Pirate Wars

by Kai Meyer

  Soledad ran down a narrow alley, came to a crossing, and turned upward again. Even here it was going to be swarming with Tyrone’s people any minute.

  “Soledad! We must get inside somewhere, now!” She was almost persuaded by Walker’s call, but she stormed on, turned off again, and suddenly stopped, gasping, at a front door. At the end of the street she saw the cannibal king’s men, headed their way.

  Walker came up beside her, snorting, at the front of a narrow coral house. The facade was only a few feet wide. He recognized the place right away.

  Buenaventure reached them and didn’t even stop. “They’re right behind us!” He kicked in the door with a thundering blow before Soledad could point out that it wasn’t locked.

  The two followed him, but inside Walker held Soledad back by the arm. “Is there a special reason you led us here?”

  She slammed the door behind them. The two half doors bounced back because the broken lock didn’t catch anymore. “In a minute—help me here first!”

  Together they pulled a wooden chest against the door. That wouldn’t stop the pirates for long if they’d noticed the four, but now it wouldn’t show from the outside that someone had just run into this house.

  “So?” asked Walker.

  “For one thing, it’s higher than all the other buildings,” Soledad said. “You can almost see to the upper wall from the roof. I know, I was here just a little while ago.”

  “You were here to see the worm?” Walker raised an eyebrow, but Soledad wasn’t sure if that meant he disapproved or simply didn’t understand.

  “It’s hard to explain.” She avoided his eyes. “I saw something in the undercity. And I had an idea that it could be something like—”

  “Quick!” came Buenaventure’s rumbling voice. “Come up!”

  They hadn’t noticed that he’d already hurried up the stairs to the gable room.

  Soledad saw that something wasn’t right while they were still on the stairs, before they could see into the attic room. But she didn’t realize what it was until the last few steps. It was too light.

  Much too much light was coming through the door, as if up there were—

  “Where’s the roof?” Walker asked, as they squeezed, stumbling, through the doorway to the storeroom.

  Over them yawned a gray-blue emptiness, streaked with clouds of smoke that the sunshine dipped in gold. The two gable walls were still standing, but all that was left of the slanting roof were a few jagged remains.

  “And where the devil is the worm?” asked Buenaventure. He stared up at the sky for a moment longer, then remembered Griffin in his arms. He gently laid the boy down in front of him. The floor was covered with scraps of the web in which the Hexhermetic Shipworm had pupated. White and gray clumps drifted around, collected in fibrous heaps in the corners, or hung like sea foam on the remains of the roof. Buenaventure gathered a little of it with both hands and pushed it under the back of Griffin’s head as a cushion.

  “I’m not…I’m all right,” the boy said softly, and Buenaventure nodded seriously.

  “You only need a little sleep…like all of us.”

  “But we have no time to…” Griffin’s voice trailed off and then he was silent.

  Soledad bent over him worriedly. “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s sleeping, that’s all,” said the pit bull man. “Let him rest. That will relieve the pain, a little anyway.”

  While Walker inspected the debris of the roof and looked in vain for the shipworm in the remains of the nest, Soledad carefully opened Griffin’s shirt and examined the wound in his side. It didn’t look that bad: a row of short cuts, not deep enough to injure him seriously. He’d bled a great deal, but not so much that it would kill him. The worst of it was probably the pain. The wounds were on his side over the ribs and might go down to the bone.

  She blotted the sleeping boy’s forehead with her sleeve and left him in the pit bull man’s care.

  “Here,” said Walker, who was crouching in the farthest corner of the attic and examining something on the floor in front of him. “Look at that.”

  Her eyes narrowed. “Is that the cocoon?”

  “What’s left of it. There are more pieces over here. The wind probably blew the rest into the courtyard or who knows where.”

  The fibrous white webbing looked like the shredded edges of a gigantic eggshell.

  Walker poked one of the remnants with his finger. Rustling, it rocked back and forth. “Doesn’t look like cut edges, does it?”

  “No,” Soledad agreed. “It looks as if the thing burst open. He hatched by himself.”

