Secrets Of The Fire Sea Part 16

Our lad.

Nandi stepped out of the transport capsule and down onto the platform of the guild's atmospheric station, the young priest from the cathedral, Father Baine, close on her heels.

Vardan Flail was waiting for them in front of the lockers holding the guild's visitors' suits, a retinue of red-cowled guildsmen standing behind the high guild master's twisted form.

One of the guildsmen stepped forward as she approached. 'Damson Tibar-Wellking, I will be your a.s.sistant for the rest of your research session within the great archive. I am archivist Trope.'

'That's very kind of you,' smiled Nandi, looking meaningfully at the high guild master. 'But I believe my research will be taking me a little further afield than the guild's transaction-engine vaults. And that's not why I'm here today, as I suspect you well know.' She indicated the young priest following behind her.

Baine caught up with Nandi and stopped in front of Vardan Flail. 'By the authority of the unified arch-diocese of Jago and the rational order of the Circlist church I present an examination notice for Damson Hannah Conquest.'

Vardan Flail looked irritated. 'If it's an observance of the formalities you want, perhaps the cathedral should have sent Father Blackwater to me rather than a mere pup.'

'The examination notice duly ratified and sealed by order of the stained senate,' added the young priest, not rising to the insult.

'Oh, very well,' snapped Vardan Flail. 'Your examination notice is accepted and I do hereby authorize release of Initiate Conquest of the Guild of Valvemen into your custody.' He clicked his fingers for one of his minions to fetch the girl. 'The temporary temporary release, pending the results of the church examination.' release, pending the results of the church examination.'

'The church examination which will be marked manually for this test,' Nandi added. 'Rather than by your transaction engines.'

'Manually! Isn't that quaint. I still expect to see the results myself,' snapped Vardan Flail. 'To ensure that there is no favouritism in the grading of one of my initiates.'

'Perish the thought,' said Father Baine.

'You probably still remember the test yourself,' said Vardan Flail. 'You hardly look old enough to shave.'

'I remember the test as being very easy. Anyone can pa.s.s, really.'

A group of staff-wielding guildsmen entered the station hall and parted to reveal Hannah Conquest, still wearing the grey cotton body suit of a turbine hall worker. She was soaked with sweat and swaying slightly on her feet.

'What have you done to her?' cried Father Baine. 'She looks like she hasn't slept in a week.'

'The city demands much of the guild,' retorted Vardan Flail. 'It is only dedicated toil that keeps the turbine halls running. Perhaps the church authorities might remember that in future, rather than twisting the law to try to circ.u.mvent the draft ballot for their favourites.'

Nandi grabbed one of Hannah's arms while Father Baine supported her other side, leading the girl stumbling towards the transport capsule.

'Don't worry,' Vardan Flail sneered after them. 'The church examinations are easy, anyone can pa.s.s them.'

Nandi shook her head in disgust and shut off her view of the high guild master's hooded face with the closing of the carriage's door.

Her arm still held by Father Baine, Hannah straightened up, wiping the sweat off her face as though she was a drunk who had suddenly transitioned into stone-cold sobriety.

Hannah winked towards the shocked young priest and Nandi. 'Well, my suit was logging double shifts down in the turbine halls, but it doesn't mean that it always had to be me inside it.' With a shudder, the carriage entered the airless atmospheric tunnel, leaving the guild's vaults. 'It's good to have friends, isn't it?'

'Quick,' Jethro said to Hannah, 'your favourite hymn from the cathedral...?'

'My knowledge, my soul,' said Hannah, looking at the books spread across the table in the inquisition agent's hotel room. 'Will that be part of the church's entrance exam?'

'No,' said Jethro. 'I just wanted to see which hymn you liked best. That question can reveal a lot about a candidate.'

And he could see; he could see Alice's mark all over the young girl, little reflections of the things he remembered and loved about his ex-fiancee. The way Hannah thought, the way she acted. Truly, Alice had been the mother than Hannah had lost, and for Alice, perhaps, the daughter that Jethro's defrocking and the breaking of their engagement had denied her. Denied them them.

'Then it won't help me pa.s.s,' said Hannah. 'I hear you sing to yourself all the time, Mister Daunt. But only tavern songs, never Circlist hymns.'

