Pirate Wars (2 page)

“I’ll be back soon.” Griffin said it more to himself than to Ebenezer. The words made him sound braver than he really felt. His voice wavered, which Ebenezer must have noticed.

Kobalins with harpoons. Even if they’d lost their weapons when they fell into the throat, that didn’t make them any less dangerous. Their long claws and sharp teeth were as lethal as knife blades.

Griffin walked out of the light of the room and climbed slowly down the hill with his lantern. He looked watchfully about him, taking pains to appear determined as he did so. No victim is more preferable to kobalins than one in deadly fear; it makes it easier for them to strike at their prey from ambush.

Ebenezer closed the door behind him. Griffin heard the bolt snap. The rays of brightness around him were cut off and only meagerly replaced by the weak shimmer of the lantern. The edges of the circle of light were just three or four yards apart. Beyond it, all was darkness.

Everywhere there was bubbling and splashing as the water
dripped off parts of wrecks and seeped into the mire. The sounds were hardly distinguishable from the whispering speech of the kobalins.

Griffin nervously shoved some of his braids out of his face with the crook of his arm. His blond hair was plaited into dozens of them. That was really a hairstyle of the slaves brought over to the New World from Africa. It was only rarely seen on one of the white inhabitants of the Caribbean, so Griffin was especially proud of it.

He’d just reached the foot of the hill when he heard a snarl. From the right. Out of the darkness.

He raised the saber high, and then something shot at him as if it had been slung in his direction with a catapult—a spindly, thin body with scaly skin on which the lamplight broke in oily rainbow colors. The kobalin’s hands, with their long claws, were wide open, and his mouth gaped like the jaws of a shark.

Griffin let himself drop, and as he did, he thrust the blade upward. Steel cut through skin and muscle, a scream sounded, then the body disappeared somewhere in the shadows and moved no more. A long-drawn-out smacking indicated that it had sunk into the mud of the stomach.

That was easy,
Griffin thought as he struggled to his feet. An oily shine gleamed on his blade. The kobalin must have taken him for a confused, starving castaway. But now the others were warned.

If he only knew how many he had to deal with!

He held the lamp on an arm stretched over his head. A
rustling was audible somewhere in front of him, followed by the lightning-fast
splish-splash
of rushing feet.

At least one,
thought Griffin.
Probably two or three
. He hoped not more.

Something hit him in the back and made him stumble forward. He cried out, stumbled into a depression between the wrecks, and plunged forward. A moment later it was clear to him that the fall had saved his life: A claw swished through the air over his head. The blow would probably have broken his neck.

But then he rolled onto his back and hit his spine on something hard. The lantern slid out of his hands and sank into the morass a yard beyond him.

In its last light Griffin made out his opponents. There were two of them. Their furrowed grimaces were like unfinished accessories arranged around their wide-open mouths—as if the creator of the kobalins had concentrated all his powers on the gigantic throats and sharp rows of teeth, like a child who loses interest in a piece of clay and apathetically squashes the rest of his work together.

Griffin struck blindly over him with his saber in the darkness and at the same time tried to prop up his body with his left hand. But his fingers sank into the dark muck with a sound like a smacking kiss. Again he slashed, but his blow went wild. Instead he felt something grab his right ankle in the dark and pull on it, just outside the range of his reach. A second hand gripped his other leg, and now the creatures began to pull in opposite directions.

They’re going to tear me apart!
The thought flashed through Griffin’s mind in a fraction of a second. Without stopping to think, he sat up and slashed a desperate stroke across his spread legs toward his feet. The pain that seared through his back with the abrupt movement was murderous.

Then—resistance! A cutting sound, followed by a mad kobalin screech.

His left ankle came free. But the strength of the creature to his right forcefully pulled him farther, away from the wounded one.

Kobalins are sly, mean creatures, but they are stupid and a little childish. If they can kill an opponent slowly and painfully, they prefer to, rather than slaughtering him the quickest way—because killing is like a game for them and the longer it lasts, the greater their pleasure.

This characteristic came to Griffin’s aid now. The kobalin could easily have killed him in the darkness. But the feared attack did not come.

