by Kai Meyer
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.
She looked anxiously at the surface of the water. The shaft was almost perfectly round, which indicated that it had been artificially constructed, but in any case it had been shaped. Its diameter might be about ten yards. It wasn’t possible to see how far down the spiral staircase continued, for the gleam of the glow-stones was too feeble to penetrate the water after even a short distance.
Soledad tilted her head back—amazingly free of pain this time—and looked up. There the stairs continued for seven or eight turns, although that observation wasn’t reliable either; the shine of the glow-stones was only a pale suggestion up there, and the stairs themselves might go on higher yet.
Soledad got her breathing under control again. Anyway, she was alive. And as far as she could tell, there were no kobalins here, near or far.
But there remained the question of how she’d gotten here. Someone or something had destroyed her diving suit and brought her to safety. If indeed she was in safety.
She grew dizzy, and for a moment she lost any sense of up and down. Only very gradually did her sense of balance return, and she began the ascent. Dragging herself up, painfully she managed step after step. It grew easier as her body became used to its own weight again.
Walker’s face appeared in front of her in the darkness, half memory, half wishful thinking, and the thought of him gave her more strength. She must make it.
Behind her, down in the shaft, the water surface exploded.
She whirled, back against the wall, and saw a fountain of water shoot up, but she was too far away now to be able to tell what had surfaced down there. Rigid with fear, she listened to it thrashing in the water. Waves splashed against the walls, and something made the steps tremble under her feet.
She stood there for a long time, not moving, back and palms pressed against the coral wall. She tried to keep her breathing as quiet as possible, but the more she concentrated on it, the more often she needed to take a breath. She no longer had any weapons and would have to meet the creature with her bare hands, if it decided to follow her up the steps.
Panic arrived suddenly, not just fear, but real terror that stopped her breath. Now she was no longer ashamed of that. She’d been through too much in the past hours to act the proud, fearless pirate princess now. It was time to face her fear. And with this thought, she gave in to her curiosity and took one step forward, to the edge of the railingless stairs.
The water had quieted. But that did not mean that it was empty.
The creature had stopped throwing itself back and forth in the confines of the coral tube. Instead it was standing upright like a living tower in the middle of the shaft, its reptile body raised high, completely motionless, with almost hypnotic stillness. Water beaded its black scales and dropped into the deep. It was standing so still that Soledad had to take a second look to realize what it actually was: a sea serpent, black as night, as wide as the trunk of a primeval tree, with a triangular head, almost as big as Soledad herself.
Instantly the serpent rose another fathom higher. Before Soledad knew it, the eyes of the creature were on a level with her own.
And what eyes those were!
Slit serpent eyes, larger than a human head and the color of pure amber, as clear as golden glass and deep enough to become lost in within seconds.
Soledad lacked the power to move. She stood there motionless, not even moving back to the wall. The serpent’s mouth would reach her in any twist of this shaft. There was no point in running away.
But still the creature made no move to devour her. Soledad’s chest rose and fell, her breathing echoed against the damp walls. Silent and unmoving, they looked each other in the eyes, princess and serpent—and somehow in these moments, which extended themselves endlessly, Soledad understood. She read it in that amber gaze, in the clarity of those eyes, in the depths of that powerful intelligence.
The serpent had saved her. But it hadn’t done it disinterestedly. The undercity was its kingdom, its territory, and if the kobalins were victorious and Aelenium went down, its living space would be destroyed along with her. It hadn’t pulled Soledad out of the water out of charity, of course not; a term like that had no place in this ancient mind. It had done it to strengthen the city and injure the kobalins. For that reason alone.
Soledad stood there a few seconds longer. Then she slowly bent her head and bowed. “I thank you,” she said, uncertain whether the serpent would understand the words. And then she quickly added something else before she could think about whether it would possibly be improper, even profane. “If you really want to help us, then protect the anchor chain.”
With a calm she maintained with difficulty, she turned and continued on her ascent. Silently the body of the snake stretched up alongside her, completely soundless, remaining on a level with her for two more turnings of the staircase. Then suddenly it disappeared, so fast and quietly that Soledad only realized it two steps later. A thundering splash sounded from the bottom, then only the sloshing of the roiled-up waters against the walls.
The serpent was gone.
Soledad dragged herself on, without stopping. She felt a strange new strength inside her, as if the sight of those eyes had purified her and awakened all the reserves she had. And deep in her heart she knew that what she had just met was not an animal, not a monstrosity of the endless sea, but something entirely different.
She closed her eyes for a moment as she climbed. A tiny smile played around the corners of her mouth. Something had touched her, far more than just the teeth of that creature.
How presumptuous it had been to assume that all the gods who’d survived the ages in Aelenium were human.
The exit was in the middle of a tangle of coral streets and plazas, only a stone’s throw below the second defense wall.
Soledad had stumbled up the last steps and come to a wooden door. She’d hammered on it and called for a long time until finally someone on the other side shoved a bolt and carefully opened it.
Two men in uniform stared at her with suspicion, rifles and lances pointing. Only when one of them recognized her and made clear to the other that the young woman in the diving suit couldn’t be a kobalin did they let her through.
