Читать книгу Secrets of the Fire Sea - Stephen Hunt - Страница 6

The Kingdom of Jackals. Middlesteel.

Boxiron walked towards the drawing room, his heavy iron feet echoing on the polished, veined marble. There was a strip of carpet before the doorway and the clunking of his feet faded, muffled just enough to enable him to hear the voices from those gathered inside the drawing room through its closed door. It was luxuriously appointed, this Middlesteel townhouse, but then that was to be expected. Only the wealthy could afford the services of Jethro Daunt and his trusty servant, Boxiron.

The constable guarding the door looked at Boxiron advancing with a curious expression on her face. Steammen were a common enough sight in the Kingdom of Jackals, but they weren’t usually quite so ramshackle. Boxiron had none of the grace of the creatures of the metal that bowed their knee to King Steam inside his mountain state. The modern shining skull of a steamman knight was inexpertly welded to the primitive body of a man-milled mechanical, steam hissing out of loose plates as he walked on his awkwardly jerking hinged feet.

‘You been out looking for clues?’ asked the constable, a simple crusher wearing the black uniform of the city’s constabulary.

Boxiron gave a slight shake of his head, the movement amplified into a spastic jerking by his unsynchronized neck controls. No. What would be the point of looking for further evidence of misdoings now? Cuthbert Spicer, Lord Commercial of the Kingdom of Jackals, was just as dead as the finer sensory control servos running along Boxiron’s neck, and both their masters now stood inside the drawing room for the culmination of the investigation – Inspector Reason of Ham Yard giving official sanction to the presence of Jethro Daunt and his metal servant.

Not that there was much of a pretence by anyone that the ex-man of the cloth would have been called in to uncover the truth of Lord Spicer’s murder without the insistence of the victim’s estate. Jethro Daunt’s keen intellect might have been arguably better employed here than it ever had been when he was the parson of Hundred Locks, but it was not an argument that you would ever hear coming from the lips of any constable or police inspector, eager to keep amateurs out of their profession. It was not as if the capital’s police force needed to feel threatened: for every high profile murder like Lord Spicer’s, there were a hundred cases of garden variety grave robbing, kidnapping, counterfeiting and pick pocketing where the injured parties lacked the resources to engage a consulting detective.

‘So, what are you here for then?’ asked the policewoman on the door.

Before Boxiron could answer there was a shout from inside the room and the door was flung open with some vigour, knocking the constable off her feet, her hand – which had been resting on her police cutlass – flying out to steady herself. Boxiron raised an arm and the exiting figure ran into it, crumpling as if a garden wall had dropped on top of his head. Knocked down to the carpet, the miscreant fumbled for the small pistol he had dropped and Boxiron took a step forward, his anvil-heavy foot smashing the gun and breaking at least three of the man’s fingers.

‘I am here for that,’ explained Boxiron to the constable. The steamman’s leg lashed out, kicking the villain in the ribs. ‘And that, and that, and that, and that…’

‘Good grief!’ came a bewildered shout from inside the drawing room. ‘Constable, stop that metal fellow, he’s beating Lord Spicer’s murderer to death.’

‘Not like that, officer!’ sounded a voice in warning. Boxiron’s vision plate was already focusing on the palm of the constable reaching down for her black leather holster, and he began to calculate the arc his right arm would need to shatter her pistol hand. ‘The lever! The lever on his back.’

Jethro Daunt lunged out of the doorway and dragged the lever on the back of the steamman’s smoke stack down through its gear positions, slotting it back into its lower-leftmost groove. The little engraved brass plate placed there by the manufacturer read ‘idle’, but Boxiron’s previous employers had scratched a line through the script and painted it over with the words ‘slightly less-murderous’, instead.

‘Boxiron can’t reach his gears by himself,’ said Jethro Daunt, apologetically.

Or rather, no household in their right mind would ever buy a Catosian city-state manufactured automatic that left its regulation in its own iron hands. Boxiron’s leg crunched down and the suspect’s beating was over; at least, the one he was going to receive from the consulting detective and his assistant. What he was going to receive inside the cells of Ham Yard was another matter. The constable forced the suspected murderer roughly to his feet, translating her embarrassment at being taken by surprise while on duty into a rather rude handling of her prisoner.

