Mervidia (25 page)

Lachlan felt his own throat threaten to seize up, but he managed, barely, to keep his instinctive reaction under control.

Zane’s neck muscles strained, as he labored through the same process. The neondra, however, recovered more quickly than his merwin. He flicked his bright red tail, propelling himself slowly into the room.

A score of the
young frilled sharks swam lethargically around the room, circling in slow lazy paths through the remains of the desperate faera who had made it this far. The Stonegem audience chamber was vast, easily the largest room in the entire compound. There was not a corner of the room, not a hand span of the chamber that wasn’t heavy with the remains of the faera who had been slaughtered there in their place of last refuge. The room was supposed to have been their last bastion of safety within their home, but instead had become an abattoir. As the meat-gorged sharks meandered about, the loose scales that had been torn from the faeras’ tiny bodies formed grotesquely beautiful spirals in the sharks’ wake.

On the floor in front of Zane, Lachlan saw the thick coral bar that had been used to hold the doors shut.
Finding themselves trapped in the chamber with the frilled sharks, some of the captive faera, in their desperation, had removed the rod to try and escape. It looked as if unbarring the door was as far as they had gotten though.

As Zane emerged from the Stonegem compound, the shark trainers were approaching the house, many carrying long spears and nets. Some of them lugged cages hung from long bone poles between them, so as not to touch the stinging, spell-shaped fire coral. It had been these same cages that had transported the frilled sharks from the palace to House Stonegem.

Captain Raygo swam to meet the
captain of the Red Tridents, as the mercenary leader moved slowly through the blessedly clear water. Zane’s merwin followed him out of the building, their gills opening wide, taking in the fresh seawater as though they had been holding their breath for hours. Pink water blossomed out of their torso gills as they purged themselves of the blood of slaughtered faera.

“Tell them not to bother,” Zane said
, nodding his head in the direction of the shark trainers as the captain of the Palace Guard came close. The neondra looked up at the ethyrie commander, the expression of sullen wrath on Zane’s face causing Raygo to pull up short, his tail flipping ahead of him to halt his movement.

“I beg your pardon, Zane?” the
ethyrie commander asked, confused.

“
Captain
Zane,” Lachlan corrected. The seifeira’s emotional state was a tumultuous mixture of exhaustion and anger, punctuated with occasional flashes of irritation and despair. He turned his baleful glare on Raygo. “You will address him as….”

The leader of the Red Tridents gestured wearily to the black-scaled
seifeira with a webbed hand. “Let it go, Lachlan,” he said. Zane’s voice, though quiet with exhaustion, still held a sharp edge. “It’s not important right now.” The motion revealed a small bundle carried in Zane’s other hand, a tiny object that had been completely obscured when the neondra had been cradling it in both arms.

Zane looked at the gelatinous ovoid held tightly against his sharkskin vest in the crook of his muscular arm and then to the
Palace Guard’s captain. “Tell the shark handlers not to bother. This is the only survivor of Iago’s massacre.” The neondra indicated the egg with a gentle nod of his head. “Nothing else is left alive inside,” he stated simply and turned to swim away.

Raygo reached out and grabbed Zane’s shoulder.
Red Trident weapons snapped into position, pointed directly at the heart of the captain of the Palace Guard. The mercenaries were battle-weary and some were still flushing blood-tainted water out of their gills. They glowered at Raygo, murder in their eyes. Zane looked at the webbed hand on his shoulder and then slowly raised his eyes to regard Raygo. The neondra’s face resembled stone.

Raygo slowly retracted his hand, eyeing the Red Tridents as he would a shiver of circling sharks.
“The faera killed all the frilled sharks?” the ethyrie asked incredulously.

“All the sharks are dead,” Zane stated simply, his eyes narrowing in contrast to the unyielding facade of the rest of his face.

Raygo realized the implication of Zane’s words. “Am I to understand that you killed the Divine Family’s frilled sharks?” There was a subtle threat laced into the ethyrie’s voice that caused the Red Tridents arrayed behind their captain to bristle further.

Zane’s expression did not change.

“There is nothing left alive inside that building,” the red-hued neondra stated with an air of finality.

