Pirate Wars

by Kai Meyer

  “Don’t tempt fate.” And with that Griffin pulled on the ray’s reins and made it sink steeply down until its underside touched the waves. It was a dangerous maneuver, especially for the animal, but Griffin’s calculation worked out. Two kobalins were rammed by the ray’s gigantic head, torn from the water by the force of the impact, and flung away. The others instantly dove and scattered in all directions.

  Griffin pulled the ray up again, but kept it at an angle behind the gigantic dark shadow under the surface.

  “Can you fly the ray?” he roared into the headwind.

  “Of course,” retorted Ismael, and then his tone of voice changed. “Hey, wait a minute, you aren’t serious!”

  Griffin pulled his long guardsman’s dagger out of his belt. “What else? You’ll never get him from up here with bullets.”

  “You can’t do that! That’s madness!”

  “Any other suggestions?”

  “They’ll shred you before you ever get near that thing.”

  “At the moment he’s alone.”

  “It may look that way from up here. But all the same he’s something like their commander of the army. No general goes into battle without his bodyguard.”

  “The battle isn’t out here, Ismael. The shores are lost, the first wall breached. The battle is raging up there in the streets now. This dirty beast is just watching it all from a distance. And it really doesn’t seem as if it’s swarming with kobalins here.”

  “Don’t do it!”

  But Griffin ignored the marksman’s objections. He turned halfway around in the saddle. “When I jump, you slide forward in the saddle and take the reins. Hear?”

  “You’re crazy!” Ismael sounded as if he were seriously considering hammering reason into Griffin with the rifle barrel.

  Before the marksman could stop him, Griffin stood up in the saddle. Straddle-legged he stood on the ray’s shoulders, the reins still in his hands. The wind blew his many braids back; they rustled at his ears like palm fronds in a monsoon.

  He looked down past the ray’s head. Any minute they’d be exactly over the lord of the kobalins. Griffin was now convinced that the lance attack had been an accident—if the creature really had noticed them, he would certainly have dived.

  Or else…he was waiting for Griffin. Perhaps he was hungry to get involved in the battle himself. Even if he could only demonstrate his power over a pirate boy.

  “Griffin!”

  He’d figured that Ismael would try once more to hold him back. He paid no attention to the shout.

  The marksman grabbed him by the trouser leg. “Griffin, damn it, wait and look at that!”

  For a moment Griffin’s determination wavered—and then he also saw what was approaching them in the water from the left. He had to hold on tightly to the tautened reins or he would certainly have lost his balance as he stood there.

  A gigantic dark phantom shot through the waves toward the lord of the kobalins, many times larger than he and incomparably more massive. Like a triumphant blast on the trumpet, a mighty column of water rose above the waves.

  “Jasconius!” Griffin exclaimed.

  “Your whale friend.” Ismael’s voice broke. “By my faith, he sooner makes a fair opponent for that bastard!”

  Griffin still hesitated. Then he realized that it would have been suicide to plunge into the deep now. He would inevitably be crushed in the collision of the two giants. He quickly slid back into the saddle and guided the ray in a tight circle around the arena of the duel.

  The whale and the lord of the kobalins came together. It happened too far under the surface for Griffin to be able to see the details. He saw only that the transparent figure of the monster changed again shortly before the collision and flowed to a kind of star, as if he intended to hurl his sharp extensions against Jasconius. But his points did not possess enough solidity to stop the whale. Powerfully and with murderous strength Jasconius crashed against the creature, and then both disappeared under a boiling carpet of foam and three-foot waves.

  Ismael swore again. “I can’t see them anymore!”

  Griffin didn’t utter a sound. He was afraid for Jasconius and Ebenezer, and instantly he became aware of how crazy it was to have planned to throw himself on the lord of the kobalins with only a dagger. A voice inside him whispered that even the whale might not have a chance against an army leader of the Maelstrom. Not even he.

