Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

They contained depth charges too. 'I suppose,' said Colonel Knipe to his men, closing the panel on his staff of office, 'that to a savage, one set of buttons must look quite like another.'

He walked to the fire step, mounted it, and then extended his telescope, scanning the smoking carnage below. Out on the walls, he noted that the severed heads of the First Senator and his lackeys hadn't been dislodged from the pikes where they had been mounted by the wet-snouts. But then the city's fire control systems were programmed never to directly hit the battlements, even if the basalt plains behind and in front of the wall had been reduced to smoking, cratered ruins littered with the invaders' carcasses.

'A bigger fool than anyone suspected,' Knipe muttered to himself.

Especially if Silvermain had thought that any commander of the police militia would voluntarily surrender the real master control functions of the capital's defences to a bunch of dirty wet-snouts for hire. Even Boxiron was starting to falter, stumbling under the weight of the commodore's Pericurian dive tank. Jethro and the old u-boat man were sharing the regulator at the end of the air hose as they coughed and blundered their way through the Seething Round. It wasn't smoke they were pushing through now. It was thick, choking clouds of gas, forcing the air out of the vaults and entering Jethro's lungs as a rasping fire between each sweet suck on the diving tank's reserves. They had been luckier than the bodies they were nearly tripping over, though, Pericurian soldiers and Jagonese alike. Luckier than them.

Boxiron was stalling, Jethro could tell that. It wasn't just the weight of the tank. The steamman might lack lungs, but his powerful boiler heart needed to inject supercharged air into his valves, not this poisonous soup suffocating the city.

Jethro was sucking on the regulator when the commodore grunted, still holding his breath and pointed to their right. Beyond the great inverted spires of Jago's cathedral hanging from the vault's ceiling, lost in the swirling clouds of poison, was the large stone staircase that led up into the wealthy centre of Hermetica City, up into the hollowed mountain. They were almost too late. At the staircase's top, vast fire doors were rolling shut, a dwindling strip of light left by the doors' rumbling closure.

As the three companions redoubled their speed in a last desperate sprint towards the top of the stairs, each tread an agony, Jethro heard the shouts of police militiamen from inside the mountain heart of the capital.

Boxiron had abandoned the heavy air tank and was dragging Jethro now, the commodore ahead of both of them, developing a turn of speed that was quite unexpected from a man of his bulk. Jethro and Boxiron crashed through the closing gap, Jethro feeling the door barge painfully into his shoulder as they cleared the closing wall of steel with barely an inch to spare. There was a resounding clang from behind them as the doors sealed shut. The three of them collapsed onto their knees, Jethro and Commodore Black hacking and coughing their guts out while the lid of Boxiron's stacks spat out great swathes of dirty smoke as he opened up all his bodily systems again.

One of the militiamen pushed his pistol back into his holster and helped Jethro to his feet. 'I won't be playing cards against any of you three. You're the luckiest bastards on Jago.'

'Lucky is it?' hacked the commodore, pulling himself up. He stopped for a second to catch another clean breath. 'Is that what you call it, to be smoked out of the city like a wicked swarm of wasps?'

'Gas,' said the militiaman, 'not smoke. The colonel worked out a way to tank the gas bleeds and pump the whole lot of it back into the vaults.'

'How fortunate,' said Jethro, 'for such a work to be completed quickly enough – and with the majority of the Pericurian army bottled up inside the city.'

Boxiron's voicebox shook as the steamman found his feet too. 'As fortunate as you insisting I carry the burden of a diver's tank through the heart of a battle.'

'Quite so,' Jethro attempted a smile, wiping the spittle away from the corner of his mouth with a trembling hand. 'You never know when one will come in useful.'

Boxiron looked up at the shaking ceiling of the magnificent entrance chamber they found themselves in. 'What is going on here, Jethro softbody? Those are the reports of the fortress-mounted guns above us.'

Before the ex-parson of Hundred Locks could answer, a pair of militiamen rapidly descended one of staircases leading up into the mountain, pushing past the refugees huddling on the steps. 'All able to fight!' the soldiers shouted. 'All able to fight, up to the fourth-level galleries.'

'We've locked the invaders out,' called back the militiaman by Jethro's side. 'They're trapped in the vaults.'

'Tell that to the wet-snouts that have reached the slopes,' his compatriot called down the staircase. 'What's left of their army is beyond the arc of our cannons and out of range of the coral line's guns. They're charging up the slopes and they don't look happy. All able to fight, with us now. Defend the Horn. For your city, for your freedom, for your lives!'

'I'll have you lucky lads with me,' said the militiaman, as all around them the police and armed citizens peeled away from the entrance's barricades. 'And may some of it rub off on me.' He joined the others clearing a way up the stairs.

'I'm too old for this,' wheezed the commodore.

'Bob my soul, but we have to find Hannah like the deuce,' Jethro told Boxiron and the commodore. 'Or this is all going to change, and not for the better!'

'Ah, lad,' said the commodore, 'tell me that Hannah can survive using the god-formula on herself if it comes to it. Tell me that she'll bring Nandi and Chalph back to life, scare this wicked war to a stop and then go back to being just a mortal lass again.'

'Nothing will survive of anyone who uses the god-formula,' said Jethro, 'not as we know them. But there is more at stake than a single life. No man or woman was meant to take on the powers of a god.'

'There's gods a-plenty out in the world,' said the commodore. 'You can't sail for a yard without tripping over them – the Steamo Loas of our metal friend here, the gods of the wind the lashlites bend their knee to, the grand smiting fellow that the Cassarabian sects worship. What's one more or one less?'

'Those are merely manifestations of our belief in them,' warned Jethro. 'What power they have is received through our belief, it is limited by our humanity – but this thing, a creature raised in our pattern, given absolute power so as to corrupt absolutely…no, the person who takes such a thing will not survive within that burning fire, and I fear that neither will the rest of us.' His ears still ringing, Ortin urs Ortin left the cover of the large basalt boulder he was sheltering behind and ran across the gap to the next rock, angry hornets buzzing past his ears as the rifles of the slope's defenders tried to bring him down.

The ambassador might have been beyond the arc of fire of the emplacements below, the guns and barrels of the vast cannons ringing the mountain set in the wrong direction, but there was a long stretch of near coverless ground above him before he reached the first buildings and windows carved out of the Horn of Jago. The Pericurian advance had stalled, their own artillery rendered silent, cannons and gun trains left scattered across the blasted, cratered surface. Not even the damned weather favoured them – no cover from the steam storms off the sea. As though the weather and the world was holding its breath to see who won this day.

Ortin braved the open ground, still slippery with his people's blood, sprinting beyond his boulder to reach the standard bearer's party kneeling under the next ridge, the wounded figure of Stom urs Stom lying spread-eagled below the rocks.