Secrets Of The Fire Sea Part 5

Hannah glanced behind her as she ducked down the corridor leading to Tom Putt Park. She could have sworn one of the police militia had been following her through the vaults below. But it looked as though Hannah had lost the militiawoman in the maze of surface corridors that led to the constellation of greenhouses huddled around the foot of the Horn of Jago. She was clearly in cla.s.s hours and the last thing she needed was to be dragged back to the cathedral just for heeding the urgent-sounding message that Chalph urs Chalph had left her.

Yes, heeding a friend's note that sounded so much better than truancy. She found Chalph by the statues of the apple singers, the overgrown path to their clearing now trampled clear by the repair crew that had sealed the greenhouse, not to mention all the sightseers who had come to see the ursk corpse before the dead beast had been dragged away for incineration. It was strange, but the presence of the Jagonese in Tom Putt Park seemed more of a violation of her private s.p.a.ce than the attack by the monsters that had scaled the city's wall. The wild beauty of the park had been hers and Chalph's alone, and now half of Hermetica City must have pressed through to gawp at the spot where she and Chalph had nearly met their deaths.

Chalph, when she laid eyes on him, had a hemp sack thrown over his shoulder and had been crouching down behind the statues as if he was one of them.

'It's me!' called Hannah. 'Didn't you smell me coming?'

'I have caught a flu,' said Chalph, coming out of hiding. 'I've been outside in the cold, pretending to be part of a free company detail escorting the Guild of Valvemen.'

'You've what?' Hannah was astonished at her friend's audacity. 'In the name of the Circle, why?'

'In the name of your G.o.dless faith, this.' Chalph held up his sack and pulled out some battered iron components. 'The guild's people were checking the machinery charging the battlements when they found it.' He showed her an iron box with holes in the side where a line of cables hung out like baby elephant trunks. Each rubber cable had been severed halfway down its length, the insulation sawn through to reveal the thick copper wiring underneath. 'The section of the battlements the ursks came over had been shorted deliberately. Someone wanted the wall's charge to fail.'

Hannah examined the box with her hands, feeling the cold metal, not believing what she was hearing. 'But who would want to do that?'

'I can tell you this much,' said Chalph. 'The Guild of Valvemen were half-expecting to find this. I was pretending I could only speak Pericurian and I heard what they were whispering. There were three sets of damaged transformers like this on the failed section of the wall, and the guild's workers were all for hiding the sabotaged parts and taking them back to their vaults.'

The guild were involved in this? Their job was to maintain the walls, the machines, keep the city powered and keep the transaction-engine rooms humming. But then, it was a guild that was run by Vardan Flail.

Chalph pointed in the direction of the park's domed surface, near to where the ursks had smashed their way down into the capital's flash steam channels. 'That's not all; I checked where the hole in the park dome had been repaired. There was broken gla.s.s scattered on the outside of the dome, as if it had been cracked open from the inside of the park.' He opened his fingers three inches wide from claw to claw. 'That's how thick the panels they were repairing this dome with are. I checked with one of the city's gla.s.s blowers: dome gla.s.s is designed to withstand steam storms and magma plume falls from the Fire Sea. An ursk would not be able to smash into the park without a very large hammer and chisel.'

'We're the only ones who use the park,' said Hannah, numb with the implications of what her friend had discovered.

'And it wasn't me they were after,' said Chalph. 'It was you you, Hannah. It's just the same as how politics in the Baronial Council work back home when things cut up rough. You don't just poison the head of a house, you poison the aunts, the sons, the daughters, the brothers you a.s.sa.s.sinate everyone at once! Leave no one alive able to come back and try to take revenge against your house. Tooth and claw, Hannah, tooth and claw.'

'This is Jago, not Pericur. We have the police, the stained senate, the acc.u.mulated law of a thousand generations.'

But there were Alice's mutilated remains lying in state inside her own cathedral. Had the failing of Hermetica's battlements simply been a distraction to ensure the entire city was otherwise engaged when she was murdered? One that should have also ensured her ward was ripped to pieces inside the abandoned park...

