by Sonia Faruqi
Holding her lantern high above her head, she rose rapidly up to the guest bedroom, knowing that three sets of eyes stared after her.
21
Abyss
Coralline took her own lantern, and Izar took Venant’s lantern from the side table in the living room. They swept out the window just as rays of dawn were starting to lacerate the waters.
“Do you see them?” Coralline asked.
“Who?”
“Pavonis, Altair, and Nacre.”
Izar cast a glance about the vicinity of the Tower—Pavonis was as difficult to miss as a helicopter; as for the other two, they were, in general, too small for him to notice. Coralline’s eyes scanned the waters thoroughly, her face falling when she failed to locate them.
“I was mean to them last night,” she confessed. “I think they’ve disappeared because they’re upset. I would have liked to apologize to them before leaving, but I can tell they don’t want to talk to me.”
“How can you tell?”
“Altair and Nacre can’t go far alone, given their species. They’re probably watching us as we speak, Altair camouflaged, Nacre hidden in some crevice. Pavonis is probably not far from here either. . . . I don’t know what’s gotten into me. I was awful to Venant; I was awful to them.”
“Don’t be hard on yourself. You’re under a lot of pressure.”
“That doesn’t justify anything.”
“We don’t have to enter the deep sea, you know.”
“Venant said the elixir is in the deep sea,” Coralline said in a mechanical voice. “I must get it to save my brother.”
Izar swallowed his guilt—if not for his oil spill, she would not be in this situation to begin with. When he had awoken this morning, he had found Coralline curled to the other side of the bed like a partially coiled snake. The line of her shoulders, the narrowness of her wrists, even the slant of her chin—everything about her had looked as fragile as china, and he had been loath to wake her up, let alone urge a trek into the darkness. But she’d awoken on her own soon after him and had said they must hurry. Facing away from each other, they had changed under the shifting glow of the luciferin orbs traveling the ceiling. They had turned around to discover that they were both wearing gray—dull attire to match their dull mood.
Now, they proceeded in the direction indicated by Venant last night. They traveled just over the seabed, which sloped downward, then started to plummet as precipitously as a cliff. The level of light began to dissipate abruptly, such that Izar had the sense he was voyaging through angry storm clouds. Having assumed the darkness would commence slowly, he felt thwarted by its rapid approach, as though he was being subject to a sudden burn when he’d registered for a slow flame.
But the burn kept intensifying.
Sheets of blackness folded in all around them. The darkness of the deep sea was not of night but of eternal night, Izar saw, and so it was constituted of a different fabric, like air from a different planet. It was torturous—Izar felt as though he’d blindfolded himself, and, with every flick of his tailfin, the blindfold was growing tighter.
He turned his head toward Coralline. Though he could feel her presence by his side in the ripples of water, he could not see her until he held his luciferin lantern in her direction. He extended his hand toward her, and she extended her hand toward him simultaneously. Their fingers intertwined, and a shiver tingled down his back. He asked himself why he’d kissed her at the Ball. He could think of no answer.
Lights appeared and disappeared all around them like fireflies in a forest. Unlike fireflies, though, these glimmers approached him and Coralline, brushing past their skin and scales. In the darkness, it was impossible to make out the colors and patterns of the animals—only their sparks and silhouettes were visible.
“Why are they approaching us?” Izar asked Coralline.
“Because they’ve never seen people before.”
“I wish they’d leave us alone. What kinds of animals are they?”
“I’m not sure. Even if I could see them, I wouldn’t recognize them, because I’ve never seen them before. The deep sea is almost as different from the open ocean as the open ocean is from land.”
Izar shuddered as a creature several times his length, with the silhouette of a squid—could it be a giant squid?—grazed past his shoulder. “Venant told us to seek the light,” he said, trying to focus. “What do you think he meant by that?”
“I can’t imagine.”
“You said you’re the detective investigating the murder of Tang Tarpon?” Limpet clarified.
“Yes,” Ecklon replied. “As you know, Coralline Costaria is, at this stage, the principal suspect in Tang Tarpon’s murder.”