'No, I don't sing those any more,' admitted the ex-parson. 'I don't feel I have the right to them. And you should call me Jethro.' He picked up the books they had been cramming from, borrowed from the acting archbishop's office. 'You have an exceedingly good mind first rate, in fact. The way you can pick apart the components of synthetic morality and put them back together again puts me in mind of Alice.'

'Alice was the cleverest person I'd ever met.'

'Myself also,' said Jethro. Until now Until now, that is that is, his mind silently retorted. 'But she had her weaknesses and I think you share them too. Circlism is not just about knowledge and enlightenment. It is about embracing our humanity. Each of us is cupped out from the one sea of consciousness and poured into these mortal vessels. You I everyone we know is the same. It is only the nature of reality that makes us feel alone, which tricks us into seeing difference where none exists. But it is a false illusion, for when you pour a cup of water back into the river, where do the cup's contents end and the river's begin? All is motion, all is the river.'

'Even for Alice's killers?' asked Hannah.

'A Circlist would say the killer only killed themselves. Lack of knowledge tends to do that.'

'I don't think I can ever see them as part of me enough to forgive them.'

'We are all but human,' said Jethro.

'What they did to Alice,' said Hannah quietly, looking down at the tome in front of her as if it was all of her world. 'It wasn't just to make it look like an ursk attack, was it? She was tortured to try and find out something.'

'I won't let the killer touch you,' promised Jethro. 'I arrived here too late to save Alice, but I'm just in time for you.' The girl that Alice had raised as her own, the child that should have been theirs. 'Isn't that right, old steamer?'

The steamman was standing in the doorway bearing a tray of steaming tea cups procured from the hotel's staff.

'Indeed it is, Hannah softbody,' said Boxiron. 'We have faced evil and criminals many times together, yet by combining my intellect and Jethro Daunt's famous brawn, we have always triumphed.'

'You are exceedingly obliging,' said Jethro, taking the tray. 'With both your refreshments and your humour.'

Boxiron tapped the armour on his chest, the transaction-engine drum buried there slowly rotating. 'My 'intellect' is, I fear, a little scratched by the Jackelian underworld's pistols. I'm sure you will forgive me.'

'Let's get back to your studying,' said Jethro, tapping the tomes in front of Hannah. For if Hannah failed to gain entrance to the church, the next place she would be going was straight back to the Guild of Valvemen and into the clutches of Vardan Flail.

And that was no longer something Jethro could allow not for Alice's sake or his own.

Jethro Daunt found it hard to suppress a smile when he saw the number of people gathered in the cathedral's testing room rarely, he suspected, would it have been busier than this. Not just with those sitting the examination, their heads swelled to gargantuan size by the Entick machinery, but with the observers trying not to trip over the trailing cables or get in the way of the priests behind the testing tables. There were twelve examinees sitting the tests this day, but only one of them was responsible for drawing in all these extra people. Commodore Black, Nandi, Boxiron, Chalph urs Chalph, Ortin urs Ortin, half the cathedral's off-duty staff all to see if Damson Hannah Conquest could throw off the guild's shackles with a few of the crimson-robed crows sitting silently in the corner. Briefed, Jethro was sure, to try and detect the slightest deviation from the usual form of the church's examination. Anything that would allow the guild to nullify the results of the test.

And the results were hardly in doubt, for Hannah Conquest had both nature and nurture on her side. The offspring of two of the brightest scholars Jackelian academia had ever produced, tutored by Alice in every mathematical nuance of synthetic morality. Even so, Jethro could sense the amazement the priests testing Hannah felt at the speed she was going through the large leather-bound tomes of questions piled on top of each table. Knocking down their questions as fast as they could fire them at her. And the scariest thing of all was that it was obvious to him that she wasn't even trying. This was just what Hannah Conquest needed, to earn what she believed would be a life of quiet contemplation. To get everyone off her back for good.

Jethro glanced across at Nandi and the commodore. Of course, the young academic had been right. None of them could tell Hannah what they had discovered in the Pericurian emba.s.sy, not before she'd sat the exam. There was no telling how Hannah would react, and she needed her head clear and focused right now. Able to conjure up, as she was at the moment, a formula to prove how allocation of food to female children during a time of famine would prove the optimum stabilising force within a democracy with a sidebar question on how the allocation would need to change for a cla.s.sic autocracy.