  She looked at the walls towering into emptiness. It looked as if an explosion had taken place. The shock wave must have flung all the debris outward. It was probably spread over half the district or there would have been more rubble lying in the street. The force had literally pulverized the roof.

  “What did you mean before?” Walker asked. “When you said you had an idea about the worm.”

  With a shiver she recalled the serpent in the undercity, that wondrous creature whose gaze had convinced her that she was facing not an animal but one of the old gods of Aelenium. Even now, in the midst of all this destruction, she still felt that she’d sensed something quite similar at the sight of the dreaming worm in his cocoon.

  “The worm,” she said, “is no worm. I think, anyway.”

  “But?”

  “A god.”

  Walker looked at her without any expression. If he laughs now, she thought, I’ll paste him one.

  But Walker squatted there motionless, just staring at her. “A god?” he repeated somberly. “Our shipworm?”

  “The ancient Egyptians worshipped beetles. And the Indians, toads. And the Indians in the jungle even—”

  He gestured to her to be quiet.

  “But he…I mean, he’s a pain in the neck. A plague. He almost ate up my ship!”

  “Other gods are said to have eaten people.” She smiled without humor. “Would you have preferred that?”

  “Then I could believe you, at least.” Quickly he added, “I mean, I really do believe you…somehow…but that…that thing! Good grief!”

  “Doubt is the privilege of the faithful,” said a voice behind them. It sounded familiar in a strange way—and yet different. “Without belief there can be no doubt.”

  Soledad and Walker whirled around. Buenaventure was still holding Griffin’s right hand in his huge one, but now he looked up from the boy to the creature floating on the other side of the shattered edge of the roof. It rose majestically from the depths of the back courtyard, where it had perhaps been waiting or sleeping or emerging from the remainder of its dream.

  Light poured over the debris of the roof. The four pirates were bathed in the glowing brightness. For a moment the glow even outshone the shimmering beams of morning sunshine that strayed through the smoke.

  “Have no fear,” said the newborn god solemnly in the midst of his dazzling aureole. And softly, almost under his breath: “Zigzag-striped rock newt! I’m so hungry I could eat a whole ship.”

  The Breach

  The kobalin mother’s nest was behind Jolly. As the rock dissolved into the darkness, she did her best to banish it from her memory.

  Her strokes hasty, she swam toward the heart of the Crustal Breach, closely followed by the lantern fish, which imitated each of her movements.

  Kangusta had described the path to the outside to her, and so Jolly lost no time in escaping from the interior of the kobalin nest. She left the mountain at the top through a jagged crack near the peak, which had been just wide enough for her shoulders. Again she realized that Kangusta had been imprisoned down there first, and then they’d piled the rocks on top of her. So that was the dimension of the power Jolly was confronting.

  Strangely, the thought of it no longer terrified her. Her mind was long past all intimidation and her resolve was unshakable. She’d never thought to arrive at a point at which courage, despair,
and indifference were one. She felt now as if other powers were moving her on a chessboard, to the last square finally. The place where the outcome would be decided.

  She floated over the labyrinth of cliffs and chasms surrounding the kobalin mountain, with the fluttering particles of the deep sea dancing around her. The school of lantern fish followed her at some distance, until she wondered worriedly whether the tiny little creatures mightn’t draw the Maelstrom’s attention to them all the sooner. She saw no more of the blind albino kobalins beneath her, but most of the crevasses were too deep for her vision, so what might be romping around on their bottoms remained unknown. Neither did she discover any trace of Munk and Aina, who’d most likely reached the source of the Maelstrom long since.

  The rocks in front of her appeared to become lower. Maybe the sea floor was sinking down even farther. But finally the rugged rock land ended and the view opened out over a wide, sandy plain.

  Somewhere there, she sensed, lay the end of her journey. It was still beyond her view, but she thought she already felt the suction emanating from there. It couldn’t be the actual suction of the vortex, for then she’d long ago have been crushed by its force. It was more a sort of pressure inside her: She wanted this to end, one way or another.