Boxiron turned to see Jethro Daunt and the police detective at the door behind him. Inspector Reason standing a shade under Daunt’s six foot – the inspector’s hard cynical face the polar opposite of the erudite, distinguished features of Boxiron’s beak-nosed employer. The others in the drawing room – all potential suspects – were hovering nervously, watching as the suspect was manacled.

‘But the Circle damn it, Daunt, how did you know that it was Spicer’s own doctor who killed him?’ asked the inspector.

‘He bobbed us for fools,’ explained Jethro Daunt. ‘The smell of elderflower in the library we came across wasn’t the bottle of scent that had cracked when Lord Spicer fell down inside the room. Its label read Kittle and Abrams, and their firm sell no scent with elderflower as an ingredient. The scent was a decoy to mask the smell of something else…a sleeping draught administered by the doctor to make Damson Stow fall asleep, giving the doctor time to wind back the carriage clock and make us think that the murder happened half an hour earlier than it actually did.’

‘But how did you know about the clock?’ asked the inspector.

‘Because when the doctor slipped back to reset it to the correct time, he did so using Damson Stow’s own pocket watch, and that runs ten minutes fast – she told me she kept it like that, so that she would never miss her day’s deliveries coming into her kitchen. And that’s why she also had to die. When the damson realized what the doctor had done, she tried to blackmail him over Lord Spicer’s murder.’

‘Poor woman,’ said the inspector. ‘She probably never knew the doctor was the illegitimate child of Lord Spicer and her sister.’

‘Raised with enough money to pass through the royal college of medicine,’ said Jethro, ‘but not enough to paper over the grievances of the family fortune sliding away from him and towards his half-brothers and sister.’

‘You almost cheated the hangman out of a handsome crowd,’ the inspector said to Boxiron. ‘They’ll pay more than a penny a seat to see a respected doctor swing outside the walls of Bonegate.’

‘Sorry, inspector,’ apologized Boxiron. ‘My steam was up and my gears slipped.’

‘No harm done, eh, old steamer.’

Now securely restrained by the constable’s manacles, the murderer winced at the pressure his arms, bent around his back, were putting on the ribs the steamman had cracked. ‘My father said I was a god for curing him. But I cured him of everything that was wrong with him in the end. What sort of god does that make me?’

‘The only sort there are, I am afraid,’ said Jethro, sadly. ‘The rather dangerous kind.’

Behind the ex-parson, the other suspects had fallen into a staccato chattering – proclaiming that they had known all along the killer hadn’t been any of those left inside the drawing room.

Jethro Daunt shook his head at their naivety and caught up with Boxiron’s hulking form just before the heavy steamman departed the town house, his voicebox muttering to himself in machine-like echoes. When his friend’s steamman head had been attached to the centaur-like form of a steamman knight, his voicebox has possessed the power to cast a battle cry that could burst a human heart inside its chest. Now it was attached to an inferior piece of Catosian machinery, however, all Boxiron could do was whisper half-mad dialogues to himself – cursing the Steamo Loas and the cruel hand of fate for how he had ended up.

‘You did well enough, good friend,’ said Jethro, laying a hand on the steamman’s cold iron shoulder. ‘You prevented the doctor from escaping.’

‘I nearly killed him. My thoughts travel too fast for this body,’ said Boxiron, allowing only a small trace of self-pity to escape into his voice. ‘Stuck in a loop every time I overreach myself.’

‘The mind is willing but the flesh is weak,’ said Jethro, opening the front door onto the neat square in Middlesteel’s expensive western district, the railings of the crescent thoroughly polished, a thousand metal spears gleaming in the sunshine.

‘It’s not my flesh that is weak,’ said Boxiron, his legs pistoning down the wide porch steps to the cobbled pavement below. ‘That’s one burden I don’t carry.’

Jethro angled a nose that was too proud for his kind face towards the cab rank at the end of the street, and one of the drivers flicked his whip, sending a midnight-black mare clattering forwards. Just before the hansom cab could reach the two of them, though, it was cut up by a larger coach, this one a horseless carriage with iron wheels as tall as a man at the rear. As his horse spooked, the cab driver swore furiously, shaking his fist at the whining clockwork contraption. But the new vehicle wasn’t a rival in the carriage trade, for all that its black iron matched the sheen of the hansom cab’s dark walnut exterior.

