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‘Well, well,’ said Jethro. ‘I’ll be bobbed. Of all the people in the capital I might have expected to be conversing with about my current mode of employment, your people are the very last ones I would have expected to turn up.’
‘As it should be,’ noted the woman. ‘Of those that know of the existence of the League of the Rational Court, there are even fewer that should be aware when they are about to be touched by our hand.’
Jethro looked at the open door of the carriage and the woman pointing to the empty red leather seat opposite the one she had just vacated. An invitation with exceedingly little choice in it. And carriage rides with these people were sometimes one-way affairs.
The hand of the Circlist church’s League of the Rational Court. The hand of the Inquisition.
Hannah Conquest pushed aside the thick brambles to try and find the path. Like all of the great domed greenhouses nestled in the shadows of the Horn of Jago, Tom Putt Park was named after its creator – or at least the merchant notable who had paid for it to be constructed. Nestling against the battlements, far from the city, Tom Putt Park had drawn the short straw when it came to maintenance from the dwindling band of park keepers and farm labourers. They were presently engaged in the serious business of feeding the capital, not pruning the wild-running hedges and copses under Tom Putt’s crystal geodesic canopy.
It always felt a curious thing to Hannah, moving through the bush and the greenery of the park. In a very real sense she wasn’t walking on the soil of Jago. All the dirt here, and in every other park and farm dome, not to mention the tree beds in Hermetica’s vaults below, had been imported by traders’ barges in centuries past. Dirt from the Kingdom of Jackals on the far side of the Fire Sea, as well as from Pericur and the other nations on the opposite shores. The native top-soil beyond the capital’s battlements was fit only for growing stunted fruitless orchards, those and the island’s blackened forests of thorns that cut at travellers with the sharpness of the machetes needed to hack out a passage amongst them. Not that many dared to venture outside without wearing heavily armoured walking machines – RAM suits, as the trappers and city maintenance workers called them. The aging power tunnels that fed the city with the energy its people required always needed upkeep, as did the iron aqueducts carrying in fresh drinking water down from the hills. A job that was almost as unappealing as what Hannah suspected was in store for her with the guild…
Hannah found the path again and after a minute came to the flint wall that would lead her to the stone singers. Chalph urs Chalph was waiting by the circle of moss-stained marble statues when she came to the clearing, looking as if he might join in the fertility song the circle of carvings were said to be singing to the stone apple tree in their centre. A reminder of more prosperous times that had once paid for the park and its upkeep. There was little time for wassailing now. The city was lucky if its entire crop could be collected before it spoiled lying on the domes’ dirt.
‘I’ve just seen the ballot list posted,’ Chalph called to her. ‘Although if I hadn’t, the look on your face might tell me the tale by itself.’
‘Well, I’ve found my future,’ said Hannah. ‘Rotting away in the engine rooms as an initiate of the Guild of Valvemen.’
‘The draft ballot’s been nailed up everywhere in the city. The senate are calling more people than ever before this year for the protected professions.’ He licked at a paw-like hand. ‘But you have dual citizenship through your parents. You can just leave…’
‘How, by walking across the Fire Sea?’ asked Hannah. ‘That twisted jigger Vardan Flail seems to think the supply boat from Pericur isn’t going to be selling tickets out of here when it comes to me, not to anyone who’s been called by the draft, in fact.’
‘There must be something you can do…’
‘I don’t want to end up like them,’ said Hannah, almost sobbing. ‘Have you ever seen what’s under a valveman’s robes? Working in the engine rooms changes your body, kills you eventually.’
‘You can claim asylum,’ speculated Chalph. ‘The Jackelian ambassador, the short fellow with the red nose, he could grant you asylum in his embassy.’
‘That old fool? Sir Robert Cugnot is lucky to remember to stuff the cork back in his wine bottle before he turns in of a night. How are he and his staff going to keep me safe? Nobody can dodge the draft now, the militia always finds you. It doesn’t matter where you hide, in a friend’s house, in one of the empty quarters, they always track you down in the end.’
‘Then take the seminary vows like you wanted to,’ urged Chalph. ‘You’re clever enough to pass the examinations and the guild can’t draft you if you’re already working for the church.’
‘Alice won’t waive the age limit for me,’ said Hannah. ‘I begged her. But I’m her ward and proffering me for early advancement is not the right and rational thing to do.’
