Explorer of the Endless Sea

  EXPLORER OF THE ENDLESS SEA

  Copyright © 2020 by John G. Hemry

  All rights reserved.

  Published as an eBook in 2020 by JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  Originally published as in Audible Original in March 2020.

  ISBN 978-1-625675-03-3

  Cover art by Dominick Saponaro

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  JABberwocky Literary Agency, Inc.

  49 W. 45th Street, 12th Floor

  New York, NY 10036

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  TABLE OF CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Acknowledgements

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Also by Jack Campbell

  To

  Selena “The Dread Pirate” Rosen, a great writer,

  and perhaps the kindest person I’ve ever known.

  For S, as always

  Acknowledgements

  I remain indebted to my agents, Joshua Bilmes and Eddie Schneider, for their long standing support, ever-inspired suggestions and assistance, as well as to Susan Velazquez, Adriana Funke, and Lisa Rodgers for their work on foreign sales and print editions. Many thanks to Betsy Mitchell for her excellent editing. Thanks also to Catherine Asaro, Robert Chase, Kelly Dwyer, Carolyn Ives Gilman, J.G. (Huck) Huckenpohler, Simcha Kuritzky, Michael LaViolette, Aly Parsons, Bud Sparhawk, Mary G. Thompson, and Constance A. Warner for their suggestions, comments and recommendations. And, of course, thank you to Steve Feldberg for his strong support.

  Chapter One

  Every sail set, the Sun Queen rolled over the top of a vast swell and plunged into the trough beyond, an explosion of white spray erupting as her bow cleaved the dark waters of the Sea of Bakre. Jules of Landfall, high on the mainmast, grasped a stay line, hearing the wind singing in the rigging and feeling the tension in the rope as if the Queen were a racehorse trembling with the excitement of the chase. Ships might be made of wood and metal and rope, she thought, but they were nonetheless living things, and like all living things they craved the lack of confinement that only the open sea could offer. And with the Queen running on a broad reach with a brisk breeze coming from aft and off her port quarter, she had sea room to spare and the wind to urge her on.

  Jules raised one hand to shield her eyes as she gazed at another ship visible a ways to starboard and ahead of the Sun Queen. From this high up on the mainmast, she had a good view of the other ship, its hull and masts easily visible as the distance between the two ships continued to shrink. The Queen’s prey this day had begun running once catching sight of the other ship, but he wasn’t as fast and he had the deadly rocks of the southern coast on his other side, preventing him from fleeing that way.

  Trapped.

  She felt a moment of sympathy for the captain and the crew of the other ship, penned in by the savage reefs of the south to one side and the oncoming danger of a pirate ship on the other. Jules knew how it felt to be trapped, to be caged. She’d grown up in a harsh Legion Orphanage, a ward of the Emperor whose generosity toward the orphans of those who’d died in his service was grudging and minimal. She’d escaped the walls surrounding the orphanage by earning a chance at an officer’s commission in the Emperor’s legions, only to learn that the Imperial officer corps was another prison whose cells were formed of rules and regulations and demands, as well as social expectations that the spawn of an orphanage could never meet.

  The whole world of Dematr was a cage, of course. The iron hand of the Emperor ruled over the entire area to the east of the great land-locked sea, forbidding cliffs walled off much of the coasts to the north and south, and the land to the west, according to every map, was a nightmare of unexplored, hidden reefs with desert wastelands beyond. And ruling over the Emperor and every other common man and woman were the Mechanics Guild and the Mage Guild, the two Great Guilds who controlled the lives of every common person, and did what they wanted to anyone. The Great Guilds weren’t above the law; they were the law.

  And then the final, biggest trap of all. The prophecy spoken by a Mage as he stared at her. The day will come when a daughter of your line will unite Mechanics, Mages, and the common folk to overthrow the Great Guilds and free the world. The prophecy that had tried to turn her into nothing but a vessel for some future outcome, robbed of any meaning regarding who she was.

  But also a way out of those cages someday—for everyone who might be alive when the prophecy came to pass. But not for her. So rather than wait for an event likely to occur long after she was gone, Jules had resolved to start breaking out of some of the cages. Some of those who had already tried to stop her had not lived long enough to regret their mistake.

  Since the prophecy, she’d come to realize that the people of Dematr accepted their cages as facts of life. Things had always been like, and always would be. But if the prophecy was true (and Mage prophecies were supposedly always true) things would change. But that would require men and women who believed they could break out of their cages, who were willing to do things no one else had ever done.

  Jules felt the wind at her back and the rolling of the ship, smelled the salt-laden air, and knew no cage could ever hold her. Not while the sea was open to her. Unforgiving though the sea might be, jealous of her secrets and eager to punish those who took her too lightly, her waters also offered the only freedom to be found on this world.

  Turning her head to look back to the west, Jules felt a familiar urge, a desire to seek out those uncharted and allegedly deadly waters, to see what really lay there.

  Someday.

  Because someone would have to show the world that every cage could be broken. And, from the looks of things, that someone would have to be her.

