A diving bell was not a weapon or a throne. It was a hardwood lung that dared the water to crush it.
In the dry upper entry hall of Val-Mora, forty feet above the dark, acidic pool, Tomas stood inspecting the massive wooden chamber that had arrived that morning from the river shipyards of Reed Bank.
The bell had begun its life thirty years ago as a five-hundred-gallon mashing tun in a royal grain brewery. It was five feet tall and four feet across at the flared open rim, coopered from two-inch seasoned white oak staves bound with four heavy bands of glowing-bronze. The outside had been charred with torches and coated in three layers of boiled pine pitch, rendering the seams impervious to water.
Beside the tun, Sile Rook was bolting four cast-lead pigs—salvaged from an old canal lock balance weight—to the oak bottom skids with heavy bronze carriage bolts. Each lead pig weighed four hundred and fifty pounds.
“Eighteen hundred pounds of dead ballast on the rim,” Sile grunted. He tightened a bronze nut with a twelve-inch box wrench. “If you don’t have enough lead on the skids, the air trapped inside will flip the tun upside down the moment it touches the surface. A bell that rolls over forty feet down fills with water in half a second, Tomas. And a man inside doesn’t get a second breath.”
