by Kai Meyer
“Inside the Maelstrom.”
“I know that.” Did she really know that? Anyway, it had been her first supposition. “But what is this, this darkness?”
His voice sounded as if he were smiling as he spoke, but the corners of his mouth only turned up after she’d heard his words. “You’ve gotten too used to polliwog vision, that’s all. We’re not in the water anymore…anyway, not in the seawater of our world. Polliwog vision is useless here. It’s dark because…well, because it’s just dark. It was just as dark outside in the Crustal Breach—only not for us.”
That sounded clear, but at the moment not important enough to be worth more than a thought. Maybe he was right or maybe he wasn’t. It didn’t matter to her.
“I want to get out of here, Munk. You have to help me.”
“Try it yourself,” he said, to her amazement.
“What?”
“You can destroy it.” Again it took a moment until she saw him smile. Then he added, “Trust me.”
Which she found somewhat strange. But she didn’t wait to be asked twice. She hit her fist against the inside of the pearl and was astounded to discover that she struck through the light. She tried to move her fingers, and it disturbed her that she could feel them move but it was only a little later that she could see them; even though her hand was now outside the pearl and thus in a different time plane.
She wondered if it was the same with Munk. Did he also see her movements within the pearl several seconds after they’d actually taken place? Then unquestionably she offered a bizarre sight from the outside, for to his eyes her hand and her body must be moving separately.
She shoved the second hand after it.
“Tear it,” she heard Munk say.
With a jerk she tore the walls of the pearl apart, so quickly that the darkness struck against her like a gust of wind. Then she pushed herself out through the gap to Munk. The shine of the mussel in his hand distorted his features to a grimace of shadow and light.
Jolly pulled her other leg through the gap. Like Munk, she was now floating in nothingness. This wasn’t water. It felt oilier, more viscous, which made moving a little more difficult. But perhaps this remarkable slowness was only a consequence of the falsified time conditions that prevailed here.
“Don’t be afraid,” said Munk yet again. Now she saw how exhausted he looked. Completely worn out and pale. “Aina can’t come here.”
Jolly didn’t understand what he intended with his new behavior. But at least one thing she did understand: Aina couldn’t turn up here because they were in Aina—in the middle of the Maelstrom.
“But why—,” she began.
Munk pointed to the pearl, which floated, glowing, at Jolly’s back. The crack had closed again. “In spite of everything, Aina’s magic is still the magic of a polliwog. A thousand times enlarged and warped, of course. But there are certain rules that apply to her, too.”
Jolly shook her head, not understanding. She was so terribly angry at Munk, but at the same time confused, too. What sort of a game was he playing? Whose side was he really on?
“Polliwog magic can work only in the sea or near it,” he said. “On the waves, on the beach, sometimes a little way inland. But this isn’t the sea anymore. Not here, inside the Maelstrom.”
Very slowly it began to dawn on her. This was a place between the worlds. She again imagined it as a tunnel, as the tail of the Maelstrom, reaching over into the Mare Tenebrosum. If that were so, the polliwog magic was slowly losing its effect here. That was the only reason Jolly had been able to free herself.
“But you shut me into the pearl,” she said, although all indignation had left her voice.
He nodded. “Because Aina’s magic couldn’t do anything to you here.”
“Then that was a trick?” she asked without real conviction.
Munk tried a grin, but he no longer had the necessary strength even for that. “For one thing, so that she’d trust me. For another, to protect you from her.” He looked past Jolly, straight into the brightness behind her. “But above all, to smuggle that inside here.”
Jolly whirled around. The pearl glowed like a moon in the darkness. She stretched out her hand and poked the thing with her finger. The light shell indented like a bag made of animal skin floating in the water. Now Jolly became aware that the light of the pearl was fading. Of course—for it, too, was created with polliwog magic.
She frowned as she turned to Munk again. “You shut me into the pearl so that Aina would suck it and me inside her?”
He nodded, but his eyes were held by the wavering light image. “I knew that she was lying to us. That is, I thought so. I first knew it when she told us that all her mussels except the one were crushed under the stone. You remember I stayed behind a moment when you and Aina walked on? I looked under the stone. And there was nothing at all there. Not a single fragment.”
“You knew it the whole time? And didn’t say anything to me about it?”
“She had to not notice anything. She had to believe I was on her side,” Munk said. But the words didn’t sound arrogant anymore, the way they used to. This was the old Munk speaking again, though infinitely drained and weary. “Otherwise she wouldn’t have let us come any closer. Her kobalins could have torn us to pieces at any time.” He stopped for a minute and appeared to listen into the darkness. “It almost went wrong when she shut you into the kobalin hill.” He was silent and looked at Aina’s mussel, as if he was regarding a tremendously precious object. “She gave me her most dangerous weapon to convince me of her goodwill and because it whispers things into your ear—if you listen to it. But to use it against her I needed a pretext—something so she wouldn’t notice what I was doing. And for that I needed you. If you hadn’t freed yourself…” He shrugged and left the rest unsaid.
She still didn’t understand where he was heading, what his plan actually looked like; she was too confused. He’d shut her into the pearl because he knew or at least hoped that the Maelstrom would swallow her. But how did he intend to harm Aina with it?