  Griffin would have given anything to have been able to intervene in the fight. But there was nothing to see in the raging waves. The sea boiled. Cries floated on the wind, and this time they were not wafting from the city. They came from everywhere at the same time, a screeching and bellowing that made Griffin desperately want to press his hands over his ears. Stiff and pale, his fingers clutched the leather, and the euphoria he’d felt just moments before at Jasconius’s appearance turned to blind panic. At the same time he was aware how narrowly he’d escaped death.

  “Jasconius!” he cried, but he knew that the whale couldn’t hear him.

  Ismael seemed to regain his reason faster than Griffin. “Let’s fly back to the city. We can do more there than here. That isn’t our fight any longer.”

  The ocean surface broke apart. A circular fountain blossomed beneath them and reached with glittering fingers of water toward the ray and its two riders. In its center appeared Jasconius and something else that covered part of him, a runny, gelatinous mass like jelly. Or like a gigantic jellyfish that had fastened itself to the body of the whale.

  “That’s him.” Griffin gasped.

  “What?” Ismael’s voice trembled. “That…stuff?”

  “That’s his body. That’s why he kept changing his form all the time.”

  The silvery jellyfish creature was obviously trying to close itself around Jasconius’s body and thus squeeze him to death. But there was something more. Griffin saw it only when he looked a second time. And although it was now directly in front of him, he hardly believed his eyes.

  “Holy Mother of God!” Ismael exclaimed. “Do you see that too?”

  “Yes…yes, of course.”

  “Is that a human being?”

  Griffin patted the back of the ray so that it flew more calmly. The water fountains had long collapsed, but the whale and his opponent were still on the surface. Jasconius thrashed and shook himself, struck with his house-high tail fin, and expelled angry water fountains from his blowhole; that wasn’t yet covered by the gelatinous mass, although the edges of the mass were pushing together with smacking sounds. Soon they were going to close around the whale’s body.

  What so unsettled Griffin and Ismael, however, was the human form resting within the jelly mass, with arms and legs outstretched, unclothed, the gaze turned upward. The silvery slime pressed his back against the whale’s body.

  “That’s a child!” cried Ismael.

  “Is that one of us? From Aelenium?”

  “Never seen him before.”

  It was a boy, perhaps a little younger than Griffin, although it couldn’t be said with any certainty at that distance. He had coal black hair, and his skin was darker than that of Griffin or Ismael. One of the natives of the islands. The transparent mass flowed and pushed over him, pressed him against the whale’s back, and according to all the laws of nature the boy should have been dead, suffocated by the milky substance of the giant jellyfish.

  And yet he lived. His lips opened and closed, as if he were calling something. The mass filled his mouth. No sound came out. Normally Griffin would have assumed that the boy was caught in the sticky substance, perhaps was being sucked up by it—but the changing expressions on the stranger’s face made him suspicious.

  The boy appeared to be angry. His features expressed sheer hatred, and the words he was uttering were perhaps not cries for help at all but commands.

  Was he the lord of the kobalins? A human, still a child, who was only using the jellyfish mass as a means of transport, as armor for his own weak body?

  Was it he who co
mmanded the deep tribes and now prodded the giant jellyfish to greater rage, to conquer the whale faster, to kill more quickly?

  “Can we free him somehow?” asked Ismael, who obviously didn’t share Griffin’s fears. To the sharpshooter this was only a child who needed their help.

  But Griffin guessed that the truth was a different matter. Together, this boy and the jellyfish body that surrounded him like an ancient insect in amber formed a single creature, no longer human but also not entirely monster. They were—together—the lord of the kobalins. The representative of the Maelstrom in this battle of men and half-forgotten gods.

  Jasconius dove again and dragged the jellyfish and the boy with him. Again the waters foamed, the waves broke apart, and again both vanished beneath gray spray and the reflection of the fire tongues on the waves.

  “Back to the city!” Ismael roared. For the first time there was panic in his voice, mixed with complete bewilderment.

  “No,” replied Griffin. “I have to see how the battle goes.”

  Ismael placed a hand on his shoulder. His fingers pressed painfully into Griffin’s muscles. “There’s no point, boy. Whatever happens, we can’t do anything to change it.”

