has a volcano that’s the devil’s own cauldron; you sail past that island and you’re liable to find molten boulders as large as houses raining down on you. And should its rocks miss your hull, the terrible place spews out choking clouds of poison gas.’
‘You’ve seen this with your own eyes?’
The commodore tapped the charts. ‘From seventy miles away, that I have. As close as I ever wanted to get. We’re almost on the Isla Furia’s doorstep, so you’ll have the sight in front of your eyes soon enough.’
That he did. Daunt saw what the commodore was afraid of through the bridge’s oddly transparent portholes. They were passing over an underwater plain of superheated water, the boils that fringed the magma fields of the Fire Sea, a basalt surface littered with the wreck of vessels, craft from dozens of nations and as many centuries. Paddle steamers and clippers, galleons and fire-breakers, u-boats and liners, debris overgrown with strange organic sculptures of fire coral.
‘This wreckage grows thicker the closer you get,’ said the commodore. ‘Those poor devils are just the surface craft whose crews were overcome with gas and holed lightly enough for them drift out a-ways before sinking on the margins of the Isla Furia.’ He turned to find Sadly, the court’s agent standing behind the two horizontal pilot positions. ‘Did you lose a grip on your marbles, lad, in that terrible prison camp you were locked up in? Have you taken a bump on your noggin while escaping? You’re heading for super-heated vents — that’s the Isla Furia on the horizon!’
‘We’re not a conventional craft,’ said Sadly. ‘We’re rated for where we’re heading.’
‘And are you rated for being hit by a squall of molten depth charges as large as carts, lad? For that’s what waiting for you on this course. I know the Fire Sea. No one has penetrated as deep as old Blacky into this foul place. Turn north-north-west twenty degrees and head for the Abbadon boils. Better choppy waters than suicidal ones.’
‘I’m feeling lucky, says I.’
Daunt reached out to steady the commodore, the u-boat man shaking with incredulous anger and his remaining fever. ‘Peace, good captain. I believe the Court of the Air prefers the sort of luck it can manufacture, rather than relying on fate’s random charity.’
‘I’ve just had my precious Purity Queen filleted by a pack of black-hearted demons and now you want me to risk my neck on this exotic tub of the Court’s? Poor old Blacky, sick and in his dotage, chased out of his home by traitors and devils set on his tail by his wicked sister, hounded across the seas… and now his unlucky stars are calling for a chance to toss boiling boulders at him? It’s a happy thing I won’t be around for much longer, Jethro Daunt. A happy thing fate won’t have these miserable bones to torment!’
Daunt said nothing and waited. Up ahead, the underwater plain was littered with the graveyard of vessels, ships laying on ships, moulded together by thick fire coral, a floor of unwise mariners and submariners forming their own geological strata. Beyond the hills of coral, a curtain of steaming water from the broken vents of the seabed shimmered. So thick with fury that nothing was visible beyond its violent turmoil. Undaunted, the Court’s vessel passed over the carpet of destroyed craft, heading right for the centre of the maelstrom.
‘Tell me, Barnabas,’ the commodore moaned, ‘Tell me the name of this strange craft of yours so I know on what boat my end is to come?’
‘The Court doesn’t name its vessels,’ said Sadly. ‘We’re travelling on U-boat 414.’
The commodore flinched. ‘No, lad, no! You talk to me of your blessed luck, then you tell me you’re challenging all the forces of the sea by daring to sail on a vessel with no name?’
Sadly just smiled ‘The Purity Queen carried a name. How long did you last against that pair of darkships?’
As Jared Black moaned, Daunt gazed at the raging wall coming up at them. In his frail state, the commodore might be better sleeping his exhaustion off next to Charlotte’s cabin, or playing cards with Dick Tull and the surviving crewmen of the Purity Queen in the hold. True to Sadly’s word, the submersible hit the wall of superheated water and passed through it with none of the creaks and complaints that would have sounded from the hull of a normal Jackelian submersible. The temperature on the bridge stayed at the same comfortable level, the gentle ticking from fans inside the air-vents continuing as untroubled as if they were cruising off the green waters of the Kingdom’s coast. Seconds after they had breached the curtain, its boiling frenzy evaporated leaving them travelling down a clear corridor of sea water. The furious underwater boils walled them in port and starboard, with spherical objects half-visible through the turbulence, a chain of iron orbs tied to the sea floor by cables. Sea mines.
