by Kai Meyer
She nodded. “What’s the last thing you remember?”
“The cannon thunder. And that I … that I … I was sitting up on the yard, wasn’t I? And I fell down, I think.”
Once again she nodded. “I came after you to look for you. Everything was full of smoke, and when I finally found you, the Carfax was gone … both ships.”
She looked out into the rock passage. Debris was floating on the waves in the moonlight. The surf cast a few pieces of wood onto the shore, pulled them out again, threw them back. Nowhere was there a ship to be seen. Also there was no noise in the distance, no voices, no cannon fire.
They were, in fact, alone.
“What if she went down?” Griffin was following her eyes. The pieces of flotsam and the empty water between the islands called up the same fear in both of them. And yet an inner voice told her that her first thought had been right: The Ghost Trader had left them behind.
Was she disappointed about that? Or angry? She’d need a while to find the answer to that.
Wasn’t it what she’d wanted all along? Munk should bear the responsibility alone. Magic, conjuring—that was nothing for her. She walked on the water. She was a pirate.
Just like Griffin.
“It’s not over yet,” he said. “Not at all.”
She didn’t answer. Instead she turned around.“Let’s go,” she said as she began to climb the pebbled slope.“Maybe there’s life here somewhere.”
Maybe humans, she thought.
Or a creature like the Acherus.
She shuddered.
Aelenium
Three days later a dense wall of fog darkened the sunrise on the horizon ahead of the Carfax. The flaming red of the sky, shot through with golden streaks and veins of light, first blurred, then disappeared completely in the billowing grayness.
“There it is,” said the Ghost Trader with barely concealed relief.“Our destination lies behind that fog.”
“Aelenium?” asked Soledad, who was standing beside him at the railing.
The one-eyed man nodded under his hood. The two parrots on his shoulders uttered shrill cries that sounded almost like human laughter.
“Maybe we can lose the Palomino in the fog,” Walker called down from the bridge.
The Ghost Trader didn’t turn around. It was as if he spoke an invocation to the rolling mist, which soon obscured their view entirely.
“We will that,” he whispered. “We will that.”
The bounty hunter’s ship was still behind them, battered and much slower than before—just like the Carfax. Two cripples who, limping and groaning, were putting up a stubborn race.
The onion-dome cage dangled on a chain over the railing. The Hexhermetic Shipworm had demanded to be moved there so that he could see something and not, as he put it, “have to stare at your stinking feet and a few rotten barrels all day long.”
The fog reached for them with ragged fingers and, within a very short time, enveloped them. To Soledad, it seemed as if it had come to meet them, but the Ghost Trader knew better: “The fog lies in a wide ring around Aelenium. It keeps most people from daring to approach.”
“And those who try it anyway?”
The Trader himself was now only a dark blob in the middle of the gray mist. “Some turn back, others remain.”
With a shiver, Soledad thought of shipwrecks on the bottom, many fathoms deep or miles under the sea.
“Is the Palomino following us?” she called up to Walker to distract herself. The captain, too, was only a silhouette in the fog.
“I didn’t see them turn around,” he replied. “But I’d be surprised if Constantine gave up after so many days.” He spoke softly with Buenaventure, then turned to the others again.“Be quiet. If they can’t hear us, maybe they’ll lose our trail.”
For quite a while nothing was heard except the creaking of the boards and the rigging, accompanied by the splash of the waves against the hull.
After minutes, an eternity, there was an earsplitting grinding and cracking, followed by a grisly bursting.
Soledad waited for an impact that would knock her off her feet—but it didn’t come.
For a moment she was convinced that the Carfax had run aground. Then she heard noises far behind them. The tiny droplets of fog carried the sounds forward like millions upon millions of tiny mouths sending them a message.
Cries wafted over to them.
Wild screaming, wretched, provoking pity. Cries from many throats, each individually so dejected and final that there was no doubt as to what was happening to those poor souls.
They were death cries.
Somewhere behind them, deep in the dense fog, the crew of the Palomino was dying. And their ship died with them.
“Good God.” Soledad whispered. She was completely rigid, no part of her moved. Even her lips felt as if they’d turned to ice.
