Pirate Wars (19 page)

Jolly crossed the distance to Munk in one instant. At first it
looked as though he was going to draw back to avoid her, but then he kept floating in the same spot, holding her eyes with a visible effort. There was a pleading in his eyes that she didn’t want to see. She didn’t understand it, didn’t understand
him
.

She grabbed him by the upper arm. “Munk, please…she’s going to make something like the Acherus out of you. Out of us both.”

“She showed me that I belong here,” he said dully. “We’re polliwogs. The sea made us. And this is the place where the most magic veins cross.”

No
, Jolly thought,
that is not so
. She’d seen with her own eyes the place where the veins began, and it wasn’t here. Nowhere else could so many strands of the magic come together than among the spinning stools of the three old women at the bottom of the sea. But how could she make him understand that? He hadn’t been there when she had; he didn’t know the water spinners. To explain to him that there was a corner of the ocean where even greater powers operated and where the true source of the polliwogs lay appeared impossible in view of the infernal scenery at his back.

Aina stopped beside them. Her lips opened, and Jolly was able to watch teeth and tongue developing behind her lips. She was taking shape only as necessary, not a moment too soon.

Why was the Maelstrom being so stingy with his power? Didn’t he have enough of it? Or had he used a major part of his strength in the battle for Aelenium? Was that why he was so bent on making use of their polliwog power? Jolly sucked
a deep breath of water into her lungs. She might have this fact alone to thank that she was still alive: the Maelstrom needed her.

Jolly was becoming more and more excited, but she tried not to show it.

“Why are you resisting so hard?” asked Aina, and even her voice only became really her own as she continued to speak; the syllables developed from something vague and blurry into the voice of a girl. Was that carelessness because it was no longer necessary to deceive Jolly? Or did Aina really lack the strength?

As fascinating as this idea was, it made Jolly even more anxious. If her enemy were in a hurry to draw her to his side, he would strike quickly and brutally and not wait for her counterattack.

Aina’s features coagulated into a smile. “Munk has understood that his place is here at my side. Why do you resist that? The humans don’t want us polliwogs. They hate us.”

“You say that because they expelled you in the old time.”

“And what about all the polliwogs they killed? Why are you two the last ones still alive? Don’t you realize how stupid humans are? They lack any wide vision, any openness to the unknown. They fear what they don’t understand. They whisper about you behind your back, they point their fingers at you and think of ways to get rid of you when you’ve fulfilled your purpose. You may be trying not to let yourself notice, but secretly you know the truth.”

Jolly shook her head. “They accepted Munk and me and treated us like their own.”

“That’s not true,” contradicted Aina, looking at Munk as if she expected a confirmation from him.

After a short hesitation he nodded. “They always said that we’re different from them. They stared at us on the streets of Aelenium and whispered when we passed by.”

Jolly’s eyes grew cold. “And you
enjoyed
it, if I remember correctly. Lord God, Munk! You even tried to keep me there when I wanted to go to look for Bannon.”

“Because…” His voice became softer. “Because I didn’t want to stay there alone.”

“Because he was afraid,” said Aina. “Isn’t that how it was, Munk?”

He nodded hesitantly. “Yes.”

“Here in the Crustal Breach you need never be alone again. Here you are among your own kind.”

Jolly made a movement with her legs that drove her a short distance from Aina and Munk. “Munk,” she said imploringly. “She’s lying! She made the two polliwogs who followed her into her creatures. Into monsters!”

He didn’t reply, only chewed silently on his lower lip.

Aina altered her strategy, and now her face grew harder. Her voice took on a commanding tone, which warned Jolly that the time for discussion was running out. The Maelstrom was in a hurry, for reasons that she could still only guess.

“Aelenium has fallen,” said Aina. “There’s nothing more awaiting you up there.”

“If that were so, you wouldn’t need us,” retorted Jolly, suppressing the trembling in her voice. What if Aina spoke the
truth? It simply must not be. “Aelenium is still fighting, that I know.”

“You saw what happened to the first sea star city. It went down and broke into thousands of pieces. Many people lost their lives, and so will it be again today. That was the first time they tried to imprison me, and they were almost clever enough—but at least I was able to destroy the city.” Aina stretched out her hand as if to touch Munk. “Show her whose side you’re on, Munk.”