Riveted iron doors swung open on each side of the horseless carriage, tall men dressed like Circlist monks with simple grey robes stepping out onto the street side and staring down the cabbie, who swapped his obscenities for a final scowl before driving off. On the pavement side of the carriage, a nun aged about sixty stepped out, dressed like her companions – although she had not tonsured her greying hair, but had her locks tied back in two buns above her ears. The monks stood very still, with a calmness that hung in the air like the glint of sunlight on a brandished dagger.

Boxiron stomped noisily on the pavement, his hulking, unwieldy body swivelling to take in the ranks of monks now surrounding them – more exiting from the second iron room at the back of the horseless carriage. Some of the monks carried staffs and Jethro Daunt doubted they were intended to aid infirmities or for the long travels of a pilgrimage. He just hoped Boxiron didn’t slip a gear now.

‘I have been defrocked,’ said Jethro. ‘I’m no longer in the church.’

The woman’s head rocked to one side. Of course she would know that. It would have been people rather like these pressing the ecclesiastical court to throw him out of his parsonage.

‘I understand you have been operating as a consulting detective for the last few years,’ said the woman.

‘That is true,’ said Jethro.

‘Of course it is. I wish to consult with you.’ There was quite a tone of menace in that single word, for all the eerie calmness in her face.

‘Well, well,’ said Jethro. ‘I’ll be bobbed. Of all the people in the capital I might have expected to be conversing with about my current mode of employment, your people are the very last ones I would have expected to turn up.’

‘As it should be,’ noted the woman. ‘Of those that know of the existence of the League of the Rational Court, there are even fewer that should be aware when they are about to be touched by our hand.’

Jethro looked at the open door of the carriage and the woman pointing to the empty red leather seat opposite the one she had just vacated. An invitation with exceedingly little choice in it. And carriage rides with these people were sometimes one-way affairs.

The hand of the Circlist church’s League of the Rational Court. The hand of the Inquisition.

Hannah Conquest pushed aside the thick brambles to try and find the path. Like all of the great domed greenhouses nestled in the shadows of the Horn of Jago, Tom Putt Park was named after its creator – or at least the merchant notable who had paid for it to be constructed. Nestling against the battlements, far from the city, Tom Putt Park had drawn the short straw when it came to maintenance from the dwindling band of park keepers and farm labourers. They were presently engaged in the serious business of feeding the capital, not pruning the wild-running hedges and copses under Tom Putt’s crystal geodesic canopy.

It always felt a curious thing to Hannah, moving through the bush and the greenery of the park. In a very real sense she wasn’t walking on the soil of Jago. All the dirt here, and in every other park and farm dome, not to mention the tree beds in Hermetica’s vaults below, had been imported by traders’ barges in centuries past. Dirt from the Kingdom of Jackals on the far side of the Fire Sea, as well as from Pericur and the other nations on the opposite shores. The native top-soil beyond the capital’s battlements was fit only for growing stunted fruitless orchards, those and the island’s blackened forests of thorns that cut at travellers with the sharpness of the machetes needed to hack out a passage amongst them. Not that many dared to venture outside without wearing heavily armoured walking machines – RAM suits, as the trappers and city maintenance workers called them. The aging power tunnels that fed the city with the energy its people required always needed upkeep, as did the iron aqueducts carrying in fresh drinking water down from the hills. A job that was almost as unappealing as what Hannah suspected was in store for her with the guild…

Hannah found the path again and after a minute came to the flint wall that would lead her to the stone singers. Chalph urs Chalph was waiting by the circle of moss-stained marble statues when she came to the clearing, looking as if he might join in the fertility song the circle of carvings were said to be singing to the stone apple tree in their centre. A reminder of more prosperous times that had once paid for the park and its upkeep. There was little time for wassailing now. The city was lucky if its entire crop could be collected before it spoiled lying on the domes’ dirt.

‘I’ve just seen the ballot list posted,’ Chalph called to her. ‘Although if I hadn’t, the look on your face might tell me the tale by itself.’

‘Well, I’ve found my future,’ said Hannah. ‘Rotting away in the engine rooms as an initiate of the Guild of Valvemen.’

‘The draft ballot’s been nailed up everywhere in the city. The senate are calling more people than ever before this year for the protected professions.’ He licked at a paw-like hand. ‘But you have dual citizenship through your parents. You can just leave…’

‘How, by walking across the Fire Sea?’ asked Hannah. ‘That twisted jigger Vardan Flail seems to think the supply boat from Pericur isn’t going to be selling tickets out of here when it comes to me, not to anyone who’s been called by the draft, in fact.’