'It's never fair,' said Chalph. 'They might not even care about you you just happened to be the ward of the wrong person. A loose p.a.w.n to be tidied from the board.'

Hannah pa.s.sed the sabotaged machinery back to Chalph. 'We have to show this to someone, to Colonel Knipe.'

'In a vendetta, you trust only your own house and family,' said Chalph. 'The militia wants to blame the free company for the ursk attack. The colonel's not going to listen to either of us if we accuse the most powerful man on Jago outside of the First Senator.'

'The church is my house, Alice was my family...'

'I could tell the baroness, but I don't think she will help us. No Jagonese is going to trust the word of a foreign trader from the House of Ush. Sentiment is already being whipped up against the ursine here in the capital people have been shouting at me about food prices and shortages of grain down in the streets: accusing the house of profiteering. Calling us dirty wet-snouts. Saying that the archd.u.c.h.ess is trying to starve the Jagonese off the island, saying that the free company fighters let the ursks into the city on purpose to scare the last of the Jagonese away.'

'The Guild of Valvemen,' said Hannah, a feeling of certainty rising within her. 'Their people would know exactly where to strike to shut down a section of the battlements. That jigger Vardan Flail is behind all of this, I know he is.'

Her suspicions were silenced by a woman's shout carrying down the park's path. It was a police militiawoman, the same one Hannah thought she had seen following her earlier but she had company this time. Four individuals cloaked in the long robes of valvemen.

'Damson Hannah Conquest,' the militiawoman said in an accusatory tone. 'You were not in the cathedral when we called.'

'I finished early,' lied Hannah.

'You have not even started,' hissed one of the valvemen.

'Your ballot notice has been served,' said the militiawoman.

Served? With a start, Hannah realized what day it was. Since Alice's murder time hardly seemed to matter at all one day, one hour, each much the same as the last all of them blurring into a single amorphous mess. This was the day her service to the guild should have started!

Two of the valvemen advanced on Hannah, grabbing an arm apiece, the third seizing her behind her shoulders.

The militiawoman lowered her lamp staff to point menacingly at Chalph as he stepped forward to help Hannah. She brushed her cape back with her other hand to indicate the pistol hanging from her waist, and that she wouldn't hesitate in drawing it if the ursine tried to stop them. 'You don't want to a.s.sist a draft dodger, Pericurian, you really don't!'

'I wasn't trying to escape!' Hannah protested, struggling. 'I forgot, that is all.'

'Set the example,' one of the valvemen hissed from beneath his cowl, the smell of mint on his clothes making her gag.

The others took up the cry, the quiet stillness of the neglected park broken by their screeching mantra. 'Set the example. Set the example Set the example.'

Hannah was dragged out of the dome, screaming and scuffling. Dragged towards the vaults of the guild. To serve the devil who had killed Alice Gray. The man who had already tried to murder her once.

As the Purity Queen Purity Queen approached the soaring coral line that ringed the island of Jago, Commodore Black ordered all of his pa.s.sengers apart from Nandi to clear the bridge, keeping his word to the professor that he would keep an eye on her. approached the soaring coral line that ringed the island of Jago, Commodore Black ordered all of his pa.s.sengers apart from Nandi to clear the bridge, keeping his word to the professor that he would keep an eye on her.

Now they were bobbing in front of the coral line's iron gate and Nandi had to stop herself from gasping. Of course, she had seen ill.u.s.trations of the gates in the texts back at Saint Vine's, but the scale was totally different watching them slowly draw back above her to reveal the cauldron-like barrels of cannons on the fortress. The fortifications were wedged between the coral peaks above, a frill of gunnery ominously tracking their vessel a silent presence and ancient reminder of why the Jagonese had never fallen to the predations of the Chimecan Empire.

