The Tree of Water

  * * *

  “What do ya suppose that is?” Char’s thrum was sounding even weaker.

  Ven looked in the direction where his friend was staring above them. A blue-green blob of light, large from what he could see, was pooling higher up in the drift. It seemed to be spreading widely through the water not too far away.

  “Squid,” Coreon said. “They usually float on the surface, but sometimes they come down looking for food. I didn’t know they could dive this deep. Keep away from the mouths—and the tentacles. If just one catches you, you’re squid food.”

  “The only squid I’ve ever seen are kind of pale and pasty-looking,” Ven said, watching the beautiful blue-green flow. “But I’ve seen patches of that color on the sea in the dark from time to time—I never realized it was squid having a party.”

  “When that color shows up in the air or around the mast, sailors call it Saint Elmo’s fire,” mumbled Char. “They think everything weird they see is a sign of somethin’ haunted.”

  “If only they knew,” Ven said.

  As if to prove him right, ahead of them something clear and filmy appeared in the drift. At first it looked like a jellyfish, a man-of-war without the tentacles. But as they stopped and looked harder, they could see it had a human form, a billowing shape wandering in the drift ahead of them, its human-like hand shading its eyes, searching the blackness. It was wearing what looked like translucent human clothes, tattered and torn the way a ship’s sails sometimes were in a terrible wind.

  “Oh man,” Char whispered.

  “Just hold still,” Ven whispered back. “Let him pass.”

  “Do you think we’re gonna end up like that?”

  Ven watched as the translucent figure floated away on the black drift. He couldn’t bring himself to answer honestly.

  “Come on,” he said. “Keep your wits about you and your eyes on the pearls.”

  They waited until they could no longer see the wandering spirit, then began following the tiny markers in the glowing path again.

  After a while, they lost track of time. The kelp packets the Cormorant had given them were almost gone. There was no plant life left in the sea, and no fish that they would have considered eating, even if there was a way to catch them. Fortunately, their hunger had vanished along with the light, and now they made their way in the dark, focused on the pathway, with all other thoughts of a world beyond the endless black drift gone from their minds.

  It was a little like sleepwalking, Ven thought.

  He had no idea how long they traveled, whether it was days, or weeks, or months, or even years. The seasons of the upworld could have changed, for all he knew, because it was bone-chillingly cold all the time. Char was so weak that Ven could barely feel his thrum. He knew the hippocampus was still with them, but he got no vibration at all from the merrow it was carrying.

  Every now and then, the blackness would brighten with thousands of tiny lights, or snap with red sparks, or a glowing flash would swim by, reminding him that even though he saw nothing in the deep blackness, it was still full of a haunted kind of life.

  “How long do you think we have been following the pearls?” he asked Coreon.

  “A long time,” the Lirin-mer said. “Several hours at least.”

  “Several hours? Seriously?”

  “It may seem like we’ve been traveling a long way,” Coreon replied. “But we’re not traveling far out to sea anymore—we’re going down. If you were to stop swimming, take a deep breath, and let go of your air stone, you’d start rising to the surface again. Eventually you’d float up out of the Midnight Realm, through the Twilight and finally find yourself in the Sunlit Realm once more. Far out to sea, of course.”

  “That sounds great,” Char mumbled weakly. “Why aren’t we doin’ that?”

  “Because you could never hold your breath that long,” said Coreon. “You need to go back to the surface slowly, or you get the bends. And that can kill you pretty quick.”

  “We couldn’t do that—but you could,” Ven said. “You have gills, Coreon. You’ve finished your mission. There’s no reason you can’t go home now.”

  “Sure,” said Coreon bitterly. “I can go back to find the mess the Cormorant has undoubtedly made of the attack on the Gated City. A whole bunch of people are probably dead, maybe even my dad. I’m not in a hurry to return to the reef. Actually, I’m trying not to think about it.”

  “Sorry,” Ven said. He sank back into the silence of the Deep, where thrum was heavy.

