by Kai Meyer
Griffin provided for Matador and asked the stable boy to care for the animal especially attentively after the strenuous ride. The worst was still to come for the sea horses, too. Griffin wasn’t sure when action would come—but when it did, the battle in the water against the kobalins certainly wouldn’t be any picnic.
Walker and Buenaventure, who’d greeted him on his arrival, had hurried away again to help reinforce the first defense wall above the breakwater. More and more wooden beams, sandbags, and pieces of coral from the undercity were heaved onto the barricades to make penetration more difficult for the kobalins. But it was questionable which was the bigger danger: the deep tribes or the fleet of the cannibal king Tyrone.
D’Artois, the Ghost Trader, and the council seemed to be divided on that. Certainly the kobalins were horrible creatures with claws and murderous sharks’ teeth. But their element was the water, and no one knew yet how well they’d fight on land.
On the other hand, the cannibals and pirates Tyrone would lead into battle were ordinary men, and in great numbers. For fighting in the streets, they were the perfect allies for the Maelstrom.
Still, Tyrone and his fleet had been involved in wasting sea battles in the waters west of the Lesser Antilles. The Antilles captains, who’d ruled that region of the Caribbean for years, felt themselves betrayed by the cannibal king and swore vengeance.
This could only be a good thing for the defenders of Aelenium. Not only would Tyrone—and with him the Maelstrom—be significantly weakened by the sea battle, but he also lost valuable time as well. What had been planned as a surprise attack on the sea star city had now turned into a predictable military expedition, which the inhabitants of Aelenium could incorporate into their plans.
Griffin picked his way through the lanes and over steep steps. Along the way he passed the two defense walls and various smaller barricades.
People in uniform were everywhere—mostly men, but there were also some women among them who intended to fight for the city. Some soldiers were formed into troops and marched in formation, while others ran around in disorder, reinforcing the walls or receiving last instructions.
The Ghost Trader had vanished immediately after their return to Aelenium. He was last seen at Forefather’s side, and when Griffin asked d’Artois about it, he confirmed that the two sages had withdrawn into the library. “No affair of mine,” the captain had declared gruffly before he took himself off to his troops to go over last-minute strategies.
Griffin wondered what Forefather and the Ghost Trader had to discuss up there. Soledad had told him in a whisper of the water spinners Jolly met when the Carfax sank and also of what the three mysterious women deep on the floor of the sea had told her. Even if Soledad wasn’t quite sure what Jolly thought about it, Griffin could hardly imagine that Jolly had been having a hallucination. Perhaps Aelenium really was a place where the gods had gathered before they went into oblivion and died. And perhaps Forefather actually was the creator himself, the first deity, who had created this world.
Griffin found it all just as incredible as Soledad did. But some of it definitely did fit into the picture, beginning with the existence of such an inconceivable city as Aelenium, and then to the remarkable capabilities of the Ghost Trader. Captain d’Artois had once told him that Forefather was the soul of Aelenium. Possibly that had been far more than an empty phrase.
Griffin went up the last steps and reached the palace square. The sentries who normally guarded the door had been withdrawn. Danger wasn’t threatening here—high over the water—but way down below on the shores of the sea star.
Griffin met scarcely anyone in the palace, either. Most of the women and children were hiding in protective shelters deep in the heart of the city. There were no more servants in the corridors, the guest section seemed swept empty. A depressing atmosphere pervaded the abandoned passageways and salons. More than once Griffin thought he heard footsteps following him; but then there was only the echo of his own steps.
He ran past his room, deciding against changing the pirate outfit for a new leather uniform. He’d assembled his odds and ends of pirate clothes from the wreckage in the belly of the whale: a pair of leather trousers, a black shirt, and a vest into which someone had sewn a bent Spanish gold doubloon over the heart, obviously a good luck charm.
Griffin decided it didn’t really matter what clothes he wore into a fight against kobalins and cannibals. Teeth and claws could go through leather, too.
He stopped at Jolly’s door. It hurt to imagine that she could still be waiting for him behind it—quite aside from the fact, he thought with a melancholy smile, that it was definitely not her way to wait for anyone at all.
The door was not locked; he could enter unhindered. The bedclothes were all roiled up.
“Looks as if Jolly had nightmares during her last night in Aelenium,” said a voice behind him.
Griffin whirled around. “So I did hear steps.”
Soledad shook her head with a smile. “Certainly not mine. No one hears me if I don’t want them to.” That sounded a little arrogant, but Griffin knew that the princess was speaking the truth. Even when she was just walking along beside you, her movements were fluid, catlike.
With a suppressed sigh he turned again to the empty room. “I think Jolly often had bad dreams—not only last night.”
It was an odd moment in which they both merely stood there, staring at the disordered bedclothes and focusing their thoughts on Jolly.
Griffin cleared his throat. “We’re talking about her as if she wasn’t coming back.”
“She’ll come back.”
“Yes,” he replied softly. “She will.”
“No one goes on a journey like that without playing it through in her head a hundred times beforehand,” Soledad said. “In dreams, too, whether she wants to or not.”
