by Sonia Faruqi
Morena soon returned with a shapely flask that had a wide base and narrow neck. A sliding stopper on top prevented the dark-green liquid from mingling with the waters. Izar lifted the decanter tentatively to his lips and tilted his head; the stopper slid back automatically upon the angle, and a sweet, pungent liquid seared his throat. It tasted like something between wine and whisky, and it made Izar think of his weekly whisky-and-cigar meetings with his father and brother. They now felt as distant as though they’d occurred on another planet.
“What is underwater wine made of?” Izar asked Coralline.
“Fermented sea grapes. Each of the four wines is prepared of a different grape—oval, bell sea, beaded cushion, and parasol—so it’s of a slightly different shade of green.”
Izar nodded. He braced his elbows apart on the table, sitting straight with effort. They had swum all morning to reach this Purple Claw village, and the swim had been equivalent to jogging steadily for hours without a break. Izar had slowed a few times, but the shark had turned his huge head to smirk at him—yes, he’d actually smirked—and Izar had bit his tongue and continued to keep pace with the monster and the mermaid.
Upon arriving in Purple Claw, they’d obtained directions from passersby to the Ministry of Meristem. Coralline had asked to speak with an administrator in the Under-Ministry of Residential Affairs. But there was a long queue of people seeking addresses, and Coralline and Izar had been given an appointment for an hour later. Izar had concluded that the government process was just as slow and bureaucratic underwater as on land.
With nothing to do during their hour of wait, they’d decided to get lunch at Taeiniata, the nearest restaurant to the Ministry. Coralline had deposited Altair and Nacre in a neighboring patch of grass, and Pavonis had rushed off to explore Purple Claw, saying he was fulfilling his “dreams of travel.” Izar preferred it this way: without the three nuisance animals.
He looked down at his dark-gray waistcoat. Its buttons were thirty small white shells called baby’s ears. It had taken him an eternity to do up the column of buttons. He had not seen a need for a waistcoat, but Coralline had said, “No one will serve us if you’re not dressed,” and her seahorse had added, “Nudity is inappropriate and unacceptable.” Izar supposed it was similar on land—he would be unable to gain entrance to any decent restaurant without a shirt—but he didn’t view his current body as his own, so he didn’t care to tend it in any way. Conceding to Coralline and Altair nevertheless, he’d purchased a handful of waistcoats from a little shop called Panache, located around a bend in the lane from Taeiniata.
Morena arrived with two plates. She placed one in front of Coralline, brimming with soft flaps of olive-green leaves, and the other in front of Izar, towering with light-green sheets that he thought looked awfully like lettuce. She handed them each a pair of stone-sticks, which Izar thought resembled chopsticks. Coralline attacked her plate enthusiastically while Izar found himself chewing as thoroughly as a rabbit. Appearing to take pity on him, Coralline placed a leaf from her plate onto a corner of his. Sampling it, he found that it was flavorful and fragrant, melting on his tongue, much better than his bland ulva.
Sipping his parasol wine, Izar asked Coralline questions about life in the ocean. She answered him patiently.
Merpeople settlements tended to be located at a depth of anywhere from one hundred to six-hundred-and-sixty feet below the waves, she said. The minimum range was determined by safety—keeping a distance from humans and ships—and the maximum range was determined by sunlight—almost no light penetrated beyond six-hundred-and-sixty feet, the boundary of the Sunlight Zone. Because most parts of the ocean went deeper than six-hundred-and-sixty feet, while some were shallower than one hundred, merpeople settlements tended to be scattered throughout Meristem as isolated pockets, she said. The rest of Meristem consisted of open ocean and deep sea. Constituting half the surface of the earth, the deep sea commenced at about five thousand feet below the surface (or one mile). Entirely pitch-black, it was almost as foreign an expanse to merpeople as to humans, Coralline said.
Izar concluded that as birds flew high but not extremely high, generally staying within a few hundred feet of the surface of the earth, so merpeople lived deep, but not extraordinarily deep, staying within the Sunlight Zone. As birds never crossed the ozone, merpeople never entered the deep sea.