Jethro winced. He remembered that question from his own examination. So, the priests administering the Entick test had reached the nineteenth book of synthetic morality, Saint Solomon and the Questions of Functional Savagery Saint Solomon and the Questions of Functional Savagery. There were no easy answers in that book, and the trick was often to reply with the heart as much as the head. Sometimes the wrong answer was the right answer, and sometimes it was better not to ask the question at all.

'And every so often, it's time for you to stand up and take responsibility for your own actions.'

Jethro's eyes darted around the testing room. That voice. The stench of sulphur and wet animal hide in the room. Was that a glimpse of fur he saw slipping behind Boxiron? The people around him to seemed to slow down, as if moving through treacle, as the exotic presence forced its way into their world.

'I take responsibility for my own actions!'

'But do you?' hissed the voice of Badger-headed Joseph from somewhere on the other side of the room. 'All that death and misery in your little kingdom, and now the Jackelians can't even be bothered to pray to us to make it better. What have you done of late to make the world a better place?'

'Life is lived by the one and one.'

'Oh, that's pat,' laughed the voice. 'And all of your trite Circlist excuses appear to be made the same way. You know what your people created here on Jago now, you must know what you could do with the G.o.d-formula. The good that you could achieve.'

'What Bel Bessant was creating was wrong,' insisted Jethro. 'No mortal mind is meant to have that level of understanding of the universe. Not without going insane.'

'Oh, but that's the twist: the world's already insane. If you understood it a little better, maybe you could do something about it. Put your world towards the mend, instead of hiding yourself away from life with the all distractions of your investigations and the smugness of your false humanist cleverness. Maybe you could stop and pull your cowardly head out of the sand just the once.'

'Leave me alone.'

'Time is just a tree to be pruned, all the infinite possibilities branching out. The whisper of a b.u.t.terfly's wings on the other side of the world and a good king takes the throne rather than his evil uncle. Plenty rather than famine. Health rather than plague. A little push here, a little nudge there. It's so very easy to do. You could do it, you could use the G.o.d-formula to remake your world as a paradise.'

'No one has that right.'

'One branch of potential, another branch next door, you're going to have to travel down one of them in the end anyway. The tree's always growing, even we can't stop that. All the branches look much the same from a higher perspective. Why not pick the road that leads to a nice warm bed rather than a swamp? A comfortable parsonage back in the Kingdom, the cosy fire stoked by Alice Gray. Isn't that the world you always wanted?'

'Those are words of temptation. I refuse you.'

'Refuse us? I expect you to join us, fiddle-faddle man. Time to step up. Time to be like your funny half-steamman friend time for you to go all the way up to top gear!'

Time lurched forward again and Jethro felt Boxiron's metal fingers on his shoulder. 'Didn't you hear me, Jethro softbody? Hannah Conquest has finished her tests. It is time.'

'Yes,' coughed Jethro, 'that it most certainly is, old steamer.'

Jethro stepped over to the table where the priest was storing away the pile of tomes filled with questions that Hannah had finished answering. The examinees were slipping off their Entick helmets and wiping away the grease marks the bra.s.s goggles had left on their faces, looking groggy from the intensity of the questioning and sudden influx of light.

'Father?' Jethro coughed.

'There is little doubt,' said the priest behind the examination table. 'Our result tabulation is just a formality now. Hannah Conquest had pa.s.sed the entrance threshold by the third book. Even the Guild of Valvemen will not be able to gainsay these results.'

Jethro shook the priest's hand in thanks and went over to where Hannah was using a tissue lent to her by Nandi to remove the grease from her cheeks.

It was time for young Damson Hannah Conquest to hear the truth...

Hannah took the chair that Jethro Daunt offered her with trepidation, sitting just behind Boxiron. After what Father Baine had told her about how the cathedral fathers believed she had done in the tests, this should have been a time of celebration, but instead there was an almost funereal air of expectation on the faces of the commodore, Nandi and Chalph. And what was the large ursine she had been introduced to as the new Pericurian amba.s.sador doing in the ex-parson's hotel room? Her escape from the guild's draft was surely not the business of Jago's distant neighbours on the opposite sh.o.r.es of the Fire Sea...

'The guild hasn't found a way to forbid me to enter the church?' asked Hannah.

'No,' said Jethro. 'You are free of the guild's call on you. But we have discovered some important things while you have been in their servitude.'

