Pirate Wars (17 page)

Buenaventure’s fighting technique resembled that of the two others, with the noteworthy difference that the striking power of his gigantic toothed sword measured severalfold more than Soledad’s own blows. Leaping over yelling men as they fell to the ground wounded, he dashed to the edge of the narrow street, and with his left hand he grabbed a beam that had become unsound in the fires of the night. The roof frame of the shed, which had been built onto one of the coral houses, was still burning. “Walker! Soledad!…Look out!” Buenaventure called—then the shed leaned in an eruption of flames and flickering wood, before it landed on the pirate mob as a rain of fire. Suddenly most of them were busy defending themselves, not against blades any longer but flaming timbers. Several pieces of timber at once landed on Buenaventure himself. A furious howling came from his throat. Walker was hit too, a little more lightly, and Soledad was the only one to entirely escape the inferno. Her immediate opponent was also unharmed, and so they fought on in the midst of the flames, the circling men, and the billows of smoke, which soon embraced them all. With one saber blow out of a whirl of them she succeeded in striking the man down. In a sudden panic she looked for
Walker and saw him, his hair smoking, dueling with a cannibal. Buenaventure was standing on two feet again, an ugly burn on his left upper arm, but otherwise more or less unharmed.

And Griffin? Where was the boy?

Most of the pirates had left the fire-saturated street for the adjoining ruins. Some had probably also gone on their way up the mountain. It was senseless to wear themselves out down here if the main forces of the defense were waiting on the upper wall. Tyrone had also disappeared.

But when a blond man stumbled out of the wall of smoke toward Soledad, coughing wildly, she suddenly recognized him and immediately went on the attack.

“Bannon!” she cried, as their blades met, striking sparks. “It ought not to have come to this.”

He gave no answer, just struck harder at her and drove her several steps backward through the acrid vapor toward the shore.

The smoke grew thicker and thicker. The stench hurt her throat and robbed her of breath.

Soledad had no choice but to save her skin, and she was almost grateful that it was Bannon, in particular, with whom she confronted that fate. She despised him for his betrayal and because he’d tried to surrender his foster daughter Jolly to Tyrone and the Maelstrom.

Bannon fought silently and grimly. Again and again their blades met. He was her superior in strength, but she was faster and more skilled with the saber than he was. The
attacks that hit him between his parries were brutal. Once she believed that her blade would surely break under the weight of his blows, yet the steel held out. But the vibration of the weapon went all the way to her shoulder, so that for a moment she could no longer lift her arm.

Bannon got ready for a lethal blow. He didn’t smile the way they used to say he did when facing a defeated opponent, and he avoided any mockery. Obviously he intended to bring this business to an end as quickly as possible.

Soledad groaned as she tried again to lift her lame arm and parry his blow.

There was a slashing sound. Bannon winced, stopped short, looked down at himself, and stared in surprise at the blade sticking out of his chest. His eyes slowly widened, his mouth dropped open. “A hundred thousand hellhounds!” he whispered. Then he collapsed, as silently as he’d dueled, fell on his face, and was still. An old, nicked saber was sticking out of his back.

A figure in red and white trousers leaped over the corpse, crashed against Soledad, and embraced her.

“Griffin!”

“Princess!” They hugged each other as if it had been years since their leave-taking, rather than several hours. It felt good to know he was back with them. When she let go of him, he reeled. Shortly afterwards his legs buckled.

“Griffin?” In an instant she was bending over him. “What’s wrong? Are you wounded?”

He tried to smile, but it only made him look more tired
and sick. None of them had had enough sleep for an eternity, but it wasn’t only exhaustion that robbed him of his strength now.

“You’re bleeding!” She carefully pushed his arm to one side and stared at the dark red spot in horror. The dirty pirate shirt was completely soaked through.

“Not deep,” he murmured. “Not dangerous.”

Soledad didn’t listen to him and raised her head. “Walker! Buenaventure!” she called out into the smoke. Her eyes burned, breathing was increasingly difficult, but at the moment she was thinking only about the boy. “I need one of you here with me!”

A shout like an answer resounded through the smoke, then Buenaventure came stomping up, followed by a disheveled Walker covered with scratches. There was a gaping burn hole in his shirt, but he appeared not to be seriously wounded.

