by Kai Meyer
Jolly looked after her, not sure what to think. But then she followed the girl.
“Munk, are you coming?”
When she looked around at him, he was listening to the opening in the mussel. Their eyes met, and he nodded. But all at once she wasn’t sure if this nod was for her or for the mussel that was murmuring something into his ear.
The attack came as a surprise, without any warning.
At the end of the slope, beyond a wall of fallen rock needles and sharp blocks, they came to the edge of a plain of white sand. Aina advised them not to walk on the white surface of the sand but to place their feet only on the gray slabs that, at a closer look, were sticking up through the cover of dust in numerous places.
“Quicksand,” she explained, her eyes lowered and her arms clasped tightly around her body as if she suddenly were freezing. “Back then, that almost pulled us under.”
Under echoed in Jolly’s mind. Under where? Even deeper into the interior of the world? Could there even be a deeper place than this? Instinctively she turned her eyes upward, to where the surface of the sea must be somewhere, many thousands of fathoms above them. The darkness stretched over their bodies like a dome of black velvet. With a little effort, Jolly could have convinced herself that she was standing under a night sky. Except that there were no stars here. No feeling of infinity. Instead, dread-provoking heaviness, which pressed on her heart, her thoughts, her courage like a ton of weight.
The kobalins attacked just as Munk had asked, “How far is it to the Crustal Breach?” and Aina had replied with a mysterious smile, “Can’t you feel it? We’re already in it!”
In front of them the blurry horizon of their vision started to move as a number of kobalins emerged from the darkness in an extended line, their bodies as white as the sand on the plain. Their eyeless faces were turned in the direction of the three polliwogs, their thick hands with the swordlike claws dangling almost to the ground. Even their joints were more pointed and angular than those of humans, and Jolly involuntarily wondered if perhaps they used their knees and elbows as weapons.
“Back!” she cried when the kobalins walked out of the gloom.
Aina stood there as if rooted. Munk’s right hand fumbled with the fastening of his belt pouch, which now also held the big mussel.
“Let them come,” he said softly.
“Munk!” Jolly yelled. “Damn it, get moving, now!”
But he didn’t move from the spot. The mussels appeared to slide from his pouch into his hand on their own, and before Jolly could say anything, he was crouching on the rocky ground, laying out the shells in front of him. He placed Aina’s gift in the center, where it rose above all the other mussels like the tower of a wondrous fairy-tale palace.
“I have to find out how powerful it is,” he murmured.
The kobalins came nearer, in an irregular line, following the course of the rock ledge. Jolly didn’t take the time to count them, but she guessed there were at least ten. Maybe more.
“Munk, quit that! There’re too many!”
But Munk paid no attention to her. Aina stood close beside him. Both were looking toward the kobalins.
A pale glow shone out of the opening of the large mussel. The circle filled with light as the largest and brightest pearl Jolly had ever seen loosed itself from the shell and floated up over the center of the circle. It was different from usual: Before, the magic power of all the mussels had concentrated in the center and flowed into a magic ball. But this time it looked as though the others were luring from the interior of the big mussel a pearl that had been waiting there the whole time. The end result might look the same as usual—a glowing pearl that floated in the heart of the circle of mussels—and yet everything was different. Jolly could feel it, and she didn’t like it.
Something happened to the water around them. It looked as if it were freezing into long, finger-thick strips, which undulated over the bottom of the sea like snakes.
The magic veins! flashed into Jolly’s head. The pearl had tapped into the power of the water spinners! That must multiply its powers.
The now visible water veins pointed, starlike, in all directions from the location of the three polliwogs. But suddenly their ends appeared to stand up somewhere in the darkness, until they formed a wall around the companions like the calyx of a flower. Then a hard, abrupt pulsing passed through the wall of water snakes. A pressure wave seemed to Jolly to come together from all sides at once. The water strands gathered themselves over her head into something that looked like a tree-thick braid of translucent strands. It began to swing like a whip, and then in a wide arc it brushed the line of kobalins to a hundred, a hundred and fifty yards away from the polliwogs.
