Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

'Do you see,' Stom urs Stom hissed at the ambassador, 'where your weakness has led us? A trap. We thought it was ours, but it was theirs! Theirs!'

'Be still,' commanded the medical orderly trying to stem the blood gushing out of the officer's torn leather armour.

Ortin looked at her and the orderly shook her head. 'The surgeon's tents were in front of the walls with the camp. Gone with everything else.'

'Gone with the baroness,' coughed Stom. 'All gone. This is your pity's harvest; this is your compassion's prize. Their dark hearts, the cursed spawn of Amaja urs Amaja. They brought us here to slaughter us, to pave the road to Armageddon with the bones of all those pure enough to try to stop them!'

It was true, Ortin could not deny it. Their people's corpses littered the ground both inside and outside the capital's walls, raked by shells from the coral line, the hail of bullets from the defenders – the storm of fire – now passing over their prone, uncaring forms where they had fallen in the smoking rubble. Outside in the harbour the torn corpses bobbing in the steaming red waters were so thick the ambassador could have used their shrapnel-studded bodies as a carpet to walk between the burning wreckage of the fleet. This had been a trap and the ursine had walked blithely into it, naively counting themselves the new masters of Jago. All they had wanted to do was to free the people of the island from the shackles of their oppressors, allow them their freedom away from this god-cursed place. This was their reward for trying to follow the word of the Divine Quad. Sent to hell by those who believed in none. What fools they had been. The darkness here had changed the people of Jago, twisted them into something inhuman. The heathen beasts' mortars were still peppering the harbour waters, the screams of exhausted survivors trying to struggle out of the bloodstained water echoing out of the scene of hell. Their fur burnt off their bodies by their sin. No, not their sins. The sins of the humans, of the race of man.

'I was wrong,' cried Ortin urs Ortin trying not to look at the staggering field of carnage behind him.

Stom urs Stom raised a massive blooded paw. 'This is the world's end and this is – your war – now.'

Ortin grasped the soldier's fingers tight, but she was no longer there to feel his grip.

Moaning in dirge, one of Stom's soldiers covered her body with the standard she had been carrying, but the ambassador growled and lifted the banner off her corpse. 'You do not lower your flag to honour a Pericurian! Lift it up, lift them all!'

The ambassador slid Stom's sabre out of her belt and stood up, letting the shots of the Jagonese ring off the rocks around him like a bell calling the people to prayer. 'Infidel!' he yelled. 'Infidel!' He turned up towards the slope and lowered the sabre. 'Put tooth and claw in every last one of them. Not one of the cursed of Amaja urs Amaja to be left alive. Salt their ruins and clean your wounds in their blood!'

Close to sixty thousand Pericurians had arrived at the island's shores. The sole thousand that had survived rose up as one and followed their ambassador in his charge up the Horn of Jago.

The narrow windowless passage Hannah was taking opened up into a raised gantry crossing the side of the senate's octagonal chamber, high above the heads of those debating Jago's future below. Colonel Knipe had joined the guards protecting her, leading the way while his two militiamen took the rear. The sounds of the heated sitting of the senate carried up towards them, the oratory continuing apace despite the rattle of gunfire and explosions from outside the mountain.

'Change with responsibility, responsible change.'

'We will stand with every vault, with every district.'

'Ideals given form with our sacrifice.'

'Set up a committee, hold a hearing!'

Hannah stopped a second on the gantry, almost mesmerized by the hypnotic cadence of the sound. You could be tricked to sleep listening to such a surreal song.

'They are not Jago,' said Colonel Knipe, seeing that she had stopped. 'Once, but no more. Now it is you, damson. You are the light that will lead us through the steam storms.'

'Am I?' said Hannah. If she was, she didn't feel like it. Uncertainties about her course of action were replacing the confidence she had felt as a prisoner of the Pericurian fleet.

She followed the clacking stamp of Colonel Knipe's artificial leg across the gantry, into another maze of narrow service corridors, before they entered a long hall. It was old, floored with expensive imported wood dating from the capital's halcyon days. But the hall hadn't been dusted in a long time, spider webs hung between hundreds of marble statues and busts of senators and notables, removed from the city and stored away, assigned to obscurity with the shifts of political fashion. Walking down the aisle between their blank, unpainted eyes, it was as though all the island's ghosts had lined up to pass judgement on Hannah's decision to grasp the legacy of Bel Bessant. There were no windows in this hall, only an ancient LED panel that hadn't been replaced for so long that its light had turned blue, washing the hall with its cold glow.

They were halfway along the hall when two guildsmen stepped out of the shadows. To the side of Hannah, the pair of militia guards pushed their cloaks back to pull out their pistols, but they had barely cleared their holsters before double arcs of forked lightning leapt out of the dark between the statues, striking the police officers and sending them hurtling back into the masonry, jerking and twitching as electric energy chased over their bodies. As more initiates of the Guild of Valvemen stepped out, Hannah saw they were holding onto steel lances with oversized rubber gloves, the lances connected to large capacitor packs strapped over their robes. They were followed out of the shadows by a bent, hobbling figure. Vardan Flail!

Colonel Knipe pushed Hannah behind him, shielding her from the guildsmen's deadly weapons. 'Flail!' spat the colonel. 'I might have known a rodent like you would have secret maintenance tunnels to carry you into the Horn of Jago.'

'Tunnels to repair the machines,' hissed Vardan Flail. 'Machines to track you. The Guild are the blood of this city, our transaction engines its brain, our turbine halls its heart.'

'So much power and yet still you want more.'

Vardan Flail stuck a deformed finger out of his robes, pointing it at Hannah. 'You know what I want.'

'Yes,' said the colonel.

Hannah only just heard the click from underneath the militia commander's cloak, his left hand hidden behind his back.

One second.

'And I know what you deserve.'

Two seconds.

Hannah saw the whirring clockwork detonator on the round glass grenade as the colonel hurled it towards the guildsmen before throwing his weight at her, carrying the two of them behind the marble shield of some centuries-dead senator.

Three seconds.

There was a lash of energy burning the stone as Knipe's grenade detonated, the charge of the guildsmen's electric weapons lashing out in a single burst as their backpacks ripped apart, the rain of shrapnel jouncing off the statue shielding Hannah and the colonel. Then there was silence.

Colonel Knipe stepped out from behind the smoking statues, his pistol drawn, and prodded the torn robed bodies lying there. It was hard to distinguish what had been ruined by the corpses' labours in the guild's vaults and what the grenade had wrecked. The pungent scent of mint from their robes mixed with sulphur from the explosion.

Hannah saw that Vardan Flail was still moving across the floor, partially shielded by his men's bodies – but he wouldn't last long, not in the state he was in.

'Sacrifice,' hissed Vardan Flail, 'the god-formula.'