Pirate Wars (12 page)

“One of them is dead. You killed him. And the other…I don’t know if I would still call him a polliwog.”

“We killed—” Jolly fell silent. Deep inside there awakened a bitter suspicion.

But before she could get around to busying herself more exhaustively with the thought, the ravine took a sharp bend. The ground rose. When Jolly looked up the incline, she realized where Aina and the kobalins had brought her.

Over her rose the kobalin hill. From down here it looked like a gigantic tower, which was only imperceptibly wider at the base than in its upper regions. If they climbed it the zigzag way that led upward on the outside, there was a chance that Munk might see them from afar. A thin hope, certainly, but for a moment it gave her new courage.

Until she discovered a second troop of kobalins that were busy with a round boulder several fathoms above her. The creatures placed poles under the stone colossus as levers and rolled it aside. Behind it, an opening in the rock wall became visible. A gateway to the nest of the kobalins, not high, not wide—just big enough to push a human through it.

“What are you going to do with me?”

“You will remain here until I have you fetched.” Aina
smiled. “Then everything will be over, and you will have the opportunity to make a decision. For or against life. Until then you have time enough to think about it.”

They reached the hole in the rock, which lay far below the level of the other peaks. If Munk were swimming toward her over the ravines, he wouldn’t be able to see her from up there.

The kobalins transported her through the opening, net and all. Jolly stumbled, further entangling herself in the mesh. She fell down a slope of smooth stone with a curse. Over her she heard the screams of the two kobalins who’d pushed her. As she lay there, stunned for a moment, she saw Aina standing alone in the opening.

“Excuse them,” the girl said angrily. “They are uncouth creatures. I have punished them for their roughness.”

Jolly didn’t see what Aina had done to the kobalins, but since the two of them had disappeared, she could guess. The cold-bloodedness of her opponent terrified her anew.

She pulled the net away from her face so that Aina could see the hatred in her eyes. “How long am I supposed to stay here?”

“Not long. The battle for Aelenium will soon be decided. After that we’ll overrun the settlements on the coast and then…well, we’ll see.”

“How did he do it? I mean, how did the Maelstrom get you on his side?”

Aina tilted her head again, as she often did when she was surprised about something. “You still haven’t grasped it, have you?”

Jolly’s gut twisted. “Then explain it to me.”

“Not now.” Shaking her head, Aina stepped back and gave her creatures a sign. “I will come again. Then we’ll talk.”

A grating noise indicated that the levers were being employed again. The crack grew narrower.

“And Munk?” roared Jolly. Her legs kicked the net away, but it was too late to run up now. “What about Munk?”

Aina made a motion of her hand and the boulder stopped for several seconds. “Munk?” she asked with genuine astonishment. “But I am his friend!”

She didn’t laugh, didn’t even smile, as she stepped back and finally left the opening free. The seriousness in her pale features terrified Jolly more than all the other things that were happening in those seconds.

She called Aina’s name, but it was too late. At the last moment something glowing shot through the crack. Then the rock sealed the last gap with a deep rumble and lay there, a weight of tons.

Silence returned. No sounds from outside penetrated the rock, and nothing moved around Jolly either. She blinked away the tears that had filled her eyes, more from rage than fear. Blurrily she gazed at the handful of lantern fish that swam around her like a glowing swarm of insects.

“You?” she asked weakly, but she couldn’t even rejoice about that. Instead she looked over her shoulder, in the only direction that was still open to her.

This was a long, extended cave, whose end she couldn’t make out.

Her knees trembling, she got to her feet and looked up at the blocked opening one last time. The formation of fish exploded, for a moment they whizzed around in confusion, and then they formed a densely clustered ball of light over Jolly’s head.

Jolly didn’t need their help. Polliwog vision worked inside the hill, too.

First hesitantly, then more and more decidedly, she began walking deeper into the lifeless stillness of the kobalin nest.

The lord of
the kobalins was making his circuit around the city. He glided through the churning waters not far beneath the surface, discernible from above only as a shadow.

