by Kai Meyer
Jolly avoided his look. She knew what he was expecting from her. That she would say, Yes, I’ll go with you.
But she couldn’t do that. She simply could not bring herself to. Not that she was afraid—although there was quite a large portion of fear stirring her insides. No, she couldn’t because she wasn’t sure if she really wanted to. She kept having the feeling that this person here floating in the deep with Munk, who had allied herself with the Ghost Trader and come to Aelenium, was an entirely different person from that Jolly who grew up on the ship with Captain Bannon and had been sure all those years that someday she would be just like him: a famous freebooter on the Caribbean Sea.
Crustal Breach. Maelstrom. Aelenium. Those were words from a fairy tale, a gloomy bedtime story.
“Come on,” said Munk, who’d probably realized what was going on in her mind. Was he disappointed? Anyway, he didn’t show it. “We have to swim in this direction.”
He said “swim,” but that wasn’t it, really—rather, they were flying through an element that for anyone else would have been water. But for them it possessed no greater density than the sky and the wind.
“You have to make swimming motions, yes, like that…. Careful, slower! Keep in mind that there’s no real resistance here for us.”
Nevertheless Jolly pulled her hands back too quickly, and a single thrust instantly took her a huge distance forward, four or five fathoms.
“Puh,” she said as she kicked to reverse and thus made a couple of somersaults by mistake, “that looks easier than it is.”
“All a matter of getting used to it.”
But did she really want to get used to it? Her life would be simpler if she were still going over the water and not flitting around underneath it like a fish.
She needed a few more attempts before she finally succeeded in moving herself forward with some degree of security and calm.
“Where do you want to go?” she asked.
He grinned. “Where do you think?”
She looked ahead again doubtfully. After two more swimming strokes, something appeared out of the darkness far ahead of them, a colossal, colorless wall of branching coral structures. The bizarre slopes fanned apart over them and ended at the underside of the sea star. Only now did Jolly grasp that for a long time she and Munk had been below its enormous point. When she looked toward the bottom of the coral wall, she realized that the mighty thing tapered to a point in the depths like a gigantic icicle.
So this was the underside of Aelenium. The deep levels of which d’Artois had spoken.
“You want to go in there?” she asked Munk without looking at him.
“Wouldn’t you like to know what you’re supposed to fight for?”
She couldn’t take her eyes off the fantastic forms that now appeared more and more clearly out of the darkness. Munk had said that the underside was a sort of mirror image of the above-ground Aelenium. But that wasn’t quite the way it really was.
The underside was very much rougher and more rugged. Jolly had assumed that the city on the upper surface had grown, not been built, but now she realized that the truth lay somewhere in between. The inhabitants of Aelenium had probably worked the coral mountain in order to form houses and little streets and squares. Here, on the other hand, was the rough, uncut condition in which the upper side of Aelenium had probably been at one time too, a proliferating, many-armed, dangerous-looking thing of points, teeth, and knife-sharp edges. The largest coral in the world.
D’Artois had spoken of sharks who lived here. Of morays. And of something else.
Something had possibly settled in there, he’d said. Something that was only waiting to strike.
The water suddenly became very much colder.
5
Underwater
The closer they came to the deep levels, the better Jolly learned to manage the underwater world. It was a different kind of seeing. The rough, crannied outer surface of the corals appeared to her in a light gray, sometimes shot through with a tinge of color like the coral up on the surface. But unlike the surface corals, the shadows between the projections were such a deep black that each crevice, each crack, and each cavity became a threatening maw. In every hole a monster could be lurking, behind every projection a kobalin. So while her new darkness vision lent a welcome security in these unknown regions of the sea, it also increased her fear of whatever might be waiting for them down here.
She felt as if she were being observed from every single one of the branched shadow shapes, and she asked Munk if he was feeling the same thing.
“It’s worse in the beginning,” he answered, “and probably the fear never disappears entirely.”
“And yet you want to go into the deep levels, of all places?”
“I was here before, along with some divers.”
Munk floated through an irregular opening in a coral wall. “Think about moving slowly. If you go too fast in the tunnels and caves, you can get caught in a crevice.”
Or on a coral thorn. “That’s comforting.”
Munk looked over his shoulder and smiled encouragingly. “I’m here with you, after all.”
“Then I feel much safer already.”
Me and my big mouth, she thought.
She followed him—very carefully, almost warily—into a tunnel into the interior of the coral mountain. For reasons she didn’t understand, her vision decreased markedly. The end of the irregular tunnel lay in complete darkness. Cracks and crevices branched off on both sides, and sometimes, too, openings that were as big as archways.
Jolly lost any sense of how long they wandered through the labyrinth of the deep levels. Munk led her as surely as if he’d often been down here already. Mostly they floated between floor and ceiling, moving forward with swimming strokes, but sometimes they also sank down to the coral floor and walked. Munk was right: They could move along the firm bottom as well as they did on the surface—they could walk and jump, even run. The only difference was that Jolly had the feeling she was out of breath sooner down here. She didn’t want to think that that might be because she was sucking saltwater into her lungs instead of air.
