Pirate Wars (22 page)

“Jolly!”

She started, figuring that something huge was rushing at her. But it was only Munk.

“The light of the pearl is getting weaker all the time!” he said excitedly. “It’s going out. You understand?”

“Certainly. And when it goes out entirely, that thing will grab us and—”

“I don’t mean that!”

She looked at him without understanding. “What, then?”

“This pearl was the greatest concentration of magic I’ve ever called up,” he said. “I mean, it was…
powerful
. Since that light is still there, it also means that its magic can’t disappear entirely.”

“We’ve already established that inside here polliwog magic doesn’t—”

“Yes. Maybe, anyway. But the pearl is glowing and that means its magic is still alive.”

“And so?” She surmised that all this was part of his original plan when he smuggled her and the pearl in here. But what
was
his plan?

He looked past her into the darkness, but the shadowy being remained at a distance. It was circling them way outside the light of the pearl, almost as if it feared the weak light.

“Do you still remember what I told you that time on the island about my parents?” he asked her, and his words sounded strained. “About the first time, when I didn’t get a magic pearl closed back into a mussel at the end of the magic?”

“The palms on your island had red leaves afterwards. And once the roof of your farm burned. But what has that—”

He nodded excitedly. “And when you kept me from closing up the pearl again on the
Carfax
, the magic went crazy and hurt my back.”

Then she began to understand.

“What do you think might happen,” Munk asked, “if the largest and most powerful pearl I’ve ever created weren’t put back into its mussel?” He swallowed, and in the dying light she saw his Adam’s apple move.

“The other mussels are lying outside in the Crustal Breach somewhere,” Munk went on. “This one is the only one the magic can go back into.” He pointed to Aina’s mussel in his hand.

“If such a powerful pearl isn’t shut into its mussel,” said Jolly, with growing excitement, “then there might be…something very
bad
, mightn’t there? A catastrophe.”

He nodded and looked enormously sad as he did so.

“And,” Jolly went on, her voice trembling, “it would look for the next best mussel to disappear into—and it would have to be quite a
large
mussel to contain so much wild magic.”

“The Maelstrom’s mussel,” said Munk. “Its root.”

Jolly cast a glance at the sagging pearl, which now looked like a shapeless pig’s bladder. The light was only a sort of pitiful afterglow. It was going to go out completely any minute.

Munk flinched. “There it was again!” He pointed to the blackness, which inched closer.

There was no doubt that the being would rush at them as soon as the magic light went out.

Jolly had eyes only for the dying pearl. “It will explode like a thousand barrels of black powder. Or…do something else crazy!”

Munk lowered his eyes dejectedly. “If it’s only half as strong as I think, then it will tear everything in a radius of many miles to pieces.”

“Us too?” She knew the answer. But suddenly the idea of her own death hardly hurt at all. It seemed to her that it had been established from the beginning that she would never return from here alive. As she sought after the truth in her heart, she knew that she’d known it the whole time. Suspected it, at least.

A strange calm descended on her. Almost a feeling of…yes, contentment.

She nodded to him and he raised his hand with Aina’s mussel, cast a last look at it—and hit it so hard with his other fist that the shell burst into a cloud of tiny splinters. A sound rang out, like a scream carried from afar by a gale wind.

Jolly reached out and took Munk’s hand.

At the same moment it was as if his face were sucked backward into the darkness. But he didn’t move away at all—instead, the darkness suddenly came nearer and closed around them like a flood of black ink.

The pearl paled.

“Jolly?” she heard him call. Then she was seized by a powerful current. Their hands were torn apart.

Something large rushed at her.

And the magic of the pearl, hardly visible at all, exploded.

Within seconds the absolute blackness turned into its opposite. The freed magic flamed up like a spark reaching the end of a fuse.

Silence.

