Secrets Of The Fire Sea Part 6

Jethro followed the direction of the large furred finger and saw an officer of the police militia striding towards the hotel.

'Colonel Constantine Knipe, a particularly charmless fellow who seems to hold a low opinion of my appointment here that's not far removed from that of my own enemies in Pericur. He's already intercepted me and warned me to restrict my duties to a bare minimum and now I suspect it's your turn. Well, at least I've beaten the old fruit here to you. I counsel saying little...'

True to the amba.s.sador's words, Colonel Knipe arrived outside their rooms a minute later, his appearance preceded by the clump-hiss of his mechanical leg. He glowered at Ortin urs Ortin as though his presence implied that all three of them were involved in some plot. Then Knipe turned his attention towards Jethro, his eyes skipping briefly past Boxiron the steamman surely an exotic oddity on the island and waved a sheet of paper at the ex-parson. 'Jethro Daunt, citizen of the Kingdom of Jackals. The same Jethro Daunt, I am presuming, who was the consulting detective that retrieved the Twelve Works of Charity Twelve Works of Charity when the painting was stolen from the Middlesteel Museum.' when the painting was stolen from the Middlesteel Museum.'

'The same, good colonel. Although it would be truer to say that the painting never actually left the museum, it was merely switched and falsely identified as a forgery by the thief. You are exceedingly well informed.'

'Our representatives in the Kingdom still collect your penny sheets,' said the colonel. 'And our transaction-engine vaults are still one of the wonders of the world.'

'So I have heard,' smiled Jethro. 'And I see from the paper in your hand that their retrieval speeds match all that I have heard about their superiority.'

'Why have you been summoned to the senate floor, Daunt?'

'That, I'm afraid, only your stained senate can answer,' said Jethro.

'Your services have not been engaged by them?'

'No,' sighed Jethro. 'Sadly, my visit here is of a private nature.'

'There is nothing private on Jago when it comes to keeping our people safe,' said the colonel. 'I will have the reason for your appearance on our sh.o.r.es. We haven't had a Jackelian u-boat call for over thirteen months.'

'If you will,' said Jethro, stiffly. 'I have come here to pay my respects to a recent grave. That of Damson Alice Gray.'

'The archbishop?' said the colonel, surprised. 'What is she to you?'

'She and I were engaged to be married, although sadly the loss of my original living prevented our union.'

Colonel Knipe looked shocked, as though he wouldn't have been more disturbed if Jethro had admitted he and Boxiron were grave robbers come to whisk the woman's corpse out of her grave for sale to medical students in need of surgical practice meat.

'If the Jagonese emba.s.sy back home have been thorough in sending you copies of the Middlesteel Ill.u.s.trated News Middlesteel Ill.u.s.trated News, you will find the posting of our banns in your archives, I am sure. A little relic of my personal history buried among so much of yours, good colonel.'

'You have missed the funeral,' noted the colonel.

'Word travels slowly from Jago these days,' said Jethro. 'But I am here now.'

'Better for you to have missed the funeral,' said the colonel, his manner softening slightly now that he thought he understood the rationale for Jethro's presence on Jago. He pointed at Ortin urs Ortin. 'One of your friend's primitive cousins was released into the city thanks to the incompetence of the Pericurian mercenaries the senate has seen fit to hire to protect us. You have your memories of the archbishop as she was, not as she was left after the ursk attack. It is better that way.'

'A terrible accident,' said Jethro. He did not say that he hadn't been able to properly remember Alice Gray's face for many years. He could recall their courtship, the places they had visited together, but the cruelty of time had erased her features from his memories. He was a different man now. Like so many men, he had defined himself by his relationship with her. What she had left behind would have been wretched, wrecked and worse even without the old G.o.ds' touch of madness.

'We killed four ursks in the ca.n.a.ls that night,' said the colonel. 'Not much of a recompense for a life lost, but some consolation. I believe we still have one of the furs on the wall in the militia fortress. I could let you have it, if you think the use of it as a rug would bring you peace when you look at it.'

Jethro nodded. 'You are exceedingly obliging, good colonel.'

'I shall take you to the senate,' decided the colonel, graciously. He waved Ortin away, noting that the amba.s.sador was expected to present himself first. Jethro watched the Pericurian leave eagerly enough, happy to be out of the militia officer's company with all his talk of skinning ursks. When the amba.s.sador had left, the colonel shook his head knowingly. 'And on the way I will tell you what you need to know to keep you safe here.'

