Secrets of the Fire Sea. Stephen Hunt

The free company may be mercenaries, but they will not dare disobey a direct order from the archduchess to leave Jago, and then who will protect your city?’

      Hannah shrugged. ‘The militia hate your mercenaries. They never wanted free company fighters here, that was the senate’s choice. They’d throw a party on the docks and help load your mercenaries into a boat if the free company were ordered off Jago.’

      ‘And your senate would widen the draft to make up the numbers,’ said Chalph. ‘Do you want to spend the rest of your life in a guard tower, hoping that the power charging the battlements doesn’t fail on your watch?’

      ‘It won’t come to that,’ said Hannah. But she knew how optimistic her words sounded even as she spoke them. There were press gangs operating across the city now, and even the senate’s latest raft of anti-emigration legislation wasn’t going to fill all the empty vacancies in every trade from the tug service to clerks for the ministries. ‘In the cathedral they’re saying that the new ambassador from Pericur is going to be one of your modernizers. He’ll argue against any attempt to embargo Jago.’

      ‘Of course he’s a modernizer,’ laughed Chalph – although there was little humour in his growl of a voice. ‘Jago’s been a dead-end posting for embassy staff for centuries. The new ambassador is being sent here as a punishment! He was ambassador to the Kingdom of Jackals before. A bit of a demotion, don’t you think? From the most powerful nation in the world to this cold, dying place.’

      ‘How can you say that, Chalph? You were born here!’

      ‘You weren’t,’ said Chalph. ‘You should go home. Go anywhere there’s a future for you.’

      ‘This is my home.’

      ‘No,’ Chalph insisted. ‘The Kingdom of Jackals is your real home, this is just where you ended up.’

      Hannah shook her head. ‘Jago is all I’ve known.’

      ‘It’s all I’ve known too,’ said Chalph. ‘But there’s more out there than this place.’ Chalph picked up a piece of rock and angrily tossed it in the direction of the Horn of Jago, the vast peak rising up behind them out of a cluster of the capital’s domed greenhouses. He threw the stone as if he might break one of the tall stained-glass windows along the senatorial palace circling the mountain. Hannah winced as the flare-house at the very top of the summit erupted with magnesium phosphorescence. A brief flash of light to help guide in the traders that had long ago stopped calling on the island.

      ‘It’s just that I don’t want you to go back to Pericur,’ said Hannah, trying to placate her quick-tempered friend. ‘Alice says there might be war between Pericur and the Kingdom of Jackals now there’s a new archduchess sitting on your throne.’

      ‘War? No, that’s foolish talk. I’m sure the archduchess would be happier if the Kingdom’s colonies disappeared from our southern border, but traditionalist though our new baronial council may be, they understand well enough the power of the Kingdom’s Royal Aerostatical Navy. The archduchess might close the border and hope the rest of the world goes away, but she won’t be invading Jackelian possessions anytime soon. Your people have airships, mine don’t.’

      ‘The Jagonese are my people,’ said Hannah.

      ‘Your parents were both Jackelian,’ said Chalph. ‘The senate can’t stop you leaving the island. You have a choice, at least. More of a choice than I have. I’m bonded in service to the House of Ush. I go where the baroness sends me, just like the baroness has to trade where the archduchess sells her the charter to operate. But you, you can travel to the Kingdom, to Concorzia, go to the Catosian city-states if the fancy takes you. But all you do is stay here. You’re wasting your life away on this island.’

      ‘It doesn’t feel like a waste to me.’

      ‘It should do,’ said Chalph. He pulled out a large Pericurian timepiece from a pocket in the heavy dark leather clothes that were the fashion among his nation. ‘You’re the cleverest person I know, but you’re surely one of the laziest too. The entrance exam is beginning now. You’re meant to be back at the cathedral, not watching steam shapes above the ocean.’

      ‘Yes,’ sighed Hannah, ‘I suppose I am.’ She pointed at one of the clouds of mist leaping up off the sea. ‘That one’s a lion.’

      Chalph responded to the game and pointed at another wall of steaming mist rolling up behind the first. ‘And look, that one’s my future. Come on, let’s see if we can’t find you one too.’

      It was a measure of how determined Chalph was to secure a life for Hannah off Jago that he had personally come to fetch her back to the cathedral. Ursine might be more or less the same height as their counterparts in the race of man, but the dense flesh and thick muscles of the bear-like people meant that a citizen of Pericur usually weighed twice as much as a similarly sized human. And Chalph urs Chalph had dragged his weight up every rung lining the air vent before wrestling open the heavy armoured door that opened out over the black cliffs of Jago.

      Now both Hannah and Chalph had to descend hundreds of rungs back down to the subterranean city without slipping – always tricky the nearer you got to the surface; where the heat from the Fire Sea made sweaty, slippery hands – or paws – an occupational hazard when gripping the ladder. Ventilation passage ninety-two was a long way from the cathedral too, close to the submarine pens of the docks – like the rest of the capital, deep underground in the city’s machine-hewn vaults. But vent ninety-two’s isolation had an advantage. It was Hannah Conquest’s favourite way up to the surface. Without a single u-boat sitting moored in the underground pens among the hundreds of tugs waiting unmanned for trade that would probably never return to the island, there were rarely any adults around to see Hannah emerging from the vent shaft and report her to the police militia. It wasn’t so much that people feared Hannah and her friends might fall and break their necks – though that was often the stated concern that forbade them to leave the city – it was the fear that a careless child might leave open an armoured door up top, allowing in one of the beasts from the island’s cold interior.

      Down below it was just as she had expected. Hannah and Chalph emerged from the vent watched only by the dark, empty eyes of passages that led to the underground water locks and lifting rooms up to the sea-bed. There were no tug crew about the docks; most of the sailors would be back home, drawing half-pay while their fire-breaker vessels sat equally idle tied up around the pens. Guiding the Pericurian ambassador’s u-boat out through the Fire Sea was a rare flurry of activity for the service this morning.

      It was a long way back home through the Eliza Vaults – a lonely walk past empty warehouses and boarded-up taverns and guesthouses for sailors that no longer visited Jago’s shores, before Hannah and Chalph began to pass through the more inhabited parts of the capital, each vault larger than the last as they followed the connected chambers towards the heart of Hermetica City. The two friends travelled on foot, ignoring the cries from gondolas drifting along the city’s canals. Chalph was a junior apprentice in an increasingly impoverished foreign merchant house and Hannah a ward of the church, and neither had the little platinum pennies that a gondola owner would demand for a quick ride towards the cathedral.

      It seemed to Hannah as if they had crossed every one of capital’s arched bridges by the time the waters widened out into the Grand Canal, and here at least Hermetica City still felt like a metropolis. Noise. Smells. Activity. People about the arcaded passages of shops, colonnaded walks that were still polished and cleaned by the district’s workers. People, it was always people that made a place. Little private skiffs moving down the canal, paddles turning under the power of chemical batteries with the whiff of eggs about them. Large oared barges moored for use as restaurants along the canal walls, bored kitchen staff leaning out of the windows to talk to idle gondola men. Hawkers’ cries filling the air, knife-grinding for a penny a blade, pig gelders offering their services to the increasing numbers of people keeping livestock in their canal-side houses and apartments. Not trusting to the scant food supplies coming down from the greenhouses on the surface, not now so many of their labourers had left for the fertile wheat plains of Concorzia. Where once civilization