Part 11 (1/2)

'I see the counsel you would offer me in the way that you stand and the tone of your voice, even though you don't suggest it.'

'From a clerk who should mind his manners,' hissed the chamberlain behind Chalph.

The baroness raised a slow-moving paw in Chalph's defence. 'I must know what all my people are thinking, not just those in the house's council. It is the trader's curse, my clerk. The wanderer's curse. All those of your age and younger have been raised in this strange foreign city and you think as much like the Jagonese as you do a proud member of the House of Ush. If the harvest is poor this season, then we shall just make much of the opportunity by bringing in grain from Pericur.'

Chalph bit his tongue. Every coin in profit the house made just fuelled Jagonese resentment against them. There would be no grat.i.tude from the locals for bellies fed that would otherwise have gone empty, just more enmity against the Pericurian ambitions to drive the Jagonese off the island and grow fat off the islanders while they did so. Why couldn't the baroness see that she was imperilling them all by staying here? They would end up selling the Jagonese the same oil and kindling that would be used to burn the mission out when things turned to the worse here. Would she treat a pogrom against them as just another part of the trader's curse?

'Patience, my clerk,' commanded the baroness. 'You will feel the soil of the homeland between your toes before your soul is called; but the House of Ush will not hand the conservatives back home a famous victory by voluntarily forsaking our trading licence here and sailing back to the new archd.u.c.h.ess with our tails between our legs. That is not not how I will meet her.' how I will meet her.'

Chalph did not agree, but he kept his place and held his tongue this time. Better to leave with their tails between their legs than have those tails cut off and handed back to them by a baying mob. The cunning of the baroness and her ability to plan five moves ahead of her opponents was legendary: how she had taken a backwater trading house and allied it to the rising star of the liberal cause in the Baronial Council, parlayed her growing wealth from the new southern trade routes into the trading licence for Jago. But her star's rise had halted with the death of the last reformist archd.u.c.h.ess, and her cunning had landed them here the renowned wealth of Jago a fading, illusory footnote of history. The flames of the Fire Sea had consumed this place and left only bitter ashes in the grate for their house to rake over. Age, it seemed, wearied everything, and now the Baroness's guile had atrophied into whatever blind stubbornness was keeping them here.

The weekly oversight of the accounts complete, Chalph withdrew with the pile of ledgers, feeling far more despondent than when he had arrived. There was a tiny nagging voice deep inside him that he ignored and then forgot. Which was a pity, as there was a grain of truth in it that he should have listened to.

Blind stubbornness. Unless the baroness knew something that he didn't. Unless the baroness knew something that he didn't.

The tea-tray rattled as Boxiron brought it towards the table in their hotel suite. It was all right for Jethro Daunt, the Jagonese food and drink might be foreign, but at least it proved mildly palatable to him. Boxiron had no such comfort. Trying to find high-grade c.o.ke in a city run on dark electric energies was proving as difficult as finding the archbishop's elusive killers. There were a few scuttles available from a stall in a small ca.n.a.l-side market that specialized in old imported Jackelian curios, but at a cost that was, quite frankly, bordering close to those charged by the extortion rackets that Boxiron had himself once acted as an enforcer for.

Jethro looked up from the papers and doc.u.ments spread across the table and gave a wan smile.

'Are we any closer to locating the archbishop's murderer, Jethro softbody?'

'Small steps, small steps,' said the ex-parson. 'The most interesting thing I have found is not among the police files you stole for me, old steamer, but among the more general data that is available from the public records office here.'

'You brought back many tomes from the city's library,' said Boxiron.

'Yes I did,' said Jethro, 'and something is exceedingly wrong with the ballot of draft for the protected professions. There are patterns of citizens being called into guilds that make no sense to me. The gas workers for instance, why are so many of their number being drafted when their trade is already essential to the city?'

'Knowing your race as well as I do, I would expect corruption when it comes to the call into unpopular and dangerous trades,' said Boxiron. 'The rich always find a way of avoiding such duty. You are looking into the draft of the young church girl into the Guild of Valvemen?'

'That is where I started,' said Jethro. 'But there is much more going on here than Alice's ward being press-ganged as leverage to force the archbishop into an unwanted marriage. Context, good friend, context. If only I can find the context, then all the parts of Alice's murder will start to fall into place.'

'I shall check the files from the police militia when I return from the market,' said Boxiron. 'Perhaps I shall find something you missed. My mind is still my own, even if this pathetic body is not. It deserves little better than the overpriced second-rate garbage Hermetica's excuse of a coal merchant sells.'

'Don't worry about the price,' said Jethro, intently sorting the papers. 'The Inquisition will pay.'

But not, Boxiron suspected, before he and the ex-parson paid a far greater price for being here.

Jethro's body twisted, hot and sweaty in the sheets of the hotel bed, while his mind churned, turning over the contents of the police files that he and Chalph urs Chalph had picked up from the capital's records office. The fruits of the steamman's raid had appeared to reveal depressingly little, apart from the cursory nature of the militia's investigation into Alice's death. All the official conclusions pointed to the mercenary force's incompetence in manning the city's defences. As fixed in stone as the weight of the cathedral that poor Alice's body had been discovered inside.