'Safe?' said Jethro. 'I understood the Jagonese were exemplars of courtesy and the abidance of laws.'

'By nature, our people are,' said the colonel. 'But the wheel has turned and things on Jago are not as they once were.' He stared at Boxiron, 'Is it safe to talk in front of this one?'

'I trust Boxiron with my life,' said Jethro. 'And despite the best efforts of the Jackelian underworld, as my living presence here attests, I have yet to be disappointed.'

'Are you from the Steammen Free State?' the colonel asked Boxiron. 'Or an automatic milled by the race of man? You are not as I imagined you.'

'I am a little of both,' replied Boxiron, his voicebox juddering.

'My friend's is a sad and difficult story,' said Jethro, 'and it would pain him to relate it. Suffice it to say, Boxiron is a better and more reliable friend than all others have proven over the years. He's a topping old steamer.'

Satisfied, the colonel led Jethro and Boxiron out of the hotel, across the square and towards the imposing steps that led into the pa.s.sages and vaults hollowed out of the mountainous Horn of Jago itself. Jethro was quite glad the colonel didn't suspect what Boxiron really was, or he wouldn't have been so happy to lead the two of them in front of the senate.

Jethro glanced across at the cathedral before the steps took him inside the mountain, the church building rising stalagmite-like to join the roof of the capital's vast central vault. That was where his business lay, not in front of the rulers of Jago.

What could the senate possibly want of Jethro Daunt that he had to give them?

CHAPTER FIVE.

The thing that disconcerted Nandi the most about Hermetica City's atmospheric station was how clean she found it compared to stations such as Guardian Fairfax back in Middlesteel. None of the smoke, the dust, the grime, no ceaseless thump from the constant labour of steam engines to keep the transport tunnels under vacuum. This system was powered by electricity. She shivered at the thought.

There weren't many people in the station but then, this line only served the distant vaults of the Guild of Valvemen, their chambers buried many miles away at the foot of the hills that served as the gateway to the cold, dark interior of the country. Outside the battlements and no doubt out of mind, too. Practically a city by itself. No farm or park domes out there, nothing on the surface. All buried deep and far enough away from the capital for Jago's citizens not to be concerned about being poisoned by the power electric the guild's turbine halls generated.

Nandi stood by a cl.u.s.ter of statues in the centre of the concourse, watching the crimson-robed valvemen moving over the polished stone floor like red ghosts waiting for the capsule that would take them to their vaults to arrive. She was puzzling over the inscription at the foot of a sculpture of three Jagonese women hugging each other Here lays Eli, still and old, who died because he was cold Here lays Eli, still and old, who died because he was cold when she spotted the commodore coming towards her. when she spotted the commodore coming towards her.

'I thought you might have forgotten I was due to make my first visit to the guild's transaction-engine rooms today,' she said by way of greeting.

'Ah, la.s.s,' said the commodore, 'I would have come sooner, but for the curiosity of that colonel of police, Knipe, and his insistence I satisfy it with every petty little detail of our voyage here. As if the Jagonese shouldn't be grateful that there is still an honest skipper willing to brave the perils of the Fire Sea to pay them a call.'

'I had my turn yesterday evening,' said Nandi. 'After they escorted us to the hotel. What was my research, why was Saint Vine's paying the guild's fees of access so eagerly? How I am to immediately report anyone offering me large amounts of money as a dowry to marry them. What I know of Mister Daunt and the old steamer that follows him around...'

'You see now,' declaimed the commodore in triumph, 'why it is old Blacky avoids this blasted port. They are an insular, suspicious bunch on Jago. They have dug themselves a pit here, pulled themselves in and let themselves stew in their own juices for a few centuries too long.' He indicated the guild workers on the concourse around them. 'And these red crows are the worst of all, their bodies crumbling under the wicked weight of the dark energies they tame. But this is where you've come to study, and so I'll wait with you to see you safely away from the cursed place.'

'I'm not your daughter,' said Nandi. 'I don't need protecting.'

'n.o.body will ever be my daughter,' said Commodore Black.

'I'm sorry,' Nandi apologized. 'I should not have said that. I asked one of your crew back on the submarine who your boat was named after.'

'You're not my daughter, Nandi, but you have more than a little of her fire. She died doing what was right. I wish I could say I taught her that, but I'd be a wicked liar if I did.'

'I'll be safe enough here,' said Nandi.

