by Kai Meyer
“But he comes from there! You saw that!”
“Out of the water,” she cried. “But we run on the water.” She was as little convinced by her plan as he was, but it was the only way out that occurred to her.
“I need time,” Munk panted, as they broke through a wall of fern and fleshy leaves. “Then maybe I can make the ghosts stronger.”
“Stronger?”
“I just sicced them on him. But they couldn’t fight if someone didn’t tell them how. Before, they only had to pick leaves. If I had time to give them orders—”
Behind them came an ear-shattering din as the Acherus left the track and followed them through the jungle with brute force. The breaking of the tree trunks reminded Jolly of the bursting of hulls of sinking ships. During a sea battle once, she’d seen two out-of-control galleons ram into each other; it was the same power, there’d been the same murderous noise, just as final and just as hopeless.
Munk panted in anguish. “If we can get across enough water, maybe that’ll give me enough time.”
Jolly had a dark recollection of the kobalins in the waves, but she nodded hurriedly. After all, they’d made it to the island without any of the kobalins attacking last time. But if not … well, it didn’t matter if they fell into the clutches of the deep-sea tribe or the Acherus.
Something fluttered past her face—two black, winged silhouettes against the sunbeams that fanned down through the jungle ceiling,
“Hugh!” exclaimed Munk. “And Moe!”
Jolly also recognized the Ghost Trader’s parrots. Was he following them and already right nearby?
“There—they’re showing us the way!” Munk turned around the dead root of a forest giant, which might possibly be wide enough to halt the Acherus.
What way? Jolly would have loved to ask, but she had no chance to.
The Acherus broke through the trees immediately behind them. Several trunks shattered and tipped in their direction, catching others with them and causing such chaos around the beast that he was invisible for another moment.
Jolly shouted a warning and tried to run faster, although it was as good as impossible. It was hard enough to avoid the vines and roots, to keep from stumbling over bushes or stepping into hidden holes in the ground under fern fronds.
She was at the end of her strength and hardly able to get her breath, compounded with fear that any moment she would feel one of the saber claws boring into her back.
Hugh and Moe had fluttered up at the appearance of the Acherus and now made a loop and flew toward the cadaverous beast. What the birds intended to accomplish was a mystery to Jolly—but she had no time to worry about the two of them, for now the undergrowth was thinning ahead of her and Munk, the ground became sandier, and soon they were running as hard as they could through a thin palm grove. On the other side of it, within sight now, lay a beach. The broad strip of sand glittered golden in the afternoon heat.
Jolly cast a glance over her shoulder. The parrots were flying on both sides of the Acherus, at the height of his deformed head, which God knew what power had created out of mud, algae, and human bones. The birds were screaming and chattering angrily, and it seemed to Jolly that something they were doing was slowing the Acherus. He didn’t stop, was still incredibly fast, but his body had lost its deadly momentum; now he even avoided palms instead of uprooting them.
Jolly whirled around and raised the pistol. She aimed at the beast’s head, pressed the trigger—and hit him. But the shot had no effect. The bullet was swallowed into the dark mass without halting the Acherus. With an oath, Jolly flung the useless weapon away.
Munk coughed with exhaustion and gasped for air. “Not much farther.”
They left the striped shade of the palm grove and stumbled out onto the beach. The soft sand slowed their run, but somehow they succeeded in reaching the water. Jolly kept an eye out for kobalins—and instead she saw the cloud bank, which was just pushing against one of the rocks in front of the island. So the Ghost Trader wasn’t onshore yet.
The water was much deeper here than in the shallow bay. They’d left the rain forest a long way farther east, a good five minutes’ walk back to the bay on foot. On a rise in the distance Jolly recognized two tall palms: She’d shot off the third a few days before with her cannon shot.
They hastened over the waves with wide, staggering steps. Soon they had around fifty yards between them and the beach.
Jolly stopped. If they couldn’t escape the Acherus now, they’d never manage to at all.