Griffin tried to kick away the claws that held his leg. In vain. The creature’s long fingers sat as firmly as C-clamps. Now the kobalin was pulling him along through the bog, through puddles and mud holes, over hard wooden edges, fish skeletons, and bones, which broke beneath him and tore his clothing and his skin. Once it seemed to him that his face was being brushed by grass—until he realized he was lying with his head on the matted fur of a lion cadaver.

The cries of the wounded kobalin behind him became softer, turned to gurgling and sobbing. Then they broke off.

Suddenly Griffin’s leg was free.

Stuffy darkness surrounded him on all sides.

Smacking steps to his right.

Before he could spring up, claws seized his braids and pulled his head back into the mud. But still the kobalin did not kill Griffin. It snatched the saber from his victim with one grab. In a twinkling, Griffin was disarmed. Steel clattered in the distance. The kobalin had thrown the blade away.

Dumb
, thought Griffin.
Kobalins are really terribly dumb.

Not that this insight was of any help to him now.

He tensed his neck muscles, supported himself on his arms, and sat up swiftly. There was a fearful jerk, and with a yell he realized that he had sacrificed patches of his scalp and at least one or two braids—they remained behind in his opponent’s claws. But he was free.

Somehow he got onto his feet, while behind him the muscular kobalin arms snapped into emptiness like scissors.

This time Griffin didn’t stop to fight. He’d learned his lesson. He ran, almost blind in the darkness. Suddenly in the blackness he saw a narrow strip of light, floating behind the parts of a wreck, which looked like huge ribs: Ebenezer had opened the magic door, a torch of light by which Griffin could orient himself in the darkness. The monk must have noted that the lantern was out. He knew that Griffin needed a signal that would point the direction to him.

“One’s still alive!” Griffin called, panting, toward the doorway. “At least.”

If he received an answer, it was lost in the smacking and
splashing of his steps. The kobalin storming behind Griffin was also now entangled in pieces of wrecks and trails of algae. A shrill gabbling sounded at Griffin’s back. Was the kobalin laughing? Or was he summoning other survivors of his brood?

Griffin ran. Stumbled. Fell. Jumped up again and rushed on.

He reached the foot of the hill. The door at the top stood wide open. Flickering light poured over the slope and the makeshift board steps. The door stood isolated at the highest point of the rise, merely a frame with an oak panel and, except for the brightness, betraying nothing of what could be found behind it. Quite certainly not a room, for the hill on the other side was empty. Nevertheless, the glow of the great fireplace fell through the frame.

Where was Ebenezer?

Griffin was now clambering up the steps on all fours. His boots were full of mud, and he was afraid of slipping off the boards if he didn’t support himself with his hands, too. He looked over his shoulder and saw the kobalin not six feet behind him—also on front and back claws, except that this posture looked natural for him. The light from the doorway bathed him in a scaly shimmer, an iridescent play of color. Even while climbing he waved his claws, trying to grab Griffin’s leg, feeling, snapping, and snarling.

“Griffin!” Ebenezer’s voice. “Stay where you are!”

Stay where he was? He wasn’t about to.

“Watch out!”

Something large flew over him, missing him by only a
hairsbreadth. Because that did make him halt, it didn’t hit him. It hit the kobalin instead.

There was a hollow
klong
, then the creature cracked backward onto the steps, finally lost his grip, and disappeared into the depths. Griffin turned around and saw him land at the edge of the light, caught between two timbers and half buried under a mighty sphere, almost as big as he was.

Ebenezer’s globe! The monk must have rolled it out of the back room and flung it out the door with both hands.

The kobalin stretched out a trembling claw, then the movement slackened. His clawed fingers fell onto the globe, sought a hold for the last time, and then slipped down with a shrill screeching. The malice in his glowing eyes was extinguished. A broken spar had bored through his body from behind.

Ebenezer’s hands seized Griffin and helped him up.

“Was that all?”

“I think so…yes.”

“Are you wounded?”

“Yes. No. Not really.” He had the feeling of having to dig for each word through walls of pain in his head. Dizziness threatened to cloud his consciousness. “Only a few scratches. Otherwise nothing.”

Ebenezer pulled him over the threshold into the light. Griffin fell onto his knees on the floorboards and supported himself with his arms.

“Kobalins have never attacked Jasconius before!” said the monk, while Griffin blinked up at him. “The deep tribes never dared to in the old days.”

