Chapter 128: A Bell Rang Underwater

Another bell stroke rolled through the water while Jiang still had no air to spare.

He felt the sound through his breastbone. Green panes trembled in their drowned wall. The tide ray folded both fins and began a turn that pulled the trapped carrier bell, two living routes, and Jiang toward the hall below.

Its first ring had called the animal. This one opened shutters along the floor. ℯℯ𝘭.

Water rushed through the exposed slots and joined the downward pull. Weighted masks swung from their niches. One struck glass, faceplate first, and released a stream of old trapped bubbles.

Whatever the drowned guild had built the bell to do, Gredudande had found a way to make it happen with the wrong caller attached.

His lungs wanted the spill mouth behind him.

The Antarctic bar flashed along one edge of the broad strip. The two-moon line shone beside it, thinner now, with the returning female’s shadow moving beyond the crack.

Jiang let both go.

He drove his working flipper down and aimed for air.

His failed flipper opened late. His body curved past the opening. Water that had welcomed him now insisted on the turn his injuries could make, not the one his mind had chosen.

Jiang kicked with both feet. One obeyed. The bad foot dragged through the stroke and sent pain back into his breast.

Above him, Pava’s coat showed as a dark square against green water.

He missed it by half his length.

Varn’s empty sheath entered the water beside his head. No rope followed it. Varn held one end from the stone and whipped the loose leather across Jiang’s path.

Jiang caught it under his working flipper.

Varn kept the strap loose in his hand. Jiang used that one fixed thing to turn, rolling his breast against the leather until his beak found the opening. Then he drove upward.

His head broke water beneath Pava’s elbow.

Air came in wrong. The first breath coughed water through his nose. The next pulled at the beak split. He tried a third and made a sound so thin the male answered from the brood rest.

Pava braced both palms around the spill mouth, shielding Jiang from the returning current. He kicked between her wrists and hauled his own breast onto stone.

"Breathe before you explain anything."

Jiang sprawled across her soaked coat. His feet felt heavy again. The injured one returned to pain as soon as water stopped holding it.

"That expression means you intend to explain first," Pava said.

He pulled his beak across the green silt.

The first line curved like the ray’s fin. A circle beneath it became the carrier bell. Jiang scratched the broad strip through the circle, then added the Antarctic line and feeding notch where they crossed the trapped metal.

He marked the lower bell with three claw points. Then he dragged one long stroke from its rope to the ray.

His beak left blood in the drawing.

Aylin reached toward him and stopped before touching the wound. "Is the animal carrying the knot?"

Jiang tapped the ray line once.

Valea leaned over the marks. "No. The carrier bell is taking it. The ray is taking the bell because it has been driven into the breathing slit."

He tapped the strip twice.

"And the broad dead road is beneath both small lines," Valea said. "Of course it is. Gredudande likes a living thing on top of its work."

Varn knelt opposite her. Water dripped from the empty sheath he had offered Jiang.

"Carrier bells were not reins," he said. "My master was irritating about that. A diver rang from the work. A ray could answer, refuse, or take another passage."

"What does the lower ring ask?" Hest said.

Varn rubbed green silt between his fingers. "The drinking-song version says home. The training version was removed from every delver hall before I joined."

Kedra studied Jiang’s three claw marks. "Could a current have pulled it?"

"A current does not pause between strokes to keep the rope from tangling."

Varn looked toward the water. Hope made him less careful for the length of one breath. Then he took his hand off the spill mouth.

"That proves skilled motion," he said. "It does not prove who made it."

Hest shifted his shoulder against the drain lid. Green water spilled around one boot. "Can we lift the small routes clear from here?"

Valea set one wrapped forearm under Antarctic white and the other beneath two-moon silver. Both burns bled through their cloth when she raised them.

Below, the carrier bell moved.

Both lines tore downward. Valea fell onto one knee.

"Not while the bell is caught," she said.

Kedra took the two-moon edge before Aylin could cross toward it. Her injured wrist bent under the strain.

"Hold yours," she told Aylin.

"Your hand is opening."

"Then watch it open from your side."

Aylin’s face tightened. She put both hands around the Antarctic bar and stayed where the stone still carried her weight.

Valea looked between them. "When the ray rolls left, give the lines slack. When it rolls right, take the slack back before the broad strip loops them again."

"How do we see the roll?" Aylin asked.

Jiang struck the wet stone with one claw.

The vibration traveled into the water. The ray’s fin answered through the floor a breath later.

Kedra adjusted her stance. "We feel it."

Pava had removed Jiang’s torn shoulder cloth. Cold skin showed beneath the wet feathers. She pressed clean wool over the reopened edge and looked at him with the kind of anger that had spent all its shouting on fear.

"The ray can turn without you."

Jiang pecked the bell in his drawing.

"I know the metal cannot."

He marked the blocked breathing slit.

"I know that too."

Pava held the wool in place until his shaking pushed against her fingers. "Knowing why you will go does not make me agree that your body can pay for it."

From the higher rest, the chick called again.

The male had lowered his breast over both of them. One outer foot stood close to green water. Across the notch, the returning female scraped at the new angle with a beak that could no longer reach her chick.

Jiang looked from them to Pava.

She closed her eyes for one breath. Then she bound the wool down with the last clean strip from inside her sleeve.

"Come back angry," she said. "It appears to be your best organ."