“Did you kill them?” Raygo demanded, all semblance of civility gone.

Zane turned his body with a flick of his flowing ruby tail to face Raygo fully. “You’re damn right I killed them! I killed every single last one of them!” The neondra’s stone face shattered, revealing the glowing, red molten anger beneath. “It was easy, Raygo. They were all gorged on the flesh of the faera they had slaughtered. That
you
slaughtered by setting them loose in there with no way of controlling them!”

Raygo sculled
involuntarily backward from Zane’s verbal assault, but quickly recovered, halting his retreat and regaining his composure. “Regent Iago won’t be happy about this,” he said, clearly attempting to use the regent’s name to bolster his own courage. “It’ll take three and a half cycles to breed a new shiver of pups.”

Zane rose higher in the water, his next words descending on the
Palace Guard captain like a series of blows. “Stonegem will never,
ever
, swim in these waters again!” he raged. “Do you think I give a festering pile of fish crap how long it takes Iago to breed a new generation of pets?!” The Red Trident commander gestured with the tiny ovoid clutched to his chest. “It’s a miracle that this single egg survived. If your regent wants to be angry, tell him to go swim through that blood-soaked nursery inside before he comes to talk to me. Until then, he can go to the Deeps for all I care.”

With another flick of his flowing red-scaled tail, Zane turned and swam away, the Red Tr
idents following him into the darkness.

As Raygo turned to face his own soldiers
, he caught some of them silently nodding at Zane’s words, though most had the intelligence to stop when their captain’s eyes fell upon them.

Chapter Twenty-S
ix

The call for an emergency Coral Assembly meeting was not a surprise to anyone. Word had spread swiftly of the regent’s eradication of House Stonegem. The messengers had been swimming back and forth all morning between the Houses of the Coral Assembly members. They were making full use of their authority, having the Palace Guard arresting perpetrators and then discussing what sentences should be allotted to them.

Penn, incapable of calling off the Palace Guard with just his and Damaris’ vote, had
accompanied Captain Raygo to witness the foul deed and keep the rest of the city from getting involved. Even though Damaris had gone straight to the other Assembly members, asking for their aid, a majority vote was needed to counter Iago’s command. The regent had acted quickly, and the Assembly had been too late to aid House Stonegem. The council members were just now gathering at the Royal Palace.

The Red Tridents had arrived after the carnage
. Most of them were still at House Stonegem, protecting the ravaged house from looters. Zane, Captain of the Red Tridents, had reported to Raygo that there was only one survivor of the massacre, a single unborn faera still in its egg.

Kiva, the
faera representative on the Coral Assembly, was beyond outraged and gave no credit to Damaris for seeking out the Assembly.
The Queen Mother just wanted to look good to the rest of the council, being the first to deliver the news,
Kiva thought, as she watched some of her peers filing from the entry chamber into the palace’s Coral Assembly meeting room.
Damaris is desperate to keep an ethyrie on the throne. Who will she support now? Iago will never be king. He’ll be stripped of his temporary title and thrown in the palace’s dungeon for the rest of his days. No leader of Mervidia, especially a regent with a temporary rule, acts with such deadly force without the Assembly’s blessing. Even King Luzige would not have acted with such brazen audacity behind our backs.

The
faera domo had yet to make her presence known. Kiva was doing what she did best; she was lurking in the shadows and was observing, waiting, and listening. After what her spies had reported to her just a few moments ago about what had exactly transpired inside House Stonegem, Kiva didn’t trust anyone. She never dreamed that revealing Beryl’s assassin to Lachlan would have caused such an unforgiving series of events. No one could have predicted Iago’s blind and savage revenge upon the house that had been hired to murder his wife. If a machi had foreseen the regent’s actions, he or she had kept that information to himself. Kiva trusted the seers even less now.

Young and rash,
Kiva sighed, staring down at the bound and gagged regent, stripped of his armor and sword down to only his skin and fin. His hands were tied behind his back, and two Serfin held him in place with their arms encircling his elbows. Iago’s expression was defiant, his eyes set forward staring at nothing in particular. The orange light from the orihalcyon sconces that lit the small stone room bathed Iago’s pink hair in its radiance. The chamber was devoid of all decoration save for its round columns and a pair of matching benches that faced each other. The regent’s pink-scaled tail appeared closer to red with an added auburn tint.
Bathed in faera blood
, House Perna’s domo thought, scowling from her hiding place.