Griffin gasped for air. “I told you the kobalins are going to war. You wouldn’t believe me then. This won’t be the last attack. The Maelstrom has taken control of the kobalins. They won’t stop for the whale, or for much larger things either. They’re going to destroy everything.”

Ebenezer took a few undecided paces through the room before he stopped. “I mustn’t allow something like this to happen again,” he said, as if to himself. His face hardened as he turned to Griffin. “And I will not allow it.” There was a new decisiveness and seriousness in his voice. “Looks as if we have to change our plans.”

“
Our
plans?”

Ebenezer nodded slowly, as if his head were heavier than usual, and at the same time his words seemed to have more weight. “The tavern must wait. Now we have to deal with cleaning up this filthy lot first.”

Griffin swallowed, then the corners of his mouth twitched into the beginnings of a smile.

“Does that mean—,” he began.

“We’ll help your friends against this pestilence,” interrupted Ebenezer as decidedly as a captain who was laying out a new course for his crew. “Jasconius will take us to Aelenium by the fastest route.”

The stalls of
the flying rays were located in the hollow dome of the coral mountain cone towering over Aelenium. The steep peak, dozens of waterfalls plunging down its sides to lose themselves in canals and ponds below, looked as if someone had cut off its natural tip ages ago. Instead there was a broad plateau at the top. In the center of it gaped a circular opening, fifty feet in diameter. It served the rays for flights in and out of their refuge.

It was the not first time Jolly had been up here—Captain d’Artois had already taken her and Munk up with him—but the sight of the countless ray pits arranged in a ring around the cave walls still appeared to her as impressive as it was disquieting.

The hall was roofed all over. Light, and sometimes rain, came in only through the large opening in the center.
Although flying rays didn’t live in water, they liked their environment damp—and so the rainwater was directed by channels to their pits, where it collected. There the remarkable animals lay flat on the ground in the dampness most of the time and appeared to sleep until someone woke them to ride out on them.

There hadn’t been time to find out much more about the amazing creatures, and Jolly treated them with hesitant respect. Unlike the hippocampi, which in spite of all their differences were similar to horses—not only in appearance but even more in behavior—she didn’t feel at ease with the rays. Spread on the ground in the corral pits, they seemed torpid and heavy, but when they lifted themselves into the air, they possessed a majesty that took one’s breath away. They were slow—the sea horses glided through the water a great deal faster—and yet they commanded enormous strength. Every ray could carry three riders, even more in a pinch. A blow of their sharp tail would kill a man within seconds.

Two rays were all ready to leave when Jolly and Munk entered the shelter. The animals lay outstretched on the floor, side by side, not in their pits but in the middle of the circle of light that fell into the shelter through the roof opening. The captain waited beside one of them.

Jolly cast a backward glance over her shoulder. She looked straight into the face of the morose Captain Walker and had to smile for the first time that day. He, Buenaventure, and the princess were staying close behind her. They looked as if they intended to attack anyone who came even one step too close
to their protégée. Jolly felt deep affection for the three people who’d been so much to her in the last weeks: friends, comrades, and not rarely her protectors.

The three were not the only ones who’d come to take leave of the polliwogs, however. A whole train of people followed them on their way to the rays, among them Count Aristotle and the members of the council in their splendid robes, cloaks, and silken shawls.

Jolly didn’t particularly like any of these men and women. She found them arrogant, spoiled, and ungrateful. Certainly they all recognized what Jolly and Munk were prepared to do. And yet most of them clearly considered the plan to be the polliwogs’ duty—as if it were the unavoidable fate of the two of them, no matter what Jolly and Munk thought about it themselves.

But Jolly had long ceased to fret about that. She worried about other things. The Maelstrom. And the masters of the Mare Tenebrosum, those powers over another, incomprehensible world who had first created this gigantic whirlpool. Originally the Maelstrom was intended to serve as a gate into this world. But he had closed himself to his creators and now practiced his reign of terror without them.

Jolly walked up to Captain d’Artois. Out of the corner of her eye she saw the one-eyed Ghost Trader in his dark robe pull Munk aside and speak to him. The blond boy nodded again and again.

The two were beginning this journey together. They’d known each other for many years. The whole time, the Trader
had tried to prepare Munk for this mission without his knowledge.

“Everything all right?” asked Soledad.

Jolly half turned around to the princess. In spite of their age difference Soledad had become a true friend. “No,” Jolly replied.