It was as if the creatures had encountered a giant’s saber.
Before the creatures even understood what was rushing at them, the water whip cracked among them and crushed them. It went so fast that Jolly couldn’t take in any details—it was only moments later that she even became aware of the kobalins’ deaths, when the horizon in her polliwog view was suddenly empty and lifeless once more.
The power of the mussel magic had turned the kobalins to dust and scattered their particles in all directions like fine ash. Nothing was left. Even their footprints had vanished, and the sand was smooth again.
The water strands had dissolved again at the shock—or immediately afterwards—and nothing showed that they’d ever been there. The pearl had vanished as well. Munk had closed it back into the mussel with a wave of his hand; that was necessary so that its magic didn’t go out of control.
Jolly fought against the sudden impulse to retch, swallowed hard several times, and finally managed to get herself under control again. Her legs felt weak, but she remained upright and stared silently at Munk, who still squatted motionless in front of his mussels with his back to her; just like Aina, whose hand was now resting on his shoulder, even though he probably couldn’t feel it.
Jolly took a deep breath and then forced herself to walk in a tight curve around the silent pair.
“Onward,” she said hoarsely, as she started on her way without looking back at them.
Nothing in the world could have gotten her to look one of them in the eye.
Rain of Fire
The sky over Aelenium was on fire. If the night sky had already been dyed red by the glow of the sea battle on the other side of the fog, now the defenders themselves were bathing the world in fire.
The ray riders were dousing the kobalins with flames.
They’d held the position hour after hour, but all had known that sooner or later it would come to this, and most of them were painfully aware of the consequences. Kindling a fire in the constricted confines of a city like Aelenium was a double-edged sword. And even now it was threatening to strike in both directions.
From above, Griffin saw that parts of the foremost walls were in flames, as well as some of the adjoining houses. The coral structures themselves remained largely untouched, but the wooden additions and roofs offered sufficient nourishment for the fire. It was already spreading to numerous living spaces.
The defenders had withdrawn and were lying in wait on the other side of the flames for individual kobalins who might leap through the flickering fire, driven by fear or bloodlust. At one place in the south, despite the flaming wall, a chieftain drove his hosts forward and soon the kobalins had extinguished part of the fire with their bodies. Black, greasy smoke rose between the houses, while the next ones trampled the cadavers of their incinerated comrades into the ashes and stormed over them to the wall.
“Did you see that?” cried Griffin’s new marksman, a man named Ismael.
“Yes,” Griffin replied, thinking, You could almost feel sorry for them. But he didn’t say it because he was afraid Ismael might not understand sympathy. He couldn’t even reconstruct it for himself very well. The kobalins were their adversaries, their deadly enemies, and dozens of men had already fallen victim to their claws down there below. And yet the fact
remained that the kobalins weren’t acting on their own. The true enemy was the Maelstrom. And, of course, that creature he’d sent to fight the battle for Aelenium for him, a creature for whom they had no name, whom they all called merely “the lord of the kobalins.”
They were, however, quite sure that this creature was not a kobalin himself. The fish rain suggested a monstrosity like the killer of Munk’s parents, the Acherus.
But so far no one had seen the kobalin lord, not even Griffin and Jolly, who’d come closer to him than anyone else.
“Damn fish!” Ismael swore, while he whirled one of the fireballs on a long chain over his head to sling it into the deep where the wall was threatening to break. “Pull in your head, boy!”
Griffin felt the iron container filled with blazing oil circling over him, and he was almost more afraid of that than of the lances of the kobalins, which were still shooting into the air, if only sporadically. It was a wonder the rays still obeyed, despite the closeness of the flames and the heat. The chain net with the fireballs in it dangled some ten yards beneath the animal and were fastened to the saddle. D’Artois had hoped not to have to make use of these weapons, for the ray riders had had only a few practice flights with them, and Griffin himself just a single one.
