He stepped over the groaning officer’s body and vaulted the collapsing barrier, his massive weight clanking into the middle of the Pericurian assault, clearing a circle of broken bones with his warhammer. Shocked ursine stumbled back as this huge iron brute landed in their midst and lashed out at them. ‘Take only those that I leave!’
Jethro looked at his hand in horror as the Jagonese defenders vaulted the blockade and threw themselves down at the stalled, hesitating assault. The hand that had just turned the clock back on everything he had accomplished since rescuing his friend from the influence of the criminal flash mobs in the slums of the Jackelian capital. Jethro pushed through the barricade, just behind the melee, the only evidence of his steamman friend the brief flash of a hammerhead among the screams and shouts. The convicts pressed forward taking Boxiron at his word and impaling the wounded soldiers trying to crawl away along the ground.
‘Please,’ Jethro begged them. ‘Take them prisoner. Enough, they are wounded.’
‘Savages. Filthy, treacherous wet-snouts. Savage. Savage. Savage.’
The convicts pushed the ex-parson away as he tried to restrain them. Jethro Daunt stumbled to his knees. ‘This is wrong. Wrong.’
A fist as strong as steel gripped the back of Jethro’s neck, pulling him off his knees. It was one of the Pericurians. A fierce scarred grey-furred face stared into his own. The beast was lying on the ground with a sabre driven through her back – mortally wounded, no doubt, but still with enough strength left to crush him. Blood was streaming out of the corner of her mouth. ‘This – is – war!’
She dragged Jethro astride her, her arms pulling him down towards the bloody blade jutting out of her own dark leather armour.
‘For me – and – you!’
Jethro grunted in agony as he tried to resist his stomach’s inevitable inching descent onto the sabre’s tip. He was being pulled down to join her in death.
Hannah woke up to a darkness filled with spots of light. Was she blind, lying on the seabed with a dwindling reservoir of air, perhaps? No, she could hear the water, but it sounded like the gentle splash of a paddle on the surface. As she stirred, a hand reached out and covered her mouth. A hand covered with rough, bare skin, not ursine fur.
‘Keep your voice down,’ whispered the silhouette in the darkness. ‘There are Pericurian soldiers on these streets.’
Hannah realized she was staring up at the LED panels of a vault roof, malfunctioning by the look of them, dark except for a few flares of light dancing along what was left of the imitation sky. ‘Where am I?’
‘The Augustine Vault,’ said the shadow bending over her. Was that a police militiaman’s cloak she could see behind the figure? ‘The wet-snouts have taken most of the city now. We’re following the Augustine canal east to get to the Seething Round and the Horn of Jago.’
Hannah tried to move, but her shoulder felt as though someone had been using it for a pincushion and left the pins inside. Gradually, her eyes grew accustomed to the dark. She was horizontal on the deck of a gondola, warm canal water soaking her clothes. Her diving suit had gone. The crew were using oars rather than poles to move the gondola forward, keeping their profile low down on the water.
‘Commodore,’ she whispered. ‘Are you here?’
‘Just you,’ said the silhouette, his cloak shifting behind him as he continued to paddle. ‘One of the tugmen found you and brought you inside Hermetica. We were expecting a wet-snout to interrogate. Got quite a surprise when we found a missing church girl.’
‘My friend,’ mumbled Hannah. ‘He was in the water with me. We had escaped from the Pericurian fleet.’
‘We just found you,’ repeated the shadowed figure. ‘There’s a lot of bodies off the coast now, our and theirs. Our divers got a few mines into their fleet and sent a couple of wet-snout boats down onto the coral. Hah.’
Was the commodore dead? She remembered seeing the torpedo go past, and Commodore Black would have been closer to the underwater blast than her. Another stupid, useless death served up to the altar of religious-motivated conflict? She had to get to the final piece of the god-formula! If she could just do that, she could put everything right. Hannah was distracted by screams in the distance carrying to the canal, followed by a burst of turret-rifle fire.
‘Poor fools,’ hissed the militiaman. ‘People hiding in their houses even