  “But I must know! I owe Jasconius that, at least.”

  “At the cost of both our lives?”

  Griffin understood what Ismael meant when the hand of the sharpshooter let go of him and pointed to the right. There beneath the waves approached a surging throng of kobalins. Lance points plowed through the water like sharks’ fins.

  Once more he looked over at where Jasconius and the lord of the kobalins had sunk. The two giants could no longer be seen under the cover of the foam and seething spume.

  “I can’t just turn around now,” he said decidedly.

  “Boy!” Ismael’s voice grew imploring. “That’s not your battle.”

  “Oh yes, it is. It is all our battle. Jasconius…the whale, I mean, he’s fighting for us. And Ebenezer…the man in the whale, everyone called him, called him names and said he was a murderer. And now those two are risking their lives for us.” Griffin looked angrily back at Ismael. “Do you seriously intend to claim that this isn’t our battle? It is ours. Only someone else is fighting it for us and may die doing it.”

  For a long moment the man’s features twitched. Griffin saw that his words had hit the mark.

  “The least we can do is wait for the outcome,” said Griffin in a firm voice. “We two are the only ones who can tell the others about it. We at least owe Jasconius and Ebenezer a damn remembrance, don’t you think?”

  Ismael hesitated, and a trace of guilt appeared in his face. But then he looked down in alarm. “We won’t be able to tell anyone else about it!” he shouted. “Turn away, boy—turn away!”

  At the sound of Ismael’s voice Griffin acted instinctively. His hands pulled on the reins, but the ray moved much too heavily. A lance rammed through its right wing and came out again through the top. The animal shook itself and let out a deep roar. Its wing beats became irregular, and for a moment it looked as though it would throw off both riders. Ismael cried out, Griffin too, but somehow they succeeded in staying in the saddle. More harpoons twitched upward, sharpened bone points full of hooks, and one grazed the animal’s body, and this time Griffin lost control. Ismael bellowed and cursed, then instantly fell silent as a harpoon ate a bloody furrow into his thigh. The shock robbed his powers of speech for a few seconds. Then he cried out, a high sound of pain that went to the very marrow of Griffin’s bones.

  “I can’t…hold him!” Griffin yelled. Then the reins were snatched from his hands, the ray reared, and its body completed a snakelike movement that Griffin would never have believed the colossus capable of.

  “Hold on tight!” he cried to the marksman, then invisible hands tore him from the saddle, he lost his balance—and slipped off.

  “Griffin!” Ismael saw the boy fall, and for a moment forgot the burning pain in his leg and tried to grab him.

  He just managed to catch Griffin’s right hand.

  Griffin cried out as a murderous jerk went through his arm. Then he realized that the crash on the water had not come, that he was still hanging in the air. He was dangling at the side of the ray, held only by Ismael’s hand.

  “I’ll…pull you…up,” the man gasped grimly, but they both knew it was hopeless.

  Down below the kobalins chattered, harpoons twitched after them. But the wavering ray had already distanced itself from the pack in the water, and the shots went awry. What nothing would change was that the animal kept shaking in pain and rearing; it was unable to coordinate the beats of its healthy and injured wings.

  Griffin was being shaken back and forth. He hung there, helpless, too weak to pull himself up Ismael’s arm with just one hand. The wounded marksman’s strength was also ebbing, and both realized at the same time that their efforts were in vain.

  “It’s not going to work!” cried Griffin. Perhaps he only thought it. He felt his fingers slide through Ismael’s hand. Bit by bit, with a nightmarish slowness. And yet the end could no longer be checked.

  Ismael’s face was distorted into a desperate grimace. He could scarcely hold himself in the saddle. The injured ray was going completely out of control and flying in a wavering zigzag, which didn’t really bring it any nearer to the city.

  A wide panicked swerve, then the animal sailed wobblingly back in the direction from which they had come, again over the screaming kobalins and their sharp-toothed hooked lances.

  Griffin was going to fall. He knew it.

  Only seconds more.