She waited for him to go on or to do something, but then his face darkened suddenly. He turned around at once and his eyes darted through the blackness. A deep crease appeared in his forehead, which made him look older. “Do you feel that too?”
She was much too excited to be able to think of anything except all her open questions. So she shrugged.
“There, outside,” he said softly.
The lump in her throat thickened her voice. “What do you mean?”
“There’s something there.”
Jolly took a deep breath. “Aina?”
He shook his head slowly without looking at her. “No, not her.”
“Who, then?”
“I don’t know.” He moved backward, closer to Jolly, but the current that suddenly brushed her didn’t come from him.
“Something is circling us,” he whispered.
Jolly was going to reply, but she couldn’t get a sound out.
The glow of the pearl at her back grew weaker.
“What is it?” Jolly breathed out as her eyes searched in vain for a clue in the blackness.
“Then you feel it too?” In the fading light of the giant pearl, Munk looked like a shallow sandstone relief; his body had lost all depth. The glow bathed them both in a brownish yellow.
“I can feel it, but I don’t see it,” Jolly replied. “And you really don’t know what it is?”
“No.”
She had to get used to trusting him again, and it wasn’t easy for her. “What do we do now?”
He didn’t answer. Suddenly his eyes widened and stared as if spellbound into the darkness outside the dwindling glow of the pearl.
She turned around and followed his eyes, but now there was nothing more to see. “Did you see something?” she asked excitedly.
He nodded stiffly. “Yes.”
“What?” Still she kept straining to try to make something out herself.
“It was big.�
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“How big?”
He was about to answer when again something slid by at the edge of the area of brightness for the fraction of a moment. This time Jolly saw it too. It was gone again at once in a flowing, shadowy movement suggesting that she had seen only a portion of an incomparably gigantic body.
“By Morgan’s beard!” Munk swore. She hadn’t heard him say that for a very long time. In spite of everything that had happened in the Crustal Breach, it brought back a pleasant memory of the past.
“Is it one of the masters of the Mare?” Her voice was now only a whisper. She wasn’t certain if Munk could understand, but then he nodded.
“Perhaps. Originally the Maelstrom was their gate, after all.”
Jolly closed her eyes for two or three moments. Almost these same thoughts had gone through her head just before. If this place was something like a between-kingdom, a kind of tunnel between her world and the Mare Tenebrosum, and if one or several of the masters of the Mare Tenebrosum were already in the tunnel, then the Maelstrom wasn’t as powerful as Aina had pretended. Kangusta had said that the Maelstrom didn’t intend to serve as a portal for the masters. But if some of them had succeeded in slipping through, that must mean that the Maelstrom had lost some power. But what had weakened him? He hadn’t taken part in the attack on Aelenium himself, so it must be something else.
Think, she flogged herself.
Perhaps Munk had struck a much bigger wound than they’d all guessed when he killed the Acherus. In the final analysis the Maelstrom made use of the magic power of his polliwog servants. After the Acherus was dead, there still remained the second polliwog from the last time, the lord of the kobalins. What if he’d been wiped out during the battle for Aelenium? Wouldn’t that mean that the Maelstrom had lost two-thirds of his power?
“Jolly!”
She started, figuring that something huge was rushing at her. But it was only Munk.
“The light of the pearl is getting weaker all the time!” he said excitedly. “It’s going out. You understand?”
“Certainly. And when it goes out entirely, that thing will grab us and—”
“I don’t mean that!”
She looked at him without understanding. “What, then?”
“This pearl was the greatest concentration of magic I’ve ever called up,” he said. “I mean, it was…powerful. Since that light is still there, it also means that its magic can’t disappear entirely.”
“We’ve already established that inside here polliwog magic doesn’t—”
“Yes. Maybe, anyway. But the pearl is glowing and that means its magic is still alive.”
“And so?” She surmised that all this was part of his original plan when he smuggled her and the pearl in here. But what was his plan?
He looked past her into the darkness, but the shadowy being remained at a distance. It was circling them way outside the light of the pearl, almost as if it feared the weak light.
“Do you still remember what I told you that time on the island about my parents?” he asked her, and his words sounded strained. “About the first time, when I didn’t get a magic pearl closed back into a mussel at the end of the magic?”
“The palms on your island had red leaves afterwards. And once the roof of your farm burned. But what has that—”
He nodded excitedly. “And when you kept me from closing up the pearl again on the Carfax, the magic went crazy and hurt my back.”
Then she began to understand.
“What do you think might happen,” Munk asked, “if the largest and most powerful pearl I’ve ever created weren’t put back into its mussel?” He swallowed, and in the dying light she saw his Adam’s apple move.
“The other mussels are lying outside in the Crustal Breach somewhere,” Munk went on. “This one is the only one the magic can go back into.” He pointed to Aina’s mussel in his hand.
“If such a powerful pearl isn’t shut into its mussel,” said Jolly, with growing excitement, “then there might be…something very bad, mightn’t there? A catastrophe.”
He nodded and looked enormously sad as he did so.
