Part 27 (1/2)

'Careful, man,' cried the commodore, grabbing the townsman by the jacket.

'Let me go! They're coming! The wet-snouts have breached the slopes. They're inside the mountain vaults now, inside!'

The townsman pulled away and resumed his sprint through the huddling crowd of refugee children. Jethro saw the commodore looking at his hands. The u-boat man's palms were covered in the blood that had been soaking the man's dark frock coat.

'Stay and fight, you mortal fool,' the commodore shouted after him. 'There's nowhere left to run to.'

Jethro looked around. There was just himself, the commodore and Boxiron trying to get through the a.s.sembly room. No defenders to protect the hundreds of children hiding here. The other fighters had already gone to man the firing lines, leaving the three of them to work their way up ever higher into the honeycombed pa.s.sages of the Horn of Jago in pursuit of Hannah Conquest.

'Where are you going, good captain?' Jethro called to the commodore as he moved towards the pa.s.sage. 'We have to keep moving higher.'

'I'm too tired to chase about the tunnels of this blessed mountain, Jethro Daunt. I'm going to sit myself down in this chamber and rest awhile.'

'These children are not our concern,' said Boxiron. 'We have a greater mission.'

'One man and a sabre will make no difference here,' agreed Jethro. 'All the armies of the world will make no difference unless we can get to Hannah before she finds the final section of the G.o.d-formula.'

'Does the Circlist church have a formula for that, Mister Daunt? Some equations wrapped up in a homily about the power of the common good?'

They did, but Jethro could sense that the old u-boat man had made up his mind. Not everyone could pick where they died. There were hundreds of children here, hiding terrified in the heart of the Horn of Jago, as safe from the bombardment and fighting outside as they could be.

'Off with you, lad. You and the old steamer have your G.o.d-formula to protect and I have my own code I must uphold.'

'May serenity find you, good captain,' said Jethro, pa.s.sing the commodore his rifle and satchel of charges.

'Maybe she will at that.'

Commodore Black watched Jethro and Boxiron climb up one of the side pa.s.sages before laying aside his sabre. Sitting wearily down in the a.s.sembly room, he raised the barrel of the ex-parson's rifle to his nose and sniffed it. 'As new as a freshly minted coin,' he muttered.

The commodore pulled out a cloth he used for his mumbleweed pipe and began cleaning the grease off the barrel. Two of the children came up to him, a brother and sister perhaps, the girl holding a tiny horse carved out of a single piece of volcanic stone.

'Why did the man run off?' asked the boy.

'He had forgotten to give his wife a kiss before he left home,' said the commodore. 'She'll be blessed angry at him if he doesn't get back to her quickly.'

'We've left home too,' said the sister.

'I thought you had, now. You had that look about you.'

There was a sound down the pa.s.sage, an echo of rattling bra.s.s, and coming out of the flickering artificial light was as bizarre a sight as the commodore had ever expected to see here on Jago. A line of children, but children in militia uniforms, miniature cloaks and full-sized rifles on their shoulders. Most of them barely looked to be in their teens, although the girl marching at their head might have had a year or two on that, along with a good few gangling inches over the troops in her company.

'Cadets, halt!' ordered the girl. She looked suspiciously at the commodore's tattered foreign naval uniform. 'We are here to protect you.'

'That's grand,' said the commodore.

'We wanted to stay on the slopes and fight but the major ordered us back here. She said that the evacuated cla.s.ses needed to be defended.'

Commodore Black sighed. In the Jackelian New Pattern Army these greenhorns might have pa.s.sed as drummers. In the Royal Aerostatical Navy, they might have pa.s.sed as mids.h.i.+pmen or catwalk monkeys for the sailors. Here in the mountain vaults, though, they were just frightened children in stiff uniforms trying to ignore the gestures and calls from the youngsters they had been studying next to the week before.

'Captain Jared Black,' said the commodore, wearily raising his full bulk to his feet. 'You might forget to salute, cadet,' he bl.u.s.tered, leaning over to lock the bayonet under her rifle barrel in place, 'but when you forget to turn-and-twist your cutlery, the first wet-snout you stick with that bayonet is going to end up keeping it in their gut.'

'Sir!' she barked.