  She felt that she was at the height of her powers, and for the first time she felt a gentle pulsing when she placed her hand on the pouch holding her mussels. Almost as if they were pushing to be freed and to open to the magic powers.

  Jolly sank till she was just over the floor of the plain. The rocks fell away into the darkness behind her. Now gray, dead sand stretched around her in all directions, stroked smooth as if by a titanic paw, perhaps a consequence of the search currents that swept over the sea floor at irregular intervals.

  Very gradually something peeled out of the darkness in front of her. At first sight it looked like a mighty tower that was rotating around itself at inconceivable speed. It arose from what she slowly realized was a gigantic white mussel, half-buried in the ground: The two halves were wide open, so that only their edges showed out of the ground. They extended from one edge of her polliwog sight to the other.

  The giant mussel was surrounded by a sea of smaller shells, whose number grew the closer Jolly came to the center of the Crustal Breach. Soon she was floating over thousands of fist-sized mussels, a solid carpet under which the sand vanished completely.

  The foot of the Maelstrom, that column of raging water, was no wider than the watchtowers of the cliff forts that the Spaniards, English, and French had erected on the islands of the Caribbean. But there was a difference between confronting a tower of solid stone and one of whirling, rushing water. Clouds of churned-up sand billowed at its foot, in the center of the open mussel giant. They were the only sign that the powers of the Maelstrom affected his immediate surroundings at all. Jolly still felt no physical suction. Only the tugging in her mind remained constant, as if the sight of the Maelstrom had released an almost uncontrollable desire to swim closer to him.

  Even though the foot of the funnel-shaped Maelstrom might be narrow compared to his mile-wide extent on the sea surface, the sight of this whirling water column was enough to evoke in Jolly a feeling of boundless respect. Sometimes during her journey through the deep she’d imagined what it would be like to face the Maelstrom. Now she finally knew: The panorama took her breath away, made her feel tiny and powerless, and even the impatient pulsing in her belt pouch did nothing to change that.

  Her mussels were urgently demanding to be set free at last. The magic in their shells was restive and rampaging, and Jolly wondered apprehensively if these powers couldn’t be turned against her, faced with the giant mussel. The sea of mussels beneath her made her doubt her own capabilities. Did the Maelstrom use the magic from all these thousands upon thousands of mussels to increase his own strength?

  She saw no sign of kobalins, no fortresses or other defenses. This was no fortress where Aina resided, not like an enchanted castle. How many magic pearls had arisen from these mussels, and what powers had they lent to their new possessor? For one thing, the strength to subjugate the ocean itself, to form it into an all-engulfing vortex. For another, the power to open a portal between the worlds.

  And in the process—Jolly was certain—the real Aina had ceased to exist thousands of years ago. The powers that the girl had once called up had long since devoured her. Like a snake that bites its own tail. All that was left was the head, her spirit, a bundle of hopes, memories, and vengeful thoughts. From them the Maelstrom had formed that bodiless image he’d sent to beguile Munk.

  A figure detached itself from the several-stories-high cloud of dust in the center of the mussel where the halves separated and the Maelstrom’s funnel twisted upward, so infinitesimal in front of the breathtaking background that Jolly almost overlooked it.

  Jolly hovered. She’d come here to…yes, to do what? Something about unpacking her mussels, laying out a small circle, and hoping that the sliver of magic she had at her command would affect something down here?

  The figure floated toward her just a few feet over the carpet of mussels. Now Jolly saw that it was Munk. The suction of the Maelstrom at his back left him completely unaffected.

  “Are you coming to fight with me?” she called out to him. Her voice wavered, but there was no point in trying to conceal her uncertainty. He knew her much too well for that.

  “It grieves me to see you like that,” he said as he came closer, almost motionless, as if he were floating on a current.

  “To see me like this?”

  “Alone. And so vulnerable.”

  “Hurt, Munk—not vulnerable.”

  He tilted his head slightly—almost the way Aina had done—as his fingertips danced in casual play around each other. “Perhaps because Aina imprisoned you?”

  “Being betrayed is much worse than suffering a defeat,” she retorted.

