Pirate Wars by Kai Meyer Page A

mission amazed Jolly and frightened her.
    “If it turns out to be a kobalin…,” she began.
    He didn’t even look around at her. “I can tell a girl from a kobalin.”
    Munk was the first to reach the ground. Dust puffed up when he set his feet down and looked around him.
    Jolly stopped above him and let her eyes roam. Even more than the box-shaped cross-section of the palace rooms that rose up to the right of them, she disliked the shapeless coral monstrosity to their left. White plants had settled in the openings, waving in the invisible currents like the fingers of corpses and appearing to be alternately waving them in or waving them away.
    “Which direction did she disappear in?” Jolly asked.
    “That way.” Munk pointed along the course of the lane.
    Good , she thought. At least he doesn’t intend to search through the holes and cracks.
    The floating plants were doughy, like the flesh of a drowned corpse. Jolly could hear the sounds they made when they rubbed against each other: a slurping and smacking, as if hidden behind them were something that was in the process of greedily devouring its prey.
    The pile of rubble around them grew increasingly taller as the two approached the part of the ruin that had apparently once formed the center of the city. Obviously the coral city had not been destroyed on the surface, not completely anyway. It had only broken into hundreds of pieces on impact with the sea floor, but it had partially retained its original plan. The city must have been structured similarly to Aelenium, arranged around a kind of mountain cone or a massive coral formation in the middle. But nowhere did Jolly discover fragments of a giant sea star. If there had ever been one, its remains were buried somewhere beneath the other rubble.
    “What do you think?” said Munk suddenly, while he kept straining to look in all directions.
    “About the girl?”
    “About the city.”
    “I’d love to know why no one thought it necessary to ever say something about it.” She cast a sidelong glance at him. “Or did Forefather tell you? When I wasn’t there?”
    He shook his head, his face serious. “No, he didn’t.” Was there a spark of mistrust of his teacher for the first time? Disappointment, perhaps? Munk had always been the more intellectually curious of the two polliwogs. He’d spent much more time with Forefather than the impatient and rebellious Jolly.
    He hesitated for a moment, then went on, “Is it possible that Forefather and the others didn’t know anything about it?”
    “Oh, come on.” She uttered a scornful sound. “Of coursehe knew about it. And he certainly didn’t just forget to tell us about it.”
    “Then maybe he wanted us to find the city ourselves.”
    “Oh, yes?” You’re looking for an easy way out , she thought, shaking her head. “Maybe he did think there was nothing left of it after so long. I mean, he may know a lot, but after all, he was never down here.”
    At least not in the last million years. She recalled what the water spinners had said. If Forefather actually had created all this, why was he so helpless today? He was nothing but an old man who was hiding away in a floating city on the sea. Hard to imagine that he’d once had the power to create a whole world out of nothing. And it was even harder to conceive that that same power was vegetating in a fragile body and waiting for an end that would perhaps never come. If Aelenium were to go under, would Forefather die with the city? Could he even die? Still, the spinners had said that many of the old gods were dead. But Forefather was the first, the source of everything. Other laws might apply to him. Or none at all.
    “Jolly.” Munk’s whisper pulled her out of her musings. “Up ahead there. Do you see that?”
    Slowly she nodded, but the words were hard for her to get out: “You were right.”
    “I told you so.”
    Ahead of them on the path, on the bed of gray sand on the floor of the lane, stood a girl.