by Sonia Faruqi
Where was Izar? Could he not hear her? Or could he hear her but didn’t care?
Eliphus thrust his dagger forward. Coralline drew her ribs inward; the point of the dagger landed on her navel, just a hair’s breadth away from drawing blood. It split into two—Coralline blinked hard, and it became one again. A wave of dizziness was sweeping over her, clouding her vision. Her shoulders sagged, and her vertebrae went limp. She no longer had the strength to continue to flick her tailfin against the desk.
Eliphus clasped the hem of her bodice with his thumb and forefinger and started cutting upward. The cloud-white strings gave way one after another, as he undressed her stitch by stitch. When he was halfway up, his hand landed on her belly from underneath her loosened bodice. His fingers toyed with her navel, then traced each of her lower ribs.
The door flew open.
Izar entered the room, his gaze flying from Eliphus to Sparus to Coralline. “You can take your turn with her after us,” Eliphus said, turning toward him, dagger in hand.
Coralline’s lips were the crimson color of bitten apples, Izar saw, and her eyes were drowsy and staring, their expression shell-shocked. Tears sprawled thickly over her lashes, making him think of raindrops over window panes. When her hair had been up in a bun yesterday, she’d been pretty; now, with her hair falling to her waist like a blanket of darkest night, she was striking.
The merman behind her, the carrot, sneered at Izar as he placed a hand on her belly and tugged her against him.
Blood pounded into Izar’s eyes, turning them bloodshot, and streamed into his hands, which folded into fists. He would kill both brothers, even if it killed him.
He focused his attention on the cantaloupe, whose sideways smirk made his mouth look like a centipede. Izar darted to him, his fists extended before him. The plump arm thrust forth with the dagger, flesh swaying like a loose rope. Izar leaned back at the waist—the dagger slashed through the waters where his neck had just been.
Izar punched in the direction of the cantaloupe’s face. The merman skirted out of the way. His dagger flashed forward again, toward Izar’s chest—it tore off one of the baby’s-ear shells. The dagger approached Izar’s face. Izar knocked the cantaloupe’s hand with an elbow, and the dagger slipped out of his grasp. On land, it would have clattered to the floor, but in the water, it floated between their faces. The cantaloupe’s hand shot out for it, as did Izar’s. Izar’s reached first. Clasping the hilt of the dagger, he faced the cantaloupe. The cantaloupe started to retreat cautiously through the room, but Izar put the dagger aside, on a corner of the dresser. He was still planning to kill the cantaloupe, but not yet—he would punish him first.
The carrot flung Coralline aside. She would have hit her head on the desk had she not placed her hands in front of her. Her wrists were pale blue from their constriction, Izar saw, and her eyes formed large, frantic coins in her face.
Turning back to the cantaloupe, Izar punched him in the gut. The big belly wobbled, and the merman slid aside, gasping. The carrot took his brother’s place. He jabbed at Izar, first with his right fist, then his left. Izar retreated slightly. Appearing emboldened by Izar’s withdrawal, the carrot advanced and gave Izar the opportunity he’d been waiting for: Just as the carrot was about to level his next punch, Izar grabbed him by the scruff of the neck and slammed his head on the dresser. A crack sounded, whether of his head or the dresser, Izar didn’t know.
Izar slammed the carrot’s head on the dresser again, harder.
“We’ll go!” said the cantaloupe, putting his hands up. “We’re sorry. But don’t kill my brother!”
“Don’t kill him, Izar!” Coralline cried.
Izar looked down at the carrot, whom he continued to clutch by the back of the neck. The lanky merman was now unconscious, his body horizontal. Izar slammed his head against the dresser again.
Suddenly, the cantaloupe flew at Izar and shoved him against a wall. He pummeled his shoulder—once, twice, thrice. Streaks of pain radiated through Izar, as though an iron rod were branding his bone, sinews, and muscles together. Trying to ignore the pain, Izar extended his hand to the dresser. His fingers found the dagger, grasped its hilt. He slashed it toward the cantaloupe’s face.
The cantaloupe leapt off Izar, started to retreat again. Izar lunged toward him, but Coralline caught Izar’s arm. “Don’t kill them!” she pleaded.