  They went on, swimming in impenetrable darkness, for what seemed like forever.

  And then, suddenly, there were no more pearls.

  The pathway came to an abrupt halt in the darkness.

  Ven exhaled.

  “Well, I guess we’ve gone as far as we can without the diving bell,” he said. “I’m going to take out the air stone—close your eyes.”

  He waited for a moment to make sure the others wouldn’t be blinded by the blue-white light, then carefully fished the stone out of his buttoned pocket and held it in his clenched fist. Even with his eyes closed, the light that leaked out between his fingers made his eyes sting.

  He opened them slowly.

  They were standing at the edge of a sandy cliff, like a giant dune under the sea. The dropoff to the bottom was steep and long, with not a shell or a broken piece of a ship in sight.

  True nothingness, Ven thought.

  “Midnight—and the Abyssal Plain,” Coreon said in return.

  With great effort, Char lifted his head.

  “Criminey,” he whispered.

  Ven looked up.

  Above them, the drift was swollen with eyes.

  Schools of lantern fish, the tiny, minnow-like flashes that brightened the drift every now and then, hung, as if stunned, all around them, like great reflective curtains. A smaller group of fangtooth ogrefish were similarly shocked, their mouths agape, with oversized teeth gleaming in the reflection of the air stone’s light. Gulper eels, creatures with whip-like tails and massive mouths lined with rows of teeth, were slithering on the sand dune below them, their black skin flashing red. And above, six-gilled sharks were circling, long, gray beasts that looked like great whites but without the dorsal fins on their backs.

  They were completely surrounded by monsters.

  Beside them, Teel began to shudder violently. His tail spasmed, uncurling suddenly, as all the color drained from his blue-green body.

  Dropping the broken body of the merrow into the dark drift.

  36

  The Abyss

  “Teel!” Ven shouted in his mind. “What are you doing?”

  The trembling hippocampus just looked at him, glassy-eyed. His skin got even paler.

  “Coreon—get her!”

  The sea-Lirin boy stared at the sinking merrow, then at the diving-bell chain in his hand. A split second later he dropped the chain, kicked down toward the ocean floor, and caught Amariel.

  Ven was locked in a staring contest of his own with the creatures of the Deep.

  The six-gilled sharks circled a little closer.

  “Close your eyes,” he thought to his friends. He gave them a moment to comply, then shut his own and opened his hand, letting the full brightness of the air stone penetrate the gloom of the Deep.

  “Get away from us!” he screamed in the harshest thrum he could summon.

  Stunned, the curtain of lantern fish swelled and disappeared rapidly into the dark, as did the fangtooth ogrefish.

  The six-gilleds veered off in their paths and swam away.

  The gulpers shut their gigantic mouths and skittered from the light as well.

  As the monstrous creatures vanished into the darkness of their realm, one thought of common thrum was left behind, hanging in the thick drift.

  Out of place!

  “Do you have her?” Ven asked Coreon. The sea-Lirin boy’s thrum replied that he did.

  “Teel? Are you all right?”

  As if in response, the
front part of the giant sea horse’s stomach looked like it was splitting open.

  Ven watched in horror, then amazement, as a cloud of tiny creatures spewed forth from a pouch of a sort on the beast’s belly and filled the area of light surrounding them. As he looked closer, he could see that they were dozens of tiny hippocampi, each a perfect replica of its father, down to its tiny spiral tail.

  “What the heck?” Char’s thrum sounded a little stronger.

  “Oh—of course!” Coreon said. “Now it all makes sense! He’s not sick, or even fat. He’s been pregnant all this time!”

  “He’s—been what?”

  “Waiting to give birth. With hippocampi, it’s the fathers that carry the eggs around until the babies are born.”

  “I wanna go home now,” Char muttered.

  “Are you all right, Teel?” Ven repeated. The hippocampus did not answer, but hung motionless in the drift, his grape-like gills flapping heavily. His hide had lost all its color, his shell-like scales pasty and white in the light of the air stone.