‘There must be something you can do…’

‘I don’t want to end up like them,’ said Hannah, almost sobbing. ‘Have you ever seen what’s under a valveman’s robes? Working in the engine rooms changes your body, kills you eventually.’

‘You can claim asylum,’ speculated Chalph. ‘The Jackelian ambassador, the short fellow with the red nose, he could grant you asylum in his embassy.’

‘That old fool? Sir Robert Cugnot is lucky to remember to stuff the cork back in his wine bottle before he turns in of a night. How are he and his staff going to keep me safe? Nobody can dodge the draft now, the militia always finds you. It doesn’t matter where you hide, in a friend’s house, in one of the empty quarters, they always track you down in the end.’

‘Then take the seminary vows like you wanted to,’ urged Chalph. ‘You’re clever enough to pass the examinations and the guild can’t draft you if you’re already working for the church.’

‘Alice won’t waive the age limit for me,’ said Hannah. ‘I begged her. But I’m her ward and proffering me for early advancement is not the right and rational thing to do.’

Chalph shook his heavy dark-furred head in anger. ‘And letting your body cook in the energies of the guild’s engine rooms is?’

‘That won’t be Alice’s choice; it’ll be Vardan Flail’s. Circle damn the man, I hate him. Always coming around the cathedral, trying to ingratiate himself with Alice, the stink of decay and death on his robes.’

‘I’ll get you out of here,’ promised Chalph. ‘The supply boat from Pericur is owned by the House of Ush. I’ll find one of our sailors willing to take on board a stowaway, there must be one of them who’ll help me.’

‘The militia search the boats now before they let them leave. But it won’t come to that,’ said Hannah, trying to sound more hopeful than she actually felt. ‘Alice will argue for me. She’s cleverer than the whole stained senate put together. If there’s a loophole…’

Chalph was about to answer when he turned his head and sniffed the air. ‘It – no!’

Hannah couldn’t smell anything, but she could hear the distant crackle of brambles as something heavy pushed through the undergrowth. ‘What is it?’

‘It’s an ursk,’ whispered Chalph.

‘How would the monster get inside the park? It should have been fried coming over the city wall,’ said Hannah, looking uncertainly in the direction of the noise. ‘Ursks are similar enough to your people, Chalph. You must have the scent of one of your house-men coming looking for you skiving.’

‘Ursks are nothing like my people,’ said Chalph, backing up. He seized Hannah’s arm. ‘Run! Back to the entrance now.’

Hannah let her friend break through the passage of greenery ahead of her, trampling bushes and breaking creepers with his mass. If it was an ursk…Chalph had a keen nose, but the monsters that inhabited the island’s interior depended on theirs for feeding. She heard the crashing behind them – a savage racket. Just the sort of clatter something twice as heavy as an ursine would make loping after them. How many times had Hannah heard people sitting at the tea-tables in the vaults below whispering that the killing charge running along the city’s battlements was failing now, predicting that something like this would happen sooner or later?

Chalph howled in fear and rage as he pushed forward, but there was no one else to hear it in Tom Putt Park. That was the point of coming here, you could be alone without being spotted by priests and housemen and assigned the kinds of tasks that often came to mind when faced with idling youngsters. Chalph’s howl was echoed by something similar-sounding, but louder, coming from behind them. That sound came from no ursine! Off to their side another roar answered the first, a quick bestial exchange of information. Two ursks, or more? How had the monsters got over the battlements alive? A section of Hermetica’s defences had to be down. Their sloping iron ramparts were over forty feet high, the electric charge they carried enough to hurl back the corpse of any creature unwise enough to touch them.

Hannah urged her cramping legs to hurry. Ursks, what did she know about ursks? Nothing that could help them here. Only stories from the men that ventured outside the walls: trappers, hunters, and city maintenance workers. Tales of bear-like monsters that prowled the basalt plains and volcanic mountains. Twice the size of a Pericurian and thrice the weight of anyone from the race of man. Monstrous, thick-furred killers that hunted in packs and could rip a Jagonese citizen apart in seconds with their claws. Almost – but not quite fully – sentient, with enough guile and cunning to plan ambushes and lure those travelling overland away from the safety of a well-armed caravan. Always hungry, always prowling the capital’s battlements.