Griffin guided the ray behind the kobalin lord, about five fathoms above the waves, and followed his course. So close to him, the rain of dead fish was a repellent, often painful business—aside from the fact that they interfered with Griffin’s vision. The scaly bodies glittered and dazzled in the light of the rising sun.

Behind him Ismael had been cursing ceaselessly. Each time he raised one of the rifles, a fish cadaver fell onto the barrel and pushed it down. Getting off an accurate shot was impossible in this stinking chaos.

“I really don’t know if this was such a good idea,” the marksman shouted over the racket.

“It’s the fear of their master that’s driving the kobalins forward.” Griffin twisted his head to avoid the lashing arms of an octopus as it fell from the sky in front of him. With his left hand he pushed the cadaver off the ray’s body. “If we succeed in killing the lord of the kobalins, then—”

“Then is the battle over?” scoffed Ismael. “Do you really believe that?”

“No,” replied Griffin coldly. “But it’s a first step, isn’t it? This whole battle is wheeling in circles. It’s time to do something that none of us expected.”

He heard himself say these words and thought they didn’t sound as if they came from his own mouth. But that also was a consequence of this war. They would all be changed men when this was over, if a spark of life was still left in them. And as Griffin guided the ray over the foaming mountains of waves, he seriously questioned whether he hadn’t already changed long ago, in that moment when he decided to fight on Aelenium’s side. Even earlier—when he made the decision to stick with Jolly.

The dead fish pelted down onto the ray’s wings. The animal had trouble maintaining its altitude. Both riders were being thoroughly shaken, their flight path careening up and down. However, Griffin succeeded in keeping the animal on the track of the mighty shadow as he pursued his course through the sea.

The shape of the creature’s body was almost impossible to make out. His outline appeared to change constantly; it was sometimes extended lengthwise, then oval, then again
polymorphic with numerous outgrowths. He was as big as four or five rowboats and only showed up vaguely against the blue-black of the deep, which led Griffin to suspect that his body must be transparent like dark glass.

Griffin had expected an especially large kobalin or a kind of twin of the Acherus. But now, up close, the lord of the deep tribes did not resemble that creature. He was completely different, and that caused Griffin far greater fear than any giant kobalin or a golem of body parts. So numerous were the terrors he’d met in recent weeks that he feared the unexpected more than any known monstrosity.

“What the devil sort of beast is that?” asked Ismael, who’d given up trying to target it with his weapons. Instead he was now holding on with one hand and fending off the falling fish cadavers with the other.

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“They say you and the polliwog, you already met him one time.”

“We were in his vicinity. But we didn’t see him. Maybe we wouldn’t be here if we had.”

“You know how to encourage a fellow.”

Griffin reined in the ray, for the lord of the kobalins had slowed under the water. Had he noticed that his trail was being followed from the air?

They received the answer in the form of half a dozen lances whizzing in their direction. Through the fish rain, Griffin hadn’t been able to see the kobalins swimming in the waves near their master. Ismael cried out as one of the barb
points grazed his shoulder, but it wasn’t a serious hit. All the others missed their target, for the kobalins couldn’t aim in the midst of this hail of dead fish either.

“All right?” Griffin called back worriedly. “Or shall I turn around?”

Ismael gave a pained laugh. “Not for anything in the world! As long as my head’s still on my shoulders, we’re staying in the air.”

“Don’t tempt fate.” And with that Griffin pulled on the ray’s reins and made it sink steeply down until its underside touched the waves. It was a dangerous maneuver, especially for the animal, but Griffin’s calculation worked out. Two kobalins were rammed by the ray’s gigantic head, torn from the water by the force of the impact, and flung away. The others instantly dove and scattered in all directions.

Griffin pulled the ray up again, but kept it at an angle behind the gigantic dark shadow under the surface.

“Can you fly the ray?” he roared into the headwind.

“Of course,” retorted Ismael, and then his tone of voice changed. “Hey, wait a minute, you aren’t serious!”

Griffin pulled his long guardsman’s dagger out of his belt. “What else? You’ll never get him from up here with bullets.”

