Secrets of the Fire Sea

CHAPTER THREE

It was the same dream that Jethro Daunt always had. He was back inside the confessional of his parsonage at Hundred Locks. They didn’t even know – many of the refugees who came to him – what a Circlist church meant. Its stone didn’t look much different to that of the churches across the Kingdom of Jackals’ borders. It wasn’t as if the refugees could look at the flint walls and know there were no gods inside them. The churches in Quatérshift were filled with the paraphernalia of the Sun Child, and a light priest’s cassock wasn’t so different from a Circlist parson’s clothes – the golden sunburst of their deity replacing the silver circle. But there were no gods in this church, no gods.

Jethro sweated on his side of the confessional, his cubicle a claustrophobic trap. He heard a scratching on the other side of the grille, a claw dragging across the filigree of equations etched across the walls. Not one of the refugees, this time, then. One of the others. The ancient things that usually visited his dreams afterwards. Black and silver fur brushed against the grille, and a snorting like that of a bull wading in a water meadow sounded from the other side. Badger-headed Joseph. An ancient god that was meant to have lightning for sight, except Jethro never got to see its eyes.

‘Fiddle-faddle fellow,’ growled Badger-headed Joseph, in the kind of voice that you would expect to come from something half-man and half-beast. ‘Are you shy, Jethro Daunt, little man, little fiddle-faddle fellow? Too shy to open the Inquisition’s post?’

Jethro glanced down towards his lap. There was the package, still unopened, the gift of the Inquisition’s highly placed emissary. ‘It is not my business; it is the Inquisition’s. I reject it and I reject you, Badger-headed Joseph.’

More scratching sounded from the other side. ‘Do you reject curiosity, too, fiddle-faddle fellow? Part of you must want to know what’s in the folder. Whose name is in the folder? The same part of you that stuck your hand in the fire when you were a child. When your grandfather warned you to watch out for the embers.’

‘I am Jethro Daunt, I am my own man. I serve the rational order.’ He tried humming the algebra-heavy mantra of the first hymn that sprang to mind, but the scratching grew louder, breaking the concentration needed to enter a meditation.

‘Take care, little fiddle-faddle fellow. You make your intellect your god – it has powerful muscles but a poor personality. Not like me. Here comes the rain…’ There was a moaning noise of relief on the other side of the confessional booth and a powerful stench assailed Jethro’s nose. The ancient god was urinating against his side of the booth.

‘This is a rational house,’ shouted Jethro, retching. ‘It has no place for you, Badger-headed Joseph. No place for the old gods. I cast you out!’

‘You’re not a parson anymore,’ growled the voice behind the grille. ‘Make me happy, fiddle-faddle fellow; indulge your curiosity with the packet.’

Jethro Daunt woke with a start. His bedroom was dark save for the illumination of the triple-headed gas lamp in Thompson Street burning beyond his window. Just enough light to see the tightly bound folder from the Inquisition.

He looked at it, the echo of his grandfather’s warning as his hand reached for the fire grate whispering across the darkness.

Boxiron thumped along the corridor. He had trouble enough approximating sleep during the small hours, the hearing folds on the side of his head wired into the inferior routing mechanisms of the man-milled neck join randomly amplifying the sounds of the night.

Opening the door with far more vigour than he had expected – or requested – from his arm servos, Boxiron was faced with a sight strange even for their chambers at Thompson Street.

Jethro Daunt was in the middle of the floor, the folder from the Inquisition cut open with a letter knife. Papers and notes sodden with the consulting detective’s tears were scattered across a rug in the centre of the room.

Glancing up, Jethro noticed the steamman as he entered. ‘She’s dead. After all these years, she’s dead.’

The light in the centre of Boxiron’s vision plate flared with anger. This was the Inquisition’s work. It wasn’t just Jethro Daunt who was an expert at staring into a softbody’s soul. Curiosity. Curiosity could always be counted on to undermine Jethro’s resolve. Every time. The Loas damn the devious minds of the Inquisition.

‘You’re going to do what they want, aren’t you? You’re going to take their case.’