'The evidence that it was Vardan Flail who murdered Alice?'

'Why she was murdered, at least,' said Jethro. He reached into his pocket and drew out a paper bag of boiled sweets, popping one in his mouth before offering the bag to Hannah.

Hannah demurred. 'The senate banned the import of those from the Kingdom years ago.'

'Lucky I never offered one to the colonel, then,' said Jethro, patting Hannah's hand. 'The weapon that Bel Bessant was developing to defend Jago from the Chimecan Empire's G.o.ds was not designed to push them beyond the walls of our world as we thought, but to transform Bel Bessant into a G.o.d, to allow her to meet the dark deities on the G.o.ds' own terms. That is what the cipher on the painting inside your locket was...it was one third of such a weapon, a G.o.d-formula. I believe the second piece of the G.o.d-formula was inside Alice's missing locket. The third was concealed in the silver infinity circle that was stolen from the cathedral's altar. These three paintings were uncovered by your parents during their research in the guild's vaults.'

Hannah was left reeling from the ex-parson's words. To become a G.o.d! There were people of power in the world who thought they already were. And murder would be the least of what they would stoop to, to make their delusions a reality beyond the confines of their own twisted minds. Dogs like Vardan Flail.

Chalph stopped prowling the hotel room. 'But the painting that was stolen from the cathedral did not contain a cipher?'

'Precisely,' said Jethro. 'Yet it was that theft that led to Alice being murdered. And who would be in a position to know what that picture meant? Only someone who already had possession of one or more of the paintings with Bel Bessant's G.o.d-formula concealed inside them. Someone who had pursued your parents for the copies of the images they found in the guild's archives.'

'I am not sure I understand,' said Chalph.

Hannah shook her head. She didn't either.

'That is because you don't yet see all of the picture,' explained Jethro. 'But Damson Tibar-Wellking, I believe, holds some of the missing pieces of the puzzle.'

Nandi produced the punch card with Hannah's writing on the reverse side. 'You did a very good job remembering your mother's Joshua Egg from the guild's archive. We ran its remaining iterations on Amba.s.sador Ortin's transaction engines and recovered the final pieces of your parents' research.'

'I knew it,' said Hannah. Hope rose within her. 'I knew there would be more.'

'Much of what was compressed inside the Joshua Egg your mother left us concerns the priest, William of Flamewall,' explained Jethro. 'Although the most important items your parents left behind for us are the first two parts of the G.o.d-formula. It seems your parents found images of all three paintings of the rational trinity within the guild's transaction engines and your mother broke the steganography concealed within the images. Like us, they found that the first two paintings contained parts of the G.o.d-formula, and that the third was a ruse, blank of steganographic code.'

Hannah gasped. 'So it was Vardan Flail who destroyed my parents' records on the guild's engines. The jigger realized that my mother had left hidden copies of the G.o.d-formula. Destroying my mother's secret backup was just removing the evidence of his crimes.'

'The evidence may have gone, but we now have two of the three parts of the G.o.d-formula,' said Jethro.

'Which of the three paintings of the rational trinity did you recover from the Joshua Egg?' asked Hannah.

'The second,' said Jethro. 'Discard your beliefs.'

Hannah murmured in appreciation. That image was captured in stained gla.s.s back in the cathedral. A man sitting cross-legged in a hall surrounded by the broken idols of a thousand religions, prophets and messiahs. 'So we have two pieces of the G.o.d-formula. But why would Bel Bessant leave two pieces of the code for us to find but not the third?'

'You will get there shortly. Once you understand what Bel Bessant was creating,' Jethro continued, 'you will understand why even a Circlist priest could be driven to commit murder why William felt he had no choice but to kill his lover when he found out. I have little doubt that just developing the G.o.d-formula would have left Bel Bessant dangerously deranged. She may even have started manifesting supernatural powers as a side effect of her work. By the time William realized what Bel was doing, physical violence was probably the only way he could have stopped her before she ascended towards G.o.dhood. I fear that towards her end she was no longer right or rational. Your parents uncovered more facts about William in their research, history they decided to bury extremely proficiently. For example, William of Flamewall never actually went on the run from the police when his crime was discovered; he had already set off into the wilderness, acting as the priest on an expedition into Jago's interior. He was following in the footsteps of Bel Bessant, who had filled much the same position herself with a party of trappers before she began developing the G.o.d-formula.'

