Pirate Wars (23 page)

The voices of innumerable gods were swirling through the Ghost Trader’s consciousness when he caught sight of the light on the horizon. Like a finger of glittering brightness it
shot up over the horizon and bored into the gray-blue of the heavens like a glowing dagger.

The Trader was distracted for a moment, and the connection to the forgotten ones was snapped. An angry bellowing arose, forcing its way out of fields where they were impatiently awaiting their rebirth—and was suddenly cut off.

An invisible fist struck the Ghost Trader and flung him to the ground. The silver ring slid from his hand and rolled to the edge of the ledge. The Trader was lucky that he’d stumbled only a few steps backward; the impact had almost thrown him over the edge of the plateau, down into the depths of the ray shelter. But he remained lying there, groaning, then lifted his head again and stared out at the horizon.

The light in the midst of the wavering walls of mist paled again. The world seemed to be holding its breath. Silence sealed his ears like liquid wax. The only thing the Trader heard was the blood pounding in his temples. Even the noise of the battle seemed to have halted, perhaps because the fighters also felt that something had happened that no one expected.

The door through which the ghosts of the dead gods of this world had intended to enter was closed. It would cost much strength and conviction to reopen it and begin the invocation all over again.

But perhaps it wouldn’t be necessary anymore.

Out of the heart of the Maelstrom, so many miles away, a gray tower of water twisted up, which was clearly recognizable even at this distance. Its point touched the sky, blossomed out
like the cup of a flower, and finally broke apart in an explosion of water cascades.

The Ghost Trader saw all this and realized at the same moment that the tidal wave would come. Knew it before he finally saw a wall of seawater under which the ocean curved up, bucked like a stubborn animal, and made the air itself tremble.

Over the Ghost Trader the two parrots shot up into the heavens, ascending until they were only two dark dots.

He struggled to his feet, looked for a hold, and found the body of the old ray. Without taking his eyes off the tidal wave thundering toward Aelenium, he ran over to the dead animal, leaned his back against it, and closed his eyes in anxious expectation.

Silent and motionless he waited for the end.

A few minutes
before the mysterious light burst the Maelstrom, before the Ghost Trader broke off his invocation, and before Griffin’s ray reached a safe height over the tidal wave with its last strength, the defense wall for the upper third of Aelenium broke for the second time.

As in the case of the south side, the attackers succeeded in making a gash in the desperate defense of the guard on the west side. Pouring over the wall now were ragged figures who’d stayed all day long in the darkness of the storerooms of Tyrone’s fleet, awaiting the outcome of the sea battle against the Antilles captains. Several cannon that had been brought on land and rolled up the streets had torn a breach in the defenses. Many of the inhabitants of Aelenium would have been killed, had the responsible commander not seen the situation in time and got his people to safety in the adjoining streets.

Now pirates and cannibals were streaming through the dense smoke from the guns, stumbling over broken splinters of coral and wooden debris, yelling and waving sabers, and trampling across a square where children used to play and people would sit in the evenings with wine and songs.

The first wave of the attackers came to a halt when the guardsmen opened fire behind a corner of the street and a few makeshift barricades. But those who fell back used the moments in which rifles and pistols were being reloaded to engage the defenders in fierce hand-to-hand fighting.

From the air, the ray riders saw what was happening, and d’Artois immediately felt compelled to divide his ray force and send a troop out of the hotly contested south to the new breach in the west. The result was that the attackers there were stopped, certainly, but those in the south now encountered less opposition and gradually won the upper hand.

“It’s hopeless,” said the captain to his sharpshooter. As commander, he couldn’t show his despair openly, but he and his marksman had known each other for years and had no secrets from each other. “They’ll take the city,” he said dejectedly, “before the sun goes down.”

The marksman fired a salvo down to the ground from several rifles. As the smoke of his weapons cleared, his eyes fell on the fog in the north.

“Look at that!” he cried, thumping d’Artois on the shoulder. The captain followed his outstretched hand and saw what he meant. On the other side of the fog ring, high over the ragged strands of mist, the sky colored brilliant white for
a moment, as if a second sun had risen somewhere over the Atlantic. An instant of gloomy dusk followed the light a moment later, before an unearthly rumbling sounded like the eruption of a volcano.

Then something high and gray rent the captain’s vision, as if an ax had split the horizon. It was as if someone had stood the world on its head: The water of the ocean shot into the sky with a roar.

Soledad had long stopped counting how many arrows were protruding from the flying serpent’s body. The creature that had once been the Hexhermetic Shipworm was still fighting with the recklessness of a predator, but even his strength was gradually being weakened by the many wounds. Certainly the serpent was big, his bites and the blows with the end of his body were lethal, but he offered an easy target for the arrows of the cannibals and the bullets of the pirates.