The princess smiled sadly. “Believe me, if I could, I’d go.”

“Munk and I will do it.”

“Of course.”

Neither one of them sounded especially convinced, but there was nothing more to say.

Walker detached himself from the others and touched Jolly on the arm. He seemed to feel even more uncomfortable in the presence of the flying animals than she did.

“Good-bye,” he said simply, but his face was grim with concern. “Good luck.”

“We don’t need it. We’re polliwogs, after all.”

He stared at her for a moment in surprise, before her sarcasm got through to him. Then he laughed, forgot the closeness of the rays, and bent forward far enough to hug Jolly one last time. “See to it that you get on my nerves again soon, all right?”

She couldn’t answer, merely nodded and waved to Buenaventure, who stood there the entire time with eyebrows raised.

With him you never knew whether that was a sign of concern or skepticism or whether it merely belonged to his dog face. He scratched behind his left ear—which made him look
even more animal-like, though he did it with a human hand—then he tilted his head and actually looked as though any moment he was going to let out an anguished howl.

Jolly lowered her eyes. She didn’t want to burst into tears now, not here and not in front of the members of the council. The captain seemed to sense what was going on in her mind. Quickly he grasped the reins, swung himself into the saddle, and motioned Jolly and Soledad to mount behind him. While the Ghost Trader and Munk took their places on the other ray, their animal also came alive. The first movements traveled through the animal’s outspread wings like waves.

A moment later the ray bore them gently upward. Jolly felt the heartbeat of the animal beneath her, very quiet and steady. And with each beat she regained a little bit of her composure.

She sighed and looked down just as the second ray left the ground and sailed through the ceiling hole to the outside.

Walker and Buenaventure stood close together looking after them, their faces betraying their anxiety and helplessness. The council members waved exuberantly, but Jolly took no notice of them at all. Munk, on the other hand, calmly waved back, like a king taking leave of his subjects. He’d taken on many such gestures in the past weeks. It pleased him to be revered by the nobility of Aelenium. Didn’t he realize that they’d forget him just as quickly as they’d welcomed him into their ranks? If the mission of the polliwogs were unsuccessful, they’d just be two more victims of a hopeless war.

“Captain d’Artois?” Jolly bent closer to him as the ray floated over the edge of the plateau and the chasm of the coral cliffs appeared beneath them.

“Yes?”

“If Aelenium survives…I mean, if the Maelstrom is defeated, but I don’t come back, can you do something for me?”

He nodded seriously without turning around to her. “If I survive—of course.”

“Can you look for Griffin and tell him…” She was silent, thought for a moment, and then took heart. “Can you tell him that I liked him very much? Much more than he can imagine?”

“I will gladly do that.”

“Tell him that I’ve often thought of him in these final days. I would really like to have seen him again before we left.”

“I understand that.”

Jolly was about to add something, but then she thought that d’Artois had certainly grasped what she meant. If he ever really did meet Griffin, he’d find the right words.

She cast a last look back. From the air the protective walls of the city were clearly recognizable. There were two—one at the foot of the coral mountain cone, at the beginnings of the points of the giant sea star from which the city of Aelenium rose. The second barricade wall lay a few hundred yards higher in the maze of narrow streets, only a short distance above the Poets’ Quarter. If that broke, the city was lost. Then the inhabitants could only defend themselves with house-to-house fighting, and it would only be a question of
time before the kobalins, cannibals, and pirates overran the last positions.

With a heavy heart Jolly turned her eyes away and looked ahead. The rays were bearing them toward the fog wall that surrounded Aelenium on all sides. A moment later the animals plunged into the clouds and were flying through the uppermost layer of the fog wall. Up here it was as if they were floating over the clouds, a woolly white and gray that stretched below them as if it could catch anyone who fell out of the saddle without any difficulty. Misty tentacles stretched out toward the rays, which now and then touched them with their undersides or cut them to pieces with their wings.

Jolly cleared her throat. “May I ask you something, Captain d’Artois?”

“Ask away.”

“Is there someone…I mean, do you have someone down there waiting for you? For whom you’re doing all this?”