'Going outside the city walls with the trappers? That's dangerous work,' said Hannah. 'Was William trying to get himself killed out of some sense of guilt for what he did to Bel?'

'A little more than that. One of the doc.u.ments your parents left us was transcribed in something distantly related to ancient Pericurian. It was discovered among Bel Bessant's possessions during the militia's investigation into her murder.' Jethro pointed to Ortin. 'The good amba.s.sador here was kind enough to have it translated for us.'

'Yes,' said Ortin, excitedly. 'It appears to be the text of a previously unknown tablet from the scripture of the Divine Quad.'

'We know what it is,' added Nandi, 'and your father with his skills would probably have been able to translate it, but the text would have been a complete mystery to William of Flamewall and Bel Bessant. The Jagonese of their era weren't to lay eyes on an actual Pericurian until many centuries later. Ortin and Chalph's ancestors believed that Jago was a lost paradise sealed away by their G.o.ds somewhere inside the Fire Sea.' Nandi dug into her satchel and pulled out a reel of paper that looked as if it had been spooled off a transaction engine. Dusting it off, she handed it hesitantly to Hannah. 'Please read this. It was also among the contents of the Joshua Egg and will clear up a great deal for you, I think. It's the last doc.u.ment your mother wrote for us, taken from her journal.' know what it is,' added Nandi, 'and your father with his skills would probably have been able to translate it, but the text would have been a complete mystery to William of Flamewall and Bel Bessant. The Jagonese of their era weren't to lay eyes on an actual Pericurian until many centuries later. Ortin and Chalph's ancestors believed that Jago was a lost paradise sealed away by their G.o.ds somewhere inside the Fire Sea.' Nandi dug into her satchel and pulled out a reel of paper that looked as if it had been spooled off a transaction engine. Dusting it off, she handed it hesitantly to Hannah. 'Please read this. It was also among the contents of the Joshua Egg and will clear up a great deal for you, I think. It's the last doc.u.ment your mother wrote for us, taken from her journal.'

Hannah unfurled the tape and began reading.

This is my last entry before I must leave Hermetica City. It seems as if our fears about who to trust were well-founded and not mere paranoia. George's boat has been reported lost in the Fire Sea. I can only thank the Circle that our decision to keep Hannah safe here on the island with me was the right one.

The local newspapers say it was an unpredicted peristaltic flow that cut off the boat and then overwhelmed the craft. If that were true, then it would have been a very easy thing for the guild here to arrange. A small alteration in their model of the lava flows, and my darling husband would have been murdered as smoothly as sliding a stiletto blade into his back.

But I am not so sure that this is how the murder was done. I could swear that I saw the face of Tomas Maggs today, the skipper of the boat we had paid to take George back home. It was the look of astonishment on his face at seeing me alive, no doubt mirroring my own, that confirmed it was indeed the same treacherous little jigger. If Maggs was paid to abandon his vessel to the lava flows, then those who gave him the coin to do it must now know that I am not a sea-sick corpse locked in my cabin as George was pretending, but that I am very much alive and still on Jago, albeit as a widow.

Maggs will no doubt have stolen all three paintings and the first two parts of the G.o.d-formula from George before abandoning his boat to the Fire Sea, and Maggs' paymasters will seek my death to put an end to the affair. If they realize quickly enough that William of Flamewall's last painting was a hoax, then they will surely try to take me alive to torture the true location of Bel Bessant's terrible creation from me. The first two parts of the G.o.d-formula are worthless without the third, so it seems I must follow William of Flamewall's trail into the dark heart of Jago, towards the Cade Mountains and beyond. I wonder if he ever found the corpses of Bel Bessant's original expedition at Amajanur? I wonder if I will find William of Flamewall's own body frozen out there? But most of all, I wonder if I will find the third part of Bel Bessant's horrific legacy and what I shall do with it when I do?

They say it is cold beyond the capital's walls, far beyond the sh.o.r.eline of the Fire Sea and the steam storms, but it is as nothing compared to the coldness inside my heart for those that have murdered George. If I can find the G.o.d-formula, they will have reason to fear my fury and regret having threatened my family. They all all will. will.

Hannah found her hand was trembling as she got to the end of the entry; tears dripping against the rough transaction-engine tape it had been printed out on.