Hannah tripped on part of the crumbling old path through the undergrowth just as a long, black-furred shape seemed to pass endlessly through the air where she had been standing; the stench of rotten, steam-slicked fur filling her nose. It didn’t matter how many of its pack had broken through the wall alongside this monster. Hannah and Chalph were unarmed. This single ursk would be more than enough to kill them a dozen times over.

Still on the ground, Hannah scrambled back in terror, gaping at the foul thing that landed snarling in front of her, a nightmare carved in flesh.

Jethro Daunt climbed into the horseless carriage’s forward compartment and Boxiron made to clamber up behind him, but the nun shook her head at the steamman and pointed across to an organ grinder entertaining a group of children in the crescent’s garden opposite. ‘Not you. We require the one playing, not the one dancing.’

The red light behind Boxiron’s vision plate flared in anger, but Jethro shook his head at his friend. ‘There’s really no call to be impolite, good sister.’

‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘My apologies, steamman. Your talents are not what I require presently.’

‘I use my talents to keep my softbody friend here safe,’ spat Boxiron.

The woman merely smiled in reply.

‘We’re in the open, it’s daylight and we’ve just walked out of a house filled with Ham Yard’s finest detectives,’ said Jethro to the steamman. ‘Save your top gear for the moment, good friend, I believe my life is safe.’

Boxiron looked at the large monks climbing back into the rear room of the carriage. ‘You may be without gods, but if I find a hair out of place on Jethro softbody’s head when next I see him, you will find cause to wish you had someone to pray to.’

Opposite Jethro, the nun shrugged nonchalantly. ‘The funny thing about those Steamo Loas you worship, creature of the metal, is that even on closer examination, they’re still mostly steam.’

As their carriage pulled away, Boxiron began to clump angrily back towards their lodgings at number ten Thompson Street.

‘He’s hardly subtle,’ said the nun, watching the gas lamps whisk past now that her horseless carriage was speeding up.

‘As you said,’ noted Jethro,’ it’s not what he’s for. He’s a topping old steamer, really.’

‘And what are you for, Jethro Daunt?’

‘I’m all for whiling away my remaining years on the Circle’s turn with as much serenity as I can find,’ said Jethro, rummaging around in his pocket to withdraw a crumpled paper bag filled with black and white-striped sweets. ‘Would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop? They’re quite wondrous.’

The nun looked at the bag with barely disguised disgust. ‘You realize those foul things are highly addictive? The sugar is mixed with poppy opiates. Parliament should have outlawed them years ago.’

‘Slander on the part of their competitors, I am sure,’ said Jethro. ‘They help me to think. I don’t suppose you are going to tell me your real name, or your rank within the Inquisition?’

‘Not if you insist on calling us by that vulgar name,’ said the woman. ‘You’re a little too educated to be reading the penny dreadfuls.’

‘The League of the Rational Court, then, if you prefer,’ replied Jethro. ‘I would say you are a mother superior.’

The woman picked up a heavy folder from her side, its contents protected by a wax seal. It put Jethro in mind of a ministry dispatch box, the kind you might spy from the visitors’ gallery at the House of Guardians, being carried by a politician on the floor below.

‘Deduced from my age or the size of my carriage?’

Jethro pulled out his pocket watch, the chain dangling from his green waistcoat. ‘From the time, good sister.’

The woman raised an eyebrow.

‘Half an hour to read the petitions a mother superior accepts before lunch, another half an hour to get here for midday.’

‘That would suggest you know where the league is based.’

‘You’ll be surprised at what can be whispered in dreams,’ said Jethro. ‘Even postal addresses, sometimes.’

‘Which gods do you hear the most, now?’

‘You mean the gods that don’t exist?’ smiled Jethro. ‘On balance, I would say Badger-headed Joseph is my most frequent visitor, although I find what Old Mother Corn whispers to me is often the most reliable.’

The woman broke the seal on the folder and opened it, lifting out a parcel of papers tied tightly with red cord. ‘It’s small bloody wonder we threw you out of the church.’

‘I wonder about it,’ said Jethro. ‘I wonder about it all the time. But haven’t I kept my end of the bargain? Not a hint of scandal, no stories about me in the penny sheets.’

