THE TRYPHON ODYSSEY (The Voyage Book 1) Read online

  THE TRYPHON ODDYSEY

  THE VOYAGE BOOK ONE

  S. D. Howarth

  About the Book

  The world of Sanctuary is not a kind place. Many races have fled there across the ages. Fewer still have survived and flourished—or survived. Humankind is the most recent to seek refuge, and the most cataclysmic. Since their arrival within the city-state of Atlantis, the embassies and tribes of man have formed new nations across several continents. Their misuse of magic in a prior age turned the seas acidic and drove their ancient Gods mad. The great contradiction of the current age is that it is only with magic that sailing ships like warship Tryphon criss-cross the oceans to protect trade routes.

  Navigator Edouard Van Reiver departs from shipboard routine and petty politics when he stops Tryphon against age-old superstitions to rescue two survivors, inviting aboard blood, fire and death.

  Sunjammer Gabriel Dagmar squanders his precocious talents through daily tedium to hide from the more terrifying depths of magic.

  Lady Carla's escort mission is in tatters, and needing rescue from the acidic sea is the least of several concerns.

  Coxswain Grimm will need every one of his decades of experience to keep the Tryphon men alive, the officers on course, and quell the threat within spilling over.

  No good deed goes unpunished. Events require they assume new roles to fight an unknown assailant, as their anti-pirate patrol mission veers into the unknown. They will need skill, luck, or a hint that the Gods of Sanctuary still exist to rebalance the scales of a power play that could tear asunder the fragile balance the World of Sanctuary teeters upon. Can they hold the line and do their duty, or fail and doom their Spires Kingdom?

  The Tryphon Odyssey

  THE VOYAGE BOOK ONE

  A World of Sanctuary Novel

  By S.D. Howarth

  A WORLD OF SANCTUARY NOVEL

  © S. D. Howarth 2021

  THE VOYAGE — BOOK ONE

  THE TRYPHON ODYSSEY

  Copyright © 2021 S. D. Howarth

  All rights reserved.

  Cover Art © Felix Ortiz

  Cover Design © Author

  Cartography © Author

  CAD © Author

  Edited by Hal Duncan

  Also available in paperback.

  Dedication:-

  To Elspeth, Alexander & Elizabeth

  My Family.

  "Ballarn discovered the Gods of Gnositos are real. Their blessings available for a price. Our heroes now live the myths and legends inspired by the glory of ancient Atlantis. In times of strife, our need for men and women to sacrifice all has never been greater."

  Lyamon,

  Chronicler to Duke Jasper of Poitiers,

  General of the Spires Kingdom Armies.

  Contents

  I. Tryphon

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  II. Adrift

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  III. Tuvala Isle

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Chapter 45

  Chapter 46

  Dramatis Personae

  Dramatis Personae

  Deities — Spires & Atlantia

  Deities — Elvenkind

  Glossary — General Terms

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Part I

  Tryphon

  1

  Second Mate Edouard Van Reiver watched the afternoon light dancing along the wave crests like unruly children playing tag. He felt no less childlike, if truth be told—as he had on his first sea voyage from Ostlingen to Beauval with his father's largest mercantile contract—to witness the magic and majesty of the sea with awe. He wondered for a moment, as he had then with a boyish fascination, how different the ocean would seem not orange but blue, as his ancestors had witnessed it. Nigh impossible to imagine, he found, with fourteen millennia since humanity's arrival in this realm and now. Fourteen thousand years since humanity had opened a portal between worlds and crashed through into Sanctuary, hundreds of tribes trapped within the cracked walls of the city of Atlantis, bickering worse than cats in a barrel. Three hundred years later, the Greeks had attempted a return with the same magics and destroyed their city states, their Gods, and the stability of the southern hemisphere. They'd changed the very water of its seas. Would the nations ever solve and reverse the leaching of acid into the oceans from belching volcanoes? Gods, this world was rotting.

  He dismissed both childish memories back into the past. Mighty Tryphon was the future for the Spires principality and his own naval career. A design bred for war, with three mighty masts of three square sails apiece and twice the arcane power of any warship from within the crimson sunjammer dome inset into the aft castle. The various reds and oranges swirled in mesmerising arcane forms on the dwarven gem-glass, like oils driven across water on the shambling tides of fate and destiny. The magic kept Tryphon's hull safe, to form a bubble and allow it to skim over, rather than cut through acidic orange seas. Protected in a mystic embrace, powered by sunlight from the two suns, Tryphon could make a third again the speed of a regular sailing ship. It made the aft castle hum with a discordant drone and pleasant heat to counter the afternoon breeze—unless you had a sunjammer like Gerad speeding up their cerrack in sickening jerks mismatched to the wind on canvas. What was it like to sail on seas by wind alone? For an instant his mind wandered, pulled into a childish fantasy before jarring reality pulled him back.