  “I bet that hurt,” said Char.

  “More than you realize,” said Coreon. “This is really bad. When male hippocampi are getting ready to hatch eggs, they normally don’t move very much. The mothers do all the hunting for food, swimming for a long ways to find it and bring it back for them. Hippocampi like to dance with their mates, and they do it every day. They usually only ever have one mate, and, like Lancel said, they can die of loneliness if they lose their partner. He must be feeling pretty awful right now, for a whole bunch of reasons.”

  “And we’ve dragged him halfway across the sea,” said Ven. “Poor guy. I’m sorry, Teel.”

  “Well, we sure can’t take him into the Abyss,” said Coreon. “You should go home now, Teel.”

  The pale sea horse looked at them sadly.

  “I wonder why the enchantment of her song didn’t break when she lost consciousness,” Char said. “That seems strange.”

  “Maybe he didn’t stay with her because he was enchanted,” Coreon noted.

  “Don’t worry about Amariel,” Ven said comfortingly to the giant sea horse. “I know you’re fond of her, but we are, too. We’ll do everything we can to save her. I promise.”

  The hippocampus watched them a moment longer. Then he gave his head a shake and let out a thrum that made Ven’s eyelids hurt.

  The dozens of tiny baby sea horses stopped floating and playing in the drift and hurried to their father. They crept back into his pouch.

  “Good luck, buddy,” Char said.

  “Yes, and congratulations,” said Ven.

  “I hope you make it back safely,” said Coreon. There was an uncertainty to his thrum.

  Teel nodded. Ven could almost hear words in his thrum, though it was more like an understanding than a statement.

  You too.

  The hippocampus sounded less sure than they did.

  He turned and swam off into the darkness, a little faster than before.

  “Now what?” Char asked. His thrum was growing dim.

  “Well, we’re at the edge of the Abyss. The only way to find Frothta and see if doing so saves Amariel is to push on,” Ven said. He looked at the diving bell, which had fallen into the sand on the ocean’s floor. “I guess we’re headed for the Trenches now.”

  He glanced at Coreon, who was silently staring above them.

  At the light’s edge he could see a number of cages floating in the drift, much like the ones attached to the bottom of the diving bell.

  “And I guess this is where we do it,” he said.

  “I’ll get the bell,” the Lirin-mer boy said. “We should hurry, before the light attracts even bigger guests.” Carefully he handed Amariel over to Ven.

  “You going to be all right on your own for a minute?” Ven said as he released Char’s elbow to take the merrow.

  “O’ course.” Char’s thrum was cross.

  “Just checking. We have to stick together.”

  “No kidding,” Char said. “At least ya finally got that straight.”

  “You might want to stay here, Coreon,” Ven said as the sea-Lirin boy swam down to the seafloor and grabbed hold of the chain on the diving bell. “We got ourselves, and you, into this mess, but there’s no point in you taking a ridiculous risk.”

  “Sure there is,” Coreon said. “If we find the Tree of Water, I’ll have seen something no one in my whole nation has ever seen. It will erase my disgrace and let me return home. And if not, well, as I said earlier, I have no reason to go back now, anyway.”

  Madame Sharra’s voice rang in Ven’s memory.

  One does not always know the reason at the beginning of a journey. Sometimes you find the reason in the course of it. What matters is that at the end, you know why you undertook the journey in the first place.

  When he had begun this journey, finding the Tree of Water had been one of the main reasons he had thought to go. That reason dimmed as other things happened, other missions, other problems, became the focus. Now it had become the only goal, because without it, he would surely lose one of the most important people in his life.

  “All right then,” he said. “Let’s go.”

  Coreon was struggling with the heavy diving bell.

  “I don’t think I can get this back high enough up in the drift to swim under,” he said. “The dragon was right—it’s miserably heavy.”

  Ven peered over the edge of the dune into the depths of the Midnight Realm.