Chalph shook his heavy dark-furred head in anger. ‘And letting your body cook in the energies of the guild’s engine rooms is?’
‘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 green waistcoat. ‘From the time, good sister.’
The woman raised an eyebrow.
‘Half an hour to read the petitions a mother superior accepts before lunch, another half an hour to get here for midday.’
‘That would suggest you know where the league is based.’
‘You’ll be surprised at what can be whispered in dreams,’ said Jethro. ‘Even postal addresses, sometimes.’
‘Which gods do you hear the most, now?’
‘You mean the gods that don’t exist?’ smiled Jethro. ‘On balance, I would say Badger-headed Joseph is my most frequent visitor, although I find what Old Mother Corn whispers to me is often the most reliable.’
The woman broke the seal on the folder and opened it, lifting out a parcel of papers tied tightly with red cord. ‘It’s small bloody wonder we threw you out of the church.’
‘I wonder about it,’ said Jethro. ‘I wonder about it all the time. But haven’t I kept my end of the bargain? Not a hint of scandal, no stories about me in the penny sheets.’
‘Not as the ex-parson of Hundred Locks,’ said the woman. ‘But you’ve been keeping busy as the proprietor of Daunt’s Private Resolutions. Quite a reputation you’ve built up among the quality, solving cases, hunting down criminals.’
‘So you say.’
‘I find it slightly grubby, myself,’ muttered the woman. ‘All those years the church spent training you in synthetic morality and here you are now, applying your finely honed mind to uncovering sordid infidelities and unmasking common poisoners.’
‘There’s exceedingly little that’s common about such crimes. To keep the gods from the people’s hearts, you must first understand the people,’ quoted Jethro. ‘And while I acknowledge your disdain for my new calling, I believe expediency has driven you to seek out those same skills as much as it has pushed me towards a career outside the church to keep my coal scuttle full and the bailiffs from my door.’
‘The irony isn’t lost on me,’ said the mother superior, passing the parcel of papers across to Jethro.
‘What is it?’ he asked.
‘A murder,’ said the woman.
‘It must be important for you to come to me.’
‘Clearly.’
‘Important enough for you to give me back my parsonage if I asked for reinstatement in the rational orders as my payment?’
The reverend mother laughed heartedly, the first real emotion Jethro had seen her demonstrate. ‘We don’t let people inside the Circlist church who believe in gods. Not as parishioners, and certainly not as parsons. I do believe your ancient gods have driven you quite mad.’
‘As I told your people at my hearing, I don’t believe in them,’ retorted Jethro.
She shrugged. ‘Well, perhaps they believe in you, rather than vice versa. It doesn’t matter. The distinction is irrelevant and besides, we’re asking you to investigate precisely because you’re not in the church. Believe it or not, we do have a few minds in the league that are almost as proficient in synthetic morality as the much-vaunted Jethro Daunt. Aren’t you going to open the folder? You will quickly see why we believe this case would be of particular interest to you.’
‘No,’ said Jethro. ‘I’m not interested in your money, I’m not interested in working for the Inquisition, and most of all, I’m not interested in continuing this conversation.’
‘We can offer you a hundred guineas to take the case, triple that upon a successful conclusion.’
‘I’ve already got a hundred guineas,’ Jethro told the woman. ‘I get to choose the members of my flock now.’
The woman sniffed disapprovingly, then banged on the roof of her carriage for it to draw to a halt. ‘Keep the folder. Read the papers. It sounds as if you already know where to send your note indicating that you agree to be engaged.’
‘Not in a hundred years, good mother superior,’ said Jethro, opening the door and starting to climb down the steps extending towards the street with a clockwork clack. ‘Not even in a thousand.’
The nun leant out of the window. ‘Is it just the precepts of synthetic morality that have helped you solve all the cases you’ve taken, Jethro? Or do the voices you hear at night whisper other things, too? What do all those ranks of pagan gods really murmur to you?’
‘That the intellect is only a lie to make us realize the truth.’
‘Just send word,’ tutted the woman at Jethro’s blasphemy. Her carriage pulled away, the hum of the engine disappearing as it rounded a corner.
Jethro looked at the collection of papers in his hand and pulled his cloak tight against the cold of the afternoon. The folder’s contents would do for a five-minute crackle of kindling in his fire grate, if nothing else.