  Ismael had tears of grief and rage in his eyes when he looked down at Griffin. Their eyes met. They both knew the outcome of this hellish ride.

  Griffin accepted the truth a moment sooner.

  “No!” roared Ismael when he realized what the boy was going to do.

  But Griffin didn’t listen to him. He had the choice: He could let himself fall, a good fifty yards away from the kobalins—or he could hold out a few seconds longer and then plunge right onto their lance points.

  “No!” cried the marksman again, but it was too late.

  “Take the reins!” Griffin yelled, gasped for air—

  —and let go.

  Ismael’s cries filled his ears, his head, until he hit the water hard. The waves seized him with their fingers of spume and pulled him down under. Darkness, penetrated by a red glow, surrounded Griffin as he sank down like a stone, then began to kick, first in panic, then with more confidence. He’d lost his orientation, didn’t know if the kobalins were already on their way to him.

  He only hoped that Ismael had succeeded in getting the wobbling ray under his control. Then it wouldn’t be entirely for nothing that he drowned or was torn to pieces by the soldiers of the deep tribes. Then it would all still have some meaning, somehow.

  The claws of the kobalins grabbed him. He felt he must scream, even though he didn’t, even though he resisted and did his best to fight, not to give up.

  Not to die. Not now.

  Not without seeing Jolly one last time, holding her, hearing her voice.

  Then they fell on him, a whole dozen, and they pulled him with them. In all directions at once.

  The Cannibal Fleet

  For a moment Griffin thought the kobalins were going to tear him to shreds. They pulled and tore at his arms and legs—until finally one of them uttered a high scream, all the others froze in fright, and the pain in Griffin’s limbs slackened.

  He immediately began to fight again, but there was no point. There were too many, a dozen or more—exactly how many he couldn’t tell in the seething, raging waters. All around him were snapping mouths, long claws, and skinny, shimmering bodies, swirling in veils of air bubbles and whirling turbulence.

  They pushed him up to the surface so that he could breathe. He gasped greedily for air and even tried to catch a glimpse of Ismael and the ray up above, but he couldn’t see them.

  He felt the creatures pull
ing on him again. At the same time a ring of ugly kobalin faces surfaced around him. Then three of them dragged him swiftly in one direction, so fast that the spume spraying into his face almost took his breath away again. Somehow he managed to get some air now and then as they rushed him toward the fog wall, which was glowing orange in the light of the early morning. Not even the smoke rising from the burning shores of Aelenium could entirely obscure the shining of the morning sun.

  But when they dove into the fog, the light stayed behind. The only thing from the outside penetrating the mist was the hail of dead fish that fell around them. The lord of the kobalins must be nearby. Despair overwhelmed Griffin, not only for his own sake but because he feared that the jellyfish creature might have killed the whale and Ebenezer. He wondered what would happen to the rooms behind the magic door if Jasconius died. And to Ebenezer, if he’d managed to hide there.

  But he had no more time to think seriously about the whale’s defeat, for now he saw where the kobalins had brought him.

  A remarkable hump rose out of the water ahead of him, half veiled in fog. At first glance it looked like a tiny island, not ten yards in diameter, which rose about three feet out of the water. As they came nearer, Griffin saw that it consisted of large mussel halves; the shape was similar to a gigantic turtle shell. He was very close to it when he discovered that each of the mussel shells was held over the head of a kobalin—on the underside of the hump it was swarming with kobalin soldiers who bore the artificial island on their clawed hands. On top stood a figure, half concealed by veils of fog.

  Two of the kobalins sprang onto the shell, seized Griffin by the arms, and pulled him out of the water. The mussels scraped and crunched under his feet but held together without a gap. It wasn’t very easy to stand steadily on them, for the two kobalins were leading him to face the figure that stood waiting for him on the highest point of the mussel shells.

  Griffin’s breath stopped when he looked into the face of the person opposite him.

  It was his own.

  Almost, anyway. For another face mixed in with the image of his features like ink trails in the water, narrower, more finely cut—and feminine.