Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt

Author:Stephen Hunt [Hunt, Stephen]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: SteamPunk, Fantasy
ISBN: 9780007289660
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers Limited
Published: 2011-04-20T22:27:24+00:00

Burning. Burning, as he rolled across the hotel room’s floor. Boxiron’s body was burning, but not as fiercely as his mind. The Steamo Loa that his people knew as Radius Patternmaster was reaching into his brain and filling it, preparing to swell and crack his nanomechanical neural channels and burn out each and every memory that Boxiron possessed. Not just the almost-decrypted code hidden inside Jethro’s church painting, but everything that made Boxiron a distinct being. His inferior, man-milled body was finally going to get the mind it deserved – that of an idiot savant.

Something deep inside Boxiron struggled and writhed in reaction to the pain – a vomit-like reflex that was trying to emerge and fight the possession of the Loa. What was it? A routine that had been hidden inside him by the flash mob? The cunning mechomancers who knew that there was always a danger that one of the steamman’s gods might strike at the abomination they had created for their Jackelian criminal masters. But whatever defences the crime lords had secreted inside his body felt too far away and the weight of the Loa riding him too intense for him to connect with it—

—as he felt Jethro’s shadow falling over his body, the gear lever on his back slid squealing up to five. Top gear.

Now it was the Steamo Loa’s turn to shriek as the cobbled-together firewall the flash mob’s hirelings had inserted inside Boxiron connected with his mind. Blocks were raised on every circuit he possessed, the Loa that was trying to ride him cut into a million separate, self-aware splinters, steam leaking out of his joints. The manifestation of Radius Patternmaster tried to seethe out of Boxiron’s body, broken and mangled beyond recognition, attempting to reform…but merely dissipating in the air of the hotel room.

Boxiron pulled himself groggily to his feet, trying to avoid placing a heavy iron foot on Jethro’s toes as he swayed to and fro. Jethro was standing there before him, as was the young ursine Chalph urs Chalph.

‘That was one your people’s gods, was it not, old steamer?’

‘A Loa – I rejected him,’ said Boxiron, ‘much as you reject your gods.’

‘I am not much of a standard to aspire to,’ said Jethro.

‘You are more than they.’

A coldness flowed through Boxiron, as if every crystal board and node inside his body was hardening after being freed of the corrupting hold of the Loa. But it was not the aftershock of cleansing himself of the possession he felt. It was the cipher from the painting.

Assembling. Assembling. The last of the flash mob’s crooked processing units came back online passing him the final clue he needed to crack the steganographic code – one third of the mathematical weapon that the priest Bel Bessant had crafted so many centuries earlier. It was like nothing that Boxiron had been expecting.

But then, neither was the explosion of pain as the terrible, cold, alien thing unfolded within his consciousness…

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