Jethro Daunt knew many things: the things that his finely tuned mind could extract from the pattern of life swirling around him, and the things that the ancient gods hissed at him in his dreams. But what he didn’t know was what in the name of the Circle had possessed the Inquisition to think that he could possibly be coerced, tricked or cajoled into working for the same organization that had hounded him out of the church.
Jethro ran his fingers thoughtfully through his long sideburns, the black running to silver now, and cleared his throat as he always did before he sucked on an aniseed ball and his brain began to whir.
‘How extremely diverting,’ he whispered to himself, balancing the papers in his hand.
Then he strode back towards his apartment.
Twisting on the overgrown path where she had fallen, Hannah flinched back from the snarling, intertwined forms – Chalph lost in the larger black mass of the ursk. Chalph, brave suicidal Chalph, who had charged the beast when they were cornered. Not only was the creature attacking them at least twice the weight of Hannah’s ursine friend, its fur was matted across a leather-thick skin hardened against the steam mists and geyser plumes of the volcanic landscape outside. You would be hard pressed to have opened its hide with a sabre, let alone the tooth and claw of a mere ursine cub.
But a turret rifle, that would do it. As the ursk angrily tossed Chalph off itself, throwing him back into the brambles and rearing up on all fours, its chest exploded open. Toppling backward, the ursk fell to the side of Hannah and landed like a collapsing mountain an inch shy of Chalph’s leather boots. Hannah glanced up to see a three-foot long rifle being lowered, the rotating ammunition drum clacking to a halt as the finger depressing the trigger uncurled and the clockwork-driven mechanism slowed. Hannah scrambled back as the cable attached to the shooter’s brass tank of compressed gas went limp and dropped past her nose.
Hannah pointed back through the brambles they had flattened while fleeing the ursk. ‘There’s at least one more over there.’
The free company fighter that had come to their rescue – at least a head taller than Chalph at seven foot – growled in acknowledgement. ‘And it knows what the bark of a turret gun sounds like, as it should.’ The soldier sniffed the air with her black nose. ‘It’s heading over to the other side of the park.’
Chalph picked himself up from the dirt. ‘Stom urs Stom, what are the free company doing inside the park?’
‘Our job,’ growled the over-sized soldier. She had a leather patch covering her left eye socket and looked like a brown-furred buccaneer as she scowled down at Hannah and her friend. ‘The guard post reported seeing ursks coming over the wall. It looks like a section of the battlements have lost their charge.’
‘How can that happen?’ demanded Hannah. It was a rhetorical question.
‘Lack of repairs would be my guess,’ said Stom. ‘Not enough people left on the island to maintain anything the way it should be kept. Now, stay close, this one’s friend might be circling around to take us from the rear.’
The soldier strode forward as Hannah and Chalph trailed in her wake, Chalph’s triangular black nose snuffling the air for a clue to the second monster’s whereabouts. ‘But its scent is coming from the other side.’
The soldier angrily raised her paw-like hand. ‘Hold your tongue, Chalph urs Chalph. It’s pissed on the undergrowth over there to draw us off in the wrong direction.’ She thrust a finger to the left. ‘I hunt that way. Stay behind my rifle to stay alive.’
‘Chalph was just trying to help,’ said Hannah.
‘When I want a price for grain I will ask a junior clerk from the House of Ush’s advice,’ said the soldier. ‘The first time you underestimate an ursk, little furless cub, is the last time you underestimate an ursk.’
They passed an overgrown gazebo built from flint sealed with white mortar. Chalph whispered to Hannah as the mercenary forged ahead through the abandoned park. ‘Stom urs Stom is the captain of the free company. Don’t ever cross her. Even the baroness is wary of her.’
In front, the soldier raised her paw and Hannah and Chalph stopped. Stom urs Stom peered suspiciously around a thicket of birch trees. They were almost at the edge of the park, the greenhouse’s crystal walls rising above their heads. Hannah could hear the wind from outside close by. They must be near where the ursk had cracked the dome to gain entry after scaling the battlements. Stom stalked forwards, her dark leather clothes disappearing through the trees. Hannah heard her curse and quickly followed. A manhole cover had been wrenched out of a stone conduit running around the base of the greenhouse wall, just large enough for an ursk to drop through. Hannah looked over the edge. She could just see a fast-flowing stream of water below, its heat striking her face. A flash-steam conduit, part of the city’s heating system – and it would eventually lead to the vaults of the capital below.
‘It’ll die down there,’ said Hannah.
