Pirate Wars (21 page)

He looked up and along the course of the stairs to the roof opening. A plateau extended all around it, the highest point of the sea star city. In order to really call up all the spirits of the dead gods, he had to see the entire city spread out below him, with every corner in which one of them had died.

The animal wheezed even louder when it noticed the visitor. The Ghost Trader didn’t know if the ray sensed his meaning. Probably not really, he thought, for he was a god of men, not of animals. This differentiated him and all other gods of Aelenium from the three spinner women, who had arisen from this world itself, from every plant, every stone, and every animal.

They were born of the dreams, wishes, and necessities of every fiber of this world—out of things over which Forefather had never had real influence. He’d created the world, but he hadn’t understood it.

The Ghost Trader knew that Forefather had envied the spinners. They had been this world’s first step into independence from its creator. The child had detached itself from its father and chosen its own way.

He stood up with a sigh, when he saw that the ray was moving on the bottom of the pit. Wearily it tried several beats of its wings, which after several failed attempts finally
lifted it from the ground. Water dripped from its body down into the puddles as it rose out of the pit until its head was at a level with the Trader’s face.

“Are you trying to tell me something, my friend?” The Trader felt the gaze of the dark eyes, which still seemed young in comparison to him, yet must be ancient for a ray. A strange excitement seized him as he watched this animal rise above itself and its infirmity.

The ray’s wings beat very slowly, just enough to hold the heavy body over the pit. Now the animal sank a little and turned itself with its left wing toward the Ghost Trader.

“I should mount?” He considered it briefly, then nodded. “Why not? If you carry me up to the plateau.”

He took a seat on the unsaddled back of the old ray and thought once more as he did so how similar he and this animal were. He also was leaning against fate and nature, just like this ray under him. Warmth went through him at the idea and something almost like a feeling of friendship toward the brave animal.

They rose through the opening in the ceiling into the outdoor air. The beams of the late afternoon sun caught them and cast them in bronze as the ray flew forward and set the handler on the edge of the wide plateau. With rattling breath, the animal lay down on the ground again.

A few heartbeats later it was dead. It was not the strain that had ended its life but its own wish: It had been of use one last time, then fell asleep contented and peaceful.

The Ghost Trader crouched down again, stroked the
motionless body, and silently took leave of it. If this meeting was a sign, it couldn’t have been any clearer.

It was time to say farewell to everything here.

He stood up and turned his gaze to the north, toward the broad band of whirling mists that announced the monstrous breadth of the Maelstrom. In front of it a dark dot was moving through the air, a ray that was quickly distancing itself from the sea star city and riding toward the Maelstrom. On the ray sat a figure.

The Ghost Trader surmised who it was. Griffin might have felt that things in Aelenium were approaching their end. Probably he couldn’t stand waiting and doing nothing while Jolly wrestled against the powers of the Maelstrom.

If she was still alive.

The Ghost Trader was gradually coming to doubt that.

With the silver ring in his hand, he approached the outer edge of the ledge and began to circle the plateau once. As he went, his eye skimmed over all the quarters of Aelenium, over the roofs and the crooked streets, through the plumes of smoke and swarms of gulls and ray riders.

Murmuring, he began the invocation.

Rolled up like
a baby in its mother’s womb, eyes closed, lips pressed firmly together, Jolly floated inside the glowing pearl just large enough to carry a human being. Warmth surrounded her, a comfortable feeling of safety. She’d reached the place she’d been trying to get to all along, a place where she felt welcome, that filled her with happiness and peace and security.

The magic pearl had broken through the thundering wall of the water column and was now in the heart of the Maelstrom, in a black abyss, which no longer filled Jolly with fear, for the darkness only strengthened the light of the pearl and the beauty inherent in it.

Jolly dreamed once more all the dreams of her former life, rolled up together in a rush of millions of pictures, pressed into one single moment, a powerful explosion of colors,
smells, and sounds. Voices in her head, many faces, circling her like mosquitoes around a blazing fire. And yes, she felt herself blazing, burning hot with power, boiling over in the storm of feelings that she had once felt and that now welled up in her again, happiness and sorrow and suffering and—

So much suffering.

Her friends were dying.

Blinking, Jolly opened her eyes, and the light, which until then had only come through her eyelids filtered, blinded her like a glowing blade. Instead of brightness there was suddenly darkness. And in this moment of blindness, of seeing absolutely nothing, she knew the truth.

She was caught. The Maelstrom had swallowed her.

The dreams turned to nightmares, no more pictures, only the bundled power of all anxieties and cares that descended upon her. Memories tormented her, not the emotions of long-forgotten dream images but the thoughts of things just past: Aina’s likeness, which dissolved to a rotating vortex and sucked her into itself together with the pearl. And Munk, who’d called up the pearl, blinded on his part, not by magical light but by the Maelstrom’s enticements. It wasn’t power that he was seeking but—and in that he resembled all others, Jolly too—only his place in the world and a little security.

Jolly opened her mouth and screamed. It was a long, shrill scream, and it broke through the close curvature of the pearl and echoed out into the dense darkness.

