Part 14 (1/2)

CHAPTER ELEVEN.

Boxiron sat in the middle of his hotel room in the lotus position, the inferior hydraulics of his legs trembling in protest. The steamman ignored the discomfort and concentrated on the task at hand or rather, mind running the stegeotext that he had found concealed in Jethro's ancient painting through his brain, parcelling pieces of the code out to the additional specialized processing unit that the criminal lords of Jackals had outfitted him with.

It was an unfamiliar thing, deciphering something so ancient. The Jackelian transaction-engine locks he had cracked were all much of a muchness, but tackling the code hidden in the painting was like breaking an ancient safe the maths that protected the cipher expressed with an antique elegance, and something else, something that remained intangible and just out of sight. He had been at it for most of the day, crunching and attacking, chipping away pieces of the puzzle. Half of the battle was trying to get inside the mind of the cipher's creator. Pus.h.i.+ng at the code to see what gave way and what held firm, modelling how he would have done it and following those avenues to their logical conclusions.

Boxiron was under no illusions about the difficulty of this job. It was as good as being a captain of the Free State's militant orders once more, marshalling his forces and distributing them, testing the enemy, finding the weak spots to overwhelm. Every inch of Boxiron's being knew it had been a member of the Circlist church who had secreted this code within the painting, and not just because the ill.u.s.tration came with the signature of William of Flamewall scrawled across it. The maths were of the highest order, everything balanced with the symmetry that the softbody faith attempted to incorporate into its formula-based moral rules. Yes, that was the weakness of the cipher's creator. Too much symmetry.

Not enough chaos and randomness.

The randomness of- -the steam from Boxiron's stack drifted across the hotel room. Thickening. Reforming.

It had been so long since they had come. And he wasn't even calling them today. Not a drop of his oil shed. Not a single cog thrown. For which of the Steamo Loas would come for Catosian cogs, which would visit for Jackelian oil? Which of the spirits of his ancestors would manifest themselves for such a desecrated body as was his now?

Radius Patternkeeper, Lord of the Ravenous Fire.

The words of the Loa came out like a snake's hiss, echoing from the distant plane occupied by the people of the metal's ancestors. 'Do not attempt to do this thing.'

'Who are you to make requests of me?' spat Boxiron at the smoking form swaying in front of him. 'I who am a desecration in your eyes. I who have gone unaided by King Steam in this living h.e.l.l of a body my mind has been condemned to join with.'

'Yet you have have called us,' said Radius Patternkeeper. 'Filling a mind that was once of the people with the dark cipher that must not be decrypted. You have summoned me as surely as if you spilled your own oil and tossed your own cogs in the ritual of gear-gi-ju.' called us,' said Radius Patternkeeper. 'Filling a mind that was once of the people with the dark cipher that must not be decrypted. You have summoned me as surely as if you spilled your own oil and tossed your own cogs in the ritual of gear-gi-ju.'

The steamman got to his feet, angrily. 'I am still of the people. I am Boxiron, even if I am a shadow of what I once was. I abide.'

'No. Boxiron died well on the Fulven Fields,' said the Loa. 'His corpse piled with the bodies of our enemies, his knight's lance broken through those that would have destroyed our land.'

'Then you should not have allowed Jackelian grave robbers to staple his skull onto this mockery of a body they fas.h.i.+oned in a Catosian manufactory.'

'The army searched,' hissed the Loa. 'But there were so many bodies, so many corpses. And the mechomancers' grave robbers came like carrion on the wind after the battle.'

'You should have searched better,' retorted Boxiron. 'And then we would surely not be having this discussion now.'

'Erase the steganographic code within your mind,' ordered the Loa. 'Then destroy the painting you took it from.'

'Tell me why I should.' demanded Boxiron.

'It is not upon you to question the will of the Steamo Loa.'

'As it is not upon you to order me to do this. My friend Jethro Daunt requires the cipher to be broken.'

'The softbody is called by his people's G.o.ds. Ancient ones that have been long forgotten,' hissed the twisting steam shape manifesting from his stack fumes. 'Forgotten with good reason. The great pattern can only be woven forwards; it can never be woven backwards. Your friend cannot be trusted.'

'Easy words,' Boxiron growled. 'But I choose to judge on actions. Jethro Daunt helped save me from what I had become when my own people would not even look me in the vision plate as I begged for high-grade boiler c.o.ke outside our temples. I will trust his judgement over yours, Radius Patternkeeper. You who will not even trust me with the truth when you would order my obedience.'

The shape in the smoke danced from side to side like an angry cobra. 'You are beyond the pale, desecration, that is the truth I see in your defiance!' Spears of smoke hardened in the air between them, darting threateningly towards Boxiron.

'You,' swore the hulking steamman, 'can go back to the flaming furnace of Lord Two-Tar and suck on his pipe.'

'I shall ride!' the Loa's voice exploded from the smoke like a banshee scream and the manifestation hurled itself at Boxiron, the steamman stumbling back and flailing at the powerful ancestral spirit as it entered through the ill-fitting joins of his body, curling into his metal as though he were a magnet and the Loa a cloud of metallic filings. Filling him, possessing him. His inferior body becoming a host for the Steamo Loa to ride.

Boxiron was left caulked, blundering across the room. Burning. Burning. The Loa was reaching for his mind, reaching for his brain's nanomechanical network swirling with the fruit of so many long hours of cipher breaking. Reaching to burn the last traces of his mind from the face of the world.

The steammen G.o.ds had finally come to bring Boxiron his second, final death.

