Читать книгу Secrets of the Fire Sea - Stephen Hunt - Страница 8

Hannah was about to go into the archbishop’s chancellery when a monk stopped her with a message. ‘Your friend Chalph is waiting for you outside on the north bridge.’

‘Thank you, father. Could you tell him I’ll be finished here in a little while?’

He nodded and departed as she entered the office. It was still strange seeing someone else sitting behind Alice’s desk, even if Father Blackwater – the head of the testing rooms – was only acting as their senior priest until another archbishop was appointed. A fiercely clever man who hid his true thoughts behind the odd veiled comment or dry remark, Father Blackwater was a Jagonese priest through and through. Which was precisely why the Rational Synod would never confirm him to the archbishop’s post he obviously thought he deserved.

Hannah entered and took the seat where she had sat opposite Alice Gray so many times over the years. Meeting an ursk wearing the robes of a priest would not have seemed as alien to her.

‘I have mixed blessings to report,’ said the father. ‘As I feared, the senate will not allow me to oppose your draft ballot. I am not regarded as having the seniority to even speak on the floor on your behalf.’

Her heart sank. ‘Then I am finished.’

‘Not yet, my dear,’ said the priest. ‘On the other side of the equation, we have found this—’ he flourished an envelope ‘—among the personal effects of the late archbishop. It stipulates that in the event of her demise preceding your majority, you receive her grant of authority to sit our entrance exam early.’

Her waiver! Alice had granted her dispensation after all. Hannah was overwhelmed, the grief over losing her guardian momentarily lifted. But…Hannah did the calculation in her head, working out the date of the next church board examination. ‘I’ll already be drafted into the guild’s service by then, father!’

‘We can’t nullify the guild’s draft order,’ said Father Blackwater, ‘but Vardan Flail can’t nullify a written waiver from the archbishop that precedes your ballot notification, either. Her letter was written weeks before your name was ever posted on the draft ballot.’

Weeks before? It was as Alice Gray’s clerk had said: almost as if she had been preparing for her own death. How many run-ins had there been between Vardan Flail and Alice in the previous months that Hannah hadn’t been around to witness, before Hannah’s name was ‘coincidently’ teased out at ‘random’ for entry into the lists of the Guild of Valvemen?

Father Blackwater pointed to the chess set waiting lonely on the table in the corner of the chancellery, and Hannah remembered the gentle snorts that Alice would make while planning her next move. ‘Stalemate, Hannah. You will unfortunately be in service with the guild for a while, but the guild cannot forbid you to take our tests, and if you pass, you will be free of the curse of the draft for the rest of your life. You will be part of the church.’

He said the words with satisfaction, as if there could be no higher honour. A couple of days ago Hannah would have agreed with him; that life had seemed almost inevitable to her. But with the death of Alice Gray, the cathedral’s bright stained glass seemed so much dimmer, the formulae and lessons of the Circlist teachings mere parroting of the echo of great thinking done by minds long since dead. In their stead grew the cold hard seed of something else planted in a ground far more fertile than the volcanic basalt outside the capital’s battlements. Vengeance, vengeance and the fell craving for it.

To Hannah’s surprise, vengeance could be like one of the mathematical puzzles of synthetic morality. You could lose yourself considering it, studying its shape. Vengeance could become as much an obsession as some of the paradoxes that had driven church priests insane when pondered for too long. There was a beauty in vengeance’s pursuit and gratification to be gained in solving the riddle of the murder. Gratification that would climax in Vardan Flail being led by a hooded executioner across Snapman’s Bridge and made to stand on the trapdoor while the crowds gathered on each side of the black canal.

It took a heinous crime to earn a death sentence that wasn’t commuted to banishment or life indenture by the senate judiciary, but Hannah was determined to see that Vardan Flail was one of the few that received it. And if she had to serve that twisted monster in the guild’s own vaults, then that would just take her a step or two closer to realizing her new goal.

Jethro Daunt pulled himself up the final few rungs of the u-boat’s conning tower and emerged onto the observation deck, almost immediately finding the goggles of his rubber scald suit misting up from the heat of the Fire Sea.

Standing against the rail wearing a battered greatcoat and holding a telescope was Commodore Black, his black-bearded face tinged orange from the glow of the magma. ‘Come up for your turn of fresh air, Mister Daunt?’

‘That I have, good captain, and I’m already regretting not bringing my coat.’

It was a curious, unhealthy mix outside, the intense waves of heat from the Fire Sea’s magma interspersed with jabbing arrows of a freezing artic wind from the north. Too much exposure to this was likely to bring any passenger – or sailor – down with a fever.