Jolly shoved her fingers to the mussels in her belt pouch, a handful of grating shells that at the moment were completely useless. She would have had to lay them out and then call up a pearl—all things that took much too much time.

“Don’t do it,” she said to Munk.

“He wants you to stay with him,” said Aina. “Isn’t that so, Munk?”

“Yes,” he said.

“You can force her to do that,” said Aina. “You must only want to.”

“You already tried that once before,” said Jolly. “To force me to stay, do you remember?” Perhaps it was wrong to remind him of his defeat on the
Carfax
. But the devil with that! It pained her to see him this way. Despite all their differences he was still Munk. The farm boy who’d fished her out of the water and saved her. Her friend.

Aina lost patience. “Do it!” she snarled in Munk’s direction. “Or I will do it myself!”

Jolly looked around her. The school of lantern fish danced
behind her in front of the gray of the deep sea. She couldn’t expect help from them this time. She must try to think of something herself. She looked down, over the endless carpet of mussels on the ground. Her thoughts felt into the deep, down into the crust of empty shells.

What she felt there shocked her: There was no more magic in those mussels, no sign of their own life or remains of their former power. The Maelstrom had sucked them all out, had taken all their power and misused it for his own devilish purposes. What Jolly had taken for a collection of immeasurable magic was in reality a graveyard. The magic of all these mussels was irrevocably lost. Sorrow clutched her heart. It was as if she herself had been cheated of the most valuable thing she possessed, gnawed down to the bones. And she realized that that was what lay ahead of her and Munk: The Maelstrom would swallow their magic, would consume their talent and their powers and leave nothing of them. It would not be they themselves who would take the places of the Acherus and the lord of the kobalins but their spent shells. That was why the servants of the Maelstrom were dependent on new bodies, for they could not move at all under their own power.

Even that thing floating there in front of Jolly was no longer Aina herself, only an image that the Maelstrom had spit out to deceive them and to mock them.

Jolly felt deeper, under the layer of mussels, to the real floor of the Crustal Breach. And there finally she found what she sought.

The magic strands. The ancient, powerful vein network of the water spinners. Branching thousands of times, it ran through the Crustal Breach, many times intertwined and interwoven.

At the sinking of the
Carfax
, the spinners had drawn Jolly to them through a tunnel of water that had borne her to their undersea nest as fast as a storm wind. Could they do that again? And would they do it to save her from the Maelstrom—and from Munk?

She tried to grasp one of the magic veins with her mind, but then she was suddenly seized herself and pulled away from the strands. Her link to the spinners’ yarn was snapped like a too-tightly-stretched rope, snapped whip-fast up out of the deep, and paled in the twilight of the Crustal Breach. Jolly shook herself, her vision cleared.

She saw that Munk was sitting cross-legged on the ground, in the middle of the emptied mussel sea. He had his eyes closed in deepest concentration.

And she realized something else.

She’d deceived herself when she assumed that all the mussels under her had gone dead. There were still some, only a few, in which power seethed. Munk’s mussels! And among them, the greatest and most beautiful of all—the mussel Aina had given him.

Munk must have laid them out in a pattern before Jolly arrived at the foot of the Maelstrom. He and Aina had lured Jolly into the center of this circle. A pearl had arisen under her feet, just above the ground, hissing and spitting with
power—and glowing more than any Jolly had ever seen. Munk could only have made such a powerful thing arise with the help of Aina’s ancient mussel.

Aina smiled, and any innocence was now gone from her face. Her features distorted, turned, formed a vortex that led directly into the interior of her skull. Jolly stared at her and at the same time fought to tear herself away from the sight. But Munk’s powers held her fast, as if he’d wrapped her in a paralyzing crust of ice. Below her the glowing pearl grew larger and larger, now touched her feet and traveled up her body while it inflated around Jolly.

It’s engulfing me!
flashed through Jolly’s mind. But not even her panic lent her the necessary strength to resist it.

She tried to speak, but her mouth didn’t belong to her. Jaw and tongue were frozen. Her eyes were only able to look straight ahead, at the rotating maw into which Aina’s features had transformed themselves.