Jethro rested his spine against the foot of the bed and stared up at the ceiling, a blank look on his face. A mask. ‘Of course I am.’

And where Jethro went, Boxiron would inevitably follow. As he so often did, Jethro began to hum one of his mad little ballads as he leafed through the papers spread around him. He didn’t hum church hymns anymore, that pained him too much; but he had picked up many ditties from the drinking houses their informers frequented. ‘Well of all the dogs it stands confessed, your Jackelian bulldogs are the best.’

The steamman noticed the stack of unpaid bills on the table in the room, a little higher every day. Boxiron hoped that the League of the Rational Court could be counted upon to pay more promptly than Lord Spicer’s estate.

It was a terrible sight to see inside the cathedral – normally so tranquil and shaded – now lit by the brightly burning diode lamps of the police militia as they moved about the nave, throwing open the doors leading down to the crypt and checking the transept for any sign of ursks. Nobody was protesting the presence of the heavily armed free company soldiers with them. The green-uniformed police militia was interviewing the few monks and vergers left inside the cathedral. Hannah and Chalph pressed past for a view of the confessional booths along the side of the far wall.

‘We weren’t here,’ Hannah heard a verger telling a militia officer. ‘Hordes of people came across the cathedral’s bridges begging for help. We were out with the people carrying torches alongside the canals. Only she stayed behind.’

She. Hannah looked unbelievingly towards where the police were kneeling outside the confessional booths, blood flooded across the flagstones. Dear Circle, those were the archbishop’s robes on that stump. That decapitated stump.

‘Alice!’ yelled Hannah, trying to press forward.

‘Who let her in here?’ frowned Colonel Knipe. Jago’s imposing silver-headed police commander limped forward on his artificial leg.

‘Is it Alice?’

‘It is the archbishop’s body,’ said the colonel sadly, pushing Hannah and Chalph back.

‘Where’s her head? Where’s her head?’

‘Don’t look at the body, this isn’t something for you to see,’ ordered the colonel.

She couldn’t take it in. There wasn’t even a skull left on the woman who had raised Hannah as her own daughter. And some of their last words…The accusation that Alice had been trying to trap her here…

‘Where’s her head?’ Chalph demanded.

‘I wish I knew,’ said the colonel. ‘It’s not inside the cathedral. The ursk that did this must have ripped pieces off the archbishop to feed on later.’

Chalph sniffed the air. ‘I can’t smell any ursk scent in here.’

‘You think her head fell off of its own accord, sprouted legs and ran away?’ snapped the colonel. He tapped his metal leg, the clockwork-driven mechanism inside whirring back at him. ‘I know things about ursks, wet-snout. The only difference between filth like those monsters and your people is about twenty stone in weight and a leather shirt.’

‘Pericurian free company soldiers are the only thing keeping Hermetica City safe,’ cried Chalph in outrage.

‘What a good job your people are doing,’ sneered the colonel. ‘I told the senate that paying for free company mercenaries to patrol our walls was a mistake of the highest order. When you fight for money, money is all you value. You wet-snouts let this happen, cub. You want to scare us all off your sacred soil, but it’s not going to happen. We’ve been here for two thousand years and we’ll be here for another thousand before your damn archduchess holds one inch of Jago’s mud for her scriptures.’

‘But there’s no claw marks on the confessional’s walls,’ observed Hannah. ‘Let me see the body!’

Colonel Knipe snapped his fingers and two of his police militia came forward grabbing Hannah and Chalph.

‘I don’t have time for this! You can see her body at the funeral like everyone else – get these two out of here.’

Chalph snarled as the Jagonese militia pushed him rudely out of the cathedral, shoving with their lamp rods and rifle butts, no doubt venting the frustration they felt at the usurpation of their role manning the battlements by Chalph’s race. They were only slightly kinder in their handling of Hannah.

In the crowd that had begun to form outside on the bridge, Hannah spotted one of the junior priests – Father Baine – the young man who usually clerked for the archbishop.

‘Is it true?’ he called out, seeing Hannah. ‘The militia won’t even let us back into our own rooms.’

