The Drowned Tomb (The Changeling Series Book 2) (6 page)

“The mighty kraken?” Henry mused.

Robin stared at the tiny squid-like beast. It must have been stuck in there, he reasoned. It had grown to fill the pot, and then couldn’t grow anymore. By the light of the floating charm, he could just make out what looked like a very old, weathered collar below its eyes and tiny beak, which might conceivably once have been a powder pink, studded with glass jewels.

“Inky?” Karya whispered in disbelief. “Woad, you mad little psychopath. You’ve captured the mighty kraken of Erlking.”

“That’s…” Robin faltered. The kraken was fixing him with the stare of death with its milky eyes. Its maw opened as it gave a shuddering hiss. It was more of a mewl. He took the pot gingerly from the faun’s slimy arms. “That’s just … bloody adorable,” he finished.

Woad swelled with pride, and then, to a chorus of complaints, shook himself like a wet dog, drenching his companions in pond slime and sludge.

ROBIN’S FOLLY

Robin hadn’t slept well. For one thing it was hot and humid and there hadn’t been a breath of fresh air in his room, despite all four of the compass-point windows being flung wide. For another, it had been rather a traumatic experience, once they had sneaked the tiny kraken back through the house in the dead of night to Robin’s bedroom, to try to ‘extract’, as Karya clinically termed it, the bile.

This had consisted, it turned out, of alternately poking the tiny creature with a stick and trying to tickle its tentacles, until it basically threw up in aquatic excitement. It had been, as Henry succinctly observed, the single grossest thing any of them had ever done. Even Woad. They all agreed never to speak of it again.

And after Henry, Woad and Karya had finally disappeared to their own quarters in Erlking, Woad insisting on looking after the tiny kraken for the night. Robin, too nervous to run a bath or shower for fear of waking the household, had been forced to clean up as much pond slime as possible using a dry facecloth, before falling asleep.

So it was with tired eyes and a lingering aroma of pond scum, that he found himself early next morning, wandering down to the lake for his first lesson in the Tower of Water.

It was early, but summer was relentless, and already breathlessly warm and sticky. The thought of the cool water was actually quite welcoming, nervous though he was. Under his arm he carried a rolled up beach towel and swim shorts. He had valiantly resisted asking Aunt Irene if there were any inflatable arm-bands in the house. Sweat trickled down his spine in the humid woodland air, and around his neck beside his mana stone, a small test-tube vial on a string clinked occasionally.

Karya, who had been up all night brewing the concoction, and extra grumpy at the breakfast table because of it, had instructed him to leave it as long as possible before drinking the potion. She hadn’t been sure how potent it would be, with the kraken being so small. It would be prudent, she’d advised, to wait until the start of the lesson, in case the effects didn’t take. Robin hadn’t argued. The liquid in the tube was black and gloopy. He didn’t relish the idea of drinking it at all and was glad to put it off.

As he finally emerged from the dappled, hazy shadows of the trees, blinded by the morning sunlight glittering off the surface of the lake, he saw his new tutor waiting for him. The nymph Calypso was seated in a white deckchair by the water’s edge, a pale, wide-brimmed hat shading her face. A small table by her side contained a teapot and she held in her lap a teacup and saucer.

“Good morning, Robin Fellows, Scion of the Arcania,” she said to him with the tiniest of hazy smiles. She was wearing huge dark sunglasses. Robin wondered where on earth she had procured them.

“I trust you slept well,” she said. “Although by the look of you, I suspect this not to be the case. Your face looks a size too large for your skull. Usually an indication of an ill-rested soul.”

Robin mumbled a guilty good morning in return. “Just Robin is fine,” he muttered, as she took off her sunglasses, standing so that the long gown she wore rippled in the soft breeze.

“What is that?” she asked off-hand, nodding to the bundle under his arm. Robin glanced down.

“Umm, swim shorts, you know, for swimming. And a towel.”

The Panthea woman regarded the towel with a kind of dreamy fascination. “A towel.” She rolled the unfamiliar word around her mouth. “And what is its purpose?”

“For, well, for getting dry afterwards.”

She blinked at him slowly. “Why on earth would you want to be dry?” she asked.

“Well … people do,” he faltered. “Generally, I mean.”

Madame Calypso sniffed and considered this. “How odd you people are,” she said. “I have always found that most people are decidedly dehydrated. And the shorts?”