Merpeople told time in two ways, Coralline told him: the hue of the waters and sand-clocks. She pointed out a sand-clock to him on the mantel of Taeiniata. It was an hourglass filled with fine white sand, with twenty-four notches carved onto its lower bulb, one for every hour of the day. The time was a little after noon now.
He glanced at the menu and asked Coralline what it was printed upon. Parchment, she said, made of treated, pressed sargassum, a tall, common brown algae that tended to grow in thick masses near coral reefs. He asked her how ink didn’t run in water. Because it was formulated from any of a variety of oleaginous algae, she said—fatty, oil-filled algae—and oil and water could not dissolve in each other.
Perhaps it was the wine, but Izar found himself relaxing. Things could be a lot worse than they were. For one, she was not half bad to look at, his mermaid companion. More importantly, his enemies, led by Zaurak, would be unable to find him in the ocean. They would not know he had transformed into a merman. And even if they did know, even if Alshain had told Zaurak, it would be impossible for them to locate him in the Atlantic, hundreds of feet below the waves.
Izar breathed deeply—for the first time in days, he was safe.
Doubt beset Coralline as she hovered with Izar before Tang Tarpon’s door.
The roof of Tang’s house was partially caved in, and the gray walls were decrepit, their shale deeply scratched, as though someone had taken a dagger to them. And yet Tang’s home looked no worse than the others in his town of Hog’s Bristle.
There was a stagnancy in the waters themselves of Hog’s Bristle, a restless unhappiness—Coralline sensed it as clearly as she sensed the day morphing from late afternoon to early evening, the passage of time evident to her in a dulling of the waters. Loiterers were everywhere, lingering among worn shops and dilapidated homes, staring at passersby. A thickset loiterer with a square face hovered directly across from Tang’s home, staring openly at her. Coralline could see at a glance why Hog’s Bristle was ranked the most unsafe settlement in Meristem year after year in the annual Settlement Status rankings prepared by the Under-Ministry of Residential Affairs. The safety situation in Hog’s Bristle seemed so dire, in fact, that even the structure of homes appeared impacted: Most houses had tiny windows, perhaps so that thieves could not squeeze in through them.
Coralline looked up as a shadow traveled above her—Pavonis. He was tingling to explore Hog’s Bristle, she knew, exhilarated by the town’s “dangerous edge,” but she had asked him to stay overhead while she and Izar met with Tang—just in case. Nothing could happen to her so long as he was there, she believed. As for Altair and Nacre, she’d deposited them all too gladly in a rocky alcove close by—they’d bickered incessantly throughout the three-hour swim from Purple Claw to Hog’s Bristle.
Coralline knocked on Tang’s door . . . and waited . . . and waited. The administrator in the Under-Ministry of Residential Affairs in Purple Claw had looked through the Register of Residents of Meristem and had told Coralline and Izar that Tang Tarpon lived in Hog’s Bristle. He had provided them an address, which Coralline had scribbled in her parchment-pad, but she thought now that perhaps the address had not been updated. Maybe Tang had moved. Izar was about to knock as well, when the door flew open.
Tang Tarpon’s hair fell to his shoulders in thick gray clumps. His nose was globular and pocked in places. His scales were a limp-brown color and his waistcoat was so stained that Coralline could not tell its original shade. The grooves around his mouth and eyes suggested he was about sixty years old.
His gaze shifted from Coralline to Izar and back, and he blinked, as though trying to prevent t
heir faces from blurring in his vision. “Why are you bothering me?” he slurred, clutching the doorknob for support.
He was drunk in the middle of the day. Hiding her alarm, Coralline introduced herself and Izar, and continued, “We’re looking for the elixir, and a note guided us to you.”
Tang’s gray eyes expanded beneath straggly brows. “Show me the note,” he demanded.
Izar handed it over. Tang’s eyes scanned it, then he said, “Come in.” No sooner had they entered through the door than he looked about surreptitiously outside and slammed the door shut behind them.
