Mervidia (14 page)

“Good,” Lachlan said, before turning and swimming from the room.
In his haste and distraction, he had missed her annoyance at being ordered about. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” he called over his shoulder as he went up through the basement’s trap door in the ceiling, “and I’ll have Zane send someone to help you with our unpleasant guest.”

As the black-haired
seifeira exited the derelict building that served as camouflage for one of the Red Trident’s secret bases in the Ghet, he nodded and sent a silent hand-signal to the hidden guard in the rubble that used to be the second floor. The gesture conveyed that all was well, but that he should remain vigilant until Lachlan’s return.

The
seifeira did not wait for a reply from the guard, as he sped through the waters towards the upper city, urgency making him negligent in his haste.

Lachlan did not see the dark figure appear suddenly behind the hidden guard, nor did he feel the
preternatural cold that slithered into the waters around the building.

Chapter Fourteen

Stupid high-dwellers,
the captured grogstack thought, as the black-haired seifeira left the room. In truth though, he was the one who felt stupid. He was the one who had let himself be captured. The fact that it was a shiny fish and her marked up lover only made it worse. Why the seifeira tattooed their bodies, he would never understand.
The high-dwellers take such pride in being pretty and shit on us grogstack for being so
ugly,
yet they put those stupid marks all over their bodies. But we’re the
stupid
ones?
He shook his head at the idiocy of it all.

“Something bothering you, muckmouth?” the emerald-scaled
neondra asked, her eyes full of disgust. The seifeira had called her Jade.

“Colk,” the
grogstack replied.

“What?” she asked

“My name is Colk,” he stated simply.

The
neondra looked at him incredulously. “Why should I care what your name is grogstack?” Jade asked heatedly. “You’re a piece of fish crap and you’re going to pay for what you’ve done. I just hope I’m there to see it.” If possible, the neondra seemed even more irate after the seifeira had left.

“What did I do, Jade?” he asked.
“I
did
nothing. I never even made it into the palace.”

The green-haired
neondra looked infuriated. She grabbed the tube that contained the jellod toxin and ripped out the stopper.

“Wait!” Colk yelled, thrashing against his bonds in a futile attempt to get away from the ag
ony-inducing poison. “I told you all I know. Don’t use that on me again. Please!” he begged. The grogstack hated how weak he sounded, but the pain caused by the jellod poison had taken its toll on him. He would do anything to avoid it.

The
neondra slipped the slender blade she had used to stab him multiple times into the tube. “You don’t get to use my name. Do you understand me, muckmouth?” There was a malevolent glint in the female’s eye that frightened Colk. She truly enjoyed causing him pain.

“Yes…,” his voice trailed off, unsure as to how to address her now.

“Mistress,” Jade supplied, a satisfied grin creeping onto her face. “You may address me as Mistress.”

“Yes, Mistress,” Colk said.
Inwardly he rebelled at the superior title. He hated the subservient roll into which it forced him, but he had grown used to taking orders recently and would do anything to avoid the toxin being injected into his flesh again.

Jade scraped the toxin off of the slender blade
on the edge of the cylinder, re-stoppering the tube of poison. “Much better,” she said, the sadistic look never leaving her eyes. The neondra seemed to have a personal hatred of him, over and above what most of the high-dwellers had for Colk and his people. If he had more time, he might be curious as to why. However, of that he had little right then. All he wanted to do was escape, back down to the lower part of the mines, where the highborns never went.
They wouldn’t dare get their fins dirty with all that rock dust and manual labor,
he thought, his disgust rising. One look at the bone cylinder, as Jade replaced it on the shelf, caused him to force the feeling back down. The memory of the pain it held made him shudder involuntarily. He wanted to avoid the neondra’s mysterious ire, but still wanted to flee from this strange hidden room, back to the safe darkness of the Deep Mines.

He studied the female merwin, wondering why she hated his kind so much.
He had time it seemed, so he inquired. “Why?” he asked, quickly adding, “Mistress.”

Jade’s lip curled in disgust.
“Why what, muckmouth?”

“I know you high-dwellers despise
grogstacks, but you
hate
us… or do you just hate me? I want to know why. I didn’t touch your queen, I swear.”

The
neondra’s eyes narrowed in anger. “She was your queen too, bottom-dweller.”

Colk
wanted to argue the point of how little say the grogstack had on who their rulers were, but he let it go. “I never got near
our
queen, Mistress. So, why are you so angry with me? I did nothing.”