‘I think so,’ said Hannah. ‘There’s a dead body by the confessionals and it’s wearing Alice’s robes. Sweet Circle, I think she’s dead. The ursks…’

‘May serenity find her,’ mumbled the priest, shocked to the core by the confirmation of his prelate’s murder. ‘Have they shot the ursk that did it?’

Hannah shook her head. ‘They’re searching the crypt levels now.

Father Baine looked at Hannah and then more nervously at Chalph standing at her side – as if he was expecting the Pericurian trader’s apprentice to triple in size and transform into one of the bestial ursks in front of his eyes.

‘They may not find anything down there,’ whispered the young priest. ‘The archbishop told me before our afternoon meditations that Vardan Flail had threatened her life and that the high guild head was no longer to be admitted to the cathedral. Not even on Circle-day for the open service.’

Vardan Flail had threatened Alice? The brief heated conversation in the testing rooms between them leapt back to Hannah. The odious little man leaving for the archbishop’s chancellery two steps behind Alice.

‘Did she say if the argument was about me?’

‘Your call-up on the ballot list, yes.’ The priest ran a hand through his prematurely thinning hair. ‘But that’s not all that they argued over. Vardan Flail mentioned to her that if she married him, it would invalidate your draft, but the archbishop told me she’d spurned such a clumsy offer.’

Chalph growled in surprise by Hannah’s side. ‘Marry Vardan Flail? Who would want to mate with such a twisted creature?’

‘He was not always what you see limping through the vaults,’ said the priest. He looked at Hannah, eager to impress her with his knowledge. ‘Why do you think he was always making excuses to come to the cathedral? He had set his cap on the archbishop from the first day she arrived on Jago. In the early years, Vardan Flail was the only friend the archbishop had on Jago – everyone else’s noses having been put out of joint by the church thinking it could presume to appoint an outsider to the position, over all the Jagonese priests who had been waiting for preferment.’

Hannah was shocked. She had always seen Alice as an archbishop first and her guardian second – but never as a woman, a woman that might marry. Hannah had been going around all these years with her eyes closed. A well of despair opened up inside her. How little she really knew the woman who had raised her – how little she ever would, now.

Father Baine leant in close. ‘We turned Vardan Flail away, just as the archbishop had ordered us to. On the south bridge, about five minutes before the city’s breach bells started sounding. Flail was furious, cursing us and wishing a plague upon everyone who worked inside the cathedral. He could have slipped back after the alarm sounded, murdered the archbishop while we were out with the people keeping a watch on the canals.’

‘I knew there was no ursk scent inside the cathedral,’ said Chalph. ‘I tried to tell the colonel, but—’

‘The colonel loathes everyone from Pericur,’ said Hannah. ‘It suits him just fine to blame the ursks for Alice’s murder – he can stoke up more resentment against the free company soldiers now, point to how many years his militia stood watch on the walls without ever letting any of the creatures from outside break into the capital’s vaults.’

There was a crowd gathering on the bridge. Word of the archbishop’s murder was spreading through the Seething Round. Using their lamp rods as staffs, the militia were holding them back. Archbishop Alice Gray might not have started off as a Jagonese churchman, but she had been popular enough with the people of the island by the time she died.

‘I think the archbishop expected something like this would happen,’ said the priest.’

‘Had Alice talked to you before about Flail?’ asked Hannah.

‘It wasn’t what she said,’ explained Father Baine. ‘It was what she didn’t say. There were letters she was drafting; the ones she didn’t ask me to write for her. Some were composed in church cipher, but I saw who those were addressed to once – the League of the Rational Court.’

The Inquisition! Sweet Circle, that was one arm of the church Hannah had hoped never to encounter.

‘It’s not just bodies that are twisted in the guild’s turbine halls,’ said the priest. He tapped his prematurely thinning hair. ‘It’s their minds. The way they cling to Circlism out in their vaults, it’s almost faith!’

Heresy. Superstitions perverting the church without gods. The implications of the archbishop’s murder collided with the weight of emotional wreckage spinning around Hannah’s mind. And with the archbishop gone, Hannah would have no one to speak for her in front of the senate. She was going to end up an initiate of the Guild of Valvemen, indentured to a master who had murdered her guardian!

