Pirate Wars by Kai Meyer

a pile of bizarre chunks of rock. Jagged formations reached toward them like stone hands.
    “Those are corals,” exclaimed Munk.
    “Looks like”—Jolly hesitated—“like fragments of a giant coral!” Following an impulse, she pushed off from the ground and floated upward.
    The view from above was like a blow in the face.
    Suddenly Munk was beside her.
    “That’s rubble,” she whispered. “Rubble of a sunken coral city.”
    Munk nodded, spellbound. “Like Aelenium,” he murmured.
    The remains of individual houses were clearly recognizable, grown structures that had somehow been hollowed out and reshaped; gigantic splinters with chiseled-out stairs running along them; burst towers that had exploded like porcelain on impact with the sea bottom; roofs and even the facade of a palace, which lay flat on its back like the fragments of a collapsed card house.
    Munk was as pale as a ghost.
    Suddenly he raised his arm and pointed into the depths and froze. “Jolly!”
    “What?”
    “Something moved down there!”
    Her eyes followed his outstretched forefinger down into the dark mountain of coral. There was nothing to be seen in the burst and splintered confusion. The sight looked like a gigantically enlarged pile of shards.
    “What was it?” Her tongue felt swollen. “A fish—or something bigger?”
    Munk cleared his throat, then his brows knitted, and he met her eyes.
    “A human being,” he said. “A girl.”

Aina
    “A girl?” Jolly stared at Munk as if he’d announced that he intended to pick flowers now. “Here?”
    He nodded uncomfortably. “I saw her. Down there.”
    Jolly surveyed him a moment longer and then looked along his outstretched arm down into the outspread rubble of the sunken coral city. It was an eerie view that filled her eye to the limits of her polliwog vision: Sand and mussel colonies had settled on the shattered ruins, though not enough to completely distort the shapes lying beneath them.
    When and why had the city sunk? Who had destroyed it?
    And above all, why had no one told them about it?
    The place where Munk was pointing lay desolate and uninviting behind the eternal veil of gray in which their vision immersed the sea bottom. It was a sandy lane between two towering pieces of rubble, the one a shapeless block fullof cavities and cracks, the other obviously part of a former palace, with hewn columns and a multitude of rooms. The crash had broken the building in two, so that you could look into the open rooms like the inside of a dollhouse. They were empty and covered with mussels, all furniture disintegrated into dust eons ago.
    “There’s no one there,” said Jolly.
    “She was there, believe me.” Munk gave up trying to convince Jolly, throwing up his hands in frustration. They had mounted high over the crash site to get a better view over the landscape of the ruins; now he dove downward again, straight toward the lane.
    “Munk, wait!”
    “You don’t believe me!”
    “Yes. But we have to be careful.”
    He stopped, floating, and turned to her. In spite of the all-encompassing gray, it seemed to her that his face was red with excitement. “If it really was a girl, Jolly, then she must be a polliwog. Just like us.”
    She nodded numbly. If he hadn’t been mistaken, that was the only explanation.
    A third polliwog.
    And where there was a third one, there might be more. Lord knew how many.
    “I don’t like this,” she said, but she followed him as he again headed downward. They were now about fifteen feet over the bottom of the lane. They were already much too close to the depressing ruins for Jolly’s taste. If it had beenup to her, they would have gone around the ruins. Even a longer way around might save them time in the end if danger threatened them in the ruins.
    She could literally taste the threat in the water. It was as if all her senses were screaming one desperate warning at her.
    Munk would not be restrained. How thoughtlessly he was jeopardizing their