Jago, the fortress of learning and the last redoubt of the Circlist enlightenment during the long age of ice. All this and more, once. But the world turned, and the retreat of the glaciers had undermined her pre-eminent position in the world. Studying history at the college, first as a student, then as Professor Harsh's a.s.sistant, the single thing that had struck Nandi most was that nations, civilizations, empires, all had a lifespan, much the same as any person. They grew from seeds, they blossomed, they aged, and finally they pa.s.sed away into the twilight. When you were a citizen of a proud nation like the Kingdom of Jackals, living in its summer years when you trod the wide streets of Middlesteel feeling the throb of commerce and could turn your eye to the sky and see only the slow-moving sweep of the Royal Aerostatical Navy's airships it was exceptionally easy to forget that the show of permanence all around you was just an illusion from the perspective of history. The same feeling of immortality a legionnaire of the Chimecan Empire would have felt millennia ago. The same deceptive feeling of durability that a Jagonese burgher would have experienced in centuries past, cosseted by achievements drawn around them like a blanket while the rest of the world huddled and froze in the ice. But the wider world's summer had become Jago's winter. Nandi would be studying a failing civilization on Jago while there was still some flesh clinging to its bones, and that was quite a privilege. It grated on her nerves that she had to travel here in near secrecy, bypa.s.sing the jealous fools who would have seen her place on the expedition cancelled. Just because she was a poor scholarship girl.

Pa.s.sing through the coral line, their u-boat remained on the surface for the short approach through the coastal waters, cutting through a broken haze thrown up by the collision of the boils and the residual lava. This, she remembered reading in the college's text, was what the weather of Jago would always be like. The coastline of the island was a scorched wasteland burned by the Fire Sea, but travel a few miles inland, and Jago's true position in arctic lat.i.tudes became apparent, a dangerous night-cold wilderness of ice haunted by creatures as fierce as the freezing landscape they inhabited. What civilization there was left on Jago clung to the fiery coastline, leaving its glacial interior to monstrous beasts. Nandi saw a final flash of magnesium light through the mists, shimmering out from the flare-house on top of the Horn of Jago, and then the mountain disappeared and boiling water covered the bridge's armoured viewing window. As they sank beneath the Fire Sea, Nandi could see the tug that had guided the Purity Queen Purity Queen in sinking before them, bubbles fleeting towards the surface from its pressure seals. in sinking before them, bubbles fleeting towards the surface from its pressure seals.

The Purity Queen Purity Queen followed the tug down, the water outside turning darker with every league of their increasing depth. As they neared the seabed, the commodore ordered his two steersmen to follow the tug's example and head for the mouth of one of the t.i.tanic bra.s.s carvings of octopi, cuttlefish and nautili wrought into the underwater base of the island's submerged basalt cliff-line. Nandi saw that they were entering a long tunnel illuminated by a strip of green lights running along its side. The tunnel ended in a door which irised open to admit the followed the tug down, the water outside turning darker with every league of their increasing depth. As they neared the seabed, the commodore ordered his two steersmen to follow the tug's example and head for the mouth of one of the t.i.tanic bra.s.s carvings of octopi, cuttlefish and nautili wrought into the underwater base of the island's submerged basalt cliff-line. Nandi saw that they were entering a long tunnel illuminated by a strip of green lights running along its side. The tunnel ended in a door which irised open to admit the Purity Queen Purity Queen into a large dark s.p.a.ce which started to drain of water and descend at the same time, a lifting room and dry-dock combined. As their descent drew to an end, the front of their lifting room opened out onto an underwater anchorage giving Nandi her first look at the great harbour vault of Hermetica City. The warm green stretch of the underwater pool was bounded by the concrete arc of the harbour at the opposite end of the chamber where hundreds of tugs similar to the one that had guided them were moored inside gated locks. From above glowing yellow plates partially hidden by wisps of condensation cast a diffuse light over the port's warm waters. If Nandi hadn't actually been present during their underwater approach, she might have taken the subterranean vault's walls for a cliff-side and believed that they had simply sailed into one of the mountainous harbours back in the Kingdom's uplands rather than entering Jago's underground civilization. into a large dark s.p.a.ce which started to drain of water and descend at the same time, a lifting room and dry-dock combined. As their descent drew to an end, the front of their lifting room opened out onto an underwater anchorage giving Nandi her first look at the great harbour vault of Hermetica City. The warm green stretch of the underwater pool was bounded by the concrete arc of the harbour at the opposite end of the chamber where hundreds of tugs similar to the one that had guided them were moored inside gated locks. From above glowing yellow plates partially hidden by wisps of condensation cast a diffuse light over the port's warm waters. If Nandi hadn't actually been present during their underwater approach, she might have taken the subterranean vault's walls for a cliff-side and believed that they had simply sailed into one of the mountainous harbours back in the Kingdom's uplands rather than entering Jago's underground civilization.

