by Sonia Faruqi
“But your father will never forgive me for letting you go, Coralline!” Altair implored.
Coralline vacillated, her tailfin flicking like a pendulum.
“Tell him you were asleep, Minion,” Pavonis suggested.
Altair’s dorsal fin ceased its fanning. “I’ve never lied in my life!” he sputtered.
“That’s your problem,” Pavonis said. “You face two choices at this moment. You can join us on our Elixir Expedition, or you can get out of our way.”
Altair’s tail loosened from around his tuft of turtle-grass. “Trochid rescued me when I was a baby seahorse,” he said, speaking to himself, “and so I owe him my life. I cannot let anything happen to his daughter.” His gaze climbing back to Coralline, he said in a barely audible voice, “I will join you on the Elixir Expedition.”
“When I said you can join us or get out of our way,” Pavonis hissed, his snout approaching Altair menacingly, “I obviously didn’t mean it. You’ll be of no use to us whatsoever.”
“What Pavonis means is that we greatly appreciate your desire to help,” Coralline said hurriedly, “but we’d hate to separate you from your lifelong home, especially at this . . . familial juncture in your life.” She glanced pointedly at his pregnant belly. “And your mate, Kuda, would miss you terribly.”
“Not as much as I would miss her. I regret only that I cannot say goodbye to her. She’s sleeping in another reef tonight, to care for a sick friend. But I know that, given our family values, she would understand.”
Coralline hadn’t wanted it to come to this, she hadn’t wanted to point out the obvious, but there was a glaring flaw with Altair’s plan to join the Elixir Expedition. Pavonis would point it out far less delicately, so her words tumbled out as a stream: “Because seahorses swim vertically, you’re among the very slowest swimmers in the ocean. As such, I don’t understand how you’ll accompany us.”
“Do you think we plan to travel not in leaps and bounds,” Pavonis sneered, “but finger widths?”
“I’ll slip in there,” Altair whispered, looking at Coralline’s satchel with the injured look of one squeezed of the last shreds of his dignity.
Coralline tried to think of any other reason Altair shouldn’t accompany them, but she couldn’t think of any. Shrugging at Pavonis, she helped the seahorse slide into an outer pocket of her satchel. Then, luciferin lantern in hand, she began weaving a path through the darkness.
Lightning rent the sky. Rain pounded Izar, slipping through his collar, forming ice-cold chains down his back, but he hardly noticed. His feet landing as gently as a hare’s, he clambered over the rails of the trawler. He examined the coordinates listed on the card in his hand, the card he’d found in the gray tin on his desk—yes, this was the precise location. If the Third Man was here, Izar would find him.
The trawler’s platform, about fifty feet long, was empty. A narrow set of stairs led to an area below deck—the sleeping quarters. Like a trailer, the trawler was a home, and the secluded, rocky enclave in which it was anchored, whose surrounding stones looked like swords protruding over the waves, acted as a private trailer park.
With all the noise of the storm, the Third Man would be unable to distinguish Izar’s footsteps on the platform. Walking on the tips of his toes, Izar crept toward the stairs, his body partially crouched. Dangling low like a white-gold pendant, the moon cast a long, quivering spotlight at his feet. He wished it would not shine so bright this night.
He paused at the mouth of the stairs. The path down was dark. He wondered whether Zaurak and Serpens could be belowdecks as well—that would explain why the Secret Search team had not yet found them. But if they were belowdecks, waiting for him, he would be walking directly into a trap.
A seagull cackled overhead. He jumped. The tin under his arm rattled, the shell within clanging. Losing his balance, he steadied himself with a hand on the railing of the stairs. But when he looked ahead again, he was facing the barrel of a gun.
The gun was pointed at him so smoothly, so naturally, that he asked himself whether he’d almost expected it. He became conscious of every breath entering and exiting his lungs. Strange, he’d never stopped to contemplate his breathing before—how deftly lungs moved, how miraculous it all was—his life, life itself.
The gun touched the bridge of his nose. The trigger cocked. Izar stumbled back.