'This city, this whole island, is a mortal tomb,' said the commodore. 'It just hasn't sunk in with the locals here yet. And I know your Professor Harsh well enough to know that she would have lectured you all about the dangers of tombs.'

'There are no stake-covered pits here,' said Nandi.

'Not the kind that you can see, la.s.s,' said the old u-boat man. 'Which makes them even more dangerous in my book.'

'What if I I need to do what I feel is right?' asked Nandi. 'Will you try to stop me?' need to do what I feel is right?' asked Nandi. 'Will you try to stop me?'

'I'm not that big a fool, la.s.s.' He patted the sabre by his side. 'But I'll be close by, waiting to take up the point with any blackguards that do.'

Nandi shook her head and accepted the inevitable. It seemed that in convincing the professor that she could manage the expedition to Jago on her own, she had merely swapped one would-be protector for another. If her father had been alive, he would have come here with her. Nandi couldn't have stopped him, though perhaps he would have used his influence over the professor to stop her her. The commodore and the man her father had been were as different as the sun and the moon, but they shared one thing they would both die for her, that much she knew. Nandi shifted the leather satchel she was carrying, inscribed with the double-headed crane seal of Saint Vine's college and weighed down with her papers, blank notebooks and pens and ink. 'You won't have to wait much longer, look...'

Three iron capsules arrived in quick succession, whipping through the rubber curtain to be caught by the turntable at the far end of the concourse, then rotated in front of the pa.s.senger platform as if they were offerings to those waiting. Nandi and the commodore had been sent a capsule all to themselves, to spare them the guild workers' company or perhaps the converse. Their capsule also came with a guide; a single valveman in the same intricately embroidered crimson robes worn by the guild workers boarding the other capsules.

'No one on the platform to check for tickets,' remarked Nandi.

'Ah, anyone who wants to go where we're going is mortal welcome to it,' said the commodore. 'If there was any justice in the world, the guild would be paying us to visit their dark lair, not the other way around.'

Their guide led them into their windowless capsule and in a female voice told the two of them to make themselves comfortable on the red leather bench seats running along one side. When they were seated, the valve worker touched a b.u.t.ton and the door irised shut with a clang, followed by a slight thump as the loading arm pushed them forward into the atmospheric system. Then a whoosh. An increasing sense of acceleration as the pressure differential built up, sending them hurtling along the airless tunnels towards the great engine rooms of Jago.

Commodore Black turned to their guide. 'Tell me, la.s.s, is there no pilot on this blessed contraption of yours?'

There was a slight shake of her heavy red hood. 'No. The atmospheric capsules are controlled by the machines.'

'Machines, always more machines on Jago,' said the commodore. 'Machines to open the gates on the great ring of coral that circles your island, machines to heat and light your vaults, and yet more of the blessed things to bring down the air from the terrible land above. You've more machines down here in your city than in King Steam's land.'

'And transaction engines,' added Nandi, expectantly. 'Filled with the lost knowledge of the ages.'

'It's never been lost to us,' said their guide.

'Archived away unstudied, then,' said Nandi. She rummaged around in her bag and brought out her letters of admittance and travel. 'Your colonel of police has already seen my papers, but my college is very insistent the right people receive these and I get access to all of the records we paid for.'

The valvewoman took the grant of access, and as she read her previously steady hand began to shake. Did she have the palsy? Had one of the engine-room afflictions weakened her arm?

'Are you well, la.s.s?' asked the commodore. 'Do you need a tot from old Blacky's hipflask to steady your hand?'

'The names on these papers,' said their guide, 'the two original names listed under the prior grant of access.' Hannah Conquest pulled her crimson hood down. 'They're the names of my mother and father!'

As Jethro walked towards the senate, the combination of noises produced by Colonel Knipe's artificial leg and Boxiron's clumping footsteps on the iron gantry seemed to merge into one rhythm. Down below lay an atmospheric station almost identical to those of Middlesteel, save for the presence of Pericurian mercenaries waiting for the capsule-like trains. A large turntable in the centre of the concourse was retrieving new capsules emerging through the rubber curtains that sealed the airless tubes the carriages travelled along.

Struggling in the shadow of the bear-like mercenaries were Jagonese loaded down with bundles, crates and chests of possessions, pushing, pulling and hauling their burdens off the transport capsules and out into the vaults of the capital below.

Colonel Knipe noted the direction of Jethro's gaze. 'You must feel Alice Gray's loss, Mister Daunt, to have travelled all the way to Jago to see her grave?'

