Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

She heard the words hiss from the shadows. 'Oh, he's a good one. A real doozy you're brewing up inside there. Your people will all be so glad to come back to us when they see him. You'll beg us. You'll pray to us!'

Hannah was desperately pulling herself up the rungs in the wall towards Boxiron, when a diamond-blue figure composed of burning angled planes forming the silhouette of a man walked through the instrument house door as if its steel was as insubstantial as the steam off the sea. Each of its steps turned the stone of the passage into a puddle of hissing liquid magma. The heat on Hannah's back became intense, the nape of her neck burning as she pulled herself up onto the second gantry. Vivid panes of gem-coloured stained glass shook in their frames with the alien pressure of the creature below – a demigod fit for the dark, blasted heart of Jago. Lord of the ruins.

The thing that had been Colonel Knipe looked down at Jethro as if noticing a slug crawling across the dirt. The pond of blood surrounding the ex-parson boiled and frothed on the stone as the demigod knelt down and ran a hand along the man's side. Jethro screamed and jerked in a wild fit as his body re-wove itself under that supernatural touch.

The ripping storm around the silhouette modulated into speech. 'MY WORD.' It raised an arm and Jethro was spun up off the ground and slammed against the steel of the flare-house cannon. 'I NEED PRIESTS TO CARRY MY WORD.'

'No,' groaned Jethro, jowls buffeted by the force emanating from the being that had been Colonel Knipe. 'I deny you.'

There was an increase in the gale's intensity, the rippling skin of the universe moving in terrible amusement. 'DID I ASK IF IT PLEASE YOU?'

Jethro's lips started moving in prayer, the words – provided by the colonel – torn unwilling from his lips. But his eyes were his own. Fixed on Hannah, who clutched the railings on the gantry opposite him, with pained urgency. 'My – lord – save – me – who gives – me – life – and – resurrection.'

Hannah lurched towards Boxiron, noting the red dot flaring on the steamman's vision plate, one second a ruby pinprick, the next expanding to fill the whole vision plate with crimson. The steamman's weak, human-milled shell was looping in paralysis. Too weak to contain…Bel Bessant knew. She had got that much right. The only way to fight a god. Hannah's hand gripped the lever on the back of the steamman's spine-box and threw it up, all the way. Top gear. Hannah's eyes momentarily fell on the gear panel as the force of the unholy squall below carried her beyond the newly trembling steamman. She saw for the first time the words that had been scratched against the highest of the steamman's gear positions. Circle save you jiggers.

Hannah was blown over the railings, landing on the lower gantry with a painful wallop. As the whirling energies carried her further down the gantry she could see Jethro Daunt slide across the cannon's barrelling in front of her, still pinned by the terrible demigod, but his lips and voice his own again. 'A god, so powerful. Truly, a god?'

'YES.'

'Then,' Jethro said, as the skull of the burning silhouette bent forwards towards him, 'it's time for you to go to hell!'

Jago's new dark demigod was pulled back, dragged by the white tentacles of steam emerging from Boxiron's stacks, the steamman's body vibrating at such a speed that it blurred in and out of sight. The blue figure of fire raised its arms and waves of energy lashed out, only to be absorbed by the steam enveloping it, diluting and ultimately mingling with the demigod, becoming one with it. The flare-house was filled with a scream so primeval that it tore at Hannah's chest, an unholy ripping sound. Hannah was backing away but Jethro was actually crawling towards the agonized demigod. Tighter and tighter the thing that had been Colonel Knipe was compressed, its force becoming brighter and more radiant, shaking with the power of a sun fashioned into a spear of primordial energy.

Jethro extended a finger to point at the teetering shaft of energy. 'Let there be us!'

As if at his bidding, the streak became lightning and leapt upwards, blasting off the roof of the flare-house and raining debris down onto Hannah, Jethro and Boxiron. From the tip of the Horn of Jago a pillar of light stretched up towards the clouds and the stars beyond. Then there were just the three of them. And something else, the steam pouring out from Boxiron's stack forming into a ghostly shape. Alice Gray.

'You look as beautiful as I remember,' said Jethro.

Alice's voice echoed around them, disembodied. 'And you, Jethro, do not look as surprised as you should.'

'I guessed when Hannah's atmospheric carriage was diverted by the machines. Saved from a bomb and taken to find Tomas Maggs' frozen corpse for good measure,' said Jethro. 'Only a valve-mind could arrange that. Vardan Flail didn't murder you, but he did cut your head off your dying body and then put you through the guild's death rites. He loved you well enough for that, to give you his people's machine immortality. And when Boxiron stopped slipping gears and was no longer trying to rip the arms off police militia and free company soldiers, I had my suspicions that he might have brought a hitchhiker back from the guild's transaction-engine vaults. Not all of you, of course. You left enough of your intelligence behind to make Vardan Flail think he still had you in his valves, enough to possess the control circuits of Hannah's suit in the turbine halls, trying to protect her from harm.'

'Alice,' Hannah groaned. The archbishop hadn't just translated the final section of the god-formula as she was hiding inside Boxiron. She had added it to the first two parts. She had used it on herself.

The archbishop's laughter came through fainter, the steam starting to disperse. 'If you can keep your head while people all around you are losing theirs…'

'Alice!' Hannah pulled herself to her feet. 'What have you done?'

'I incorporated the church's counter-weapon into the final section of the god-formula, child, I took it into myself, just as the colonel did. The archbishops of Jago have had over a thousand years to polish our counter-weapon into perfection. A sabotaged godhead. Expansion without end. Ascending into eternity. Nothing to cling onto. No fixity, no way to reverse the transfiguration.'

'Alice, don't-'

'It's all gone, child. I removed all traces of William and Bel from the guild's transaction-engine vaults, their work and their lives. Just a forgotten dream now. It's time for me to leave, too. Everything else, I leave for you.'

'-go.'

But the smoke was dissipating. Expansion without end.

Alice had gone. Forever.

Hannah brushed the tears from her eyes, and not just of mourning. Alice had known where to find Tomas Maggs' corpse, the dead skipper who had scuttled the boat taking Hannah's father home. And the archbishop could only have done that if she had been the one who killed the skipper. Trying to protect the Inquisition's secret, perhaps? Or had Alice known that the boat her father was taking was going to sink, and who else might be involved in the plot? Was Maggs' murder an act of revenge or merely tying up loose ends? How guilty had Alice Gray felt to ensure the cathedral raised a girl pressed into its care by two desperate, fleeing parents? Love and ruthlessness, remorse and compassion. How could you ever choose?

'There are always things we shall never know,' said Jethro, realizing what Hannah was thinking. Perhaps remembering the woman he had loved? 'Notes rise and fall. But the song endures forever, as long as there are people who care to sing it.' He gently patted Hannah's tear-stained hand and looked up at Boxiron. 'Pray tell me that Alice took all three parts of the god-formula with her when she left your body, old steamer?'