“Yes, but how did you come to find us?” Limpet asked suspiciously.
“The Constables Department of Hog’s Bristle informed me. They received a memo from the Constables Department of Blue Bottle stating that Coralline Costaria was last sighted here, in your home.”
Limpet nodded, his brows scrunching over his bulbous nose. Ecklon imagined it didn’t bode well for Limpet’s career that a murder suspect had slipped out through his fingers.
“We felt sorry for Coralline and her companion Izar,” Linatella said, toying with her white-gold hair, “and invited them to stay in our home. They accepted.”
“I see,” Ecklon said, trying to keep the drowsiness out of his eyes, the sleeplessness out of his voice. He had swum straight through the night in order to arrive in Blue Bottle this morning. His head was pounding, and he longed to press his thumbs to his temples, but in an effort to be professional, he continued to sit straight on the settee and look at Limpet and Linatella evenly.
“What did the relationship between Coralline and Izar appear to be?” Ecklon asked in a deliberately nonchalant voice. As a detective, he was trained to pose questions casually, in order to ensnare others into betraying information casually, but now, his sole goal was to try to not betray his personal stake in the case. If the Laminarias learned he was Coralline’s fiancé, it would affect what they shared with him.
“Coralline and Izar were a couple, of course,” Linatella replied.
“What leads you to say so?” Ecklon inquired, more sharply than he’d intended.
“It was obvious,” Linatella said, “in the way Coralline cared for him when he was ill, in the way Izar looked at her during breakfast, in the rose petal tellin shell at her throat, in the beautiful corset he got her for the Ball.”
Forgetting himself, Ecklon dropped his head into his hands and massaged his temples. He had planned to get Coralline plenty of corsets when they were married, but he had never gotten her one before. It was such a personal present, something ordinary but intimate, worn directly on the skin.
“Coralline and Izar shared that guest bedroom there behind you,” Limpet said.
Swiveling from the waist, Ecklon stared into the guest bedroom through its open door. Limpet and Linatella would assume he was trying to memorize the details of the room, but all he noticed was its bed—the narrowness of it. The loiterer Wentle Varice in Hog’s Bristle had mentioned that he had seen Coralline with a merman in Tang’s home. Ecklon had not thought much of it then, but he could not avoid thinking of it now. He also could not avoid thinking of the rumor he’d heard in Urchin Grove—that Coralline had left home not to save her brother but for a lover.
Now that he was turned away from the Laminarias, he permitted his face to crumble, his eyes to fall half closed, his cheeks to sag. But when he turned back to Limpet and Linatella, his face was again a closed mask.
“Do you think Coralline will get caught?” Limpet asked.
“If she’s guilty, yes.”
A rumble sounded. Coralline could not tell whether it had issued from her stomach or Izar’s.
“Are you hungry?” Izar asked.
“Famished. And you?”
“Same. How long do you think we’ve been in the deep sea?”
“I’m very sleepy,” Corall
ine said, “which leads me to think we’ve been here at least a day, and likely closer to two days.”
Time and space were anchors of life, but in the deep sea, Coralline had no measure of either. The loss of both anchors was, for her mind, equivalent to what the loss of her arms would be for her body. She was flailing, drifting, unmoored, unbalanced. As she looked about her into the impenetrable darkness, she had the sense of wandering through a black hole in space.
She, of all merpeople, was particularly unaccustomed to darkness, being among the few adults she knew who kept all her luciferin orbs bright all through the night. If ordinary darkness could be compared to a scratch on the skin—causing temporary discomfort—the darkness of the deep sea could be compared to a malignant tumor, fast spreading through the organs, she saw now. Last night, her challenge had been to lose the constables; this eternal night, her challenge was to not lose herself. People died in the deep sea not of the darkness outside but of the darkness within.