Jethro nodded.

'There,' said the colonel, 'is our loss. The senate has ordered the closure of Tarramack, the second city of Jago. Her people are being relocated here to the capital, whether they care to come or not. When the evacuation is complete, the atmospheric line out to Tarramack will be blown and the tunnels caved in to keep us safe in the capital. Then there will only be us left. Our loss is not as sudden as the one you feel so keenly, it has been happening over centuries. Slowly, like a disease, or like old age, dying a little more each year.'

'Those people couldn't stay in their homes?' asked Jethro.

'A couple of thousand in a city built for hundreds of thousands?' The colonel drew a circle in the air. 'There were twelve great cities looping around our coast, connected by the atmospheric line. In a week's time Hermetica City will be all that is left of them. When your city's population is reduced beyond a workable level, things break down faster than there are people with the time or knowledge to fix them. I was in the city of Flamewall when we discovered that the hard way, manning a tower on its battlements. I left my leg behind there along with the graves of the woman I married and our two young sons.'

'I am sorry,' said Jethro.

Colonel Knipe hardly seemed to have heard him. 'No, better an orderly withdrawal and the planned decommissioning of Tarramack. The refugees hate us now, but they have their choice of homes in the deserted quarters here in Hermetica City.'

'Does everyone come?' asked Jethro.

'Some hide,' said the colonel. 'Holdouts that don't want to be resettled. A few turn outlaw. They won't last long on their own, not when the creatures outside the walls get into a city.'

'These are the problems you said you would warn me about, good colonel?'

'Partly,' said Knipe. 'And those that follow as a consequence of it. There are parents here, proud people, good people, who'll thrust their daughters at you as if their children were two-penny bawdy house girls in the hope you'll take them away from Jago their sons, too, if they thought you had a taste for it. There are others who would slit your throat if they suspected you carried the foreign coins needed to bribe a u-boat man to look the other way on hatch duty. And as for the Pericurian mercenaries that guard us, you've had a taste of the misery those brutes' incompetence can bring you, with Alice Gray's death. This is what Jago has come to, our ancient redoubt of civilization. The world has forgotten who we are, and now it's just waiting for the last of us to forget too. Then there'll just be the ursks and the ab-locks and the other monsters of the interior hunting each other by the flames of the Fire Sea, amongst our broken ruins.'

'It is never too late to change,' noted Boxiron, stumbling along nosily behind Jethro. 'There are many threads of the great pattern, many paths that may yet be taken by your people.'

'Yes,' agreed Jethro. 'What about the senate you're taking us to see, what course do those that you've voted for favour in this matter?'

'Voted for?' laughed Colonel Knipe, grimly. 'They're the main part of what I wanted to warn you about, Jackelian. Jago's other cities may have been abandoned, but their political wards remain, controlled by one or two voters with ancient property t.i.tles. Our senators' seats have been as good as hereditary since long before I was born. When you speak to the First Senator, make no promises. Dissemble if the fool presses you. If you are lucky and his functionaries don't get your words on paper, he will have forgotten what he asked you to do by the next time you see him. His mind will have flitted onto a new fancy.'

Jethro nodded and continued walking, humming a tune under his breath. 'The bulldog as well as to bark may go whistle, just as an upland pup is doomed to be flogged with a thistle.' 'The bulldog as well as to bark may go whistle, just as an upland pup is doomed to be flogged with a thistle.'

The Jagonese may have chosen to site the bulk of their capital in the warm subterranean caverns along the coast, but the vaults hollowed out within the Horn of Jago followed the usual laws of wealth the higher they travelled inside the burrowed mountain, the greater the prosperity of its citizens, until the clothing of the merchants and mill-owners became so baroque that Jethro thought it a wonder they could still move under the weight of elaborate brocaded jackets and velvet cloaks. Each zone of wealth within the mountain seemed to have its own lifting room and territory, every guild and organization represented with their routes jealousy guarded, and although the pa.s.sages' guards would not bar the colonel of the police militia, Knipe led them through the horn using a circuitous route to avoid unnecessary antagonism. By the time they had reached the senatorial levels inside the mountain, the public lifting rooms had become hall-sized, the padded crimson leather of their walls reflected in crystal mirrors and manned by public servants in senate livery. The last such lifting room they rode upwards deposited Jethro, Boxiron and the colonel in a long, echoing corridor lined with busts of First Senators long since departed. Each bust was as tall as a man and created the eerie impression that a company of invading stone giants had been captured and decapitated, their heads left here as a warning. In each of the gaps between the busts a waist-high wooden rack waited.

