Mervidia (31 page)

Blessed life-giving water flooded Cassondra’s lungs and strength returned to her body.
The ethyrie blinked several times, the light from her lantern suddenly too bright for her eyes. As she turned her head away from the source of illumination, she saw Captain Raygo’s spear on the seafloor, where the grogstack Gotarm had dropped it in his haste to retreat. Her mind considered, for the briefest of moments, darting to retrieve it in a desperate attempt to defend herself, but then thought better of it.
I would be dead before I got halfway there
, she realized.
I cannot defeat Ambrose. My only hope is to convince him that I am somehow useful to him.

“What did you say?” the kalku asked, the apprehension thick in his voice.

Cassondra could not afford to be coy or diplomatic. Her only course was to tell him everything and hope that he listened to her. “Marin is going to be killed tomorrow night. I have
seen
it.” The pink-finned ethyrie hoped that Ambrose knew enough about her family’s gift that he would believe her. “She’ll die unless you do something about it.”

“Where?” Ambrose demanded, his anger at Cassondra had waned, but the dark light in the kalku’s eyes still burned.

“I don’t know,” she said weakly.

Ambrose’s eyes flared again with fury.

“A bedchamber of some type,” she said frantically. “I didn’t see much of the room itself. There was a bed heavily laden with pearls and a headboard.” Cassondra’s mind clung desperately to each detail that she could recall, hoping that something, anything, would reach the enraged octolaide. “The headboard was two, large curved bones with smaller balusters beneath it. The floor was flagstone, and there were strange kalku symbols drawn upon it.” Her brain struggled to bring the memories of the vision to the forefront of her mind. “There was a solid bone door that… that you broke down.” She looked at Ambrose desperately. “
You
broke down the door. I mean you will. You’ll save her. You’ll save your daughter.”

“Who?”
Ambrose said the single word, but the amount of rancor contained within it hit Cassondra like a blow.

“You do,” she answered.
“You save her.”

“Who
will try to kill her?” the octolaide clarified, his tone as sinister as the cloud of shadowy energy that now swirled in his right hand. If Ambrose realized that he had called such magic to his hand, he did not show it.

“Uchenna,” Cassondra said urgently, scrambling to answer the kalku’s questions as quickly as she could.

“And Odette?” Ambrose asked, his anger subsiding somewhat, as he continued to ask questions and consider the implications of her answers.

Cassondra was thankful.
Each question extended her life and appeared to be giving her a greater chance of survival. Ambrose’s fury was beginning to subside, though he was plainly still irritated. “She was being killed too,” the ethyrie replied, hoping that was what the octolaide was asking.

“By Uchenna as well?” the kalku asked, his eyes narrowing in contemplation.

Something is going on behind those eyes,
Cassondra thought.
What plan are you hatching, Ambrose?
Hopefully, she would be alive to see it. “Yes,” she answered. “Odette will try to save her daughter, your daughter,” she reminded Ambrose, “but in my vision she was failing to overcome Uchenna. Odette will need your help as well.”

A brief flash of fury in Ambrose’s eyes caused Cassondra to think
that perhaps she had made an error in mentioning the octolaide’s former lover, but the ire quickly subsided. Whatever had caused the flare-up and its cessation, the ethyrie did not know.

For several long, tense moments the pair of merwin hung silently in the water.
Ambrose seemed lost in thought while Cassondra was too frightened to speak, lest she interrupt his contemplation and incur his wrath again. The ethyrie took the opportunity to bring her breathing under control, letting the water slowly fill her lungs, before flushing it out the gills along her torso. Her mind was the only thing keeping her alive, and she wanted to make sure it was working at its fullest capacity.

Ambrose focused his milky-white eyes on Cassondra.
Though his voice was calm, the ethyrie knew the fury she had witnessed earlier could not be far beneath the surface.

“Why were you banished?” the
octolaide asked.

“What?” Cassondra was momentarily confused by the non
sequitur.

“Why were you banished from Mervidia, Cassondra?” Ambrose asked calmly.
The octolaide was speaking slowly and directly.

Cassondra thought about all the answers she could give about political maneuverings and di
plomatic concessions, but decided the simple truth was the best response. “I had my brother killed,” she stated.

“Why?” Ambrose asked, surprisingly un
moved by her admission. “What did he do to you?”