Her grasp on his arm was like a parrot’s claws on a branch. The grasp did not loosen easily, but, managing to shake it off, Izar cornered the cantaloupe against a wall. He jabbed the dagger toward the fleshy neck. But a pair of hands stayed him again. This time, their grip on his arm was not a parrot’s but an eagle’s. The eagle compelled the tip of the dagger to stop at a vein in the cantaloupe’s neck, just a hair’s breadth away from slicing the neck open. “Let’s not stoop to their level,” she implored.
Izar flung himself off the cantaloupe. The merman sidled away, clutching his throat. He grabbed his still-unconscious brother by the elbow and hurried out the door.
Coralline’s hands fumbled to close the folds of her corset over herself. Appearing to concede defeat, for the strings were in tatters, she bolted to the bed. Izar was aware of her crying not through any sound but because, with her loosened corset, much of her back was visible, and he could see her individual vertebrae shifting like waves. “Constables are here, looking for me,” she told him in a muffled voice from over her shoulder. “They think I killed Tang. We have to leave.”
“I’ll be back with my bag,” Izar said. With a hand on his throbbing shoulder, he left for his room.
There seemed a gap between Coralline’s mind and body: Her mind realized Eliphus and Sparus’s violation was over, but her body didn’t seem to quite believe it. Her teeth chattered, and tremors vibrated through her ribs.
She heard a dual thump. The sound came from the window in the corridor outside her door. It would be Pavonis—he must have located a back door. Coralline longed to snuggle under the blanket, to fall into a long sleep, but his tail continued to clobber the wall, insistent, impossible to ignore. Dragging her tailfin over the side of the bed, she sat up, but her back continued to slouch like a snail’s, and her shoulders formed listless triangles.
She straightened with effort and shifted slowly to the dresser. Fumbling through the contents of her satchel, she pulled out the most conservative of the bodices she’d brought with her: a heavy, durable scarlet piece with elbow-length sleeves and a high, rounded neckline. She donned it numbly and buttoned the column of large beige pitted murex shells that ran down its center.
She stashed the remains of her sky-blue bodice at the bottom of her satchel. She wished she hadn’t worn Ecklon’s favorite bodice today; she wished she’d worn anything but. Propriety and tradition were important values to Ecklon. What would he think if he saw her now? Certainly, if his mother, Epaulette, ever came to learn of what had happened, she would insist on canceling the wedding. Coralline clutched the rose petal tellin shell at her throat anxiously.
She glanced at herself in the mirror. Her shoulders looked as stiff as though pins were embedded in the blades, and her face looked stricken—and struck. An angry gray smudge was forming beneath her right earlobe, a souvenir of Eliphus’s backhand across her jaw. Coralline wound her hair into a long side braid and curled it up over her ear to conceal the mark. She was fortunate there was no blood anywhere on her, for Pavonis would otherwise detect something to be the matter as soon as he saw her. She couldn’t bear to tell anyone, not even him. Only Izar would know, because he’d been there.
Coralline started to slip away from the mirror, but a glint on the floor caught her eye. Eliphus’s dagger. She bent down to pick it up, discerning her reflection in it as a faint, frowning wedge. She rotated the dagger between her fingers. It was such a simple implement—just larger than her hand, its hilt carved of sandstone—but whoever held it wielded power. She’d made the mistake of leaving her home without a dagger; she wouldn’t make the mistake of leaving
this dagger behind. If ever she were assaulted again, she would not hesitate to kill. She was accused for murder; if necessary, she would live up to the charge.
Coralline often knew how ill a patient was as soon as the patient swam through the door; Ecklon often knew how difficult a murder case would be as soon as he swam through the door of the murder scene. This would be a difficult case, he recognized, as he swam through the door of Tang Tarpon’s home.
His gaze roved over the half-dozen empty decanters of wine forming a semicircle on the floor. His attention then shifted to Tang’s bookshelf. Ecklon had read two of Tang’s murder mysteries, The Vanished Whelk and The Under-Minister’s Assassination, and he’d liked them, finding them to be full of uncanny surprises and unexpected twists.