And then—

The ray bore Griffin over the outrunners of the Maelstrom as if over a mountain of water. From the great height the churning masses of water did in fact look like a landscape that was constantly changing. The floods moved in broad lanes, broke over and into each other, mixed in numerous smaller whirlpools that were still big enough to swallow a whole fleet. Foaming hillcrests arched up and flowed away again. Gigantic hands of salt water and spray curled up out of the sea and seemed to be trying to snatch the ray and its rider from the sky.

Griffin was sailing a good two hundred fathoms over the ocean. He’d never climbed so high on a ray before. Since
he’d left Aelenium he’d not only moved forward but also upward at the same time, so that he reached the height necessary to be able to look over at least a portion of this whirling, raging beast.

But he’d erred in thinking that he could grasp the absolute size of the Maelstrom even from up here. The rapidly advancing water masses already filled his entire field of vision, and still he couldn’t see the real center of the whirlpool, the eye of the monster.

After a while he noticed that in the distance the world appeared to curve down, as if the globe of the earth had suddenly become much smaller and its curvature visible. So there was where it went down into the abyss, straight into the heart of this inconceivable, monumental monstrosity.

He’d long ago ceased to perceive the noise as actually noise. His ears gave up the task of filtering out details or even variations from this chaos. Everything had become one, a constant rushing and thundering that filled his head and almost brought it to bursting.

The ray was afraid of that thing stretching away under it. Occasionally it bucked and jerked so hard that Griffin feared he might slide out of the saddle despite the safety belts. On Tortuga he’d once heard a one-legged priest preaching about the apocalypse, of the end of the world and the hellish beast that would rise from the sea on the Day of Judgment. How wrong that picture of the end of all things had been. For now it was clear that it was the sea itself that rose and that it could be more dreadful and cruel than any creature of flesh and blood.

The wave crests of the Maelstrom stretched in all directions, and now the slopes of the boiling surface became steeper. Soon beneath him it was going down vertically, and again he was conscious of what power must be at work to curve the ocean itself like the back of a giant creature.

With the reins he signaled the ray to climb even higher. The animal obeyed willingly. It would probably have flown to the moon if Griffin asked it to, just as long as it got out of reach of that chasm opening beneath them mile after mile.

After the slopes had become a steep wall and a cloud cover of seething steam and spray stretched out beneath him, Griffin caught sight of the opposite side of the abyss in the distance. He was now exactly over the Maelstrom’s center. Treacherous eddy winds tugged at the ray’s wings, and dangerous air currents threatened to suck him into the pit. It was hard to gauge the diameter of this titanic funnel, but from one curving edge to the other must measure many miles. It surpassed Griffin’s imagination that this maw in the framework of the world stretched some thirty thousand feet into the deep, becoming narrower and narrower as it went down so that at its deepest point on the bottom of the sea it could vanish into a mussel.

Somewhere down there was Jolly.

If she ever got that far
, whispered a voice in the back of his mind. He did his best to repress this thought, but he didn’t succeed entirely. Jolly had ventured into regions that lay beyond human experience. And her only companion was someone who had at one time become almost her worst enemy.

There was no point in fooling himself. Her chances were not good. And yet he was glad that he was here now, at this place that was closer to Jolly than any other place in the world. He could only hope, perhaps even pray, that she was still alive.

For a moment he weighed actually plunging into the deep with the ray and just seeing how far they got. How deep could he thrust into the Maelstrom without being caught by the rotating walls of water? But he rejected the idea, for what good would it have done to take his own life in the bargain? He would help neither Jolly nor his friends in Aelenium that way.

In a curious way he was almost relieved, in spite of everything. He was finally seeing with his own eyes what they had only talked about for so long. He looked at the Maelstrom lying below him, heard its roaring, felt its terrible suction. He felt the nearness of the enemy, and that spurred his hatred again. Determination rose in him, and if he succeeded in returning safely to Aelenium, he would fight for the freedom of mankind until there were only two possible ways left—survival or going straight to the end.

