Secrets of the Fire Sea. Stephen Hunt

and din of each other, leaving the fringes of their capital to the water rats, cavern bamboo and the shadows of their ancient glory.

      Even the roof of the subterranean vaults seemed to burn brighter in the centre of the city, the diode plates shimmering above in an approximation of the sun the mist-shrouded island’s surface hardly ever saw, especially now, in the winter. Though the seasons mattered little to the Jagonese; not with their flash steam systems, powered by the underground water table warmed by volcanic action within, and the Fire Sea without. If only the island had more people. They could continue to live on Jago for another two thousand years – the machinations of the Archduchess of Pericur and the rising power of her nation on the opposite side of the Fire Sea be damned.

      It wasn’t long before Hannah and Chalph reached the largest – and, some said, most elegantly carved vault in the city, the vast circular cavern of the Seething Round. Here, flanking the grand canal, buildings stood as high as twenty storeys, sash windows sparkling as brightly as jewels. And there at its centre, Jago Cathedral, the Grand Canal surrounding it like a moat, spanned by three bridges leading across to its chambers. The largest bridge – the south – lay opposite the steps leading up into the Horn of Jago itself, the mountain long ago hollowed out like a termite mound for the richest vaults and streets of the capital, topped by the senate and capped at its summit by their flare-house. Yes, the light of Jago had once burned with far more than the Fire Sea’s red glow reflected from its basalt cliffs. For those who ruled the city below from high inside the mountain, it probably seemed as if nothing had changed – and even Hannah, at her tender age, could see that that was part of the problem.

      There were extra priests and vergers standing at all three bridges across to the cathedral now. Last month, Jago Cathedral had been broken into at night and the altar raided for silver, its collection boxes smashed. The crime no doubt perpetrated by would-be emigrants desperate to scrape together enough coins to bribe the harbour workers to look the other way when the next supply vessel docked.

      Hannah chose the smallest bridge to try to sneak across to the cathedral, but Chalph’s heavy six-foot figure following behind her was unmissable. A tonsured priest sucked on his teeth in a disapproving way as they passed. ‘You may be late, Damson Conquest, but I can’t be letting your friend into the cathedral.’

      ‘Because he’s ursine?’

      ‘Because he’s a believer, miss. In the scriptures of Pericur, unless you’ve renounced your faith, Chalph urs Chalph?’

      ‘My house may be of a reforming bent,’ said Chalph, ‘but I don’t believe we’re ready to renounce the scripture of the Divine Quad quite yet. Atheists are treated less kindly in my nation than in yours.’

      ‘Then you and your faith shall stay on this side of our good Circlist dwelling, my fine-furred wet-snout friend, while young Hannah can go and make her apologies to the archbishop for an appointment ill-kept.’

      Chalph glanced knowingly at Hannah, who was looking annoyed that the priest had used the insulting Jagonese name for an ursine: wet-snout indeed. ‘This place is just like the rest of Jago, it’s a relic. You remember what you’re going inside there for…it’s your future.’

      She shrugged. ‘I’ll meet you out in the park later. We’ll see what the future looks like then.’

      Hannah walked inside. Jago Cathedral wasn’t a relic to her, it was home. Wheel windows a hundred feet across painted the nave of the cathedral with brightly coloured illumination, much of it speckled by lines of formulae traced across each stained glass light. Formulae had always been important to the Circlist church – the church without a god. Some of them were scientific, outlining the known building blocks of creation. Others were the proofs and balances of synthetic morality – equations that proved society worked best when people worked together, that kindness to the weak was a thing of glory, to do unto others as you would have done unto you. The quantitative proof for the qualitative teachings of Circlism. Hannah’s eyes flicked across the stained glass. There, the elegant proof for the parable of the clear mind – openness of mind versus the infective vectors of a faith-based meme. Every koan and parable taught by the church was represented, through both equations and sublime rainbow-coloured images. Of all Jago’s arts, stained glass was the most celebrated: as was attested to by the double-lancet windows as tall as the cathedral’s spires, which adorned the island’s most important building, the senatorial palace.

      Hannah found the archbishop lighting candles in the north transept where a simple steel hoop held a thousand red wax candles, one for each of the koans of the Circlist teachings. The candles were always going out, much as they did – so the archbishop said – in the hearts of the race of man that were meant to subscribe to them.

      ‘I’m sorry I’m late,’ announced Hannah.

      Archbishop Alice Gray turned around with an appraising look at Hannah. What did she see before her? A young blonde girl with skin so pale it might as well be alabaster? The lazy blue-eyed youngster that hoped to follow the woman who had raised her into the Circlist church? A stubborn, slightly distant little dreamer who always seemed to cause mischief for the prelate who had taken her in as her ward after her parents’ death?

      ‘I don’t suppose you were off studying for the algebra test that Father Penley tells me he’s setting the church class at the end of the week?’ asked the archbishop.

      ‘I’ll pass it,’ said Hannah.

      ‘Yes, I’m sure you will. Then, undoubtedly you’ve been helping Damson Grosley fumigate the sleeping rooms for wall-louse.’

      ‘I tried,’ admitted Hannah. ‘But the brimstone was making me choke. I thought I was going to be sick.’

      The archbishop rolled her eyes. ‘You’re not the only one who is being tried. That is the point of it, Hannah. That’s how you get rid of wall-louse.’

      Sometimes, Hannah thought, the archbishop must have regretted taking her in aged three as a ward of the cathedral. If only Hannah’s parents’ boat hadn’t been incinerated in the Fire Sea. If only she’d had other relatives still alive in the Kingdom of Jackals, then they both might have been spared such perennial disappointments. If Archbishop Alice Gray had such thoughts, the perpetual look of concern that she wore on her face, whatever and whoever she was dealing with, effectively masked them.

      Hannah followed the archbishop into a lifting room, past the belfry – then up into the rectory testing rooms, vestries, refectory, charterhouse and lodgings for the church staff that formed the cathedral’s highest level, but the lowest level of the Horn of Jago. Windowless at so low an elevation inside the mountain, and with nothing to look out on anyway except the frill of artillery tube placements waiting to drop mortar shells on anyone – or anything – foolish enough to try to storm either the capital’s walls or its harbour.

      It was the rectory testing rooms that Hannah was interested in this afternoon, though; always more hopefuls waiting in front of testing tables than there were fathers with seminary experience to administer the tests. While every shop, mill and concern in Hermetica City perpetually displayed staff-wanted signs in their bow windows, the Circlist church had to turn away would-be novices queuing to enter its ranks. Or rather, sign up for the slim chance that the church might post them away from Jago and across the sea to one of the other Circlist nations.

      The archbishop talked to the seminary head for a minute, before coming back towards Hannah.

      ‘Father Blackwater has had no message from the church council, nothing in the post sack that arrived with the boat from Pericur this morning.’

      ‘I need to sit the entrance exam,’ protested Hannah.

      ‘You are still two years away from being of age,’ said the archbishop. ‘You need special dispensation from the Rational Synod.’

      ‘Do I?’ asked Hannah. ‘You’re the Archbishop of Jago, you can grant me the dispensation.’

      ‘No.’ The archbishop shook her head, a stubborn glint in her green eyes that Hannah knew too well. ‘It would be wrong for me to intervene where