“Most of them have gone on,” he gasped in between coughs. “But this smoke is going to kill us if we—” Walker broke off as he saw the blood on Griffin’s side. “Goddamn it!”

Griffin’s mouth twitched again, but this time there wasn’t even the shadow of a smile. “It isn’t bad. Only it hurts…a little….”

“Come here, boy.” Buenaventure pushed Soledad aside and lifted Griffin from the ground like a flyweight, very gently, so as not to cause him any more pain.

“We have to get behind the wall,” said Soledad. “He needs help.”

“I do not.”

She wouldn’t allow herself to be distracted. “Do you think we can do it?”

“No.” Walker spoke candidly, as always. “We’re behind enemy lines now. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s already fighting at the wall. And there are still more of Tyrone’s people down on the shore. As soon as the smoke clears, they’ll be coming through here.” He shot a concerned look at Griffin, who lay like a child in Buenaventure’s muscular arms. “I guess we have to find ourselves a hiding place right now and wait until it’s more opportune to push through to the others. So far we’ve just had good luck.”

He’s right
, Soledad thought.
The skirmish with Tyrone’s people would have turned out differently if Buenaventure hadn’t made the shed collapse.

“I can walk,” gasped Griffin unconvincingly.

“Of course you can.” Buenaventure hurried off without setting him down on the ground. He bore Griffin uphill through the smoke, until the billows thinned a little and they could see more clearly what the situation was. Soledad and Walker stayed beside him.

The stepped street in front of them was empty, but the sounds of the battle reached their ears from above. The fighting around the defense wall had been reignited. This time, however, it was men against men.

“Looks as if we’re exactly between two attack waves,” Buenaventure said. “The rest of the crews from the ships will be coming along pretty soon. We’ve got to hurry.”

They stormed up the steps, striding breathlessly over the
bodies of kobalins and fallen defenders, and very soon they reached the Poets’ Quarter.

The shouting and stamping behind them was growing louder.

“They’ll be here soon!” Walker whispered, adding a formidable oath.

“Let’s duck into one of the houses.” Buenaventure was about to run into an entry and kick in the door, but Soledad held him back.

“Wait! Just a little bit farther.”

Walker threw a doubtful look over his shoulder. The smoke at the foot of the stepped street was swirling in bizarre eddies, the billows moving erratically. Behind the smoke it was dense with human silhouettes. Any minute the first ones would break through the haze and discover the fugitives.

“To the left!” Soledad ran ahead. There was nothing for the two men to do but follow her. In Buenaventure’s arms, Griffin clenched his teeth. Despite his pain and the wild shaking, his eyelids threatened to close.

Soledad ran down a narrow alley, came to a crossing, and turned upward again. Even here it was going to be swarming with Tyrone’s people any minute.

“Soledad! We
must
get inside somewhere, now!” She was almost persuaded by Walker’s call, but she stormed on, turned off again, and suddenly stopped, gasping, at a front door. At the end of the street she saw the cannibal king’s men, headed their way.

Walker came up beside her, snorting, at the front of a narrow coral house. The facade was only a few feet wide. He recognized the place right away.

Buenaventure reached them and didn’t even stop. “They’re right behind us!” He kicked in the door with a thundering blow before Soledad could point out that it wasn’t locked.

The two followed him, but inside Walker held Soledad back by the arm. “Is there a special reason you led us here?”

She slammed the door behind them. The two half doors bounced back because the broken lock didn’t catch anymore. “In a minute—help me here first!”

Together they pulled a wooden chest against the door. That wouldn’t stop the pirates for long if they’d noticed the four, but now it wouldn’t show from the outside that someone had just run into this house.

“So?” asked Walker.

“For one thing, it’s higher than all the other buildings,” Soledad said. “You can almost see to the upper wall from the roof. I know, I was here just a little while ago.”

“You were here to see the worm?” Walker raised an eyebrow, but Soledad wasn’t sure if that meant he disapproved or simply didn’t understand.

“It’s hard to explain.” She avoided his eyes. “I saw something in the undercity. And I had an idea that it could be something like—”

“Quick!” came Buenaventure’s rumbling voice. “Come up!”

