Pirate Wars (6 page)

The bolt hit its target. However, the kobalin’s stroke was strong enough to get him up to Soledad as he died. In his
death throes he struck and kicked about him, his clawed fingers whirled like shears in front of her face, and he almost tore the diving helmet from her head. But then she succeeded in drawing up both legs and pushing him away from her with a powerful kick. Moments later he’d already disappeared behind a wall of dark clouds.

Soledad swam through the thick, dark fog. Her vision did not reach much farther than a doubled arm’s length. This hindered her, but at the same time it protected her from the malignant eyes of the kobalins. Nevertheless she was swimming farther upward, toward the danger of leaving the mist and thus becoming visible to her enemies again.

Suddenly her head struck resistance. In the first moment she was seized with panic and struck about her, fearing that she was being attacked again. But then she realized that it was only a cross brace of the labyrinthine iron-and-coral construction in whose center the anchor chain was fastened. Close by her shimmered brightness from one of the torch shafts in the underside of the sea star point.

She froze as several silhouettes flashed in front of her, kobalins in search of opponents. But the creatures didn’t notice her, perhaps because their sense of smell failed in the bloody water.

Soledad pulled herself still farther up into the web of the support structure. Once she saw a second diver. She gave him a short wave and pointed up, but she couldn’t tell if he’d noticed her. He also was concealing himself between the braces, obviously just about to give up.

She took a break, forced herself to be calm, and changed the bubblestone before her lack of air could save the kobalins the work. Then she began to move away. The light now became more intense and bathed the surroundings in a red glow, through which lighter and darker streaks ran.

She was aware that she was approaching the true goal of the kobalin attack, the upper end of the anchor chain. If her luck were bad, it would already be swarming with soldiers of the deep tribes who were trying to destroy the fastening.

Her fear was confirmed when the fog thinned and opened up to a view of the chain. A dozen kobalins were climbing up the mighty iron links like monkeys, pulling themselves up by the floating curtain of plants and the mussel colonies and using the chain itself like a ladder that led up from the bottom of the sea to Aelenium. However, something was still keeping them from covering the last bit. Now Soledad realized that three or four divers had taken positions up there. They received each kobalin who approached them that way with a steel bolt.

Silently Soledad wished them luck and changed her direction. She had no chance of getting past the kobalins and advancing to her comrades. She must choose another way to safety.

Again she looked up to the torch shaft and wondered where it led. To the interior of the sea star city, that much was certain. She herself had never been in one of the shafts, but she knew that stairs within their walls wound to the top. From there the countless torches were regularly renewed in
their holders. She might have tried to get to the surface through one of the shafts and run on up the stairs. But the gates to the shafts were barricaded so that no kobalin could get into the city this way. There were probably gratings under the water surface as well.

Soledad was thinking feverishly and at the same time keeping an eye out for other kobalins, when suddenly an enormous silhouette poked through the murk in front of her.

In the first moment she thought it was yet another monstrosity of the Maelstrom, a gigantic monster out of the abysses of the sea, which was going to help the kobalins in the destruction of the chain.

But it was Jasconius.

The man in the whale and his titanic friend had come to the aid of the divers at the chain!

The whale plunged into the middle of the kobalin pack and whirled the attackers around with mighty blows of his tail. Even Soledad, who was some distance away from him, felt the current, was flung against a brace, and cried out in pain beneath her diving helmet.

When she opened her eyes again, she saw that panic had broken out among the kobalins. The giant head of the whale rammed them and broke all the bones in their bodies. His fins smashed them like insects. The sea giant moved with inconceivable agility. His speed gave the lie to his clumsy appearance. The kobalins could not have reckoned on such a fierce attack.

Soledad weighed her chances. The only remaining possibility
for flight was the way past the chain in the direction of the undercity. Whether there was a chance of climbing up into the upper city from there she did not know. But she had no choice.

The name
undercity
was misleading, for it described the undersea part of Aelenium, but by no means a city. The gigantic sea star that formed the base of Aelenium possessed two mountainlike outgrowths: one on the upper side, the other below. While over the course of time the upper part had more and more been brought into the form of a human settlement, with houses and towers and palaces, the formations on the underside remained untouched. Here the caves and tunnels ran as chance had created them; arms of coral grew wildly in all directions, and the surface was covered with sharp ridges, points, and thorns, which could cost a careless diver his life.

The way to the fissured coral incline was largely free. Soledad could get there unhindered, if Jasconius distracted the kobalin swarm just a little while longer. But fear made her hesitate, for she knew what she was letting herself in for. It was quite possible that she would become hopelessly lost in the twisting coral passageways and grottoes, until her air supply was used up—and never get even close to the upper surface at all.