Alice Gray. Don't think of the militia daguerreotype of her headless corpse in situ on the cathedral floor; or of her laid out on the coroner's slab, her few possessions spread out alongside her the archbishop's robes, the Book of Common Reflections Book of Common Reflections.

She was dead, gone. But there was a wrongness to it more than the death of the only woman he had truly loved. A wrongness to all of this. The possessions spread around her, something was missing. What was it?

The realization came to Jethro, but then suddenly he was back among the pews of his church at Hundred Locks. Say a meditation for Alice's soul, cupped back out into the one sea of consciousness. Say a meditation and ignore the arch of fur slowly snuffling around the back of the pews. Surfacing, then sinking, as though it was the conning tower of a u-boat. Ignore the cloying voice of Badger-headed Joseph taunting him.

'You're the man for the job, fiddle-faddle fellow. You're the man.'

'Alice would have cast you out,' snarled Jethro. 'Just one look from her.'

'From a real priest?' snickered the distant prowling voice. 'But she's dead and you're you're the man. The Inquisition's man now.' the man. The Inquisition's man now.'

'I won't hear you.'

'Did you never wonder why that was? Why the Inquisition wanted you to come to Jago, you of all people.'

'I won't hear you.'

'You don't need to,' hissed the ancient G.o.d. 'You hear them them and because of that you need to believe in something, and we're it. We're the ones that went before your G.o.dless church set up empty altars to the reason of humanity. The best. The original and we're still waiting for you. Patiently. Benevolently.' and because of that you need to believe in something, and we're it. We're the ones that went before your G.o.dless church set up empty altars to the reason of humanity. The best. The original and we're still waiting for you. Patiently. Benevolently.'

'I'm not a Circlist parson any more,' howled Jethro.

'Yet the refugees still keep coming to visit you,' said Badger-headed Joseph. 'I can hear them outside your confessional, queuing. Can't you? And it's your duty to see them. Every last runaway escaped over the border from Quaters.h.i.+ft to the safety of the Kingdom of Jackals.'

'Shut up!' Jethro covered up his ears. 'Shut up about the-'

Organized communities long lines of naked bodies emaciated they beat me for the last of the gruel when the food arrived and I thought they were my friends and neighbours cleaning out the blood from the blades in the machines my friends before they took my children away and made them but that's not the worst of it, father when they- 'Shut up!'

-were pulling sacks of processed flesh from the grinding bins guards forced them to play on flutes while they took the women inside and are you listening to me, father? When they- 'Please shut up.'

'Why should they be silent?' laughed Badger-headed Joseph. 'They're the sound of the boundless humanity your Circlists cling to. There wasn't much humanity in the nation next door when the glorious revolution started, was there? The synthetic morality machine, snick-snick-snick. Toss another bag of organs on the manure pile, compatriot. And if you run out of coal for the killing machines, there are always plenty of knives or sticks or stones. But then, why waste good sticks on the enemy when you can just toss them outside the walls and let the beasts eat them?'

'Leave me alone,' begged Jethro.

'What else were you going to believe in after the refugees came to you?' sneered the half-animal G.o.d's voice. 'That horse-s.h.i.+t inside your Circlist book. A little light algebra? A koan or two? b.l.o.o.d.y koans, more like a children's tale that kicks you in the head at the end of it.'

Jethro tried to crawl away across the floor of the church. 'Why me, why?'

'We're here for you, fiddle-faddle fellow. But we're going to need to hear you say it. Say that you believe in us.'

'You can wait for the Circle's end. I cast you out!'

'And in return we're going to do exactly what the Inquisition expected us to do. We're going to help you.'

'Liar!' Jethro pulled himself towards the altar.

'That's it,' said Badger-headed Joseph. 'Go towards the altar, crawl towards your empty, barren altar.'

The refugees outside his confessional were fading; their emaciated, scarred bodies disappearing with each hand's length Jethro pulled himself closer to the front of his church.

'That was your clue, by the way,' growled Badger-headed Joseph, releasing a stream of warm, foul-smelling liquid over the back of Jethro's boots. 'Don't you dare look back at me eyes forward, eyes on the prize. On the altar. The empty empty altar.' altar.'

'I don't believe in you!'

'But you will. And much more, too.'

Jethro touched the altar. It became the headboard of his bed, his fingers clawing the bamboo wood. And as he woke he saw in his mind's eye what was missing from amongst Alice's possessions. What the police should have found but didn't. What had been stolen from her corpse.

There was a breeze blowing in through his room's open window, cooling the sweat-soaked sheets lying across his legs. It was an artificial breeze, the whisper of the vault's machines.

Hannah couldn't believe she was still arguing when they got to the rooms of this great church investigator that Chalph and Father Baine had sworn would be able to help her. She should have risked bringing Chalph along with her to help argue her case, even if the police militia guarding the hotel did get suspicious about his comings and goings.