Tang’s body was no longer in the living room—it was being examined by the Forensics Department of the Under-Ministry of Crime and Murder—but the smell of his blood lingered. The murder-mystery writer had, ironically, become the subject of his own real-life murder mystery.
Most people wanted to have an interesting life, but Ecklon also wanted to have an interesting death—a death of the sort for which a detective like himself would be required. He wondered whether Tang had felt similarly; probably not.
Ecklon slipped away from the bookshelf and looked about the small, shabby space. His gaze dropped to the murder weapon on the floor, a dagger with a serpent-encrusted hilt. He collected the dagger, ran his hand over its hilt. He had a passion for daggers, as did many at the Detective Department of the Under-Ministry of Crime and Murder. He was attentive to the style of dagger carving, just as mermaids were attentive to the style of their bodices; he evaluated dagger blades on the basis of their shine and sharpness, just as mermaids evaluated fabrics on the basics of their sheen and softness. The merman who’d owned this serpent-encrusted dagger seemed to have a passion for daggers as well.
Ecklon would begin his murder investigation by interviewing dagger carvers in an attempt to learn the identity of the owner of this dagger. Dagger carvers were often ancient mermen, for dagger carving was an art that was becoming lost over time—a shame, in Ecklon’s opinion. The elderly age of dagger carvers meant two things: Their memories were often weak, and they may have sold a dagger decades ago, making recollection of the purchaser difficult. But Ecklon would have to try nonetheless. Once he had an identity, it wouldn’t take long to find a motive, he knew from experience. Placing the serpent-encrusted dagger carefully in his satchel, he extracted his own dagger.
His dagger had been designed by the most elderly dagger carver in Urchin Grove, an eighty-five-year-old merman with arthritic hands, and it featured an eagle ray wing across the hilt, because his muse, Menziesii, was an eagle ray. He had not told Coralline, but, soon after their wedding, Ecklon planned to return to the same dagger carver and have a new dagger designed for himself, one encrusted with the precious olive-green gemstone peridot in the branching shape of coralline algae. That way, Ecklon would think of Coralline every time he wielded his dagger—and he would wield it always to protect her, to protect them.
He remembered the day he’d tried to teach her how to wield a dagger. After some half-hearted flicking of her wrist, she had handed his dagger back to him, making some comment about a scalpel. He had put his dagger away patiently, deciding to try to teach her again after they were married. He carried a dagger and a pair of handcuffs in his satchel at all times, to defend and to intercept, respectively; it was imperative to him that his wife know how to wield the former and stay out of the latter. His boss, Sinistrum Scomber, had alluded to that when informing him of Coralline’s murder charge.
His enormous nose wrinkling, Sinistrum had handed Ecklon a scroll from the Constables Department of Hog’s Bristle. Ecklon had read it and, after a stunned silence, announced, “I’m going to be the detective on Tang Tarpon’s murder case.”
“That’s a bad idea,” Sinistrum had said with a grimace. “Credibility comes from neutrality, and you have no neutrality in this case. Whether or not your fiancée is a murderess, I suggest you refrain from murdering your career for her.”
“Now that I’m tenured,” Ecklon had said, in a sharper tone than he’d intended, “I can choose my own cases. And I choose to investigate Tang Tarpon’s murder.”
“Don’t make me regret my decision to tenure you!” Sinistrum had snapped. “Unfortunately, though, you’re right that I cannot stop you from choosing your own cases and, in this case, making your own mistakes. Who will you choose as your associate detective?”
Detectives usually worked in pairs, a lead and an associate, because, when criminals learned the identity of a detective, the detective’s life was often under threat. Two detectives working together offered the advantage that, if one of them was murdered, at least the other would know the specifics of the case. But Ecklon did not want to share this particular case with anyone, because he did not want to share Coralline with anyone.
“I’ll work alone,” he’d said. He had then burst out of his chair, pushed past Sinistrum, returned home, and hurriedly started to pack a satchel. He’d tried to deflect his mother’s questions, but she’d read the scroll he’d placed on his dresser, from the Constables Department of Hog’s Bristle.
“You have to cancel your wedding to Coralline!” she’d said. “Think of the terrible headlines in Urchin Examiner and The Groove of the Grove once it becomes public knowledge that she’s a murderess.”
