by Kai Meyer
“As if they were afraid of something,” growled Buenaventure. He was breathing hard. During the fight, Soledad had looked over at the pit bull man a few times and observed his tongue hanging out of his mouth as he panted.
“It seems to me it’s the other way around,” said Walker.
Buenaventure looked at him with a frown. “Huh?”
“It looks as though suddenly they aren’t afraid anymore—of their captains or even of the Maelstrom.”
“You think”—Soledad swallowed—“they’ve lost their commander?” She didn’t look at him but stared out over the fleeing army of the deep tribes.
“So it would seem,” said Walker. “Without him they’re following their instinct and rushing back into the water. They detest land and air.”
“And fire,” said Buenaventure, sniffing the smoke.
Soledad let herself sink down with her back against the defense wall. “But that would mean that the lord of the kobalins is beaten.”
Some of the soldiers wanted to follow the kobalins and fell those in the last lines, but the officers of the guard held them back. No one trusted what he was seeing yet, especially not the actions of kobalins.
Soledad turned from the congested streets and looked up at the sky over the water. A handful of rays was circling there; the others were busy transporting the injured from the wall up to the entrances of the refuge halls. Had one of the ray riders out there killed the lord of the kobalins? And where was Griffin? Through the smoke, aglow with the beams of the morning sun, she couldn’t distinguish the individual riders on the rays—they were hardly more than bright dots on the backs of the mighty animals. Soledad sent a fervent prayer to heaven that nothing had happened to the boy.
Uncertainty nagged at her, in spite of the great relief she felt at the withdrawal of the deep tribes. Were they really gone?
The defenders got busy binding up each other’s wounds. Water bottles were passed from hand to hand, and all greedily quenched their thirst. Those who’d managed to stay on their feet with their last strength were helped down from the wall by their comrades.
“What now?” asked Buenaventure helplessly. He hadn’t even lowered his saber yet, as if he still couldn’t believe that the battle had come to an end. Even the deafening jubilation that echoed from all parts of the wall couldn’t convince him.
Walker took a step forward. “I think,” said the captain, “we—”
A shout interrupted him. Before he could finish the sentence, the general congratulation turned into cries of alarm. Somewhere in the streets above them the alarm bells were sounded, and very close to Soledad a young man began to weep heartrendingly.
She followed the direction of the others’ gaze and saw what had so suddenly put an end to the relieved atmosphere.
Only vaguely discernible through the walls of smoke, ships were breaking out of the fog. Black flags flapped at the mast tops, and the wind carried a dull chorus of war cries over to Aelenium’s cliffs.
“That’s Tyrone!” exclaimed Walker, his face stony. “From the frying pan into the fire, I’ll be goddamned.”
The galleons emerged from the fog ring like ghost ships. Their decks swarmed with gruesomely decorated tribesmen and saber-wielding pirates.
“Are those the cannibals?” whispered the weeping boy near Soledad.
No one answered him.
A Conversation in the Deep
The cave in the kobalin hill was extensive, quite narrow, and not especially high. But Jolly’s hope that the angular rock tube would be a tunnel that led somewhere turned out to be false.
After thirty or forty paces Jolly’s polliwog vision saw the back wall emerge from the darkness, first only as a blur, then as a steep scree of boulders and small stones. At some time the roof must have fallen in at that spot. There must be earthquakes down here that you didn’t feel on the surface, and this realization made Jolly’s sense of isolation intolerable. If she were to die in this place, there wouldn’t even be a wave up there on the sea. No one would learn of it.
Oddly, she thought of the sky as she looked up at the rock roof—of a bright blue open sky, which now lay thirty thousand feet above her, as unreachable as the moon and the stars. She thought of the Caribbean wind, which had blown in her face countless times and filled the slapping sails. She thought of the freedom of the endless ocean. And she remembered her old life on the Skinny Maddy, her foster father Bannon, how it used to be, before his betrayal, which had started all this.