Robin’s face flushed. “To wear!” he said. “I’ve got to wear something to swim in, haven’t I?”

She nodded a little after a moment. “Yes, of course. I understand. It would be far too hilarious otherwise. Come along.” She turned away before Robin could reply, or burst into mortified flames, and she led him down to the water’s edge.

“Your strange human companion seems to have the correct idea at least when it comes to water,” she observed. Robin followed her gaze, realising why he hadn’t seen Henry at breakfast earlier. He’d assumed the boy was still asleep, but as it happened, he was wrong. Robin could just make out the boy’s figure, out on the mossy island, in trunks, goggles, and what Robin feared was an actual swimming cap, bright canary yellow. Henry was clambering a low tumbled wall of the old folly like a spider-monkey. As they watched, he leapt gracelessly, a flailing mass of gangly limbs, and cannonballed into the water with an almighty splash.

“He’s been doing that all morning.” Madame Calypso said, her head tilted to one side. Her voice was filled with confused wonder. “He has all the skill and grace of a dropped potato, but I have to say, his love for the water is admirable.”

Robin sighed. “Yes, as you can see from that perfect swan dive there, he’s training for the Olympics.”

“Gird yourself appropriately, Robin Fellows, Scion of the Arcania,” his tutor said softly. “And then we shall begin your instruction out on the island.”

Leaving the towel on the beach by the deckchair, Robin scampered off to the privacy of the wooded edge to change into his shorts, taking the opportunity, while hidden by the foliage, to take Karya’s kraken-bile brew. In the shadows of the trees, he unstopped the tube and sniffed the contents dubiously. It smelled like low tide. Bracing himself, he gulped down the black muck.

For a moment, he felt nothing but instant revulsion and the urgent and pressing need to gag, but then, whatever strange potency the brew contained seemed to activate. There was a fizzing sensation in his limbs and a flickering in his brain. Robin shook his head, blinking rapidly as the strange sensation flowed over him, and then, as quick as it had come, it was gone.

In the dappled sunlight of the trees, Robin smiled to himself in surprise, flexing his hands. He knew how to swim. It was that simple. As though the knowledge has just been downloaded into his brain, or coded into his limbs as surely as if he were a fish.

If we could find a similar brew for algebra, he thought, we’d make millions.

Robin worried briefly if he was going to start sprouting gills or tentacles, but decided not to think about that for now. He could always worry about magical mutation later. Right now, for the first time in his life, the water was calling to him.

When he returned to the shore, bare feet skipping across the gravelly stones which were warm to the touch, he saw that Calypso has walked out some way into the lake. Unlike when he had first met her, when she had seemed to float atop the water’s surface, now she was knee deep, her long dress swirling about her pale legs in the water like the billowing of a jellyfish.

“Come into the water, Scion. To master an element, you must immerse yourself in it,” she instructed quietly.

The water was freezing. Much colder than Robin had anticipated, but he didn’t want to look like a mewling baby, so he made his best show of not gritting his teeth as he walked out into the lake, sloshing through to where she stood. After the initial shock, it was actually a blessed relief from the sultry summer heat baking the shore. The slope of the lake beneath the surface was shallow, and he found they could walk out quite far across the slippery stone bed, although Calypso was taller than he, and when he reached her, it was up to his hips, raising shivery goose bumps everywhere. Deciding it was best to get it over with, he ducked down and plunged himself fully under the water, trying to acclimatise to the temperature. It was cold enough to make his temples ache, but he felt exhilarated as he broke the surface again, blowing out air and pushing his wet hair back across his head.

His tutor looked at him oddly. “For one who cannot swim, you appear to hold little fear of the water, Scion,” she mused.

Robin grinned, wiping water from his face. “Oh, I can swim,” he mumbled. “I learned.” It was wonderful not to be nervous about the vast body of water surrounding him for the first time.

She nodded, completely unconcerned with his sudden mastery. “Very well. But it is right to be afraid of water.”

“It is?” he frowned.

“The Tower of Water is the most mutable of all the Towers of the Arcania, student,” the nymph said. “It is fluid in more than simply form. In intention also, and in mood. It is not always easy to control, or to predict. There are dark and dangerous currents everywhere, and no man is master of the sea. She swallows sailors whole.”

Robin was finding his new tutor equally hard to read, mood and intention. Everything she said was delivered in the same light and breezy tone, regardless of how macabre it may be.