‘Not as the ex-parson of Hundred Locks,’ said the woman. ‘But you’ve been keeping busy as the proprietor of Daunt’s Private Resolutions. Quite a reputation you’ve built up among the quality, solving cases, hunting down criminals.’

‘So you say.’

‘I find it slightly grubby, myself,’ muttered the woman. ‘All those years the church spent training you in synthetic morality and here you are now, applying your finely honed mind to uncovering sordid infidelities and unmasking common poisoners.’

‘There’s exceedingly little that’s common about such crimes. To keep the gods from the people’s hearts, you must first understand the people,’ quoted Jethro. ‘And while I acknowledge your disdain for my new calling, I believe expediency has driven you to seek out those same skills as much as it has pushed me towards a career outside the church to keep my coal scuttle full and the bailiffs from my door.’

‘The irony isn’t lost on me,’ said the mother superior, passing the parcel of papers across to Jethro.

‘What is it?’ he asked.

‘A murder,’ said the woman.

‘It must be important for you to come to me.’

‘Clearly.’

‘Important enough for you to give me back my parsonage if I asked for reinstatement in the rational orders as my payment?’

The reverend mother laughed heartedly, the first real emotion Jethro had seen her demonstrate. ‘We don’t let people inside the Circlist church who believe in gods. Not as parishioners, and certainly not as parsons. I do believe your ancient gods have driven you quite mad.’

‘As I told your people at my hearing, I don’t believe in them,’ retorted Jethro.

She shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps they believe in you, rather than vice versa. It doesn’t matter. The distinction is irrelevant and besides, we’re asking you to investigate precisely because you’re not in the church. Believe it or not, we do have a few minds in the league that are almost as proficient in synthetic morality as the much-vaunted Jethro Daunt. Aren’t you going to open the folder? You will quickly see why we believe this case would be of particular interest to you.’

‘No,’ said Jethro. ‘I’m not interested in your money, I’m not interested in working for the Inquisition, and most of all, I’m not interested in continuing this conversation.’

‘We can offer you a hundred guineas to take the case, triple that upon a successful conclusion.’

‘I’ve already got a hundred guineas,’ Jethro told the woman. ‘I get to choose the members of my flock now.’

The woman sniffed disapprovingly, then banged on the roof of her carriage for it to draw to a halt. ‘Keep the folder. Read the papers. It sounds as if you already know where to send your note indicating that you agree to be engaged.’

‘Not in a hundred years, good mother superior,’ said Jethro, opening the door and starting to climb down the steps extending towards the street with a clockwork clack. ‘Not even in a thousand.’

The nun leant out of the window. ‘Is it just the precepts of synthetic morality that have helped you solve all the cases you’ve taken, Jethro? Or do the voices you hear at night whisper other things, too? What do all those ranks of pagan gods really murmur to you?’

‘That the intellect is only a lie to make us realize the truth.’

‘Just send word,’ tutted the woman at Jethro’s blasphemy. Her carriage pulled away, the hum of the engine disappearing as it rounded a corner.

Jethro looked at the collection of papers in his hand and pulled his cloak tight against the cold of the afternoon. The folder’s contents would do for a five-minute crackle of kindling in his fire grate, if nothing else.

Jethro Daunt knew many things: the things that his finely tuned mind could extract from the pattern of life swirling around him, and the things that the ancient gods hissed at him in his dreams. But what he didn’t know was what in the name of the Circle had possessed the Inquisition to think that he could possibly be coerced, tricked or cajoled into working for the same organization that had hounded him out of the church.

Jethro ran his fingers thoughtfully through his long sideburns, the black running to silver now, and cleared his throat as he always did before he sucked on an aniseed ball and his brain began to whir.

‘How extremely diverting,’ he whispered to himself, balancing the papers in his hand.

Then he strode back towards his apartment.

Twisting on the overgrown path where she had fallen, Hannah flinched back from the snarling, intertwined forms – Chalph lost in the larger black mass of the ursk. Chalph, brave suicidal Chalph, who had charged the beast when they were cornered. Not only was the creature attacking them at least twice the weight of Hannah’s ursine friend, its fur was matted across a leather-thick skin hardened against the steam mists and geyser plumes of the volcanic landscape outside. You would be hard pressed to have opened its hide with a sabre, let alone the tooth and claw of a mere ursine cub.