Out of the shadows, a giant loomed onto the platform. He had a grizzled beard into which an entire body could have disappeared, and into which one of his front teeth seemed to have. His lashes were sparse, absent in clumps like deforested patches, as though they’d decided to abscond to his beard. Belonging to a man of his girth, the gun in his hand seemed ornamental, like a crocodile protecting itself with a fake set of fangs. With his bare hands, the giant could crush any man he encountered, including Izar.
His brown-gray eyes glinted in the moonlight as flat, impassive slits, their expression so still that Izar wondered whether the giant was even human—he could just as well have been a lizard. And yet his face looked distantly familiar; it was not the sort of face one could forget—looking, as it did, like it belonged on a wanted-for-murder poster. Frowning, Izar tried to clutch at a memory, but it was not even remotely close enough to grasp—it was like a song he’d heard as a child, of which he recalled only one or two words—insufficient to whistle a tune. He hated wispy memories—they were like flies buzzing around his head, irritating but impossible to swat.
“The name is Alshain Ankaa,” the giant said, the movement of his lips barely displacing the thicket around his mouth. “I’ve been waiting for ya, Izar.”
Izar’s eyes widened at the mention of his name. So, he had walked directly into a trap. He’d been so impatient to uncover the identity of the Third Man that he’d arrived unarmed and unprepared.
“Why is yer hand bleeding?” Alshain asked.
Izar looked down at the scrape that tore through the palm of his hand like a straight, orderly earthquake. He had shed no blood other than his own this night. He had planned to kill Tarazed, but he’d been unable to bring himself to open Ascella’s bathroom door and see him in her shower. He’d whirled around and walked out of her apartment and her life.
“Never mind my hand,” he said.
Alshain dropped his gun, such that it dangled at his side. But Izar’s exhale of relief caught in his throat, for Alshain stepped closer, such that their shirts were almost touching. His face was perfectly still, as though even the veins beneath his beard had cooled.
“I brought ya to Menkar that day,” Alshain said, “when ya were a boy. Antares and I were on this very trawler.”
That was why Alshain’s face looked familiar—Izar had seen it as a three-year-old! He had gone to the island of Mira yesterday to try to remember his past, but he’d remembered nothing and had heard only the lies of his biological parents’ neighbor, the drunkard Rigel Nihal. Now, most unexpectedly, by means of the mysterious tin under his arm, he had arrived at a bridge to his past—this giant, Alshain.
Was it possible that, in the state of paranoia pursuing the two attempts on his life, he had wholly misinterpreted the tin? Could it be that the man who’d placed the tin on his desk was not an enemy but a friend? After all, the card with coordinates had led him here; the half-shell could be construed as a tool to defend oneself rather than a threat; as for the amber scroll, although he had no means to decipher it yet, perhaps it contained a helpful message. Feeling suddenly better, Izar straightened his shoulders.
“Thank you for helping save me that night,” Izar said. “Can you tell me more about that night?”
“I can take ya to the area where we found ya. Do ya want to go?”
Izar looked up at the sky, but he could make it out just barely, for rain was lashing his eyes. The clouds were emptying bucket upon bucket over the ocean, and he was as soaked as though he was sitting in a bathtub. There was a fury to the night, a challenge to its tempest. To set forth on a night like this, even on a ship much la
rger and sturdier than Alshain’s, would be dangerous. And Alshain, a giant with a gun, could not be said to inspire trust. He could easily shoot Izar and hurl his body overboard. But Izar needed to know—all his life, he’d wanted to know who he was, how Antares had found him in the ocean, how he’d come to acquire the scar along his jaw. Maybe by going to the stretch of water where Antares and Alshain had found him, he would remember something.
“Let’s go,” he said.
11
Salt and Sea
I’m nauseous,” Altair moaned.
