Mervidia (24 page)

“I’d be married to my cousin?” Cassondra asked, the disgust plain on her face.
“Not to mention he isn’t a full ethyrie.”
No, no,
she thought.
This isn’t how it was supposed to happen. I am not supposed to marry Ebon.

“Possibly,” Ghita said, “Once we get this arrest dismissed.”
Cassondra’s mother’s face shifted from excited to a furrowed brow of worry, which baffled her daughter. The rapid shift in her mother’s emotions often made Cassondra wonder about Ghita’s mental health. The older merwin’s next words jerked the pink-haired ethyrie’s attention back to the conversation. “Someone seems to be trying to set you up for Flinn’s death. A so-called
witness
has come forward, claiming he saw you tamper with the frilled shark pen.”

Cassondra looked deeply into her mother’s eyes.
She pitied Ghita’s devoted look, never dreaming her daughter was capable of such a monstrous act. When her daughter did not respond, Ghita’s upbeat expression immediately soured, sensing that something was wrong. The younger merwin dropped her eyes, partly in shame but more so to carefully consider her next words – that, and she couldn’t think with her mother staring at her like she was.

She is my mother,
the pink-finned ethyrie said in her head.
I owe her the truth, yet I know she will never forgive me, despite the fact that Flinn needed to be removed for Mervidia’s sake. There is no going back after this.
Cassondra raised her eyes from the sharkskin rug, feeling the stone walls of her room closing in on her.
I will never feel her arms around me again.
She was surprised at how calm she felt.
Mervidia must survive. This is my journey, and I will pay the price.

Ghita’s face became a warring mask of confusion, sorrow, worry and horror.
The battle ended in desperate look, with her milky orbs screaming “Say it isn’t so!” Cassondra set her shoulders and swam closer to her mother’s side, crouching before her like she did when she was just a fry. Ghita used to hold her daughter’s head in her lap and sing the most beautiful lullabies to her.
Our youth is to be treasured,
Cassondra thought,
but being an adult means taking on duties, some of which our parents might disapprove.
In her case though, Cassondra’s deed was a great betrayal. She chose the future of the city, of the Merwin, over her own family.
Few will see the honor in my actions until this journey’s end.
She took her mother’s hands in her own, and Ghita looked like she was going to cry, silently begging Cassondra not to confirm what in her heart she already knew.

“Mother, I am truly sorry for the emotional pain I have and will cause you now,” Cassondra said boldly.
Her voice was steadier than she had thought it would be, the younger merwin’s belief in her cause giving her strength. She would have to whisper her next words though, not wanting the guards outside to eavesdrop. If they overheard her confession, they would testify against her, and she would surely be executed. If she also kept quiet at the Coral Assembly interrogation, she had a good chance of being exiled instead of being put to the sword.

I was not seen actually killing my brother after all,
she thought,
despite allegedly being spotted at the pens. I could just deny I was there and sway the Assembly that the witness was hired to lie. Whose story will the Assembly believe? Surely, whoever it was who saw me, his word will not stand above that of a member of the Divine Family. The timing of this witness coming forward, after Iago is to be removed from power, is questionable though. Why did he not come forward right when it happened? Somebody is trying to get the ethyrie off the throne, perhaps several somebodies working together.
Cassondra reigned in her ruminations and returned to the task at hand, telling her mother of her part in Flinn’s death. With trembling hands, the ethyrie’s mother eyed her warily, terrified of what she was about to say. “I tampered with the frilled shark pen the night Flinn died. I told him to go out there to meet with you and Aunt Damaris about his possible future wearing the Fangs.”

“No…” Ghita whispered, her voice haunted and her eyes growing distant.

“You may not understand now, mother, but you will,” Cassondra added, holding onto a tiny thread of the familial rope she had probably just severed with her confession.
Perhaps if I explained…
she began to think before Ghita pushed her away. She freed her hands from her daughter’s in the process, as if she was shaking off an eel that had struck and latched on to her arm. Her mother did not want an explanation; Cassondra’s admission had caused too much pain for her to hear any more.