“Coralline is not a murderess, Mother,” he’d said, without looking up from his satchel.
“The truth matters in your profession, son, but nowhere else. In the eyes of society, it does not matter whether or not Coralline actually committed the murder—an accusation is as good as a conviction.”
“Well, in my eyes, it’s not. Also, I’ve never asked you this, but why have you always hated Coralline?”
“Because she and her family are beneath us.”
“It appears that everyone is beneath you, Mother, and no one beneath me.”
Ecklon had zipped his satchel and swum past her, but, just as he’d reached his bedroom door, she’d said sadly, softly, from behind him, “I’m still ill from the black poison. Don’t leave me, son.”
Trained to detect lies, he had not needed to turn around and look at her face to know she was lying—she was no longer sick; she was fine. “Father is here for you,” he’d said. “And your life and liberty are not at risk, but Coralline’s are.” Speaking to himself, he’d muttered, “I should have left with Coralline on her elixir quest for Naiadum; had I done so, she would not be in this situation.”
He had swept out of his room and to the front door, where he’d bumped into Rosette. She was wearing a lacy, bright-pink corset with a hem that ended at her navel. Batting her eyelashes at him, she’d said, “I made you a casserole set with carrageenan,” and she’d thrust the dish in his hands. Nodding politely, he’d been about to turn around to take the casserole into the kitchen, when she’d leaned forward and kissed him on the lips. He’d drawn back, looking at her with surprise. Then he’d swum into the kitchen, deposited the dish on the counter, and, to avoid bumping into Rosette again, had left his home through the back door rather than the front door. Accompanied by Menziesii, he’d swum straight to Hog’s Bristle, pausing not for a moment along the way.
A knock sounded at Tang’s door. Ecklon pulled it open.
A thickset merman with a square face hovered there. He was the loiterer, Wentle Varice, who’d given a statement to the Constables Department of Hog’s Bristle. It was he who had claimed to have seen Coralline’s hand wrapped around a dagger; it was he who had insisted she’d committed the murder—in other words, it was he who was responsible for the murder charge she was facing. Ecklon tightened his grip around his dagger; it took all his self-restraint to not point the dagger at Wentle. After all, it was he who had summoned Wentle here.
“I’m Ecklon Elnath, the detective on Tang Tarpon’s murder case,” he began coldly. “I read the statement you
gave the Constables Department of Hog’s Bristle. Is there anything else you noticed? Anyone else you saw?”
“Yes.” Wentle gulped, eyeing Ecklon’s dagger. “There was another merman here with her. I didn’t get a good look at his face, but he had an indigo tail.”
Ecklon frowned. He could think of no one whom he or Coralline knew with an indigo tail. He would uncover the identity of this merman sooner or later, he knew, as he continued to investigate Tang’s murder. “Anything else?” Ecklon asked.
“No,” Wentle said, and left.
Ecklon closed the door. He saw Coralline’s small, golden drawstring pouch on the floor and picked it up. Holding it to his nose, he sniffed. It did not smell of anything, as he’d expected, but it still helped him remember the sweet fragrance of her.
He found himself thinking back to their first date, at the restaurant Alaria. It was her favorite restaurant, and he pretended it was his favorite as well, simply because it was her favorite. After their main courses—undaria for her, buttonweed for him—they’d shared a custard of devil’s apron, a saccharine kelp that had melted on their tongues. Their stone-sticks had accidentally bumped against one another in the bowl of devil’s apron, and Ecklon had found it to be the most strangely romantic of sounds. They’d lingered at their table long after finishing the agar-gelled dessert, taking their leave of Alaria only when the waitress had said apologetically that the restaurant was closing for the evening.
Ecklon had insisted on escorting Coralline home. They’d swum in a companionable silence, trailed above by Pavonis and below by Menziesii. After Ecklon had dropped Coralline at her door and was swimming back to his own home, Menziesii had told him that his silver tailfin had swayed in exact tandem with her bronze tailfin, as though their swim together had been not an informal amble but a synchronized dance. Ecklon, who’d never danced before, had laughed at the thought.