‘We have to prove that Vardan Flail killed the archbishop,’ said Chalph. ‘If we can do that, prove that your draft ballot was a personal matter in a vendetta, the senate will have no choice but to nullify it.’

Prove it when the colonel’s police militia wanted the very opposite finding. What hope did they have?

But it was the only way Hannah was going to survive – if the deadly energies of the guild’s vaults didn’t finish her off, then Vardan Flail would be only too eager to ensure an accident befell her and silenced her wagging tongue.

Jethro and Boxiron waited in the shipping office for the agent behind the wooden counter to flick through his box of yellowed cards. This was the last shipping agent on the harbour, and it looked as if they were about to receive the same answer they had been given by every other office they had visited.

‘Sorry, Mister Daunt,’ said the clerk. ‘I hate to turn away custom, but there ain’t no call for passage to Jago no more.’

‘There must be at least one vessel on your roster that makes regular stops there?’

‘Not since the southwest passage fully opened,’ said the clerk. ‘They’re dangerous waters, the Fire Sea, and there are easier ways to get across to the colonies now. It’s their own fault, bloody Jagonese. Their tugs used to charge skippers a small fortune to see us safely through the boils. Now there’s another way to sail to Concorzia, who’ll pay their fees, eh? Not any of the vessels on my lists, that I can tell you.’

‘Myself and my good steamman friend here need to get to Jago,’ insisted Jethro.

‘Well, you won’t be going direct, fellow, that’s the truth of it. Last I heard, Pericur still runs a service out to the island once a month. Take a steam ship across the Sepia Sea to Concorzia and travel north overland to the ursine lands, and then you can wait there for your boat to the island. That’s how I’d do it.’

‘What about a direct passage to Pericur?’

‘Not on my list either,’ said the clerk. ‘Their great and mighty archduchess hoards their trade routes for her kin, and it don’t seem like I got the furry hide to qualify for her graces, do I? Like I say, travel to the colonies and then head north overland for the Pericurian border. I can sell you an airship berth rather than a steamer cabin if you’re in a hurry. You’ll be walking the streets of New Alban in three days and there’s plenty of wagon trains from there up towards Pericur.’

‘We are on church business,’ said Boxiron. ‘Is there really nothing you can do?’

The clerk traced an ironic little circle across his waistcoat and shrugged. ‘Then may serenity find you.’ He walked away leaving the two of them to their own devices.

‘Then may it find us on a luckier day.’ Jethro shook his head and made to leave the dusty little room, but a younger female clerk – seeing her master had left the front office – stopped scribbling in a ledger and waved her inky nib in Jethro Daunt’s direction.

‘There is a way for you to travel directly to Pericur. There’s a free trader with a trading licence from the archduchess moored down in the submarine pens. No shipping agent here will recommend him to you, though. He’s an awkward bugger and he’s not registered with any of us.’

Jethro eased a coin out of his pocket and slipped it across to the girl. ‘Thank you. I would have paid you a commission on the recommendation, whether the boat was a free trader or not.’

‘It’s not just the lack of a fee for us,’ warned the girl. ‘There’s talk about this boat and the kind of cargoes it’s been known to handle. You’ll be shipping out with a right crew of rascals. A gentleman of your quality, sir, you might want to take a berth on an airship of the merchant marine and go the rest of the way overland from the colonies like was suggested to you.’

Jethro tapped the iron shoulder of his hulking steamman companion. ‘Have no fear, good damson. Boxiron and I can both be persuasive, in our own different ways.’

‘Then count your fingers after shaking hands with any of the crew, sir, and ask for the Purity Queen down on the docks. You won’t miss her when you see her lines.’

She was correct in that, there was no chance of missing the craft. The u-boat in question was a double-hulled affair, lying low in the waters of the pens like a giant metal catamaran, a single conning tower rising out of her middle, the bridge low and square and home to a flock of screeching seagulls. The bowsprit of the closer hull ended in a snarling moulding of a boar, her companion hull an iron lion’s head, the ferocity of both figures diminished somewhat by the spattering of guano from the cloud of noisy seagulls above her.