“You can’t do that! That’s madness!”

“Any other suggestions?”

“They’ll shred you before you ever get near that thing.”

“At the moment he’s alone.”

“It may look that way from up here. But all the same he’s
something like their commander of the army. No general goes into battle without his bodyguard.”

“The battle isn’t out here, Ismael. The shores are lost, the first wall breached. The battle is raging up there in the streets now. This dirty beast is just watching it all from a distance. And it really doesn’t seem as if it’s swarming with kobalins here.”

“Don’t do it!”

But Griffin ignored the marksman’s objections. He turned halfway around in the saddle. “When I jump, you slide forward in the saddle and take the reins. Hear?”

“You’re crazy!” Ismael sounded as if he were seriously considering hammering reason into Griffin with the rifle barrel.

Before the marksman could stop him, Griffin stood up in the saddle. Straddle-legged he stood on the ray’s shoulders, the reins still in his hands. The wind blew his many braids back; they rustled at his ears like palm fronds in a monsoon.

He looked down past the ray’s head. Any minute they’d be exactly over the lord of the kobalins. Griffin was now convinced that the lance attack had been an accident—if the creature really had noticed them, he would certainly have dived.

Or else…he was waiting for Griffin. Perhaps he was hungry to get involved in the battle himself. Even if he could only demonstrate his power over a pirate boy.

“Griffin!”

He’d figured that Ismael would try once more to hold him back. He paid no attention to the shout.

The marksman grabbed him by the trouser leg. “Griffin, damn it, wait and look at that!”

For a moment Griffin’s determination wavered—and then he also saw what was approaching them in the water from the left. He had to hold on tightly to the tautened reins or he would certainly have lost his balance as he stood there.

A gigantic dark phantom shot through the waves toward the lord of the kobalins, many times larger than he and incomparably more massive. Like a triumphant blast on the trumpet, a mighty column of water rose above the waves.

“Jasconius!” Griffin exclaimed.

“Your whale friend.” Ismael’s voice broke. “By my faith, he sooner makes a fair opponent for that bastard!”

Griffin still hesitated. Then he realized that it would have been suicide to plunge into the deep now. He would inevitably be crushed in the collision of the two giants. He quickly slid back into the saddle and guided the ray in a tight circle around the arena of the duel.

The whale and the lord of the kobalins came together. It happened too far under the surface for Griffin to be able to see the details. He saw only that the transparent figure of the monster changed again shortly before the collision and flowed to a kind of star, as if he intended to hurl his sharp extensions against Jasconius. But his points did not possess enough solidity to stop the whale. Powerfully and with murderous strength Jasconius crashed against the creature, and then both disappeared under a boiling carpet of foam and three-foot waves.

Ismael swore again. “I can’t see them anymore!”

Griffin didn’t utter a sound. He was afraid for Jasconius and Ebenezer, and instantly he became aware of how crazy it was to have planned to throw himself on the lord of the kobalins with only a dagger. A voice inside him whispered that even the whale might not have a chance against an army leader of the Maelstrom. Not even he.

Griffin would have given anything to have been able to intervene in the fight. But there was nothing to see in the raging waves. The sea boiled. Cries floated on the wind, and this time they were not wafting from the city. They came from everywhere at the same time, a screeching and bellowing that made Griffin desperately want to press his hands over his ears. Stiff and pale, his fingers clutched the leather, and the euphoria he’d felt just moments before at Jasconius’s appearance turned to blind panic. At the same time he was aware how narrowly he’d escaped death.

“Jasconius!” he cried, but he knew that the whale couldn’t hear him.

Ismael seemed to regain his reason faster than Griffin. “Let’s fly back to the city. We can do more there than here. That isn’t our fight any longer.”

The ocean surface broke apart. A circular fountain blossomed beneath them and reached with glittering fingers of water toward the ray and its two riders. In its center appeared Jasconius and something else that covered part of him, a runny, gelatinous mass like jelly. Or like a gigantic jellyfish that had fastened itself to the body of the whale.

“That’s him.” Griffin gasped.

