Pirate Emperor Read online

  “Little polliwog,” whispered Agostini. And he repeated, still more softly, “From one place to another …”

  A shimmering body brushed past his shoulder, but the master builder didn’t move.

  Jolly and Griffin began to run back to land, but after a few steps, they both stopped.

  Griffin breathed in sharply. “My god.”

  Jolly made not a sound. She watched the crowd of men break apart and flee in all directions, a handful even back onto the bridge. It was barely possible to see through the hail of fish bodies, but even that little was enough to explain the workers’ panic. Small, dark shadows were appearing among them, figures that uttered gabbling cries as they landed blows with arms that were much too long.

  Jolly tore her eyes from the sight, bent over the bridge railing, and looked down at the water. The sea was churning with so many thousands of fish that the waves appeared to boil. And yet it wasn’t only the fish corpses that set the sea in motion: Something was also pushing up through the water from underneath, dark forms that floated on the waves like seaweed. Hundreds of them.

  “Kobalins!” Griffin started back from the railing as if one of the frightful creatures had popped up right in front of his nose.

  Jolly’s voice was so hoarse that she could hardly be understood between her gasps. “And something else, too.”

  Griffin avoided a squid body and was hit on the back of the head by another dead creature instead. He made a face. “Something else?”

  She nodded. She’d experienced a fish rain like this twice before. The sign was clear: A creature of the Maelstrom must be nearby. A monster like the Acherus, who had killed Munk’s parents.

  “But why are the kobalins attacking the workers?” Griffin stared over at the cliffs, where more and more dark forms were now falling on the men, a black, glittering wave of wet bodies, with overlong, much too thin limbs and snapping jaws. “Kobalins don’t go on land!” He sounded terribly helpless. “Never!”

  “They are now, though.” Jolly pushed herself away from the railing and cast an anxious look through the latticework of the bridge down at the water. Between the crests of the waves it was swarming with kobalin heads. “Their leader is driving them onto shore. He must be able to frighten them more than the land and the air do.”

  Agostini was now on the railing, both arms raised, his head thrown back. “Go, little polliwog …” he whispered. “You are expected.” Jolly hadn’t seen him climb onto the railing, and she didn’t understand how he could stay up there without holding on to anything. But his words froze the blood in her veins. What the devil did he mean?

  A deep humming came from Agostini’s throat. A gust of wind blew the hat off his head and his gray hair fluttered around his skull like tatters of smoke.

  Griffin grabbed Jolly by the arm. “The kobalins are following the workers onto the bridge! Come on, we have to get out of here!” He gestured toward the opposite end of the bridge, where the forested hill of the second island was visible behind the pelting fish bodies.

  “No, not that!” Jolly held him back. “Wait!”

  Griffin looked back over his shoulder at the volcanic island. Scrabbling, clinging, and leaping kobalins now crowded onto the latticework of the bridge, reaching the fleeing workers and flinging them over the railings into the water below. Once they struck the water, they sank inexorably under the fish cadavers and did not appear again.

  “They’ve seen us!”

  “Of course,” she said. “After all, they’re here because of us.” It was a highly probable assumption, but even as Jolly said it, she doubted it again.

  “We can’t go over there,” she cried, trying to raise her voice over the thumping of the dead fish and avoid them at the same time.

  “Why not?”

  “What exactly did Agostini say before?”

  Griffin stared at her desperately, then at the master builder, who was still standing in his posture of submissive worship on the railing. He looked less and less human, his proportions were becoming distorted, as if his reaching arms were growing toward the heavens.

  “What did he answer when I asked him where the bridge led?”

  “Not to the other island.”

  “Not to the island,” repeated Jolly, and tried to make herself think. Be calm! Try hard!

  Griffin looked at her, eyes wide. “But then where else would it …? I mean, if not to the island, then …” He broke off, shaking his head.