  She’d figured that he would have fallen under the Maelstrom’s influence by the time she arrived here. And yet it flustered her that he still looked the way he always had. Not pale or ailing, without glowing eyes or the other signs of possession she’d imagined. Quite the contrary—Jolly had to admit that it was far more painful to see him so vigorous and content, rather than facing a weary, dazed boy who hadn’t been able to prevent Aina from taking control over him.

  He was here voluntarily. What he said, what he was going to do—it was all happening of his own free will and his own conviction.

  Jolly was so disturbed by this that her swimming strokes went awry, and she plunged to the ground. Mussel shells broke under her feet. Quickly she pushed off and fought for seconds to float calmly again.

  “Don’t be afraid,” said Munk. “If she’d wanted to kill you, it would already have happened. She told me. She wants you as an ally, Jolly, not an opponent.”

  “What did she promise you to make you fall in with her?”

  “Promise?” For a moment he seemed genuinely surprised. “Do you really think she had to promise me something? She’s only explained to me the necessity of everything. The inevitability of the whole thing, no matter what you or I try to do about it.”

  “Then it’s much worse than I feared,” she said scornfully. “You haven’t simply given up—you’ve crossed over to her side! To his side—the Maelstrom’s side.”

  “You’re still seeing all this as a war, aren’t you? The good on one side and the bad on the other.”

  “No.” She’d learned from the words of the spinners, and she’d long known that it wasn’t so simple. “But to kill others or to enslave them, that can’t be good, Munk. You know that. Or has the Maelstrom also wiped out your memory along with your conscience? He murdered your parents. Have you really forgotten that?”

  She saw by his look that her words had struck him. Good, she’d meant them to. He floated closer to her. Now there were about thirty yards between them.

  “That was a mistake,” he said with an obviously conscious effort. Or was she only ima
gining that? “An oversight,” he added.

  She stared at him, openmouthed, and for a second was unable to reply. An oversight? The murder of his parents? She shook her head and put her right hand to her mussels in the pouch. There was hardly enough room in the narrow leather case, and she had to be careful not to damage any of the fragile shells. A comfortable warmth rose through her arm and reached her chest.

  “You’re not yourself anymore,” she said numbly. “How did you get the idea that it could be good to summon the masters of the Mare Tenebrosum into our world? Hang it all, what do you see being right about that?”

  Munk was silent for a long moment. His face twitched. “The Mare Tenebrosum hasn’t much to do with all this anymore,” he said finally. “It began with the Mare, but it won’t end with it.”

  He halted scarcely ten yards away from her. They were now at the same height over the sea of mussels. Behind Munk the water column of the Maelstrom rotated endlessly around itself, an untiring cycle that never lost momentum. It roared and boiled, but the raging wasn’t loud enough to drown out their words. Not only were the laws of nature out of kilter down here, they were completely suspended.

  “Aina explained everything to me,” said Munk. He looked nervously about him. “The masters of the Mare Tenebrosum made her into the Maelstrom so that she could serve them as a gate into our world. But when the Maelstrom was defeated by the other polliwogs, the masters didn’t lift a finger to help her. Instead, they looked on while she was imprisoned. Time meant nothing to those beings, not a few thousand years, and so they decided to wait. They didn’t have to undergo the torments the Maelstrom suffered…or Aina.”

  Devil take it, Jolly thought, that sneak has totally warped his mind.

  He went on, “Then when the Maelstrom gained power again and broke out of his prison, the masters of the Mare demanded that he serve them. But he decided to make himself the master of this world—without being of use to those who’d created him and then betrayed him.” He motioned his hand toward her. “Aina was just defending herself, Jolly. And it was almost the same with you. Remember when you were stranded on the shape changer’s island with Griffin? That was no accident. The shape changer obeys the Mare. And his bridge was built for only one purpose: to take you to the masters. With you they would have had a new Maelstrom, could have formed a new gateway, this time into their world.” He lowered his voice. “You were lucky. Aina sent you the kobalins to destroy the bridge in time. That’s all that saved you.”