The Ghost Trader’s hand clutched the railing, a corpselike shadow around it.
“Those weren’t the powers of Aelenium,” he said tonelessly. “They are not so pitiless.”
And then, as if at a secret signal, their eyes traveled to the bow.
There sat Munk, cross-legged. He’d laid the mussels out around him in a circle. Inside, glowing fiery like the pupil of a sea monster, floated a pearl. Munk made a motion of his hand, much more skillfully than before; immediately the pearl ducked into an open mussel and was swallowed as the shell snapped shut.
“Was that him?” Soledad realized that she’d spoken aloud only when the Ghost Trader nodded. Only once, very briefly.
“By the gods,” slipped out of him so softly that only Soledad could hear. She believed she recognized something like fear in his voice for the first time. Her knees trembled; thoughts whirled in her head.
“Munk?” she inquired.
The boy raised his head and looked at her. His smile in the fog was triumphant and icy.
She was about to make herself go over to him when a powerful draft whipped away the fog over their heads; tiny eddies appeared in the white clouds and almost swept them off their feet. Something large floated over the deck of the Carfax, above the shattered mainmast. It vanished into the fog again just as quickly. Yet soft, rushing sounds still came through to Soledad’s ears, the lifting and falling of powerful wings.
“What was that?”
“Don’t worry,” said the Ghost Trader reassuringly. He’d regained his composure. “That was one of the first harbingers of Aelenium. We’re about to reach the other side. The fog will thin any minute.”
Munk calmly packed up his mussels. There was perspiration on his forehead and soaking his clothing, but he didn’t bother about it. Only his fingers trembled slightly, and he was breathing a little faster.
Soledad wasn’t at that moment sure what made her more afraid: Munk’s magic thrusting of the Palomino into a watery grave or the powerful creature that hovered, invisible, around the masts.
She forced herself to take her eyes off the boy. Later there would be time enough to concern herself with him. With what he had done—and how he had done it. And what he might still possibly bring about, for good as well as bad.
Out beyond the bow she saw the red-yellow glimmer, which was now dawning through the mist: the morning sky over Aelenium. A brilliant panorama like a veil of gold dust on a sea of scarlet. With every wave that broke against the Carfax’s bow, the water took on more and more of the color of the sky, until the fog finally drifted away entirely and left them in a fire of red and copper.
“Aelenium,” whispered the Ghost Trader beside Soledad at the railing.
She could do nothing but stare ahead with eyes wide, lips parted. She didn’t see how the others on board were reacting, what Walker said or thought or what the Hexhermetic Shipworm was doing in his cage.
She could only … look.
The fog ring enclosed a circular field of water two or three miles in diameter, perhaps larger. The sunrise glowed and sparkled on a forest of roofs and towers, a many-colored ho
dgepodge of low houses, fortresslike crenellated walls, and palaces in the character and multiplicity of bizarrely frosted cakes. There were bridges between pointed gables and lookout platforms, some roofed, others open, and as finely worked as if they were made of porcelain. There were rows of porticos and spiny citadels; free-floating staircases that stretched like spiderwebs between facades, towers, and sky-lights; waterfalls that bubbled out of openings in the facades and disappeared into invisible canals and reservoirs in the confusion of buildings. Hardly any of all this appeared to have an obvious, practical purpose, as if the architects of Aelenium had let their feelings for beauty and elegance have free reign, without giving any thought to the habitability of the floating city.
In the center of the haphazard jumble of interconnected structures rose the white cone of a mountain, very steep and regular on all sides. Its tip was cut off straight, as if by a knife blade, which made it look like the crater of a volcano. Whether there was an opening yawning up there or whether the artificial top was finished off with a platform was impossible to discern out at sea. Water flowed along its flanks in deep cuts and formed a golden pattern as it reflected the morning sun.
Stretching into the sea all around Aelenium were broad jetties, which grew progressively narrower toward their ends. It took Soledad a moment to grasp that these jetties were actually the points of a gigantic star.
Aelenium was sitting on a sea star.
A sea star that floated flat on the water, as big as an island, built up to its outer edges.
Actually … built up?