  “It’s a gate. Or a passageway. Even a … a bridge” she said helplessly, because nothing better came to her. “Agostini actually did build a bridge, but it doesn’t lead to the island over there, even if it looks like it. In reality, over there is something different. Perhaps another world.”

  “The Mare Tenebrosum?”

  “It might be possible, mightn’t it?”

  Griffin’s face hardened, his look became grim. “They’re coming. We have to get out of here!”

  Still Jolly didn’t move. She took one step toward Agostini, who kept on humming and whispering into the cadaver rain and not looking at her at all.

  The kobalins were coming closer. They weren’t as agile as they were in the water, and the height seemed to intimidate them even more than the unaccustomed surface under their feet or the unfamiliar element. And yet their snapping, hissing, squealing mass was threatening enough to prove Griffin right. He and Jolly had to get away.

  Jolly ran, but she felt as if someone else were running for her, carrying her forward and making her insensitive to her terror.

  Only for a few steps. Then she stopped again. Griffin stumbled and almost slid off, but he caught himself at the last moment with her help.

  “There ahead,” she said tonelessly.

  They had come closer to the other island. And yet it appeared more indistinct than before. Its shape was fuzzy around the edges, like a form of dark smoke. At the same time the air over it was darkened, not by clouds, but as if the light was sucked out of the blue Caribbean sky.

  “What is that?” Griffin asked.

  The kobalins let out a concert of high, lashing shrieks as they approached from behind. They were now only forty yards away.

  “Keep going!” yelled Griffin as he looked over his shoulder.

  “We can’t—”

  “You want to let them tear you apart?” He grabbed her by the arm and pulled her on. “It’ll be enough if they throw you off the bridge like the others. The impact will break your neck—or the kobalins in the water will do it.”

  The darkness had spread over the sky. Not merely over them, it had also grown darker beside and in front of them. The island’s hump grew higher and wider and flowed in all directions.

  A screech alarmed them and made them both whirl around.

  Something sprang toward them with arms outstretched, teeth bared, webbed fingers spread and curled into claws.

  “Look out!” Jolly cried.

  Griffin ducked. At the same time he drew his dagger from his belt. The blade flashed in the last light of the blue sky that glowed over the bridge behind them like the light at the end of a tunnel. The kobalin avoided Griffin’s knife blow, swung his arms wildly, and came to stand astride two wooden crosspieces. His hideous head, with its too many teeth, swung menacingly from right to left, over and over, while behind him the tide of his fellows came nearer.

  Jolly drew her own knife from her boot, quickly turned it in her hand, seized it by the point, and in a flowing movement flung it at the creature, just as Captain Bannon had taught her. The blade struck the monster’s chest with a dull fummp. A last, high scream, then the kobalin lost his balance and plunged between the timbers into the deep.

  Jolly whirled around and gratefully took Griffins outstretched hand. While they rushed forward, the thought flashed through her mind that she was now unarmed.

  The kobalins held back, as if the remaining light held them fast.

  The island at the end of the bridge was an island no longer but a surging heart of darkne
ss that turned and stretched, pulsing, as if it were alive. The bridge seemed to become longer. They really ought to have reached the other side by this time. But the structure led ever farther, now curving downward, which made it harder to find enough footholds to run on the struts and not be swept off their feet by their own momentum.

  “They’re … they’re staying back!” Griffin’s voice almost broke.

  I don’t know if that’s a good sign, Jolly thought, but she didn’t say anything. Her throat felt raw, and there was a horrible taste in her mouth, somewhere between chewed peppercorns and spoiled meat.

  Suddenly the view cleared and the darkness turned into a deep, starless night, which extended over a stormy sea like a dome.

  A sea that had not been there. Without islands, without a trace of land. A sea of black, oily water. The crests of the waves were crowned by dark foam, which appeared to consist of millions and millions of tiny creatures; little crabs, perhaps, or water insects.

  There was no more light behind them. The part of the bridge over which they’d come led straight into the endless night of this place and lost itself in the darkness. The kobalins had vanished; they could not follow them here. Or did they not dare to?