And then the memory of a single face flashed through her like a sharp pain. Griffin. It was almost as if something from him stretched out to her, a hand that waved to her one last time, a farewell forever.
Jolly sank to her knees and burst into tears.
It was too much, definitely too much. She’d borne pain, the sorrow of separation, the loneliness, and Munk’s enmity. She’d swallowed all that. But now the moment had come when she gave in, and everything that she’d repressed for so long overwhelmed her.
For a long time she cowered there on the floor, her eyes closed, curled up like a child who didn’t know where to turn, and she wept until she could no longer tell if the tears were still coming because they were one with the sea and left no trace behind them.
Something bumped the tip of her nose.
When she opened her eyes, she was blinded by the brightness of the light from the little fish. The rest of the school were dancing in front of her face, while pairs of tiny dark eyes looked at her expressionlessly.
“Leave me alone,” she whispered, weakly batting her hand at them. The fish darted apart, but they immediately reformed again. Again one of them bumped her nose; two others stroked along her cheeks. This time she felt almost as if hands were gently stroking her face.
In her memory, an image assembled itself from swirling light and darkness: Three old women, their long hair binding them together, sat at spinning wheels on the bottom of the sea and spun the water into a transparent, sparkling yarn. The fibers, some single, others bundled, extended out into the distance. Woven apparently at random, they formed a tissue of glistening strands that stretched in all directions; the spinners sat at the center of a worldwide network of veins.
Then the image detached itself from what Jolly had seen with her own eyes and took her with it on a journey. At breakneck speed her gaze whizzed along a fat bundle of the magic strands, over undersea mountains, dusty wastelands on the sea bottom, and forests of bizarre plants. Finally it went over rugged gorges and crevasses, along mighty stones that might be sunken ruins, again through gray wasteland until…yes, to this rock cone, the nest of the kobalins. Here the magic yarn crossed other strands, a host of them, and Jolly understood: The hill towered over a crossroads of magic, a place where the veins from many other directions met one another, saturating the environs with their power.
The lantern fish swam apart, whirled around Jolly’s head, and came together in a glittering cluster that bobbed up and down on invisible currents.
The vision faded at the end of her journey into the kobalin nest, and Jolly’s hand involuntarily moved to her belt pouch. She’d lost her knapsack and all her provisions, but the pouch on her hip was still there. And in it, her mussels.
She got to her feet and blinked a few times, as if this were the only way she could be sure that her surroundings were real. The fish twirled restlessly among one another, seized by a hard-to-comprehend excitement.
“You can’t help me, I take it,” said Jolly, “so I have to do it myself, don’t I?” She sniffled one last time, gulped, and felt new strength coursing through her.
She crouched down, laid out the mussels in a circle around her, and waited for them to speak to her. It wasn’t long, and then she felt her hands going through motions that were only partly guided by her. Her fingers sorted out the mussels, added others to them, and changed the pattern again and again. Finally satisfied, she let go of the shells, regarded the arrangement, and nodded slowly.
She shut her eyes fo
r an instant, and when she opened them again, the magic pearl was there, almost without her help. She couldn’t remember when it had ever been so easy to call up the magic of the mussels. It must be due to the power of this place. Jolly didn’t let herself imagine how dense the network of magic yarns must be in the Crustal Breach itself, how interwoven the magic, how concentrated its power.
The pearl in the center of the mussel pattern glowed and sparkled. Then it moved from its position and floated up the steep hill of rubble, exploring cracks and crevices, and diving into hollows and holes. The lantern fish followed along behind it in a wavy row, like the sparkling tail of a meteor. Jolly was enchanted by so much beauty in the middle of this desert.
Finally the pearl disappeared into a dark corner, where the incline and the roof came together. It glided into an opening that was not discernible from down on the floor. Jolly’s heart made a leap. The pearl had found a way through, an opening that led behind the debris of the caved-in rock ceiling.