Ismael, a light-haired, light-skinned giant, had upper arms like tree trunks, and he needed them too, to pull the fireballs up out of the net by their chains. He claimed that it was necessary to swing them over his head to increase the effect of the shot. Griffin wasn’t so sure of that; it would have worked just as well, he thought, if they’d simply been able to hurl the balls down onto the kobalins. He had the uncomfortable feeling that Ismael was having fun with this and enjoyed the thrill. That might be all right as long as he didn’t risk the lives of Griffin and the ray doing it. All the same, so far he hadn’t lost one drop of the burning oil on the animal or its rider. Ismael was unusually strong and skilled and his hatred for the kobalins was deep-seated. No, Griffin thought, probably better not to show any sympathy for the kobalins. It might be that he’d risk having Ismael throw one of the balls straight at him.
His eyes followed the fiery shot when the marksman let go of it. With chain tail clinking, it whizzed accurately down, leaving a glowing trail through the night. Before the ball crashed into the mob of kobalins, Griffin lost sight of it for a moment. But then a flaming flower hissed up among the creatures, and he knew that Ismael had once again hit his target. He felt no triumph, only deep horror.
“That was the last one,” Ismael bellowed to make himself heard over the uproar. “Let’s land and pick up some more balls.”
Griffin shook his head. “No more balls! Look down there. Most of the places we could pick up supplies are too crowded. I don’t want to circle around out of action as long as we can do in a few of the beasts another way just as well.”
He felt Ismael’s eyes on his back and expected a vigorous argument. But after a moment Griffin heard him loading his rifles behind him and the guns being cocked. Soon Ismael began firing below with all barrels.
They flew a second wide orbit around the embattled city, swooping fast and deep over the sea star points, where the kobalins were now swarming, and swept through the smoke clouds of the burning barricades. Griffin could not make out either Walker or Buenaventure.
In this chaos humans and kobalins alike were transformed into vague, scurrying figures, as small as toys from up here. Griffin felt himself strangely removed from it all, although really he was caught right in the middle of it.
As they repeatedly moved out of fields of hot air into nighttime coolness and back, he thought again about Jolly. How was she making out on the bottom of the sea? Were she and Munk still under way, or had they already reached the Crustal Breach?
“Boy! Damn it all, look at that!”
For the first time Griffin was grateful to hear Ismael’s hoarse voice. It tore him out of the nightmare pictures that had sprung up on their own before his inner eye.
But the reality wasn’t one whit pleasanter. “That fire over there,” cried Ismael, pointing to one of the sea star arms, “those are the sea horse stables, aren’t they?”
Griffin’s throat felt as if he’d swallowed some of Ismael’s hot oil. For a moment he almost lost control of the ray. Matador and the other hippocampi! They’d all be incinerated down there!
He looked in the direction where Ismael was pointing and sighed with relief. Indeed fires were burning on the arm, but they hadn’t yet jumped over to the long, extensive complex of the stables. However—and that was almost as bad—the entire arm was at the mercy of the kobalins.
But then Griffin discovered something else: The stall boys had opened the gates before their withdrawal into the interior of the city. Beneath the smoke a stream of sea horses poured out, shot between the kobalins in panic, and disappeared into the fog wall. His innards knotted until he realized that the kobalins had better things to do than to fall on the harmless sea horses. In fact, he didn’t see that any hippocampus was pulled under. Obviously the servants of the Maelstrom were letting the herds pass. Griffin kept looking for Matador, but he couldn’t pick him out in the flood of animals and through the clouds of smoke. He silently wished his sea horse well, holding back the tears that burned at the corners of his eyes.
Ismael emptied his rifles and pistols at the kobalins in front of the stables, and then they were beyond the sea star arm, leaving the barns and the fleeing herds behind them.