From her place behind the wall, where Soledad had withdrawn to rest for a moment, she could clearly see that the flying reptile was bleeding from many wounds even where no arrows were sticking out between his scales. And as great as the panic that he spread among the attackers was, the triumphant cries when another arrow hit its mark were loud as well, and the courage and determination of the invaders was kindled anew.

Soledad was just about to jump up and plunge into the battle again when suddenly Buenaventure was standing next to her, panting, his tongue hanging out of his dog muzzle. The toothed saber now had more nicks than teeth.

“Walker’s wounded!” he shouted to her.

Her heart almost stopped beating.

“I carried him away from the wall,” the pit bull man went on, “into an empty house at the edge of the square. The one with the little windows over there.”

“How bad is it?”

“Not too bad. A wound in the side. And a deep knife cut in the left upper arm. Nothing that will kill someone like him. But he’s lost a lot of blood and can’t fight anymore.”

“Take over my place. I’ll be right back.” She pointed to one of the houses. “That one there?”

Buenaventure growled agreement; then he plunged into the battle with a wild war cry.

Soledad ran as fast up the steep square as she could. Several times she had to avoid wounded who were being carried from the wall to the field hospital. In the beginning there were still plenty of reinforcements moving up across the square, but that was long past. Anyone who could hold a weapon was now fighting at the very front.

She reached the entrance of the house, stormed into a hallway, and looked into the open doors right and left.

“Walker?”

“Soledad?” came a voice from the second floor. “Up here. That hairy, stinking monster of a friend has laid me aside here like an old man. Help me get back—”

He broke off as she came flying through the door of a room on the second floor, her face pale with alarm.

“Damn it,” he said with a pain-filled grin, “you were
worried about me!” He lay on the floor, a single pillow under his head. The rest of the room was empty—all the furniture had been taken out to strengthen the wall.

“Not in the least,” she retorted. Then she leaped over beside him and embraced him hard. “When he said you were wounded, I thought…”

He tried to raise himself from his supine position. “Nothing happened to me. It just makes me sick to lie here uselessly, while—”

The rest of his words were lost in a terrible din that came in through both windows and even overwhelmed the noise of the battlefield.

Soledad jumped up. “What the devil…” She couldn’t hear her own voice, it had grown so loud outside suddenly. The floor trembled, and then she was thrown off her feet as if by a gale wind and tumbled through the room in a somersault.

Chance willed it that she crashed against the wall beside one of the windows. Groaning, she tried to get to her feet, but for some reason her sense of balance wasn’t cooperating. Then she understood: The floor was no longer level. The whole house was lying on a slant like a ship in a storm!

The wooden shutters had been smashed by a ricochet, probably hours ago, and so her eyes fell on the square unhindered.

At first she didn’t take in what she was seeing.

Something like a hurricane had hit the city. Everywhere there was water, spray, gray foam, and people in panic. But
that was only a foretaste of what was approaching from the other side.

A gray wall.

The Maelstrom
, shot through her mind, almost matter-of-factly.
He’s here. He’s come to get us all.

But it was not the Maelstrom. It was the ocean itself that rose against them.

And then, in those endless, unreal fragments of seconds, before the tidal wave hit Aelenium, she saw something else.

The defense wall had vanished, torn away by the first surging water masses. And with it all the people who had been on it. The place where Soledad herself had just been fighting was now only emptiness.

Buenaventure and all the others were gone.

The tidal wave looked like water, acted like water, and for the drowning it even tasted like water during their last, terrible moments. Yet in that second when it hit Aelenium, it seemed hewn out of solid stone and ground up beneath it people, coral, and ships on the shore equally.

The great miracle in the midst of all this misfortune and death and the absolute feeling of being at the end was the fact that the anchor chain held.

There was a list of other miracles, though certainly lesser in comparison, that were for some people just as marvelous and merciful.

There was the little girl who had stolen out of the refuge hall with her brother to watch the battle from above; at the
last moment she was caught by a ray’s wing as a water fountain poured down on her from a rooftop.

There was the cannibal who got himself to safety on a statue and was able to grab a guardsman as he was torn away by the flood; the tribesman pulled the man up beside him on the shoulders of the statue and there they sat silently side by side, deadly enemies just before who now faced a common, incomprehensible opponent.

There was the cook of a pirate ship who only survived because at the last moment he fell headfirst into a half-empty apple barrel. And while the hull of the ship broke into pieces beneath him, he remained unharmed for some mysterious reason and was found unconscious but alive, floating in his barrel, still with his head down; he never went to sea or touched an apple again in his life.