Over the shoulders of the men she saw that she’d landed in a narrow space, which was only meagerly illuminated by a single torch. A few nets were stretched on the walls to dry. The cellar of an ordinary house, Soledad guessed, which was intended to camouflage the entrance to the undercity.
One man made a move to grab her under the arms as Soledad threatened to fall, but she pushed him away indignantly, straightened herself, and walked proudly past the sentries. She also refused the offer to bind her wounds with a silent shake of her head. Behind her the door to the undercity was closed again, the bolt squealing into its guides.
Those gigantic amber eyes—golden, bottomless pools—were still burning in Soledad’s memory. And more than everything she had seen at the anchor chain, this gaze caused her fear and breathless amazement equally. Such perfection, such cold calculation. And at the same time, such superiority.
Dazedly she let them show her the exit and climbed the stairs—still more steps—until finally she was standing outside.
In the first moment she felt as if she’d just walked into the eyes of the serpent. The night sky was dyed golden, flooded with the glow of countless fires. The deadly glow of the flames was refracted by the veils of cloud and streamers of fog. She knew what this sight meant. However, she couldn’t combat the fascination of the firelight. Many deaths, much destruction, and in spite of that, this light was of measureless beauty. She doubted that anyone except her saw it that way.
Soledad shook her head and rubbed her eyes as though waking from a dream. The amber eyes faded, melted into the hellish brightness
of the sky and the burning city. Only now, with each further step, did she become herself again.
Before her the street opened onto a small, deserted square, which ended in a broad balustrade. From there she could look out over the deep drop-offs, over the sea of roofs, between which the shadows seethed like boiling oil. Streams of fugitives were pouring through the streets up the mountain.
The lower wall had fallen, that much she could tell right away. The fighters were pulling back, were already on the way to the second defense ring above the Poets’ Quarter. Not much longer and the first ones would reach it.
Soledad raised her eyes to the sky over the water. In front of the fog wall, which almost looked like a wall of fire itself, isolated ray riders were circling, even if the majority of them now floated over the shore, keeping the flood of kobalins under fire.
On the other side of the fog wall the night was burning. Soledad couldn’t tell if that was already the distant red of dawn, a reflection of the burning city, or if the inferno of the sea battle between the Antilles captains and the cannibal king Tyrone was still raging out there.
A thought came to her, and once it took hold of her, it wouldn’t let her go. She detached herself from the balustrade, hurried back across the square, and turned into one of the adjoining streets.
Soon she was standing in front of the narrow house in which the Hexhermetic Shipworm slumbered. There were no longer any guards in front of the door; the entrance was closed but not locked. Soledad quickly walked inside and ran up the stairs to the attic of the house.
The cocoon had grown larger since she’d last been here. It appeared to be forming new silken layers still, and the threads that kept the bizarre tissue afloat were much more numerous. Almost two-thirds of the sharp-gabled storage space was now filled with them. Fine fibers extended from beam to beam, from floor to ceiling, and as floating curtains inside the network.
“Worm?” She made the suggestion of a bow, without really believing that he could see it. If he was still alive, his spirit was probably somewhere else, caught in a dream that was, she hoped, more agreeable than the gruesome reality of the battle.
“I’d give a lot to know what you’re seeing right now,” she said absently. The cocoon still seemed to be pulsing and sending vague oscillations through the net. Again and again tenuous fibers detached themselves, joined with others, and formed new layers within the net. There was a barely audible rustling and swishing in the air.
Carefully she stretched out a hand to touch the nearest layers, but she pulled back a finger’s breadth before the net. She was afraid to awaken something that perhaps mightn’t be ready to return yet.
“I don’t really know why I came here,” she said to the worm. “But I saw something down below, in the undercity…something that was not of this world. Jolly said that some of the people living here in Aelenium are in truth ancient gods—or what’s left of them after they’ve lost their power. But that thing down there…well, I can’t imagine that it was ever more powerful. I can feel it, you know? Something in those eyes has touched me, and there was something…something truly godlike. Sounds crazy, doesn’t it?” She looked for words but found none that could express what was going through her head. “I mean, it really didn’t do anything…anyway, not really.” She cast a pain-filled look at her lower arm and went on, “It looks as though it saved my life. And I think I know why. It doesn’t want Aelenium to fall into the Maelstrom’s hands. It’s just as stuck on this place as Forefather and the Ghost Trader. I think they all need Aelenium, perhaps because here is the only place they can still exist undisturbed.”
Shaking her head, she broke off, thought for a while, and then said, “Anyway, I’m wondering what you really are, Worm. It wasn’t a coincidence that we brought you here, was it? The wisdom of the worm you’ve talked about, that’s nothing but a pile of sea lion crap. In reality, you’re no more a worm than that snake down there is a snake.” She took a resolute step up to the net, not knowing what she intended to express by it. “Right?” she asked softly.
The worm—or that which was in the cocoon—gave no answer. Not that she’d seriously expected one.
She snorted softly, then shook her head again. She was terribly tired, and the idea of now having to fight on frightened her deeply.