‘A savage, strange sea,’ said the commodore. ‘But old Blacky has got used to it. I’ve sailed further and deeper inside it than any other skipper, and left many a good friend’s bones on the shores of its wild islands while doing so.’

‘I’m hoping for a rather more pedestrian voyage.’ Jethro looked down at the boiling waters their u-boat was pushing through on the surface – boils in nautical parlance – searing, shifting channels of water veined through the bubbling magma. He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a paper bag filled with striped sweets. ‘Would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop, good captain?’

Commodore Black put aside the telescope he had been using to sweep the burning waves. ‘I won’t be troubling you for one of those wicked things. You know what they put in them…?’

‘Defamation on the part of their commercial rivals, I am certain.’

‘I’ll stick to eating what goes well with a drop of wine. No need to suck those blessed things for your nerves, Mister Daunt – a nice boring voyage is what you’ll get aboard the Purity Queen. Jago barely lies inside the rim of the Fire Sea and The Garurian Boils here are settled waters. The magma keeps to its course and so do the boils we sail through.’ Commodore Black pointed to the north. ‘One hundred and seventy miles ahead is a buoy station of the Jagonese tug service. That’s when the magma gets unpredictable and choppy, but the island’s sailors will lead us through the safe channels – for a price.’

Jethro stared where the old u-boat man was pointing, but all he could see from the conning tower was a burning ocean of red seamed by black cooling rock, the passages of superheated water they were following marked out by curtains of rising steam.

‘You’ve never sailed the Fire Sea before, Mister Daunt? Never been to Jago. I can see it in the way the flames are casting a mortal spell on your gaze.’

‘My business has occasionally seen me travel across the nations of the continent,’ said Jethro, ‘but never over the ocean.’

‘Yes, now, your discreet business,’ said the commodore, teasingly. ‘But you’ve travelled widely enough to know that a master of a boat is rightly addressed as captain, be they an admiral or a commodore.’

A cracking sounded in the distance and a geyser of molten rock and gas fumed into the air, adding to the chemical stench of the place – sulphur, by its reek.

‘Someone told me that at the docks,’ Jethro dissembled. ‘An ocean this wild, it seems hard to believe that the people on Jago can predict where the ebbs and flows of the magma and the passages of water through them will lie within an hour’s time, let alone days and weeks ahead. It’s a wonder anyone can follow the boils back to Jago.’

‘Ah now,’ said the commodore. ‘It’s an easy enough matter predicting a safe passage when you have caverns filled with mortal clever transaction engines. Machines that could give King Steam a run for his money when it comes to the thinking game. And when we get to the buoy station and the master there summons up a tug to see us safe to their black shores, we’ll no doubt pay for every penny of their engine room’s power and the model of the Fire Sea they have sealed up down there with them.’

‘That will be a sight to see on Jago, good captain,’ said Jethro. ‘Cities where they have actually tamed the wild power.’

‘Electricity,’ said Commodore Black. ‘Yes, nowhere else in the world, only on Jago.’ He pointed to the currents of magma sliding past the watery channel of the boils they were navigating. ‘Something to do with all that blessed molten iron swirling around out there, or so a fine steamman friend of mine would have it.’

‘You sound like you don’t approve, good captain.’

‘I’ve used the wild energy to tickle the armour of wicked savages trying to break their way into my hull and had cause to thank it,’ said the commodore. ‘But for more practical purposes I’ll take the thump of good honest steam power, the hum of high-tension clockwork and the burn of a little expansion-engine gas any day of the week. The kind of dark power the Jagonese use is as good for your blessed health as taxes.’

Jethro nodded. The commodore was as superstitious as most u-boat men. It was small wonder when a small metal bubble of air was all that stood between them and death under the darks of the ocean. The Circlist church always did have its work cut out in the harbour towns of the Kingdom. U-boat men were almost as bad as airship sailors with their strange rituals and their profession’s cant.

He raised a hand to shield his hair from a few rogue cinders drifting across from a fire plume that looked to be erupting ten miles to starboard. It was no wonder that no airship could cross above the Fire Sea intact – the combination of plumes, wild thermals and fierce artic storms made an aerial crossing a one-way bet: with a grinning skeleton drawn on the reverse of every card in the deck. Jethro remembered reading about a few foolhardy Jack Cloudies who were never seen again after attempting the voyage in the early days of Jackelian aviation.

Commodore Black pressed the telescope back to the brass goggles protecting his face and Jethro looked on as the whistle of a magma fountain off their starboard became the whisper of Badger-headed Joseph. ‘The blood, the blood of the earth is your sea.’