“He did nothing to me,” Cassondra replied, her pulse and mind now fully back under her own control.
“What he was going to do to Mervidia was another manner,” she explained. “He did not have the strength to lead Mervidia as it should be; the way it needs to be. His mind and heart were too soft to do what would be necessary to save the city. The Coral Assembly would have chosen him, and he would have ruined Mervidia.”

“Did you
see
this in one of your visions?” Ambrose inquired. The octolaide seemed to be weighing Cassondra’s words carefully.

“I didn’t need my gift to see what Flinn was,” she answered carefully.
“I did what needed to be done for Mervidia to survive.” The ethyrie looked directly into Ambrose’s eyes, unflinching for the first time since they had first met. “I do not regret what I did.”

A strange half
-smile caused the corner of the kalku’s thin-lipped mouth to turn up slightly. “Come inside, Cassondra,” Ambrose said, some decision apparently made in his mind. “We have much to discuss.” The octolaide undulated his tentacles, turning around and propelling himself towards the door of his shadowy abode.

Ambrose paused a moment on the threshold and looked over his shoulder.
“And retrieve your spear,” he said, nodding his head towards where Raygo’s ornate weapon lay on the seafloor. “I have a feeling you’ll need it in the future.”

Cassondra complied, fetching the spear, and looked at the gaping maw of darkness that awai
ted her. The tips of Ambrose’s trailing tentacles disappeared into the black entryway.
No turning back now,
she thought and followed the kalku sorcerer into the shadows.

Chapter Thirty-O
ne

Marin swam back and forth between the blocked stone walls of her bedchamber like a caged shark. Her tentacles writhed as she fidgeted, trying to decide how to go about interfering with the Coral Assembly’s seer ritual. A carved bone statue, given to her by her mother cycles ago, of a light grey shark with white pearls for eyes was knocked off her dressing table by one of her errant appendages. She caught the decoration with another of her tentacles, before releasing it, realizing that it wasn’t going fast enough to smash into the wall. The shark bauble was light enough that it floated around the room momentarily in the slight current, discarded in her pacing wake. The octolaide paused, regarding the trinket. It reminded her of an actual predator dipping and weaving, its milky eyes staring at her. The shark settled to the flagstone floor and there she left it, not caring anymore. It wasn’t important.

Marin
had changed her garb several times to give her anxious hands a task. As mindless as changing her clothes was it kept them busy. The octolaide finally settled on a belt of shimmering iridescent scales, garnered from the flesh of some pretty fish, finished off with a small shell-inlaid pouch at the base of her spine. She left her chest bare, remembering her mother’s earlier request that she show off her assets. She plopped down on her pink kelp mattress, hoping that by stilling her body her mind would follow suit.

Time to concentrate.
If I manage to take hold of mother’s spell, do I simply show myself on the throne, wearing the Fangs?
Marin thought, grinding her sharp teeth and grimacing when she bit her tongue. She cursed as the taste of her blood filled her mouth. She knew better than to spit it out. Its scent could possibly attract unwanted attention even in her bedchamber, so she swallowed the foul-tasting fluid. There was so much at stake...
I’ll have to play my game of strategic stones perfectly. With too many different colored slates flanking the Coral Assembly, they will suspect another player, seeking to claim their pieces.

A booming knock at House Chimaera’s exterior door roused her from her ruminations.

On the opposite side of the inner courtyard from Marin’s room, the front door to her family’s compound was by no means close, but the hammering of the large stone knocker echoing across the courtyard tended to alert the whole house. Along with many of her kin, Marin poked her head out of the door of her room to see if someone was receiving the visitor.

Most houses had a guard at their door, but House Chimaera did not.
The octolaide family did not get many visitors anyway, but the fact that the whole windowless structure was securely encircled with protective spells caused even fewer merwin to come calling. The wards would cause bone-chilling agonizing pain to anyone touching anything other than the knocker and tended to dissuade anyone from showing up without business with the house. It was usually only the Coral Assembly that sent messengers to Chimaera’s compound.

Odette’s lithe form slipped out from her bedchamber
. She cut across the inner courtyard and headed straight to the front door. Her tentacles snaked out like lunging black eels, as she propelled herself across the atrium. A school of small orange fish with white bioluminescent spots on either side of their light blue dorsal fin darted out of the octolaide’s way, not wanting to become a snack. In the light of the orihalcyon embedded in the atrium’s ceiling, Odette’s white skin took on an auburn hue. The altered color gave her a healthy glow, as opposed to the matron’s usually cold monochromatic visage.

