The Poisoned Crown (37 page)

“Farewell,” said the albatross. “May the winds of fate bring you long life and good fortune.”

“The Force be with you,” Nathan responded, unable, on the spur of the moment, to think of anything else.

“May the tides of destiny carry you to the pathways of the moon,” Denaero intoned formally.

“Live long and prosper,” Nathan quipped.

Finally, they dived.

And now this was magic indeed. The water no longer dragged or resisted him—instead it seemed to flow not just past him but through him, as if he were part of it, moving with its currents, rocked in its storms and its gentleness. He remembered how, at the end of Andersen’s “Little Mermaid,” the eponymous heroine had felt her breast melt into foam, and he began to comprehend what it meant to be merfolk, to be a creature not so much half fish as half sea, a spirit at one with its element. Little wonder they felt no pressure even at great depths, and their fealty to Nefanu was less worship than kinship—the same tides flowed in the veins of merfolk and Goddess alike. Humans, he had learned at school, are about 60 percent water, but he sensed the potion had somehow increased the percentage, melting his too solid flesh, transforming him into a being whose pulse beat was the waves and whose lifeblood was the surges of the deep.

And the water brought him messages—the rippled pattern of a nearby shoal of yellowstripe, flickering through the coral, the silent swoosh of a passing ray, the shifting coils of a moray eel stirring in its lair.

“Follow me,” said Denaero. “I will show you the dragons of Dragon’s Reef.”

Now that he was so far down, he could see the form of the Western Reef more clearly: the ocean currents or some other phenomenon had eroded the rock in such a way that the upper section spread out like the cap of a giant mushroom while the supporting cliff had been eaten away. What remained was a species of thick trunk joining the reef to a broad plateau of rock below—rock in shelves and planes and strata— with here and there a chasm opening on blue darkness, so Nathan
guessed the seabed must be much farther down. The reef was the highest point of a sprawling mountain ridge, a strange formation coral-grown and sun-touched, teeming with the life of the shallows, while far beneath was the eternal midnight of the ocean vales where creatures lived that never came up for light. Even under the overhang of the mushroom cap it was gloomy, though the potion seemed to have endowed Nathan with mervision, and he could distinguish rippling curtains of weed and the glimmer of tiny fish darting to and fro.

Denaero paused by one such curtain, parting the stems. “Look!” she said. A piece of the weed had broken free and hovered in the gap, a curling tendril like an S with too many bends, sporting leaves that fanned in the current and decorated with waving spines thin as gossamer. At one end was a minute encrustation like the head of a dragonet, with round sea-beryl eyes and tip-tilted snout. Denaero stroked beneath its chin with her fingertip, and suddenly Nathan saw it was real, though its camouflage was perfect, not a weed fragment but a miniature dragon as delicate as a butterfly, with leafy fins and sinuous body.

He had a feeling there were such creatures in our world—he must have seen them on television—but it was different, so different, when you saw them for real. The sea, he decided, with or without sorcery, was indeed a magical place.

“This is one of our dragons,” Denaero said. “Isn’t he beautiful? But I don’t think he would be much good at guarding anything.”

They swam on, descending farther, gliding above the lower stratum of rock. Overhead they saw the arch of the Dragon’s Bridge, while below them the ridge was split by a long canyon with a path of sand visible between its walls. There the march of the lobsters had passed, but Denaero appeared untroubled by the recollection. Merfolk lived in the moment, Nathan thought; both her peril and her fear were forgotten, replaced by the anticipation of fears—and perils—to come.

Beyond the bridge, along the borders of the main reef, they plunged still deeper, past great bastions of stone, down into the dark. Denaero plucked a sea star from the rock and held it in front of her, a small nodule of light in the vast glooms of the sea.

The pressure here would be instant death to an unprotected diver, Nathan guessed, and for a second he worried that the spell might fail, but that was like worrying about an air crash when you were on a plane: there was nothing you could do, so why bother? He pushed the worry aside and went on.

“I didn’t realize the reef was so big,” he said to Denaero when they’d been swimming for some time.

“It’s the greatest of the twelve,” she said. “One reef for each tribe— one king for each kingdom—but ours is the largest. Even the Long Reef of Imarnu is shorter. That’s why my father is High King.”