Jethro indicated the racks. 'For umbrellas, perhaps?'

Colonel Knipe shrugged. 'For holding the senators' rapiers and foils. Duelling was outlawed five hundred years ago on Jago. It may be hard to believe now, but our cities were incredibly overcrowded once. Settling matters of honour at the point of a sword was commonplace, and the senate considered duelling a useful mechanism for society to release pressure.'

Yes, Jethro could see how centuries before, the comforts of a warm city and dome-grown crops would have seemed a paradise when the alternative was freezing on the surface and possibly ending up as food for the ancient Chimecan empire's plate. The memory of the Chimecans' vicious heel on the continent's throat had faded into the annals of history an age ago, and yet still Jago abided. Narrowly.

A line of Pericurian mercenaries stood sentry over a triangular-shaped door eighty feet high at the end of the corridor. After Jethro and Colonel Knipe had been thoroughly searched and the militia commander sufficiently humiliated forced to un-belt his pistol and hand it over one of the mercenaries behind a marble lectern threw a switch and the ma.s.sive doors were powered slowly open.

'Your staff of office, too, colonel,' said one of the mercenaries, as the three of them were about to enter.

'A colonel of the police militia is permitted their staff on the floor of the senate,' barked Knipe.

The ursine guard shook his large furred head. 'The tradition has changed now, by order of the First Senator.'

Colonel Knipe's eyes narrowed at the insult, but he surrendered his staff anyway. 'Why not, there are hardly any of our traditions left to honour. One more lost won't make any difference.'

Inside, Jethro saw where the stained senate obtained its name: the mid-peak of the mountain was hollowed out into a vast octahedron-shaped chamber, the lower half filled with marble seats, public galleries and stands for the a.s.sembly's functionaries. The upper half of the octahedron was a ring of sloped stained gla.s.s that bore testament to Jago's lost greatness. Some of the scenes were historical, pictures of the great exodus from the continent to the island galleons trapped frozen in ice while others burned in the Fire Sea, the surviving settlers standing tall on the sh.o.r.es of Jago and surveying the land. Ramparts being built and defended against rolling hordes of the island's monstrous natives. Acres of rainbow gla.s.s paid tribute to the height of Jago's mercantile era docks spilling over with trade goods, food and spices from a hundred foreign nations. These scenes were interspersed with Circlist imagery, the ill.u.s.trations of ancient koans and parables mixed with mathematical formulae so dense and elaborate the effect was of an illuminated ma.n.u.script set in gla.s.s. Light chased across the thousands of panes that had gone into each scene, and for a moment Jethro thought he was seeing lightning, but then he noted its regularity and realized it was the flare-house's sodium glare high above them. Beckoning in a world that had laid Jago aside.

Jethro hadn't known what to expect of this a.s.sembly, but it certainly wasn't this this. None of the rude, urgent jostling and violent ritual of parliament back in the Kingdom. This vast echoing senate was as depopulated as the city it ruled, elegantly robed politicians dotting the chamber here and there, like patrons arrived early at a Lump Street theatre for a play that had received scathing reviews the night before, scaring away the bulk of the audience. Jethro noted some of them were sleeping. There were more senators and officials standing in the centre of the chamber than sitting down, cl.u.s.tered around something, and, as Jethro drew closer, he saw that it was an architect's model of a city built on top of a large round table.

'First Senator Silvermain,' announced the colonel. 'I have the two visitors from the Kingdom you requested to see.'

'Their presence was requested,' announced a politician in his sixties, straightening up from his observation of the model. He had wild, white curly hair and a hangdog face, his neck hidden by a long scarf despite the comfortable warmth of the chamber. 'Yours was not, Constantine Knipe.'

The police colonel gave a slight bow. 'As the senate wishes.'

'The senate wishes for you to go. You and your sly eyes, always watching.' The First Senator pointed to the elaborately liveried servant standing behind him carrying a tall gold staff of office. 'You think you're fit to have a senatorial rod carrier following you with the First Senator's staff? You're not! You haven't the breeding for it and without the breeding you're nothing, Knipe.'

The First Senator waited until the colonel had left, then beckoned Jethro and Boxiron to come towards the architect's model. 'We're watching him him. Watching him talk to senators who think they can fill our chair. But not when we're cleverer than he is, with free company soldiers we trust. Protecting us. Take off your shoes.'