Secrets Of The Fire Sea Part 28

'Sp.a.w.n of Amaja urs Amaja!' the amba.s.sador yelled. The children crowding the floor scrambled away in panic from this huge monster that had suddenly invaded the a.s.sembly room, a fur-covered demon bearing a sword slicked in the blood of their parents.

Commodore Black lowered his sabre at Ortin urs Ortin. 'That and worse, amba.s.sador.'

Ortin charged, pure animal savagery bearing down upon the old u-boat man. Commodore Black stepped forward and met him with a clash of steel.

'You trapped us, tricked us!' Ortin bayed. 'You butchered half the great houses!'

'No, lad, not me.' The commodore fell back, grunting. Ortin's strength was far beyond that of any fighter from the race of man. 'But I'm going to settle for you all the same. For Nandi.'

Ortin struck the commodore's sabre with his steel, again and again, making the commodore's arm ring with the wicked pain of it. There was little room for sophistication in this battle, his parries blunted by the raw swinging power of the Pericurian's ma.s.sive frame. The commodore's rare bones turned into an anvil from the battering.

As their fight stumbled back and forth across the a.s.sembly room, Commodore Black caught a brief glimpse of the barricade where the front line of cadets was thrusting bayonets against the crush of the Pericurian advance, the second line unable to shoot now without hitting their own side. Children, blessed children asked to fight and die like this. To fight for their lives. Their stronghold at the centre of the mountain was seconds away from falling...

Commodore Black yelled in surprise as he slipped on the blood of a dead Pericurian soldier and sprawled backwards, his sabre sliding away across the floor. He was weaponless. Ortin urs Ortin moved in and the commodore met the amba.s.sador's insane, glazed eyes as the huge beast raised his blade upwards for the killing stroke.

'Leave...me...to die.' Jethro coughed.

The steamman shook his visored head at Jethro's wounded form and dropped the warhammer with a clang, mounting the rungs up to the circle of stained gla.s.s windows. 'No, I cannot. You must trust me.'

Hannah watched the huge steamman stop in front of the stained gla.s.s, drinking in the final hidden section of Bel Bessant's terrible creation. 'Don't do this, Boxiron. I would only have used the G.o.d-formula to fix what wasn't meant to be broken. What sort of G.o.d will you create by giving such a thing to Knipe? For the love of the Circle, he killed my father, Nandi, Chalph, Alice, he-'

'Be quiet, damson,' threatened the colonel. 'The Inquisition was good enough to send us a machine to break codes, it's only fitting that we use it as they intended.'

'What sort of thing will you be?' Hannah cried.

'A better thing than your precious Circlism,' spat the colonel. 'All this time the church knew what it had here the means to save our land! And your people buried it away; you forgot it along with our greatness! And the church claims to care for the needs of the people...'

'I have completed the steganographic key,' said Boxiron. 'I am ready to begin deciphering the main code.'

Colonel Knipe picked up the first two sections of the G.o.d-formula that Hannah had dropped and threw them towards the steamman. 'Pick up the girl's pencil and begin writing on that paper. Quickly! Your Inquisition friend only has a few minutes of life left in him.'

Hannah looked down. Jethro Daunt had fallen silent and was lying with his back against the flare-house cannon, as still as a corpse bar for the trembling of one single leg. The floor below was awash with his blood.

'Jethro Daunt is not a member of the Inquisition,' said Boxiron as he worked. 'He is not even a churchman anymore.'

'So you say. For hire, then. A mercenary, no better than the dirty wet-snouts the senate believed they were buying.'

Boxiron continued to write out the equations of the final piece of the G.o.d-formula, his iron fingers moving several times more rapidly than any human hand could. 'Not for hire, for love.'

'He really was going to marry the archbishop?' said Colonel Knipe, sounding surprised. 'Well, I never did get around to checking if that part of his story was true. More fool him. Everything that you love you end up losing. That is the way of life.'

'What will you do with this, colonel?' asked Boxiron. His voicebox sounded as if it was vibrating with pain, as if the mere effort of translating the final section of the G.o.d-formula burned at the core of his being.

