The Tree of Water (36 page)

It was time to go.

I took a last good look at myself, just in case.

Then I turned the key in the lock, opened the grate, and dropped out of the diving bell and into the dark drift.

Char and Coreon followed a moment later. Char was almost impossible to see. The glow in his pants pocket where he kept his air stone weighted down with pebbles was far brighter than the light of his spirit.

I waited until they were free of the diving bell, then pushed the grate shut.

Then I turned the key in the lock. The thud of its thrum was a sickening sound.

A little like the tolling of a bell.

The second diving bell, the little cage below, was even smaller, as well as flimsier.

What Lancel had called the diving bell of the soul.

It was lucky that we were nothing more than spirits, because it was too fragile to hold anything else.

 

They descended for a long time into the deep Trenches.

Far below, a split in the ocean floor crawled with lava, like a glowing thread of light. Clouds of smoke rolled upward in the drift, then were devoured by the dark.

Above them they could feel vibrations, slow and lonely.

“More diving bells?” Char guessed.

“Let's go see,” Ven suggested. “We're not mortal at the moment. We may as well take a look.”

“Leave the cage?”

“Why not? We can bring it with us—but it's not going to keep anything with teeth from eating us anyway. It will be good to be out in the drift, I think.”

“After you, mate,” said Char.

Ven grinned, then swam out of the bell, followed a moment later by the other boys.

They floated along in the misty light from the Trenches below them. Above them, hanging in the black drift, were rusted bells and cages, many of them empty, but most with their grate floors closed, the keys missing.

Wandering below the old diving bells were what at first looked liked patches of light, but as they watched, their shapes became clearer. Like the few they had seen before, these spirits had faces and hands, though it was hard to tell if some of them had legs, because their clothes were tattered and raggy as they hung in the blackness above the world's root cellar.

Every now and then one of the spirits would float up toward one of the diving bells and bang piteously in the grate, or shake a small cage of rope like the one hanging at the bottom of the bell Lancel had given them. Sometimes it howled with rage or sobbed in grief, but eventually it would turn and glide away, seeking other bells in the dark water.

Char's filmy form was shaking beside Ven.

“Do ya think we'll end up like them?” he asked. His thrum was weak and wavery.

“No,” Ven said, trying to sound confident, but he had been thinking the same thing. “I wish we could help them—this is so sad. I think that one over there was a sailor.”

Char nodded in agreement as the hovering spirit with what looked like a peg leg and an eye patch drifted past them as if it did not see them. “Maybe a little light might help—maybe they just can't see inside the diving bells.”

Ven patted his buttoned pocket. The weight was still there, even as it had left the rest of his body.

“I'm not sure it's a good idea to take out the air stone,” he said. “What if it falls through my hand?”

“Are you sure it's even still in there?” Coreon asked. “It may have stayed behind on your body—otherwise, wouldn't you have drowned already?”

“Good point,” Ven said. “I'm not sure what is still with me and what isn't.” He unbuttoned the pocket of his vest and felt around inside.

He knew at once that the jack-rule had not come with him. His heart sank. The tool had been his prized possession, something he had wanted most of his life even before his father had given it to him.
I hope I can get it back,
he thought as he felt around the corners of his pocket.

The sleeve of Black Ivory was still there. Ven sighed in relief. The dead stone was working its magic on him even in the depths of the sea. If he was not touching it, most of the time he forgot it was even there.

The gleam of light from the corner of Char's pocket was matched by his own. His air stone was still there.

And still in the pocket was the long thin tool with the skull on the top. Ven pulled it from his pocket and rebuttoned it.

“Hmmm,” he said. “I had forgotten all about this. What did it say on it, do you remember?”

“Somethin' about freein' the only innocent prisoners she ever held,” said Char.

“Well, this may not work, because if any of these spirits have something to do with the
Athenry
it's purely a coincidence,” said Ven. “But if you were right, and it's a skeleton key, or a lock pick, it might open the locks on the grates where the keys are missing. And then if there are souls that have found their way back to their original cages, only to be unable to reach their bodies, well, maybe they'll be reunited.”

“I suppose these could be the souls forgotten by Time that the Epona's prophecy mentioned,” said Coreon. “If that is about you after all.”

“Nothing ventured, nothing gained, as my father used to say,” Ven said. He swam to the first of the diving bells and peered insider, then jumped away.

Parked on the rim much like the one in Lancel's diving bell was a skeletal being, its bony hands grasping a wooden sea chest. The chest was open, and empty. The creature's eyes were open and hollow, its face drawn into a skull-like mask, and its lips skinned back in a ghoulish expression. A metal hose swung lazily around in the drift. No air bubbles came out of the loose end.

“I'm—I'm not sure what to do,” Ven whispered. “I think he's dead.”

“Whether he is or not, he's a prisoner,” said Char. “Ya may as well set 'im free. It's not like he can do us any harm.

“I hope you're right.” Ven inserted the long thin wire of the tool with the skull on the top into the lock in the grate below the shrunken man.

A loud, scratchy
plink
vibrated through the drift.

The grate opened slightly.

“I guess this is a skeleton key after all,” Ven thought to the others. “Probably from a pirate ship, or—”

“Uh, Ven—move out of the way—quickly,” Char murmured.

Ven turned to see the floating spirit that had looked like a sailor to them streaking through the darkness at him. He hurried back to his friends in the drift below the diving bell, just in time to be out of the way when the lost soul reached the metal cage.

From inside the bell they saw a glow brighten intensely, then fade again.

Then the bell began to toll joyously.

From the bottom a spirit appeared. It was shining brightly and looking whole, not ragged and pale as before. It shot out of the bell and rocketed toward the surface, its thrum merry and light.

