Secrets of the Fire Sea. Stephen Hunt

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.

      Ortin urs Ortin tactfully overlooked the rattling from Boxiron and instead addressed the young academic, his Jackelian accent so polished he might have been born a squire to its acres. ‘You mentioned that you have not been to Jago before, damson, but I am interested to know what your book learning in the college suggests the island’s people will be like?’

      ‘Very similar to the Jackelian citizenry,’ answered Nandi, balancing a soup spoon between her fingers as if she was penning a dissertation on the subject. ‘And with good reason, ambassador, when we look back to what classical history texts have to say on the matter. The two largest tribes settled on the northwest of the continent were the Jackeni and the Jagoli, but when the cold time arrived, the Jagoli fled the advancing glaciers and journeyed to a new island home, whereas the Kingdom’s ancestors stayed put. Prior to that, the early Circlist church had converted both tribes, and there were plenty of intermarriages between the two peoples. In many ways, the modern Jagonese are truer to the traditions of our ancestors than we are – as, unlike the Jackelians, their civilization never fell to the Chimecan Empire. When all else was darkness and ice, their island kept the traditions of democracy burning. They kept their freedom when our kingdom was a vassal province of the empire and our people were being farmed for food. Jago kept their science through the age of ice, and they kept their history.’

      ‘The people of Pericur hold the island in some reverence, I believe, good ambassador,’ said Jethro.

      ‘The scripture of the Divine Quad,’ said Ortin, adjusting his monocle, ‘teaches that the island was once a paradise, where the ursine were shaped and breathed into life by the whisper of the world. There we lived on the Island of the Blessed until the two male members of the quad, Reckin urs Reckin and Amaja urs Amaja, fell to bickering between themselves and had to leave the island for the crime of destroying their home. And the whisper of the world became tears of fire at their fall from grace, filling the sea with all its flames.’

      ‘Then you believe Jago is sacred soil and that neither the Jagonese nor your people should be there?’

      ‘That is a conservative view. I am certainly not one of those who believe that, but I do believe there must be some practical truth to the scriptures. That the ursine once lived on Jago before we lived on Pericur.’

      Nandi took another mouthful of soup. ‘And why would that be?’

      ‘Let me show you,’ said Ortin. The ambassador ducked out of the commodore’s quarters and returned a minute later having retrieved a leather-bound tome of Pericurian scripture from his cabin. ‘In the scriptures, Reckin urs Reckin was unfairly cast out of paradise for the covetousness and lusts of his ravening brother, Amaja urs Amaja.’

      The ambassador opened the holy book to a beautifully illuminated page showing the two couples of the Divine Quad. The two deities on the left were clearly ursine, glowing in beatific purity, while the pair to the right – a furless male and female – were almost definitely from the race of man. ‘“And the fur of Amaja urs Amaja and his wife was singed from their bodies as they waded into the fires of the sea, begging Reckin urs Reckin and his beloved to forgive their brother his foolishness in destroying their home, the selfish Amaja urs Amaja watching his brother and his wife borne away by the Angels of Airdia to new lands.” The people of Pericur had followed the scriptures of the Divine Quad for thousands of years before we ever laid eyes on someone from your nation, Damson Tibar-Wellking. It came as quite a surprise when we discovered the same covetous devils painted on the walls of our temples colonizing the territory to our south in Concorzia, not to mention trampling the sacred soil of Jago deep inside the Fire Sea.’

      ‘But the timescales are all wrong, you must see that?’ said Nandi, perplexed. ‘The Jagonese settled the island long before we first established contact with your people in Pericur. Your race and ours have never lived alongside each other: the Jagonese migrated from the freezing wastes of our continent – they were never native to the island.’

      ‘Aye,’ interrupted the commodore, ‘and the only time the black blasted rock of Jago looked like a paradise was when sheets of ice covered the rest of the world and the people there had the blessed heat of the Fire Sea to keep their greenhouses warm and their vaults heated from the cold.’

      Ortin urs Ortin tapped his book. ‘And yet here your people are, and here we are too, just as the scriptures say. I am a reformer, damson and gentlemen. The great liberal houses of the Baronial Council have paid for this u-boat’s hold to be filled with the latest transaction engines from the Kingdom’s workshops. I would see our archduchess’s rule tempered by a properly elected council of her peers; I would see our cities pushing towards the heavens with the sway of pneumatic towers; I would see the best of your Jackelian science and culture being used to improve our nation; but for all that, there are still some things you must take on faith.’

      ‘Don’t be so quick to change, lad,’