kiss to bring them back to life. But the Fire Sea didn’t leave bodies in the water, only ashes. And nor did Vardan Flail’s schemes. Well, Hannah had cheated him of a life of servitude within the guild, and if she could follow her mother’s trail in the footsteps of William of Flamewall, she would cheat Vardan Flail out of getting his filthy hands on the last piece of the god-formula, too.
After they made camp in the foothills, Hannah saw why Tobias Raffold had been so particular about the location of their site – and discovered the purpose of the large steel components that two of the trappers had been lugging distributed across their suits, a heavy load even with a RAM suit’s amplified strength. The parts were assembled into a circular frame holding a turbine vane, pieced together over a steam blowhole that had been previously marked by the trappers with a fluttering pennant. After heavy rubber cables had been attached to the device, the ends of the leads were plugged into their RAM suits’ chemical batteries. With the portable turbine whining as the steam hole drove it into action, a stench of bad eggs began to circulate within the confines of Hannah’s suit. Circling the disk-capped blowhole, connected by the cables, the twenty suits would have seemed to observers like some strange variety of iron flower, a night orchid emitting a bizarre stench as they recharged their batteries.
The increased size of the trappers’ RAM suits wasn’t just to accommodate the larger batteries needed to cover great distances – it had other uses, too, such as allowing the pilot frame to rotate back into a sleeping position, the lightly cushioned spine making a serviceable, if not particularly comfortable, bed. Hannah was selfishly glad that the number of trappers the expedition had engaged was large enough that she wouldn’t be required to stand a turn on sentry duty – not that the hard, taciturn trappers were likely to have trusted her even if she had offered. They stood duty two at a time, the sensing mechanisms in their suits set to violently judder the pilot cage if they detected a lack of movement consistent with sleep.
After a hard day pushing the suit forward over endless miles of terrain – harder even than duty in the turbine halls – sleep was really not a problem. It swallowed Hannah up, rising out of the suit like a spinning vortex and cutting off the smell of sweat, oil and recharging battery packs.
In the days that followed, most of the places where they made camp were the same: low rocky wolds with enough of a view of the surrounding landscape for them to ensure that stalking ursks weren’t trying to crawl up on the resting RAM suits – although when the mist filled the low valleys, it was as if they were sitting on an island surrounded by smoking white rivers. And who knew what nightmares were swimming through their depths?
There was one site that got Nandi excited, a hill where the blowhole they were using to tap the steam lay in a dip and the crest of the hill was a rock formation that resembled a cup melted along one side. The archaeologist swore that there were tell-tale signs the rock had once been the foundations of a building and pointed down into the valley to indicate contours which she said were further indications that there had once been constructions on the surface.
‘I’m not so sure, lass,’ said the commodore, his RAM suit turned to face the ridges on the hill opposite. ‘There’s no bricks or mortar on this slab of rock – it looks as blasted and natural as the black cliffs on the coast to me – and those ridges could be where the storms have carved the soil away from the top of the hill.’
‘That’s because you don’t know what to look for,’ insisted the archaeologist.
‘Well, I’ve spent more of my life sandwiched between the hull of a boat than I have between the shelves of the library at St Vines College and I’m no doubt the worse for it,’ said the commodore, ‘but old Blacky’s seen the sunken streets of the city of Lost Angels on the seabed, and scoured by the tides though the ruins were, they still had the look of streets to his tired old eyes.’ He called across to Ortin urs Ortin’s RAM suit– their domes retracted as they took in the fresh cold air.