by Kai Meyer
“Are they here?” Jolly asked cautiously, though she wasn’t overly alarmed. She had been taking in the surrounding crevices and cavities the entire time and discovered no evidence at all of an ambush.
“Many have gone away,” said Aina with a gentle shake of her head. “The Maelstrom has sent them away.”
To Aelenium, thought Jolly, without any real relief. Had the battle already begun? Or might it even be decided?
“How long have you been down here?” Munk asked. “And who sent you?”
Jolly thought she heard a slight undertone of jealousy in his voice. Was he worried that Forefather might have secretly sent other polliwogs as well? And did that make him feel…yes, what, actually? Slighted? No longer so important as before?
“We came down here a long time ago,” said Aina. “An inconceivably long time.”
“We?” Jolly probed.
“I and the others, who are just like you.”
“Still more polliwogs?”
“If that is your word for us, yes.”
The whole thing was getting more and more baffling. And then suddenly it dawned on Jolly. “You’re one of the polliwogs from the old time?”
Munk gave her an amazed, then increasingly somber side glance. “That’s impossible,” he whispered to her grimly.
“Oh, yes?” she retorted, just as tense.
“From the old time,” Aina repeated sadly, and her eyes fixed on distances that Jolly dared not imagine. “It was so long ago.”
How long ago might it have been that the Maelstrom was overcome the first time and imprisoned in the Crustal Breach? There had only ever been talk of thousands of years. Not once had Forefather or Count Aristotle said anything specific about the time of the first war with the powers of the Mare Tenebrosum, so inconceivably long ago had it been.
But Aina looked as if she was no older than fifteen.
Jolly’s knees grew weak, and for a moment it was all she could do to stay on her feet. If Aina could live so long, what did that mean for the other polliwogs? For Jolly herself?
She cleared her throat with an effort. “Aina,” she said, “are you one of those who fought against the Maelstrom in the old time? Did you imprison him in the mussel?”
The shadow of a smile crossed the girl’s regular features. “I have seen the Maelstrom,” she said hesitantly. “I know the way.”
Munk appeared to have decided to disregard Jolly’s surmise. “Then you can show us how we can get there the fastest.”
Jolly poked her elbow into his ribs. “Munk, damn it…!”
He whirled around, and for a moment it looked as though their long-brewing conflict would be decided here and now, in the ruins of a forgotten coral city, many thousands of feet under the sea and before the eyes of this mysterious girl. For several seconds it looked as if Munk were going to hurl himself at Jolly, not with the help of mussel magic or any other tricks, but with bare fists.
He thinks I’m superfluous, flashed through Jolly’s mind. He thinks I’m only holding him back. That I’m of no use down here anyway because he’s much more powerful than I am.
And the worst thing is, she thought, he’s right. I am superfluous.
She’d scarcely formulated the thought when she contradicted herself: No, I’m not. If he so innocently trusts the first one who comes along and hands over the fate of the whole world, then it’s good that I’m with him. Even if it’s only to keep an eye on him. On him and what he does. On his dumb tendency toward recklessness.
He needs me, thought Jolly. He doesn’t know it, doesn’t want to admit it—but he’s dependent on me. And I on him, if I ever want to get out of here alive.
“I can lead you to the Maelstrom,” said Aina, but it sounded as if it were not a confirmation of what Munk had said but an idea that had just come to her. “I can help you. But will you also help me?”
How? Jolly wanted to ask, but Munk was ahead of her. “Certainly,” he said.
“I will explain it to you,” said Aina. Her eyes were so large and dark. Jolly tried to read the truth in them, but there was nothing there she could discern.
The girl looked around searchingly. “But not here. It’s too dangerous.”
“Oh?” asked Jolly mistrustfully, thus earning a warning look from Munk. But she would not be sidetracked. “If you’re one of the polliwogs from the old time, you must have escaped from the Maelstrom, right? You were just running away when you ran across our path. Quite a coincidence, wasn’t it?”
Aina looked to Munk for help.