“We will swim together to the island there,” she instructed him. “Where your skinny, noisy friend awaits us. And then I shall show you what you are going to learn first.”

His tutor didn’t wait, but turned and dived with lissome elegance beneath the water’s surface. It was so expertly done, like a sleek dolphin, that it barely made ripples.

Robin, eager to try swimming for the first time, followed suit.

The island with the folly was further out than it looked, and the bed of the lake soon fell away from under him as he swam, dropping away into cold and murky darkness below. His tutor swam the entire way beneath the surface, her arms flat at her sides, her long hair trailing like sleek silver seaweed and her legs, wrapped in the silvery dress, lashing like a mermaid’s tale. Robin on the other hand, had to occasionally come up for air and found it difficult to keep up with her. He cut through the water expertly, however, feeling bold and confident from the kraken-bile draught, and enjoying the unfamiliar and magical sensation of swimming over deep water. It felt a little like flying. Partway to the island he flipped onto his back and swam the remainder of the way staring up happily into the cloudless bright blue of the summer sky. Swallows danced and dived high above him. Robin found himself utterly content, thinking to himself that at times, there was simply no place he would rather be in all the world than here at Erlking.

When he reached the shore, and clambered, dripping and panting a little, out onto the island’s edge, Henry and his tutor were waiting for him. Oddly, Calypso didn’t look remotely wet.

“That worked then, didn’t it, Mer-boy,” Henry grinned, giving Robin a sneaky thumbs-up from the broken, moss-covered wall he perched on.

“What worked?” his tutor asked lightly, as the sun dried Robin off.

“Nothing, nothing,” Robin replied.

“If the human child is to remain during your lesson, Scion, this is permitted,” Calypso said. “However, know that should he be injured, fatally or otherwise, it is no concern of mine. I have very little skill in healing, and I have been engaged to teach you, not to care for the severed limbs of a grinning mortal.”

Henry looked a little offended. “Child?” he muttered. “I’m fourteen this year.”

“Severed limbs?” Robin repeated, thinking this was perhaps the more pertinent thing.

“Water…” the nymph said, leading them away from the water’s edge and into the middle of the ruined circular wall of the folly, which was open to the sky. “…Is dangerous. Drown, freeze, burn, crush.” Her voice was almost sing-song. “It can and will turn on you if it chooses. But it is also life, feeling and emotion, the irresistible pull of the moon moving the tides of mana throughout the Netherworlde.” She pointed back at the lake. “Water can scald and steam.” She flicked her wrist, as though shooing a fly, and some way out from the water’s edge, a tremendous geyser of steaming water erupted suddenly from the surface of the lake. The column of bubbling, boiling liquid roared high into the air, flashing in the sunlight, and making both Robin and Henry jump in surprise.

It fell back to the surface noisily, hot rain that steamed across the lake in thick clouds.

“An excellent barrier to repel oncoming enemies,” his tutor said, sounding quite pleased. “Or to cook a fish supper, of course.”

She glanced at Henry, the corners of her mouth turned up a little. “Water can also … fix,” she said, flicking her fingers at him as though shaking off droplets.

Bands of blue ice flew suddenly from her hands, mini-snowstorms which rushed towards Henry in a swift blur. They knocked the boy from his feet, and Robin watched in shock as his friend was lifted from his feet and slammed unceremoniously against the ruined folly walls, some ten feet in the air. When Calypso daintily lowered her hands, Henry had been fixed to the wall, thick and jagged bands of solid ice pinning him in place at the wrists and ankles as surely as iron manacles.

“Hey!” Robin protested as Henry wheezed.

“Bloody … hell,” Henry spluttered, looking furious, although his yellow swimming cap made him look rather ridiculously like a red-faced gnome. “Bit of … warning … next time … please.”

“See,” the nymph told Robin, utterly ignoring Henry, pinned like an angry butterfly. “Water exists in many states, steam, liquid and ice, and has as many uses.”

“This is really, really cold,” Henry’s voice came politely from behind Robin.

“Can you let him down?” Robin asked. His tutor held out her hands, palm upwards. There was a shimmer, and a long, wickedly sharp spear of ice appeared in them, as tall as Robin himself. “Ice is best for combat,” she confided in him. “You can pierce and slash as hard as any steel could. Once you have your enemy caught,” she glanced, unconcerned, at Henry. “Evisceration is a simple matter.”