It was good she’d decided to work with Izar, even if briefly, Coralline thought. Had she arrived at Tang’s door alone, without a note, he would likely have turned her away. But as she heard the lock click in place behind her, the feeling in her heart was far from relief. Half a dozen empty decanters of wine cluttered the living room floor in the shape of a semicircle. Tang seemed to have been lying among them, for he smelled like a life-sized decanter as he swept past her and Izar. How could such a mess of a merman possibly help them?
Despite her doubts, Coralline felt somewhat appeased to see a bookshelf on the wall; a merman who liked to read was a merman to whom she could relate. She smiled to see that the most prominently displayed book on the shelf was The Universe Demystified by Venant Veritate, her favorite author. Other book spines stated the name Tang Tarpon; he was a writer, much to her surprise. His books included The Case of the Confusing Conch, The Vanished Whelk, The Under-Minister’s Assassination, and Death by Desmarestia. Their names suggested to Coralline that they were murder mysteries. She herself did not read murder mysteries, but she knew that Ecklon enjoyed them; she wondered whether he’d read any of Tang’s books.
Tang staggered into a chair and beckoned them to sit on the settee across from him. It was narrower than Coralline would have liked; her scales touched Izar’s at the hips as they sat down together.
Tang turned the elixir note over and studied the back of the parchment, running his hand over it slowly, deliberately. His thumb paused over the top-left corner; something seemed embossed there. Holding the note up to his nose, he squinted at it. “P&P,” he pronounced softly. Returning the note to his lap, he looked at Coralline and Izar, and continued, “I believe P&P refers to a stationery shop called Printer & Parchment, located in the settlement of Velvet Horn. I know Printer & Parchment because I’ve had a few of my book manuscripts printed there in the past.”
Tang was smarter than he looked, Coralline thought with a flicker of hope. He’d noticed a logo that had slipped both her attention and Izar’s.
“Do you know who wrote the note?” Izar asked Tang. “Is there anyone you can think of whose name starts with the letter O?”
“I’m afraid not, no.”
“Either way, why do you think the note would lead us to you?” Coralline asked.
“Because I found the elixir.”
Coralline gasped. This was so much better than she’d expected. Tang’s words showed that, at the very least, the elixir was not just a legend—it actually existed! And given that he’d found it, who better to guide her to it? Clasping the armrest of the settee, Coralline perched at the edge of her seat and asked breathlessly, “How do you propose we find it—”
With a heave, Tang started sobbing. His face itself appeared to be disintegrating, the lines twisting and turning. “I’m sorry,” he said eventually between hiccups. “I found the elixir for my wife, Charonia.”
Coralline looked about the living room newly, at all the decanters littering the floor. How could any mermaid worth her salt live like this? Coralline would have been willing to bet every shell in her meagre carapace pouch that Tang was a dedicated bachelor.
“Thirty years ago, just a month after our wedding,” Tang continued in a breaking voice, “Charonia was diagnosed with a malignant spinal tumor. Apothecaries said she would die in a matter of weeks. I couldn’t bear the thought of it and decided to find the elixir for her—and I did. I still remember the moment as clearly as if it was three days, rather than three decades, ago: The moment she swallowed the elixir, Charonia glowed brightly, and her tumor simply vanished, like it had never existed. The elixir saved her life, but, as it appears, it could not save our marriage. We were together thirty happy years, but she left me last week for another merman.”
He keeled forward, his head collapsing in his hands, long clumps of hair falling around his face like dead kelp.
How selfish, Coralline thought. Tang risked his life to save Charonia, and she repaid him by leaving him. No wonder he looked so miserable.
Suddenly, a merman’s shadow passed a small window to one side of Tang, a window overlooking an empty alley. Coralline turned to Izar, wondering whether he’d noticed the shadow, too, but he was staring unwaveringly at Tang, a touch of sympathy in the set of his face. Had he recently been betrayed himself? Coralline wondered. But his features hardened before her eyes, and he said, in an expressionless voice, “Where did you find the elixir?”
“I’m afraid Mintaka made me swear to keep her location a secret.”
Izar muttered a series of curses.
Tang scowled at him. Coralline also glowered at him. She tried to warn Izar with her eyes—Tang was doing them a favor by speaking to them, they needed him on their side, Izar should not address Tang like he was a sluggish employee—but Izar was not looking at her.