And yes, the salt … they weren’t immune to it entirely. She’d developed a strong, salty taste in her mouth, which not only made her thirsty but gradually hit her in the stomach as well. It would probably have been too wild for the whole business not to have any side effects at all.
“You get used to that, too,” Munk said when she complained about it. “But there are a couple of other things that are uncomfortable. The water pressure, for instance. Of course we don’t really feel it, but sometimes you can get a backache, as if you’d been carrying heavy sacks around with you for hours. And sometimes, after you surface you can get headaches. Forefather says the brain doesn’t understand why it isn’t being squeezed from all sides anymore, or something like that.”
“Who’s Forefather?”
“Our teacher. You’ll meet him tomorrow.”
“Did he teach you all this?”
“Yes. But Forefather can only tell about it. He isn’t a polliwog himself, but he knows all about us, just the same. Well, almost all. I think he knows every book and every scroll in Aelenium’s library by heart.”
Jolly was going to ask another question, but Munk stopped at a fork. Confused, he looked around. “Hm,” he said. “I think we’ve gotten lost.”
Marvelous! “Lost?” she asked.
He raised an eyebrow. “Off the path. Taken the wrong way. Climbed through the wrong hole.”
“I know what lost means!”
“Why’d you ask, then?” He grinned again, pale and wan in her underwater vision. “Besides, I was just pretending. I know exactly where we are.”
“Oh, very funny.”
He scratched the back of his head guiltily. “I’m sorry.”
“Can we go up again now? I just can’t wait any longer for the headache and backache.”
He sighed—something else that appeared supremely strang
e underwater—then nodded and went on ahead. After two dozen bends, coral halls, and shadowy holes, they came to a wide shaft, which led straight up.
“Up here,” he said shortly.
They pushed off and rose effortlessly upward, now clearly faster than before. Maybe Munk wasn’t as sure of himself as he pretended to be. The walls of the coral shaft were irregular, and so they kept having to avoid sharp-edged outgrowths and projections. Once Jolly pulled Munk to one side just before a sharp coral blade could slice his back.
“Thanks,” he muttered, and she wasn’t sure if he was really frightened or was secretly angry because she’d protected him and not the other way around. He enjoyed the role of leader, that was impossible to miss. The fact that he knew more than she did made him arrogant. And careless.
The shaft was endless. Jolly hadn’t been aware that they’d gone that far down. The crevices and gulfs in the walls formed intricate patterns of shadows and flashes of light. Some were big enough to offer shelter for animals. And all the time, Jolly kept expecting that a head would shoot out of the darkness, open-jawed, with teeth as long as she was.
But perhaps d’Artois’s men had done a thorough job when they searched the deep levels for intruders.
At some point, a fissured ceiling appeared over them, the shaft made a bend to the side and now ran horizontally. Jolly and Munk halted for a moment.
“I thought this shaft led up into the city,” said Jolly anxiously. She no longer made any attempt to conceal how very much she feared all the empty caverns and tunnels.
Munk frowned. “Actually, I thought so too.”
“Are you trying to say that now you really don’t know where we are?”
“It can’t be that bad. Anyhow, we’ve already come a long way up.”
She made a wry face.
“We simply follow the shaft farther; it certainly has to lead to the upper side sometime.” He took her hand to give her courage. “If necessary, we’ll go back the same way we came.”
“Down there again?” She looked into the abyss, which narrowed to a dark, shadowy point far below them. “Most certainly not.”
Was the darkness stretching at the foot of the shaft? Her heart stopped for a moment and then pounded like a fist against her chest.
Was something corning up toward them from down there?
“I want to get out of here,” she said.
He followed her eyes down to the depths. Did he see it too? Did he feel it coming closer?
“Right,” he said, and he pulled her behind him into the horizontal shaft. “We can hurry if you want.”
The abyss was behind them, but at the moment that was no great reassurance. Jolly kept looking around, back to the bend and the darkness, which lurked there like an oily black puddle.
They quickened their swimming strokes and now drove forward with considerable speed. It was reckless, certainly, and if they weren’t careful, their unease would turn to utter panic. But Jolly couldn’t help it, and, looking at Munk, she saw that he felt the same way.
A sound rang in their ears, a rasping and splintering, as if something were shoving itself through the shaft behind them, something too wide for it that was breaking off coral combs and outgrowths with its body. But when they looked around again, the tunnel was empty and nothing showed in the distant bend.
Imagination, she said to herself. You’re just making yourself crazy.
“Do you hear that too?” Munk asked.
“Yes.”
They increased their tempo, without wasting another word. Fear made them careless, and they constantly bumped against coral arms and edges.
“There’s an exit up ahead!” Jolly cried.
“Not much farther,” Munk said between clenched teeth.
Several hundred feet in front of them the walls of the shaft ended in a gray oval. What lay behind it wasn’t discernible—it was too dark there. If they were lucky, it was the open sea. But it might only be another cavern in the coral labyrinth of the undercity.