“
No!
” Ghita screamed, her rage and resentment at her daughter’s betrayal bubbling to the surface. “Don’t call me
mother
! You are
not
my daughter!” the pale-finned merwin shouted, as she flipped her tail fin, rushing across the room, and
flung open the door. She pushed through the guards, leaving the entry ajar in her flight. Cassondra could hear her mother’s wailing, echoing down the hall, long after she had disappeared from sight.

Cassondra righted herself, swimming up from the floor and regaining her composure.
She rubbed her neck, running her fingers from the bottom of her hair down to where her shoulders met her neck. She was trying to rub the emotional tension away. As the Palace Guards eyed her warily from the doorway, the ethyrie did the only thing she deemed appropriate. She swam to the opening and compliantly extended her wrists.

The
Palace Guard with the red plume sprouting from his spiraled helm produced a thong of eel skin and bound Cassondra’s wrists, his muscular biceps flexing as he affixed her bonds. He tied them so painfully tight that she already felt her blood circulating poorly to her hands, causing them to throb. The guard fixed her with a revolted stare as he finished his task.

“Cassondra of House Lumen, you are under arrest for the murder of your brother, Flinn,” the
Palace Guard stated. Cassondra glanced at the half dozen faces, regarding her with no small amount of disgust.
You murdered your own brother
, the guards seemed to silently scream at her.
Monster!

We are all monsters here in the Deeps
, Cassondra thought sardonically.

Chapter Twenty-F
ive

Long before they reached the threshold of the compound, Lachlan could smell the blood in the water. A strange acrid flavor came unbidden to his tongue and caused his neck gills to spasm involuntarily as they swam closer to House Stonegem. The fluttering sound of torso gills being flushed began behind Lachlan and grew more prevalent. Even Zane paused a moment to force water through the vents sewn into the sides of his sharkskin vest. No one was immune, and Lachlan began to guess that the Palace Guard’s retreat from the slaughter wasn’t entirely due to the presence of the young frilled sharks still inside.

Zane
was the first to enter the house, a spear in his left hand and a spell-crafted bone dagger already drawn in his right. Trained frilled sharks were dangerous enough, but at least they had been conditioned to obey commands. The creatures that had been set upon the faera house had had no such conditioning. They would attack and feed without hesitation, and anything that got in their way was going to be regarded as one of two things: food to be consumed or a threat to be eliminated. Either way, the response would be the same.

As Zane moved down the main hallway of the building, he kept a wary eye on the small, pra
ctically hidden tunnels that dotted the walls. Tendrils of blood oozed from many of the openings, betraying some of the more hidden entrances; a grim taste of the slaughter that awaited them.

It is not that unusual for one merwin to kill another
, Lachlan considered. Merwin were, at their heart, predators, regardless of their race.
But, even the faera assassins, who killed with stealth and poison, aren’t brutal about it.
The small merwin murdered quickly and without malice. They were not mindless animals though.
But this
, Lachlan thought,
is disgusting
. The indiscriminate slaughter of an entire house, down to the fries and possibly even the unhatched, was an abomination. It grimly reminded him of the destruction of his own house, Nori. Yet, even then, it had been merwin killing other merwin, not remorseless animals set upon helpless young.

Motion
up high and to the seifeira’s right pulled him from the dark memories of the destruction of his house.

A gush of blood out of one of the tiny openings along the wall was all the warning that Lac
hlan saw, but it was apparently all that Zane had needed. A small wedge-shaped head darted out of the narrow hole, its open maw revealing rows of sharp spiny teeth, as it surged at the red-scaled neondra. Zane jammed the haft of his spear into the shark’s mouth and brought his dagger up under its chin. A single thrust, quick and fatal, up into the beast’s brain killed it instantly. Despite the deathblow, the shark continued to thrash for several moments, worrying its fangs on the bone shaft of Zane’s weapon until it slowly stopped moving. The captain of the Red Tridents had to reach up with his dagger and slip the blade between its teeth to pry the shark from his spear. The creature’s jaw, even in death, refused to release the haft.

As the mercenary company proceeded down the main corridor, the attacks came with increa
sing frequency the closer they came to their destination. However, the merwin learned from where to expect the attacks. Red tendrils oozed from the hidden openings, puffs of blood that preceded the sharks as they pushed up the tunnels, alerting them to an approaching predator. The Red Tridents pointed their namesake weapons toward the entrances. As they rushed out of the blood-filled passageways the frilled sharks in their frenzy impaled themselves on the mercenaries’ weapons.