‘Look at the carvings of the mouths,’ noted Boxiron, his voicebox quivering. ‘That vessel has real teeth: those are torpedo tubes inside the jaws.’

‘Ex-fleet sea arm,’ said a familiar-sounding voice behind them. ‘Decommissioned and sold off into private hands. There’s empty gun mounts on the fantail behind her bridge, and the torpedo tubes have been deactivated. Allegedly.’

Jethro turned and was startled to see a face he knew standing behind them; a middle-aged woman with gorilla-sized arms, and next to her a girl half her age whom Jethro didn’t recognize. ‘Professor Harsh,’ said Jethro. ‘Bob me sideways; I haven’t seen you since, what, that business with the tomb of Kitty Kimbaw? Are you mounting another expedition, good lady?’

‘Not this time,’ said the professor. ‘I’m head of the department of archaeology at Saint Vine’s College now. I’m reluctantly leaving the fieldwork to my more youthful associates these days.’ She indicated the young woman standing next to her. ‘This is Nandi Tibar-Wellking, my assistant, about to embark on the solemn task of adding some extra letters after her name, and these—’ she indicated Jethro and Boxiron ‘—are the two dears who helped me prove that the curse of Kitty Kimbaw’s tomb owed more to a heavily bejewelled statue that had been stolen from a side-passage than it did to supernatural vengeance from the disturbed mummified remains of its occupant. Mister Jethro Daunt, ex of the church, and Boxiron, ex of the Steamman Free State and various other parts.’

‘It is good to see you again, Amelia softbody,’ Boxiron nodded towards the professor. ‘Would your assistant be shipping out on the Purity Queen? We’ve been led to believe that this vessel has something of an unsavoury reputation.’

‘Yes,’ hummed the professor, ‘knowing her skipper, I would be surprised if it were otherwise.’

‘Do you know her commander well enough to recommend us for berths?’ asked Jethro.

‘I don’t think you’ll have much of a problem in that regard. Tramp freighters are lucky to get whatever cargo they can, and there are no bigger tramps than—’ she pointed towards a figure weaving out of the conning tower and crossing the gantry to the quayside, followed by a pair of submariners in striped shirts ‘—him!’

‘Ah, lass,’ said the figure as he got within earshot. ‘I can tell by the mortal twinkle in your eye that you’re either slandering Jared Black or defaming my fine boat’s reputation.’

‘One of the two, commodore,’ said the professor.

‘It’s a terrible thing, the malicious tittle-tattle in Spumehead that has attached itself to an honest fellow like me. A fellow who, as you well know, Amelia, has done nothing but sacrifice himself for the blessed Kingdom of Jackals. A war hero who has had little out of the state but the wicked attentions of her revenue men and false accusations of smuggling from lesser skippers jealous of old Blacky’s genius and skill at navigating the perilous courses of the oceans.’ He looked at the professor’s young assistant and indicated her baggage to his two u-boat men. ‘And this must be your Damson Tibar-Wellking. A pretty rose to be carried by the hard lines of my old war-boat, but we’ll see you safe to your destination, lass.’

It seemed to Jethro that the young academic nodded rather nervously towards the commodore. Whether it was the ruffians acting as porters, the military lines of the freighter, or the declarations of the vessel’s master about his honesty that made her apprehensive, Jethro was uncertain. He didn’t need his church training in reading the souls of men to know that upright people very rarely needed to proclaim their honesty. Young Nandi kissed goodbye to her mentor and was led away inside the u-boat. The commodore watched her walk away, scratching his thick black beard. There was a speckling of white on its fringes that made it look as if snow had recently fallen and settled there.

‘I’ve bumped into a couple of old acquaintances I wasn’t expecting to see,’ said the professor to the old u-boat man, indicating Boxiron and Jethro. ‘They seem also to be in need of a vessel.’

‘I am led to believe you have Pericurian trading papers, good captain,’ said Jethro. ‘Myself and my steamman friend here need to reach Pericur to catch the supply boat to Jago.’

‘Jago is it now?’ said the commodore. ‘Well then, I can save you the bother of the extra leg. I’m calling at the dark isle before I head on out to Pericur.’