Again Jolly looked over her shoulder. The water behind them appeared to flutter, like the air over a burning ship, but she still saw nothing that should have made her really worry. If something had followed them out of the deep, it had perhaps given up the chase.
“It is an exit!” cried Munk triumphantly.
They rushed up to the oval opening, and now Jolly realized that he was right. Like two cannonballs they shot away over the edge and found themselves in the middle of the ocean again, under them an entirely different sort of abyss, bottomless and yet only half as scary as the creepy shaft.
But couldn’t the thing that had followed them also have been seeking a way to the outside?
They were rising toward the surface, arrow-swift, like hornets on the attack, when Munk suddenly said, “Look over there.”
She froze inside as her eyes followed his outstretched arm. But her fear was groundless.
To their left, the anchor chain of Aelenium extended diagonally across their entire field of vision, a slanting rope. It originated in a tangle of steel and coral on the underside of a sea star point and stretched stiffly taut down below, where it lost itself in the dark gray of the sea after some hundred feet. The chain itself must have been about thirty feet wide, each link as big as a house. Algae and other water plants waved, buffeted by invisible currents. The metal of the chain was covered with dark brown rust where it showed between the strands of plants.
“How long is it?” Jolly wanted to know.
“From here to the sea bottom is three thousand feet.”
“That far?”
“The Crustal Breach is almost ten times as deep.”
For seconds she forgot to breathe. “Thirty thousand feet?”
Munk nodded while they swam toward the edge of a star point. “Anyway, that’s what Forefather says.”
Jolly said nothing as they continued their ascent. She tried to imagine a depth of thirty thousand feet. That was almost—
Six miles!
People were expecting them to dive down six miles to the bottom of the ocean in order to close the source of the Maelstrom there?
She could not conceive of the depth, the darkness, and the loneliness that must reign there. And yet an aura of it brushed over her and made her shiver inwardly.
They broke through the water surface at one of the sea star points and climbed onto dry land. Meanwhile deep night had descended. The city’s coral cliffs were sprinkled with hundreds of lights, and the wall of fog had sunk into complete darkness.
Six miles.
Through the icy cold, through darkness. Through a landscape that was not comparable to anything that she knew from the surface.
For the first time tears came to Jolly at the thought of her future. She didn’t want to cry, not in front of Munk, not in front of anyone at all. But she did it anyway, sobbing softly to herself and not allowing him to comfort her.
Soaked to the skin and wordless, they trotted up into the city, through empty streets, across deserted squares. In some places it was as dark as if Aelenium itself had already sunk into the deep.
Jolly’s tears overcame her when she saw the coral palace in front of her again. Somewhere inside was Griffin. She had to talk with someone about all of this, with a person who wasn’t a polliwog himself. Someone who bore no responsibility in this horrible war.
Someone who wasn’t Munk.
6
The Plan
In her room again, Jolly took off her wet things, dried herself off, and slipped into the clothes someone had laid out for her—again tight leather trousers, this time black, and with them a sand-colored shirt with a wide belt and high, laced sandals. In addition, she found a silver-embroidered vest, which she put on over the shirt.
At least no one had gotten the idea of laying out a skirt or a dress for her. No one here seemed to see her as a mere girl.
Although at the moment, even that would have been all right with her: She could have acted naive and helpless and no o
ne would have expected her to be a match for the Maelstrom. But everyone in Aelenium appeared to conclude quite as a matter of course that she would take up the challenge.
Munk was right about the backache, but anyway, her head didn’t ache. However, the thoughts were whirling in her head, impressions and images, so fast that everything was becoming a flickering, whirring confusion. She didn’t know what she should think. She didn’t know which way to turn.
She didn’t have a chance to look for Griffin, for there was a knock at her door, just as soon as she’d finished changing. A servant stood outside in the hall and asked her to follow her to the council assembly room.
“At this hour?” asked Jolly, but she earned only a shrug of the shoulders, and so she followed the young woman downstairs and over bridges to a high portal. It must have been goingon midnight when they arrived, and two guards with expressionless faces and muskets on their shoulders let them in.
Behind the portal, in a broad hall with an arching coral ceiling, Jolly was awaited by her comrades—and by other men and women she did not know. Most were sitting a very long table, and some were standing in groups, conversing.
Princess Soledad was leaning against a white coral column, one knee bent, and deep in conversation with Walker. The pit bull man stood beside them, looking bored and rolling his eyes silently when the captain said something to Soledad. When Buenaventure saw Jolly, he detached himself from the two of them with a relieved sigh and hurried over to her with thumping steps, his boots hammering on the coral floor as if he wanted to break out pieces of the surface with their heels.
“Thank God, Jolly … the flirting of those two drives me crazy.”
She returned his smile and noticed that he wasn’t wearing the knapsack with the Hexhermetic Shipworm. Obviously Aelenium’s new prince of poetry had not been invited to the assembly.
Instead she caught sight of Griffin, who looked up at the same moment. Bored, he’d been sitting at the table with his feet on the edge of it. Now he leaped up with a joyful grin and quickly came over to her.