Her eyes fell on the pack of kobalins, which had left the anchor chain and moved to safety outside the range of Jasconius’s deadly blows.

Suddenly one of the kobalins raised his arm and pointed at her. Immediately ten or eleven of them started moving.
Apparently they’d received orders to leave no human in the water alive.

She cursed her indecisiveness, which might now cost her her life, then pushed off and swam with hasty strokes in the direction of the slope. A little farther, one of countless openings gaped below her, a jagged crack, wide enough for a small ship to sail through it. She ducked along coral edges and passed sharp corners and turned into the darkness. Here there was no source of light except for the pale gleam that came in through the entrance. Desperately she wished for the polliwog vision that allowed Jolly and Munk to orient themselves underwater. She herself was dependent on the weak light from outside and on her sense of touch.

Panicked, she looked around at her pursuers. The kobalins shot up to the opening to follow her inside the coral mountain. Soledad swam faster, now using much too much of her air supply. In front of her rose the rugged cave wall. There was no exit.

Then it became dark around her.

She needed a moment to grasp what had happened. A black silhouette had slid in front of the crack and plunged the grotto into complete darkness. Jasconius!

He gave her the opportunity to flee deeper into the interior, even if she couldn’t see her hand before her face. But the shock had paralyzed her and kept her motionless in the water. Spellbound, she looked back at the opening. When the whale left it clear again, Soledad’s pursuers were floating higgledy-piggledy, crushed and lifeless.

Moments later she came to herself and repressed the urge to swim back into the light, into open water. With a heavy heart she left the brightness behind her.

In the dusky light she now made out a second crack in the back side of the cave, which she hadn’t noticed in her fear a few moments before. If she were lucky—
very
lucky—she’d have stumbled on one of the routes the divers had marked on their inspection rounds through the undercity. Xander had explained to her that the passable coral shafts were marked by glowing stones. The stones didn’t give enough light to illuminate the surroundings but gleamed bright enough to serve as trail markers. If one found them. And if one knew how to read their directions.

Soledad dove through the opening deeper into the interior of the undercity. It became pitch-dark around her.

Outside, Jasconius took on another troop of kobalins, broke the bones of some of them, and squashed the others between his jaws.

Soledad stopped only briefly to take her last bubblestone out of the bag and set it into the container under her chin. Then she went on feeling her way, searching for an outlet to the surface.

“I wish we
could just swim over them,” said Munk, looking gloomily across the labyrinth of cracks in the rock that opened before them.

Jolly nodded silently. It might be more reasonable to disregard the Ghost Trader’s warning and choose the fastest way. So far they hadn’t received the tiniest indication that the Maelstrom was looking for them at all. Perhaps he was simply
overlooking
them.

Munk looked at her sideways. “What do you think?”

She shrugged, unable to take her eyes off the maze of cracks and gorges. From up here, the craggy chasms looked like frozen black lightning, which touched and crossed, thus forming a sea of rock islands.

They were standing at the edge of a narrow plateau. It protruded like a nose from the slope on which they’d been
steadily moving downward for the last few hours. It was an effort for them both to walk on the soft ground beneath them; the ground itself might consist of rock, but in many places dust-fine gray sand had built up, which swallowed their feet at every step, sometimes up to the ankles. It was as if you were walking over a carpet of flour that, on top of everything else, billowed up at the slightest touch. From far off it must look as though they were pulling a cloud of smoke along behind them.

But if even this cloud hadn’t betrayed them yet, would they really be more noticeable if they swam a little bit instead of embarking on the burdensome trek through the labyrinth on foot?

In the beginning they’d both avoided, if possible, admitting openly that their feet hurt and that they were gradually getting charley horses in their legs. But after the first few hours they’d come to the silent agreement that it was silly to be so tough and dogged. Now they cursed together over the strenuous path, the poor vision, and the whole miserable situation they were stuck in.

Their polliwog vision ranged to several hundred feet, but the last bit was dark and blurry. The rock labyrinth at the foot of the slope extended very much farther out, its end unrecognizable in the distance. The black fissures opened out into the darkness like a river delta into an ocean of shadows. The depressing view robbed Jolly at one stroke of all the courage she’d mustered at the beginning of their trek. In the beginning the unavoidability of their fate had
driven her on, even given her new strength. She’d assumed nothing could surpass the wasteland she’d found on her arrival on the bottom of the sea—until this rock wasteland had turned up out of the darkness in front of them. In an instant, the depressing panorama destroyed all hope in Jolly of ever getting to the Crustal Breach in time. They’d be stumbling around in these ravines for so long, their meager provisions would be used up. Aelenium would fall. The Maelstrom would reach the city and—

“Jolly.”

She started. “Hmm? What?”

“I asked you what you think. Should we swim?”