Jethro gritted his teeth. The old gods never normally bothered him during the day, only within his dreams. He wiped the steam off his goggles and unnoticed by the commodore, stepped back and rubbed at the side of his head. This was his choice, sailing to Jago. His. Not the Inquisition’s, not theirs. Only his.

An invitation to dinner at the captain’s table wasn’t something that Jethro expected, but perhaps for Commodore Black it mitigated the guilt he felt at the extortionate rates he was charging his passengers to travel through the inhospitable currents of the Fire Sea. Although looking at the square navigation table in the captain’s cabin that had been pressed into service for dinner, Jethro suspected the location of their supper had more to do with the wishes of the coarse men and woman that served as the u-boat’s crew – desiring to make free with their ribald table manners in the mess, rather than feeling they had to be on good behaviour in front of the ‘cargo’.

The Pericurian ambassador-in-transit – Ortin urs Ortin – demonstrated the highest manners at their table, every facet of Jackelian etiquette smoothly performed in almost mocking counterpoint to Boxiron’s jerky shovelling of high-grade boiler coke into his furnace trap and the noisy siphoning of the water the steamman needed to feed his boiler heart. The young academic Nandi Tibar-Wellking was a fairly neutral observer of the two polar extremes at the table, but recalling his own time in the company of her professor, Jethro rightly guessed that Nandi had been well taught and exposed to the intricacies of dining at foreign tables. If the cabin boy acting as steward had served them sheep’s eyes and fried scorpion tails rather than their usual fare of scrambled duck eggs, Spumehead rock crab and pot-roasted lamb, he doubted she would have even blinked.

Commodore Black’s appetite tipped the table’s balance back towards the ribald; he ripped apart the meats with gusto and matched Boxiron’s siphoning of water with an equal capacity for sweet wines, jinn and beer. If the boat’s master had an excuse for his thirst, it was that even with the Purity Queen’s cooling systems running on maximum, it was hard not to drip sweat onto their food as they maintained their course through the outer boils of the Fire Sea.

Ortin urs Ortin tactfully overlooked the rattling from Boxiron and instead addressed the young academic, his Jackelian accent so polished he might have been born a squire to its acres. ‘You mentioned that you have not been to Jago before, damson, but I am interested to know what your book learning in the college suggests the island’s people will be like?’

‘Very similar to the Jackelian citizenry,’ answered Nandi, balancing a soup spoon between her fingers as if she was penning a dissertation on the subject. ‘And with good reason, ambassador, when we look back to what classical history texts have to say on the matter. The two largest tribes settled on the northwest of the continent were the Jackeni and the Jagoli, but when the cold time arrived, the Jagoli fled the advancing glaciers and journeyed to a new island home, whereas the Kingdom’s ancestors stayed put. Prior to that, the early Circlist church had converted both tribes, and there were plenty of intermarriages between the two peoples. In many ways, the modern Jagonese are truer to the traditions of our ancestors than we are – as, unlike the Jackelians, their civilization never fell to the Chimecan Empire. When all else was darkness and ice, their island kept the traditions of democracy burning. They kept their freedom when our kingdom was a vassal province of the empire and our people were being farmed for food. Jago kept their science through the age of ice, and they kept their history.’

‘The people of Pericur hold the island in some reverence, I believe, good ambassador,’ said Jethro.

‘The scripture of the Divine Quad,’ said Ortin, adjusting his monocle, ‘teaches that the island was once a paradise, where the ursine were shaped and breathed into life by the whisper of the world. There we lived on the Island of the Blessed until the two male members of the quad, Reckin urs Reckin and Amaja urs Amaja, fell to bickering between themselves and had to leave the island for the crime of destroying their home. And the whisper of the world became tears of fire at their fall from grace, filling the sea with all its flames.’

‘Then you believe Jago is sacred soil and that neither the Jagonese nor your people should be there?’

‘That is a conservative view. I am certainly not one of those who believe that, but I do believe there must be some practical truth to the scriptures. That the ursine once lived on Jago before we lived on Pericur.’

Nandi took another mouthful of soup. ‘And why would that be?’

‘Let me show you,’ said Ortin. The ambassador ducked out of the commodore’s quarters and returned a minute later having retrieved a leather-bound tome of Pericurian scripture from his cabin. ‘In the scriptures, Reckin urs Reckin was unfairly cast out of paradise for the covetousness and lusts of his ravening brother, Amaja urs Amaja.’

