Secrets of the Fire Sea Read Online Free PDF

the street side and staring down the cabbie, who swapped his obscenities for a final scowl before driving off. On the pavement side of the carriage, a nun aged about sixty stepped out, dressed like her companions – althoughshe had not tonsured her greying hair, but had her locks tied back in two buns above her ears. The monks stood very still, with a calmness that hung in the air like the glint of sunlight on a brandished dagger.
    Boxiron stomped noisily on the pavement, his hulking, unwieldy body swivelling to take in the ranks of monks now surrounding them – more exiting from the second iron room at the back of the horseless carriage. Some of the monks carried staffs and Jethro Daunt doubted they were intended to aid infirmities or for the long travels of a pilgrimage. He just hoped Boxiron didn’t slip a gear now.
    ‘I have been defrocked,’ said Jethro. ‘I’m no longer in the church.’
    The woman’s head rocked to one side. Of course she would know that. It would have been people rather like these pressing the ecclesiastical court to throw him out of his parsonage.
    ‘I understand you have been operating as a consulting detective for the last few years,’ said the woman.
    ‘That is true,’ said Jethro.
    ‘Of course it is. I wish to consult with you.’ There was quite a tone of menace in that single word, for all the eerie calmness in her face.
    ‘Well, well,’ said Jethro. ‘I’ll be bobbed. Of all the people in the capital I might have expected to be conversing with about my current mode of employment, your people are the very last ones I would have expected to turn up.’
    ‘As it should be,’ noted the woman. ‘Of those that know of the existence of the League of the Rational Court, there are even fewer that should be aware when they are about to be touched by our hand.’
    Jethro looked at the open door of the carriage and the woman pointing to the empty red leather seat opposite the one she had just vacated. An invitation with exceedingly little choice in it.And carriage rides with these people were sometimes one-way affairs.
    The hand of the Circlist church’s League of the Rational Court. The hand of the Inquisition .
    Hannah Conquest pushed aside the thick brambles to try and find the path. Like all of the great domed greenhouses nestled in the shadows of the Horn of Jago, Tom Putt Park was named after its creator – or at least the merchant notable who had paid for it to be constructed. Nestling against the battlements, far from the city, Tom Putt Park had drawn the short straw when it came to maintenance from the dwindling band of park keepers and farm labourers. They were presently engaged in the serious business of feeding the capital, not pruning the wild-running hedges and copses under Tom Putt’s crystal geodesic canopy.
    It always felt a curious thing to Hannah, moving through the bush and the greenery of the park. In a very real sense she wasn’t walking on the soil of Jago. All the dirt here, and in every other park and farm dome, not to mention the tree beds in Hermetica’s vaults below, had been imported by traders’ barges in centuries past. Dirt from the Kingdom of Jackals on the far side of the Fire Sea, as well as from Pericur and the other nations on the opposite shores. The native top-soil beyond the capital’s battlements was fit only for growing stunted fruitless orchards, those and the island’s blackened forests of thorns that cut at travellers with the sharpness of the machetes needed to hack out a passage amongst them. Not that many dared to venture outside without wearing heavily armoured walking machines – RAM suits, as the trappers and city maintenance workers called them. The aging power tunnels that fed the city with the energy its people required always needed upkeep, as did the iron aqueductscarrying in fresh drinking water down from the hills. A job that was almost as unappealing as what Hannah suspected was in store for her with the