Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

'I'm used enough to empty streets,' Hannah said. 'It's the colony's crowds in the lanes outside the seminary I have more of a problem coping with.'

'There's only a couple of garrisons all the way out there,' said the archbishop. 'If Pericurian mercenaries push south over the border looking for trouble, as like as not you're only going to have a handful of wild woodsmen and miners to stop your church being set on fire.'

'I have learnt enough Pericurian to reason with them.'

Maybe she could reason with the believers at that, but the archbishop had other concerns, ones that ran a little closer to home. 'New Alban isn't that much different from life in a Jackelian city, or the island society you grew up in for that matter, but the forests breed superstition like fallen leaves in autumn. I've seen experienced priests travel out there who have thrown up their hands in despair at what their people claim to see out in the trees, in the dark, deep woods.'

'All the more reason to go where the need is greatest.'

The archbishop sighed. 'Well, I can't stop you. Not with that peculiar letter of commendation from the League of the Rational Court lodged with the cathedral secretary. But seeing as you might have your choice of vacant parishes, I thought something across the ocean in the Kingdom would appeal. Even as a New Alban man, I can say that everyone should see Middlesteel at least once in their life. If only for perspective. Now there's a city. For all our achievements here in recent years, it makes New Alban look like a provincial backwater.'

'Just a larger crowd and more noise.' Hannah smiled and reached down to take the archbishop's hand. 'I'll be safe, your grace. Sometimes, well, sometimes you just have to have a little faith.'

The Archbishop of New Alban's hand fell away from Hannah's as the wagon train began to trundle forward, before rising in a final wave, and he stayed where he was until the last wagon had cleared the city gate.

'I sometimes wonder what we ever have to teach you, anyway?' the archbishop muttered to himself as he grimaced in worry.

Then he turned to walk back home. Among the other members of the ab-lock clan on Jago, the male was known as Cutter, for his skills at sharpening and shaping flints and cutting grooves in the bamboo shafts to hold their spearheads. His eyes were sharp too, and as he left the entrance to the cave system he was the first among the ab-locks to notice the glassy black surface of the ground cracking as heads of wheat pushed through.

He didn't know that the seeds of the wheat he was noticing had blown in from one of the distant city's ruptured farm domes, now emptied of the last of humanity, and he certainly didn't realize that there was a new network of lichen filaments growing under Jago's dark soil, sapping the poisons, cleansing the burnt, barren ground.

Days later, however, when Cutter saw many more of the heads pushing through, he fell to his gnarled knees and muttered guttural sounds of thanks to the goddess of fertility – and in that he was part-right, for it had been a goddess who had created the lichen network – a push here, a nudge there, modifying, with a little hint of irony, the death spores left over from an ancient war to a far better purpose.

But the goddess wasn't around to hear Cutter's prayers any more, nor would she have approved of them if she had been. She might have approved of his next thoughts, though. If the clan grew these, they wouldn't need to root around in the dark fruitless forests – they wouldn't need to hunt so much.

And then what might they do?