Secrets of the Fire Sea - By Stephen Hunt Page 0,2

heavy armoured door that opened out over the black cliffs of Jago.

Now both Hannah and Chalph had to descend hundreds of rungs back down to the subterranean city without slipping – always tricky the nearer you got to the surface; where the heat from the Fire Sea made sweaty, slippery hands – or paws – an occupational hazard when gripping the ladder. Ventilation passage ninety-two was a long way from the cathedral too, close to the submarine pens of the docks – like the rest of the capital, deep underground in the city’s machine-hewn vaults. But vent ninety-two’s isolation had an advantage. It was Hannah Conquest’s favourite way up to the surface. Without a single u-boat sitting moored in the underground pens among the hundreds of tugs waiting unmanned for trade that would probably never return to the island, there were rarely any adults around to see Hannah emerging from the vent shaft and report her to the police militia. It wasn’t so much that people feared Hannah and her friends might fall and break their necks – though that was often the stated concern that forbade them to leave the city – it was the fear that a careless child might leave open an armoured door up top, allowing in one of the beasts from the island’s cold interior.

Down below it was just as she had expected. Hannah and Chalph emerged from the vent watched only by the dark, empty eyes of passages that led to the underground water locks and lifting rooms up to the sea-bed. There were no tug crew about the docks; most of the sailors would be back home, drawing half-pay while their fire-breaker vessels sat equally idle tied up around the pens. Guiding the Pericurian ambassador’s u-boat out through the Fire Sea was a rare flurry of activity for the service this morning.

It was a long way back home through the Eliza Vaults – a lonely walk past empty warehouses and boarded-up taverns and guesthouses for sailors that no longer visited Jago’s shores, before Hannah and Chalph began to pass through the more inhabited parts of the capital, each vault larger than the last as they followed the connected chambers towards the heart of Hermetica City. The two friends travelled on foot, ignoring the cries from gondolas drifting along the city’s canals. Chalph was a junior apprentice in an increasingly impoverished foreign merchant house and Hannah a ward of the church, and neither had the little platinum pennies that a gondola owner would demand for a quick ride towards the cathedral.

It seemed to Hannah as if they had crossed every one of capital’s arched bridges by the time the waters widened out into the Grand Canal, and here at least Hermetica City still felt like a metropolis. Noise. Smells. Activity. People about the arcaded passages of shops, colonnaded walks that were still polished and cleaned by the district’s workers. People, it was always people that made a place. Little private skiffs moving down the canal, paddles turning under the power of chemical batteries with the whiff of eggs about them. Large oared barges moored for use as restaurants along the canal walls, bored kitchen staff leaning out of the windows to talk to idle gondola men. Hawkers’ cries filling the air, knife-grinding for a penny a blade, pig gelders offering their services to the increasing numbers of people keeping livestock in their canal-side houses and apartments. Not trusting to the scant food supplies coming down from the greenhouses on the surface, not now so many of their labourers had left for the fertile wheat plains of Concorzia. Where once civilization had clustered around the warm coastline of Jago as the glaciers moved south and enveloped the world under white sheets of ice, now the islanders were themselves clinging ever tighter to the noise and din of each other, leaving the fringes of their capital to the water rats, cavern bamboo and the shadows of their ancient glory.

Even the roof of the subterranean vaults seemed to burn brighter in the centre of the city, the diode plates shimmering above in an approximation of the sun the mist-shrouded island’s surface hardly ever saw, especially now, in the winter. Though the seasons mattered little to the Jagonese; not with their flash steam systems, powered by the underground water table warmed by volcanic action within, and the Fire Sea without. If only the island had more people. They could continue to live on Jago for another two thousand