Commodore Black stared back down the a.s.sembly rooms, calculating the meagre options for their defence. There was the corridor at the rear where he had entered with Jethro and the steamman. That led to the lower levels of the Horn of Jago and those grand doors out onto the subterranean city that should be safe enough. There was the stairway on the side up to the next level too narrow for a good a.s.sault, but maybe good for flanking with a skirmisher or two, he'd have to keep an eye on that. Then there was the entrance in front of them, leading onto the main corridor the cadets had retreated down. Yes, the main corridor, that's where he would a.s.sault from, and that's where the mortal Pericurian troops would show their snouts in force.

'Turn over those tables in front of this pa.s.sage and form two lines behind them. First line kneels and loads, second line fires on command, then you change position. Don't sight your rifles; the pa.s.sage's width will do your blessed aiming for you. Clear your broken charges cleanly and watch you don't burn yourself on the wadding and residue.'

She saluted. 'We will do our duty, captain.'

Aye, and they would break on it too.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX.

Hannah opened the door and she and Colonel Knipe stepped out onto the floor of a hoop-shaped pa.s.sage circling around the metal barrel of the flare-house gun. The two of them had travelled as high as they could climb up the Horn of Jago, to the very tip of the summit itself. It was cold in the narrow pa.s.sage. It would have been warmer had the flares still been launching like magnesium stars overhead, but the flare bins deep below must have run empty with the loading crews cowering in hiding like everyone else in the mountain vaults.

A ladder had been riveted to the stone wall, rising a man's height to a second gantry, which ran alongside the flare-house's stained gla.s.s windows. Each twenty-foot high pane bore a multicoloured ill.u.s.tration based on the rational orders' illuminations, filled with the calligraphy of mathematical philosophy and Circlist imagery from the Book of Common Reflections Book of Common Reflections.

'Up here?' said the colonel. 'This is where the third part of the G.o.d-formula is hidden?'

'There were three paintings created by William of Flamewall,' said Hannah. 'Two of them held parts of the G.o.d-formula hidden in steganographic code. The last painting was blank of any code it was the third painting of the rational trinity.'

'You climb the mountain alone,' said Colonel Knipe.

'William of Flamewall wasn't just an illuminator of ma.n.u.scripts for the church,' said Hannah, pointing up towards the stained gla.s.s. 'He was a gla.s.s master. He even used the oxides from his gla.s.s dye to murder the priest who had created the G.o.d-formula, Bel Bessant.'

Colonel Knipe swivelled on his feet, looking in amazement at the wall of gla.s.s surrounding the ma.s.sive flare cannon.

'The third painting wasn't blank,' said Hannah. 'The Circlist priest in the painting was pointing to the top of the Horn of Jago. We never found an image of William of Flamewall, but I'd wager that his face is that of the priest in the third painting.' She craned her neck up at the images circling them, indicating a panel that represented the third part of the rational trinity. 'And there is the same face on the gla.s.s.'

Colonel Knipe climbed the ladder to the second gantry, his cloak brus.h.i.+ng Hannah's hair as she followed. 'And this picture will hold the missing piece of the G.o.d-formula!'

Hannah looked at the stained gla.s.s work, running her hands along the borders of the towering illumination set in crystal, a chequerboard of colourful squares purples, reds, greens, yellows all set in a seemingly random pattern that echoed the colours used in the main ill.u.s.tration, priests of a dozen religions being parted by Circlists to make way for a single man to climb the mountain. Alone.

'It's here,' she declared. 'a.s.sign each colour along the border a value, work out the key. This is more steganography.'

'You know what you must do now,' said Colonel Knipe. 'Decipher the code. The archbishop tutored you, you are your mother's child, you must!'

'I didn't crack the first two codes,' said Hannah. 'It was Jethro Daunt and his friend Boxiron the steamman has special skills in this area.'

'As you love Jago,' pleaded the colonel, 'you must! Our people's time is short.'

Yes, as high as they were, she could still hear the sounds of war drifting up from the slopes below. Hannah's mind raced. She was visualizing things so fast now, she could do this. She had to. For all of them. Hannah reached for the satchel containing the first two sections of the G.o.d-formula. She would use the blank sides of the paper to decipher the steganography and tease out the last part of the G.o.d-formula. She knelt down to note the sequence of colours on the first of her sheets, suddenly twisting her head to look down onto the lower gantry. 'Did you hear that?'

Colonel Knipe already had his pistol out as he looked down towards the barrel of the flare-house cannon and the instrument room beyond it from where the flares were launched. 'I heard nothing.'

Hannah scowled and went back to work. She could have sworn she had heard an animal grunting below as though it was laughing.