Part 15 (1/2)

Nandi shrugged. She didn't give a d.a.m.n about Pericurian politics, and if the amba.s.sador's transaction engines came configured for cipher work, so much the better. What was in here was going to save Hannah from the guild and Nandi would burn out every transaction engine on Jago if it meant saving the young church girl from her tormentors.

The transaction-engine room inside the Pericurian emba.s.sy was a lot more advanced than Nandi had been expecting. In fact, it was a lot more advanced than it had any right to be. How many customs officials on the Jackelian docks had Commodore Black bribed to look the other way while their most advanced transaction-engine models were hustled out of the country for export to the rising power across the sea?

The rattling, steam-driven drums on the Jackelian machinery looked out of place in this chamber, decorated in the Pericurian style with richly carved hardwood panelling across the walls and floors. The windows here were in the circular wooden-framed style known as bulls' eyes back in Jackals. The stained gla.s.s obscured the view beyond, but that had probably been intentional. All of the emba.s.sies were cl.u.s.tered together in a ring on the hollowed-out level of the Horn of Jago know as Emba.s.sy Circle, and had a clear view of the concrete artillery domes around the foot of the mountain. A not-so-subtle reminder of Hermetica City's ability to drop a sh.e.l.l on any unauthorized boat trying to breach the coral line defending the island.

'You're a fine fellow, Ortin,' said the commodore. 'Helping your old s.h.i.+pmates out of a blessed tight spot like this. I'll give you a free berth to Pericur for your troubles, Amba.s.sador, when you want it.'

'What I want is of little consequence, dear boy.' The Pericurian amba.s.sador was still dressed like a Jackelian squire. Perhaps the Jagonese tailor hadn't come to see him yet. 'The only way I'm getting out of my posting here is if the liberal houses come back into power, and I hardly judge that likely at the moment. Besides, annoying the ineptly disguised intelligence officer the archd.u.c.h.ess has watching my every step by allowing you inside our emba.s.sy is worth every ill word in the report she's furiously drafting right now.'

With the machine's operator dismissed from the room, Ortin urs Ortin took an almost childish delight in taking charge of the transaction engine himself, his eyes glinting with manic glee as he transcribed the Joshua Egg's second iteration and sprayed water onto the rotating drums when they started running hot. He put Nandi in mind of her mother watering the roses that wound around the trellises at the back of her cottage, all concentration, lost to the world.

As Nandi had predicted, if there was a curse on the Joshua Egg, it was a particularly Jackelian one, because the engine room in the Pericurian emba.s.sy seemed markedly unaffected by it. The results came rattling back on a large Rutledge Rotator, an abacus-like board of rotating squares. A more detailed breakdown appeared on a winding reel of paper tape, its wheels poorly oiled and squealing like suckling piglets competing for a mother's teat.

When the results were flowing back from the third iteration of the Joshua Egg, Nandi didn't hesitate. She urged the amba.s.sador to toss the newly reformed code back into the decryption run she would have enough time later to leaf through the data spooling out. Nandi might not be as convinced of a curse as the commodore, but she didn't want to tempt fate if there was some mathematical quirk in the code that led to transaction engines overloading as they were teasing meaning out of it.

Again the next level of the Joshua Egg was solved, more data thrown out along with another iteration and she tossed the new code back like a fish that was too small. By the fifth iteration, the Joshua Egg was exhausted. No more iterative pearls to be uncovered, no more compressed data to be drawn out.

Nandi spread the unfurled rolls of printed data across a heavy table meant for use by the engine's cardsharps. Here it was, then. The last legacy of the two Doctors Conquest. Would there be anything in the pages of records they had printed out to help save the daughter they had hardly known? Would there be anything in them to allow Nandi to prove she was at least the equal of every one of the pampered popinjays who had bought their way into Saint Vine's rarefied halls of academia? As Nandi started reading, she was calmly intent on finding out what the guild was so bent on preventing her from discovering. By the time she had finished, though, her hands were shaking and her skin was cold with sweat.

'What is it, la.s.s?' asked the commodore. 'Say this blessed evil code hasn't given you a fever...'

'Not the code,' said Nandi. 'What is inside it. We have to get to Hannah, Jared. We have to get her out of the guild's vaults to hear what I've found here...'

The superst.i.tious commodore was backing away without even realizing it, nearly treading on the riding boots of the large Pericurian amba.s.sador.

'...because she's not going to believe this,' said Nandi.

Jethro Daunt came running back into the hotel room with more thick cream bamboo paper to replace the pile that Boxiron had already used up. The pencil clutched in the steamman's iron fingers moved across the paper so fast it was as if the numbers of the formula he was writing were flowing out of a breached dam. Chalph urs Chalph was gathering up the completed papers, standing back from Boxiron as the steamman moaned about the pain of holding whatever he had found in the painting in his head before it vomited across the papers.

At last the steamman stopped scribbling. He rolled across the floor, whimpering, his stack emitting wheezing bursts of smoke. 'It is gone. It is gone.'

'It has,' rea.s.sured Jethro. 'It is all down here, now. On paper.'

'Such a thing is not meant to be held within a mind,' hissed Boxiron.