She kicked and hit around her, but nothing helped. She saw no up and no down, only emptiness around her. She
guessed what this was, recognized that a piece of the Mare Tenebrosum dwelled in the interior of the Maelstrom, whether the whirlpool had repudiated the masters of that world or not. Where did the water go that he sucked into himself? Quite certainly not to the bottom of the sea, for then they couldn’t have approached him for many miles. So there was still a connection to the Mare whether the Maelstrom wanted it or not, and of course, because he himself was the connection. He might live, think, plan the destruction of an entire world—but he’d still been created at one time as a passage, as a tool for crossing, as the portal for the masters of the Mare Tenebrosum. Something of them was also in him, and the darkness was part of their world.

Though she couldn’t be certain, Jolly imagined that she was floating between the worlds, in the middle of a whirling tunnel connecting the one plane of existence with the other.

Suddenly she saw a point of light glow in the darkness, become larger, unfold itself. Trapped in the pearl, she had to watch as he rushed toward her.

It was Munk. The glowing brightness surrounding him came from the mussel he was holding in his right hand. It was the same mussel that Aina had given him, the wonderful, dangerous thing that whispered to him when he held it to his ear.

“Jolly, don’t be afraid,” said a voice, which she only recognized as his after a moment. He came to a stop a mere arm’s length away from the pearl, floating in the middle of the darkness. His lips were moving without another word being
audible. It was as if she heard what he said
before
he said it, and it took her a while to understand that the pearl was the reason for it. The glowing sphere that imprisoned her refracted and distorted time; what she heard might be being said at precisely the same time, but what she
saw
had really happened a little bit earlier. That seemed a meaningless detail, given the situation she was in, but it intensified Jolly’s feeling that she’d been transplanted into a dream.

“I’d never do anything to you.” Munk’s voice sounded in her ears, and only then did his mouth move outside the pearl.

“Where are we?” she asked, after she’d swallowed down the flood of vituperation that had been the first thing to come to her mind.

“Inside the Maelstrom.”

“I know that.” Did she really know that? Anyway, it had been her first supposition. “But what is this, this darkness?”

His voice sounded as if he were smiling as he spoke, but the corners of his mouth only turned up after she’d heard his words. “You’ve gotten too used to polliwog vision, that’s all. We’re not in the water anymore…anyway, not in the seawater of our world. Polliwog vision is useless here. It’s dark because…well, because it’s just dark. It was just as dark outside in the Crustal Breach—only not for us.”

That sounded clear, but at the moment not important enough to be worth more than a thought. Maybe he was right or maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t matter to her.

“I want to get out of here, Munk. You have to help me.”

“Try it yourself,” he said, to her amazement.

“What?”

“You can destroy it.” Again it took a moment until she saw him smile. Then he added, “Trust me.”

Which she found somewhat strange. But she didn’t wait to be asked twice. She hit her fist against the inside of the pearl and was astounded to discover that she struck through the light. She tried to move her fingers, and it disturbed her that she could feel them move but it was only a little later that she could see them; even though her hand was now outside the pearl and thus in a different time plane.

She wondered if it was the same with Munk. Did he also see her movements within the pearl several seconds after they’d actually taken place? Then unquestionably she offered a bizarre sight from the outside, for to his eyes her hand and her body must be moving separately.

She shoved the second hand after it.

“Tear it,” she heard Munk say.

With a jerk she tore the walls of the pearl apart, so quickly that the darkness struck against her like a gust of wind. Then she pushed herself out through the gap to Munk. The shine of the mussel in his hand distorted his features to a grimace of shadow and light.

Jolly pulled her other leg through the gap. Like Munk, she was now floating in nothingness. This wasn’t water. It felt oilier, more viscous, which made moving a little more difficult. But perhaps this remarkable slowness was only a consequence of the falsified time conditions that prevailed here.

“Don’t be afraid,” said Munk yet again. Now she saw how
exhausted he looked. Completely worn out and pale. “Aina can’t come here.”

Jolly didn’t understand what he intended with his new behavior. But at least one thing she did understand: Aina couldn’t turn up here because they were
in
Aina—in the middle of the Maelstrom.

“But why—,” she began.

Munk pointed to the pearl, which floated, glowing, at Jolly’s back. The crack had closed again. “In spite of everything, Aina’s magic is still the magic of a polliwog. A thousand times enlarged and warped, of course. But there are certain rules that apply to her, too.”

Jolly shook her head, not understanding. She was so terribly angry at Munk, but at the same time confused, too. What sort of a game was he playing? Whose side was he really on?

“Polliwog magic can work only in the sea or near it,” he said. “On the waves, on the beach, sometimes a little way inland. But this isn’t the sea anymore. Not here, inside the Maelstrom.”

Very slowly it began to dawn on her. This
was
a place between the worlds. She again imagined it as a tunnel, as the tail of the Maelstrom, reaching over into the Mare Tenebrosum. If that were so, the polliwog magic was slowly losing its effect here. That was the only reason Jolly had been able to free herself.

“But you shut me into the pearl,” she said, although all indignation had left her voice.

He nodded. “Because Aina’s magic couldn’t do anything to you here.”