Griffin shuddered at the thought of the terrors that Jolly must have painted for herself, and shivered still more at the idea of what she might actually expect down there. His imagination exhausted itself in pictures of grisly monsters before he came to a much more obvious terror: the loneliness in the black wasteland of the deep sea.
The same thoughts seemed to be worrying Soledad. “The greatest fear she had, I think, was not the Maelstrom.” She turned and stared at him until he returned her gaze. “But Munk, don’t you think?”
“Yes,” he said. “I do think so, for sure.”
“Is he a danger to her down there?”
Griffin was amazed that Soledad had thought about that. Until now he’d believed that he was the only one who saw Munk as a threat to Jolly. “If only I knew.”
“That night on the Carfax, they almost fought with each other. He wanted to force her to remain in Aelenium.” Soledad’s eyes looked more shadowed than usual. It made him uneasy to see her that way; perhaps because he’d hoped she could dispel his own worries. Instead her words only confirmed what he’d secretly been fearing himself.
“Why did you come here?” she asked. “Into her room, I mean.”
He hesitated. “For the same reason you did, right? To be close to her. To say good-bye.”
She walked past him to an arched window. The room was very high and narrow, almost like the inside of a tower. Many rooms in Aelenium had such odd dimensions, evidence of the fact that the city had grown and not been constructed.
Griffin followed the princess and looked over the steep cliff into the city below, over the furrowed slope of lanes and roofs that led down to the points of the sea star and the water. Not much longer and then nothing would be as it once had been anymore. Death and destruction would strike the city.
The image tore at his heart. For the first time he felt a real bond with this wondrous place, and something like a feeling of responsibility rose in him. If Jolly was ready to sacrifice herself for Aelenium, then he must ask the same of himself.
“What are you going to do?” Soledad asked, as if she’d just asked herself the same question and already found an an
swer.
“Fight,” he said. “Like Jolly.”
She nodded silently.
“And you?”
Soledad shrugged. “They won’t let me ride the rays because I’m a woman, those idiots. And no one seems to know yet whether they’re really going to use the sea horses against the kobalins.”
He nodded.
“I’m going with the divers,” she went on. “I’ve been taking lessons the last few days. I was down at the anchor chain. The kobalins will try to cut it to detach Aelenium from the sea bottom.”
“If they really try it, no one can stop them. The divers can’t go to the bottom. It’s too deep.”
“Nevertheless, we aren’t going to just look on and do nothing.”
He shook his head sadly. “It’s madness to confront the kobalins in their own element.”
“One has to do something.” The corners of her mouth twitched slightly, but no smile followed. “And you?”
“D’Artois has assigned me to the ray riders.”
Suddenly the princess walked up to him and hugged him. “Then take care of yourself, Griffin. Don’t make me be the one who has to tell Jolly when she comes back that the kobalins have torn you to pieces.”
He returned the embrace and blushed when she gave him a kiss on the forehead.
“I’ll leave you alone up here now. And give Jolly a nice greeting from me when you think about her.” With a wink she went out into the corridor and pulled the door closed behind her.
Griffin stared at the door for a long moment. Then, with a heavy heart, he turned to the window again. Over the fog the rays were moving in their majestic orbits.
It was Soledad’s ninth dive, but she’d been told that the constricted feeling in the diving suit never diminished, even by the fiftieth time. True, she could breathe for fifteen to twenty minutes through hoses that ran to the bubblestone in a metal container strapped under her chin. But the air was already thin and stuffy after a few minutes.
Soledad had never seen anything like the bubblestones before her arrival in the sea star city, and she wondered where they came from. The other divers seemed not to know the answer to that either. They explained to Soledad that the stones were kept in a cave near the core and carefully protected. When a stone had given up all its air, it needed several hours to dry out completely and absorb new oxygen. Because there were only several hundred of these stones in existence, the supply would inevitably run low during the battle if the fighting under water lasted too long.
Soledad and a handful of others dove down along the furrowed underside of a sea star arm. The princess had been able to sleep for a few hours to gather strength, which she would urgently need in the days to come. Although the sun was shining on the water above, it was very dark down here below. Only where the mighty anchor chain emerged from a complicated tangle of steel and branching coral was there pale light. Shafts had been driven through the sea star point and within them, above water level and at regular intervals, were placed torches. A yellow glow fell from them but was soon lost in the depths. Enough light to recognize attackers and to oppose them—but too little to, say, read the print in a book. The murky soup would make the battle down here even more difficult.
The anchor chain was so broad that it would take twenty men to encircle one of the powerful links with outstretched arms. Next to the rusty chain links, a human was as lost as a fish. Disheveled water plants floated on invisible currents and settled around the metal in many places like dense shrubbery.
Every time Soledad looked down into the deep from the chain, she grew dizzy.
It was true that the endless ribbon sank down to the edge of the field of light, out of the torchlight into darkness, but the idea that it reached to the bottom of the sea turned her stomach. Even though she was underwater, that thought gave her something like acrophobia. So much emptiness beneath her, so much nothing.
Walker had argued with her when she told him that she was going to join the divers. She hadn’t let herself be budged from her decision, however, not even by him.