  She glanced upward before heading down the rigging, seeing her new banner flapping in the wind. Two crossed swords, one a straight Imperial blade and the other a curved pirate’s cutlass. The two halves of her, united into a single outward force even as they struggled for balance inside.

  Stepping off the ratline she’d balanced on, Jules hand-over-handed down a shroud to the deck, her calloused hands barely noticing the stings of the hemp fibers sticking out of the rope. She dropped the last lance to the deck, the Imperial officer boots she still wore thumping onto the wooden planks. Running up the short ladder onto the quarterdeck, Jules gestured toward the other ship. “I didn’t see anyone on deck except for the sailor at the helm. He’s holding course and keeping all sail on.”

  “He doesn’t have much choice,” First Mate Ang replied. Large, with a sturdiness that could be reassuring to friends and intimidating to everyone else, he didn’t seem pleased by what should be good news.

  Jules nodded to the sailor at the helm. “Keep her on this heading.” Sound calm, she reminded herself. Give clear orders. Don’t let excitement or worry mess with your head. Pay attention to the mood of your own people. Lessons for an Imperial officer that had proven to be useful to a pirate captain.

  Turning to Ang, she gave him a questioning look. “What
’s the matter?”

  Ang made a face that shifted through a few expressions before settling into a frown. “Cap’n, it just seems too easy. Most of the Emperor’s ships are trying to catch you, and the Mechanics and the Mages are trying to kill you. Nothing should be easy.”

  “He’s right there,” Liv agreed. The older woman leaned on the starboard rail of the quarterdeck, looking toward their quarry. “There’re no other masts visible?”

  “No,” Jules said. “I scanned the whole horizon. If he has hidden help, they’re well beyond him.”

  “Not to his starboard. They’d be grazing the reefs there.”

  “They’d be in the reefs,” Ang said. “He’s steering closer to shore than I’d be comfortable with in these waters.”

  “We are chasing him,” Jules said, leaning on the railing beside Liv.

  “Ripping his hull open on those rocks wouldn’t help him get away,” Ang said. “He’s too close to them.”

  “Maybe there’s a stupid owner aboard demanding it,” Liv said, frowning as well. “Or maybe their captain knows these waters well enough to think he can dare waters like that, maybe even lure us onto one of the reefs?”

  “Maybe,” Jules said. She glanced up at the sails, all drawing well. Unless the wind shifted, there’d be no need to adjust the sails. But she worried over Ang’s concerns. Ang had been at sea a lot longer than she had. His instincts were worth listening to.

  She gazed toward the fleeing ship again, asking herself a question that had grown familiar in the last few months. What would Mak do? The Sun Queen’s former captain had been the only authority figure Jules had met in her life who had tried to teach her instead of trying to break her. But he’d had far too short a time to work with her, and at times like this Jules felt the ache of how much she still had to learn. The crew of the Sun Queen had voted her captain despite her being only twenty-one years of age, but more than once Jules had wished she had as much confidence in herself as her crew did. “Ang, Liv, what do you think Captain Mak would be thinking right now?”

  “Mak?” Liv shook her head. “You got to think for yourself, Captain, not worry about what Mak would’ve done.”

  “She’s right to ask,” Ang protested. “Mak could out-sail anybody, and he could smell trouble a hundred lances off. I’m thinking now of what he used to say when something looked easy. If it looks easy, he’d tell me, that likely means there’s something you don’t know about it.”

  “That’s no Imperial galley,” Liv said. “And there’s no help lurking nearby or we’d see it. He’s just a cargo ship, and by the way he’s riding he’s got a good load aboard. We need the money that cargo’ll bring,” she added meaningfully.

  Jules nodded, her eyes on the waves where they washed against the other ship’s hull. Heavily laden, probably with salt out of the Imperial mines. With the Emperor’s warships scouring the waters off the Imperial coast for any sign of Jules, it had seemed prudent to seek safer waters for a while. But there were lean pickings this far west, so the Sun Queen hadn’t found many ships to prey on in recent days. Even the pirate of the prophecy had to worry about such mundane things as having enough money to keep the ship in repair, buy food and water and rum, and keep the crew happy. “But he’s out here alone. No Imperial warships in sight even though they’ve been prowling this coast looking for us. What are we not seeing? I think we need to get closer and find out.”

  “How much closer?” Ang said.

  “We’re upwind of him, and we’re faster. If we have to open the distance quickly, we can do that. We’ll get close enough to look him over, see if there’re any signs of a trap, before we go alongside. I got enough of a look at his deck to be sure he doesn’t have a ballista mounted, so he can’t hurt us if we’re out of crossbow range.” She’d trained on crossbows under the far from gentle guidance of Imperial centurions, and knew how far they could fire and have a good chance of a hit. “Fifty lances. No hand-held crossbow will have decent accuracy at that range. Take us in to about fifty lances from him and hold us there.”

  Ang nodded. “Aye, Cap’n.”

  “Liv,” Jules said, “get the boarding party armed.”

  As Liv ran off to see to the task of arming most of the crew, Jules went back down the ladder and into the stern cabin. The captain’s cabin. She still thought of it as Mak’s, but it belonged to her now.