‘By Lord Tridentscale’s beard, what’s this?’ the commodore cursed.
‘The Court’s luck,’ said Daunt. ‘Is that not so, good agent?’
Sadly said nothing, but he didn’t need to.
Daunt pointed outside. ‘These vents aren’t natural, they’re an artificial thermal barrier. Machines under the seabed cooking the water, with mines to sink anyone that tries to push through the shield. There must be something of considerable value on the Isla Furia to warrant all of this.’
‘I think you’ll find we will be able to protect your sceptre,’ said Sadly.
‘Bob my soul, but I hope so.’
The thermal barrier must have been protecting the island for the Court for centuries, designed by the mad, bad and dangerous to know. The graveyard of vessels stretching for miles beyond its curtain spoke volumes for its lethal efficiency. It took a minute to clear the corridor through the curtain of heat, walls sealing behind them as they passed, but whatever Daunt had been expecting on the other side, it wasn’t what he found himself facing.
Beyond the thermal barrier stretched the submerged ruins of a city. Much of it looked like blackened termite mounds, thousands of buildings towering and ruined and slagged. So ancient, that its structures had decayed into featureless underwater spires, only the occasional areas of surviving symmetry or flat surfaces to indicate that something sentient had once had a hand in these crags’ formation. But among the lofty termite mounds, hundreds of storeys high, were scattered other buildings — better preserved, signs of stone carvings and ornamentation visible on smooth surfaces, pitted by hundreds of oblong holes. Windows once, now glassless doorways for schools of fish to dart through, the surface light slanting down onto a grid of uneven, half-silted streets.
‘Bob my soul,’ said Daunt. ‘I have never seen its like.’
‘I have,’ said the commodore. ‘A far ways off from here, though. The ruins of the city of Lost Angels on the seabed. One of the world’s wonders.’
Sadly stood by the main view screen at the front of the bridge. ‘Ironically, our scientists believe the better- preserved buildings down there are actually the oldest. They were probably sprayed with a substance that resists age. The anthills were the last buildings to be built. They’re little more than dirt and dust held together by kelp now.’
Even the commodore seemed impressed. ‘Compared to those sunken behemoths, the tallest tower in Middlesteel would stand like a blessed blade of grass next to a sunflower. What manner of creature lived out there?’
‘You’ll meet their descendants on the island,’ said Sadly.
The Isla Furia’s underwater rock face loomed ahead, a jagged rise of dark volcanic stone holed by caves. The Court’s submersible headed for one of the openings, lanterns inside the tunnel activating as the craft entered, the vessel’s own bow lights switching off. She passed confidently through a smooth arrow-straight cavern, before passing out into another stretch of water, this revealed as an inland lake when U-boat 414 surfaced. Ahead of the bridge’s pilot screen a walled town was visible, concrete u-boat pens upon the shore waiting to receive their vessel. There wasn’t much to see of the town beyond its high fortifications. Whatever lay beyond the wall, it obviously wasn’t a land-locked counterpart of the ruined spires under the sea. They docked in the shadow of the volcano. It was a beast all right, the commodore had been right about that. Towering twelve thousand feet high, clouds of thick white smoke poured out of its throat. Current discharges aside, there seemed little sign of the violence and magma the old u-boat man claimed to have witnessed. In fact, as they docked, Daunt could see the Isla Furia’s slopes were covered with terraces growing crops, a series of metal pylons driven into the incline bearing cable cars up and down into the city below.
Daunt scratched his chin. ‘This is the Court’s?’
‘More or less,’ said Sadly. ‘We landed on the Isla Furia centuries ago, looking for a secluded ground base to support our operations. The islanders we found here are called the Nuyokians. Like all the tribes on the Fire Sea islands, they’d been locked inside the magma and boils of the ocean and trapped here. The natives were in a sorry
