The Sea Beyond the Sea
The ferries go where the charts are. The Reaches are where the charts stop. Bring your own ship, your own crew, and your own reasons, for the sea will not supply them.
Beyond the waters that the ferries cross lies another ocean, one that does not share a coastline with the mainland and is not on its maps: the Corsair Reaches. Warm reefs and smugglers’ coves in the Shallows; fog banks and wrecks in the Blackwake Strait; and in the south a storm-belt around a drowned volcano, which is the Maw. Some three-score islands lie scattered across it, from Gull Rock and Driftwood Cay to the Widow’s Teeth and the Bones of the Kraken, and a guild ship can sail for days between them on the world’s clock and never see another sail; or see far too many.
Only a guild that owns a ship may go there. The Crown sells the berths at Saltmarrow, and the shipwrights there will build a sloop for a new company and a man-o’-war for a rich one, and the chartmaker will sell the common charts any day. The rare ones are found at sea, in wrecks and in the hands of the dead. The legendary ones are never sold. They must be lifted from the fog over hidden places by those who sail into it.
Saltmarrow and the Admiralty
Saltmarrow is the Crown’s harbour in the Reaches: a walled port of grey stone with foundries smoking on the quays, turning out iron and powder and shot for the Navy, and paying very well for spices, pearls and sugar. The guilds keep their ships at berths beside it, and the Admiralty watches them, as it watches everything that floats.
The Saltmarrow Admiralty is the Crown’s navy in the Reaches, and it is the only part of the Crown’s armed strength that the Charter of Banners did not replace. It keeps the worst of the pirates out of the Shallows, mostly, and its cutters and frigates hunt the Brethren across the Strait. A guild that sinks pirates will find the Admiralty friendly, and then honoured, and in time exalted, and will be given commissions and fine charts and the right to fly the Crown’s pennant under its own. A guild that sinks the Navy will find all that in reverse, and very quickly.
Rumhollow and the Brethren
In the fogs of the Blackwake Strait lies Rumhollow, the pirates’ own port, where rum and sugar flow, where plundered pearls change hands in the open street, and where shot, powder and planks fetch a fortune, because nobody in Rumhollow makes them and everybody uses them.
The Brethren of Rumhollow are the pirate brotherhood of the Reaches. They have a code, which they keep, and a council of captains, which they mostly keep, and a long hatred of the Admiralty, which they keep above all. They are not wholly villains: there are Tidekin among them, and runaways from the Saltwind, and debtors and dreamers and those who simply wished to be somewhere the Crown was not. A guild that sinks the Navy will find a welcome in Rumhollow. They keep their worst secrets in Blackwake Grotto, a sea cave under the Strait where Gunner Maddox and the Twin Corsairs guard what the Brethren do not want the Navy to find, and where Mother Brine keeps the Brethren’s oldest bargain with the sea.
Between the two, and serving both when it pays, are the merchant towns: Gullspire, a timber town on stilts, where wood and cloth are cheap; and the Coral Market, a floating bazaar of spices, pearls and tonic out of the far south. Out past the Maw stand Emberhold, Saltcrown and Hollowpeak, the islands worth fighting over, which change hands between the guilds by force of arms.
The Maw
When Vaelmere drowned, a mountain of fire in the southern sea fell in upon itself, and the sea poured into the hole and boiled, and the storm that rose from it has never stopped. That is the Maw: a wall of black weather around the Drowned Caldera, through which only the best-handled ships can pass, and inside which lie the richest islands in the Reaches and the worst things in the sea.
The Tidekin say the Maw is the Dreamer’s breathing, now that he lies nearer the surface. They say, too, that the great beasts of the Maw are not beasts at all but his dreams, given flesh by the splinter of the Hollow in him: the Kraken of the Maw, whose tentacles slam the deck and whose ink blinds the gunners; the Ashscale Sea Serpent, that coils round a ship and breathes steam; and the Drowned Leviathan, which is the oldest of them and the largest, and where it dives the sea opens into whirlpools. When one of them is killed, another just like it is dreamed up again before the week is out.
Tidegrave Hold
There was a fortress once on a rock at the edge of the Maw, built by the first Admiralty to watch the storm. It was called Tidegrave, and it was meant ironically, and in the hundred and twentieth year of the Crown it ceased to be.
The garrison had taken a prisoner from a wreck on the rocks below: a woman with sea-green hair who did not speak, and would not eat, and sang. The jailer, Brinehook, put her in the deepest cell, and she sang there for a month, and on the last night of the month the sea came up the walls to listen. She sang the fortress under. They call her the Siren of the Hold, and she is singing still.
Two captains were in harbour at Tidegrave that night. They went down with the same ship, and they still argue about whose fault it was; the sailors of the Reaches call them Captains Harrow and Hask, in one breath, as if they were one person, which neither of them can stand. Brinehook kept his cells when the fortress stood above the waves, and he keeps them still, with a hook for a hand and barnacles for company. And in the cistern under the fortress, where the Siren’s song first called it up, lives the thing that pulled the fortress down: the Deepmother, enormous, a dream of the Deep given flesh.
For eleven hundred years no one knew where Tidegrave lay. Now the guild ships have found the charts to it, and the guilds go down into it, ten at a time, with the tide rising in every fight.
The Drowned Places
The Brinewrack is a treasure galleon on a reef in the Shallows, half under water, that went down with her hold full of gold and her crew still aboard. Her crew never left. Bosun Barnacle keeps the deck, the Tidecaller keeps the weather, and Captain Gullet keeps the gold, and will not give it up to the living, though he has no use for it whatsoever.
The Drowned Spire was the great lighthouse of the old Admiralty, which stood at the mouth of the Maw to guide ships through the storm. The Maw swallowed it whole, and its lamp is still burning at the bottom of the sea. Admiral Veyne commanded there, and he commands there still. The Coral Sentinel guards its door, the Siren Choir sings in its gallery, and the Broodmother Skarra nests in its foundations; and the light at the top still turns, slowly, in the black water, guiding ships that will never come.
The sailors of the Reaches will tell you that the light of the Drowned Spire can sometimes be seen from the surface, on still nights, very deep and very green, and that a ship that steers for it will never be seen again.