“Nothing?” Jade said, her voice growing louder.
“You did nothing? You tried to kill the queen. The fact that you weren’t smart or skilled enough to succeed doesn’t make you any less guilty.”

Colk tried to protest his innocence, but the
neondra would not allow him to speak, continuing her tirade.

“What would you have done if you had?” she asked.
“Would you have eaten her? Would you have dragged her body off into the Deeps and had a nice little meal with your kin? Or would you have devoured her right there on the spot, regardless of her husband sleeping right next to her?” Jade reached out her hand, driving a claw deep into one of the wounds left by her earlier interrogation.

Colk winced as new pain blossomed from
her digit plunged into the cut. He did not call out though. He refused to give her the satisfaction.

“Well, cannibal?” she asked, moving her finger around in the open wound, clearly enjoying the pain she was causing him.
“Would you have made a meal of her there, or carried her dead body off to one of your caves in the mines, like you did my mother? Would you have picked your teeth clean with her cracked bones after you had sucked the marrow out and left her carcass floating in the water for the other bottom-dwellers to pick clean?”

The
neondra’s hate made sense to Colk now. Her mother had apparently died at the hands of a grogstack and been consumed by one of his brethren. He had never understood the high-dwellers’ disgust at the practice of eating the flesh of one’s enemies. Better that the meat of one merwin goes to feed another merwin, rather than be left to rot or nourish the common creatures of the ocean. He could never figure out why the other races didn’t do the same.
Once the flesh had been consumed, and the spirit drained from inside the bones, who cares what happened to the discarded skeleton afterwards?
he thought.

Obviously the neondra cared, given the way Jade continued
to dig her finger inside Colk’s tail, her answer to his unasked question. After a time, the neondra became bored with trying to elicit more screams from him and she ceased her torture, drifting away to wipe her hands off on a square of woven kelp. He gasped, trying to calm his body’s trembling. If she continued to torment him, he doubted he would remain conscious much longer.

She
leaned against the wall where the seifeira had rested. Colk said quietly, “I am sure that whoever ate your mother appreciated her meat and honored her spirit.”

The
neondra drew her short blade with murder in her eyes. “What did you say?!” she yelled.

Before Colk could answer, Jade froze, her body rigid and her milky eyes wide.
It happened so fast that the grogstack saw the effect on the neondra before his mind registered a dark-tentacled figure appearing behind his tormenter.

“He said, that your mother’s spirit went to feed a good cause, just as yours will, my dear.”
The octolaide said, his voice quiet, but possessed of a strange euphoric quality. As Colk watched, the neondra’s eyes fluttered slowly closed, and she somehow became…
less.
She did not shrink, nor did she become skinnier, but by the time the octolaide released her from his grasp, there was something obviously missing. Her emerald-hued scales had become dull. Where before they glinted and sparkled with each tiny iota of reflected light, now they were simply a rough green color, like tiny pieces of unpolished stone covering her body. Her vibrant green hair now hung limply in the water like rotten seaweed, sprouting from her lolling head. The most remarkable change though was in her eyes. Moments before, Jade’s milky white eyes had been lit from within by an inner glow of rage and hate. Now they were a dark grey color, like an orihalcyon lantern whose glowing ore heart had been extinguished by some unseen force.

“Master,” Colk said, recognizing Ambrose as
he pushed the body of the neondra aside, a small sated smile on his thin lips above a narrow, pointed chin. The octolaide’s eyes quickly lost their faraway quality and focused their penetrating gaze on Colk. Ambrose’s high eyebrow-less forehead wrinkled with irritation and the nostrils in his small flat nose flared. The grogstack saw that the octolaide carried no blade or weapon of any kind in his webbed hands, only his usual staff carved from bone and topped with a large black pearl held in one of his lower tentacles. The master kalku had killed the neondra with a touch and witnessing Ambrose’s dark power drove Colk into a panic.

“How did you find me?” the
grogstack blurted out. “I was careful, I swear. I did exactly what you said, but someone beat me to it. When I heard the alarm I panicked. I fled here into the Ghet hoping to wait until things calmed down, so that I could slip back into the Deep Mines unnoticed.” Relief, but mostly fear of the kalku, caused the words to pour from Colk’s mouth as he tried to explain himself to the powerful octolaide. “I’m sorry. I’m so sorry,” he blubbered. “I don’t know how they found me.”