  The end of the bridge ahead of them led in a shallow arc down into the water. The crests of the waves broke over the latticework, swirled away over them, and left behind dark, oily traces.

  Mighty bodies moved under the surface, extremely elongated bodies as wide as Spanish warships. Sometimes something slapped into the waves, after an almost unseen leap in the darkness.

  A primal ocean, as it might have been in the beginning of the world, and yet different, stranger, more frightening. A gray shimmer lay over the water. Hazily it outlined the tossing wave crests and house-high waves.

  Jolly and Griffin stopped, hand in hand, and stared unmoving out into that sea of timeless blackness and infinite deepness.

  Gazed out onto the Mare Tenebrosum.

  2

  Bridge of Fire

  Jolly felt as if someone had grabbed her by the feet and stood her on her head. She could hardly find any hold on the wooden girders of the bridge. Her body trembled and swayed, and her mind seemed to be lost in a confusing nothingness.

  Griffin was holding her hand (or was she holding his?), but his fingers felt cold, as if the emptiness over the endless black ocean sucked all the strength out of them in order to animate them with its own ghastly essence.

  In the distance, lightning flickered over the frothing water, across a horizon that in some absurd way appeared to be much farther away than the one in their world. Perhaps the world of the Mare Tenebrosum wasn’t curved like their own, or here everything was simply more enormous. The distances, the darkness, the mountains of waves.

  The living creatures.

  Jolly and Griffin just stood there, incapable of moving. And where were they supposed to go, anyway? The bridge continued about thirty yards farther down, then it vanished into the oily waters of the Mare Tenebrosum, washed by black spray and orbited by gigantic shadows that glided in tight circles around the foot of the structure. Sometimes it seemed to Jolly as though she heard an angry howling, prolonged and muffled, as if cries and screams were being uttered under the surface of the water. But the noise of the waves was deafening in itself. And then the wind that swept around the wooden latticework—it sighed and shrieked, and sometimes it also seemed to whisper: words in strange languages, cold and horrible.

  It smelled of rotten seaweed and algae, mixed with the stench of dead fish. But there was also another smell, something that Jolly couldn’t identify right away.

  “Vanilla,” said Griffin, as if he’d sensed what was going through her mind. Perhaps she’d spoken her thoughts aloud without noticing it. “It smells like vanilla.”

  She nodded dumbly, because she was afraid her voice might sound as miserable as his. The sweetness in the midst of all these awful vapors made the scent even more unbearable. It reminded her of the possibility of something more beautiful, better, that was completely unreachable in this place.

  “We can’t go any farther,” Griffin managed to say. Each word was uttered with difficulty, sluggishly, like snails creeping out of his throat.

  Behind them there was no sign of the kobalins. The bridge was empty, an endless arc that melted away somewhere in the blackness. But each time there was a flash of lightning, they saw that in fact the bridge continued into endlessness, thin as a thread, thin as the finest hair, but still visible, as if all the rules of visual range were suspended. The view in this world extended into infinity. Did it also reach out into time, into the past and the future? Was the Mare Tenebrosum in fact a primeval ocean at the beginning of time as well as a state to which all would someday return?

  They stood there wondering what they should do, holding tightly to each other’s hands, dazed, despairing, overwhelmed by the sheer alikeness of this deep black ocean … stood there and resigned themselves to their end … when in front of them the bridge caught fire.

  Flames shot up between the beams. The sudden brightness hurt their eyes. A wave of heat hissed over them.

  The bridge was blazing!

  The dark froth at the foot of the wooden structure shrank back like a living thing and formed a crater of water. At the same time a shrieking came from the depths of the sea, no longer of the invisible creatures down under there, nor even of the mysterious masters of this world, but of the Mare Tenebrosum itself. Fountains high as towers sprayed into the air, curiously slowly, as if they were frozen in time; they formed marvelous patterns in the blackness and then collapsed heavily. At one moment the spray almost looked like a gigantic mouth, with fangs of water that opened around the bridge and then subsided.