They hadn’t noticed that he’d already hurried up the stairs to the gable room.

Soledad saw that something wasn’t right while they were still on the stairs, before they could see into the attic room. But she didn’t realize what it was until the last few steps. It was too light.

Much too much light was coming through the door, as if up there were—

“Where’s the roof?” Walker asked, as they squeezed, stumbling, through the doorway to the storeroom.

Over them yawned a gray-blue emptiness, streaked with clouds of smoke that the sunshine dipped in gold. The two gable walls were still standing, but all that was left of the slanting roof were a few jagged remains.

“And where the devil is the worm?” asked Buenaventure. He stared up at the sky for a moment longer, then remembered Griffin in his arms. He gently laid the boy down in front of him. The floor was covered with scraps of the web in which the Hexhermetic Shipworm had pupated. White and gray clumps drifted around, collected in fibrous heaps in the corners, or hung like sea foam on the remains of the roof. Buenaventure gathered a little of it with both hands and pushed it under the back of Griffin’s head as a cushion.

“I’m not…I’m all right,” the boy said softly, and Buenaventure nodded seriously.

“You only need a little sleep…like all of us.”

“But we have no time to…” Griffin’s voice trailed off and then he was silent.

Soledad bent over him worriedly. “What’s wrong with him?”

“He’s sleeping, that’s all,” said the pit bull man. “Let him rest. That will relieve the pain, a little anyway.”

While Walker inspected the debris of the roof and looked in vain for the shipworm in the remains of the nest, Soledad carefully opened Griffin’s shirt and examined the wound in his side. It didn’t look that bad: a row of short cuts, not deep enough to injure him seriously. He’d bled a great deal, but not so much that it would kill him. The worst of it was probably the pain. The wounds were on his side over the ribs and might go down to the bone.

She blotted the sleeping boy’s forehead with her sleeve and left him in the pit bull man’s care.

“Here,” said Walker, who was crouching in the farthest corner of the attic and examining something on the floor in front of him. “Look at that.”

Her eyes narrowed. “Is that the cocoon?”

“What’s left of it. There are more pieces over here. The wind probably blew the rest into the courtyard or who knows where.”

The fibrous white webbing looked like the shredded edges of a gigantic eggshell.

Walker poked one of the remnants with his finger. Rustling, it rocked back and forth. “Doesn’t look like cut edges, does it?”

“No,” Soledad agreed. “It looks as if the thing burst open. He hatched by himself.”

She looked at the walls towering into emptiness. It looked as if an explosion had taken place. The shock wave must have
flung all the debris outward. It was probably spread over half the district or there would have been more rubble lying in the street. The force had literally pulverized the roof.

“What did you mean before?” Walker asked. “When you said you had an idea about the worm.”

With a shiver she recalled the serpent in the undercity, that wondrous creature whose gaze had convinced her that she was facing not an animal but one of the old gods of Aelenium. Even now, in the midst of all this destruction, she still felt that she’d sensed something quite similar at the sight of the dreaming worm in his cocoon.

“The worm,” she said, “is no worm. I think, anyway.”

“But?”

“A god.”

Walker looked at her without any expression.
If he laughs now
, she thought,
I’ll paste him one.

But Walker squatted there motionless, just staring at her. “A god?” he repeated somberly. “Our
shipworm
?”

“The ancient Egyptians worshipped beetles. And the Indians, toads. And the Indians in the jungle even—”

He gestured to her to be quiet.

“But he…I mean, he’s a pain in the neck. A plague. He almost ate up my ship!”

“Other gods are said to have eaten
people
.” She smiled without humor. “Would you have preferred that?”

“Then I could believe you, at least.” Quickly he added, “I mean, I really do believe you…somehow…but that…that thing! Good grief!”

“Doubt is the privilege of the faithful,” said a voice behind them. It sounded familiar in a strange way—and yet different. “Without belief there can be no doubt.”

Soledad and Walker whirled around. Buenaventure was still holding Griffin’s right hand in his huge one, but now he looked up from the boy to the creature floating on the other side of the shattered edge of the roof. It rose majestically from the depths of the back courtyard, where it had perhaps been waiting or sleeping or emerging from the remainder of its dream.