Stephen Hunt - Secrets of the Fire Sea

Standing against the rail wearing a battered greatcoat and holding a telescope was Commodore Black, his black-bearded face tinged orange from the glow of the magma. 'Come up for your turn of fresh air, Mister Daunt?'

'That I have, good captain, and I'm already regretting not bringing my coat.'

It was a curious, unhealthy mix outside, the intense waves of heat from the Fire Sea's magma interspersed with jabbing arrows of a freezing artic wind from the north. Too much exposure to this was likely to bring any passenger – or sailor – down with a fever.

'A savage, strange sea,' said the commodore. 'But old Blacky has got used to it. I've sailed further and deeper inside it than any other skipper, and left many a good friend's bones on the shores of its wild islands while doing so.'

'I'm hoping for a rather more pedestrian voyage.' Jethro looked down at the boiling waters their u-boat was pushing through on the surface – boils in nautical parlance – searing, shifting channels of water veined through the bubbling magma. He rummaged in his pocket and pulled out a paper bag filled with striped sweets. 'Would you care for a Bunter and Benger's aniseed drop, good captain?'

Commodore Black put aside the telescope he had been using to sweep the burning waves. 'I won't be troubling you for one of those wicked things. You know what they put in them…?'

'Defamation on the part of their commercial rivals, I am certain.'

'I'll stick to eating what goes well with a drop of wine. No need to suck those blessed things for your nerves, Mister Daunt – a nice boring voyage is what you'll get aboard the Purity Queen. Jago barely lies inside the rim of the Fire Sea and The Garurian Boils here are settled waters. The magma keeps to its course and so do the boils we sail through.' Commodore Black pointed to the north. 'One hundred and seventy miles ahead is a buoy station of the Jagonese tug service. That's when the magma gets unpredictable and choppy, but the island's sailors will lead us through the safe channels – for a price.'

Jethro stared where the old u-boat man was pointing, but all he could see from the conning tower was a burning ocean of red seamed by black cooling rock, the passages of superheated water they were following marked out by curtains of rising steam.

'You've never sailed the Fire Sea before, Mister Daunt? Never been to Jago. I can see it in the way the flames are casting a mortal spell on your gaze.'

'My business has occasionally seen me travel across the nations of the continent,' said Jethro, 'but never over the ocean.'

'Yes, now, your discreet business,' said the commodore, teasingly. 'But you've travelled widely enough to know that a master of a boat is rightly addressed as captain, be they an admiral or a commodore.'

A cracking sounded in the distance and a geyser of molten rock and gas fumed into the air, adding to the chemical stench of the place – sulphur, by its reek.

'Someone told me that at the docks,' Jethro dissembled. 'An ocean this wild, it seems hard to believe that the people on Jago can predict where the ebbs and flows of the magma and the passages of water through them will lie within an hour's time, let alone days and weeks ahead. It's a wonder anyone can follow the boils back to Jago.'

'Ah now,' said the commodore. 'It's an easy enough matter predicting a safe passage when you have caverns filled with mortal clever transaction engines. Machines that could give King Steam a run for his money when it comes to the thinking game. And when we get to the buoy station and the master there summons up a tug to see us safe to their black shores, we'll no doubt pay for every penny of their engine room's power and the model of the Fire Sea they have sealed up down there with them.'

'That will be a sight to see on Jago, good captain,' said Jethro. 'Cities where they have actually tamed the wild power.'

'Electricity,' said Commodore Black. 'Yes, nowhere else in the world, only on Jago.' He pointed to the currents of magma sliding past the watery channel of the boils they were navigating. 'Something to do with all that blessed molten iron swirling around out there, or so a fine steamman friend of mine would have it.'

'You sound like you don't approve, good captain.'

'I've used the wild energy to tickle the armour of wicked savages trying to break their way into my hull and had cause to thank it,' said the commodore. 'But for more practical purposes I'll take the thump of good honest steam power, the hum of high-tension clockwork and the burn of a little expansion-engine gas any day of the week. The kind of dark power the Jagonese use is as good for your blessed health as taxes.'

Jethro nodded. The commodore was as superstitious as most u-boat men. It was small wonder when a small metal bubble of air was all that stood between them and death under the darks of the ocean. The Circlist church always did have its work cut out in the harbour towns of the Kingdom. U-boat men were almost as bad as airship sailors with their strange rituals and their profession's cant.

He raised a hand to shield his hair from a few rogue cinders drifting across from a fire plume that looked to be erupting ten miles to starboard. It was no wonder that no airship could cross above the Fire Sea intact – the combination of plumes, wild thermals and fierce artic storms made an aerial crossing a one-way bet: with a grinning skeleton drawn on the reverse of every card in the deck. Jethro remembered reading about a few foolhardy Jack Cloudies who were never seen again after attempting the voyage in the early days of Jackelian aviation.

Commodore Black pressed the telescope back to the brass goggles protecting his face and Jethro looked on as the whistle of a magma fountain off their starboard became the whisper of Badger-headed Joseph. 'The blood, the blood of the earth is your sea.'

Jethro gritted his teeth. The old gods never normally bothered him during the day, only within his dreams. He wiped the steam off his goggles and unnoticed by the commodore, stepped back and rubbed at the side of his head. This was his choice, sailing to Jago. His. Not the Inquisition's, not theirs. Only his. An invitation to dinner at the captain's table wasn't something that Jethro expected, but perhaps for Commodore Black it mitigated the guilt he felt at the extortionate rates he was charging his passengers to travel through the inhospitable currents of the Fire Sea. Although looking at the square navigation table in the captain's cabin that had been pressed into service for dinner, Jethro suspected the location of their supper had more to do with the wishes of the coarse men and woman that served as the u-boat's crew – desiring to make free with their ribald table manners in the mess, rather than feeling they had to be on good behaviour in front of the 'cargo'.

The Pericurian ambassador-in-transit – Ortin urs Ortin – demonstrated the highest manners at their table, every facet of Jackelian etiquette smoothly performed in almost mocking counterpoint to Boxiron's jerky shovelling of high-grade boiler coke into his furnace trap and the noisy siphoning of the water the steamman needed to feed his boiler heart. The young academic Nandi Tibar-Wellking was a fairly neutral observer of the two polar extremes at the table, but recalling his own time in the company of her professor, Jethro rightly guessed that Nandi had been well taught and exposed to the intricacies of dining at foreign tables. If the cabin boy acting as steward had served them sheep's eyes and fried scorpion tails rather than their usual fare of scrambled duck eggs, Spumehead rock crab and pot-roasted lamb, he doubted she would have even blinked.

Commodore Black's appetite tipped the table's balance back towards the ribald; he ripped apart the meats with gusto and matched Boxiron's siphoning of water with an equal capacity for sweet wines, jinn and beer. If the boat's master had an excuse for his thirst, it was that even with the Purity Queen's cooling systems running on maximum, it was hard not to drip sweat onto their food as they maintained their course through the outer boils of the Fire Sea.