Secrets of the Fire Sea. Stephen Hunt

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?’