After a while she continued: “The caverns are under the mountains. The main entrance was supposed to be somewhere along the top, but no one knows exactly where: the boulder would be overgrown with coral and weed now, indistinguishable from the surrounding rocks. It isn’t a secret, you understand; it’s just that nobody knows where it is.”

“And the door that
is
meant to be secret?” Nathan said with emphasis.

“It’s at the foot of the mountains. In the dark.”

It would be
, Nathan thought.

Now it was altogether black. The tiny glow of the sea star showed Denaero’s hand, her arm, the swirl of her hair coiling in her wake. Every so often some small luminous creature would swim past, flourishing a glitter of antennae: ghost-shrimps, translucent worms, strange hairy fishy things whose filmy bodies appeared almost too insubstantial to exist. Their only substance was the light, the kernel of phosphorescence they carried within them like an internal lamp, gleaming in the ocean night. And once in a while Nathan had the impression of something far larger in their vicinity, as a long string of lights hove out of the blackness, like portholes on the side of a submarine. (He wasn’t sure submarines
had
portholes, but even if they didn’t, that was the image his brain supplied.)

He lost all sense of time. They seemed to have been swimming through the dark forever, in an unchanging midnight where the sun would never penetrate. In another state of being he had been afraid of the water—the blue rush of bubbles, the air expelled from his lungs—
now he was so much a part of it, he felt himself losing touch with the world above, as if the ocean deep was his long home and there was nowhere else he had ever been, nowhere else to be.

They had not spoken for what felt like hours. The vast silence of the undersea got inside them, making speech, like breathing, seem an alien thing, a function of other beings, in other worlds. Even Denaero appeared affected by it. As for Nathan, all the universes he had ever seen shrank to an atom of memory; he felt absorbed into the dark and the gigantic entity of the sea.

Denaero’s voice came as a shock, intruding on the silence like the whisper of a bell.

“It’s somewhere here,” she said.

The light of the sea star showed the mountain roots sinking into sand, and details of the cliff rising like a wall above him. “I followed my father here once,” Denaero volunteered. “With the shamans. I was very small, and I swam in their wave pattern. They never detected me.”

She was always curious
, Nathan thought. Going into forbidden places, making the wrong friends, doing the wrong things. Quibbling, quarreling, being difficult. And suddenly, in a distant sort of way, he was reminded of Hazel—Hazel who was farther away than the farthest sun, in another element, another universe—a speck of familiarity on the outer reaches of his thought. Hazel his companion, his ally and friend. And with the idea of Hazel came the awareness that the sea was not the only world, and somewhere every ocean came to shore, and the sands reached out beyond the waves toward daybreak and the realms of Land.

It was strange how, in every world, sooner or later there was someone who reminded him of Hazel.

“Here!” Denaero said, on a note of triumph. “This is it.”

There was a pointed arch cut into the rock, little more than a crude triangle tapering from a narrow base to the apex some seven feet up. By the faint purplish glow of the sea star Nathan saw that it framed a door—an ordinary door, apart from its shape, with a handle in the form of a whorled shell and hinges that seemed to be made of bone and fastened with leatherwrack, though in the dim light he couldn’t be sure. Spongy growths padded the frame and in the center the carved head of
a fish protruded, its mouth open in a threatening gape and set with a full complement of what looked like genuine teeth, long and curved and gleaming with a toothy gleam.

“It’s a special door,” Denaero explained, knowledgeably. “You turn
this
and pull, and it opens. I saw my father do it.”

Nathan was about to say something mildly sarcastic when he realized that under the sea a door would generally be just a hole in the rock. “Clever,” he commented blandly. “Where’s the guardian?”

“I’m not sure. I think it might be—that.” She indicated the fish head. “I was only a child when I saw it, and there’s never much light. With all those pointy teeth, it
did
look scary.”

“If there’s no guardian,” Nathan said, “what keeps people away?”

“They stay away because they’re told to,” Denaero said. “Anyhow, there’s nothing to go inside for except air. The treasures belong to the Goddess: no one would touch them. And who wants to be in a cave full of
air?”

