave threw Ortin back into the fort's entrance, as the air filled with shrapnel and pulverized basalt rock fragments. Boom after boom, fire and fury, intense enough to suck the air out of his lungs, the single minute of that salvo seemed like an entire day to the ambassador. Then silence. Everything still except for the sad pattering rain of smoking debris falling. Outside, one of the pennants that hadn't been shredded by the explosions fluttered through the air on fire, carried by the cold wind into the boils off the coast. There it landed, ignored by the hundreds of screaming sailors treading the boiling water, unnoticed by those jumping out of exploding, sinking, splitting u-boats. Some of the sailors were trying to swim towards the boats that hadn't been wrecked in the rain of hell, but the surviving vessels were submerging, a few trying to turn back towards the coral ring holding back the worst of the Fire Sea's lapping magma. Those that reached its shadow found the great gates of the harbour had been closed on them, trapping the u-boats inside the killing zone. Those that didn't soon discovered that the automated magazines of the coral line hadn't just been loaded with shells.