As they came closer, Soledad realized that the star city hadn’t been artificially built as she’d at first assumed. All points, prickles, roofs, and walls consisted of coral, as if over millions of years, layer upon layer had collected on the upper side of the sea star and created a masterpiece that, at first sight, one could very easily have taken for the work of an overzealous builder.
Did it look exactly the same on the underside? Was there a bizarre mirror image underneath the upper side of the city? Empty, sea-flooded spaces and endless tunnels; pointed towers on which colonies of mussels grew and crabs sought plankton; unoccupied rooms through which a predator glided now and then, in majestic darkness and silence?
We’ll find out, she thought suddenly, for she was just realizing that she would actually be a guest in this wondrous structure. They were allies, perhaps even friends. They had nothing to fear.
And yet there was a bitter taste beneath all her astonishment and wonder, a deep anxiety. Panic, almost.
What kind of a place was this? Where did it come from?
Aelenium might have grown out of thousands and more thousands of tons of coral, but that couldn’t just have happened by accident. The stairs, jetties, and friezes had been built up for a purpose, with the leisureliness of the eons. For the purpose of being inhabited.
But by whom?
She saw still more, high over the coral cathedrals and sea-foam minarets: gigantic ray creatures with purple-veined wings, between which sat men, tiny riders in comparison to the mighty creatures. Three of them now broke out of the wall of mist, in a fluffy explosion of tatters of fog. Soledad recognized the sound of the rushing wings again. It was the same as before, when something had circled around the tip of the mast.
There were riders not only in the sky but also on the water: Men on bony seahorses with long, pointed snouts and eyes as big as plates, horned bodies, and gracefully navigating tails, which enabled the animals to bear their masters in wide arcs through the waters of Aelenium.
The princess saw all this and at the same time knew that it was only a fraction of the wonders that awaited her and the others in the coral city.
One of the giant rays sank down to them until it hovered only some twelve feet over the deck of the Carfax, with leisurely wing beats and gently waving tail point. A man with long black hair bent between the wings and greeted the Ghost Trader with a wave of the hand that looked both ritual and exotic.
“Welcome back, old friend!” cried the ray rider. “And welcome to your friends and companions. They shall dwell under our domes and eat our food.” It sounded like a polite formality, not like an invitation that came from the heart.
Soledad exchanged a look with the Ghost Trader before he replied to this greeting: “Have my thanks, D’Artois, captain of the Ray Guard! I am glad to be back again. And I bring you what I promised.”
Where have you led us? Soledad asked him with her eyes, but he only smiled mysteriously, the way he frequently did. There was nothing for her to do but keep silent and wonder and try to calm her heartbeat and hold her weak knees still.
Suddenly Munk was standing beside her, staring expressionlessly at the coral structures of the star city.
“Jolly should have seen this,” he whispered. “She should be with us now, nowhere else.” His head jerked around. He first looked Soledad in the eyes, then glanced over at the Ghost Trader. “We’ve betrayed her.”
Then he fell silent again and looked toward Aelenium.
Walker, following the ray rider’s directions and with Buenaventure’s help, slowly maneuvered the ship to one of the sea star’s points, which extended out into the sea a good two hundred feet from the actual center of the city.
“Betrayed,” Munk murmured again.
Soledad fought the impulse to move away from him, only a little bit away, out of his immediate proximity. Perhaps that would have stopped her shivering.
Munk stood motionless beside her, a boy who’d just drowned a whole ship’s crew in the sea with a wave of his hands. Without hesitation. Without scruple.
The Carfax slowed, the ghosts reefed the sails, then finally the anchor dropped.
Aelenium received its savior.
End of Volume 1
About the Author
Kai Meyer is the author of many highly acclaimed and popular books for adults and young adults in his native Germany, The first book in his Dark Reflections Trilogy, The Water Mirror, was a School Library Journal Best Book, a Book Sense Pick, and a Locus Magazine Recommended Read, It also received starred reviews in School Library Journal and Publishers Weekly, and has been translated into sixteen languages. Kai Meyer lives in Germany.
About the Translator
Elizabeth D. Crawford is the distinguished translator of the Batchelder Award—winning novels The Robber and Me by Josef Holub and Crutches by Peter Harding. She lives in Orange, Connecticut.