Coralline looked down at her side. The strap of her satchel lay tight and diagonal over her torso, the satchel itself at her hip, as she swam horizontally. She lowered her luciferin lantern over the satchel’s outer pocket. Altair looked a dull, sickly brown. She patted his star-shaped coronet gently and then returned the lantern in front of her, but it was too late: Her forehead bumped into Pavonis’s tailfin. He muttered irritably, but she found the collision comforting—it showed her physically that, even though she could make out no more than his size and shape in the dark, he was there with her.
He was navigating the way to the Elnath Mansion, his tail swerving sharply around houses. The swim would have been faster had they been traveling in the waters above Urchin Grove instead of weaving among the village’s homes, but they’d found earlier that black poison was more concentrated in higher waters. They’d consequently sought the safety of the seabed, notwithstanding that it was darker there, hundreds of feet below the waves at night, and the swim would take longer because of all the maneuvering.
They hadn’t counted on being lost, though, which Coralline now had to admit to herself that they were. The swim to the Mansion should have taken half an hour, but they’d already been out at least two hours by her estimation. Pavonis, an unerring navigator by day, was a poor navigator by night. It was not his vision—he could see at night, even if not as well as during the day, and he could see better than merpeople—but it was the fact that he, unlike most sharks, liked to navigate in part based on the sun, as it traveled from east to west, and he got confused about direction once that compass was gone. Yes, like other sharks, he relied on a whole slew of other data as well—currents, temperatures, smells, mental maps, magnetic fields—but the sun was his favorite navigational tool.
From a shuffle in the sands below, Coralline thought she discerned a brown-striped octopus scuttling over the sediment. Then she saw something glowing directly ahead of her and Pavonis. It was a spotted lanternfish the size of her hand, its iridescent head flashing with blue-green light. Spots of bioluminescence sparked suddenly and intermittently throughout the waters, momentarily cracking the blackness. They were manifestations of nocturnal creatures lighting their paths through the night—eels, octopuses, crabs. The biological mechanism of their light matched that of the bacteria in her lantern: light created through the reaction of the compound luciferin with oxygen. Coralline liked seeing the sparks—they made her feel like she was traveling through the night sky.
She looked around her, at the homes she passed, the gardens, the shops. She must have seen them countless times before, but she could recognize not one of them in the dark. Her own village felt foreign to her; she could just as well have been in any other part of the Atlantic Ocean. She didn’t like the feeling of unfamiliarity in a place that should have felt familiar.
Suddenly, Altair lurched out of her satchel. “Something’s moving in there!” he cried.
Pavonis whipped around, his massive head appearing where his tailfin had been. “You’re just a spineless Minion,” he scoffed, “spooked by everything.”
But Coralline felt it, too—a minor movement against her hip. And Pavonis heard it—a jangle from within her satchel, as though something was traveling over her pouch of shells.
“Open it,” Pavonis commanded.
“But what if there’s a snake inside?” Coralline said, trembling.
All sea snakes were venomous. They were never muses, in part because of their venom and in part because of their proclivity for the surface—as marine reptiles, they breathed air rather than water.
“We have to find out,” Pavonis insisted.
Holding the satchel away from her, Coralline unzipped it quickly. Tentacles came waggling out above a red-and-white scotch bonnet carapace. It was her mother’s muse, Nacre. Coralline would have preferred a snake, for Nacre’s tongue was more venomous still. “How did you get inside my satchel?” Coralline asked.
“My last recollection is of having been curled up in one of your corsets.”
Coralline had tossed a handful of corsets into her satchel and must have neglected to notice Nacre among them. “Why were you in my bedroom to begin with?” she demanded.
“I was snooping, of course.”
“That’s unacceptable—”
“Why are we out in the middle of the night like hooligans—even the Pole Dancer?” Nacre interrupted, in the imperious tone of addressing a servant.
Altair stiffened.
“We’re on our way to find the elixir to save Naiadum,” Pavonis said.
“I’m not in favor of the idea myself,” Altair added.
“For the first time, the Pole Dancer and I are in agreement,” Nacre said. “Now, Coralline, return me home and place me on your mother’s shoulder!”