Only once did a shark make it past the trident that awaited it.
A stout merwin of mixed octolaide and grogstack heritage was bitten savagely before the shark that attacked him was finally killed. Though it had wounded many others, those merwin had thankfully escaped with only minor injuries. The crossbreed, however, had to be dragged out despite his protests that he could continue; one of his tail flukes ravaged by the frilled shark’s spiny teeth. Barring quick intervention by a skilled machi healer, Lachlan believed that the wounded merwin was likely to lose the fluke, which would make the merwin less agile and less able to maneuver for the rest of his days.
Sure he will be able to swim
, Lachlan thought,
but nowhere near as well as he could before
. It would be a weakness and Mervidia was not kind to the weak.

As they reached the large
sealed doors to Stonegem’s audience chamber, Zane called for a short rest. The majority of the Red Tridents settled down to the hallway floor, taking advantage of the respite to recover as much energy as they could. Like all soldiers, they rested where and when they could. A handful kept watch at the rear and on the few tunnels that dotted the walls of the hallway. So far, there had been no sign of a single faera, at least not in one piece.

“Report, Lachlan,” the captain said, his voice weary.
The merwin under his command had had to remain constantly alert for the sudden attacks of adversaries, who they could not see until it was nearly too late to react. Maintaining that level of readiness for so long took its toll on the body, as well as the mind. Even Zane was not immune to the resulting fatigue.

“Other than the one incident with Colburn, only a handful of minor wounds,
Sir,” Lachlan replied. Zane knew Colburn, the crossbreed with the wounded tail, as he knew all of the merwin under his command. No further explanation had been necessary.

“Good,” the
neondra replied.

“An observation, if I may, sir?” the
seifeira asked.

“Go ahead,” Zane replied,
breathing as deeply as was possible through narrowed gills, attempting to filter out the blood that hung like a sanguine haze around them. This far in there was a pink cloud that had suffused the building, and it was beginning to seriously irritate the merwin’s eyes and gills. Each soldier was constantly balancing the need to pull life-giving water into his lungs with trying his best to keep out the blood and other viscera. Lachlan couldn’t get out of the insidious miasma they swam through fast enough, and he doubted the others felt differently.

“The sharks are
slowing down.” Zane’s eyes narrowed in confusion at the seifeira’s words, so Lachlan continued to elaborate. “The frilled sharks we’ve been killing have been moving slower the deeper we go into the building. They’re acting sluggish, almost… sleepy.” His tongue tripped over the last word. It was a strange adjective to apply to the sea creatures, but it was the best word he could come up with. They rarely slept and when they did they still continued to swim, washing fresh water over their gills.

“Yes, I had noticed the same,” Zane replied, the confusion in his eyes giving way to despair.
“I have seen the same behavior once before.” The neondra paused, his body seeming to sag in the water, as though the weight of the memory was too much and it began to push him down to the floor. “The sharks are meat-gorged.”

It was Lachlan’s turn to look confused.

Zane continued, though the explanation seemed to pain him. “I came upon a shiver of skalugsuak sharks in a similar state once before. They had found a fresh uklod corpse resting on the seafloor. My guess is that the uklod had been killed in the upper reaches by a giant squid, given the way the head had been crushed, and had then sunk to the bottom. Regardless, the uklod flesh had been fresh enough that the sharks had fed ravenously upon it before I had arrived. You know how large an uklod is, and this one had clearly been a full grown adult. There was more than enough meat for the sharks, and they hadn’t hesitated to gorge themselves. I saw the tail of the dead uklod in the light of my lantern and had hoped to be able to harvest some bone or maybe even some meat as well.”

Lachlan nodded.
Uklod meat was a rare delicacy, and he understood Zane’s actions. The bones of the enormous sea creatures from the upper reaches were often all that remained of the elusive beasts by the time they were discovered, usually by patrols far beyond the borders of Mervidia. To find a mostly intact carcass that close to the city would have been too fortuitous for Zane to pass up.

“As I got closer though, I saw that other predators had beaten me there,” Zane
said, his voice losing a little of its melancholy as he told the tale, distracting him from their current task. “I could see several skalugsuak sharks swimming lazily around the uklod’s body. There were huge chunks of its flesh missing, which wasn’t surprising given the size of that type of shark.”

