even if Father Blackwater – the head of the testing rooms – was only acting as their senior priest until another archbishop was appointed. A fiercely clever man who hid his true thoughts behind the odd veiled comment or dry remark, Father Blackwater was a Jagonese priest through and through. Which was precisely why the Rational Synod would never confirm him to the archbishop’s post he obviously thought he deserved.
Hannah entered and took the seat where she had sat opposite Alice Gray so many times over the years. Meeting an ursk wearing the robes of a priest would not have seemed as alien to her.
‘I have mixed blessings to report,’ said the father. ‘As I feared, the senate will not allow me to oppose your draft ballot. I am not regarded as having the seniority to even speak on the floor on your behalf.’
Her heart sank. ‘Then I am finished.’
‘Not yet, my dear,’ said the priest. ‘On the other side of the equation, we have found this—’ he flourished an envelope ‘—among the personal effects of the late archbishop. It stipulates that in the event of her demise preceding your majority, you receive her grant of authority to sit our entrance exam early.’
Her waiver! Alice had granted her dispensation after all. Hannah was overwhelmed, the grief over losing her guardian momentarily lifted. But…Hannah did the calculation in her head, working out the date of the next church board examination. ‘I’ll already be drafted into the guild’s service by then, father!’
‘We can’t nullify the guild’s draft order,’ said Father Blackwater, ‘but Vardan Flail can’t nullify a written waiver from the archbishop that precedes your ballot notification, either. Her letter was written weeks before your name was ever posted on the draft ballot.’
Weeks before? It was as Alice Gray’s clerk had said: almost as if she had been preparing for her own death. How many run-ins had there been between Vardan Flail and Alice in the previous months that Hannah hadn’t been around to witness, before Hannah’s name was ‘coincidently’ teased out at ‘random’ for entry into the lists of the Guild of Valvemen?
Father Blackwater pointed to the chess set waiting lonely on the table in the corner of the chancellery, and Hannah remembered the gentle snorts that Alice would make while planning her next move. ‘Stalemate, Hannah. You will unfortunately be in service with the guild for a while, but the guild cannot forbid you to take our tests, and if you pass, you will be free of the curse of the draft for the rest of your life. You will be part of the church.’
He said the words with satisfaction, as if there could be no higher honour. A couple of days ago Hannah would have agreed with him; that life had seemed almost inevitable to her. But with the death of Alice Gray, the cathedral’s bright stained glass seemed so much dimmer, the formulae and lessons of the Circlist teachings mere parroting of the echo of great thinking done by minds long since dead. In their stead grew the cold hard seed of something else planted in a ground far more fertile than the volcanic basalt outside the capital’s battlements. Vengeance, vengeance and the fell craving for it.
To Hannah’s surprise, vengeance could be like one of the mathematical puzzles of synthetic morality. You could lose yourself considering it, studying its shape. Vengeance could become as much an obsession as some of the paradoxes that had driven church priests insane when pondered for too long. There was a beauty in vengeance’s pursuit and gratification to be gained in solving the riddle of the murder. Gratification that would climax in Vardan Flail being led by a hooded executioner across Snapman’s Bridge and made to stand on the trapdoor while the crowds gathered on each side of the black canal.
It took a heinous crime to earn a death sentence that wasn’t commuted to banishment or life indenture by the senate judiciary, but Hannah was determined to see that Vardan Flail was one of the few that received it. And if she had to serve that twisted monster in the guild’s own vaults, then that would just take her a step or two closer to realizing her new goal.
Jethro Daunt pulled himself up the final few rungs of the u-boat’s conning tower and emerged onto the observation deck, almost immediately finding the goggles of his rubber scald suit misting up from the heat of the Fire Sea.
Standing against the rail wearing a battered greatcoat and holding a telescope was Commodore Black, his black-bearded face tinged orange from the glow of the magma. ‘Come up for your turn of fresh air, Mister Daunt?’
‘That I have, good captain, and I’m already regretting not bringing my coat.’
It was a curious, unhealthy mix outside, the intense waves of heat from the Fire Sea’s magma interspersed with jabbing arrows of a freezing artic wind from the north. Too much exposure to this was likely to bring any passenger – or sailor – down with a fever.
‘A savage, strange sea,’ said the commodore. ‘But old Blacky has got used to it. I’ve sailed further and deeper inside it than any other skipper, and left many a good friend’s bones on the shores of its wild islands while doing so.’
‘I’m hoping for a rather more pedestrian voyage.’ Jethro looked down at the boiling waters their u-boat was pushing through on the surface – boils in nautical parlance – searing, shifting channels of water veined through the bubbling magma. He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a paper bag filled with striped sweets. ‘Would you care for a Bunter and Benger’s aniseed drop, good captain?’
Commodore Black put aside the telescope he had been using to sweep the burning waves. ‘I won’t be troubling you for one of those wicked things. You know what they put in them…?’
‘Defamation on the part of their commercial rivals, I am certain.’
‘I’ll stick to eating what goes well with a drop of wine. No need to suck those blessed things for your nerves, Mister Daunt – a nice boring voyage is what you’ll get aboard the Purity Queen. Jago barely lies inside the rim of the Fire Sea and The Garurian Boils here are settled waters. The magma keeps to its course and so do the boils we sail through.’ Commodore Black pointed to the north. ‘One hundred and seventy miles ahead is a buoy station of the Jagonese tug service. That’s when the magma gets unpredictable and choppy, but the island’s sailors will lead us through the safe channels – for a price.’
Jethro stared where the old u-boat man was pointing, but all he could see from the conning tower was a burning ocean of red seamed by black cooling rock, the passages of superheated water they were following marked out by curtains of rising steam.
‘You’ve never sailed the Fire Sea before, Mister Daunt? Never been to Jago. I can see it in the way the flames are casting a mortal spell on your gaze.’
‘My business has occasionally seen me travel across the nations of the continent,’ said Jethro, ‘but never over the ocean.’
‘Yes, now, your discreet business,’ said the commodore, teasingly. ‘But you’ve travelled widely enough to know that a master of a boat is rightly addressed as captain, be they an admiral or a commodore.’
A cracking sounded in the distance and a geyser of molten rock and gas fumed into the air, adding to the chemical stench of the place – sulphur, by its reek.
‘Someone told me that at the docks,’ Jethro dissembled. ‘An ocean this wild, it seems hard to believe that the people on Jago can predict where the ebbs and flows of the magma and the passages of water through them will lie within an hour’s time, let alone days and weeks ahead. It’s a wonder anyone can follow the boils back to Jago.’
‘Ah now,’ said the