Ambrose floated forward, the gentle motion of his dark-aqua tentacles propelling him through the water.
He still wore an irritated look on his face, as he reached out and placed his left hand on Colk’s chest. “That, my simple grogstack, is an easy question to answer.”

Colk felt frigidity
bloom at the touch of the octolaide’s hand and begin to radiate in icy waves throughout his body. He suddenly felt weak, and it had nothing to do with his torture at the hands of the deceased neondra. Ambrose’s magic slithered into his limbs and tail, and his vision began to dim. His heart began to race in panic, as he realized that Ambrose was not there to rescue him. The kalku placed the webbed digits of his right hand over Colk’s eyes.

“They found you because I told
the seifeira’s friends where you were,” he said calmly. The grogstack began to buck feebly against his bonds in a futile attempt to escape, but he knew that his efforts were useless.

“Shhh,” Ambrose said quietly.
“You failed me, Colk, but don’t fret. Even if you had succeeded, you would have met the same fate. Loose ends need to be tied up so that all of our plans don’t come unraveled.”

The darkness slowly closed in around the
grogstack, as the last of his strength left his body and poured into the kalku. Before blackness consumed him, he heard the octolaide say one more thing.

“Your spirit feeds a higher purpose, Colk,” Ambrose said gently.
“Take comfort in that.”

Chapter Fifteen

Lachlan was made to wait.
He figured
Domo
Kiva was delaying their meeting on purpose, probably hoping the seifeira would grow bored and leave. House Perna’s matron had him waiting in a cramped room, full of her busy faera kin, who were
being exceedingly loud and annoying as they procured food for the house as well as an income. They were breaking open clams, as more were brought in by the smaller swarming merwin. Lachlan shifted uncomfortably on his bench against the far wall, but he dared not get in their way. He was irritated at having been forced to sit there most of the day, listening to the endless cracking of shells and the occasional shouts of excitement, as a pearl was discovered and thrown into a kelp basket. These treasures would be whisked away once the basket was full.

He bided his time thinking about his lover Jade.
The thought of her brilliant green-scaled tail entwined around his dark turquoise one… and the scent of her hair as he buried his head into its strands while they mated caused him to flush with desire, a feeling he instantly repressed in such a public setting.
New love always burns bright and is highly distracting,
he thought,
but
I do love her.
It was a bittersweet relationship;
he’d never tell her, or anyone else, how much he truly cared for her for fear of it being used against him. Any exposed weakness in Mervidia would be exploited and usually in a despicable self-serving way. Some merwin seeking to advance himself could ruin what they had. Lachlan knew he was poor and from a broken house. His honor and loyalty only held value with Zane and the Red Tridents.
Jade… well she is beautiful and talented… her house might not like us being together.
He shook such thoughts from his head.
I am on duty. I can’t think of her right now. Stay focused, Lachlan,
he scolded himself.

I need to find out why we were given misinformation about the assassin’s identity.
It might be that Kiva didn’t know herself. I doubt it though, with the true assassin being a faera. Her agent telling us about the grogstack fleeing the palace was not a lie… he was there to kill the queen, but it did sidetrack us from the actual murderer, perhaps giving him or her more time to hide and cover their trail.
Lachlan had many questions for Kiva, and he would not leave without answers. A farmer could be exceedingly patient.

He forced himself to concentrate on the merwin around him, watching with amusement
as some of the clams were bigger than the faera trying to open them. Two faera, in particular, were screaming at each other over how to best open a large problematic clam that would not crack. Despite all their small bone tools and even a shovel, their attempts to pry open the shell had failed.

Lachlan couldn’t stand sitting idle any longer.
The Red Trident mercenary swam over to the pair and softly moved aside the green-finned male with his tail. With a gentle hand on her pale dainty shoulder, Lachlan guided away the other faera, who wore her purple hair in a topknot. The faera looked ready to rebuke him, with their tiny hands on their hips and their expressions irritated at being pushed away. They shut their mouths though, when Lachlan picked up the bone shovel and set it in between the outer edges of the clam.