Coralline turned back to Tang with an apologetic smile. “We really appreciate your speaking to us despite the difficult time,” she said. “We’re trying to find the elixir ourselves. Would you mind our asking you a few questions about it? You can answer those that allow you to remain true to your oath to Mintaka.”
“Fine,” Tang said sullenly.
“Is the elixir made of starlight, as the story The Legend of the Elixir states?”
“Yes.”
“And is it made by Mintaka?”
“Yes.”
“And is it true that the elixir is a blessing that comes accompanied by a curse?”
“Yes.”
“May I ask what your curse was?”
“Mintaka told me: Beware of the serpent.”
“What does that mean?” Izar asked.
“I can’t imagine. I never managed to figure it out.”
“How do you suggest we proceed with our elixir quest?” Coralline said.
“There’s someone who might be able to help you, someone who helped me. Take a look at that scroll.”
He pointed an index finger at a scroll lying on the mantel. Coralline rose and picked it up. Stars sparkled brightly over the parchment, their glitter smooth and indelible. It was an invitation to the Ball of Blue Bottle, taking place in an auditorium called The Cupola. Coralline knew the Ball to be the most prestigious annual event in Meristem—a gathering of its most successful and esteemed people. She sympathized newly with Tang—considering the level of accomplishment he must have had to be invited to the Ball, his fall in life at the loss of his love was all the starker.
“The Ball of Blue Bottle is in three days,” Tang said. “I was planning to attend with Charonia, but, given the current state of affairs”—his gaze roved over the empty decanters—“I won’t be attending. The two of you can take my invitation and attend instead of me. Now, read the back of the parchment.”
Turning it over, Coralline read the one sentence scribbled upon the back: Meet me at the center of The Cupola when the music ends. She looked at Tang quizzically.
“The merman you should meet is—”
A dagger flew past Coralline’s scales and stabbed Tang in the chest.
Her head whirled toward the small side window from which the dagger had flown in—she caught the barest glimpse of a head as it vanished. Had the dagger been aimed at her? But who would aim it at her?
Coralline trembled. She wanted to cower, to take shelter behind the settee, but her nerves seemed frozen. All she managed was to shield her torso with her arms.
Tang tumb
led off his chair to the floor, his hands encasing the dagger. It had stabbed him in the heart—the precision of its location suggested to Coralline that it was meant for him, not her. But that provided little consolation. Blood was spurting out of him, spewing through the waters, accosting her nostrils. His tail started bleaching, scale upon scale turning a dead white, a disappearing act of color.
It was Coralline’s fault. She’d seen a shadow pass the window, but she hadn’t said anything—just as she hadn’t said anything when she’d seen black poison spreading above Urchin Grove.
“Look at the dagger,” Izar said quietly, next to her.
Its hilt was encrusted with translucent-green olivine stones in the pattern of a serpent. Beware of the serpent, Mintaka had told Tang—this was that serpent. To know in theory that the elixir came accompanied by a curse—to read of it in a story book, to hear of it through Tang—that was one thing, but to see the curse in action was yet another. It seemed unbearably cruel, the way it worked, the blessing and the curse. If Coralline found the elixir, this could well be her own fate—a dagger in the heart, or death in some other way.
Focus on Tang, Coralline told herself. She dug her nails into the palms of her hands to bring her attention back to her present environment through pain. She had to do something—but what could she do? She was a disbarred apothecary. If she tried to save Tang, she would be in trouble legally under the Medical Malpractice Act for practicing without a badge; in that case, she would be forbidden from practice for the rest of her life. If she let Tang die, she would be in trouble morally—how would she live with herself?
“I’ll find you a back door,” Pavonis hollered through a window.
Coralline turned her head in his direction mechanically. He must have smelled the blood. And the reason he wanted to find a back door was that Tang’s body lay so close to the front door that it would be impossible to open the door without passersby seeing.
“Be ready to beat a hasty retreat as soon as you hear my dual thumps, Coralline!” he hissed, before vanishing around the corner.