  She didn’t require much preparation, strapping on a belt from which a cutlass hung on one hip. On the other hip was an oddly-shaped leather sheath for a weapon the Mechanics called a revolver. She drew out the strange weapon, looking at it and wondering again at how it could have been made. The Mechanics guarded the secrets of their technology with deadly and highly efficient means, leaving even smiths among the commons unable to guess the methods by which the metal of the revolver had been made and shaped.

  “You going to carry that?” Liv asked from the doorway.

  “I need it,” Jules said. “You never know when I might run into another Mage.” She settled the weapon carefully back into the holster.

  “If you run into any Mechanics, they’ll kill you just for having that. How many commons do you think have ever held one of those? Let alone shot one?”

  “I might be the first,” Jules said. “The Mechanics thought they’d use me to kill Mages.”

  “They were right,” Liv said. “I don’t know how many other commons have ever killed a Mage. Maybe none.”

  “Then it’s about time someone started.” Jules felt in her pocket, pulling out the two objects kept safe in there. “Do you know about these? The Mechanics call them cartridges. They’re what the revolver shoots, like the bolts for a crossbow. But a cartridge can only be used once, then it’s empty and useless.”

  “How many of them have you got?”

  “Eight left of the eleven I had after the Mechanics gave me more that last time.”

  Liv shook her head. “That’d be the time they realized that they hadn’t been actually using you, that you’d been using them?”

  Jules’ grin at the memory felt tense. “Good thing I didn’t snap and speak my mind until after they’d given me more cartridges. But…all’s well, right? I got away after.”

  “With Mechanics shooting and a Mage dragon breathing down your neck,” Liv scoffed. “They say nobody else has ever been that close to a dragon’s jaws and lived to tell of it.”

  “But I did live, didn’t I?” Looking down at the weapon again, Jules glanced at Liv. “I should teach you and Ang how to use this. Just in case something happens to me.”

  “No,” Liv said. “I’ll not touch that thing. Not just because the Mechanics Guild demands the death of any common who meddles with their devices—and why should I invite as much attention from them as you have to deal with—but because I have no use for something that kills by means I don’t understand. It could do me in, couldn’t it?”

  “I don’t think so,” Jules said. “The Mechanics told me if I tried to use it against one of them it would explode and kill me.” She raised the weapon, smiling again. “Someday I’m going to try it anyway.”

  “Save it for Mages,” Liv said. “Jules, sometimes you scare even me.”

  Jules shrugged and put the revolver back into the sheath the Mechanics called a holster. “Maybe you don’t need a Mechanic weapon to kill Mages. Liv, I killed two Mages on this ship, and I did it using a cutlass.”

  “Yeah, you could do that. But…Jules, you’re different than the rest of us.”

  “Am I?”

  Liv sighed and raised her eyes upward like an aggravated parent. “I know you don’t like being reminded of the prophecy—”

  “Do you think I ever forget it? For even a moment?” Jules turned her head to look through the cabin’s small stern windows at the sea, though what she saw wasn’t the restless waters but a memory seared into her mind. “I can still see as clear as day the eyes of that Mage as he stared at me. Ever since then my life hasn’t belonged to me.”

  “And you’v
e been so careful with it,” Liv grumbled sarcastically. “You shouldn’t be running any risks. Not until—”

  “That’s enough of that, Liv.” Jules grasped the dagger in a sheath at the small of her back, checking to be sure it could be drawn easily. “I won’t spend my life in hiding. I’m going to do things that that daughter of my line will hear about and know she has to match, whenever she shows up. Mak thought it might be hundreds of years.”

  “You’d better hope that daughter doesn’t inherit your stubbornness,” Liv said.

  “She’ll probably need it.” Jules kept her eyes on the waves behind the Sun Queen, feeling the now-familiar frustration. “How can anyone ever do that? Mechanics and Mages hate each other, and to them commons like you and me might as well be cattle or horses. But this daughter of my line is going to unite some of them, get them to work together, to free everyone? It’s impossible.”

  “If a Mage prophesized it, it has to come true,” Liv insisted. “That’s why the Mages, and the Mechanics, want you dead before you start that line. And that’s why for the first time the commons have hope.”

  “And that’s why half the men in the world seem to think they’d be doing me a great favor by getting me pregnant so they could claim credit for the things that daughter of my line will do,” Jules said.

  “If you keep slitting the throats of those that proposition you, they may start being a little less eager to ask.”

  Jules laughed. “There’s that to hope for! I didn’t have nearly as many men bothering me for a while after I knifed that jerk Vlad. Let’s go see if we’re close enough to give that other ship a good look over.”

  Out on deck again, Jules paused to gauge the distance, nodding in approval. “I’m going up again!” she called to Ang, and grabbed the rigging to swing herself up onto the lowest ratlines.

  She went all the way up to the highest top, where one of the crew was stationed to keep watch. “See anyone else, Kyl?”

  Kyl shook his head. “Maybe a masthead way off to port, but barely showing. That way.”