'Not held incomplete,' said Jethro. 'Not without being balanced by the other two parts.'

'No!' said the steamman, so loudly it was almost a warning. 'It is not what you think it is. I should have listened to the Steamo Loa when it came to me. Read the formula, Jethro softbody, see the symmetry of what has been wrought here.'

Jethro took the papers being neatly piled by Chalph urs Chalph and started to read through them, slowly at first, then more frantically almost disbelieving flicking through the sheets and turning them over, tracing the formulae between pages and jumping back and forth until the ex-parson was perspiring. 'This cannot be!'

'What is it?' asked Chalph. 'Is it something to do with the machine spirit that was trying to possess your metal friend?'

'So obscene,' said Jethro. 'So obvious. Such a fearful symmetry.'

'What was hidden in the painting?' demanded Chalph.

'How do you slay a G.o.d?' asked Jethro, pus.h.i.+ng the formula-strewn papers back, sadly, towards Chalph. 'Why, the easiest way in the world. By becoming a G.o.d yourself, a stronger stronger G.o.d.' G.o.d.'

'Become a G.o.d?' Chalph sounded shocked. 'Such a thing is not possible.'

Boxiron cleared his voicebox. 'It should not be. Yet I was burning with just a third of this horror held within my mind.'

'Sentience is a function of complexity,' said Jethro, regretfully. 'To an ant, good ursine, you would look like a G.o.d. To an animalcule living on a slide under a microscope, the ant would seem like a G.o.d. The purpose of this G.o.d-formula would appear to be to focus the complexity of the universe inside a mortal mind and keep on folding it in an infinite loop: infinitely wise, infinitely knowing, and the Circle preserve us, I have no doubt, infinitely mad. And what would emerge from such a fearful recursion would be as far beyond that which we are, as we are beyond an unthinking mote of dust.'

'I have never encountered such mathematics before,' admitted Boxiron, his voicebox trembling with awe. 'The clarity of it, using paradoxes to refocus the great pattern and turn the threads of existence inwards on themselves.'

Jethro sighed. 'Oh, Bel Bessant. Such genius. But such arrogance to believe her mind could have held the entirety of such a thing and not ended up as dangerous as the divine monsters she had been asked to protect Jago from. A G.o.d-formula, of all the things for a Circlist priest to want to create. A G.o.d-formula G.o.d-formula.'

'She had to die,' said the steamman, simply.

'Poor William of Flamewall. Close enough to his lover to see what she wanted to become. Close enough to poison Bel Bessant before she could use the formula on herself. Loving enough to take the blame for a crime of pa.s.sion rather than circulating the dangerous truth behind her work any wider. To go on the run as a murderer rather than being hailed as the hero he deserved to be.'

'William of Flamewall, he is the one that concealed the code in the painting?' asked Chalph.

Jethro nodded.

'If he was willing to murder his own mate to stop the G.o.d-formula being used, why preserve it within a series of paintings, why not destroy it instead?'

'Once created, weapons are never uninvented, they are never forgotten' said Jethro. 'If someone was to use this or something similar to raise themselves to G.o.dhood, the understanding of the G.o.d-formula would be the sole way to stop them it is virus and vaccine both.'

Boxiron picked up one of the sheets and waved it angrily 'The Inquisition knew this abomination was here.'

'It is possible, good steamman. The Inquisition might have held onto this terrible secret for millennia. Why else would they ensure the archbishop of Jago was always one of their officers? But I rather think the recent rediscovery of the G.o.d-formula, its unearthing, was the work of the two Doctors Conquest. And Alice was involved somehow; dear Circle, I do hope it wasn't her that killed Hannah's parents.'

Chalph shook his head. 'Come on Jackelian, the archbishop was strict, but-'

Jethro interrupted. 'You can only ever know yourself, and then barely. Alice was an officer of the Inquisition. If it meant protecting William of Flamewall's secret, I have little doubt she would have killed everyone in this room to achieve that end.'

'I have never voiced misgivings about the work you have accepted before,' said Boxiron, 'but...'

Jethro spread the sheets containing their painting's third of the G.o.d-formula out in front of him. 'There is something about this. Something wrong.'

'Beyond the alarming concept of a completely unworthy mortal transfiguring themselves into a G.o.d?' asked Boxiron.

'Yes indeed, but bob me sideways, what is it?' Jethro looked as if he had remembered something, and pulled out the catalogue he had found in the murdered fence's hidden storeroom, pa.s.sing it to his friend. 'You will find a painting on the last page, old steamer. Another of William of Flamewall's works.'

'This is a picture of a picture,' complained the steamman, leafing to the end of the catalogue. 'A third-generation copy.'

'Your best efforts, if you please.'

Boxiron raised the page in front of his vision plate and waited a couple of seconds while he resolved its details. After a moment's stillness he shuddered back to life. 'There is nothing there. No sign of steganographic concealment within the image. It is just a simple painting.'

'You are certain?'

'As certain as the signature of William of Flamewall scrawled in its right-hand corner. The print quality of the catalogue is such that I would not be able to resolve the detail of a code in the painting, but I can can see there is no trace of one hidden anywhere on this canvas.' see there is no trace of one hidden anywhere on this canvas.'