eventually lead to the vaults of the capital below.
‘It’ll die down there,’ said Hannah.
‘An ursk can swim through superheated geyser water before diving for an hour in a frozen lake,’ said the soldier. ‘What’s down in those drains won’t kill it.’ She patted her rifle. ‘What’s in here will.’
Voices sounded from the break in the dome, ursine voices talking in the modulated growls of the Pericurian language. Stom urs Stom moved towards the smashed panels of the dome and barked orders at her fighters.
The reality of what had just occurred sank into Hannah. Ursks and the other creatures of the interior had occasionally breached the battlements before, when the wall’s killing power failed, but they had always been shot down outside. She couldn’t ever remember a time when they had got into Hermetica City’s vaults – it was the citizens’ greatest fear.
Hannah realized the fact that she and Chalph had been in the abandoned park – the same park the ursks had smashed into – would put them under suspicion of complicity in the creatures’ intrusion. Chalph, the apprentice merchant, one of the venal wet-snout foreigners profiting from Jago’s hard times. Hannah, the lazy church girl whose parents weren’t even Jagonese, the reckless outsider who was known to climb air vents to travel beyond the vaults.
They were both in a great deal of trouble now.
The streets were alive with people when Hannah and Chalph followed the hulking mercenary captain down into the central vaults of Hermetica City. The diode lamps in the roofs of the caverns had dimmed for the evening, while the street lamps burned a brilliant yellow. Mobs of citizenry ran around the canal-lined streets carrying chemical braziers, most clustering tightly around the green-uniformed police militia with their long rifles. Heavy free company soldiers swept their turret rifles’ barrels across the surface of the canal from gondolas running low in the water. The vaults were the territory of the Jagonese police militia. The fact that so many mercenary fighters had been allowed down from the battlements at all was a sign of how bad the situation was.
Stom urs Stom stopped on a bridge and one of her ursine fighters came running up alongside a Jagonese militiaman, halting to beat her chest with her paw in a salute. Stom looked at her fighter. ‘Why are the city lights still on evening time? We need full daylight to hunt properly.’
‘We have sent word to the Guild of Valvemen,’ the militiaman interjected defensively, ‘but it may not be possible to switch the city to daylight quickly enough to serve the search.’
‘Why should it be otherwise?’ growled Stom urs Stom. ‘When it seems the guild can’t even keep the battlements fully charged now?’
The militiaman snorted as he heard this. Hannah knew there was an intense rivalry between the local police militia and the foreign mercenaries who had usurped their ancient position as the battlements’ sentries, and this man did not take kindly to the city’s institutions being belittled by wet-snout savages. He slotted the base of his staff of office in a control socket on the highest point of the bridge, sliding up a panel to expose a line of keys enamelled with shorthand communication symbols, and began tapping out a message – no doubt a call for extra police to be dispatched towards their position.
From lower down the canal there were shouts from one of the gondolas, the guttural cry of a free company mercenary followed by the howl of depressurizing gas from the brass tank on the fighter’s back. As she fired her turret rifle spouts of water erupted where her pitons struck. A forest of bobbing torches and the insistent cries of the crowd up on the streets indicated that the mercenary had found one of the intruders.
‘There!’ cried Hannah as a black shape glided under another gondola. The gondola slammed into the air, unseating both the gondolier and his mercenary passenger. The man fell into the water screaming and disappeared thrashing inside a bubbling maelstrom, while the mercenary hit the water silently. She must know that she would be next, after the ursk swimming underneath finished off the weakest victim – the gondolier. She didn’t even try to swim to the side of the canal.
‘Shoot the water!’ the militiaman next to Hannah shouted at the mercenaries. ‘Shoot the water, she’s dead down there anyway.’
But none of the massive Pericurian mercenaries was listening. A couple of seconds after the gondolier had disappeared, the mercenary fighter was pulled under the