  Van Reiver clung one-handed from the ratlines abaft the midship steerboard catapult platform and leaned further outboard to scrutinise the sailors scrambling down the boarding net. In his mind's eye, he distracted himself from Gerad by envisaging the nearby catapult launching a fiery comet towards some elusive pirate. He could almost feel the ship jerk to the weapon release—and the heady, acrid aroma of burnt naphtha surge into his nostrils. The West Spires navy had worked hard in the last decade against numerically superior pirates with improved ship designs and deck artillery to batter their threat into burning submission. Albian may be West Spires first colony—albeit by accident—but outside the city walls and port the war with the pirates of Freeport raged on.

  Spread across two continents, the Spires Kingdom was immense, though with a lower population in the older, western nation. West Spires principality and Spires Central were on one continent, neighboured to the north by Kelta tribes and the Friscian kingdom from where Van Reiver's family originated. To their east lay the richer East Spires principality, at peace for now with Danska and Germania kingdoms. Across the Inner Sea to the south sweltered the Babylonian Kingdom. And sandwiched between the continents was The Citadel
, the isle of the autonomous centre for magic.

  Of all the neighbouring territories though, nowhere had caused so much trouble for the West Spires navy as the solitary Spires colony of Albian, off to the north west. The swamp to the west of Albian clutched Freeport in a diseased embrace.

  No nation wanted the land Freeport perched upon. The inescapable fact of the isle not having a name was summary enough. The Atlanteans had tried, tried again, and given up. They'd returned over the central mountains to their coastal outposts and legion forts, slammed the doors and driven the bolts home. The Demeta tribe had snatched the land on the east coast up to the central mountains, but done little with their ambition outstripping their means. They made a profit of a kind, by selling grain and slaves to Freeport amongst other things. Ex-slaves, merchants and minor nobility from Atlantis dabbled in Freeport along with rogue elements from West and Central Spires fleeing the king's justice. The solitary saving grace was location. The biggest trade routes on Sanctuary lay vulnerable to anyone based in Freeport with ill intent and skill at navigating shallow water. In addition, the marshland behind made it impossible for the determined to root out mischief and why the pirates used shallow drafted vessels, with copious sail to prey on slower victims.

  So, it fell to the Tryphon to patrol these acid seas. Each day was weapon drill and simulated boat practise. Every week they had a live ordnance exercise as though their lives depended on it. In part, it did. Few captains would risk expensive repairs by slamming hulls when boarding a pirate. Captain Bullsen had the reputation of making boarding irrelevant by sinking the bastards at range—yet they still drilled.

  Van Reiver sighed. At their current rate of slovenly descent, curses alone would meet the mystery craft, bobbing a hundred yards beyond Tryphon's bows and ahead of the crewmen. Was he being harsh? He swung aft as Gerad ceased all forward thrust through the sunjammer plating. He glanced over his shoulder to the quarterdeck to see Captain Bullsen staring back without expression. The captain twitched a shoulder to his second mate and Tryphon's navigator as though to 'get on with it'. Fair point, he knew Bullsen's desires were a firm order.

  "Shall I winch it aboard, sir, and spare you the faffin'?" Coxswain Grimm inclined his head at the capstan where seamen loitered, chatting to a slouched Garshum who held the brake lever as he swayed to the motion. Van Reiver considered and shook his head as their sails slackened. More at Garshum picking the inside of his ear with grubby fingers than Grimm's practical suggestion.

  "Can you reach it?" Van Reiver called down to the foremost seaman, waving a boat hook one-handed while he threaded his other arm through the hemp net to stand inches over the small acidic orange waves slapping on the plating. The man shook his head and readied himself. As if preparing herself in tandem, the bulk of the war cerrack Tryphon settled lower into the water as their sunjammer halted their drifting momentum. The usual whine from the dome's crystal squawked and faded into a sporadic susurration of arcane energies as the rigging rattled a protest at losing speed. Van Reiver threw a look of concern to the coxswain, who fingered a chain of beads around his short, thick neck.

  "He's approaching a little on the fast side, but our sunjammer needs to prove himself every so often," Grimm said so only Van Reiver could hear. "Old Bullsen will patch any hole with the man if he botches it, or skin him for chart paper for you if he keeps up the damn juddering."

  "Hah! It is what we find that bothers me. We should not be running across boats out here. Superstition decrees we leave them, and I do not need another lecture on our duty and due diligence when on a war patrol." Van Reiver's ears still rang from the last one, and remembering the faces of Third Mate Comace and Quartermaster Hadley smirking in the background failed to improve his mood. Whispers in shadows. Oh, the joy of sailing the amber with ambitious officers with noble titles, capricious egos and deep pockets.

  Grimm didn't answer. He glanced instead to the dual catapults on either midship platform with loaded naphtha casks, as though any threat was meaningless.