Izar tugged at her hand. Her eyes opened; only then did she realize that they had closed. Her eyes were redundant in the deep sea—it did not matter whether they were open or closed, for she could not see regardless. Izar also could not see, but he must have sensed her semiconscious state in the looseness of her hand. “Stay with me, Coralline,” he said gently. “Let’s seek the light, as Venant instructed.”
Her eyes closed again, as heavily as though stones had settled upon the lids. There was a strain on her shoulder socket, and she had the sensation of lying upon a mattress of shifting ripples; it meant that Izar was dragging her along by a hand.
“What’s that, Coralline?” he said, juddering her arm.
Her eyes opened lethargically, then widened. In the distance stood what looked to be an immense luciferin orb, blindingly bright, many times larger than The Cupola.
“This has to be the light Venant was referring to!” Izar cried.
Tails swinging, they swam to the light—then entered the light itself. Coralline reached out a hand; the particles of light danced away from her, as though they had a life of their own.
The seabed below the particles looked like a fragmented plate of rocks; through the cracks, she could discern more light below, as though a slice of the sun were hiding there, at the bottom of the ocean.
A rock-face flew open. A column of light erupted—magnetic, irresistible. The light yanked Coralline and Izar down through the rock-face like a rope to the navel.
Izar found himself in a vast bottomless cavern, shimmering with thousands of silver particles like stars in the night sky. The particles’ energy filtered through his muscles, replacing sleep and sustenance. Previously exhausted, though he’d tried to hide it from Coralline, he suddenly felt exhilarated.
“Many have tried to find me but failed. You succeeded.”
It was a voice that could not be detected by the ears, a voice that went straight to the heart. It did not belong to the ocean; it did not belong to earth. Izar and Coralline cast a glance about the cavern to discover its source, then turned back to each other, puzzled.
“I am everywhere, and I am nowhere.”
The voice seemed to be coming from each silver particle, and yet no particle.
“One must experience true darkness in order to know true light. You did, and so I let you into my universe.”
“Who are you?” Izar asked.
“Mintaka.”
“What are you?” Coralline whispered.
“A fragment of a star.”
Izar looked at Coralline, then turned back to the stardust.
“When I was a whole star,” Mintaka continued, “I yearned to nourish planets with my energy. My desire to nurture life outside of my own was the desire to become a mother, in essence. But I could not be a mother—unlike most stars, I was not blessed with a family of planets. One day, my despondence reached such an abyss that, I’m ashamed to say, I exploded. I had hoped to die, but I learned that stars don’t easily die—our energy is boundless, practically immortal.
“Shattered, I floated about the universe, trying to decide where I wished to settle. After thousands of years of wandering, I happened to pass the earth. I saw that it harbored life. Life was what I most cherished, what I’d most wanted to birth, and here, I saw that it existed in absurdly lush abundance. I glided down to earth. Once here, I decided to settle in the deep sea because it most resembles the universe, with its darkness broken by sparks of light. In this hidden universe I created my own hidden universe. The particles all around you possess the power to heal, because every particle of a star creates light in darkness, something in nothing.”
Numerous particles coalesced in front of Izar and Coralline, forming a silver ball with the diameter of a quarter. They extended their clasped hands toward the ball, but it shifted out of their reach. They tried again; the ball moved farther away.
“The elixir is a blessing that comes accompanied by a curse,” Mintaka said. “Would you still like to have it?”
“Yes,” Izar and Coralline said simultaneously.
“Very well. I will tell each of your curses to you alone. Only you will know it, not the other.”
The celebration will be a funeral, Izar heard.
What could it mean? he wondered. What celebration? Whose funeral? Would it be his own celebration or his own funeral—or both? There was no celebration he was anticipating in the near future. It did not have to be the near future, though, he reminded himself: Tang Tarpon’s curse—Beware of the serpent—had materialized thirty years after Mintaka’s pronouncement of it. There was no reason for Izar to assume that the celebration and funeral in his own future would occur in a matter of days rather than decades. The thought brought him relief.
He turned to Coralline. Her lips were dejected, her eyes drooping. Whatever Mintaka had told her, it seemed more serious than what she had told him.