She took a deep breath, felt the water stream through her windpipe, and finally nodded. “Otherwise we’ll never get through it.”

A last hesitation, then together they walked over the edge of the rock. They didn’t sink down but moved forward in the emptiness with slow swimming strokes. It was still strange to float in an element that they no longer perceived as ordinary water. It was in Aelenium that Jolly learned she could not only walk on the sea but also survive in it. For them the salt water was more like air—after all, they breathed it and it didn’t keep them from hearing or speaking.

Slowly they glided farther down until they were almost touching the tips of the rock towers that rose between the crevasses. They felt themselves moderately safe over the stone plateaus on the peaks, but whenever they glided over
a new chasm, another broad fissure, they shivered. They could see to the bottom of the crevasses, which meant that the chasms were rarely deeper than a few hundred feet. Since there was no source of light down here and the polliwog vision illuminated everything evenly, there were no shadows, either. But that in itself didn’t make the way across the labyrinth any less eerie, for there were still hundreds of overhangs under which all sorts of things might be concealing themselves. Not to mention the numberless caves and holes in the rock walls.

Although they still hadn’t discovered any signs of life, Jolly couldn’t shake the feeling that they were being observed. No one knew whether the kobalins could venture into these regions—after all, if Forefather’s calculations were correct, they were more than twenty thousand feet under the surface of the sea. The Crustal Breach itself lay somewhat deeper still. However, there must be some reason why people called the kobalins the deep tribes.

They’d long left behind in the darkness the slope they’d climbed down. Now there was only the sea of ravines and crevasses around them, the same in any direction they looked. Most of the time they were silent, except now and then, when one warned the other if they got too far from the plateaus on the rock towers. In spite of everything, they respected the Ghost Trader’s warning and tried never to get farther than six feet from the bottom. If something were to approach, they’d notice it early enough and still be able to seek protection in the ravines.

Provided that
something
hadn’t better eyes than theirs and hadn’t detected them long before.

“Doesn’t seem as if this stops anywhere,” said Munk. Even he was growing more and more disheartened at the extent of the rock labyrinth.

“No,” Jolly murmured in reply. “And what if we’re swimming in a circle?”

Munk’s arms and legs stopped moving for a moment, but then he got hold of himself. “Impossible.”

“Oh, really?”

He muttered something she didn’t understand and was silent for the next few minutes.

Finally Jolly sighed in relief. “Munk!” she cried, pointing below them. “Look!”

He followed her gaze down into the chasm beneath them, but he shook his head. “I don’t see anything.”

“Exactly.”

“Exactly?”

“We can’t see the bottom anymore. The crevasses are getting deeper! That means we’re still moving downward, even if the tips of the rocks appear to be staying at the same height. But really they’re
growing
, while the bottom of the sea is sinking farther!”

He thought about that for a long moment, then he agreed. A relieved smile twitched at the corners of his mouth, but it hardly brightened his face. Even his joy was swallowed up in the omnipresent gray down here.

Jolly thought they really ought to have been reassured now,
but her heart was still racing. What she’d have given for a compass! Instead they had to rely on the vague hope that down here all descending paths actually led to the Crustal Breach. They could only trust that the Breach really was the deepest place in this region of the sea floor. Otherwise, all their orientation was gone.

Again a long time passed with neither of them saying anything. Jolly observed that now and then Munk would stop swimming and stroke one hand across the pouch on his belt where he kept his mussels, as if he were gaining new strength that way. She tried secretly to do the same thing herself, but touching her mussel pouch did nothing at all for her. Possibly that was because she’d never developed such a close attachment to the mussels and their magic as he had.

“Down!” he cried suddenly, immediately letting himself sink deeper.

Jolly froze, hovering in place for an instant, and then she followed him down into the protection of a rock. She’d seen it too, at the last moment before she ducked behind the edge of the stone.

Several points of light appeared in front of them in the darkness.

“Are those…eyes?” she asked hoarsely.

Munk’s voice sounded thick. “No idea.”

They hardly dared to raise their heads over the edge, but finally they did.

The bright points were coming nearer. At first there were six or seven, but the longer they looked out at them, the more
there were—almost as if they were looking into a starry sky and seeing more stars with every minute.

“If they are eyes,” Jolly whispered tonelessly, “there are an awful lot of them.”

“Spiders have many eyes.”

“Oh, thanks, Munk!
Many
thanks!”

Once he would have smiled. Not today. He didn’t even look at her. Instead he held himself rigid at the height of the rock edge and stared tensely out over it.

“It’s a school of fish,” he said after a while.

In fact, the glowing points turned out to be tiny fish, whose bodies gave off a constant light. None of them appeared to be any larger than Jolly’s thumb.

“Let’s go deeper,” she said.

