The Tree of Water

  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 bui
ldings 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.

  He closed his eyes and concentrated.

  At first he could feel nothing but the ferocious pressure of the sea. The weight of the water was heavy even on his spirit, and seemed to block out the thrum from almost everything else around them. The vibrations of the hydrothermal vents, the giant tube worms waving in the drift, the enormous clams filtering water on the seafloor, the thousands of starfish clinging to the mineral chimneys of the black smokers, were all very slight compared to the heaviness that surrounded everything.

  But then, high above it, he heard, or more likely felt, a sound.

  The thrum was bell-like and clear, with a sweet, deep tone. It did not ring desperately like the harsh clanging of the diving bells, but rather rolled through the drift, like tides of breath. It seemed like it was coming from very far away, and yet it hung in the water around him at the same time.

  If he hadn’t been specifically listening for it, he never would have heard it.

  Now that he could hear it, the sound reached down into the depths of his soul. He felt lighter just knowing it was there, and a moment later it was as if he had breathed in sweet air, or sunshine, something that banished the darkness from inside him, even though it was still all around him.

  “I think I hear her,” he said.

  Char’s eyebrows drew together.

  “Who?”

  “Frothta.”

  “Really?” His best friend listened carefully. “Sorry, mate, but I don’t hear anything except the thuddin’ o’ the sea.”

  Coreon, who had been listening as well, nodded in agreement.

  “I could be wrong, but I can’t imagine what else would make a thrum like I’m hearing,” Ven said. “I guess we should just follow it, at least as long as we can. Unless someone else has a better idea.”

  “No better idea—but you have to lead,” said Char. “Where are we headin’?”

  Ven pointed to the towering mountain range. “Over there. Then up.”

  “I don’t think I can carry this diving bell any longer,” said Coreon. “I can barely drag it along here at the bottom. If you think we need to climb, I don’t think it’s coming with us unless we’re inside it.”

  “I guess we’re going to have to decide if we believe we’re going to find a miracle, then,” said Ven. “Because you can get back in that diving bell, say going up, and it should take you back to your body. It may be the last chance either of you have for making it out of the Abyss. I don’t blame you if that’s what you want to do.”

  “You’re sayin’ you—not we,” said Char. “I guess this means you’ve already decided you’re not goin’ back in the divin’ bell?”

  “Yes,” said Ven. “I’m going to the mountains—and I’m going to find the Tree of Water, or die trying.”

  Char sighed. “Well, then, ya know what I’m gonna say.”

  “Me too,” added Coreon. “There’s no point turning back now.”

  Ven smiled in relief. “Good. We’ll just start climbing the first mountain we come to, and keep going as long as we can.”

  Coreon let go of the chain tether. The small cage floated away from them and into the black water outside their sight.

  “Goodbye!” Char called after it. “Well, there goes our last lifeline.”

  “We’ll have to make our own way out, then,” said Ven. “Let’s get to it.”

  The black drift was heavy, and it took all their strength and concentration to move upward in it. Every now and then a crack in the floor of the sea would spew forth acidic spray. They dodged out of the way, forgetting for a moment that they had no bodies to be harmed by it.

  They soon lost all track of time. The mountains they had seen in the light of the river of lava were much farther away than they had seemed, and after a while it felt like they were traveling in vain, not getting any closer.

  “You know, I really hope that stupid hippocampus made it back,” Char muttered. “I hope he’s home, tendin’ to his babies.”

  “With his mate,” Coreon added.

  “I hope so too,” said Ven. “He really was a trooper.”

  “Are you still tryin’ not to think about the Cormorant?” Char asked Coreon.

  “Trying, but not succeeding,” the sea-Lirin boy said. “My dad is the division leader of the eastern part of the coral reef. He would have been one of the first ones in.”

  “Sorry to have brought it up,” Char said.

  “Focus on hearing the song of
the Tree,” Ven advised. “Once you do, you’ll feel better, I bet.”

  Coreon nodded. “I think I do hear it,” he said. “It has a hopeful ring to it, doesn’t it?”

  “Yes.”

  Finally the mountains were within plain sight. They reached up into the black drift, lighted by the blazing lava oozing from the cracks in the skin of the world. The haze and smoke from the mineral chimneys on the seafloor made them look like a nightmare fairyland.

  This is a little bit like what the Nain kingdom of Castenen, where my ancestors come from, might have looked like if it were in the upworld, Ven thought as he stared up from the base of the towering mountains. Strange that Nain fear the water so much, and in fact in the deepest depths of the sea the world looks almost the same.

  He tried to remember what it felt like to ride the drift, the way Amariel had shown him and Char at the beginning of this long, terrifying, amazing journey. None of the lift the ocean had provided then, back in the Sunlit Realm, was in the heavy salted water at the bottom of the world. He pushed his arms through the drift, and his spirit form rose slightly, with great effort. He took another stroke. He rose a little farther up, feeling tired.

  The other boys joined him. Char took twice as long as he and Coreon, his dim spirit form all but disappearing several times. Ven set a slow and steady pace, swimming until he was finally within reach of the side of a mountain of towering rock formations.

  All over the surface, millions of tiny starfish clung to the mountainside with several of their arms while they waved others in the drift, catching the occasional eyeless shrimp for food. Light from deeper within the mountain chain glowed, making the drift almost as bright as moonlight when it shone on the surface.

  “This is so weird,” Char said as they struggled past the cliff faces swarming with starfish. “It looks like the reverse of the sky in the upworld, like all the stars fell right into the sea.”

  “Are any of them shining?” Ven asked. “Because until they do, we won’t be seeing home again, according to the Epona’s riddle.”