“I’m afraid I can’t do that,” Coralline said apologetically.
“We’re not returning home until we find the elixir,” Pavonis growled. “Now, get back in the bag, Minion, or we will leave you on the seabed here!”
“You’re just a big, mean Ogre!” Nacre retorted. “As for you, Coralline, you’re in big trouble. When I do eventually return home, you’ll see all the things I tell your mother!”
Nacre vanished inside her shell. Sighing, Coralline zipped her satchel most of the way to try to create a separation between herself and the snail.
“Things are starting to implode,” Altair remarked, in a voice directed at everyone and no one, “as often happens in irrational and ill-considered situations.”
The Elixir Expedition had barely begun, but Coralline was already anticipating the struggle to her sanity that would be wrought by the three muses together.
Izar stood at the bow of the trawler. A wave shot over the rails, like saliva out of the mouth of a rabid hound. Its froth soaked him freshly from head to toe, plastering his clothes to his skin. He shivered, teeth rattling.
Alshain Ankaa’s trawler was ill equipped for depth, and great beasts were lapping at it hungrily from all directions—big, black-bodied waves with white heads. The storm was rousing them to ever-greater heights like a snake charmer. The sky and sea together formed a single, wet, tumultuous layer; there was no horizon but only a great swath of empty darkness.
It had been a mistake to venture out onto the ocean this night.
The trawler started to slow. Izar heard footsteps as heavy as a bull’s and turned his head slowly, his hands continuing to grip the rails for balance. Alshain, who’d emerged from the cockpit, came to stand beside a small table nailed to the center of the platform. Alshain’s gun lay diagonally over it; he had placed it there when they’d set out two hours ago. The giant crossed his log-like arms over his chest, his feet spaced apart, his stance making Izar think of an undertaker posing over a grave.
Izar staggered over to him on legs that felt as pathetically wobbly as a fawn’s.
“There was a third man with me and Antares that night, twenty-five years ago,” Alshain said.
“Who?”
“A man with a limp.” Izar’s blood congealed in his veins, for there was only one man he knew with a limp. His heart raced—he could hear it even through the downpour. “Zaurak Alphard,” Alshain continued.
Izar placed his hand on the small table for support. “I remember nothing before that night,” he said, “but I remember that night. How come I don’t remember Zaurak in it?”
“Because Zaurak went belowdecks.”
Izar found h
imself believing Alshain, because when Izar had first met Zaurak at Ocean Dominion and they’d shaken hands, Zaurak had looked at him like he knew him. But why had Zaurak been there that night, twenty-five years ago? And why had no one ever told Izar?
“Everything ya know about yerself is a lie,” Alshain said. He gripped the handle of his gun and pointed it at Izar’s forehead.
Not again. Izar’s feet remained under him, but he had the sense he was floating in the air even while standing. His original thinking had been right—Alshain was the Third Man. In alliance with Zaurak, he had brought Izar here to kill him. This would be the third murder attempt on Izar’s life, a successful one. Upon shooting Izar, Alshain would dump Izar’s body overboard, where no one would ever find it. People would think he’d simply disappeared.
The barrel of the gun came to rest on Izar’s forehead, its steel cold. Izar closed his eyes.
The Elnath Mansion’s black-shale walls loomed before Coralline like great boulders. After hours of searching in the dark, it was a relief to have finally arrived at her destination. She rapped on the shutters of Ecklon’s golden-framed window. She knocked again, then again, before the shutters turned to slits and silver-gray eyes peered out at her. Ecklon pulled the pane open, and Coralline flew into his arms.
“Is everything all right, Cora?” he asked, his hands caressing her hair.
She told him about her firing from The Irregular Remedy, then about Rhodomela’s diagnosis for Naiadum. Her voice was dispassionate, the voice of a journalist stating facts, but tears trickled down her cheeks in contradiction.
“I’m so sorry,” he said softly. “But what are you doing here in the middle of the night, my love?”
“We’re embarking on a quest for the elixir to save Naiadum.”