A little later the pearl reappeared, shot down to Jolly, and again placed itself in the middle of the mussel pattern. There it floated back and forth and waited impatiently for her to lead it back into one of the mussels. Jolly obliged it with eyes closed and conjuring hands outstretched. When she looked down again, the pearl was gone and all the mussels were closed.
Never had she felt so powerful. For the first time she understood how Munk felt when he commanded the magic of the mussels. It was an enlivening, wonderful euphoria, but it also hid within it the danger of forgetting oneself and everyone else to feel completely unfettered and omnipotent.
It pleased her, flattered her, but it also frightened her. In the silence she swore to herself never to give in to this temptation. She hoped that in the end she would be able to make this choice for herself.
She quickly gathered up her mussels, stuffed them into her belt pouch, and climbed up the rock slope. The fish were still dancing around the newly discovered opening. With their silver light they marked the place, which otherwise Jolly would have lost sight of entirely.
The hole was bigger than she’d supposed, and it wasn’t hard for her to crawl through it. More caves awaited her on the other side, the remainder of the blocked rock tunnel.
She climbed down to the floor and went on her way, down deeper into the silent caverns of the kobalin nest. The fish followed her, emitting a barely audible crackling and rustling, perhaps the sound of their rubbing scales, perhaps also a babble of voices, a joyous, relieved giggling of these tiny creatures.
Eventually she lost track of how many forks she’d taken, how many turns of the path. The floor kept sloping down the entire time, sometimes gently, sometimes steeply again, and it seemed to her that the water around her was gradually becoming warmer. What if she were stumbling straight into a settlement of kobalins? Into an undersea cave city of the deep tribes? However, she’d already discovered numerous small and larger caverns. If the kobalins had intended to settle in these rocks, they’d surely have already done it farther up.
Something else was waiting for her down there. And in light of what Aina had said, there was very little doubt about what that would be. Or who.
Nevertheless, there was only this one direction. Until now she’d found no way leading upward. There’d been forks, certainly, but all the other tunnels had led down even more steeply.
Had Munk and Aina already reached the heart of the Crustal Breach? Don’t think about it, she drummed into herself. Rather, give some thought to how you’re going to get out of here.
The passageway widened. Its walls ended abruptly and released Jolly into a gigantic grotto, so big that the end of it was beyond the range of her polliwog sight.
The cave appeared to be empty. The floor fell steeply away at Jolly’s feet, though only one or two yards deep, and then there was the bottom, even more furrowed and dark. This surface appeared to curve gently up, like a hill, at the middle of the cave.
For a moment Jolly thought that at one time the grotto must have been full of molten lava, which had hardened there. The ground was black and wrinkled and looked quite different from the cave walls or the floor of the tunnel from which she’d come. She hesitated briefly; then she took a step over the edge and landed with legs astride on the sunken cave floor. To her surprise it gave under her feet and was springy. It was as soft and resilient as tar that hadn’t yet cooled.
A bone-chilling shrieking filled the air, rebounded from the walls, and pierced Jolly’s ears like needles. Terrified, she pushed off from the floor and shot up to the ceiling of the grotto. She hovered there.
From here she had a good view over the floor of the cave, at least as far as the limits of her sight. And she realized that what she’d been standing on was not floor.
It was a body.
A doughy, gigantic body, which filled the entire grotto and…yes, was stuck in it like a cork.
The shrieking came from a mouth as big as a well shaft, in the middle of a corpulent, very wide face that was located at the end of the monstrous body without recognizable neck or shoulders. Black skin folds and half-rotten teeth surrounded the throat, and a little above it—or rather, next to it, for the face was lying horizontal and staring up at the ceiling—she recognized two eye slits, framed by fleshy bulges.
The gruesome creature looked like an infinitely fat kobalin that a powerful fist had mashed flat and somehow pressed into this grotto. In truth the cave must be a mighty rock cathedral, very deep, so that there was room enough down below for the rest of the giant kobalin. What Jolly was looking at was the upper end of this living, shrieking cork. Her imagination wasn’t able to picture what kind of power had forced this creature into the rock shaft.