'We're the only vessel in harbour,' said Nandi, staring around her at the quiet lock gates, power houses, travelling dock cranes, sheds and warehouses. At least, they were if she discounted the idle tugs of the Jagonese home fleet. It was a lonely feeling.

After the Purity Queen Purity Queen had moored up, the commodore ordered all hatches open and reached for his jacket. 'Best take yours too, la.s.s. It's warm enough during the day in the vaults, but at night they vent in air from the plains above to make it cooler underground.' had moored up, the commodore ordered all hatches open and reached for his jacket. 'Best take yours too, la.s.s. It's warm enough during the day in the vaults, but at night they vent in air from the plains above to make it cooler underground.'

'Just like the real world,' said Nandi.

'It's different enough in Jago, la.s.s,' said the commodore. 'I've never had a liking for this place. If it wasn't for your blessed professor twisting my arm, I'd be Pericur-bound and leaving Hermetica City's underground vaults to the Jagonese with a welcome-they-be for them.'

Nandi looked at the customs officials joining the tug crew on the dockside outside the bridge, a gaggle of velvet-cloaked functionaries pushing past the sailors in their rubber scald suits. 'You don't like living underground?'

'You can't be claustrophobic in my trade, la.s.s. Maybe it's the crackle of the wild energy they've tamed to power this place, or the dark creatures from the interior you'll hear singing and whining outside the city walls up on the surface. Maybe it's just that the more they try and make this place seem like home, the stranger it seems to me, but I've no love for this island or the shiver I feel when I walk its sealed-up streets.'

Out on the dockside the collection of velvet-cloaked officials had been joined by green-uniformed militiamen whose main function seemed to be to keep back the townspeople filtering through the otherwise deserted harbour front. Nandi and the commodore were the first out onto the gantry that swung across to the Purity Queen Purity Queen's deck, Nandi fishing in the pockets of her short tweed jacket for the letter of introduction she had been given. Sealed in red wax with the crest of Saint Vine's college.

By the time the police had finished warning the commodore of the penalties if he were to take onboard any Jagonese pa.s.sengers without senate-stamped exit visas, Jethro Daunt and his curious jerking steamman friend had followed Nandi out, no doubt enjoying their first taste of solid land for weeks. More and more Jagonese were heading for the line formed by the police, presumably the hopeful emigrants that the Purity Queen Purity Queen's master had just been warned of, waving and calling at the crew coming out of the u-boat, brandishing money, papers, or just their empty hands. The tug service's sailors must have spread word among their friends and family. A rare chance to get off Jago.

One of the men standing by the custom officials strolled over to Nandi and Commodore Black. Judging by his dark frock coat and stovepipe hat, he was Jackelian rather than a local. He nodded at Nandi and the commodore before clearing his throat. 'I am Mister Walsingham, an officer attached to the Jackelian consul here. I have cleared your arrival with the Jagonese Board of Aliens.' He pa.s.sed each of them a wax-sealed wallet. 'You have full papers, captain, your crew and pa.s.sengers have subsidiary visas attached to your own Jagonese law can be swift and severe, do try to make sure they don't start any brawls in taverns.' He smiled weakly towards Nandi. 'The crew, that is to say, not your pa.s.sengers.'

'Any that do will answer to me before they answer to the Jagonese magistrates,' said the commodore, balling a fist.