The ambassador opened the holy book to a beautifully illuminated page showing the two couples of the Divine Quad. The two deities on the left were clearly ursine, glowing in beatific purity, while the pair to the right – a furless male and female – were almost definitely from the race of man. ‘“And the fur of Amaja urs Amaja and his wife was singed from their bodies as they waded into the fires of the sea, begging Reckin urs Reckin and his beloved to forgive their brother his foolishness in destroying their home, the selfish Amaja urs Amaja watching his brother and his wife borne away by the Angels of Airdia to new lands.” The people of Pericur had followed the scriptures of the Divine Quad for thousands of years before we ever laid eyes on someone from your nation, Damson Tibar-Wellking. It came as quite a surprise when we discovered the same covetous devils painted on the walls of our temples colonizing the territory to our south in Concorzia, not to mention trampling the sacred soil of Jago deep inside the Fire Sea.’

‘But the timescales are all wrong, you must see that?’ said Nandi, perplexed. ‘The Jagonese settled the island long before we first established contact with your people in Pericur. Your race and ours have never lived alongside each other: the Jagonese migrated from the freezing wastes of our continent – they were never native to the island.’

‘Aye,’ interrupted the commodore, ‘and the only time the black blasted rock of Jago looked like a paradise was when sheets of ice covered the rest of the world and the people there had the blessed heat of the Fire Sea to keep their greenhouses warm and their vaults heated from the cold.’

Ortin urs Ortin tapped his book. ‘And yet here your people are, and here we are too, just as the scriptures say. I am a reformer, damson and gentlemen. The great liberal houses of the Baronial Council have paid for this u-boat’s hold to be filled with the latest transaction engines from the Kingdom’s workshops. I would see our archduchess’s rule tempered by a properly elected council of her peers; I would see our cities pushing towards the heavens with the sway of pneumatic towers; I would see the best of your Jackelian science and culture being used to improve our nation; but for all that, there are still some things you must take on faith.’

‘Don’t be so quick to change, lad,’ warned the commodore. ‘I have visited Pericur, and I say that your cities of oak with their strange blessed wooden minarets wouldn’t be much improved by the smogs of our mills and the beating engines of our industry. Your scriptures say that Jago is a dark isle where only those who would be cursed abide. You walk down the streets of Hermetica City after we have docked and tell me that you don’t feel cursed just being there, and then ask yourself why their land is locked away behind the Fire Sea.’

Ortin urs Ortin raised his glass in salute towards the commodore. ‘May I always be reminded of the scriptures’ truth by my Jackelian friends without any gods at all.’

Jethro winced. Without any gods at all. If only the Pericurian ambassador knew the truth of that.

‘There are other books than your people’s scriptures that must be considered,’ said Nandi kindly, her voice coming alive with the passion of her quest. ‘Jago is not just the oldest democracy in the world; their transaction-engine archives are the oldest in the world, too. When the rest of the continent was burning encyclopaedias to stay warm, Jagonese traders were preserving what knowledge they could find, keeping the Circlist enlightenment alive during the depths of the long age of ice.’

‘Their transaction engines may be ancient, lass,’ said the commodore, ‘but they’re dangerous. They don’t run things on steam out there. The Jagonese will poison your lovely head with their knowledge.’

‘I am aware of the dangers, but I’ll take precautions,’ said Nandi. ‘New knowledge is never acquired easily. The island has historical records stretching back unbroken for two millennia that have never been properly mined.’

‘Aye, and now our boats can bypass the Fire Sea to get to the colonies it’s all they have to sell,’ spat the commodore. ‘That and safe passage to a fat fool like Blacky who’s still generous enough to come a-calling to their bleak isle.’

Jethro didn’t comment that the commodore seemed only too willing to pass the cost onto his passengers.

‘Saint Vine’s college must consider your research worth funding, Nandi softbody,’ said Boxiron. ‘If it wasn’t for the college’s share of this voyage’s cost, I suspect Jethro softbody and I would be heading to Jago via Pericur by way of a colony boat.’

‘I won’t argue with you on that,’ said Nandi. ‘But I don’t think my research can take all the credit. When my sponsor at the college, Professor Harsh, was my age, she studied under a Doctor George Conquest. He later travelled to Jago with his wife to pursue a similar vein of research to mine, but his boat sank in the Fire Sea as he returned back home to the Kingdom. All his work was lost.’

‘And the good professor wants his work finished,’ said Jethro.

‘I believe it would be fitting,’ said Nandi. ‘And now the professor is sitting on the High Table and she has the authority to spend the money to ensure it happens.’