Lachlan nodded again.
Skalugsuaks were enormous, often four times the size of a full-grown frilled shark.

“I quickly shuttered my lantern
until only a sliver of light escaped and turned to flee,” Zane said, “afraid the sharks would see me and attack, but they didn’t. So, I stopped, opened my lantern wider and floated nearby for a long time, just watching them and wondering why they were acting so strangely. Eventually, I realized that they had eaten so much that they simply couldn’t eat anymore. They had no interest in me at all, either as food or as another predator to compete with for the uklod’s meat. Even more bizarre was the way they were swimming.” A perplexed look crossed briefly over Zane face. “Their motions were slow and clumsy, especially for sharks, sometimes even running into the uklod’s corpse or each other. It was as though they were ill.”

Lachlan arrived at the same conclusion that Zane had reached, before the
neondra said it out loud. “So you think these young frilled sharks are in a similar state?”

“I do,” the Red Trident captain said, his renewed angu
ish making his voice seem small.

Lachlan stared at his commander for several moments.
The state of the frilled sharks, and its implications meant that there was still a remote chance of finding survivors beyond the door in front of the Red Tridents.

Zane tapped the butt of his spear on the stone floor twice, pulling Lachlan out of his rumin
ations. The seifeira, and the rest of the Red Tridents, immediately focused their attention on their captain, recognizing the neondra’s signal that the time for rest was over. Merwin of all breeds, up and down the long hallway, readied their weapons, preparing for what was beyond the double doors.

Zane made a series of hand signals, which were quickly passed down the line of Red Tridents,
telling them that he was going to attempt to open the door and to be ready. The neondra reached out and gave the handle of one of the thick stone doors an experimental tug.

To Lachlan’s surprise, it shifted, a thin line of the inner part of the door becoming exposed, as it separated from its twin.
Zane looked over his shoulder at his lieutenant, his expression portraying the same astonishment that the black-scaled merwin was feeling. These doors should have been barred. Lachlan guessed that Zane had only attempted to open them in order to be thorough. He hadn’t expected them to give way so easily.

Lachlan, using the Red Tridents’ secret hand language, passed another message to his fellow soldiers, sparing Zane the need to give the command.
There was something peculiar going on. The only way to find out what though was to open the entryway to the Stonegem audience chamber.

Zane’s chest expanded, as he took a deep breath, and pulled the door
partially open. A dozen tridents, Lachlan’s included, immediately lowered, their coral tips pointed at the cracked doorway.

A small frilled shark swam lazily out through the small gap between the stone doors.
It moved with none of the speed or urgency that its other brethren had, as they had darted out to attack the passing merwin. This shark began to meander its way down the hallway, its bizarre behavior temporarily shocking the Red Tridents.

Lachlan broke
out of the stupor that had descended on his fellow merwin and jammed his trident through the shark, pinning it to the wall. In contrast to its earlier lethargy, the young frilled shark began to thrash wildly, but futilely, on the point of Lachlan’s weapon. Zane jammed his bone dagger into the writhing creature’s head. After a moment, the shark stopped squirming. The black-scaled seifeira pulled his trident free from the lifeless corpse.

Zane jerked his dagger free of the shark’s small narrow body.
As he did so, he gave Lachlan a wretched look.

Lachlan retuned his captain’s expression with a sad nod.
They both realized what the shark’s lethargic behavior meant.

Slowly, the red-hued
neondra turned away from the merwin under his command and pulled the door open wide.

The motion of the portal being opened caused a fresh wave of carnage to be
sucked out in its wake. The water was a shade darker than the rosy cloud that still hung in the passage.

A strange sound began in the hallway.
It started with one merwin, directly behind Lachlan, but was quickly picked up by the soldier next to him and then the ones behind them both, until it spread all the way down the hall. Dozens of merwin, hardened soldiers who had survived their Culling and grown up with the brutality of life in Mervidia, were all making a strange sound with their gills. It was a bizarre combination of an aborted regurgitation, like when a mother stopped halfway in an attempt to deposit digested food into the mouth of one of her young, and a choking noise, as when a merwin reflexively shut their gills to keep out a repulsive substance that had invaded the water around them.