'A tight ship, eh. Good, good. If you need us, the Jackelian emba.s.sy is inside the Horn of Jago. But do try to stay out of trouble here, there's a good fellow. We don't have much leverage with the locals these days, so if any of your sailors end up in the police militia's fortress, they're rather on their own I'm afraid.'

'A grey little suit,' said the commodore as the officer walked away, 'and just the same as a thousand of his friends in the civil service back home, no imagination for anything save creating new taxes to lighten my pocket-book. As much use as a blunt stick in a sabre duel. We're on our own here, la.s.s.'

But not quite as alone as would suit Nandi. 'You don't have to wait for me, whatever the professor told you. I'm hardly likely to get into trouble researching ancient history. You can leave me here in the capital, deliver your cargo to Pericur, and then pick me up on the return leg of your voyage. The more time I have to root through Jago's archives, the better I shall like it.'

The commodore scratched at his dark, forked beard. 'A promise is a promise, now. Your fine professor has gone out on a limb for me more times than I care to count and I wouldn't want her to use those great big arms of hers on my noggin. Old Blacky's crew and the Purity Queen Purity Queen will stay here and feed pennies to a suitably grateful tavern owner while you avail yourself of the archive access Saint Vine's College has so handsomely paid for.' He winked at her. 'Besides, shipping to Pericur and back via the island will mean double navigation fees for these Jagonese pirates and they've had their thieving hands deep enough inside my pockets as it is.' will stay here and feed pennies to a suitably grateful tavern owner while you avail yourself of the archive access Saint Vine's College has so handsomely paid for.' He winked at her. 'Besides, shipping to Pericur and back via the island will mean double navigation fees for these Jagonese pirates and they've had their thieving hands deep enough inside my pockets as it is.'

Nandi felt a brief stiffening of the same hackles that Professor Harsh so frequently raised. Wrapped in cotton wool, handled with kid gloves, overlooked for any foreign archaeological dig where there was even a hint of danger. Where else were you going to find sand-buried cities but in Ca.s.sarabia, with its bandits and wild nomads? Creeper-covered temples were two-a-penny in the jungles of Liongeli but so were sharp-clawed thunder lizards, feral tribesman and river pirates. And here it was again. Jago, the heart of the enlightenment, but Commodore Black was still going to wait around while she poked through the Guild of Valvemen's archives. What were he and his crude, lewd crew of rascals and brawlers going to do for her? Start a fight with the guild if it didn't grant her the complete access the college had paid for?

What no one else seemed to realize was that every dig, every position she was barred from, was just another reminder of the hole left in her life by the death of her father, his bones lost in the sands outside the Diesela-Khan's tomb thanks to a single poisoned rifle ball. Nandi had ostensibly come to Jago to fulfil Doctor Conquest's work, but in reality she was completing another expedition. One that had ended disastrously in the great southern desert. When she was finished here and standing back on the soil of the Kingdom of Jackals, her work circulating through the corridors of the college, then her father's restless spirit would finally have his grief eased. Perhaps if she took her own sweet time in her studies, the commodore might grow bored and make for Pericur anyway, giving her an extra month or two alone here in Jago's capital.

Nandi moved aside as the Pericurian amba.s.sador led a delegation of Jagonese dockers forward towards the u-boat's cargo hold. It looked as if he was unloading some of the crates carrying the transaction-engine parts. His emba.s.sy, Nandi suspected, was about to be upgraded with the fruits of the latest Jackelian science.

Commodore Black walked away to present the papers he had been given by Mister Walsingham to the local customs officials, and by the time he had finished with them, he looked to be in a dark mood. 'The raw-faced cheek of it, la.s.s. We've been allocated rooms in city-centre lodgings with not a choice in the matter, and we're to be escorted there by these green-uniformed popinjays as if we were prisoners being given our afternoon const.i.tutional by the warders.'

'Maybe they don't trust us,' said Nandi.

'They trust sailors well enough,' said a voice behind them. 'They trust them to act like sailors in any port and they'd rather not have Jagonese men and women claiming marriage rights with any of your lads or la.s.ses when you sail out of here.'