Izar looked at the elixir dangling in front of them. It was so light yet so heavy, life-saving but potentially also life-taking. He and Coralline reached for it together with their joined hands. Izar’s hand was over Coralline’s, and so it was the palm of her hand that wrapped around the elixir, but energy from the elixir transmitted through to his own fingers—he felt stronger even just holding the elixir.
“Thank you, Mintaka,” he and Coralline said.
Together, they ascended through the cavern and slipped out of the blinding light into the blinding darkness. They continued to rise steadily up, the elixir acting as a tiny but powerful torch illuminating their path.
22
Healer
To Coralline, the sight of the Telescope Tower was not just the sight of the Telescope Tower—it was the sight of reality. The voyage into the deep sea had started off a nightmare, and then, in Mintaka’s cavern, had turned into a dream. The only evidence that it had all actually happened was the elixir in her hand.
“Well, finally,” drawled a voice. “I thought my tail might lob off while I waited.”
Coralline looked up to see Pavonis’s great white belly swooping down, generating a ripple that pushed her back. His snout arrived before her, and she patted it eagerly, resting her cheek against it for a moment. “I missed you!” she said. “I’m sorry for what I said to you before I left. I didn’t mean a word of it.”
“I’m sorry, too. You’re right—you don’t need my protection. Your return from the deep sea proves it.”
Coralline cringed to see a dark bruise almost as long as her on his side, a souvenir from the constable altercation at the Laminaria apartment. She pressed her fingers into the bruise—his muscles tensed. “Does it hurt?” she asked.
“Only when you prod it.”
“You’re back!”
Nacre. Turning away from Pavonis, Coralline located the snail’s red-and-white carapace not next to a window, where she would have expected it, for ease of snooping, but in a spot of short, stubbly grass.
Altair favored grass, Coralline knew, because he could wrap his tail around a strand and thus an
chor himself against the currents. As such, Coralline sought him in the same patch, for it was the only patch of grass in the vicinity of the Telescope Tower. He materialized momentarily, glowing orange.
“I owe the two of you an apology as well,” Coralline said, looking from the snail to the seahorse.
They didn’t seem to be listening—they were staring at Coralline’s and Izar’s clasped hands. Nacre’s tentacles fell perfectly still. Altair paled, as though by being unseen, he could unsee. Pavonis swerved his enormous head to study their joined hands with his second eye, as though to ensure the first eye had not become defunct.
Coralline became aware of the location and angle of each of her fingers as they lay intertwined with Izar’s. What were the two of them doing holding hands? And why did it feel so natural that she had not stopped to think about it before now?
“Do you have the elixir?” Nacre demanded.
“Yes!” With a smile that flooded her whole being, Coralline jutted her and Izar’s clasped hands forward. Both sets of fingers opened in unison, and there it glimmered, as dazzling as a spot of sunlight.
“Victory is ours at last!” Pavonis yelled, his tailfin thumping against the shale of the Tower.
“Careful!” Nacre said. “You’ll wake Venant up.”
“Why is Venant sleeping at this hour?” Coralline asked. “It’s not even dark yet.”
“He’s sick,” Altair replied.
Continuing to clutch Izar’s hand, Coralline peered through Venant’s bedroom window. The stargazer lay curled and slumped in bed, his fingers clasping the edge of his blanket. His complexion was pastier than before and made Coralline think not of a green moray eel anymore, but a wrinkled turtle. He coughed in his sleep, so hard that the entire bed frame rattled. She should have examined him before she’d left; had she done so, maybe he would not be so sick now.
“I’ll check on him,” Coralline said, turning her head to look at Izar.
He nodded at her and started to disentangle his fingers from hers. It was necessary, for she would be unable to check on Venant while holding hands with Izar, but they had held hands for so long—they’d been in the deep sea for the better part of two days—that their fingers seemed to have molded around each other’s. As their hands separated, Coralline cringed first with pain, then with anxiety. As long as they’d both held the elixir, it had belonged to both of them. Now, would it belong to him or to her?