What the
seifeira believed would be an easy task for him proved to be more difficult than he had anticipated. The muscles of his arms, chest, and lean torso strained, tightening into thick cords under his skin. The mirrored sharks, surrounded by blue seaweed, tattooed onto his chest appeared to lunge at each other as he flexed his pectoral muscles. Unsuccessful, Lachlan relaxed for a moment and released the shovel with one hand, in an effort to brush his long black hair out of his eyes. He cast a sidelong glance at the female faera, who was watching him with her arms crossed over her pink seashell top. Her body language spoke of her continued irritation at him doing her chore for her, but Lachlan saw that her blue eyes were appreciatively fixated on his chest. The mercenary grinned and took her lingering look as a compliment, giving him renewed vigor and determination to open the clam.

What I need is some leverage,
Lachlan thought. He looked around, his eyes settling on the bench, on which he had been sitting. He dragged the clam over to the seat. He used the weight of the stone bench to brace himself in place, wrapping his tail around its middle. Using all the strength in his back, abdomen, chest and arms, Lachlan pressed into the clam once again. For all his effort, the miniscule sound of a tiny crack was all he achieved. It was all the faera needed though. They were waiting with their bone wedges and hammers. As soon as the crack formed, they attacked it, pounding in the wedges, which opened the crack more and allowed Lachlan to finally lever the troublesome clam open with a final loud grunt.

The clam
burst open, the sharp sound resounding off the stone walls and raising a cheer from the crowd of faera onlookers, whose attention he had garnered; the whole room had ceased its work to watch the seifeira aid their companions. Lachlan handed the bone shovel back to the green-finned male, whose face was beaming at their accomplishment.

A cry of excitement erupted from
within the clam. The mercenary looked down and saw only the purple-haired faera’s lavender tail flicking excitedly. The rest of the tiny merwin’s body was obscured by the large shell. She was flipping her flukes rapidly in an effort to exit the pink fleshy interior of the exposed mollusk that was big enough to feed a merwin for a week. When she emerged, she held a perfect black pearl the size of her head in her hands. She turned it in her hands, inspecting it. As the light of the room’s orihalcyon sconces glinted off the curvature of the pearl’s smooth dark surface, every jaw in the room dropped open, even Lachlan’s. Such a pearl held enough value to purchase a decent-sized house. The female that held it smiled widely, seeing her reflection in the pearl.

Through the silence of the stunned onlookers came the slow listless clapping of a single set of hands.
Lachlan looked up to see Domo Kiva floating in the doorway on the opposite side of the room, staring daggers at him. Her expressionless face resembled the stone floor, aiding the effect of her mocking applause. The faera nearest Lachlan backed away from him, as if Kiva had just declared him diseased. The female domo brushed a lock of blonde hair out of her face, hiding her amused smile behind her hand. The gesture gave Lachlan a good look at the kelp-green swirling tattoos that circled her forearms and wrists, twirling delicately down to her fingertips.

Lachlan didn’t remember Kiva having those markings when last he had seen her, but he put them from his mind, focusing on his purpose in visiting House Perna.
Lachlan was on official Red Trident business, and Zane had personally set him on the mission of finding Beryl’s assassin. Kiva and Lachlan had history, but the mercenary wasn’t going to let that get in the way of his task. In fact, he planned to use that history to acquire the information for free.

Kiva probably tells them to avoid the other races and keep to their own,
Lachlan thought, looking at the retreating faera around him. He didn’t really blame Kiva if she had, as devious as Mervidia had become since King Reth’s passing. Beryl had done a satisfactory job in her short year as queen; her machi talent was strong. Beryl had had a vision of a diseased patch of kelp in the seifeira fields that would have killed any who had eaten it. She also was a compassionate enough queen and had obviously cared for her people, making sure no one went hungry. She had not been a strong enough a ruler though, like her father had been, to keep the rebellious schemers in line. Her unsteady grip on the city had likely cost her life.

“Hooray,” Kiva said blandly, her
annoyed tone drawing Lachlan’s attention back to the present. “Shaike,” she continued, fixing her milky stare on another purple-haired faera, male this time. “Take that pearl to the vault straight away.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” the male she had addressed replied.

“Delynn and Aaron,” Kiva added, addressing two more of her household. “Escort Shaike… please.”

“Yes, Ma’am,” the additional
faera said in unison. One was a pretty female with blue skin and cream fins, and the second was a male, whose tail was the murky dark green of putrefying kelp. Lachlan scrunched his nose, knowing all too well what decaying kelp smelled like from his cycles of working in House Nori’s hydrothermal vent fields which teemed with the nutritious seaweed. Lachlan felt a momentary sadness, knowing that another seifeira house now worked those fields. When House Nori fell, its possessions and lands were seized by its neighbors, and the house’s survivors were not strong enough in number to stop them.