Nandi looked at the short, broad man that had spoken dressed in a Jackelian waistcoat with a battered leather trapper's coat over it, rather than the brocaded velvet clothes of the islanders. No local, this, and too scruffy to be one of the Jackelian emba.s.sy staff.

'Ah well,' said the commodore. 'Lucky that my friend is here to study and not to find her fine self a husband.'

'I've been married twice,' said the man. 'But never to anyone on Jago. I'm an outsider and they only tolerate me because they find my skills useful.' He pointed to a set of cages on the side of the docks, iron bars holding back snarling, hooting specimens of the local wildlife. Nandi recognized the giant bear-like ursks from the ill.u.s.trations in her college tomes, huge feral versions of the Pericurian amba.s.sador who had travelled here with them. And by their side a cage filled with something else she had only glimpsed in books before, ab-locks ab-locks. Leathery-skinned bipedal creatures with ape-like faces. They were a head or two under a man's height, furless on the front but with a silver mane striped down their stooped backs.

'My name is Tobias Raffold,' said the trapper, 'and I've been contracted by the Jackelian Zoological Society to deliver these creatures back to the Kingdom.'

Nandi noted the metre-long gap between the ursks' cage and the one holding the ab-locks, the inhabitants of each crate snarling furiously at one another.

Tobias Raffold picked up a crowbar from the floor and drew it along the bars, turning the creatures' growling attention towards him, hands snapping at the bars and trying to reach through to claw at him. 'The only thing they bleeding loathe more than us is each other. Ursks and ab-locks rip each other apart when they cross onto each other's territory.'

Nandi watched the ab-locks' fierce red eyes burning as they pushed up against the bars. 'They can be tamed, can't they?'

'Not at this age,' said Tobias Raffold. 'Trap ab-locks when they're young and geld them and they can be taught basic orders well enough. They're used in the Guild of Valvemen's vaults to porter for them. Ab-locks last longer than us before they're killed by the energies of the turbine halls.'

'Feral or tamed, I'm not carrying the likes of these in the Purity Queen Purity Queen, Mister Raffold,' said the commodore. 'I don't transport live cargoes. They can die, they can escape, and even if they don't their stench and racket will make my crew restless. They're not a lucky cargo for old Blacky.'

The trapper waved a wad of money at the two of them. Jackelian paper notes drawn on Lords Bank. 'I can make it lucky enough for you.'

'Not with those you can't,' said the commodore. 'I've been paid well enough to sail here and I already have an outbound cargo for Pericur. Taking these mortal whining things on board is a mite too close to slaving for my tastes.'

'Don't give me that cant,' said the trapper. 'You've got a cat on board your b.l.o.o.d.y boat to keep down the rats, haven't you? Abs and ursks are nothing more than dumb beasts.'

Commodore Black wrinkled his nose and turned his head away from the whining ab-locks' clamour. 'Not dumb enough for me, Mister Raffold. You can wait for your regular Pericurian boat to put in and ship your pets away for the mortal Jackelian Zoological Society. I'll not be taking them with me.'

'I'll have to wait a month for the next Pericurian boat, man. I just missed the last one!'

Nandi and the commodore left the Jackelian trapper on the dockside, cursing the old u-boat skipper for a superst.i.tious fool.

As the two of them caught up with the other u-boat pa.s.sengers and their guard, the gathering crowds coming to see the u-boat parted to allow another police escort to pa.s.s in the opposite direction. The second group of police militia were pulling an ursine towards the harbour, heavy chains bound across long leather robes inscribed with the symbols of the Pericurian religion. They pa.s.sed closed enough to Nandi and the others for Amba.s.sador Ortin to take a quizzical interest in one of his fellow nationals being so rudely manhandled.

'That is a preacher of the Divine Quad you are mistreating,' Ortin urs Ortin protested to the officer leading the way. 'Dear boy, can you not-'

Nandi and the amba.s.sador lurched back as the ursine priest threw herself at the new arrivals, the police struggling to hold her. 'You filthy heretic, you'll burn in h.e.l.l for this! Your presence here is hastening the apocalypse. This is sacred soil sacred soil that you defile. Your fur will be burnt away with the wrath of Reckin urs Reckin. You will be left as hairless as these twisted, dirty infidels, the foul descendents of Amaja urs Amaja. You will burn along with all those malignant traders with their blind eyes that can see only profit, standing on the cursed soil where our ancient temples once stood. Their eyes will burn in their sockets for their sins, then they will know true blindness!'