Bright light points rose up to the right and left of Jolly’s vision, were drawn past her. The lantern fish of the Spinners were caught in the suction of Aina’s skull vortex, shot helplessly up to it—and were swallowed. Their light went out in the depths of the gray whirl, and Jolly felt a sharp pain, as if someone had rammed a needle between her ribs. Then the light of the pearl reached her face and enwrapped her. Jolly was now caught in the center of the flaming sphere.

A desperate scream rose in her, blazing fury and hatred for the Maelstrom and infinite anger at Munk, who was too
weak or too dumb or simply too wounded by her love for Griffin to listen to her anymore.

He appeared not to have noticed the change that had taken place in Aina at all. Nothing remained of the body of the girl, only a whirling spiral, rotating swiftly around itself. At the lower end, the vortex lengthened to a whipping water worm, which slithered to the mighty Maelstrom column and melted into it. Soon the great pearl would be also caught, with Jolly trapped and huddled inside. She had to watch helplessly as she was sucked toward the vortex, straight into the interior of the Maelstrom.

The flood of
light pouring over the destroyed roof of the house blinded them all. Even while the worm—or what he had become—was speaking with them, Soledad wasn’t able to tell what he’d really changed into. Only very gradually, as he again cursed and complained that he was hungry and asked if there wasn’t a sturdy tree trunk for a starving god anywhere, her eyes got used to the glittering and glow and she made out what was hovering in the center of the light.

The worm had turned into a winged serpent whose mighty body coiled incessantly in the air, borne by wings that were wide enough to cover the entire attic. Their fanning sent warm, humid breezes over the ruins of the attic and whirled the remains of the web around like snowflakes. The creature’s scales gleamed a dark crimson, almost black. His wings were the same color and thickly feathered, like the wings of a
predatory bird; they were set in the upper third of the serpent body, which might measure about twenty feet when stretched out, although all the coiling and whipping made it hard to estimate.

Walker let out a roar, and Buenaventure shoved himself protectively in front of the weaponless Griffin. But Soledad stood fast. Inside she was just as upset as her friends, but she had one advantage over them: She’d already met such a creature once. It hadn’t been winged, but it was just as enormous. Even the triangular reptile head was the spitting image of that of the sea serpent of the undercity. Had she not known better, she might have supposed that the creature from the depths of Aelenium had grown wings and flown to the surface.

But for all the elegance and size it was still plainly the Hexhermetic Shipworm who was speaking to them. God more or less, his complaining and cursing was reminiscent of a badly brought-up child. “By the treacherous breath of Tetzcatlipoca, is there no one here who can bring a newly hatched serpent god a serving of wood?” He fell silent, seemed to be thinking, and then expelled a sigh of utter self-pity. “I’ve finished up everything that was lying down in the courtyard, but that wouldn’t even have been enough to satisfy a worm, not to mention—” He broke off, for his slit snake eyes had just discovered Griffin. The pointed head shot forward, over Soledad, wove effortlessly past Buenaventure, and swinging, bent solicitously over the boy. At first the pit bull man looked as if he were going to bash the serpent god’s
head away with his bare fist, but then he took a deep breath and let him do as he wished.

“Boy!” the creature exclaimed with concern. His voice sounded lisping and was amazingly like the worm’s, though much more powerful. “What’s wrong with you?” The serpent body made an arc and, without intending it, formed a loose loop around Buenaventure. The gaze of the narrow pupils was again directed at Soledad. “He isn’t dead, is he?”

“No,” she said. “He’s not dead. Only exhausted and wounded.”

The reptile head ducked, then the amber-colored eyes blinked down at Griffin again. The glow billowing around the mighty serpent body now also embraced Buenaventure and the unconscious boy. Soledad almost expected that the light would heal Griffin, but when the creature unknotted itself and unmade the loop around the cursing pit bull man, Griffin hadn’t awakened. The crusted cuts in his side still shone dark red.

“Where’s the girl?” asked the serpent. “Where’s Jolly?”

“Still in the Crustal Breach,” said Soledad. At least she hoped so.

“The Crustal Breach…of course.” The creature’s voice sounded thoughtful, as if he were slowly remembering what had happened before his pupation.

Soledad saw Walker frowning. “By Morgan’s beard, what’s that supposed to be?” he asked undiplomatically, pointing at the winged serpent. The question wasn’t directed at anyone in particular, but then he planted himself in front of the creature,
chin raised, placed his hands on his hips, and looked at the gigantic head. “What’s this you’ve turned into, Worm? Looks to me like something you’d find under a stone.”