“Jolly,” he said sharply. But he wasn’t completely blinded yet and turned again to Aina. “Have you some sort of…proof for what you say?”
Thank goodness, thought Jolly, relieved.
“Proof?” Aina opened her eyes wide in alarm. “Look at me—I don’t even have clothes. How can I prove anything?”
That beast! flashed through Jolly’s mind.
Munk looked over at Jolly. “She’s right about that.”
“Oh, Munk, surely you’re not serious!”
Aina frowned. Obviously she was uncomfortable being in the firing line of an argument between the two. She quickly began to speak again. “Please listen to me. And then decide for yourselves.” She was silent for a moment, looking worriedly up at the slopes of rubble to the left and right of the lane.
Munk walked up beside her. “Don’t worry.” His voice sounded gentle and reassuring. “We’ll find a hiding place. Some kind of a place where no one can see us from above so easily. And then you can tell us everything.”
“I’ve seen a place like that,” said Aina. “A little farther down. There’s an overhang, I’ve rested there.”
Jolly looked thoughtfully from one to the other. She still couldn’t shake off her mistrust of the girl. But she had to admit that it was only fair to listen to Aina. The girl didn’t actually appear too dangerous. Quite the contrary: She felt Aina’s vulnerability arousing pity in her, too.
After hesitating briefly, she followed Aina and Munk downward along the lane. Here and there she noticed small creatures between the rubble pushing themselves along the ocean floor with difficulty. Obviously the deep sea wasn’t as dead as she’d thought in the beginning. Even the ugly albino plants that grew everywhere among the ruins and fished invisible nutrients out of the water with their stumpy outgrowths spoke for that.
The lane broadened and led on over a bottomless crack between two mighty fragments. They swam over it and reached a kind of plateau, which in truth was the mirror-smooth broken edge of a gigantic coral piece. All around it lay rubble.
“Behind there is the place.” Aina pointed across the bizarre plaza, where more coral mountains arose at the edge of their polliwog vision.
“The area is too open,” said Jolly to Munk. “If one of the currents comes now, we’re unprotected.”
He agreed, if reluctantly, and so they went around the plaza in the protection of the heaps of debris. Aina had nothing against that. She even appeared to be a little frightened to realize that she’d already risked crossing the open surface.
Finally they reached the place the mysterious girl had meant. Jolly had to admit that it was a solid hideout. Not perfect. Not secure through and through. But it was a place in which they could take cover for the moment.
It was a tower that was still standing almost upright and whose upper half had caved in with the crash onto the sea floor. Inside, a funnel-shaped slope of debris had formed. Here there were no plants and no crabs. But the best thing was that other rubble had fallen onto the opening above and closed it like a roof. There were two entrances: the old entry and a window opening farther up to which they could easily swim in an emergency.
“Looks good,” said Munk when they’d made themselves fairly comfortable on the coral heap.
“One hour,” said Jolly. “No more. We don’t have time.”
He nodded, and the two turned to Aina, who knelt not even an arm’s length from them, her hands crossed on her thighs. He
r long hair fell down into her lap.
“It’s strange,” began Aina. Her eyes were turned toward them. “It’s already so long ago now. But I can remember it as if it were only a few years.” She was silent for a moment before she went on. “At that time we were sent out to close the Maelstrom. There were three of us, two boys and a girl. We were good friends.”
Jolly and Munk exchanged a brief look, almost a little ashamed.
“We succeeded. We closed in the Maelstrom, but also ourselves.”
“Into the mussel?” exclaimed Munk with a groan.
“Yes. The Maelstrom was not dead, you know. He wasn’t even asleep. He was simply locked in the whole time. And we with him.”
Jolly had a number of questions burning on her tongue, but she hesitated. Gradually her pity for Aina was growing into real sympathy. She tried to imagine what it would be like to be closed in with your greatest enemy in a narrow space for thousands of years.
“What did he do to you?” Munk wanted to know.