Jiang entered the spill headfirst.

Cold found him faster on the second dive. Water passed the fresh shoulder wrap and reached his skin along the molt. His chest tightened before he cleared the spill mouth.

No active ability answered him.

His pulse slowed anyway, not through Pressure Heart but through an animal body entering water. The change frightened his human mind more than the cold did. A long space opened between one beat and the next while his lungs held the same shrinking breath.

He kicked before panic could waste it.

The second dive lacked the clean wonder of the first. Water had entered his molt. Each stroke moved cold across bare skin under the shoulder wrap. His working flipper carried too much of the load, and the muscle beneath it began to burn before he reached the first arch.

His injured foot trailed farther than the other. When he tried to spread both as rudders, the bad one trembled and folded toward his belly.

Deeper in the drowned hall, the tide ray scraped its left fin along a bell arch while the right crossed open water. The carrier bell hung crooked beside the blocked slit, black strip trailing from its frame into the two narrow routes above.

Jiang struck the nearest bell rib with his claw.

Aylin and Kedra felt the answer through the floor. The Antarctic white and two-moon silver both loosened.

The ray rolled left.

Jiang rode the released current under its fin. His working flipper gave him speed. His failed one remained close to his body and turned the approach into a long curve.

He aimed that curve past the carrier bell instead of fighting it.

Bent-Toe called from inside the bronze.

The sound reached him through water with both voices intact and neither alive. It repeated the last clean answer Gredudande had taken before the storm killed him.

The ray’s fin struck the arch.

The bell answered with the chick’s first cry.

Green shutters opened farther below. Their current pulled the false call through every bell rib in the hall. The sound arrived from above, below, and inside the bronze beside the ray’s wound.

Jiang could not tell which direction the animal would treat as escape. That uncertainty belonged to the living ray. Gredudande answered it by ringing the same dead direction again.

Above, the newborn lifted its head beneath the male and gave a hungrier, rougher call. Gredudande repeated the older one through the carrier bell.

The ray shuddered between the two sounds.

Its body had no reason to understand emperor calls. Pain gave every ringing the same meaning.

Jiang reached the outer bronze loop.

The loop had once allowed the carrier frame to move with the ray’s fin. The broad strip pinned it backward. Each roll tightened the black road across the breathing slit and pressed a square bronze corner into scarred flesh.

Jiang could not bite through the metal. His feet found the lower loop while his working flipper pressed the frame. He needed the ray to roll before his breath or beak failed.

Above, Jiang’s claw strike faded.

Kedra took the two-moon line too soon.

Aylin felt her movement through the broad strip and released Antarctic tension before the pull could close. The white bar dropped hard enough to cut her palm. She kept it from looping the silver strand.

"That was my error," Kedra said.

"Make a different one next time."

They recovered without touching.

Below, the ray opened its freed breathing slit and turned away from the next bell strike.

Jiang pushed with both feet.

The bronze loop slid along the broad strip. It caught at the corner, moved the width of his claw, and stopped.

Black filament came out from under the frame.

Current swept the filament sideways. The dead-call road stretched it into the shape of a hand, still remembering the body that had fallen with it. Five dark lengths closed around the carrier bell.

Jiang drove his good foot between them.

The false fingers folded over his claws. Cold pressure climbed the leg. Gredudande played Bent-Toe again, then the chick, then one fixed piece of White-Nape’s old answer.

On the Antarctic line, living White-Nape changed.

The false hand tightened around the version that did not.

Jiang used the difference.

He stopped fighting the grip and waited for the live call to pull white tension across the knot. When the old recording remained still, a narrow gap opened between dead bronze and the ray’s changing turn.

Jiang shoved the outer loop into it.

The carrier frame tore free on one side.

The ray’s left breathing slit opened. Water crossed it without metal. Its whole body bucked as airless relief became movement.

Jiang saw the route knot before the fin struck him.

Antarctic white and two-moon silver passed over one another beneath the broad strip. The dead road had cinched both around the carrier bell’s inner stem. Freeing that knot would save the small lines.

The bronze corner remained buried in the ray.

Jiang had enough breath for one problem.

He left the routes and went for the wound.

His beak could not take another hard pull. He wedged the working flipper under the loose carrier frame and used the ray’s next turn to lift. Bronze peeled away from scar tissue. Blood spread around them.

The ray drove downward, away from the pain.

Its choice pulled the half-freed carrier frame across the submerged arch. Bronze hit bronze. The lower bell rang without the green rope moving.

Above the waterline, the loose drain stone lifted in the same shape as the carrier frame. Old Tideglass channels joined the two pieces of guild work. When one opened below, its mate opened under the brood rest.

Its fin missed Jiang. The current did not.

He tumbled through the opened bell arch. A drowned rib broke loose behind him and fell across the passage to the spill mouth.

Jiang righted himself beneath the lower hall.

The ray had one open breathing side and a carrier frame hanging from the other. Between them, the route knot pulled tighter.

Above, the drain lid rose under Hest.

Water burst around his legs and crossed the higher bronze rest. Pava threw her body against the male’s wet side. Varn caught the salt brick before it washed away. Aylin and Kedra held their separate strands while Valea’s burned arms shook between them.

Green water climbed over the male’s windward foot.

Under his brood fold, the chick gave one weak call and received no answer from Jiang below.