“Walker,” Soledad warned him gently.

“Zzzssss,” hissed the serpent. Its forked tongue shot out, darted through the empty air, and disappeared again between the scaly jaws. “That would have had to be a bigger stone than you could carry—don’t strain yourself, my friend.”

Was that a warning?
No
, Soledad thought,
probably not.
In his old form the Hexhermetic Shipworm had been gluttonous, deceitful, and self-seeking through and through, but there’d been a good heart in his…well, breast.

“I am the Great Serpent,” said the creature, and now he sounded almost as if he were commanding reverence. “I fly on the winds between the worlds and devour the enemies of the Ancient People.”

Soledad knew the myths of the Indians’ serpent god that were told by the native inhabitants of the islands. She’d also seen drawings and reliefs of the winged serpent in the ruins of the jungle temple of Yucatan, where her father had once taken her many years before. Now she wondered if the mythical deity of the Indians was in fact the same as that creature opposite them. That would have been incredible in itself. But to have to accept that it and the shipworm were one and the same creature was completely mad.

“Devour enemies.” Walker repeated the serpent’s words. “Sounds like a good idea.”

The head of the serpent swung, but it wasn’t possible to tell if the movement was supposed to be a nod.

“Can you carry Griffin behind the wall?” Soledad asked.

A mighty gust of wind buffeted her, making her hair dance around her face. But this time it wasn’t the serpent’s wings that were stirring the air by the roof.

“We’ll take care of that,” d’Artois called down from his ray. The animal’s angular silhouette darkened the sky over them, but it cast no shadows because the serpent’s light was illuminating the attic. No one had noticed the rays descending, so fascinated were they all by the serpentine creature.

Two other flying rays, manned by riders and marksmen, hovered in the captain’s party. The serpent god’s glow was reflected in the mussel decorations of their black leather uniforms. The soldiers were staring in distress at the creature in the center of the light. One of the marksmen had aimed his rifle at the serpent, but d’Artois quickly raised a hand and made him lower the weapon again.

“I’ve seen weirder things in this city than a snake with wings,” he said. Soledad shuddered at the picture of what creatures the captain might have met during his years in Aelenium. Even older, even larger than the sea serpent in the undercity?

She had a thought. “You knew what he was going to turn into!” The words were directed at d’Artois, but she was pointing at the flying serpent as she spoke.

“Not when he arrived,” replied the captain. “But when the pupation started…well, let’s just say, Aelenium has quite an
astonishing effect on some. It brings out things in some of us that elsewhere might have remained latent.”

And that was such a pertinent observation that they all left it at that, and even Walker refrained from any further remarks. For one thing was clear: D’Artois’s statement didn’t apply just to the worm but in certain ways to each one of them.

There was noise down in the chasm of streets under the ray riders. The gathering in the air over the house had attracted the enemy’s attention, and now the second attack wave of Tyrone’s troops arrived. Shots whistled past, and one of the rays shook itself as a bullet struck its underside. With an animal of this size, a single shot wasn’t necessarily fatal, but several would bring the giant down.

D’Artois shouted commands, and at once the three rays fanned away from each other. As always their movements were phlegmatic, their reactions unhurried. The marksmen opened fire onto the ground—but they weren’t the first to avert the danger.

Like a lightning bolt the winged serpent shot forward, turned in flight between the rays still drifting apart, and whizzed away over the edge of the attic and steeply down toward the street.

Horrifying cries rose from the street, screams from many throats. But when Soledad overcame her paralysis, ran with the others to the edge of the roof, and looked down, the battle was almost over—if you could call what had happened down there a battle at all. The serpent had mowed down the military host of cannibals and pirates in seconds. Soledad
got gooseflesh when she saw the remains of a body at both sides of the serpent’s mouth fall to the ground.

A second attack from below never came. If other men from Tyrone’s fleet had been watching what happened, they stayed at a distance. However, Soledad doubted that there were very many witnesses. The serpent’s attack had been swift and thorough, and at greater distances the smoke still veiled the city.

A remarkably pale d’Artois gave a brief command to his men. He guided his ray down, and Buenaventure helped to secure the mumbling but still not completely awake Griffin in the saddle between the soldiers. The animal lifted off again, carrying Griffin away, up the mountain, in the direction of the tumult of battle at the wall.