But a turret rifle, that would do it. As the ursk angrily tossed Chalph off itself, throwing him back into the brambles and rearing up on all fours, its chest exploded open. Toppling backward, the ursk fell to the side of Hannah and landed like a collapsing mountain an inch shy of Chalph’s leather boots. Hannah glanced up to see a three-foot long rifle being lowered, the rotating ammunition drum clacking to a halt as the finger depressing the trigger uncurled and the clockwork-driven mechanism slowed. Hannah scrambled back as the cable attached to the shooter’s brass tank of compressed gas went limp and dropped past her nose.

Hannah pointed back through the brambles they had flattened while fleeing the ursk. ‘There’s at least one more over there.’

The free company fighter that had come to their rescue – at least a head taller than Chalph at seven foot – growled in acknowledgement. ‘And it knows what the bark of a turret gun sounds like, as it should.’ The soldier sniffed the air with her black nose. ‘It’s heading over to the other side of the park.’

Chalph picked himself up from the dirt. ‘Stom urs Stom, what are the free company doing inside the park?’

‘Our job,’ growled the over-sized soldier. She had a leather patch covering her left eye socket and looked like a brown-furred buccaneer as she scowled down at Hannah and her friend. ‘The guard post reported seeing ursks coming over the wall. It looks like a section of the battlements have lost their charge.’

‘How can that happen?’ demanded Hannah. It was a rhetorical question.

‘Lack of repairs would be my guess,’ said Stom. ‘Not enough people left on the island to maintain anything the way it should be kept. Now, stay close, this one’s friend might be circling around to take us from the rear.’

The soldier strode forward as Hannah and Chalph trailed in her wake, Chalph’s triangular black nose snuffling the air for a clue to the second monster’s whereabouts. ‘But its scent is coming from the other side.’

The soldier angrily raised her paw-like hand. ‘Hold your tongue, Chalph urs Chalph. It’s pissed on the undergrowth over there to draw us off in the wrong direction.’ She thrust a finger to the left. ‘I hunt that way. Stay behind my rifle to stay alive.’

‘Chalph was just trying to help,’ said Hannah.

‘When I want a price for grain I will ask a junior clerk from the House of Ush’s advice,’ said the soldier. ‘The first time you underestimate an ursk, little furless cub, is the last time you underestimate an ursk.’

They passed an overgrown gazebo built from flint sealed with white mortar. Chalph whispered to Hannah as the mercenary forged ahead through the abandoned park. ‘Stom urs Stom is the captain of the free company. Don’t ever cross her. Even the baroness is wary of her.’

In front, the soldier raised her paw and Hannah and Chalph stopped. Stom urs Stom peered suspiciously around a thicket of birch trees. They were almost at the edge of the park, the greenhouse’s crystal walls rising above their heads. Hannah could hear the wind from outside close by. They must be near where the ursk had cracked the dome to gain entry after scaling the battlements. Stom stalked forwards, her dark leather clothes disappearing through the trees. Hannah heard her curse and quickly followed. A manhole cover had been wrenched out of a stone conduit running around the base of the greenhouse wall, just large enough for an ursk to drop through. Hannah looked over the edge. She could just see a fast-flowing stream of water below, its heat striking her face. A flash-steam conduit, part of the city’s heating system – and it would eventually lead to the vaults of the capital below.

‘It’ll die down there,’ said Hannah.

‘An ursk can swim through superheated geyser water before diving for an hour in a frozen lake,’ said the soldier. ‘What’s down in those drains won’t kill it.’ She patted her rifle. ‘What’s in here will.’

Voices sounded from the break in the dome, ursine voices talking in the modulated growls of the Pericurian language. Stom urs Stom moved towards the smashed panels of the dome and barked orders at her fighters.

The reality of what had just occurred sank into Hannah. Ursks and the other creatures of the interior had occasionally breached the battlements before, when the wall’s killing power failed, but they had always been shot down outside. She couldn’t ever remember a time when they had got into Hermetica City’s vaults – it was the citizens’ greatest fear.

Hannah realized the fact that she and Chalph had been in the abandoned park – the same park the ursks had smashed into – would put them under suspicion of complicity in the creatures’ intrusion. Chalph, the apprentice merchant, one of the venal wet-snout foreigners profiting from Jago’s hard times. Hannah, the lazy church girl whose parents weren’t even Jagonese, the reckless outsider who was known to climb air vents to travel beyond the vaults.