'I will save your Jackelian friend. I have never broken my word.'

'Afterwards.'

'I shall restore Jago to its natural position at the head of the world's nations, just as I shall burn the last wet-snout left on the island into ashes. Fire, then ice!'

Hannah pulled herself up, clutching her bleeding scalp. If that meant what she thought! 'You can't.'

'My will shall be done,' shouted the colonel. 'The world's winter shall be Jago's summer. Our civilization will rise once more. Everyone will want to dwell here again and those who do not will consider themselves cursed. And they shall be And they shall be!'

No. A new age of ice. A winter without end, never the spring again as the world turned.

'Please!' Hannah begged Boxiron to stop what he was doing, but instead the steamman slid the final completed section of the G.o.d-formula back towards Colonel Knipe.

'We gave the world everything, little girl,' snarled the colonel. 'And they turned their backs on us, believed us fit only for use as a rock to break the rising wet-snout tide. A mere p.a.w.n in the game of our betters. We pa.s.sed the world the light once, after the age of ice ended, now the torch of their civilizations shall be ours to snuff out again.'

Seizing the completed G.o.d-formula, the colonel vaulted over the railing, landing on the lower walkway, then sprinted into the flare-house instrument room and sealed its door behind him.

Hannah was on her feet, groggily climbing down the ladder to the lower level. She picked up Boxiron's hammer and smashed at the door to the instrument room, but its head bounced uselessly off. She screamed for Boxiron to help, but he was standing on the upper gantry as immobile as an iron statue. Had the enormity of what he had done finally begun to sink in? The terrible cost of his friendship with the man who had saved him? She tried to batter the crystal panel in the door, but it had been hardened to withstand a flare misfiring inside the launch barrel. Hannah's strength was draining away. On the other side of the gla.s.s, a haze of twisting, turning diamond-sharp panes of light surrounded Colonel Knipe as he read the G.o.d-formula, enveloped by energies that were too exotic to be contained by the mortal world. His body was growing translucent, his organs pulsing with light. He was shedding his mortal sh.e.l.l.

Hannah felt fingers circling her ankle.

'Don't...let...him.'

'It's no good,' said Hannah, kneeling beside the ex-parson. 'The colonel's in there changing. He's taken the G.o.dhead.'

'Boxiron! Boxiron!'

'He's frozen,' cried Hannah. 'Please, Jethro, Boxiron's not even moving anymore.'

There was an awful ripping sound behind the instrument room door, something alien and terrible, the fabric of matter itself tearing.

It was the laughter of a new demiG.o.d striding the earth.

Commodore Black heard the cadet commander's yell as she scooped up his sabre and tossed it across to him. He rolled through the blood on the flagstones and speared Ortin urs Ortin squarely through the stomach, the tip of his sabre emerging through the back of the Pericurian amba.s.sador's jacket.

Commodore Black was on his knees, the amba.s.sador looming over him, still trying to move forward despite the wound. At first the commodore could barely hold the amba.s.sador back, but gradually the realization of his imminent death seemed to sink into Ortin urs Ortin, his eyes losing their glare of insanity.

'Well played dear boy.'

The commodore nodded, trying to rise, still keeping both hands on the sabre's grip and preserving the gap between them.

'I am not not a savage.' a savage.'

Commodore Black pulled out his sabre and the amba.s.sador swayed. The old u-boat man raised the steel to his nose in salute as the amba.s.sador crashed onto the flagstones, his monocle rolling away across the floor.

'Just two blessed n.o.bles,' said the commodore, 'living through a savage age as best we can.'

But the amba.s.sador was beyond hearing him.

Commodore Black turned as the barricade cracked open to admit a wave of ab-locks, tools jangling from leather belts, bayonet-fitted rifles at the ready, followed by a pair of men in guildsmen's robes. They looked for all of the world like a couple of hunters taking their hounds out for a walk through the vaults of the mountain.

'Our RAM suits wouldn't fit through the Horn's corridors,' said the nearest of the guildsmen.

