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Rational Court.’
    The Inquisition! Sweet Circle, that was one arm of the church Hannah had hoped never to encounter.
    ‘It’s not just bodies that are twisted in the guild’s turbine halls,’ said the priest. He tapped his prematurely thinning hair. ‘It’s their minds. The way they cling to Circlism out in their vaults, it’s almost faith!’
    Heresy. Superstitions perverting the church without gods.The implications of the archbishop’s murder collided with the weight of emotional wreckage spinning around Hannah’s mind. And with the archbishop gone, Hannah would have no one to speak for her in front of the senate. She was going to end up an initiate of the Guild of Valvemen, indentured to a master who had murdered her guardian!
    ‘We have to prove that Vardan Flail killed the archbishop,’ said Chalph. ‘If we can do that, prove that your draft ballot was a personal matter in a vendetta, the senate will have no choice but to nullify it.’
    Prove it when the colonel’s police militia wanted the very opposite finding. What hope did they have?
    But it was the only way Hannah was going to survive – if the deadly energies of the guild’s vaults didn’t finish her off, then Vardan Flail would be only too eager to ensure an accident befell her and silenced her wagging tongue.
    Jethro and Boxiron waited in the shipping office for the agent behind the wooden counter to flick through his box of yellowed cards. This was the last shipping agent on the harbour, and it looked as if they were about to receive the same answer they had been given by every other office they had visited.
    ‘Sorry, Mister Daunt,’ said the clerk. ‘I hate to turn away custom, but there ain’t no call for passage to Jago no more.’
    ‘There must be at least one vessel on your roster that makes regular stops there?’
    ‘Not since the southwest passage fully opened,’ said the clerk. ‘They’re dangerous waters, the Fire Sea, and there are easier ways to get across to the colonies now. It’s their own fault, bloody Jagonese. Their tugs used to charge skippers a small fortune to see us safely through the boils. Now there’s another way to sail to Concorzia, who’ll pay their fees, eh? Not any of the vessels on my lists, that I can tell you.’
    ‘Myself and my good steamman friend here need to get to Jago,’ insisted Jethro.
    ‘Well, you won’t be going direct, fellow, that’s the truth of it. Last I heard, Pericur still runs a service out to the island once a month. Take a steam ship across the Sepia Sea to Concorzia and travel north overland to the ursine lands, and then you can wait there for your boat to the island. That’s how I’d do it.’
    ‘What about a direct passage to Pericur?’
    ‘Not on my list either,’ said the clerk. ‘Their great and mighty archduchess hoards their trade routes for her kin, and it don’t seem like I got the furry hide to qualify for her graces, do I? Like I say, travel to the colonies and then head north overland for the Pericurian border. I can sell you an airship berth rather than a steamer cabin if you’re in a hurry. You’ll be walking the streets of New Alban in three days and there’s plenty of wagon trains from there up towards Pericur.’
    ‘We are on church business,’ said Boxiron. ‘Is there really nothing you can do?’
    The clerk traced an ironic little circle across his waistcoat and shrugged. ‘Then may serenity find you.’ He walked away leaving the two of them to their own devices.
    ‘Then may it find us on a luckier day.’ Jethro shook his head and made to leave the dusty little room, but a younger female clerk – seeing her master had left the front office – stopped scribbling in a ledger and waved her inky nib in Jethro Daunt’s direction.
    ‘There is a way for you to travel directly to Pericur. There’s a free trader with a trading licence from the archduchess moored down in the submarine pens. No shipping agent here will recommend him to you,