Suddenly d’Artois’s neck muscles grew clearly prominent, his back visibly tensed. “I’m fighting for…” He stopped. Perhaps he’d been going to say “for all the people of Aelenium,” but at the last moment he probably realized how empty those words would have sounded. “My wife is dead,” he said after a short pause. “She was killed when the kobalins attacked the north arm of the sea star. She was riding a hippocampus that was pulled under by the kobalins.”

Jolly’s throat became even drier. “I’m sorry.”

D’Artois seemed to be concentrating on guiding the ray
again. But she saw that his knuckles were white as he gripped the reins. He was breathing deeply, as if he could free himself of the bad memories that way.

Soledad laid a hand on Jolly’s shoulder, very briefly, only to clutch the saddle again immediately. The flight made her uneasy.

“Each one here has made a sacrifice,” she whispered in Jolly’s ear. “Munk lost his parents; you, Captain Bannon; I, my father. The soldiers are no exception.”

Jolly knew that, but still it was good to have Soledad say it aloud. Absorbed with her own fear and uncertainty, she tended to forget that others had to live with loss and with sorrow. She was only one of many. She was nothing special, she’d always said that. Even if Forefather and the Ghost Trader had tried to talk her into something different.

Just a girl.

Somehow she found the thought more comforting than all the talk of polliwog powers and mussel magic. If they should ever succeed in defeating the Maelstrom, it would not be because they were different from others. If they conquered him, it would only be because they didn’t forget what they were. Who they were.

And that it was worth it to fight just for that.

“Can you see anything?”

The whale was drifting on the waves with his mouth open. Ebenezer stood between two teeth, holding fast with one hand and bending so far forward that he could look up past
the animal’s gums. The sky was deep blue, like a concave gem. Swarms of gulls circled over the whale. They followed him along all his pathways through the seas of the world. When he came to the surface, they picked algae and small shelled animals from his back.

Griffin was high up on the whale’s head. It had been a difficult and frightening journey through the tunnel-like gullet up into the mouth. From there he’d jumped out into the water, and the whale had dived and then come up again right underneath him, thus lifting Griffin onto his back.

“Griffin!” called Ebenezer from the mouth down below. “Come on, tell, can you see the fog?”

Griffin was shading his eyes with both hands, but the brightness still blinded him. He squinted in all directions, searching for the fog wall behind which Aelenium was concealed. Jasconius might have a substantial intelligence for a sea monster, but his sense of direction left more than a little to be desired.

How would a whale know the points of the compass? Or degrees of longitude and latitude?

“I don’t see anything!” Griffin yelled back. “Everything is so bright.”

“Wait for a minute,” replied Ebenezer, making an effort to be heard over the crashing of the waves against the mighty columns of teeth in the open whale mouth. The monster’s gums stretched over him like a black dome. “You’ll get used to the brightness pretty quickly.”

It wasn’t easy to find enough hold on the skin of the
whale’s upper surface. Griffin had taken off his boots so as not to injure the animal. Barefoot, he crouched on the highest point of the mighty body, which stretched away under him like the hull of an overturned boat, as black as tar, with patches of thousands of tiny crabs and mussels.

Only now could Griffin comprehend how mighty the whale actually was. He estimated that the body measured more than double the size of a four-master—even without including the gigantic tail.

Griffin peered at the horizon through the whirling flocks of gulls. The more his eyes got used to the daylight, the bluer and more brilliant the sky seemed to him, as if azure dye were being unendingly pumped into it.

But still he couldn’t see the fog anywhere. Hadn’t Ebenezer explained to him that Jasconius chose his routes randomly? The monk could steer the whale in a general direction, and during the past night Griffin had checked the course by the stars—this was the first time that Ebenezer led him through the throat into the mouth. After that they’d dived again and begun the journey. To be certain, however, Griffin had insisted that they look for their destination once more by daylight. They might be closer to Aelenium than they thought, and he didn’t want to risk missing the sea star city.

But except for the gulls, the glittering brightness, and the black monstrosity beneath him, he couldn’t make out anything. No fog, nothing. Maybe he was still too close to the surface. That was the reason for the lookout being on the
highest mast of a ship. Yes, if he could have flown like the gulls, then maybe—

A hellish noise startled him. About ten paces away, a towering column of water shot up from an opening in Jasconius’s back, with a rushing and rattling that hurt his ears. Seconds later Griffin’s clothes, which had just dried in the sun, were soaked through again. The masses of water had nearly rinsed him off the whale’s back.