“They had damned good luck!” the marksman shouted over the noise of the weapons and the roaring headwind. His laughter sounded relieved. Like all the guardsmen of Aelenium, he too felt deep love for the elegant sea horses.
They’d half rounded the city when they again encountered a hail of fish cadavers. This time Griffin did something that until now he’d resisted: He disregarded d’Artois’s order, broke out of the ring formation, and steered his mount hard to the outside.
Ismael exulted boisterously, as if this were only a singularly great prank they were indulging in. At the same time he got off a whole salvo of shots at a horde of kobalins that were just preparing to go on land. The shots struck the front row and drove the creatures back into the water. Ismael crowed with delight.
“Where are we off to, boy?” he called, while he reloaded his weapons.
“Are you interested in a real fight?” Griffin returned. He felt Ismael’s high spirits infecting him—maybe because of his relief over the saving of the sea horses, maybe also because all this madness had finally rubbed off on him.
“Well, of course, boy.” Ismael slapped him on the shoulder. “Who’re we going to give it to, then?”
Griffin pointed through the clouds of dead fish down to the water. The light of the fires didn’t reach this far, but the moon was illuminating a dark silhouette that showed vaguely under the waves. Down there was something large and shapeless, circling around the shores of the sea star city.
“Him,” replied Griffin grimly. “We’re going to kill the lord of the kobalins.”
Soledad awakened feeling as though her back would break in two if she tried to move more than just her head. Her right arm burned, and when she looked she saw that the leather of her diving suit was hanging in shreds from the elbow down. However, the skin beneath it seemed to be largely undamaged.
Her head was filled with a terrible confusion of headache and a multitude of mixed-up images: the battle with the kobalins at the anchor chain, her flight into the undercity, and then complete darkness—a blackness that pressed like thumbs on Soledad’s eyes. She’d tried to find a way, had put in her last bubblestone and had—as the air grew increasingly stuffy—finally stumbled on a shaft to the upper city. The last thing she remembered was the image of a mighty body that glided into the shaft and filled up the water around her, ever longer, ever more tortuous. And then—yes, then there was nothing more. Only blackness. A deep, gaping hole in her memory.
In spite of the pain in her back she tried to sit up. She was lying
on something that felt like steps—and in fact, her hunch turned out to be right. It was a staircase.
And she slowly became aware of something else: She was no longer wearing a diving helmet. She could breathe freely without the bubblestone that had provided her with air. The reason was, of course—yet she also realized that in strangely slow motion—that she was no longer in the water.
A pale gleam lay over her surroundings, comparable to moonlight falling through a thin cloud cover: White, almost blue light flickered over the steps. Those were obviously part of a long circular staircase, which led upward and downward along the walls of a round shaft. Soledad’s legs still lay up to the knees in water. Beneath the surface, plashing as it lapped against the walls of the shaft, the stairs descended farther into the deep.
The pale light came from numerous glow-stones. There was one lying on each stair in the corner between floor and wall, and this winding ribbon of light points even extended into the water below her.
This shaft must have served as access to the undercity for earlier diving expeditions of the guard. But how had she gotten here?
Slowly Soledad pulled her legs up into the dryness and tried to right her upper body completely. It worked, if only with a lot of pulling and stabbing in her back muscles. But the pain was only because of her uncomfortable position on the steps, not from other injuries. How long had she lain there that way? Certainly several hours, for the wounds of the battle at the anchor chain had long ceased to bleed. Leather and clots were firmly stuck together.
Stand up, she told herself. You must stand up.
She tried it—and failed. She sank back onto the step with a groan. A renewed attempt. This time she managed it. Wobbly, but somewhat more securely, she supported herself with an arm against the wall. She didn’t want to move the right one if she could help it; at least not until she was sure how badly injured it was.
She stood there for a while, out of breath, as if she’d just achieved a superhuman effort. And she’d merely gotten to her feet. Why had that cost her so much strength? Obviously she was much groggier than she’d realized at first.