“Well, we do,” Nathan pointed out. “Is it locked? The door, I mean.”

“What’s …
locked?”

“Never mind.”

Denaero passed him the sea star and, taking the knob in both hands, twisted it and pulled. The door swung back sharply, throwing her against Nathan—she laughed her sudden laugh, making bubbles in the water. Nathan dropped the star, retrieved it before it could swim away, and they both peered inside. Beyond was a small stone chamber— perhaps three people might have stood there, huddled close together— and a second door, this time with no fish head.

“What do we do?” Denaero asked.

“I suppose we go in.”

He stepped through the gap and tried the other door, but it wouldn’t open. “What did your father do?”

“He went in,” Denaero said, plainly struggling to recall things accurately, “he and two of the shamans. Then they closed the door. The other shamans waited for a while, then they followed him. I couldn’t really see into the chamber—I was hiding behind those rocks over there—so …”

“Did you hear them chant a spell or anything?”

“I don’t remember.”

“All right,” Nathan said. “Let’s give it a go. In you come … then we shut the door.” The sponges, he assumed, would make it watertight— or airtight. He glanced around and saw, set in a groove, a lever made of bone. The kind of lever that you pulled and something happened. He gave it a jerk—it was stiff from lack of use—and there was the whir of a pump jolting into action somewhere above, and a slot opened at the base of the door through which they had entered.

“What’s going on?” Denaero demanded, clutching Nathan’s T-shirt. He was getting used to being clutched in this way and managed not to focus on the closeness of her bare breasts.

“It’s mechanical,” he said, “though I suppose it could be operated by some kind of automatic spell. I don’t know how else the pump would function. The water’s being expelled from the chamber via the gap under the door; you can see the air coming in through that vent up there. When all the water’s gone we’ll be able to open the
other
door and get into the cave.”

“How do you know?” Denaero sounded almost petulant. “You’ve never been here. You come from another world—a world of land. You can’t possibly know how it works.”

“It’s logical,” Nathan explained. “Anyway, in my world we use something similar to get people in and out of ships that can go under the sea.”

“I’ve heard of ships,” Denaero said. “But I thought they were meant to float.”

Explanations only make things more complicated, Nathan decided. “You’d better
change,”
he said. “You’re going to need your legs for walking.”

“But I can’t walk!” Denaero protested. “How should I?
I’m
not a legwalker.”

“You have the option of legs. You must use them sometimes.”

“When? There’s nothing to walk on.”

“Why didn’t you think of that before? You knew we were going into the caverns of air …”

“I just
didn’t.
I was—I was thinking of other things …”

“You’ll have to hang on to me then,” Nathan said. “My turn to hold you up.”

The water was draining fast. Denaero’s tail seemed to dissolve, dividing into two, scales softening into the smoothness of skin. The forked tail fin shrank and paled into feet, placed unsteadily on the rock. As the level dropped Denaero’s knees started to fold; she wound her arms tightly around Nathan’s chest. “How can I balance?” she wailed. “My feet are too small. How can they support my whole body?”

“Mine do,” Nathan said, half propping her up, half lifting her, trying not to focus on her nakedness. She was so slight, she weighed almost nothing. “Just keep holding on to me and try to walk on them, the way I do. Look, the slot’s closing—the water’s gone. We should be able to—”

But the second door opened by itself.

Nathan hobbled through, hampered by the mermaid, who was looking down at his feet to see how they worked. Exposed to air, the sea star no longer glowed, flapping helplessly on the rock where they had let it fall, but light came from somewhere, a pale light from a source a long way off, showing them that what they had entered was less a cave than an enormous void hollowed in the mountain. The roof was so far above them as to be almost irrelevant; great shadows dripped down the walls; here and there a clump of stalactites extruded from the darkness like a gigantic chandelier. The floor was split into huge shelves and steps, crunchy with the shards of splintered shells and the bones of sea creatures trapped there when the water was driven out. And it was dry. Dust-dry, bone-dry, dry as a tomb. Nothing lived there. A black frazzle of what had been weed sprawled close by, crumbling to powder at a touch. Nathan heard Denaero’s breath wheezing in her throat.