'You've had your answer, sir,' said the officer in charge of the group as his men fought to bundle the giant priest away. 'Now move along.'

'What is going to happen to that lady?' demanded the amba.s.sador.

'She stowed away on the boat from Pericur,' said the officer. 'Now she's going back. She attacked some of your own traders down in the main market, turning over their stalls. You know we deport any of your preachers that try to sneak in. We could have arrested her for the damage she did.'

'A zealot,' said Ortin, sadly. 'Treat her as kindly as you can.'

'Nothing for the archd.u.c.h.ess to complain about, sir.'

Nandi watched the disappearing figure of the preacher, still yelling about the end-times and the fall of paradise, railing against the laughing Jagonese crowds who were jeering and taunting her. 'Does all of the race of man look like devils to you, amba.s.sador?'

'I think there is a little bit of the devil in all of us, dear girl,' said Ortin. 'Whether you have a fine pelt like we do, or even if you don't.'

Nandi nodded in agreement. So many tensions came from the misreading of history. All so avoidable.

The preacher's voice grew fainter as they walked towards the capital.

'The last judgement is coming, all of you...doomed!'

Jethro looked out of the window of their lodgings while Boxiron finished unpacking the last of the travel cases he had been too tired to start the day before. It was a grand hotel, the Westerkerk, but the fact that the connected rooms they had been given were almost as large as their lodgings back at Thompson Street did not disguise the fact that this place was as a good as a prison cell for them. As soon as they'd arrived they had noticed the police militia posted at all the hotel's entrances, and while the soldiers were obviously busy turning away Jagonese claiming they had business with the Purity Queen Purity Queen's crew, Jethro knew that their presence was a double-edged blade.

'We have quite a view of the cathedral across the Grand Ca.n.a.l,' noted Boxiron.

'A view,' said Jethro, 'but not an un.o.bserved way to present the Inquisition's credentials to the cathedral staff.'

'The law enforcers here are not like your friends back in Ham Yard,' said Boxiron.

'Indeed they are not,' said Jethro. 'If they changed the colour of their green uniforms for a redcoat's cherry attire, they might almost be taken for a military force.'

'You marked the coral defences ringing the island on the way in,' said Boxiron. 'The commodore told me they have battlements surrounding the capital's surface structures almost as impressive.'

Jethro rubbed his chin. 'An interesting frame of mind, don't you think? All your enemies are external, all your defences facing out to protect you. But what do you do if you find there is a rot within? How would you cope with that?'

Boxiron did not get a chance to reply there was a knock at their door and when the steamman opened it, Ortin urs Ortin stood there, filling the doorframe with his impressive furred bulk.

'Good amba.s.sador,' said Jethro. 'You're not rooming in the hotel, are you? I thought your emba.s.sy would have taken you in.'

'The deputy amba.s.sador claims that she wasn't told I was coming and that she's taken the opportunity of my predecessor's departure to remodel my apartments. I won't be able to move into my emba.s.sy rooms for weeks.'

Jethro frowned. 'You suspect a slight?'

'Of course I suspect a slight, dear boy,' said Ortin urs Ortin. 'I am a rare male office-holder in a matriarchal society, and it seems my banishment here is not to be made a comfortable one. But even they can't stop me taking up my duties. I have a summons to present myself to the stained senate this morning, as do you...'

'Me? I'm a private party, good amba.s.sador, not a representative of the Kingdom's foreign office.'

'There's still a couple of reformers left on my staff here, despite the best efforts of the archd.u.c.h.ess's conservatives, and my house's friends have caught wind of a few worrying circ.u.mstances brewing here,' said the amba.s.sador, moving to the window. 'And that's one of them.'