Then there was the small troop of guardsmen who were able to save themselves on the roof of the only house that remained undestroyed in the Poets’ Quarter. And the old woman who in spite of her great age was hobbling to the wall and approached the first waves with stick raised like a soldier swinging a saber against a superior enemy force; even she survived, half-drowned, of course, but sturdy enough to save herself. And the doctor who in his despair kept his back against the door of the hospital to protect the many wounded from the water with his own body; actually, the waves flowed around the house, which might have been because some god or other had saved it or because the building was sited unnoticeably higher than the land around it.

There were many such episodes, but also far more of those with the unhappy ending of death and the disappearance of many people without a trace.

It affected the attackers most of all. The tidal wave was high enough to lay waste to the lower two-thirds of Aelenium, and by that time the area was exclusively occupied by the cannibals and pirates who were hurrying up to the upper wall. They were all swept away. Of the dozens of ships at the shoreline not one was left, and the few men who’d remained aboard during the battle were miserably drowned, except for a handful.

Also, the defense wall was destroyed. Fighters of both sides died on it.

Only the people above the wall were almost completely unscathed: countless wounded guardsmen and citizens of the sea star city, but also those who had fled up the mountain just in time as the water approached.

No one ever found out how many people lost their lives on that day. Later, tallies were taken in the sea star city, but it remained uncertain how many pirates and cannibals had died.

Tyrone’s fleet was wiped out at one stroke.

As the tidal wave rushed toward the Lesser Antilles and finally the mainland, slowly lost its force, and ebbed away, Soledad and Walker were sitting pressed close together in the bedroom of the house where Buenaventure had brought the captain.

They huddled in a corner, not speaking, keeping their eyes
closed, listening to the breathing of the other and the gradually diminishing noise outside.

At some point they separated from each other, and Soledad helped Walker to the window.

“I’m going out to look for him,” the princess breathed tonelessly. “I’ll find him. He must be somewhere.”

“I’m coming along,” said Walker.

“No!”

“He’s my friend.”

“I’ll find him for you,” she said gently. “You’re too badly wounded to be running around.”

“My right arm is working. I can duel and shoot and—”

She placed a finger on his lips. “With that wound in your side? Let me look around first to see how it really looks outside. Then I’ll come and get you.”

She jumped up and quickly took two steps backward so that he couldn’t hold her. It hurt to see how he struggled to his feet, tried to follow her, and then had to give up, his face twisted in pain.

“Please,” she said, “stay here. I couldn’t bear to lose you.”

Their eyes met again. He gave up and leaned against the wall, exhausted. “He’s bound to be out there somewhere.”

She gave him a reassuring smile and ran down the stairs and out of the house. Torrents were still rushing through the streets, and the whole city was rocking like a loaded galleon on a heavy sea. Soledad wasn’t sure what had caused the tidal wave, but she was increasingly doubtful that it could be a weapon of the Maelstrom. Tyrone’s men had been on the
brink of victory. Why would the Maelstrom have included their deaths in the bargain?

Because human life meant nothing to him, she thought icily. And because the attack wasn’t going fast enough.

But what had the Maelstrom gained? Aelenium had not gone down to defeat, which in all probability was thanks to the anchor chain. And to that which protected it. Soledad recalled her meeting in the undercity, the sparkling eyes of the sea serpent, yet now she was only overcome with gratitude at this memory.

In the square she found most of the wounded still where they’d been lying before the wave. Some had been thrown about higgledy-piggledy, and a few were probably washed away as well—Soledad wasn’t sure. The first relief workers were gradually venturing down from the upper streets, many with stricken faces and groping, uncertain steps. Almost everyone kept looking to the north, where the sky now showed itself blue and beaming. If a second wave were going to come, there was no sign of it.

Soledad hurried past the confused and injured men in the square. Soon she reached the three street openings where the wall had been situated. There was some debris lying there, but the wall itself had disappeared almost entirely.

She looked through the center opening and down the street, which after a few dozen paces was no longer there. The tidal wave had destroyed a majority of the buildings in the central part of Aelenium, had torn down walls, ripped off roofs, and left only ruins standing. Water ran
from all openings and flowed into branching gutters and down to the sea.

But it was even worse farther down.

The districts in the lower third of the Aelenium, down to the water, were washed away. Where hundreds of houses had stood before, there was now only emptiness. All that was left were smooth, white cliffs, looking as if they were covered with broken ice floes—the remains of the crooked and tightly crowded buildings that had once risen there. From where she stood Soledad could also see a sea star arm, and it, too, was completely empty. As though polished clean.