  Meanwhile, the flames at the foot of the bridge surged higher and higher and crept along the boards like swarms of glowing ants, rapidly consuming the exotic fibers of the wood—wood that, as Jolly now understood, came from plants from the depths of this ocean, alien shrubs that grew in places that were empty and cold and dark like the gaps between the stars. Agostini must have received his materials from the Masters of the Mare Tenebrosum in order to realize his project, no, their project.

  A bridge between the worlds, much smaller and less conspicuous than the Maelstrom, who was also going to break through the barriers. The perfect needle eye for any creatures that might want to prepare for the Maelstrom’s rule.

  Were there other such gates in remote places in the Caribbean? Perhaps even in the whole world?

  Jolly had no time left to wonder. She was pulled backward by Griffin. While she’d been staring numbly into the flames, the fire had come closer. Griffin pulled her with him, and they leaped and ran in the direction from which they’d come, toward the invisible transition between this world and their own.

  The darkness receded, their surroundings changed, and once more Jolly had the thought that they were perhaps also moving in time, that they were returning from the very beginning of the eons into their own, brief, narrowly limited life spans.

  The bridge ahead of them shortened, drew itself together into its original proportions. Out of the multitude of images and colors and sounds emerged the bodies of the kobalins, who were frantically darting between the cross timbers of the wooden grid work. But the creatures paid no attention to the pair before them returning out of the mists of time and worlds. Fire was their natural enemy, the enemy of the element into which they were born.

  The bridge was also in flames on this side of the crossing. The black smoke of the fire darkened the sky, so that the change between the two worlds was almost unnoticeable. The smoke bit into Jolly’s lungs, making her cough. At the same time the heat struck her like a blow, and she had the feeling that the tips of her hair were frizzling and her eyebrows were smoldering.

  The flames were everywhere—behind them, in front of them, even on both sides, where they danced on the railings like an army of glowing fire devils.

  Agostini was still there too.
He stood in the midst of the flames as if they could do nothing to him. His clothing was burning, and the brim of his hat flickered around his head like a grotesque halo.

  Yet his face didn’t change at all.

  Or what remained of his face.

  “A shape-shifter,” Griffin said matter-of-factly, as if he dealt with such creatures every day. “A wyvern!”

  Jolly managed to tear her eyes away for a second from what had once been Agostini to give Griffin an uncomprehending look. “A … what?”

  “A wyvern. I’ve heard of them. In the ports they say—”

  An outcry interrupted him. Agostini’s head rotated on his neck, and the burning hat slid down and disappeared into the wall of flames. The head of the master builder no longer had any human features, or even human size—inflating, it grew to double in girth, a long, extended oval of flickering points that reminded Jolly with a shudder of the living spray foam of the Mare Tenebrosum. In fact, Agostini’s body now consisted of tiny crabs, a little smaller than Jolly’s smallest fingernail. They billowed all higgledy-piggledy, forming caricatures of human limbs, until they finally slid out of Agostini’s burning rags of clothing as a many-armed devilfish.

  Jolly first thought that the creature—or the swarm of creatures—would rush at her and Griffin, but the thing’s tentacles jerked back and forth in the air. Something seemed to be alarming it, for suddenly it condensed itself and flowed through the openings in the bridge into the deep below.

  Jolly had no time to think about what had happened to Agostini. The fire had now almost encircled them. Burning kobalins leaped over the railings in panic, breaking through walls of flame and spraying apart like hot fat, until Jolly and Griffin were alone on the bridge.

  “Back to the island!” Jolly cried, without conviction. Anything was better than standing there doing nothing until the fire reached them.

  She could see how bad their chances were: The way to land was blocked by a sea of flames, and the other direction, into the Mare Tenebrosum, was also cut off by the hissing conflagration. Nevertheless, she’d rather burn than go back there once more or even take one look into that world of terrors.