“And,” Jolly went on, her voice trembling, “it would look for the next best mussel to disappear into—and it would have to be quite a large mussel to contain so much wild magic.”
“The Maelstrom’s mussel,” said Munk. “Its root.”
Jolly cast a glance at the sagging pearl, which now looked like a shapeless pig’s bladder. The light was only a sort of pitiful afterglow. It was going to go out completely any minute.
Munk flinched. “There it was again!” He pointed to the blackness, which inched closer.
There was no doubt that the being would rush at them as soon as the magic light went out.
Jolly had eyes only for the dying pearl. “It will explode like a thousand barrels of black powder. Or…do something else crazy!”
Munk lowered his eyes dejectedly. “If it’s only half as strong as I think, then it will tear everything in a radius of many miles to pieces.”
“Us too?” She knew the answer. But suddenly the idea of her own death hardly hurt at all. It seemed to her that it had been established from the beginning that she would never return from here alive. As she sought after the truth in her heart, she knew that she’d known it the whole time. Suspected it, at least.
A strange calm descended on her. Almost a feeling of…yes, contentment.
She nodded to him and he raised his hand with Aina’s mussel, cast a last look at it—and hit it so hard with his other fist that the shell burst into a cloud of tiny splinters. A sound rang out, like a scream carried from afar by a gale wind.
Jolly reached out and took Munk’s hand.
At the same moment it was as if his face were sucked backward into the darkness. But he didn’t move away at all—instead, the darkness suddenly came nearer and closed around them like a flood of black ink.
The pearl paled.
“Jolly?” she heard him call. Then she was seized by a powerful current. Their hands were torn apart.
Something large rushed at her.
And the magic of the pearl, hardly visible at all, exploded.
Within seconds the absolute blackness turned into its opposite. The freed magic flamed up like a spark reaching the end of a fuse.
Silence.
And then—
The ray bore Griffin over the outrunners of the Maelstrom as if over a mountain of water. From the great height the churning masses of water did in fact look like a landscape that was constantly changing. The floods moved in broad lanes, broke over and into each other, mixed in numerous smaller whirlpools that were still big enough to swallow a whole fleet. Foaming hillcrests arched up and flowed away again. Gigantic hands of salt water and spray curled up out of the sea and seemed to be trying to snatch the ray and its rider from the sky.
Griffin was sailing a good two hundred fathoms over the ocean. He’d never climbed so high on a ray before. Since he’d left Aelenium he’d not only moved forward but also upward at the same time, so that he reached the height necessary to be able to look over at least a portion of this whirling, raging beast.
But he’d erred in thinking that he could grasp the absolute size of the Maelstrom even from up here. The rapidly advancing water masses already filled his entire field of vision, and still he couldn’t see the real center of the whirlpool, the eye of the monster.
After a while he noticed that in the distance the world appeared to curve down, as if the globe of the earth had suddenly become much smaller and its curvature visible. So there was where it went down into the abyss, straight into the heart of this inconceivable, monumental monstrosity.
He’d long ago ceased to perceive the noise as actually noise. His ears gave up the task of filtering out details or even variations from this chaos. Everything had become one, a constant rushing and thundering that filled his head and almost brought it to bursting.
The ray was afraid of that thing stretching away
under it. Occasionally it bucked and jerked so hard that Griffin feared he might slide out of the saddle despite the safety belts. On Tortuga he’d once heard a one-legged priest preaching about the apocalypse, of the end of the world and the hellish beast that would rise from the sea on the Day of Judgment. How wrong that picture of the end of all things had been. For now it was clear that it was the sea itself that rose and that it could be more dreadful and cruel than any creature of flesh and blood.
The wave crests of the Maelstrom stretched in all directions, and now the slopes of the boiling surface became steeper. Soon beneath him it was going down vertically, and again he was conscious of what power must be at work to curve the ocean itself like the back of a giant creature.
With the reins he signaled the ray to climb even higher. The animal obeyed willingly. It would probably have flown to the moon if Griffin asked it to, just as long as it got out of reach of that chasm opening beneath them mile after mile.
After the slopes had become a steep wall and a cloud cover of seething steam and spray stretched out beneath him, Griffin caught sight of the opposite side of the abyss in the distance. He was now exactly over the Maelstrom’s center. Treacherous eddy winds tugged at the ray’s wings, and dangerous air currents threatened to suck him into the pit. It was hard to gauge the diameter of this titanic funnel, but from one curving edge to the other must measure many miles. It surpassed Griffin’s imagination that this maw in the framework of the world stretched some thirty thousand feet into the deep, becoming narrower and narrower as it went down so that at its deepest point on the bottom of the sea it could vanish into a mussel.
Somewhere down there was Jolly.
If she ever got that far, whispered a voice in the back of his mind. He did his best to repress this thought, but he didn’t succeed entirely. Jolly had ventured into regions that lay beyond human experience. And her only companion was someone who had at one time become almost her worst enemy.
There was no point in fooling himself. Her chances were not good. And yet he was glad that he was here now, at this place that was closer to Jolly than any other place in the world. He could only hope, perhaps even pray, that she was still alive.