“Then that was a trick?” she asked without real conviction.

Munk tried a grin, but he no longer had the necessary strength even for that. “For one thing, so that she’d trust me. For another, to protect you from her.” He looked past Jolly, straight into the brightness behind her. “But above all, to smuggle
that
inside here.”

Jolly whirled around. The pearl glowed like a moon in the darkness. She stretched out her hand and poked the thing with her finger. The light shell indented like a bag made of animal skin floating in the water. Now Jolly became aware that the light of the pearl was fading. Of course—for it, too, was created with polliwog magic.

She frowned as she turned to Munk again. “You shut me into the pearl so that Aina would suck it and me inside her?”

He nodded, but his eyes were held by the wavering light image. “I knew that she was lying to us. That is, I thought so. I first knew it when she told us that all her mussels except the one were crushed under the stone. You remember I stayed behind a moment when you and Aina walked on? I looked under the stone. And there was nothing at all there. Not a single fragment.”

“You knew it the whole time? And didn’t say anything to me about it?”

“She had to not notice anything. She had to believe I was on her side,” Munk said. But the words didn’t sound arrogant anymore, the way they used to. This was the old Munk speaking again, though infinitely drained and weary. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have let us come any closer. Her
kobalins could have torn us to pieces at any time.” He stopped for a minute and appeared to listen into the darkness. “It almost went wrong when she shut you into the kobalin hill.” He was silent and looked at Aina’s mussel, as if he was regarding a tremendously precious object. “She gave me her most dangerous weapon to convince me of her goodwill and because it whispers things into your ear—if you listen to it. But to use it against her I needed a pretext—something so she wouldn’t notice what I was doing. And for that I needed you. If you hadn’t freed yourself…” He shrugged and left the rest unsaid.

She still didn’t understand where he was heading, what his plan actually looked like; she was too confused. He’d shut her into the pearl because he knew or at least hoped that the Maelstrom would swallow her. But how did he intend to harm Aina with it?

She waited for him to go on or to do something, but then his face darkened suddenly. He turned around at once and his eyes darted through the blackness. A deep crease appeared in his forehead, which made him look older. “Do you feel that too?”

She was much too excited to be able to think of anything except all her open questions. So she shrugged.

“There, outside,” he said softly.

The lump in her throat thickened her voice. “What do you mean?”

“There’s something there.”

Jolly took a deep breath. “Aina?”

He shook his head slowly without looking at her. “No, not her.”

“Who, then?”

“I don’t know.” He moved backward, closer to Jolly, but the current that suddenly brushed her didn’t come from him.

“Something is circling us,” he whispered.

Jolly was going to reply, but she couldn’t get a sound out.

The glow of the pearl at her back grew weaker.

“What is it?” Jolly breathed out as her eyes searched in vain for a clue in the blackness.

“Then you feel it too?” In the fading light of the giant pearl, Munk looked like a shallow sandstone relief; his body had lost all depth. The glow bathed them both in a brownish yellow.

“I can feel it, but I don’t see it,” Jolly replied. “And you really don’t know what it is?”

“No.”

She had to get used to trusting him again, and it wasn’t easy for her. “What do we do now?”

He didn’t answer. Suddenly his eyes widened and stared as if spellbound into the darkness outside the dwindling glow of the pearl.

She turned around and followed his eyes, but now there was nothing more to see. “Did you see something?” she asked excitedly.

He nodded stiffly. “Yes.”

“What?” Still she kept straining to try to make something out herself.

“It was big.”

“How big?”

He was about to answer when again something slid by at the edge of the area of brightness for the fraction of a moment. This time Jolly saw it too. It was gone again at once in a flowing, shadowy movement suggesting that she had seen only a portion of an incomparably gigantic body.

“By Morgan’s beard!” Munk swore. She hadn’t heard him say that for a very long time. In spite of everything that had happened in the Crustal Breach, it brought back a pleasant memory of the past.

“Is it one of the masters of the Mare?” Her voice was now only a whisper. She wasn’t certain if Munk could understand, but then he nodded.

“Perhaps. Originally the Maelstrom was their gate, after all.”

Jolly closed her eyes for two or three moments. Almost these same thoughts had gone through her head just before. If this place was something like a between-kingdom, a kind of tunnel between her world and the Mare Tenebrosum, and if one or several of the masters of the Mare Tenebrosum were already in the tunnel, then the Maelstrom wasn’t as powerful as Aina had pretended. Kangusta had said that the Maelstrom didn’t intend to serve as a portal for the masters. But if some of them had succeeded in slipping through, that must mean that the Maelstrom had lost some power. But what had weakened him? He hadn’t taken part in the attack on Aelenium himself, so it must be something else.

Think
, she flogged herself.

Perhaps Munk had struck a much bigger wound than they’d all guessed when he killed the Acherus. In the final analysis the Maelstrom made use of the magic power of his polliwog servants. After the Acherus was dead, there still remained the second polliwog from the last time, the lord of the kobalins. What if he’d been wiped out during the battle for Aelenium? Wouldn’t that mean that the Maelstrom had lost two-thirds of his power?