Before he turned around and started back, however, he couldn’t resist the temptation to go a little lower. It was as if the suction of the Maelstrom also had an effect on his thoughts, as if there were a pull there that drew him down like a magnet.

Come closer
, hissed up out of the throat of the Maelstrom.
You cannot escape me.

While he was still wrestling with himself, trying to resist the temptation, he saw something that startled him alert in an instant.

Deep below him, beyond the cover of water vapor and the arcs of splashing water that now and again formed over the abyss like bridges, a glittering brightness flared up.

At first he took it for another cloud of water droplets, snowy white and denser than the others. But then he realized that the entire cloud cover was glowing, as if lightning had struck and ignited the whole world for the fraction of a second.

A fountain of light shot up out of the depths and stood only a few stone’s throws removed from Griffin in the center of the Maelstrom like a pillar of glittering, blazing fire.

The ray reared as if it had flown against an invisible wall. Griffin hollered in fright, slumped in his safety belt, and for seconds fought to keep from falling out of the saddle. The wounds in his side burned. When the animal was horizontal again and Griffin had managed to pull himself together in his pain and regain his balance, the pillar of light dissolved before his eyes into a cascade of glittering points of fire.

From deep, deep below an enormous rumbling thundered up, entirely drowning out the roaring of the water masses and seeming to rotate in common with the walls of the Maelstrom, at one moment on this side, the next moment on the other side. The ray fell into a panic, but it no longer shook, rather it shot forward with powerful wing beats, faster than Griffin had ever experienced with one of these animals. It was looking for the shortest way to the edge of the Maelstrom, away from his center and the swarm of light points that were still dancing and sparking there.

The rumbling grew louder, and suddenly it appeared to
Griffin as though the edge of the funnel kept moving away from them, as though it intended to keep the ray and rider from ever reaching it. And while a bizarre competition broke out between the ray and the curvature of the Maelstrom, Griffin looked down over the animal’s wings into the deep.

The waves of vapor flew apart and with them the water masses around the chasm in the sea. The funnel grew wider and broader, while the bestial rumbling filled the world with a sound quite different from the noise of the raging water.

The wings of the ray flapped up and down, faster and faster now, as if the animal were still not yet at the end of its strength. Gradually the edge of the abyss came closer, that whirling steepness that somewhere merged into the level of the ocean.

But before they arrived there, Griffin saw something else.

Beneath him there was no more water vapor. The clouds had pulled away and the walls of the funnel were glowing on their own, as if the water had turned to glowing lava.

Down below them gaped a shaft in the water that reached all the way to the bottom of the sea.

He grew dizzy and then sick, but when he retched, nothing but gall came up. No wonder—he hadn’t eaten anything for an eternity.

Under him lay the Crustal Breach.

Six miles deep and at least two miles wide yawned the abyss. On its bottom was a white surface, sand perhaps, like a piece of desert in the midst of the sea. Something shimmered in its center, a dot, which might be anything. Much too big for a human being. Perhaps a shipwreck.

Or a closed mussel.

The ray let out a strange sound, a muttering cry of alarm, and a moment later Griffin realized the reason.

The abyss was closing again! From all sides at once the rotating walls of the Maelstrom stormed closed. The bottom of the sea was already invisible now. The waves circled ever faster, drew together, filled the emptiness with the floods of ocean.

“Faster!” Griffin screamed in panic. “Faster!”

The ray now had a speed almost approaching that of a sea horse. Its wings beat in an unprecedented rhythm, and its heart was pumping so hard that Griffin was bouncing up and down in the saddle.

They made it.

Somehow they made it.

When the Maelstrom closed behind them and a colossal column of water rose into the sky, they were just far enough away not to be caught by the flood.

Griffin closed his eyes and shouted, and the water thrown up plunged from the sky in crystal curtains around him.

Beneath him the sea surface curved up in a tidal wave several hundred feet high. For a moment it almost appeared to freeze. Then it rolled apart in an eruption of gigantic force in rings in all directions, to bury the shores of the world beneath it.