As it did, something that looked like falling ash quietly floated down into the dark sea below the diving bell, then spread out in the drift and disappeared.

The bell fell silent.

“What the—what just happened?” Char whispered.

“I'm not sure. But I think it was a good thing.”

“Me too,” said Coreon. “There's something not right about bodies trapped in all those bells. I think it makes this part of the sea sick and haunted. Do you want to open more of them?”

Ven considered. “If we find them as we go,” he said finally. “If that prophecy was indeed about us, we may have to fulfill the different parts of it to save Amariel. And if that's the case, I'm willing to do whatever we have to do. But Lancel said we would need a miracle to save her, and that finding the Tree of Water was the only way that would happen. So I think we need to keep going down into the Trenches and keep searching until we do.”

“Why do ya suppose her cap came along with us?” Char asked. “That seems odd, doesn't it?”

“Not really. I think a lot of a merrow's spirit is tied to her red pearl cap. That must be why when they give the cap to a human man it lets them grow legs and leave the ocean. They also lose a lot of their, well,
brazen
spirit and become very quiet, like Amariel did before we got her back to the sea. So I think her spirit is with us—at least most of it.”

“I feel another bell thrumming in the distance,” said Coreon. “Deeper, I think.”

“Down we go,” said Ven.

Without the crushing weight of the water against their mortal bodies, the boys passed almost effortlessly through the drift. Coreon dragged the small diving bell behind him by the tether, because when Char tried to grasp it, his filmy hand passed right through the chain.

They swam slowly to the bottom of the world, stopping wherever they saw diving bells hanging in the drift. Sometimes the spirit was just outside the door, but mostly there was nothing there. After a few times, they gave up looking inside the bells, because what they saw was always terrifying. But every so often, as they were moving deeper into the Trenches, closer to the river of lava, they heard the thrum of a bell ringing happily above them.

As they descended, they discovered that going down was easy, but swimming higher in the drift was almost impossible. While the lack of a body meant they could float downward with almost no resistance, the absence of their muscles and bones made them weak. Coreon almost lost the diving cage several times.

“Don't let go if you can help it,” Ven said the third time the tether slipped through the Lirin-mer's hands. “It's going to be too hard soon to get back on our own to the diving bell.”

“I hope we live long enough to have that problem,” Coreon muttered.

Finally there were no more bells. The pressure around them was so great that Ven could feel it in his eyes, even without his body.

The floor of the trench into which they were descending was coming closer all the time. Unlike the bare sandy floor of the Sea Desert, the bottom of the sea in the deepest of its depths was alive.

And terrifying.

As freezing as the black water was, there was heat rising from the ocean floor. The ground was bursting with smoke that was belching forth from what looked like chimney vents, rolling in great black waves toward the surface. Some of the vents were taller than buildings Ven had seen back in Vaarn.

Waving from the knobby floor were fields of long thin noodles that Ven realized after a moment were tube worms, giant creatures that resembled the coral of the reefs, but many times larger. Spidery crabs with ten legs walked among the worms, fishing out shellfish and snapping them into their mouths with claws attached to their front legs.

He felt Char gasp beside him as his best friend realized that those giant spider crabs trolling the floor near the vents, feeding on blind shrimp and starfish, had legs that were longer than the two of them would have been together standing on top of one another. Clams of immense size were filtering water near the white smokers, vents belching lighter smoke than their counterparts, snapping their giant shells shut from time to time and spraying forth water into the darkness.

“When are we gonna wake up from this nightmare?” he whispered to Ven.

“Not until we have Amariel back, safe.” Ven dodged as another vent erupted like an undersea volcano, spewing harsh ash into the drift, ash that smelled like the sea dragon's acidic fire.

“Look.” Coreon pointed into the distance.

Rising up from the seabed was a mountain. It was visible in the light of the glowing lava that ran down its sides, streaking its black surface with veins of bright orange. The mountain reached up into the black drift farther than they could see.

And filled the ocean floor from side to side.

As did the thousands of others in the mountain range it was part of.

“Which one do ya think is the tallest?” Char asked.

“No idea.”

“Well, you had best figure it out—since Frothta supposedly grows on top of the tallest mountain in the sea. And from where we stand, all I can see is mountains. More than we could climb in a lifetime if we all were Lirin-mer.”

 

39

Letting Go of the Last Lifeline

I try not to whine. I really do.

My mother has no tolerance for whiners. I have learned, as the youngest in the family, that you risk having your ears pinched until they bleed if you whine in her presence.

My brother Jaymes wears a small gold ring in the top part of his left ear to fill in the hole she left there after one particularly bad temper tantrum on his part.

But after traveling far out to sea, then down into its depths, after dodging giant sharks and leaving our bodies behind in a giant bell-shaped tin can and everything else we've gone through, a range of enormous mountains suddenly appeared before us.

And all I wanted to do was throw myself on the ocean floor amid the giant tube worms and the eyeless shrimp and have a tantrum that would put Jaymes's to shame.

Of course I didn't.

But I thought about it seriously.

 

Coreon broke the silence first.

“Now what?”

Ven sighed, a deep, painful sigh that came from the bottom of his spirit.

“How are we supposed to find a tree on top of a mountain in a range of mountains we can't even see the tops of?”

He looked down at the red pearl cap in his hands. It was beginning to fade, to curl slightly at the edges. If, as he believed, it was a sign of Amariel's spirit traveling with them, it made him fear for her.

Her voice rang in his memory.

The bigger something is, the louder the thrum it makes
.

Ven took a breath.

Lancel's voice replaced Amariel's.

If the Tree of Water had died, the sea itself would know it.