“Lovely that we’ve discussed it,” she murmured mockingly, walking to the only window of the attic room. When she looked out, she could see up to the upper defense wall, now swarming with people. She took a deep breath and ran back down the stairs, leaving the net and the cocoon and whatever was in it behind.
She wondered what would happen if the kobalins entered this house. If something made them climb up to the attic.
What would they see in it?
And would they dare to wake it?
In the street outside it was raining dead fish. A troop of guardsmen came toward her on the way to the upper defense wall. She attached herself to them, reached the wall at a place where it crossed a former marketplace, and looked for someone she knew.
A hand touched her shoulder. As she whirled around, she was already taken into his arms.
“Walker,” she whispered against his shoulder, and then she began to cry.
The Heaviness of Deep Water
The hill on the bottom of the deep sea looked like a termite hill, although a thousand times larger and strangely uniform in its proportions. Almost like an upright index finger that warned the wanderers on the sea floor against going any farther: Beyond me is nothing but death.
“What is that?” Jolly asked.
Aina lowered her voice as if she feared that someone might hear her from the hill. “That’s the nest. The kobalins’ nest, as they call it. They’re born here.”
Jolly and Munk exchanged a look. “All kobalins?”
The girl from the sea bottom shook her head. “Only the oldest. The fathers of the deep tribes, long before they splintered and began fighting each other.” She stepped from one foot to the other. “At any rate, they did that until the Maelstrom united them again.”
“We’ve heard that the ancestors of the kobalins came out of the Mare Tenebrosum,” said Jolly, remembering what Count Aristotle had told the council. “And that the humans mixed with them. They say that the very first kobalins came into existence in the old days.”
Aina shrugged her naked shoulders. “I don’t know anything about that. Anyhow, that there”—she pointed to the finger-shaped rock tower—” is the place where the first of them were…hatched. Or born.”
Jolly took a step to the edge of the narrow rock plateau. They had only just walked out of the protection of an assemblage of round stones as tall as houses onto this natural platform. From above they must look like ants creeping out between a pile of pebbles.
In front of them spread the panorama of a deep rock kettle, with jagged cracks running across it, chasms, and sharp-edged crests that must cut a sinking ship to pieces like a knife blade when it landed. The kobalin hill rose in the middle of this inhospitable landscape as sentry over the Crustal Breach, a ghostly silhouette at the edge of her perception.
Since their meeting with the albino kobalins they were no longer walking downward. It appeared that Aina had been right—they’d crossed the outer margins of the Crustal Breach and were now approaching its center.
Perhaps the kobalin hill was in fact something like a last sentry post before the heart of the breach, before that place from which the Maelstrom sprang. The roaring and raging in the darkness had become noticeably louder, but they still couldn’t see anything. Polliwog vision didn’t reach far enough.
“I swam over the rocks when I fled,” said Aina. “We could walk, but that would take a long time and—”
“We’ll swim,” Munk interrupted her.
Jolly regarded him with a dark side glance. “Oh, is that so?”
He sighed, as if he were sorry to have to fight with her over each and every thing. But she only wanted him to at least ask her what she thought. “We
have no time, Jolly. You know that as well as I do.”
“And the search currents?” she retorted angrily. “What good will it do us to save a few hours if one of those currents catches us and either kills us or throws us a zillion miles back?”
“We can work forward bit by bit,” Aina put in. “From one rock ridge to the next. And we can rest at the kobalin hill.”
“Oh, good idea,” Jolly answered. “We’ll just ask them if they still have a warm place by the fire for us.”
Aina smiled. “They told us about the hill—in the old time, before we started out. We have no danger to fear from there. The kobalins have never lived in the nest—except for one.”
Aina walked to the edge of the plateau. Her right hand felt for a long strand of hair, and she rolled it thoughtfully between her fingers. “It’s said she was the mother of the kobalins. Even her own children fear her. But she’s been sitting there so long in her pit of slime and bones that the rocks have grown up over her and closed her in. After that she couldn’t get out anymore because she was too big and fat for the cracks and tunnels.”
“Too big?” Jolly repeated with terrible misgivings.
“Probably she’s long dead.” Aina was silent for a moment and appeared to be thinking. “We could make a detour around the hill. But that will take time.”
Jolly looked up at the peak again. It was hard to estimate its height in the weak half light, but she estimated that from the place where it became visible over the rock labyrinth to its knobby top it measured around a hundred yards. But the mighty stone tower might be somewhat taller still.
“We should hurry,” said Munk.
Jolly gave in and nodded. The three of them pushed off from the edge of the plateau and floated over the rocky peak with powerful swimming strokes.
The landscape beneath them resembled the one in which they’d been saved by the lantern fish at the beginning of their journey; only everything seemed to be more furrowed and sharper edged, as if in the gray prehistoric times a giant had struck the rocks with a huge hammer. Here, too, the bottom of the abyss lay too far below them, and polliwog vision did not reach to the ground. From above it looked as if wavering shadow streams flowed through the cracks. Pure black frothed around the cliffs and stone needles.