Secrets of the Fire Sea

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

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

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

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

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

Jethro nodded.

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

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

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

‘I am sorry,’ said Jethro.

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

‘Does everyone come?’ asked Jethro.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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