Pirate Emperor

The Attack The scream of the Acherus awakened her. Jolly started up, her head throbbing so badly that she felt as though she'd banged it hard on something. She was lying on a scratchy raffia mat, the twisted roll of a woolen blanket beside her. A narrow stripe of daylight was falling through the cave's crudely carved window, but it couldn't drive away the shadows around the rumpled sleeping place. She must have tipped over the water jug in the night, and its contents had evaporated into the oppressive heat. Even the rock walls surrounding her were sweating in the humid weather. The scream of the Acherus. She'd heard it, most certainly. But now there was stillness -- no, not stillness, only the distant murmuring of the Caribbean, the whispering of the wind, and the rushing of the surf. And...yes, voices. Very far away. Where was she? What was she doing here? Remembering took a moment. But then the images flowed back into her consciousness, most of them no less painful than the throbbing behind her eyes. They'd gone overboard. In the middle of a raging sea battle, between murderous salvos of cannon and powder smoke, she and Griffin had landed in the water. Jolly recalled how she'd looked for Griffin in the boiling sea, how she'd dragged him onto the rocky shore of an island with the last of her strength. And when the air cleared, their ship was gone. Their companions had gone with theCarfax:Munk, Captain Walker, the pit bull man Buenaventure, the pirate princess Soledad, and the Ghost Trader had vanished into the air with the smoke of the shots. "Jolly! You're awake!" Griffin came through the doorway in a crouch. The pirate boy just fit through the narrow opening. Like all the shelters on the island, this one was hardly bigger than a narrow cabin. But after the two of them had been given food and water, the dark rock shelter had seemed like a palace to them. "I...I heard something," Jolly said hoarsely, as Griffin squatted down beside her. "The Acherus, I think." For a fraction of a second, the boy's face showed concern. But then he grinned and shook his head so vigorously that the blond braids whirling around his head looked like garlands. "You dreamed it," he said gently. "There's nothing here on the island. At least no Acherus or something else that the Maelstrom could bring down on us." Most probably he was right. Jolly had been dreaming a lot since this whole business had begun. Again and again she saw images of endless armies of kobalins lurking under the waves as far as the eye could see. She felt the dead fish on her skin as they rained from the heavens and smelled the foul breath of the Acherus. And yet, the evil that had called up these terrible happenings was no more comprehensible because of them. The Maelstrom and the Mare Tenebrosum stayed hidden behind their own creatures -- inconceivable, incomprehensible, and thus even more terrifying. "Agostini said I should call you," said Griffin. "He wants to take us out onto the bridge. You'll come, won't you?" She nodded vigorously but grimaced at once when the headache made its presence known again. Nevertheless, any distraction was all right with her. She stood up, a little shakily, washed perfunctorily at the spring in the rock cleft, and then hurried outside with Griffin. The bridge builders' camp was situated in a multitude of tiny caves that ran like air bubbles through the cooled lava on this side of the island. Jolly and Griffin had landed on the north end of the island, where the cliffs of the mountain cones were filled with old, dried-out tree stumps and the ground was colored yellow-brown. But here, in the south, a gray layer of hardened lava several miles wide covered much of the former volcano. It must have belched out of the crater thousands of years ago and gradually cooled on its way to the water. A branchingMeyer, Kai is the author of 'Pirate Emperor ', published 2007 under ISBN 9781416924746 and ISBN 1416924744.