show of affecting the manners of a modern Jackelian gentleman, but his heart still belonged to the savage deep forests of his homeland, it seemed.
‘A prickly fellow to have done all of this, then,’ muttered the commodore.
‘The terrain across there looks volcanic,’ said Nandi. ‘I’ve never read of ruins in such a strange condition in any of the texts back in Saint Vine’s. The damage doesn’t match what I’ve read of pyroclastic flows.’
There were signs that someone had visited the foot of the mountains before their expedition, wooden planks laid like a pier across the band of glassy ground, stopping halfway out at an oval circle of ground, almost an island, formed of a lighter-coloured rock than the black surf. There were piles of discarded garbage to Hannah’s right, opened food cans rusting by the remains of a fire.
‘A decade old, I reckon’ said Tobias Raffold, examining the circle of rocks that had contained the fire. ‘Give or take.’
Hannah’s heart leapt. Around the same time her mother would have arrived here!
Nandi pointed back to the tunnel. ‘There might be more inside those side corridors we passed. I’m going to dismount and have a poke around on foot.’
Commodore Black reluctantly opened his suit and climbed down after her, a long-barrelled rifle slung over his shoulder, sabre and holstered pistol hanging from his wide girth. Hannah pushed open her canopy and joined them while Tobias Raffold ordered two suited trappers to stand guard at the mouth of the tunnel so nothing could slink after his clients, and a couple more to wait a hundred feet inside to ensure that their weapon arms’ firepower was available should they need it.
Hannah held a lantern she had unclipped from her suit, flickering light dancing from the tight featureless corridors and antechambers. She shivered. Was it fear, or excitement at what she might find?
A couple of chambers back from the tunnel the three of them discovered a pile of supplies that Nandi dated to the era of William of Flamewall. A barrel of dried food – little more than desiccated leather now – and spindly rifles with intricate engravings on their imported beech-wood butts that spoke of an age of wealth and opulence.
In the chamber behind they made another discovery, one that made Hannah recoil as her lantern revealed the shape of a camp table with a shining white skeleton sitting at a chair behind it, a silent sentinel watching the open arch they had just walked through. The remains of tattered clothes clung to its bones and there was a splint attached to the left leg. On the table in front of it were a dust-covered satchel and a pistol with crystal charges scattered about.
Commodore Black picked up the pistol and rubbed its clockwork hammer mechanism clean. ‘A Buford and Armstrong lady’s pattern. This is a Jackelian gun.’
Nandi collected the satchel, and Hannah saw the young academic wince as she noticed something on the satchel’s flap. Nandi lifted out a number of books, placing them carefully on the tabletop.
Hannah was staring so intently at the satchel’s flap – the same arms of Saint Vine’s College that decorated Nandi’s own bag – that it took a couple of seconds for her to notice the young academic holding out one of the books to her in an almost apologetic fashion.
‘No!’
The initials on the diary’s leather cover.
Hannah’s eyes ran with tears, blurring the figure in the chair. In no way was this the reunion that she had been planning with her mother.
‘It’s all right.’ Hannah leant forward to kiss the skull’s forehead, but nothing happened: her mother’s skeleton was still a skeleton. A kiss to bring them back to life. But all the magic had fled.
Hannah’s hands were still gently trembling as she read the pages of her mother’s diary. She felt a mixture of shock and denial that the bones behind the camp table belonged to the woman who had given birth to her – denial even when Nandi had examined the pelvis and declared it was a woman’s, even when Hannah had come to the page in the diary that described the ursk attack on the other side of the Cade Mountains and the wound on her mother’s leg exactly where the skeleton’s splint had been set. The writing grew shakier page by page as the infection spread and the medicines Hannah’s mother was carrying failed to heal it.
Hannah’s mother, the redoubtable Doctor Jennifer Conquest, must have been feverish even as she arrived where the expedition