Secrets of the Fire Sea. Stephen Hunt

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      ‘That won’t be Alice’s choice; it’ll be Vardan Flail’s. Circle damn the man, I hate him. Always coming around the cathedral, trying to ingratiate himself with Alice, the stink of decay and death on his robes.’

      ‘I’ll get you out of here,’ promised Chalph. ‘The supply boat from Pericur is owned by the House of Ush. I’ll find one of our sailors willing to take on board a stowaway, there must be one of them who’ll help me.’

      ‘The militia search the boats now before they let them leave. But it won’t come to that,’ said Hannah, trying to sound more hopeful than she actually felt. ‘Alice will argue for me. She’s cleverer than the whole stained senate put together. If there’s a loophole…’

      Chalph was about to answer when he turned his head and sniffed the air. ‘It – no!’

      Hannah couldn’t smell anything, but she could hear the distant crackle of brambles as something heavy pushed through the undergrowth. ‘What is it?’

      ‘It’s an ursk,’ whispered Chalph.

      ‘How would the monster get inside the park? It should have been fried coming over the city wall,’ said Hannah, looking uncertainly in the direction of the noise. ‘Ursks are similar enough to your people, Chalph. You must have the scent of one of your house-men coming looking for you skiving.’

      ‘Ursks are nothing like my people,’ said Chalph, backing up. He seized Hannah’s arm. ‘Run! Back to the entrance now.’

      Hannah let her friend break through the passage of greenery ahead of her, trampling bushes and breaking creepers with his mass. If it was an ursk…Chalph had a keen nose, but the monsters that inhabited the island’s interior depended on theirs for feeding. She heard the crashing behind them – a savage racket. Just the sort of clatter something twice as heavy as an ursine would make loping after them. How many times had Hannah heard people sitting at the tea-tables in the vaults below whispering that the killing charge running along the city’s battlements was failing now, predicting that something like this would happen sooner or later?

      Chalph howled in fear and rage as he pushed forward, but there was no one else to hear it in Tom Putt Park. That was the point of coming here, you could be alone without being spotted by priests and housemen and assigned the kinds of tasks that often came to mind when faced with idling youngsters. Chalph’s howl was echoed by something similar-sounding, but louder, coming from behind them. That sound came from no ursine! Off to their side another roar answered the first, a quick bestial exchange of information. Two ursks, or more? How had the monsters got over the battlements alive? A section of Hermetica’s defences had to be down. Their sloping iron ramparts were over forty feet high, the electric charge they carried enough to hurl back the corpse of any creature unwise enough to touch them.

      Hannah urged her cramping legs to hurry. Ursks, what did she know about ursks? Nothing that could help them here. Only stories from the men that ventured outside the walls: trappers, hunters, and city maintenance workers. Tales of bear-like monsters that prowled the basalt plains and volcanic mountains. Twice the size of a Pericurian and thrice the weight of anyone from the race of man. Monstrous, thick-furred killers that hunted in packs and could rip a Jagonese citizen apart in seconds with their claws. Almost – but not quite fully – sentient, with enough guile and cunning to plan ambushes and lure those travelling overland away from the safety of a well-armed caravan. Always hungry, always prowling the capital’s battlements.

      Hannah tripped on part of the crumbling old path through the undergrowth just as a long, black-furred shape seemed to pass endlessly through the air where she had been standing; the stench of rotten, steam-slicked fur filling her nose. It didn’t matter how many of its pack had broken through the wall alongside this monster. Hannah and Chalph were unarmed. This single ursk would be more than enough to kill them a dozen times over.

      Still on the ground, Hannah scrambled back in terror, gaping at the foul thing that landed snarling in front of her, a nightmare carved in flesh.

      Jethro Daunt climbed into the horseless carriage’s forward compartment and Boxiron made to clamber up behind him, but the nun shook her head at the steamman and pointed across to an organ grinder entertaining a group of children in the crescent’s garden opposite. ‘Not you. We require the one playing, not the one dancing.’

      The red light behind Boxiron’s vision plate flared in anger, but Jethro shook his head at his friend. ‘There’s really no call to be impolite, good sister.’

      ‘Of course,’ said the woman. ‘My apologies, steamman. Your talents are not what I require presently.’

      ‘I use my talents to keep my softbody friend here safe,’ spat Boxiron.

      The woman merely smiled in reply.

      ‘We’re in the open, it’s daylight and we’ve just walked out of a house filled with Ham Yard’s finest detectives,’ said Jethro to the steamman. ‘Save your top gear for the moment, good friend, I believe my life is safe.’

      Boxiron looked at the large monks climbing back into the rear room of the carriage. ‘You may be without gods, but if I find a hair out of place on Jethro softbody’s head when next I see him, you will find cause to wish you had someone to pray to.’

      Opposite Jethro, the nun shrugged nonchalantly. ‘The funny thing about those Steamo Loas you worship, creature of the metal, is that even on closer examination, they’re still mostly steam.’

      As their carriage pulled away, Boxiron began to clump angrily back towards their lodgings at number ten Thompson Street.

      ‘He’s hardly subtle,’ said the nun, watching the gas lamps whisk past now that her horseless carriage was speeding up.

      ‘As you said,’ noted Jethro,’ it’s not what he’s for. He’s a topping old steamer, really.’

      ‘And what are you for, Jethro Daunt?’

      ‘I’m all for whiling away my remaining years on the Circle’s turn with as much serenity as I can find,’ said Jethro, rummaging around in his pocket to withdraw a crumpled paper bag filled with black and white-striped sweets. ‘Would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop? They’re quite wondrous.’

      The nun looked at the bag with barely disguised disgust. ‘You realize those foul things are highly addictive? The sugar is mixed with poppy opiates. Parliament should have outlawed them years ago.’

      ‘Slander on the part of their competitors, I am sure,’ said Jethro. ‘They help me to think. I don’t suppose you are going to tell me your real name, or your rank within the Inquisition?’

      ‘Not if you insist on calling us by that vulgar name,’ said the woman. ‘You’re a little too educated to be reading the penny dreadfuls.’

      ‘The League of the Rational Court, then, if you prefer,’ replied Jethro. ‘I would say you are a mother superior.’

      The woman picked up a heavy folder from her side, its contents protected by a wax seal. It put Jethro in mind of a ministry dispatch box, the kind you might spy from the visitors’ gallery at the House of Guardians, being carried by a politician on the floor below.

      ‘Deduced from my age or the size of my carriage?’

      Jethro pulled out his pocket watch, the chain dangling from his СКАЧАТЬ