  “Can you shove it off the edge?” he asked. “We can swim under it as it descends and get up inside it.”

  “I think so.”

  “Good. Char—can you take out your air stone without dropping it? We don’t want to risk that again, and you look sort of woozy.”

  “I’m all right,” Char insisted. “If I can’t hold on to a bloody air bubble, I’m not gonna survive the Abyss anyway.” He fished around in his pocket. “Got it.”

  “Let’s trade,” Ven said. “On the count of three, you take yours out and I’ll put mine away.” He waited until Char nodded that he was ready, then switched the air stone back into his pocket and buttoned it with one hand.

  Just as he did, he took a last look at Amariel’s face.

  * * *

  I didn’t think she was still alive.

  I remembered how bright she looked, smiling broadly, her teeth showing, her skin gleaming in the light of the moon on Skellig Elarose, laughing smugly at her victory over the sea lion. I thought about her singing to the coral and the creatures of the reef, when real elaroses grew just to hear the sound of her voice.

  And I remembered how frightened her face had been at the thought of meeting a sea dragon. It’s a good thing she was unconscious for the meeting with Lancel, because I’m not sure she would have made it through.

  I recalled, in the haze of my own woozy memory, her singing to me while I floated on the piece of my father’s broken ship, songs of the sea, telling me tales of the Deep and the glories I would find there, if I stayed alive long enough to see them.

  As the light from my air stone went away, it seemed to me like I was looking at the shipwreck of Amariel’s body. Lancel said that the bones of ships sang sad songs as they were sinking into the depths of the sea. I realized that Amariel’s thrum, whether in the sea or the upworld, was a music of a sort, a song that rang from her with every breath she took.

  A brazen song.

  There was no music coming from her now.

  It’s almost as if her soul had already descended into the Abyss.

  Then I remembered what else the dragon said about the sinking ships.

  If I hear them, and I call out to them, they often come to me. They know I will care for them as no other would.

  I wondered if she might hear a call like that. A call from her mother—or perhaps her father, who I know she loved very much. She told me he had swum across a good deal of the sea with her once to take her to a place he wanted her to never go, just to show her why she s
hould never go there. He didn’t want her curiosity to win out and her to go alone.

  Then I knew what I had to do.

  I had no idea if it would help or not. But I still had to do it.

  * * *

  Ven put his head down next to the merrow’s.

  “Amariel,” he whispered. “Amariel, stay with me, please. Wherever you are in there, stay with me.” The voice in his head caught in his throat. He cleared his thoughts, then tried to imagine himself singing to her, the way she had sung to him on the wreckage of his father’s ship, the name of which he could no longer remember.

  He sang her name in his mind, over and over, as Char’s stone began to glow in his hand. He kept singing as Coreon shoved the diving bell, with great effort, off the side of the underwater cliff, and swam up inside it. The diving bell began sinking slowly into the black drift.

  “You comin’?”

  Ven nodded to Char. “Go ahead,” he said. “I’ll follow your light.”

  His best friend nodded, then dove as quickly as he could.

  Ven pulled Amariel up against his shoulder and followed him.

  The diving bell was sinking slowly, but it weighed a good deal more than he did, so he had to kick hard to catch up with it. He could see the light of Char’s air stone as his friend crawled up inside the large bell. Now the smaller cage that was attached to the bottom of the door in the diving bell cast shadows into the deep, slashes of foggy darkness against the foggy light.

  “Hurry up, Ven! I can’t see you!”

  “I’m coming. I’m almost there.”

  With a few more kicks he was just below the edge of the sinking bell. He tucked Amariel up inside the rim and released her into the hazy light, knowing she would float up as the bell sank. Then he grasped the rim and pulled himself up inside it.

  Char and Coreon were seated on a small ledge that ran all the way around the inside of the bell, belted in with a length of chain across their laps. Char had caught the merrow and was holding her steady in front of him. He passed her back to Ven as he took a seat beside Coreon and strapped himself in.