Free Secrets of the Fire Sea by Stephen Hunt Page B

new goal.
    Jethro Daunt pulled himself up the final few rungs of the u-boat’s conning tower and emerged onto the observation deck, almost immediately finding the goggles of his rubber scald suit misting up from the heat of the Fire Sea.
    Standing against the rail wearing a battered greatcoat andholding 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 masterthere summons up a tug to see us safe to their black shores, we’ll