Soledad, Walker, and Buenaventure divided up on the two remaining rays, and soon they all were sailing away over the coral gables of Aelenium, toward the upper defense wall.

The winged serpent followed a short distance behind them. He had not spoken again since his attack on Tyrone’s people. The light that flickered around him gradually paled, as if that had also been part of his magical rebirth.

It appeared that the transformation of the worm was not yet completed.

The Ghost Trader didn’t notice the departure of the companions for the wall. He’d walked out onto the library balcony alone and was observing the course of the battle between the plumes of smoke. Like termites, the masses of
attackers were surging through the streets of the sea star city, and it was this sight that finally decided the issue.

“It’s wrong,” said the Ghost Trader, “and perhaps even stupid and irresponsible. But I will do what must be done.” He said the words aloud, for his next step was too important and momentous for him to want to confide his thoughts to the grave of silence.

He stood there outside, isolated, with flakes of ash whirling around him on the wind and the noise of the battle far, far below him.

The Ghost Trader was in despair, and he could no longer conceal his discouragement.

Forefather had stayed with the books, the thousands and thousands of books that for a long time had been much closer to his heart than the humans he’d once created. His spirit had suffered in all the years. It had begun after the destruction of the first sea star city. Or even earlier? It was not a public decline, nothing that showed in the words or actions of the old man, whose passivity had scarcely changed in the last millennia. Much more it was a vague feeling, a whiff of decline and death, that floated through the halls of books. And since there was nothing else that could die here, there could be no doubt as to where this presentiment originated.

Everything was tending toward the end, one way or the other.

The Maelstrom was about to swallow up the world. And if he didn’t do it, the resurrected gods would.

The Ghost Trader had decided to awaken their spirits again—the spirits of those deities who’d once withdrawn to Aelenium and had died there in the forgetfulness of the humans. He knew no other remedy than to battle the one catastrophe with the other. Jolly and Munk must long since have reached the Crustal Breach, and there was still no sign that they’d defeated the Maelstrom. The defenders of Aelenium had paid a high toll to buy time for the polliwogs.

But the grace period had run out. Aelenium would fall under the assault of the cannibal king, and with him the Maelstrom would reach his goal. For a long time it had no longer been about the masters of the Mare Tenebrosum, as the Trader once assumed it to be: The Maelstrom had served them in order to build up his power, but he had no intention of opening a gate for them. This world was now his, and he would shape it as he wished.

And that included making it a world without humans. The revenge of the girl Aina on her race would be realized.

The Ghost Trader hadn’t decided on his step because he shared Forefather’s weariness and indifference. The fate of humankind was no game. The Ghost Trader had walked among them too long to believe anything different.

And if nevertheless he was now going do what he alone could, then it was only because he was despairing and helpless—perhaps for the first time in his immeasurable existence.

He inhaled the stench of war once more, like an admonition not to weaken now. Then he turned back into the
library. His black parrots fluttered somewhere in the heights of the coral dome. Yet not even they could provide him with solace.

“Have you made your decision?” asked Forefather, looking up from a book whose writing had long ago faded. Forefather knew the words once visible there by heart.

“I will do it,” said the Ghost Trader.

Forefather closed the book and stood up. The sound echoed through the hall like a cannon shot. “I’m not going with you,” he said wearily.

He was silent for a moment before he began to speak again. “My road ends here.”

The Ghost Trader nodded. “I know. You can’t help me.”

Forefather shook his head. “That’s not what I mean,” he said.

The Ghost Trader was startled, but with a wave, Forefather motioned him to be silent. “I’m like the writing on this paper.” He pointed to the book with the empty pages that he’d just closed. “Without even noticing it myself, I’ve been faded for a long time. It only looks as if the writing were still there because we know the words by heart, you and I and a few of the people in this city. But in truth”—he took a deep breath—“in truth, no one can read me anymore.”

The Ghost Trader tried to contradict him, but again Forefather gestured for him to be quiet. “Don’t try to claim that I’m still needed here!” As vehement as these words sounded, the old man punctuated them with a gentle smile. “I created this world, that is so, but I have never been able to
protect it—not from dangers from the outside and not from itself. My place is no longer here. Let me depart, old friend, before I must experience the end with my own eyes.”