They were both in a great deal of trouble now.

The streets were alive with people when Hannah and Chalph followed the hulking mercenary captain down into the central vaults of Hermetica City. The diode lamps in the roofs of the caverns had dimmed for the evening, while the street lamps burned a brilliant yellow. Mobs of citizenry ran around the canal-lined streets carrying chemical braziers, most clustering tightly around the green-uniformed police militia with their long rifles. Heavy free company soldiers swept their turret rifles’ barrels across the surface of the canal from gondolas running low in the water. The vaults were the territory of the Jagonese police militia. The fact that so many mercenary fighters had been allowed down from the battlements at all was a sign of how bad the situation was.

Stom urs Stom stopped on a bridge and one of her ursine fighters came running up alongside a Jagonese militiaman, halting to beat her chest with her paw in a salute. Stom looked at her fighter. ‘Why are the city lights still on evening time? We need full daylight to hunt properly.’

‘We have sent word to the Guild of Valvemen,’ the militiaman interjected defensively, ‘but it may not be possible to switch the city to daylight quickly enough to serve the search.’

‘Why should it be otherwise?’ growled Stom urs Stom. ‘When it seems the guild can’t even keep the battlements fully charged now?’

The militiaman snorted as he heard this. Hannah knew there was an intense rivalry between the local police militia and the foreign mercenaries who had usurped their ancient position as the battlements’ sentries, and this man did not take kindly to the city’s institutions being belittled by wet-snout savages. He slotted the base of his staff of office in a control socket on the highest point of the bridge, sliding up a panel to expose a line of keys enamelled with shorthand communication symbols, and began tapping out a message – no doubt a call for extra police to be dispatched towards their position.

From lower down the canal there were shouts from one of the gondolas, the guttural cry of a free company mercenary followed by the howl of depressurizing gas from the brass tank on the fighter’s back. As she fired her turret rifle spouts of water erupted where her pitons struck. A forest of bobbing torches and the insistent cries of the crowd up on the streets indicated that the mercenary had found one of the intruders.

‘There!’ cried Hannah as a black shape glided under another gondola. The gondola slammed into the air, unseating both the gondolier and his mercenary passenger. The man fell into the water screaming and disappeared thrashing inside a bubbling maelstrom, while the mercenary hit the water silently. She must know that she would be next, after the ursk swimming underneath finished off the weakest victim – the gondolier. She didn’t even try to swim to the side of the canal.

‘Shoot the water!’ the militiaman next to Hannah shouted at the mercenaries. ‘Shoot the water, she’s dead down there anyway.’

But none of the massive Pericurian mercenaries was listening. A couple of seconds after the gondolier had disappeared, the mercenary fighter was pulled under the water, vanishing as quickly as if she had just winked out of existence. Almost instantly a massive plume of water gushed up in her place, showering the bridge where Hannah stood with steaming water.

A guttural humming sounded from the mercenaries, and they raised their fists towards the vault’s roof as they sang the death hymn for their comrade. Hannah glanced down at her clothes. The water that had spattered her was tinged crimson with the blood of the ursk and of the dead foreign mercenary.

‘It was her kill,’ said Stom to the militiaman, patting the belt of spherical grenades looping around her waist. ‘That is why we did not fire. It was her kill. Turret rifle bolts are slowed by water. The ursk we hunted knew that.’

‘She killed herself,’ said the militiaman in disgust. ‘You people truly are savages.’

Hannah looked at the tall mercenary commander silently scanning the water. No. The ursine were a force of nature. Fractious, quick to temper, but magnificent. Quite magnificent.

‘There might be more monsters in the canals,’ said Hannah.

‘If there are, the presence of the crowds will keep them in the water,’ said Stom, grimly.

But word of the ursks infiltrating the city was to come quicker than any of them had anticipated. Another militiaman came running up to the bridge and after a brief exchange with his superior, the green-uniformed man turned to Stom. ‘Your fighters are requested to deploy in the Seething Round, wet-snout. There has been an attack there.’

Hannah looked with horror towards Chalph. An attack on the vault where she lived.

‘Where?’ demanded Hannah. ‘Where inside the Seething Round?’

‘The cathedral,’ replied the militiaman. ‘It’s the archbishop. She’s been torn apart by the bloody beasts.’