“What? What? Whattttt?” came spitting out of the mouth. Oily saliva fell straight down in blurry strings, looking like smoky air flickering in the heat. “What are you? Whatttt are you?”
“Jolly,” said Jolly.
She was careful not to sink a fraction of an inch deeper. Her head was almost bumping against the cave roof. The hill of spongy kobalin flesh was a good fifty yards below her.
The mother of the kobalins—for it must be she, if Aina had spoken the truth—uttered a gurgling sound that turned without pause into something that might be a repetition of Jolly’s name.
“Whatttt are you doing here?” asked the monster.
“I’m trapped,” said Jolly. “Just like you.”
Again there came a hideous roaring and shrieking. The ceiling trembled slightly, dust sprinkled out of cracks and recesses. But the creature didn’t move from the spot. She was stuck as firmly as if someone had walled her in.
“Trapped, yes, yessss. I am that. By that hateful, dreadful brood.” The black, wrinkled flesh around the eyes was so swollen that it was impossible to say if the creature was directing her gaze at Jolly. “My miserable, cowardly, corrupted brood. Cowardly and corrupted is what they are.”
Jolly considered whether she should swim nearer to the contorted giant mouth, but then she decided to remain where she was. The kobalin mother might be stuck fast, and perhaps she no longer had the strength to free herself after all the millennia—but Jolly didn’t trust the truce. She saw neither arms nor legs; they must be stuck with the lower part of the fat colossus. But the appearance of the gigantic mouth was unquestionably reason enough to maintain her distance.
“The kobalins are your children?” she asked.
“Yes, yes, yessss!” The gurgling, hissing voice sounded impatient. No wonder, after such a long time. “Will you free me?”
I can hardly wait, thought Jolly with a shudder, but instead she said, “Possibly.”
“Then do it! Then do itttt!” murmured the beast.
“I told you my name, so it would only be polite if you tell me yours.”
“Kangusssssta,” roared the maw. “Kangusta the Greatttt!”
“Kangusta…And you can’t free yourself?”
“No, no, no.”
“How shall I help you?
”
“Pull down the accursed mountain! The whole accurssssed mountain!”
“I’m too small for that. And if you can’t even do it…”
Kangusta let out a snarl that produced a strong current in the grotto. The lantern fish, which had clustered anxiously around Jolly, were whirled apart by it.
“I’m stuck fasssst!”
“I can see that.”
“He did this to me. Incited my brood to turn against their own mother….”
The beast might seem ponderous, but Jolly took care not to underestimate her. A trapped colossus, certainly—but there was also cunning in her voice, an undertone of cruel wiliness.
“Is there another way out of here?” That was clumsy and probably too early, but she could no longer bear the presence of this monstrosity. “A way that we could escape together?”
A rumble came through the mouth. It sounded like lava shooting up out of a volcano.
She’s laughing, Jolly realized with horror. She’s laughing at me.
“I can see you, little animal. You’re like her. Like that which she once wassss.”
Jolly had already begun to search for a second opening in the grotto walls when Kangusta’s words roused her. “Who do you mean?” she asked, now not quite as firmly as before.
“She! She! The little animals who came…Little animals like you. And then…And then…” She fell silent, but the mouth still remained wide open.
“What happened then?”
“Why do you ask such questions, little animal?” She said it questionssss, and it sounded smacking and ghastly. “You should know that. You’re like her.”
“How many of them came here in the old time?”
“One and two little animals. First one. Later two.”
There was hardly any doubt that she was speaking of Aina and the two other polliwogs who’d come in ancient times to subdue the Maelstrom. Perhaps not all the girl had said had been lies.
Kangusta’s voice grew softer and stealthy. “You must help me, little animal. Then perhaps…yes, perhaps I will tell you everything.” Yessss, perhapssss, she said.
