Secrets of the Fire Sea. Stephen Hunt

of their aptitude and mastery of synthetic morality. ‘So if I wasn’t your ward, if I was just one of them, you’d give me your dispensation to sit the church entrance exam early?’

      ‘You’re two years away from the age of testing,’ said the archbishop. ‘And any answer I have to give would be far too clouded by my feelings for you.’

      ‘I’m ready for it!’

      ‘I don’t doubt your abilities in casting analytical proofs, Hannah,’ said the archbishop. ‘There’s too much of your mother in you for you to be anything other than a mathematical prodigy. But you need a basis of experience to apply what you learn in the church, that’s why there’s an age set to take the test. If the church merely wanted to indoctrinate fanatics, if we wanted to train preachers, we’d have snatched you from your cot and invented deities to terrify your mind into obedience. You need a clear mind and a wise heart to work with your parishioners, with the experience of humility to know when you’re falling short of either of those.’

      ‘I don’t even want to leave the island,’ argued Hannah. ‘I’d be happy to stay on Jago, not try to land the first vacant Jackelian vicarage or Concorzian parsonage that comes up.’

      ‘I’m not concerned about you leaving the island.’

      ‘You are,’ accused Hannah. ‘You want to keep me here, wallowing in the same ignorance you’re sworn to try to banish.’

      The archbishop sighed. ‘We’re not exactly a pit of ignorance here at the cathedral. I think you’ve been spending too much time listening to your ursine friend Chalph urs Chalph, young lady.’

      Hannah could see this was an argument she wasn’t going to win, and she was distracting the others taking the entrance exam. Some of the seminary fathers were looking up irritably from behind the piled leather tomes full of questions and equations to solve. A few of the candidates were trying to twist their heads around inside their rubber helmets, rattling the heavy lead-lined cables going back to the Entick machines. The goggles inside the hood measured the dilation of the iris in an attempt to ensure the questions were being answered truthfully, and her heated debate with the archbishop was probably skewing results across the testing room.

      ‘Chalph is no fool. He said I’m going to have to leave the island to have a future,’ retorted Hannah. ‘Perhaps he’s right.’

      ‘“The finger that points at the moon isn’t the moon,”’ quoted the archbishop.

      ‘Oh, please,’ said Hannah, ‘of all the koans…this is Jago. I haven’t seen a moon through the mist for months.’

      Hannah didn’t hear the archbishop’s reply. Someone was coming through the testing room door and her heart sank as she saw who it was. Vardan Flail. The long red robe he wore disguised the high guild master’s awkward movements. The Circle knew what mutations he was hiding under that intricately embroidered crimson garb! If a foreigner were to enter the cathedral and see the archbishop standing next to Vardan Flail, they would lay eyes on his fancy red velvet mantle with all its woven transaction-engine symbols, note the archbishop’s simple chequerboard-pattern cassock, and come to the conclusion that it was Flail who was head of the church here on Jago, not the archbishop.

      A shiver went down Hannah’s spine as she smelled the mint-like fragrance that had been infused into the valveman’s velvet robes – sprayed, it was said, to disguise the smell of putrid flesh.

      ‘I hope,’ said the archbishop, ‘that you aren’t here to complain about the additional processing cycles that the testing sessions are going to require of your transaction engines.’

      ‘Hope,’ came the grinding voice under the cowl, ‘or pray?’

      ‘I won’t tolerate that filthy language here in the cathedral!’

      Which was precisely why he had said it.

      ‘If you had need of extra processing power, I would bring the matter up in the appropriate forum – in front of the stained senate,’ said Vardan Flail. ‘We have power enough. It’s not you that I have come to see, it is your young ward here.’

      Her? Hannah looked with disgust at Flail’s red cowl, just enough of the high guild master’s pockmarked features visible in the shadow of the hood to turn her stomach. What in the name of the Circle did the most loathsome high guild master in the capital want with her?

      ‘I have the results of the ballot,’ said Vardan Flail.

      The ballot? Hannah’s stomach felt as if it was dropping down the city’s deepest airshaft.

      ‘Damson Hannah Conquest is one of the names that has been randomly selected for service within the guild.’

      ‘Randomly selected by the programs running on your transaction engines,’ said the archbishop.

      ‘I don’t care for your tone,’ warned Vardan Flail. He pointed slowly to the testing equipment and then up towards the diode panels in the stone roof of the testing room. ‘You seem happy enough to utilize the processing cycles of the engine rooms and draw power for the lights to keep your cathedral illuminated, but like everyone else here, you flinch at the sacrifices necessary to keep our island’s mighty turbine halls humming.’

      ‘I won’t do it,’ spluttered Hannah.

      ‘Not turning up for balloted service is considered desertion,’ threatened Vardan Flail, ‘and you are far too clever to let yourself be exiled for that crime, young Hannah Conquest. With your mind you will settle in fine with us as an initiate cardsharp. We won’t have that beautiful intellect of yours wasted hauling sacks of broken valves to the smelt or crawling inside the turbine halls’ generators to oil the magnets. No, within a year you’ll be able to turn out punch cards like you were born to it. Punch cards to control the most powerful transaction engines we possess. You will be able to make a difference that can be measured in the efficiency of everything you code.’

      ‘And end up like you?’ spat Hannah.

      ‘These are my blessings,’ said Vardan Flail, touching his arm. ‘The sacred scars of duty.’

      ‘The senate won’t need to exile me beyond the city walls. I can ship out for the Kingdom of Jackals any time I want.’

      ‘Legally perhaps,’ sneered Vardan Flail. ‘Although dual nationality and the application of the draft is still a point of law that is open to examination; I should know, I checked the legality of the situation quite thoroughly before I came to see you, little lady. How many new anti-emigration bills have been passed this year? You can spend the few days before your service starts looking at the empty docks and wondering when the next Jackelian u-boat is going to come calling – because we both know there won’t be any. And there’s not a supply-boat captain this side of the Fire Sea willing to risk the senate’s wrath by smuggling out a passenger without official exit papers.’

      ‘This is outrageous!’ said the archbishop. ‘I will protest to the senate.’

      ‘Of course you will. Everyone who is called to our service protests,’ said Vardan Flail, sadly, as if the desire not to end up concealing a twisted body underneath crimson robes was a personal calumny against him. ‘The bleating of our chosen is as natural as a steam storm after rain. After every annual ballot the floor of the senate is fleetingly filled with the cries of rich merchants’ sons who are too good for our guild – or prelate’s daughters who are too fine and unblemished to toil inside our vaults.’ Vardan Flail reached out to stroke Hannah’s face and she flinched back as his warm, wrinkled skin brushed against her face. ‘This isn’t your true beauty, girl, it’s in there.’ He prodded a finger against her forehead. ‘Yes, it is in there, and we shall use it well…’

      Hannah watched in horror as the valveman’s claw-like fingers vanished back inside the sleeve of his robe. This wasn’t happening to her. This wasn’t any future fit for her! She was going to follow her guardian into the church, a quiet, easy life of meditation and reflection in the still peace of the cathedral. Thinking great