note – that sounded so much better than truancy. She found Chalph by the statues of the apple singers, the overgrown path to their clearing now trampled clear by the repair crew that had sealed the greenhouse, not to mention all the sightseers who had come to see the ursk corpse before the dead beast had been dragged away for incineration. It was strange, but the presence of the Jagonese in Tom Putt Park seemed more of a violation of her private space than the attack by the monsters that had scaled the city’s wall. The wild beauty of the park had been hers and Chalph’s alone, and now half of Hermetica City must have pressed through to gawp at the spot where she and Chalph had nearly met their deaths.
Chalph, when she laid eyes on him, had a hemp sack thrown over his shoulder and had been crouching down behind the statues as if he was one of them.
‘It’s me!’ called Hannah. ‘Didn’t you smell me coming?’
‘I have caught a flu,’ said Chalph, coming out of hiding. ‘I’ve been outside in the cold, pretending to be part of a free company detail escorting the Guild of Valvemen.’
‘You’ve what?’ Hannah was astonished at her friend’s audacity. ‘In the name of the Circle, why?’
‘In the name of your godless faith, this.’ Chalph held up his sack and pulled out some battered iron components. ‘The guild’s people were checking the machinery charging the battlements when they found it.’ He showed her an iron box with holes in the side where a line of cables hung out like baby elephant trunks. Each rubber cable had been severed halfway down its length, the insulation sawn through to reveal the thick copper wiring underneath. ‘The section of the battlements the ursks came over had been shorted deliberately. Someone wanted the wall’s charge to fail.’
Hannah examined the box with her hands, feeling the cold metal, not believing what she was hearing. ‘But who would want to do that?’
‘I can tell you this much,’ said Chalph. ‘The Guild of Valvemen were half-expecting to find this. I was pretending I could only speak Pericurian and I heard what they were whispering. There were three sets of damaged transformers like this on the failed section of the wall, and the guild’s workers were all for hiding the sabotaged parts and taking them back to their vaults.’
The guild were involved in this? Their job was to maintain the walls, the machines, keep the city powered and keep the transaction-engine rooms humming. But then, it was a guild that was run by Vardan Flail.
Chalph pointed in the direction of the park’s domed surface, near to where the ursks had smashed their way down into the capital’s flash steam channels. ‘That’s not all; I checked where the hole in the park dome had been repaired. There was broken glass scattered on the outside of the dome, as if it had been cracked open from the inside of the park.’ He opened his fingers three inches wide from claw to claw. ‘That’s how thick the panels they were repairing this dome with are. I checked with one of the city’s glass blowers: dome glass is designed to withstand steam storms and magma plume falls from the Fire Sea. An ursk would not be able to smash into the park without a very large hammer and chisel.’
‘We’re the only ones who use the park,’ said Hannah, numb with the implications of what her friend had discovered.
‘And it wasn’t me they were after,’ said Chalph. ‘It was you, Hannah. It’s just the same as how politics in the Baronial Council work back home when things cut up rough. You don’t just poison the head of a house, you poison the aunts, the sons, the daughters, the brothers – you assassinate everyone at once! Leave no one alive able to come back and try to take revenge against your house. Tooth and claw, Hannah, tooth and claw.’
‘This is Jago, not Pericur. We have the police, the stained senate, the accumulated law of a thousand generations.’
But there were Alice’s mutilated remains lying in state inside her own cathedral. Had the failing of Hermetica’s battlements simply been a distraction to ensure the entire city was otherwise engaged when she was murdered? One that should have also ensured her ward was ripped to pieces inside the abandoned park…
‘It’s never fair,’ said Chalph. ‘They might not even care about you – you just happened to be the ward of the wrong person. A loose pawn to be tidied from the board.’
Hannah passed the sabotaged machinery back to Chalph. ‘We have to show this to someone, to Colonel Knipe.’
‘In a vendetta, you trust only your own house and family,’ said Chalph. ‘The militia wants to blame the free company for the ursk attack. The colonel’s not going to listen to either of us if we accuse the most powerful man on Jago outside of the First Senator.’
‘The church is my house, Alice was my family…’
‘I could tell the baroness, but I don’t think she will help us. No Jagonese is going to trust the word of a foreign trader from the House of Ush. Sentiment is already being whipped up against the ursine here in the capital – people have been shouting at me about food prices and shortages of grain down in the streets: accusing the house of profiteering. Calling us dirty wet-snouts. Saying that the archduchess is trying to starve the Jagonese off the island, saying that the free company fighters let the ursks into the city on purpose to scare the last of the Jagonese away.’
‘The Guild of Valvemen,’ said Hannah, a feeling of certainty rising within her. ‘Their people would know exactly where to strike to shut down a section of the battlements. That jigger Vardan Flail is behind all of this, I know he is.’
Her suspicions were silenced by a woman’s shout carrying down the park’s path. It was a police militiawoman, the same one Hannah thought she had seen following her earlier – but she had company this time. Four individuals cloaked in the long robes of valvemen.
‘Damson Hannah Conquest,’ the militiawoman said in an accusatory tone. ‘You were not in the cathedral when we called.’
‘I finished early,’ lied Hannah.
‘You have not even started,’ hissed one of the valvemen.
‘Your ballot notice has been served,’ said the militiawoman.
Served? With a start, Hannah realized what day it was. Since Alice’s murder time hardly seemed to matter at all – one day, one hour, each much the same as the last – all of them blurring into a single amorphous mess. This was the day her service to the guild should have started!
Two of the valvemen advanced on Hannah, grabbing an arm apiece, the third seizing her behind her shoulders.
The militiawoman lowered her lamp staff to point menacingly at Chalph as he stepped forward to help Hannah. She brushed her cape back with her other hand to indicate the pistol hanging from her waist, and that she wouldn’t hesitate in drawing it if the ursine tried to stop them. ‘You don’t want to assist a draft dodger, Pericurian, you really don’t!’
‘I wasn’t trying to escape!’ Hannah protested, struggling. ‘I forgot, that is all.’
‘Set the example,’ one of the valvemen hissed from beneath his cowl, the smell of mint on his clothes making her gag.
The others took up the cry, the quiet stillness of the neglected park broken by their screeching mantra. ‘Set the example. Set the example.’
Hannah was dragged out of the dome, screaming and scuffling. Dragged towards the vaults of the guild. To serve the devil who had killed Alice Gray. The