“First we resisted. We were all three powerful mussel magicians, and in the beginning we could keep him from doing anything to us. It even looked as though we could keep him away from us forever. But the Maelstrom was superior to us in one thing—he had all the time and patience in the world. He wasn’t strong enough to break the mussel magic, but he didn’t mind waiting. Sometime our vigilance must diminish, and that’s what happened. When the years had worn us down, he struck unexpectedly. And from then on we were at his mercy.” Aina moved uncomfortably back and forth on her knees. It was a wonder that the sharp edges of the coral didn’t cut her skin. “First he tortured us. Then, when the pain could no longer be any greater, he suddenly left us alone. He simply lost the pleasure in harming us. Perhaps we weren’t important to him any longer, for presumably by that time he’d already begun to plan his return. We were only his past, but he wanted the future. He separated us from each other and must have hoped that we would perish of boredom. Or go mad.”
Jolly couldn’t utter a word. She was ashamed to have met Aina with such mistrust. Had the girl experienced what was also in store for them? An eternal imprisonment at the side of the Maelstrom? Was that why Forefather had claimed that he didn’t know what actually awaited them at the end of their road into the Crustal Breach?
Munk stretched out a hand to touch Aina. Very carefully only, on the arm. Perhaps he wanted to be sure that they weren’t merely dreaming the girl, that something hadn’t taken shape out of their fear to warn them.
His hand went right through Aina’s arm. She offered no resistance.
Munk shrank back with a gasp. Jolly leaped up. But the girl only looked sadly up at them without moving.
“I am fading,” said Aina.
Munk stumbled to his feet. “She’s a ghost,” he whispered tonelessly.
“No.” For the first time Aina sounded energetic, as if all the sorrow and all the pain were gone with one stroke. “No ghost! I am I. I am Aina. And I live.”
A spark glowed in her eyes that hadn’t been there before. “Perhaps that’s enough proof that I’m telling you the truth.” She was silent for a moment and then went on in a quieter voice. “I’d like for you to believe me. Since I succeeded in escaping the spell of the Maelstrom, I’ve lost…substantiality. I’m fading, and it’s going faster and faster, the farther I go from the Crustal Breach. Perhaps because in the world outside there, in the time outside there, I really oughtn’t to exist anymore.”
That was crazy—and at the same time it sounded so plausible that this time it was Jolly who was the first to get over her suspicion.
Poor thing, she thought sympathetically. “Why didn’t the others flee with you? Your friends.”
“I don’t even know if they’re still alive. The Maelstrom separated us. I haven’t seen them for an eternity. But I can feel them. That sounds crazy, doesn’t it?”
Automatically both of them shook their heads. They were polliwogs, no matter how things stood among them. Aina was right: There was a connection among them, unseen and incomprehensible.
“Will you help me?” Aina’s eyes glowed. “Will you help me to free them?”
Munk looked at Jolly. “What do you think?”
She nodded. “We’ll try.”
Munk sounded a little hesitant as he turned to Aina. “Good. Agreed. We’ll help you if you help us. You know the way.”
Jolly looked at his face. It was closed, as so often in recent days. She didn’t understand him. Just a minute ago he was ready to quarrel with her in order to support Aina. But now it was as if she had to convince him, not the other way around. Was it because of disappointment that after Jolly, for the second time a girl had become unreachable for him?
For now she gave up trying to understand him. Everything was confusing enough without trying to figure out a boy’s mind.
“So, shall we go together?” asked Aina hopefully through the strands of black hair that kept falling into her face. They looked a little like strands of dark water plants.
Jolly nodded. Munk did as well.
Silently they sat in their hiding place, each of them lost in thought. And although Jolly had a multitude of questions going through her head, she was reluctant to ask them aloud. Did she really want to know more about what the girl had lived through? Or would the answers be worse than all the unknowns?
Somehow she fell into a restless sleep, perhaps several hours long. When she awakened, Aina was still with them, sitting above them in the window of the tower ruin with her knees drawn up and looking out into the black deep sea, lost in her own thoughts.
