like an angry cobra. ‘You are beyond the pale, desecration, that is the truth I see in your defiance!’ Spears of smoke hardened in the air between them, darting threateningly towards Boxiron.
‘You,’ swore the hulking steamman, ‘can go back to the flaming furnace of Lord Two-Tar and suck on his pipe.’
‘I shall ride!’ the Loa’s voice exploded from the smoke like a banshee scream and the manifestation hurled itself at Boxiron, the steamman stumbling back and flailing at the powerful ancestral spirit as it entered through the ill-fitting joins of his body, curling into his metal as though he were a magnet and the Loa a cloud of metallic filings. Filling him, possessing him. His inferior body becoming a host for the Steamo Loa to ride.
Boxiron was left caulked, blundering across the room. Burning. Burning. The Loa was reaching for his mind, reaching for his brain’s nanomechanical network swirling with the fruit of so many long hours of cipher breaking. Reaching to burn the last traces of his mind from the face of the world.
The steammen gods had finally come to bring Boxiron his second, final death.
Even the young guild navvy Hannah was following down the oblong-shaped shaft seemed impressed at how easily she had taken to the art of shaft walking – pushing the back of her RAM suit against one wall and using the leverage of her armoured legs against the opposite one to ease her way slowly and steadily downwards. Yet this whole situation seemed odd to Hannah; it was almost as if her suit was anticipating her needs and helping her. Though unless the ghost of some guildsman who had died inside the suit’s cockpit had possessed it, she didn’t know how that could be. Their suits were inanimate; they relied on their occupants to provide direction and intelligence. She shivered as she recalled the tales the other grubs had told each other. They were just stories, surely.
There was still the occasional spear of steam rising up past them from tiny cracks in the shaft, but the regulator gate they were heading for looked to be well and truly immobilized. They had already passed several working gates – iron frames containing motorized vanes that could be opened or shut depending on how much superheated steam was rising up from the island’s depths. The power needs of the turbine halls were carefully balanced with the pressure from below and the engineering tolerance of the gates themselves.
‘My first day,’ Hannah muttered, ‘and he’s already trying to kill me.’
‘Don’t flatter yourself,’ the young navvy’s voice sounded inside her helmet. ‘The charge-master thinks a lot more about keeping the turbine halls intact than he does about teaching some fancy-piece a lesson, just because she thinks she should be chopping punch cards upstairs rather than pushing iron with the lads down below.’
‘Then why’s he sending me down here with a—’ Hannah had to stop herself from saying a boy. ‘A navvy.’
‘Because I’m the best he’s got for shaft work,’ said young Rudge. ‘And he must think you’re the best he’s got for transaction-engine work, or you wouldn’t be here, either.’ The navvy pointed at the small transaction engine attached to the gate they were passing through – still functional enough to close its vanes and withdraw into the wall when they triggered it.
Hannah looked more closely at the transaction engine on the gate, blinking in surprise. It was the kind of thing she had seen in Jackelian picture books. ‘It’s got no valves. That’s a transaction-engine drum rotating inside it – it’s steam-driven!’
‘Isn’t that just like a cardsharp,’ snorted Rudge. ‘You love your head games with numbers, but you haven’t got a clue about the iron you need to run them on. This shaft is normally full of superheated steam. How long do you think a glass valve would last down here? Primitive works just fine inside a steam tap, especially given there’s usually enough steam flowing past here to power every paddle steamer in the world. Our pressure regulator gates operate autonomously. They’re not on the guild’s network, understand?’
‘I’m here because I’m the best,’ Hannah repeated the words, hardly believing them. And not because Vardan Flail had instructed the charge-master to ensure that she was dropped down the first conveniently deep shaft.
‘The charge-master comes across as a right bastard, but that’s only because unless you temper young metal well, it breaks before it becomes steel. If you’re not made into the best you can be down here, you’ll never survive