of the universe moving in terrible amusement. ‘DID I ASK IF IT PLEASE YOU?’
Jethro’s lips started moving in prayer, the words – provided by the colonel – torn unwilling from his lips. But his eyes were his own. Fixed on Hannah, who clutched the railings on the gantry opposite him, with pained urgency. ‘My – lord – save – me – who gives – me – life – and – resurrection.’
Hannah lurched towards Boxiron, noting the red dot flaring on the steamman’s vision plate, one second a ruby pinprick, the next expanding to fill the whole vision plate with crimson. The steamman’s weak, human-milled shell was looping in paralysis. Too weak to contain…Bel Bessant knew. She had got that much right. The only way to fight a god. Hannah’s hand gripped the lever on the back of the steamman’s spine-box and threw it up, all the way. Top gear. Hannah’s eyes momentarily fell on the gear panel as the force of the unholy squall below carried her beyond the newly trembling steamman. She saw for the first time the words that had been scratched against the highest of the steamman’s gear positions. Circle save you jiggers.
Hannah was blown over the railings, landing on the lower gantry with a painful wallop. As the whirling energies carried her further down the gantry she could see Jethro Daunt slide across the cannon’s barrelling in front of her, still pinned by the terrible demigod, but his lips and voice his own again. ‘A god, so powerful. Truly, a god?’
‘YES.’
‘Then,’ Jethro said, as the skull of the burning silhouette bent forwards towards him, ‘it’s time for you to go to hell!’
Jago’s new dark demigod was pulled back, dragged by the white tentacles of steam emerging from Boxiron’s stacks, the steamman’s body vibrating at such a speed that it blurred in and out of sight. The blue figure of fire raised its arms and waves of energy lashed out, only to be absorbed by the steam enveloping it, diluting and ultimately mingling with the demigod, becoming one with it. The flare-house was filled with a scream so primeval that it tore at Hannah’s chest, an unholy ripping sound. Hannah was backing away but Jethro was actually crawling towards the agonized demigod. Tighter and tighter the thing that had been Colonel Knipe was compressed, its force becoming brighter and more radiant, shaking with the power of a sun fashioned into a spear of primordial energy.
Jethro extended a finger to point at the teetering shaft of energy. ‘Let there be us!’
As if at his bidding, the streak became lightning and leapt upwards, blasting off the roof of the flare-house and raining debris down onto Hannah, Jethro and Boxiron. From the tip of the Horn of Jago a pillar of light stretched up towards the clouds and the stars beyond. Then there were just the three of them. And something else, the steam pouring out from Boxiron’s stack forming into a ghostly shape. Alice Gray.
‘You look as beautiful as I remember,’ said Jethro.
Alice’s voice echoed around them, disembodied. ‘And you, Jethro, do not look as surprised as you should.’
‘I guessed when Hannah’s atmospheric carriage was diverted by the machines. Saved from a bomb and taken to find Tomas Maggs’ frozen corpse for good measure,’ said Jethro. ‘Only a valve-mind could arrange that. Vardan Flail didn’t murder you, but he did cut your head off your dying body and then put you through the guild’s death rites. He loved you well enough for that, to give you his people’s machine immortality. And when Boxiron stopped slipping gears and was no longer trying to rip the arms off police militia and free company soldiers, I had my suspicions that he might have brought a hitchhiker back from the guild’s transaction-engine vaults. Not all of you, of course. You left enough of your intelligence behind to make Vardan Flail think he still had you in his valves, enough to possess the control circuits of Hannah’s suit in the turbine halls, trying to protect her from harm.’
‘Alice,’ Hannah groaned. The archbishop hadn’t just translated the final section of the god-formula as she was hiding inside Boxiron. She had added it to the first two parts. She had used it on herself.
The archbishop’s laughter came through fainter, the steam starting to disperse. ‘If you can keep your head while people all around you are losing theirs…’
‘Alice!’ Hannah pulled herself to her feet. ‘What have you done?’
‘I incorporated the church’s counter-weapon into the final section