The Second Wave
“Buenaventure! Here they come!”
The pit bull man didn’t look up as Walker pointed over the wall toward the water. With his keen canine senses he’d already scented the kobalins not far from the shore before anyone else could have seen them.
The rays were still wheeling in three wide orbits around the city, but soon their mission would be at an end. Even d’Artois and the other commanders must know that. It had been clear from the beginning that the Maelstrom’s hosts couldn’t be halted from the air forever.
This task would fall to the men and women on the shore, the defenders of the first wall. Most of them were frozen with horror when the first kobalins crept onto the land.
Skinny, almost skeleton-like bodies with arms much too long; hard-bitten gargoyles of faces with receding foreheads, dark slits for eyes, and mouths so large that they could dive into fish schools with wide-open jaws and swallow dozens of prey at once; scaly skins that shimmered in all colors of the rainbow and in their fascinating play of color were a bizarre contrast to the ugliness of these creatures; and not least, the knife-sharp claws on bony fingers, some of which held weapons: primitive harpoon lances replete with barbs, rusty sabers from the bottom of the sea, the odd dagger that had once belonged to a sailor.
The kobalins were creeping out of the water in oil-slick-lustered waves, as if the spume itself were spitting them up. Creatures that had not been created to leave the sea, and nevertheless now dared to. Buenaventure might almost have admired them for their determination—if it weren’t for the certainty that they were not acting of their own free will but were being incited by their chieftains and driven forward with threats. Chieftains who were under the influence of their lord, who himself obeyed the Maelstrom.
With many others, Buenaventure and Walker were manning a defense line on the north side of Aelenium: a twelve-foot-high wall of coral pieces, which had been broken out of the undercity and strengthened by sandbags, wooden beams, and even furniture that the inhabitants had dragged there from the nearby houses. To the right and left of the barricade rose the walls of a wide street. All the accesses to the sea were closed with similar blockades.
The first row of defenders awaited the kobalins above on the wall, with loaded rifles and flintlock pistols, which were discharged at the attackers nearly simultaneously on command.
The noise hurt Buenaventur
e’s ears, and the powder dust stung his eyes. When the smoke cleared, he saw that the front row of kobalins was down, some dead, others wounded and still screaming. Their comrades, pressing forward behind them, climbed heedlessly over the fallen—they had no choice, for behind them still new fighters of the deep tribes rose from the surf, an incredible flow of bodies and claws and bared teeth.
Buenaventure, Walker, and many others quickly took the places of the shooters on the wall while the latter sprang down to reload their weapons. In his right hand, the pit bull man carried his saber with the broad, toothed blade that had already given him good service in the fighting pits of Antigua; in his left he held a dagger long enough to be a passable sword for an ordinary person.
Buenaventure exchanged a brief look with his friend—that had to be enough to wish each other luck. Then they plunged into the battle side by side, as they had countless times before. And yet they’d never had to face opponents like these. They’d dueled on land and ship, not seldom against a superior force of Spanish soldiers who far surpassed them in weapons and numbers; they’d fought in the alleys of Tortuga and New Providence, in the great prison uprising of Caracas, and on the burning tobacco fields of Jamaica. In the fighting pits Buenaventure had more than once found himself in hopeless situations, but in spite of everything he’d always escaped with his life.
Today it might turn out differently.
He dealt out blows like a dervish, mowed down two, even three kobalins with one blow, avoided their hooked lances and claws, broke the scrawny neck of one, and with a kick sent another flying back into the advancing masses. At the same time he kept his eye on Walker, who was no less skillful than he was with a blade, to be sure, but might well have been inferior to him in strength. Buenaventure would go to his aid if he got into difficulty, as he always had.
The plan had been to fight in an orderly formation. But after the first encounter with the enemy, all plans and wishes went up in smoke. Everyone fought as he could, always in the hope to be a little faster, a little more unpredictable than the enemy. In the hurly-burly of a battle, fighting possesses no elegance, no matter what the chroniclers claim: It is cruel and brutish.