Even the young guild navvy Hannah was following down the oblong-shaped shaft seemed impressed at how easily she had taken to the art of shaft walking pus.h.i.+ng the back of her RAM suit against one wall and using the leverage of her armoured legs against the opposite one to ease her way slowly and steadily downwards. Yet this whole situation seemed odd to Hannah; it was almost as if her suit was antic.i.p.ating her needs and helping her. Though unless the ghost of some guildsman who had died inside the suit's c.o.c.kpit had possessed it, she didn't know how that could be. Their suits were inanimate; they relied on their occupants to provide direction and intelligence. She s.h.i.+vered as she recalled the tales the other grubs had told each other. They were just stories, surely.

There was still the occasional spear of steam rising up past them from tiny cracks in the shaft, but the regulator gate they were heading for looked to be well and truly immobilized. They had already pa.s.sed several working gates iron frames containing motorized vanes that could be opened or shut depending on how much superheated steam was rising up from the island's depths. The power needs of the turbine halls were carefully balanced with the pressure from below and the engineering tolerance of the gates themselves.

'My first day,' Hannah muttered, 'and he's already trying to kill me.'

'Don't flatter yourself,' the young navvy's voice sounded inside her helmet. 'The charge-master thinks a lot more about keeping the turbine halls intact than he does about teaching some fancy-piece a lesson, just because she thinks she should be chopping punch cards upstairs rather than pus.h.i.+ng iron with the lads down below.'

'Then why's he sending me down here with a-' Hannah had to stop herself from saying a boy a boy. 'A navvy.'

'Because I'm the best he's got for shaft work,' said young Rudge. 'And he must think you're the best he's got for transaction-engine work, or you wouldn't be here, either.' The navvy pointed at the small transaction engine attached to the gate they were pa.s.sing through still functional enough to close its vanes and withdraw into the wall when they triggered it.

Hannah looked more closely at the transaction engine on the gate, blinking in surprise. It was the kind of thing she had seen in Jackelian picture books. 'It's got no valves. That's a transaction-engine drum rotating inside it it's steam-driven!'

'Isn't that just like a cardsharp,' snorted Rudge. 'You love your head games with numbers, but you haven't got a clue about the iron you need to run them on. This shaft is normally full of superheated steam. How long do you think a gla.s.s valve would last down here? Primitive works just fine inside a steam tap, especially given there's usually enough steam flowing past here to power every paddle steamer in the world. Our pressure regulator gates operate autonomously. They're not on the guild's network, understand?'

'I'm here because I'm the best,' Hannah repeated the words, hardly believing them. And not because Vardan Flail had instructed the charge-master to ensure that she was dropped down the first conveniently deep shaft.

'The charge-master comes across as a right b.a.s.t.a.r.d, but that's only because unless you temper young metal well, it breaks before it becomes steel. If you're not made into the best you can be down here, you'll never survive to get your own suit, and you'll as like take more than a few good people with you when you die. What the charge-master does, he does for a reason.'

The deeper they travelled down the shaft towards the jammed gate, the more erratic her suit appeared to get, the frame that surrounded her body inside the cabin juddering and getting harder to control.

'My suit's stopping working,' called Hannah.

'Mine too,' said the navvy. 'We're going to crack the doors on our armour manually and tie an abseil line to our suits' legs and then rappel the rest of the way down. I'll distribute the gate gear between you, me and T-face.'

'Both our suits can't be malfunctioning at the same time,' Hannah protested.

The navvy's reply came as if he was talking to an idiot. 'It's not a malfunction, grub. We're reaching the electric limit.' He grunted in annoyance at Hannah's silence and continued. 'We're too deep, girl. Whatever spells the Fire Sea casts on the power electric topside don't stretch this far down. A couple more yards further and you might as well be back in the Kingdom of Jackals. The current in our suits is getting irregular, it's spiking and cascading in random amplifications. If we go any deeper wearing our armour, we'll burn out both our suits, and then we'll have one h.e.l.l of a climb getting back up to the turbine halls.'

Hannah swore at the insanity of what she was being asked to do. 'Maybe you could find a way to run one of these suits on steam for the next time we come down.'

The navvy laughed. 'That's not a bad idea, grub. But then I heard you're the girl that's got Jackelian blood. Using steam should be second nature to you. And we need to tame the steam down here too, if we're going to make it back up to the turbine halls.'

When Hannah cracked the door to her suit, the heat came rus.h.i.+ng in like a flood. Even with the concrete shaft clear of steam, it was still as febrile as a kettle outside. Hannah's plain cotton skin-garb was quickly soaked through with humid moisture while her nose was dripping itching beads of sweat onto the burning hot exterior of her RAM suit.

They had halted their suits next to each other like two bridges wedged in the shaft, and as Hannah climbed from her c.o.c.kpit she looked nervously across to where Rudge was slinging equipment around himself and his ab-lock, tying up his abseiling lines as securely as if their lives depended in it which they surely did. Out of his c.o.c.kpit and standing on the chest of his horizontal suit, Rudge was a burly-looking six-foot with a poorly cropped mop of ginger hair soaked by sweat. The ab-lock was making a low crooning sound beside him, as it too was loaded down with satchels and equipment.

'T-face doesn't sound much like the ab-locks outside the wall,' said Hannah.

'They have their vocal chords removed when they're caught by the trappers,' Rudge called back as he sorted out the gear that Hannah was no doubt to carry the rest of the way down. 'Good job, too, the racket they'd make in the stables otherwise. But T-face is all right; I was with my father when a current reversal blew out a turbine and half the pipes in hall four. It was us that pulled T-face out of there. We saved his life and he knows it right enough.'