“What?” Ismael’s voice trembled. “That…stuff?”

“That’s his body. That’s why he kept changing his form all the time.”

The silvery jellyfish creature was obviously trying to close itself around Jasconius’s body and thus squeeze him to death. But there was something more. Griffin saw it only when he looked a second time. And although it was now directly in front of him, he hardly believed his eyes.

“Holy Mother of God!” Ismael exclaimed. “Do you see that too?”

“Yes…yes, of course.”

“Is that a human being?”

Griffin patted the back of the ray so that it flew more calmly. The water fountains had long collapsed, but the whale and his opponent were still on the surface. Jasconius thrashed and shook himself, struck with his house-high tail fin, and expelled angry water fountains from his blowhole; that wasn’t yet covered by the gelatinous mass, although the edges of the mass were pushing together with smacking sounds. Soon they were going to close around the whale’s body.

What so unsettled Griffin and Ismael, however, was the human form resting within the jelly mass, with arms and legs outstretched, unclothed, the gaze turned upward. The silvery slime pressed his back against the whale’s body.

“That’s a child!” cried Ismael.

“Is that one of us? From Aelenium?”

“Never seen him before.”

It was a boy, perhaps a little younger than Griffin, although it couldn’t be said with any certainty at that distance. He had coal black hair, and his skin was darker than that of Griffin or Ismael. One of the natives of the islands. The transparent mass flowed and pushed over him, pressed him against the whale’s back, and according to all the laws of nature the boy should have been dead, suffocated by the milky substance of the giant jellyfish.

And yet he lived. His lips opened and closed, as if he were calling something. The mass filled his mouth. No sound came out. Normally Griffin would have assumed that the boy was caught in the sticky substance, perhaps was being sucked up by it—but the changing expressions on the stranger’s face made him suspicious.

The boy appeared to be angry. His features expressed sheer hatred, and the words he was uttering were perhaps not cries for help at all but commands.

Was
he
the lord of the kobalins? A human, still a child, who was only using the jellyfish mass as a means of transport, as armor for his own weak body?

Was it he who commanded the deep tribes and now prodded the giant jellyfish to greater rage, to conquer the whale faster, to kill more quickly?

“Can we free him somehow?” asked Ismael, who obviously didn’t share Griffin’s fears. To the sharpshooter this was only a child who needed their help.

But Griffin guessed that the truth was a different matter. Together, this boy and the jellyfish body that surrounded
him like an ancient insect in amber formed a single creature, no longer human but also not entirely monster. They were—together—the lord of the kobalins. The representative of the Maelstrom in this battle of men and half-forgotten gods.

Jasconius dove again and dragged the jellyfish and the boy with him. Again the waters foamed, the waves broke apart, and again both vanished beneath gray spray and the reflection of the fire tongues on the waves.

“Back to the city!” Ismael roared. For the first time there was panic in his voice, mixed with complete bewilderment.

“No,” replied Griffin. “I have to see how the battle goes.”

Ismael placed a hand on his shoulder. His fingers pressed painfully into Griffin’s muscles. “There’s no point, boy. Whatever happens, we can’t do anything to change it.”

“But I must
know
! I owe Jasconius that, at least.”

“At the cost of both our lives?”

Griffin understood what Ismael meant when the hand of the sharpshooter let go of him and pointed to the right. There beneath the waves approached a surging throng of kobalins. Lance points plowed through the water like sharks’ fins.

Once more he looked over at where Jasconius and the lord of the kobalins had sunk. The two giants could no longer be seen under the cover of the foam and seething spume.

“I can’t just turn around now,” he said decidedly.

“Boy!” Ismael’s voice grew imploring. “That’s not your battle.”

“Oh yes, it is. It is all our battle. Jasconius…the whale, I mean, he’s fighting for us. And Ebenezer…the man in the
whale, everyone called him, called him names and said he was a murderer. And now those two are risking their lives for us.” Griffin looked angrily back at Ismael. “Do you seriously intend to claim that this isn’t our battle? It
is
ours. Only someone else is fighting it for us and may die doing it.”