Pirate Wars Read Free Page B

movement slackened. His clawed fingers fell onto the globe, sought a hold for the last time, and then slipped down with a shrill screeching. The malice in his glowing eyes was extinguished. A broken spar had bored through his body from behind.
    Ebenezer’s hands seized Griffin and helped him up.
    “Was that all?”
    “I think so…yes.”
    “Are you wounded?”
    “Yes. No. Not really.” He had the feeling of having to dig for each word through walls of pain in his head. Dizziness threatened to cloud his consciousness. “Only a few scratches. Otherwise nothing.”
    Ebenezer pulled him over the threshold into the light. Griffin fell onto his knees on the floorboards and supported himself with his arms.
    “Kobalins have never attacked Jasconius before!” said the monk, while Griffin blinked up at him. “The deep tribes never dared to in the old days.”
    Griffin gasped for air. “I told you the kobalins are going to war. You wouldn’t believe me then. This won’t be the last attack. The Maelstrom has taken control of the kobalins. They won’t stop for the whale, or for much larger things either. They’re going to destroy everything.”
    Ebenezer took a few undecided paces through the room before he stopped. “I mustn’t allow something like this to happen again,” he said, as if to himself. His face hardened as he turned to Griffin. “And I will not allow it.” There was a new decisiveness and seriousness in his voice. “Looks as if we have to change our plans.”
    “ Our plans?”
    Ebenezer nodded slowly, as if his head were heavier than usual, and at the same time his words seemed to have more weight. “The tavern must wait. Now we have to deal with cleaning up this filthy lot first.”
    Griffin swallowed, then the corners of his mouth twitched into the beginnings of a smile.
    “Does that mean—,” he began.
    “We’ll help your friends against this pestilence,” interrupted Ebenezer as decidedly as a captain who was laying out a new course for his crew. “Jasconius will take us to Aelenium by the fastest route.”

Ray Flight
    The stalls of the flying rays were located in the hollow dome of the coral mountain cone towering over Aelenium. The steep peak, dozens of waterfalls plunging down its sides to lose themselves in canals and ponds below, looked as if someone had cut off its natural tip ages ago. Instead there was a broad plateau at the top. In the center of it gaped a circular opening, fifty feet in diameter. It served the rays for flights in and out of their refuge.
    It was the not first time Jolly had been up here—Captain d’Artois had already taken her and Munk up with him—but the sight of the countless ray pits arranged in a ring around the cave walls still appeared to her as impressive as it was disquieting.
    The hall was roofed all over. Light, and sometimes rain, came in only through the large opening in the center.Although flying rays didn’t live in water, they liked their environment damp—and so the rainwater was directed by channels to their pits, where it collected. There the remarkable animals lay flat on the ground in the dampness most of the time and appeared to sleep until someone woke them to ride out on them.
    There hadn’t been time to find out much more about the amazing creatures, and Jolly treated them with hesitant respect. Unlike the hippocampi, which in spite of all their differences were similar to horses—not only in appearance but even more in behavior—she didn’t feel at ease with the rays. Spread on the ground in the corral pits, they seemed torpid and heavy, but when they lifted themselves into the air, they possessed a majesty that took one’s breath away. They were slow—the sea horses glided through the water a great deal faster—and yet they commanded enormous strength. Every ray could carry three riders, even more in a pinch. A blow of their sharp tail would kill a man within seconds.
    Two rays were all ready to leave when Jolly and Munk