Munk stopped beside her. He pressed both hands into his sides, panting so loudly that he drowned out the crashing of the beast, which just then broke out between the outer palms, not halted but markedly slowed by the spells of the two parrots. The ghosts were still sticking to the creature’s deformed body like misty burrs.
The weariness in Munk’s face changed to determination. “Now, we’ll just see who’s stronger,” he whispered. He was obviously having trouble staying on his feet, and if Jolly’s own weak knees were any gauge of his exhaustion, he wouldn’t be able to stand much longer.
But he was still holding on.
The Acherus had stopped on the beach and was staring over at them from hundreds of blind fish eyes, a grim figure, as tall as four men, with knotty limbs and too many joints. He looked as if someone had piled him up there out of muck and refuse, a repugnant caricature of human life.
He seemed to be considering. He no longer paid any attention to the ghosts, which were still clinging to him. The parrots left him and flew over the water to Jolly and Munk.
“Bastard!” Munk murmured, and then he concentrated.
Again he closed his eyes, spread his arms, and whispered his orders to the ghosts with quivering lips, without a sound coming from his throat. Jolly wondered whether anyone could have done that or whether it required the Ghost Trader’s special magic to transfer the power of command over the ghosts to other people.
The Acherus put one foot into the water.
“He’s coming!” Helplessly, Jolly clenched her fists and bounced up and down on the waves, “You’ve got to hurry,” It was probably a mistake to press him, but her panic was rising again and overshadowed any reason.
Not allowing himself to be distracted, Munk continued to give his silent orders. His eyelids twitched, his hair stuck to his sweaty forehead. Jolly’s felt no better.
Now the Acherus had waded up to his knees in the sea. Anyway, he couldn’t walk on top of the water like the two polliwogs. Would he swim to them? Or push up at them from the bottom of the sea?
The Acherus kept on coming. And now there was movement in the seething mass of ghosts on his shoulders, on his chest, and on his back. Jolly was too far away to be able to make out the details, but she thought she saw the misty beings drilling their arms into the rotten body like blades. No longer were they content with dragging on it—now they went on the offensive. Munk’s orders were taking effect.
The Acherus’s scream pierced Jolly to the quick. Even the waves rose higher. They made Jolly and Munk almost lose their balance.
Munk’s eyes snapped open. “Spirits can determine when and where they become solid to pick something up or carry it…. I ordered them to go inside the Acherus and then become solid bodies.”
What happened to the creature next was not a pretty sight. The ghosts vanished inside his massive interior, which swelled more and more as more of them took on solidity. They were now no longer wisps of mist but bodies of … yes, what? Flesh and blood?
It was only a matter of seconds before the mass burst the limits of his body.
Jolly averted her eyes as the screams of the beast died away. When she looked back at the shore, the ghosts were scattering. A viscous carpet of black muck and algae was floating on the waves. A horrific smell wafted across the water and made Jolly gag.
The parrots flew away over their heads, farther out over the sea. Jolly reeled as though she’d been stunned.
Arms of fog reached for her, but they couldn’t sto
p Jolly from falling forward, landing feebly on all fours, and vomiting with exhaustion. Out of the corner of her eye she saw Munk crouching; he was even more done in than she was.
Hugh and Moe uttered shrill screams as they plunged into the fog.
Then there was only milky white around Jolly, too, as if the air had frozen to ice in an instant.
“She will die.” The Ghost Trader sat on the edge of the bed on which they’d laid Munk’s mother. “She has already forgotten that she’s still alive.”
Munk didn’t break down. He didn’t even cry. His face was as hard as glass. “There must still be something that could be done.”
The Trader shook his head under his hood.
Munk was silent. Jolly put her hand over his. His fingers were ice-cold. She had infinite sympathy for him. She felt the tears rush to her eyes and wasn’t ashamed when they rolled down her cheeks.
“There is one thing I can do for her,” said the Trader.