Curious, Marin left her room and followed her mother to House Chimaera’s massive, stone front door
. She rapidly weaved through the first few columns which created a pseudo-hallway along the outer edge of the courtyard until she was on the pathway proper. Catching up to Odette, Marin fell in beside her mother. The older octolaide cast her a brief glance, acknowledging her presence before speaking the magical opening phrase for the entryway.

“Upeo,” Odette stated.

A blast of water washed over them as the door’s seal broke, the cooler current outside rushing in and causing them to squint against the onrush. House Chimaera’s crest, a descending octolaide with its tentacles splayed out in a widespread spiral, was carved into a disk set into the center of the door. It rotated and the stone entryway groaned, slowly rumbling open.

A single
faera waited patiently on the other side. He had green scales and charcoal skin. With tiny webbed fingers he extended a scroll, not to Odette, but to Marin. Surprised, Marin took the rolled eel skin. The faera turned and darted away, his long emerald hair flowing behind him as he disappeared into the pitch black water from whence he came.

Marin saw that the stamp b
ore no embossed house seal; it was blank and roughly textured, as if someone had simply pressed raw orihalcyon ore to the document. While Marin cracked open the seal, Odette scanned the flagstone pathway outside. The alley was empty, with only the neighboring High House’s smooth rock walls filling their field of vision. A single orihalcyon lantern hung by its entrance, illuminating the menacing lunging octolaide carved onto its surface. Above the door, House Tenebris’ sigil, a single eye, glowed brightly as if it were staring at them, its gaze fixed.

Odette started to wave her hand in front of House Chimaera
’s locking mechanism to close the door, when Marin stalled her with a hand on her forearm. As a result of the chilling current flowing in from the street outside, her mother’s arm was cool to the touch, more so that normal. Marin raised her eyes from the open scroll in her other hand.

“Mother, I must go.
I will return later this evening,” Marin stated. Odette nodded and slid a bone dagger from the pearl-studded sharkskin belt that encircled her hips.

“Take this,” Odette said, for once not questioning her daughter.
That fact concerned Marin, but she was pleased not to be pestered with questions for once.

Perhaps mother really does trust me
, Marin thought, but then frowned as she took the dagger from Odette’s hand.
Don’t bet your life on it, little fish
, she told herself, using her mother’s pet name for her. Marin tucked the weapon and the scroll into her own iridescent-scaled belt.

As Marin swam out into the street, she left her mother to watch her dwindling form fade into the night.
Odette watched her go. When her daughter was out of sight, she retrieved Marin’s scroll from one of her tentacles, the one that she had used to pilfer the message. She had slid it deftly out from her daughter’s belt while she distracted Marin with the loan of her bone dagger. The octolaide calmly opened the note and attempted to read it, but the words were encoded in a cipher she could not discern. There was a single letter at the bottom, as a signature of sorts. Z.

“Zane,” Odette whispered lowly, her voice no louder than an exhalation.
She looked up, her white eyes cast in the direction her daughter had gone. “Enjoy your tryst, but I wonder… what scheme might you also be hatching, little fish?”

Marin swam through the field of red kelp that swayed in the blasts of its thermal geysers. The plants clustered around the vents, relying on their warmth and minerals for sustenance. The octolaide held a small piece of orihalcyon, retrieved from the pouch on her belt, and wrapped it in a spell-formed bubble, so she could hold it without being burned. It produced enough light that she could see where she was going but was small enough that she could also close her fingers around it to hide its glow if she spotted a predator.

The sea of undulating crimson made her stomach turn
. It was like looking at a large dead fish’s exposed entrails, shredded to floating chum by a shark. Ahead, in the distance, she spied the outcropping of rock she was looking for. It jutted out of the field, its rounded grey exterior looking like an expired uklod that had floated down from the upper reaches of the ocean.

It had been some time since she had last
been here. Marin had been a rebellious youngster, sneaking out of her house, well before her Culling. In her playful wanderings, she had met Zane in these very fields. He would also slink out into the night, escaping the safe confines of his house well before he was of age. The two like-minded merwin had become childhood friends and then lovers as they had grown older.

