Pirate Wars Read Online Free PDF Page B

inclined very gradually downward, which was really impossible according to all known rules.
    Over and over, towers of foam sprayed into the air, for no apparent reason, for there were no reefs or sandbanks to break the waves. The surface boomed and raged, and here and there the waves seemed to possess wills of their own, for they also turned against each other, as if there were something beneath them resisting the terrible suction. Foam lay in streaks on the water like scraps of skin on boiled milk, and not even the blue of the heavens was mirrored here anymore, the sea was so stirred up, so scarred. Instead the endless expanse beneath them had turned a purplish black, as if the disturbance of the waters had washed up the darkness from the depths like the camouflage color of ten thousand octopuses.
    “It would be much worse if we flew closer,” said d’Artois. His voice sounded hoarse and thick.
    “Do you intend to?” asked Soledad. “To fly over the Maelstrom?”
    Jolly shuddered at the thought.
    “Of course not. That would be much too dangerous. But I thought it would be good if we all finally saw what we’re dealing with. Maelstrom is only a word. But that down there, that’s…” He shook his head when no suitable expression occurred to him. “A chasm between the worlds, the one-eyed one says. But it looks to me more like the end of the world.”
    He was right. If Jolly hadn’t known better, she’d have beenconvinced they’d reached the end of the ocean, that place where, people had once believed, the water poured over the edge of the flat earth. Jolly’s foster father, Bannon, had explained to her that the world was round and that there was nothing like an end of it. But the sight of the Maelstrom could convince a person that the opposite was true.
    Jolly felt horribly small, much too tiny to cope with such a force of nature. Mile after mile of roaring sea stretched out down there, and that was certainly nothing compared to what awaited her in the center of all this chaos. In the Crustal Breach, in the heart of the Maelstrom.
    D’Artois gave a wave to the soldier flying the second ray, and the two animals simultaneously turned in a wide curve.
    “We’re now flying back to a place where the sea isn’t so churned up,” he explained over his shoulder. “It’s important for you two to be able to dive vertically so as not to get caught in the suction.”
    “But we have to get closer in any case,” Jolly countered. “Sooner or later we’re going to feel the suction anyway.”
    “Not necessarily. A maelstrom is shaped like a funnel. Up here it might be fifty miles wide, but it decreases on the ocean floor. You’ll be able to walk on the ground unharmed, straight underneath its outer edges.” He paused for a moment. “The one-eyed one says that in the center, where it rises from a gigantic mussel on the floor of the Crustal Breach, the Maelstrom isn’t much wider than a tower.”
    Jolly looked over at the Ghost Trader, the one-eyed one, as d’Artois called him. The Trader was talking urgently to Munk,but at this distance she couldn’t hear what he was saying. Perhaps he was giving instructions similar to the captain’s.
    “How many miles do we have to go?” Jolly asked.
    “If we set you down at the edge of the Maelstrom…well, about twenty or thirty. It’s not possible to say exactly, because it’s getting bigger every day and we’ve given up measuring it.”
    Thirty miles , thought Jolly, shaken. The Crustal Breach itself supposedly lay at a depth of thirty thousand feet, Forefather said. And they were supposed to cover all that without any help? They couldn’t even take a compass with them because the water pressure would immediately destroy the glass.
    “Don’t forget that you mustn’t get too far from the ocean bottom,” d’Artois continued, repeating an instruction that the Ghost Trader and Forefather had already hammered into them. “The Maelstrom will be looking for enemies