Munk nodded, but he didn’t move. He was still peering out over the rocks in fascination. The light of the fish reflected in his eyes and lent them a wild glitter that disquieted Jolly almost more than the strange school, which was now making straight for them.

She seized Munk by the hand and pulled him with her.

“Hey!” he exclaimed, but he didn’t resist. The glittering in his eyes seemed to last a moment longer before it finally went out. For a few long moments it had looked as if the glow of the fish had been caught in his head and were looking through his eyes to the outside.

They sank quickly downward. The chasm must have been much deeper than Jolly assumed, for they still couldn’t see the ground.

“Jolly!”

“What?” she replied gruffly, before she saw with her own eyes what he meant.

He could have spared himself the answer. “They’re following us.”

The school shot out over the edge of the rock, doubled back in a flowing motion, and streamed into the deep, just behind Jolly and Munk.

The two polliwogs rushed downward, headfirst, accelerated by frantic swimming. The rock walls on both sides shot past them. They had to avoid projections and spurs now and then, but they maintained their breakneck speed.

The fish were faster.

Light flowed over them, white and glassy like the shine of a rising full moon. The school seemed to take them into its arms as if it were a single massive living creature, not a mass of hundreds of tiny animals.

Jolly uttered an oath. Munk roared something like “Keep away from me!” and began to slap about him wildly.

The touch on her cheek felt like a delicate kiss, as if the fish wanted to sniff her face or explore with other senses. Jolly stopped short as other fish touched her hands and rubbed against her clothing. She had feared bites and pain. But all that she felt was that tender touching everywhere on her body.

Before their departure, they’d been given thin, dark leather clothing, which fit close to the body and whose oiled outer surface was supposed to facilitate locomotion in the deep.
They looked a little bit like the uniforms of the guard, but without the mussel decoration and other reinforcements. Two-piece, with a wide belt, without ornament, and so dark that they also served them as camouflage.

A fine camouflage if the very first creatures they met attacked them unerringly.

Munk kept beating around him with both arms. Without success. They must reach the bottom of the ravine any minute, a narrow strip of rubble whose surface was covered with the ever-present dust of the deep sea.

Jolly touched the ground first, wrapped in her cloud of lantern fish. She’d turned herself up again and landed feet-first. Unlike Munk, she’d given up trying to defend herself. The fish covered almost her entire body. There wasn’t a bare spot on her arms and legs, and there must even have been ten or twenty on her face. She repressed her panic and kept herself under control with difficulty.

The fish were sucking at her with their tiny mouths, but they still weren’t biting and didn’t betray by anything else that they saw Jolly and Munk as a tasty evening meal.

“Munk, hold still!” she called to him. The fish on her face wagged and billowed as she moved her lips. The brightness they gave off was astonishing, though not glaring enough to blind her.

“Munk!” she tried again. “They aren’t doing anything to us!”

He stopped in mid-motion, as if she’d snatched him from his panicked Saint Vitus’s dance with a slap on the face. As
much as he’d been defending himself, the fish were stuck to him all over, completely unimpressed by his slapping and kicking.

“They’re harmless,” said Jolly gently, involuntarily giggling when one of the animals bumped against the tip of her nose and remained stuck by its mouth.

“I don’t know what’s so funny,” Munk burst out angrily, but gradually he seemed to calm down. He created a remarkable picture, as he stood there a few steps in front of the rock wall—a dumpy figure of pure light, as if someone had cut the shape of a person from black paper and was now holding the opening against the daylight.

“Maybe they’re spies or something like that.” Munk was making a noticeable effort not to open his lips too wide as he spoke, for fear one of the fish could slip inside.

“Spies for the Maelstrom?” For a moment Jolly was frightened. But then she told herself that the Maelstrom wouldn’t send out spies, but murderers to kill them on the spot. He’d have sent kobalins or a monster like the Acherus, not lowly little lantern fish.

She tried to push off the ground to float over to Munk, but she couldn’t move. Something was keeping her fastened to the ground like a nail to a magnet.

“They’re holding us!” Now panic was rising in her again. She quickly fought the feeling down, if only with moderate success.

Munk was about to say something, but then his face froze. “Do you hear that?” he asked after a short pause.

At first she thought the noise was produced by the fish in some way: a dull droning and rolling that seemed to come from all sides. But it sounded quite different from anything they’d heard in the fish-filled waters beneath Aelenium.

Munk looked up. The upper edge of the rock wall was too high for him to be able to make out anything; polliwog vision didn’t reach that far.

“Munk!”

The movement of his head produced a tail of light as the fish whirled around with it to face Jolly.

She pointed to the ground. “Look at that.”

The dust layer on the rocks was moving, dancing up and down barely noticeably. Now Jolly felt it in her legs, too. The entire underground was vibrating, very slightly, but constantly.