‘It’s a wicked shame,’ said the commodore, ‘for a beautiful lass like yourself to be locked away in dusty archives studying the shadows of what has passed. What use is that to us, Nandi? Forget Jago, lass, stay on my boat and I’ll show you all the mortal wonders of the oceans. There are wild, beautiful islands deep inside the Fire Sea untouched by the footsteps of the race of man; there are the seabed cities of the gill-necks carved from coral and shaped in living pearl. And if you’ve still got a taste for archaeology after you’ve seen all that, I’ll show you some of the broken, flooded towers that lie collapsed along the sides of the Boltiana Trench. You can put on a diving suit and run your hand along marble statues that haven’t been seen by anything apart from sharks for a hundred thousand years.’

Her dark skin seemed to blush, and Jethro wondered whether it was the attraction of the offer or the glow from the magma outside the porthole that was lighting her burnished features.

‘Thank you,’ said Nandi, ‘but there is important work awaiting me on Jago. The Circlist church was kept alive on Jago when the Chimecan Empire were raising idols to their dark gods across the continent – without Jago there would be no rationalist enlightenment in the Kingdom today. We’d likely be dancing around maypoles on the solstice, wearing the masks of animals and our old gods like—’ Nandi paused to recall a name.

‘Like Badger-headed Joseph,’ said Jethro.

‘Exactly. You’ve studied prehistory, Mister Daunt?’

Jethro rubbed at his temples, which ached as if trapped in a vice. ‘I used to be a parson, before I found a more accommodating line of work. But I can still disprove the existence of every god and goddess of every religion on the continent – current or historical. Some things you never forget.’

At the head of the table, the commodore narrowed his eyes; he obviously disapproved of Jethro Daunt’s old career. ‘There’s five types of gentlemen I don’t normally carry on the Purity Queen, sir. That’s members of the House of Guardians, lawyers, spies, officers of Ham Yard, and last but not least, church crows – of any denomination. But seeing as you’ve taken up a new business now and come well-recommended by a fine lady like Amelia Harsh, I shall make an exception in your case.’

‘Thank you, good captain,’ said Jethro. ‘I fear neither myself nor Boxiron would be comfortable swimming through the boils or trying to scramble over the flows of magma.’

But it wasn’t the steaming waters of the sea that Jethro Daunt felt he was drowning in. It was the swirling currents of his thoughts. His case. The demands of the Inquisition. The visitations from gods he was trying to deny. And now tales of the history of Circlism on the island and the concerns of a long-dead university doctor and a venerable professor worried for the life of her student.

Jago, all the answers lay on Jago, smouldering lonely and dark amidst the angry solitude of the Fire Sea.

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 class 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 space 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 godless 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 glass 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 glass blowers: dome glass 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, 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 assassinate 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 accumulated 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 pawn to be tidied from the board.’

Hannah passed 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 archduchess 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 assist 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.’

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 approached the soaring coral line that ringed the island of Jago, Commodore Black ordered all of his passengers 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 illustrations 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 assistant, 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 passed 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, bypassing the jealous fools who would have seen her place on the expedition cancelled. Just because she was a poor scholarship girl.

Passing 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 latitudes 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 in sinking before them, bubbles fleeting towards the surface from its pressure seals.

The 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 titanic brass 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 into a large dark space 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 had moored up, the commodore ordered all hatches open and reached for his jacket. ‘Best take yours too, lass. 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, lass,’ 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, lass. 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’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 passengers 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’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 passed each of them a wax-sealed wallet. ‘You have full papers, captain, your crew and passengers 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 passengers.’

‘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 embassy 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, lass.’

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 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 Cassarabia, 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 ambassador 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 embassy, 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, lass. 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 constitutional 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 lasses 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 embassy 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 illustrations in her college tomes, huge feral versions of the Pericurian ambassador 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. 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, 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 bloody 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 superstitious fool.

As the two of them caught up with the other u-boat passengers and their guard, the gathering crowds coming to see the u-boat parted to allow another police escort to pass 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 passed closed enough to Nandi and the others for Ambassador 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 ambassador 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 hell 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 ambassador.

‘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 archduchess 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, ambassador?’

‘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’s crew, Jethro knew that their presence was a double-edged blade.

‘We have quite a view of the cathedral across the Grand Canal,’ noted Boxiron.

‘A view,’ said Jethro, ‘but not an unobserved 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 ambassador,’ said Jethro. ‘You’re not rooming in the hotel, are you? I thought your embassy would have taken you in.’

‘The deputy ambassador 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 embassy 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 ambassador, 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 archduchess’s conservatives, and my house’s friends have caught wind of a few worrying circumstances brewing here,’ said the ambassador, moving to the window. ‘And that’s one of them.’

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 ambassador’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 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 shores. 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 embassy back home have been thorough in sending you copies of the Middlesteel Illustrated 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 gods’ touch of madness.

‘We killed four ursks in the canals 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 ambassador 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 ambassador 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 passages 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?