Soledad knew what she was letting herself in for. She could have chosen the easy way and fought on the barricades, and no one would have reproached her for that. But she wouldn’t be her father’s daughter, the future empress of all the pirates between Tortuga and New Providence, if she watched passively as the kobalins streamed onto land. She wanted to fight the creatures of the Maelstrom—and as quickly as possible.
All the divers had now reached the network of metal stays and branching coral in whose center the chain was anchored to the underside of the sea star point by a mighty ring. Nowhere was the anchor chain so vulnerable as at this spot where it connected with the city.
Destroying the metal was beyond the kobalins’ capabilities—they possessed neither explosives nor heavy-duty tools—but their claws were sharp enough to dig the fastening out of the coral. Therefore, the attack on the chain was expected primarily at the upper end, not down at the anchor.
The torch shafts were arranged in a wide circle around the mooring, which gave the strange place the feeling of an ancient temple—a spectral shrine that was surrounded by a ring of pillars of light.
The patrol that Soledad and the other divers were replacing returned to the surface. Soledad watched the clumsy figures swim through the shimmering columns and dissolve into darkness on the other side of them. Despite the presence of her fellow fighters, she was overcome by an anxious feeling of forlornness, and she shuddered at the thought of Jolly, who must be experiencing this feeling but a hundred times more strongly. She wished she could have found the right words before Jolly left to express how deeply she respected the girl’s bravery.
Soledad and the others scattered into the jungle of coral branches and metal stays. Most took positions on the cross braces to preserve their strength for the coming battle. Bubbles of oxygen swirled around their heads like swarms of silvery insects.
The thin air was already undermining Soledad’s stamina. She tried to breathe more consciously and slowly. She loosened one of the two small crossbows she carried at her belt, stretched it with the aid of a crank, pulled a bolt out of her chest strap, and pushed it into shooting position. The force of a shot under-water was not half as great as on the surface, but it was still enough to penetrate a thin kobalin body at a distance of ten feet. Firing pistols down here was of course impossible, but like the others, Soledad was armed with a multitude of daggers. The narrow stilettos were the most practical weapons. Unfortunately they were only useful in close combat—which in view of the kobalins’ claws was not a comfortable idea. Therefore they all hoped to be able to keep their enemies away from them with the help of the crossbows.
Most of the divers had spent hundreds of hours in shooting practice underwater. Soledad had been repeatedly surprised at how accurate the men were, despite the adverse conditions. She wished she could have said the same for herself.
Thus they sat there, spanned crossbows in both hands, and waited. After about twenty minutes, even the hardiest man changed his bubblestone, to then again wait silent and motionless, keeping his eyes on the darkness on the other side of the light pillars.
It was not Soledad who saw the first kobalin, but a man who was crouching on a stump of coral thorn a little way away from her. Out of the corner of her eye she saw him start into excited motion, which in spite of all the practice looked slow and strangely clumsy. In an instant the warning was passed on by signals, and at once two dozen crossbow bolts were directed out into the darkness.
At first there was only a handful of kobalins, then more, and more.
Spindle-thin figures with limbs much too long glided through the darkness. Creatures with bared teeth and narrow eyes, in which the shine from the torch shafts was refracted. It looked as if their eyes had imprisoned fire.
Soledad overcame her horror, aimed, and fired her first bolt into the dark.
Did the kobalin scream when she hit him? If so, human ears were not able to hear the sound.
A cloud of dark blood enwrapped the dying creature and made the sight even worse.
Now the bolts were flashing through the water everywhere. Most hit their targets. The first wave of attack faltered, then ebbed away entirely. Soon the only kobalins still to be found within the circle of the light columns were motionless corpses with sightless eyes, floating in the emptiness like ash flakes over a fire.
Soledad didn’t stop to think. Her motions were mechanical. Her breathing grew faster, now using much more of the valuable air from her bubblestone. But she kept herself under control, reloaded both crossbows, and resisted the temptation to change the stone ahead of time—it would have been a waste and furthermore would have taken much too much time.
She clenched her teeth and stared into the darkness, past the floating bodies in their billowing clouds of blood.
She thought about Walker. Thought about Jolly.
Then they came again, and Soledad gave up thinking about anything at all. The creatures avoided the light columns as if they shunned the brightness. From all directions they glided toward the divers with grotesque, lightning-swift strokes.
Soledad killed two with bolts before a third one reached her.
Claws flashed, then steel.
The war for Aelenium had begun.
The Battle for the Anchor
Griffin was at the breakwater with Ebenezer and Jasconius when the alarm bells sounded. First only one, then more and more, until finally all Aelenium resounded with the clangor of bells. The sound sped across the roofs of the sea star city like a storm wind, floated up the cliffs and down, broke on the filigreed towers and ornamented facades and the steep roof ridges of the lower quarter.
“Take care of yourself,” said Ebenezer in farewell, drawing Griffin to him in his big arms. “Remember, I need you for—”
“The first floating tavern in the belly of a whale.” Griffin laughed and thumped him on the back. “Sure.”