The Tree of Water (33 page)

It was the most terrible sound, or feeling, or whatever it is that thrum really is, that I have ever heard, or felt.

It made my blood literally run cold.

In the sea I thought I had lost my sense of smell. Amariel had told us that the hooded sea slug had a powerful odor, but I couldn't tell. So I thought I was unable to smell anything underwater.

Until Char began flailing and shaking his arm beside me.

And the blood in the water swept past my face.

Then it was all I could smell.

 

“Ven!” Coreon thrum was urgent. “Take out your light!”

Ven fumbled in his pocket and located the air stone and his jack-rule. He pulled out the blue-white bubble, glowing in the same color as the pearls on the ocean floor, but far more intensely.

In the cold light, he could see Char violently waving his hand, trying to shake off a monstrous-looking fish whose jaws had clamped around his wrist. The fish was brownish and round like a ball, and a little shorter than Ven's arm to the elbow, but it had swallowed Char's hand and seemed to be dragging him into its huge mouth, which was opening wider than the rest of its body. Above that massive mouth the glowing ball Char had reached for bobbed on what looked like a small fishing pole attached to the fish's head.

“It's an angler, I bet,” Coreon whispered, his thrum high with fear. “The sea Lirin warn about them. We have to pry it off fast, before it swallows his whole arm.”

“
Ven!
” Char's thrum was desperate.

“Stop jerking your hand around and hold still,” Ven said. He extended the blade in his jack-rule. His hand was shaking so much that he lost his grip on the tool and it almost dropped to the ocean floor. He caught it in the drift, trying to keep his fingers clear of the knife.

Gathering all his strength, he slashed across the top of the fish's head, and struck off the bobbing light.

The fish reared back in shock, its mouth agape.

“Pull it off!” Char moaned. “Get it off me!”

Coreon seized the angler's upper and lower jaws and pried them apart. As he did, Ven grabbed Char's arm and dragged it, bleeding, out of the angler's mouth.

This is going to get ugly,
he thought as Coreon threw the fish as far away as he could in disgust.
If Megalodon could find me from just three drops of blood, what kind of beacon is
this
going to be, and to what?

“You all right?” he asked Char.

Char nodded numbly, but his eyes seemed glazed.

Looking through the magnifying glass of the jack-rule, Ven inspected his friend's injured hand. It was gouged and bleeding, but the wounds didn't seem too deep. There was, however, something black at the edge of each tear in the skin, and it seemed to be spreading. “Wrap your shirt around your hand,” he said to Char, who was trembling with shock. “We have to get past the Realm of Twilight and into the diving bell as soon as we can, before predators find us.”

He looked at the symbol of the Time Scissors in his palm, wondering what moment he would redo if need be.

This is the closest I've come to needing to use this power,
he thought. It was something he had avoided carefully, uncertain if changing a decision in the past would be better or worse than allowing things to remain as they were.

But somehow, entering a sunless, all-but-frozen part of the sea in a diving bell that separated his body from his soul, with two of his friends gravely injured, seemed to be an action that might need to be reconsidered.

“Can you drag the diving bell yourself if I pull with one arm?” he asked Coreon. The sea-Lirin boy nodded. “All right, then, let's get out of here. Char, hold pressure on the bite with your other hand and I'll pull you along by your good elbow.”

“I can swim,” Char mumbled.

“No. Your thrum is getting weaker, and we need to douse the light or everything in the Deep will find us.”

He held up the tiny glowing sphere one last time.

In the circle of dim light he saw little but the sand of the ocean floor. This realm of endless night, somewhere between Twilight and Midnight in the sea, was a lifeless place, empty and cold, without even dead seaweed on the ocean floor or floating in the motionless drift.

“Teel—how is Amariel?”

The hippocampus shook its head sadly.

Ven inhaled, willing himself to be calm, to be brave. It seemed to work—a moment later he felt as if his brain shut off all ties to his feelings, and was functioning by itself.

“All right,” he thought briskly to the other boys and the sea horse. “Let's go.”

He put his air stone back in his pocket and buttoned it carefully. The dim light was swallowed immediately, returning them to absolute darkness a moment later. Then he took hold of Char by the elbow with one hand, and the diving bell's chain with other, feeling Coreon's grip on it closer to the end.

He made sure he could feel the thrum of each of his friends. Coreon was nervous, he knew. His gills were opening and closing with more effort than usual. As nervous as the sea-Lirin boy was, Char was fighting full-blown panic, clutching his wounded hand with all his remaining strength. The hippocampus's vibration was mournful and frightened.

He could feel nothing at all from Amariel. He shook that thought from his mind.

Then he made his way back to the water just above the pathway of pearls and started following it.

Everything Amariel had taught us about riding the drift seemed long ago and far away. There was almost no movement to the water this deep in the sea, just a thick swell here and there, like moving through heavy cream or the air of the upworld in a hard, blinding rain.

With the light gone, I began to think of my limited sight as a bit of a blessing. All about me in the heavy drift I caught sight of movement, but little else. Occasionally a glowing light would pass by in the distance, or we could feel the sea above us move as something swam overhead, but considering what Lancel had said about the creatures that lived in the Realm of Midnight, it was probably better that we couldn't see them too well, anyway.

Every now and then, I thought I could hear a bell tolling in the depths.

The thrum made my teeth sting.

Usually I have a terrible time controlling my curiosity. But for once the vibration of those distant bells did not catch my interest even a little bit.

“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.