  Ten feet to go as Gerad dropped thrust to let the boat drift into them. Eight feet. Six feet, and the sailor, Brak, leaned forward, his boathook lancing out. A splash, a stifled curse, a thud, and then the seamen tugged it alongside, a cream-painted carvel boat sixteen feet from bow to stern, mostly blanketed by ragged sailcloth.

  "Ware the damn hull!" Grimm barked as a pair of seamen scrambled to tie the boat onto the net, and another belatedly dropped a hemp fender between Tryphon's copper hull plating and the other craft.

  "We should leave the fuckers, we all know we should leave the cursed alone. Mark my words—it'll bring nothing but blood, fire, and death!" Garshum muttered, pitching his words to carry to loitering crew on the main deck as his weathered face twisted in contempt. "Let the rot an' amber 'ave 'em. Fuck 'em before they taint us."

  "Stow it, you have yer orders." Grimm stilled the rumble of discontent with a glare at the man and looked to Tryphon's navigation officer. Van Reiver gestured with his free hand to wait and gulped a breath. He suffered a moment of vertigo at the twenty-foot drop as Brak looked up, lips forming a question.

  "Is it just the two—no-one else under there?" Van Reiver shouted, resisting the urge to plummet into the orange swell slapping their hull.

  Standing half on the net, Brak stretched a leg to the forrard thwart and toed up the sailcloth to form a hole. Shortening his grip on the boathook, he pried up the crumpled sail to peer beneath. "Aye sir, an old man and woman. There're some cases midships, but no crystal mount or cargo."

  "Are they alive?" Van Reiver asked the next obvious question. Brak looked at Paska hanging above him like a seventeen-stone ape and passed up the boathook. Brak slid along the cargo net, stepping on each thwart, and prodded the man with his foot to no effect. The seaman looked up and shrugged. Van Reiver clenched his teeth, knuckles whitening on the ratline as Grimm looked skywards for inspiration.

  "Don't wait for him to rot, check 'em for a bloody pulse," snarled Seaman Vaska from the middle of the cargo net above the smirking Brak. Three score years of wiry seadog scrambled down the net with enviable grace through chattering men, made easy with one hand ending in a steel hook. "Get on with it!"

  Van Reiver stifled a smile as the greybeard cut through bullshit and petulance by waving his hook at Brak. Pulling a face, Brak crouched and reached for the man, pausing several inches from the neck as though undecided on what he might find, or what was safe to touch. At crude sniggers from men lining Tryphon's rail, his hand flicked against the neck for a count of five to prove his mettle.

  "He's out, but has a pulse," he called to the crowd and shuffled towards the woman.

  "Careful, she might bite," Paska muttered above him to general laughter from the main deck. Ignoring him, Brak reached out but had his hand batted away in a convulsive twitch of filthy sailcloth.

  "Fuck!" He gasped, convulsing backwards over an empty thwart in an explosion of thudding flesh and ribald laughter. Instead of anger, Van Reiver saw him scramble up and thrash an arm for silence. It took endless seconds, but when the deck crew quietened, Brak leaned in, listening to words only he could hear.

  "What was that?" Van Reiver called, feeling urgency build at the thought of time being wasted. He didn't need an overactive imagination to appreciate an impatient captain staring daggers at his back and with one eye to the north and the pirates based in the swamp hell of Freeport.

  "She said they're West Spires folk, sir, an' can we help 'em?" Shading his eyes, Brak added. "Do I cut 'em free, or haul 'em up?"

  Van Reiver dithered as the woman slumped back, seeming tiny from where he stood. It was his responsibility, on his shoulders, as he'd altered Tryphon's course to investigate. Heads nodded, though Garshum had the right of it. Shit. Now everyone looked to him to decide, or to see if he chickened on the decision and passed it up to Captain Bullsen. If he cut them loose and someone else found them... that could be a problem if it were a crew of flexible morality—And it'd leave him—and him alone with t
he guilt of abandoning them back to the sea... Fuck! It would make him no better than the pirate haven they were sailing to purge.

  "Is there a ships' name?" Van Reiver shouted, playing for dithering time. They were far enough south in the Western Ocean to make it unlikely to be a pirate encounter, but it wasn't beyond the impossible. Deep hulled merchant ships had vanished, which made seamen and merchants alike nervous. Sailors of all nations had taken a deeper interest in nautical superstition—even the ridiculous ones. Brak made a show of looking and shrugged. Van Reiver ground his teeth. Typical bloody half-arsed behaviour.

  "A clear sea, just them." Vaska opined and hooked his way up the tumblehome.

  "Hoisting the boat will be faster, sir," Grimm repeated. Van Reiver looked at the older man and could guess what he was thinking. It could be them one day. Power crumbles when ambition wanes. He was an officer in the West Spires navy, regardless of how others saw him, and he would help those in need. He would do his duty.