'There's a pity,' answered the commodore. He watched the ab-locks fan out across the a.s.sembly rooms towards the stairs to the higher levels, followed by the guildsmen. Hunting down creatures that looked and smelt like ursk cubs was something that no doubt came quite naturally to the pack.

'On, T-face,' cried the younger of the two valve-men. 'Smell them out for us, up the stairs, up.'

Commodore Black drew out his mumbleweed pipe and searched for a packet of leaves to light, standing next to the white-faced cadet commander who was starting to tremble in shock now that the combat had ended. He took her rifle from her clenched fingers and set it down on the ground.

'Is this war?' she murmured in horror.

'Not for us, la.s.s,' said the commodore. His eyes moved across the heaps of dead cadets and ursine, bodies locked together in death, mourned by the cries of the shivering children behind them.

'For us, this was campaign experience. For us it's the chance of a medal. It's only war for them.'

Hannah had hold of Jethro's hand, the tremor of his fingers growing weaker as the alien gale of laughter behind the iron door became a storm. The energies being unleashed inside that chamber were leaking through the seals as little flickers of ball lightning.

'Boxiron. He...' Jethro gasped. 'Top. Gear.'

Hannah glanced up. The steamman was standing statue-still, transfixed by the scene below. What was the point, what was the point of anything now?

'Bel. Bessant.' Jethro's fingers tightened around Hannah's hand. 'How. Do. You. Fight. G.o.ds?'

Hannah stopped. She could see something moving down the corridor, a shadow, the blur of a rooting animal. Or a badger.

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 pray to us!' 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 pa.s.sage 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 gla.s.s shook in their frames with the alien pressure of the creature below a demiG.o.d 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 demiG.o.d 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 amus.e.m.e.nt. '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 pinp.r.i.c.k, the next expanding to fill the whole vision plate with crimson. The steamman's weak, human-milled sh.e.l.l was looping in paralysis. Too weak to contain...Bel Bessant knew. She had got that much right. The only way to fight a G.o.d. 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 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 demiG.o.d, but his lips and voice his own again. 'A G.o.d, so powerful. Truly, a G.o.d?'

'YES.'

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

Jago's new dark demiG.o.d 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 demiG.o.d, 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 demiG.o.d. 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 G.o.d-formula as she was hiding inside Boxiron. She had added it to the first two parts. She had used it on herself. 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 G.o.d-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 G.o.dhead. 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 compa.s.sion. 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 G.o.d-formula with her when she left your body, old steamer?'

Boxiron nodded, his steamman knight's skull trembling with pent-up aggression. 'Jethro softbody, please, I am still running in top gear.'

'Splendid.' He looked over at Hannah. 'Damson Conquest, if you would be so kind...'

Hannah went to retrieve the steamman's warhammer. She dragged the hammer over towards the rungs on the wall. There was a shadow moving just out of the corner of her eye and she imagined a frantic howling from a distant, far-off place. Jethro helped her lift up the large hammer to Boxiron's outstretched iron fingers.

'Something best forgotten?' asked Hannah.

'Indeed.'

Outside, the sound of the guns had stilled and the tinkling of shattering stained gla.s.s drifted down from the summit of the mountain.

EPILOGUE.

Commodore Black was pacing the docks of Hermetica harbour, watching the stevedores haul the cage of ab-locks over to a crane that was making ready to lift it towards the Purity Queen Purity Queen's open cargo holds. Resisting the temptation to bark orders at the dockworkers, Jared Black noted the figure walking towards his u-boat from the buildings behind them. A nondescript fellow in a dark frock coat, wearing a tall stovepipe hat. Where had he seen him before? Ah, the grey little fellow from the Jackelian emba.s.sy who had warned him to stay out of trouble when the Purity Queen Purity Queen first docked. And hadn't he made a grand job out of that, this voyage? first docked. And hadn't he made a grand job out of that, this voyage?

'A rather raucous cargo, captain,' said Mister Walsingham, stopping to listen to the howl of the ab-locks.