Kiva waited for the three
faera to leave the room with the large pearl and the rest of House Perna to get back to work. Lachlan felt foolish, still floating amongst the small merwin as they returned to their duties, but he knew better than to move in Kiva’s house without being told to do so; she had a cruel reputation for eliminating any merwin that she found offensive. Lachlan need not fear her while he was in plain view of others though; it was at night when he was sleeping that Kiva would choose to eliminate him, if she felt inclined to do so.

Finally, the
domo waved him over.

“Lachlan,” Kiva addressed him, once he was at her side.
The seifeira slowly undulated his fins to keep himself floating as close to the floor as possible, so that his greater height did not have him looking down at her. “Come tell me what you want, so I can get you out of my house.” Kiva floated there a moment longer in the doorway, seeming to enjoy Lachlan being eye to eye with her. She then turned and motioned with a green-webbed hand for him to follow her down the corridor to her audience chamber.

They didn’t swim far, passing only a few closed doors, before the hall opened up into a sizable room.
There was a large, throne-like chair of engraved stone, decorated with pearls of all colors and sizes, centered at its far end. Besides the impressive chair, the room was devoid of any other furniture. The walls were blank empty stretches of quarried stone blocks, but Lachlan knew better to think that the walls were solid. Most faera homes were riddled with tunnels and hidden openings, which served as escape routes or places from which they could eavesdrop on visitors in their home. The chamber’s only decoration was the floor’s pale-colored pebble inlay that went down the center of the room like a carpet runner. The lighter rock contrasted with the darker grey pavers, butting up to its walls, and drew one’s eye to the ostentatious chair built upon a small circular dais. Lachlan followed Kiva down the hall and stopped at the bottom tier. She swam to the chair and placed her special little derriere onto the kelp pillow, nestled between the chair’s short yet overly thick arms.

What a show off,
Lachlan thought with no small amount of disgust for the faera before him.
You’re a tiny self-important shark, Kiva. Fine, I’ll play your little game. You can think highly of yourself all day, as long as you tell me who hired Beryl’s true assassin.
As Kiva took her time getting settled, Lachlan’s thoughts drew his eyes back to the domo’s arm tattoos. Such markings were unusual for any merwin other than the seifeira, who tattooed themselves after their Cullings. It was done as a reminder to the other races that, despite being kelp farmers, the seifeira were also capable warriors and were able to withstand the great pain involved in the inking process.

Very few merwin of the other six races got tattoos.
The faera didn’t need nor want them; such markings would cause them to stand out. The tiny merwin were as well known for being capable assassins as they were for pearl farming. Tattoos garnered distinction and attention, neither of which they wanted. Kiva was as arrogant as they came though. It made sense that she’d want to be eccentric, perhaps even getting them to mock the seifeira houses she had helped bring down, including Lachlan’s own house. In her younger days, the domo had started a war between several seifeira families and a major ethyrie house, though that was knowledge held only by Lachlan and Kiva’s employers at the time.

Lachlan thought about
when he had first seen Kiva during that conflict. She had been darting out of House Mauve and had collided with Lachlan, who had been on his way to negotiate peace between House Nori and House Mauve over a food payment disagreement. It was before Lachlan had joined the Red Tridents and before Kiva had become Domo of House Perna. He remembered how she had squirmed in his grasp after he had disarmed her of her small knife. Lachlan had clutched Kiva by her hair and refused to let her go until she explained her presence in the ethyrie compound. She had lied, of course. Lachlan had been naïve enough to believe her excuses for being there and had let her go. The seifeira had been unwise to detain her in the first place, knowing now how lucky he had been to catch Kiva off guard; she was as deadly as they came.

Little did Lachlan know that
just moments after he had released Kiva that the Domo of House Mauve would be found dead in his room with a tiny hole through his chest. He had held his tongue about the faera having been there. When he had captured her, he had not known what she had done and feared punishment from his domo for letting her go. Also, keeping her secret, while dangerous to his well-being, meant that she owed him. That leverage and the seifeira’s rough handling of her at the time was no doubt why she was treating him with such contempt now. She sat quietly on her throne, daring him to try her patience. Lachlan’s patience reached its breaking point.