you been all evening? Did you stay out all this time?”
“We had a—it will be easier if I show you. Come on.” He held out his hand. “Come on. What I found can even make you forget about your uncle.”
She extended her hand but said, “I don’t think so.”
He found her fingers in the dark and drew her out of the boat. “Just wait.”
She shushed him then. They both stood listening, hardly breathing. She decided that she hadn’t heard anything after all.
Tastion, unable to keep still, began whispering to her. “We found it this afternoon. The net got caught the way it does sometimes. It wouldn’t come loose and I had to dive down to it.” He pulled her out of the boathouse while he babbled softly. “But it wasn’t caught. I swam all the way to the bottom, and there was this thing in the net. We’d been dragging it along, just like…like I’m going to drag you if you don’t speed your step.”
She looked around, back toward the house. There was no one there. Absently she asked him, “What was it?”
“That’s where I’m taking you. You’ll see.”
Soon she knew they were going to the cavern. The entrance was dark. Leodora complained that they’d brought no lamp.
“You won’t need one,” he told her, and tugged her inside. She thought he meant they would be kissing in the dark. But as her eyes adjusted, she realized that the deeper cavern was lit by a feeble bluish glow. “We put it in here,” Tastion explained, “to keep it from drying out too much. It seemed only right that it should stay with the fish. It took four of us with two nets to lift it from the bottom, and all the afternoon for our dragons to haul it back.”
They rounded the bend. The whole chamber was visible. The stone table where she cut fish was outlined in a blue halo. The source of the light lay hidden behind it.
She tugged free. Tastion released her hand, and she strode boldly to the edge of the stone. What she discovered made her inhale sharply and step back. She bumped against him. He was looking over her shoulder.
A body lay on the cavern floor.
It was not a normal—not a living—body. Its luminescence she had seen before: the color of the ocean at night when tiny sea creatures clustered, darting and swaying. The color of their radiance. It seemed to emerge from within the shell, the husk that had condensed, making the features into shadows, not unlike the puppets on their sticks when the lantern shone through them; but this body wasn’t hammered fish bladder. It was a crust—a coral grown into a human shape.
A coral man.
A lump defined the nose, and shallow cavities the eye sockets. Water pooled in them, creating an illusion of wet and shiny eyes rolled back in its head. The mouth might have been invisible were it not for a darker vein through the coral there. Swirls and ridges of accretion created the illusion of clothing, too. Maybe, she thought, beneath the crust there lay a statue, and the coral had merely built up and up over that original form, so that with each new layer the unknown sculptor’s work became less defined. Maybe…But it had no discernible feet, as if it was still growing.
When Tastion spoke again, she flinched.
“It weighed as much as if the whole of Shadowbridge had been poured inside it. I tugged at the net, but it wouldn’t budge with just me pulling. Finally I had to swim up for air, and I told my father what it was. We found Lemros and Sel on their dragons, and Sel and I dove down with their net and looped it beneath our own, and then the four of us hauled it. The dragons never worked so hard. Then in the shallows we four stood on the beach, and others came and helped, and we pulled it up out of the water. We unfolded the nets to see it, and then we just marveled. No one knew what they were looking at any more than you do. But here’s something more peculiar, as if the look of it weren’t enough. After it had lain on the beach awhile, when we went to pick it up—” He stepped around her and cupped his hands under the figure’s head. “—it weighed hardly anything at all.” And so saying, he lifted it upright as if it were a stick of driftwood.