Munk’s expression became colder, and his voice could have cut steel. “Do you want to make her into one of your ghosts?”
“I am speaking of something better. Something good.” He paused a moment, then added, “Something she deserves.”
“What do you mean?” asked Jolly. She didn’t care if she sounded rude. After all they’d gone through, politeness had become meaningless.
“I can give her another kind of life. One that never ends.” The Ghost Trader lowered his voice to a piercing whisper. “A life as story.”
“And what does that mean?” Jolly remained mistrustful, while Munk only continued to look silently at his mother.
“She will live on, not as human, not in a body, but as something that people continue to recount, from one generation to the next.” He leaned forward and smoothed a strand of hair away from the dying woman’s face. “I can make her into a legend, a most beautiful fairy tale, or a new myth.”
Shaking her head, Jolly looked at the floor, but out of consideration for Munk, she kept quiet.
“Munk?” The Ghost Trader touched him on the arm. “I will only do it if you agree.”
The boy gazed at his mother’s face as he held her bloodless hands. They’d bound up her wounds, but as they did so, it was clear to them that it wouldn’t save her. She was already in deep unconsciousness, and her breathing paused more and more often.
“Munk,” said the Trader urgently, “I can do it only as long as there is still life in her.”
Jolly pressed her lips together. She didn’t know what advice she could give Munk, and if he’d want it anyway. She didn’t trust the Ghost Trader, despite the help of his two birds. However, she couldn’t rule out the possibility that he was speaking the truth.
“Do what you can,” Munk whispered, without raising his eyes from his mother. Now his eyes filled with tears, but his tone was so hard and determined that it gave Jolly gooseflesh.
The Ghost Trader nodded. “You can hold her hand if you like.”
Munk bent over, embraced his mother one last time, and whispered something into her ear. When he sat up again, her cheeks were wet with his tears.
Something in the Ghost Trader’s face melted, as if from beneath his face another suddenly came into view. The many lines that radiated from around his eyes and the corners of his mouth smoothed, but it didn’t make him look younger—only more unblemished, more superhuman. His one eye gleamed, as if it had turned into polished marble. He whole face radiated power.
“I make you into a story,” he said softly to the dying woman, as if she could understand each of his words. “You will be a story in which young girls meet powerful magicians and poor wretches meet brave princesses. In which fate turns sometimes in one direction, sometimes another, and thereby the progress of a world is decided. In which doors are in places where no one looked for them, and windows everywhere. And in which the old gods wander over the earth, just as they still occasionally do today.”
Munk’s mother took her last breath. Then the air escaped from her in a gentle sigh, and it came to Jolly in a flash that they had all become part of that story the Ghost Trader had just conjured up: As if they were also legendary heroes, of whom people would be telling in centuries to come; as if there were also in her own life a goal of which she had never dreamed but that unavoidably awaited her just over the horizon.
“She will live on from mouth to mouth,” said the Ghost Trader, “and one day someone may even write about her, so that she will never be forgotten.”
He stroked the dead woman’s hair one last time, “Fare well and give solace and happiness and sorrow. Fare well and truly forever.”
With these words, he got up and left the house.
Jolly looked from the dead woman to Munk. He folded his mother’s hands on her breast.
“We’ll bury them together,” he said in a cracked voice. “Both in one grave. They wanted it that way.”
Sea of Darkness
The very same night, the Ghost Trader summoned Jolly and Munk to him. They’d returned to the ghost ship several hours before and put out to sea immediately after their arrival. Now the fog and ship were gliding through the darkness.
Jolly was burning with a multitude of questions, but she sensed that the Ghost Trader wouldn’t let himself be hurried. For the time being, it was enough that he’d agreed to take her back to her own world, to New Providence, where she could forget her experiences on the island and begin her investigation into Bannon’s fate. New Providence had also been Bannon’s original goal. In addition, it was the headquarters of the pirate emperor, Kendrick, and if anyone were to know something about betrayal of the Maddy, it would be the leader of the freebooters and corsairs.