The
octolaide looked around to ensure that she was alone. The field was empty of House Ignis’ neondra laborers, who tended the field alongside their seifeira neighbors. Marin figured it would be vacant at this late hour. It was unlikely that she would be spotted. The seifeira house that flanked the main field with House Ignis was slumbering like its neighbor, it seemed, with only the light from the sconce by its front door to mark it as a house at all. Otherwise, it appeared to be just another massive rock outcropping, rising from the fields.

In stark contrast to the more natural looking domicile, House Ignis was
easily distinguished from the surroundings. Its walls were squared off with quarried stone and its orihalcyon sigil blazed above its front door, two crossed spears over a gushing vent. Both the architecture and the crest clearly marked it as a High House. Usually, only the High Houses could afford to have their sigils embedded with the precious ore. The illuminated crest was certainly a rare sight on the outskirts of Mervidia. House Ignis was the only High House not clustered around the palace, situated instead in the red kelp fields that it owned and from which it greatly profited.

However,
House Ignis wasn’t named for the red kelp fields in which it was located. Far in the distance, out in the open water, Marin knew a mountain rose from the seafloor, which the Merwin called Kopawe. It had orange fluid so hot escaping from its top that it was unbearable to swim even near the waters above it. A few times, she and Zane had foolishly gone to see the strange and dangerous geological feature in the seascape. The last time they had visited Kopawe had almost cost them their lives. The two merwin had gotten too close to one of the smaller openings, that when seen at a distance dotted the seafloor around the mountain with specks of illumination. They were trying to get a closer look at the strange glowing orange liquid churning inside, before it turned dark and solidified as it entered the freezing waters of the Deeps. The rent in the stone had exploded, shooting a jet of the searing fluid high and spattering smaller blobs of the scorching liquid all over them. If it had not been for Marin’s protective spell that she had cast on them before approaching Kopawe, they would have been burned alive or horribly disfigured.

Returning her thoughts to the task at hand, Marin swam the last little way until she came to the
hidden opening that she knew was there in the rocky edifice. She had been within the depths of the concealed cave countless times before. She placed a hand on the top of the jagged entrance and leaned in so that her face floated just inside its gaping mouth.

“Zane…,” Marin called quietly.
It never hurts to be cautious
, she thought.
I may be the first to arrive and some poisonous eel could have taken up residence inside the cave
. There was no reply, yet she sensed something lurking within. Something was watching her. A flash of red moved at the edge of the orihalcyon light’s reach. The octolaide drew Odette’s bone dagger from her belt and pulled power into her body, calling a spell to mind, a blasting current that would buffet an attacker and push him away.

A pale webbed hand darted into the light, grabbing her by the wrist of the hand that held the bone dagger, and yanked her inside.
Her startled scream, and the spell that would have followed, never escaped her lips, stifled by a forceful kiss. Marin relaxed, recognizing the feel of the mouth sealed with hers, and returned the kiss. Strong arms enclosed her, one of his hands still holding her wrist with the dagger behind her back. She dropped the blade, and it descended to the cavern floor, following the orihalcyon fragment that already had drifted from her grasp.

Zane released her wrist,
and Marin wrapped her arms around his neck. He pressed his lover against the wall of the cave, their bodies pushed tightly together. The neondra’s kisses became more insistent, while their pelvises ground together and awoke his member, the scales over it lifting as it swelled outwards. Zane dropped his head down in between her breasts, cupping them with his hands so that they cushioned his cheeks. He turned his head back and forth kissing her smooth soft flesh.

Desire ignited in Marin’s loins, her own yearning enflamed by his sense of need.
He returned his lips to hers, his member hard and pleading as it pressed against her hip. She felt his hands grasp her backside. Instinctively, she spread her tentacles so that they draped from her sides like a long raised skirt. The neondra kissed his way down her neck and buried his face into the base of her head tentacles, breathing hard as he found his mark and plunged deeply inside her. Zane thrust into her over and over until the octolaide’s mind went blank, feeling only him and caring about nothing else. Her black tentacles tightened around his muscular body, slithering around his waist and up the red scales on his spine, her suckers leaving kisses of their own as they attached and moved on for better purchase. Marin had her head tentacles join her arms around Zane’s neck and shoulders, locking his entire body in her embrace.