The Ghost Trader was sitting on one of the steps leading up to the bridge, just beside one of the swaying oil lanterns. At each movement of the ship, the lantern swung toward his face, then away again, momentarily bathing his angular features in glowing firelight. The eyes of the parrots on his shoulder gleamed like semiprecious stones.
On both sides of the railing there was impenetrable darkness. The fog ring around the ship made the night even darker, swathing them in deep, saturated black. Only high over the masts, in a round cutout of the night sky, did the stars show themselves. Even they seemed farther away than usual.
Except for the creaking of the timbers and the moaning of the rickety rigging, there was utter quiet, with even the splashing of the wake silenced. The fog seemed to bear the ship through the night on a cloud; they hardly felt that it was moving forward.
Munk had said scarcely a word since they’d left the island. His tears had dried, but he was only externally contained. His eyes were staring into the dark night, and even when the Ghost Trader began to speak, Munk didn’t turn toward him.
“The Acherus,” said the one-eyed man, “is a creature of the Mare Tenebrosum. Few have ever seen one like him, and if they have, it was a long, long time ago, when the powers of the Maelstrom tried to take over the world once before.”
“What’s that—Mare Tenebrosum?” Jolly asked.
“Sea of Darkness. Sometimes it shows up in places where no one expects it. Then there’s foul weather where none should be, ships are wrecked, although there are no reefs or sandbars, and always men are killed then, swallowed by something that is infinitely deeper than the craters of burned-out volcanoes on the bottom of the sea and blacker than all the places to which no light reaches. The Mare Tenebrosum is a sea that knows no borders, in which there is no land, and whose creatures cannot be compared with any that show themselves here among us!”
Jolly and Munk exchanged a mystified look. “Here among us?” Jolly asked. “So is this sea you’re talking about somewhere else?”
The Ghost Trader nodded. “In a place that, normally, none of us can reach, in a world that lies directly below ours. It’s separated from us by boundaries that neither ordinary mortals nor even the gods can cross. At least, not the gods of this world.”
“And what about the gods from that one?”
Munk asked coldly.
To Jolly, who believed neither in one god nor several, this question seemed strange. But perhaps Munk was only trying to distract himself from his grief. She thought that was very brave. When she thought of Bannon and the others, she was pierced by a powerful stab of grief, followed by a moment of deep despair. Nevertheless, she still had the hope of finding the men sometime. Or at least the traitor who’d lured them into the treacherous trap. When the loss hurt too much, she could cling to this hope. Munk, on the other hand, had buried his parents with his own hands. He would never see them again.
“I don’t know if it’s gods or mortals who come over from the Mare Tenebrosum,” said the Ghost Trader. “Breaches in the wall between the worlds have occurred in times past, though only very rarely. Then a bit of the Mare Tenebrosum sloshes over to us, like spillage from an overfilled kettle. Those are the unexplained disasters on the high seas you sometimes hear of and that I mentioned: the vanished ships, the terrible hurricanes and floods, the black fogs on the water from which no one returns. Usually, these breaches close so quickly that nothing living can get through them to us.”
“But the Acherus is something living. Or at least something comparable,” said Jolly.
The Ghost Trader nodded sadly. “You’re right. The powers of the Mare Tenebrosum don’t intend to be content with the water any longer. They now want to conquer land as well—land that does not exist in their world. They’ve created a doorway into our world: a powerful maelstrom, larger than anything you can imagine, several miles wide at its broadest place and as deep as the bottom of the sea. A maelstrom with a sharp, dark intelligence.”
He paused to allow the picture evoked by his words to sink in. “When it opens—and I pray that it hasn’t gotten so far yet—it will mercilessly suck everything in its path into the abyss, into the darkness of its world. Yet, at the moment, it has changed direction and spewed harbingers out of the deep to us in the daylight, sometimes fish and monsters and sometimes creatures—”
“Like the Acherus,” said Jolly dully.