Vaschel, Iago’s father, floated to the right
of his son with Penn beside him. Damaris and Nayan floated to the Regent’s left. Even with Iago in custody for his outrageous crime, the traditionalists were making themselves clearly known as they clustered around their former lord, showing their support for the prized ethyrie figurehead until the very end.
He will be beyond even my reach soon or I would kill him myself,
the faera thought grimly.

Iago would never be seen again if taken within the dungeon’s depths, assuredly buried away in some hole far below the Palace.
The exact location of the palace’s dungeon, or the fact that it existed at all, was a well-kept secret of the Divine Family. The only non-House Lumen merwin that knew the precise location of the dungeon’s entrance was Raygo. Prisoners were taken to a holding room until the good captain was available to escort them to their cells. Additionally, when it came time for Raygo to descend to the dungeon, any visitors in the Palace were asked to leave and return at another time. Even the Palace Guards stepped outside, ensuring that the prison’s exact location remained a secret.

Hasad, Slone, Thaddeus, and Quag were already inside the Assembly chamber; Kiva had seen them enter previously.
Through the open door, she could still see Quag’s bald misshapen head as he sat in the chair closest to the entryway with his long tail twitching under the meeting table. The grogstack was nervously tapping his talons on the stone table. As disgusting as Kiva found the grotesque merwin, he was currently acting the smartest of his compatriots by sitting closest to the exit. If a fight broke out, he would be able to determine who would be staying within, who he would allow to leave, or be the first out the door if he so chose. The grogstack kept glancing to Uchenna in the antechamber. It was the he room where the Assembly’s family members waited during meetings and where the council members
usually
gathered beforehand, allowing royalty to enter first.

No doubt he is seeking support from his master
, Kiva scowled at the grogstack from the shadow of the column, behind which she was hiding far above them all. Her green tail kept brushing the stone ceiling in her effort to remain in her high hiding spot. It was irritating but did not bother her enough to seek a new location.

Following Quag’s gaze
, the faera’s attention shifted to Uchenna, who was swimming opposite Iago and his attendants. Their positioning made a hallway of sorts with the space in-between them. Next to the octolaide domo was his cunning wife, Odette.
She
was a power within Mervidia that not many merwin took as seriously as they should, thinking her just a pretty face. Kiva watched Odette fawning over her husband, straightening his ostentatious, purple kelp coat with a number of her black tentacles. She kissed Uchenna on the cheek and grinned mischievously at him. Her hands roamed freely as if she were going to mount him right there in front of everyone. Of course, the Domo of House Chimaera loved his wife’s attention. Distracted as he was, Uchenna paid no mind to the merwin next to her.

On the opposite side of the female
octolaide was a muscular ethyrie male with rare black scales, floating obediently by her side. Kiva knew his name to be Druitt, a distant cousin of House Lumen. His bone white skin and sprawling transparent tendrils, even tipped with black as they were, clearly marked him as an ethyrie. However, his ink-colored tail betrayed his octolaide and seifeira mixed breeding. Only one other merwin she had seen looked similar to the hybrid - King Reth’s bastard son, Ebon. Ironically, the female octolaide at Druitt’s side was Ebon’s mother.

It was common knowledge that Druitt
worked with the Divine Family’s frilled sharks as a trainer and handler. What was unbeknownst to Domo Uchenna, but Kiva had learned from one of her spies, was that Druitt was a slate in Odette’s game of strategic stones. When the female kalku had lived in the Royal Palace and was attending to Damaris’ infertility, Odette had first slept with Druitt. The first season after she had moved in, the two merwin would rendezvous in the kitchen larder. Kiva suspected that, while her spy no longer saw them meeting for such activities, Odette and Druitt had still been involved even after King Reth had also welcomed her into his bed.
Slut,
Kiva thought, but smiled; the faera liked Odette.
She is smart and has a different sort of weapon at her disposal other than a blade. That octolaide has a lot going for her, much more than any of these other idiots.
Kiva didn’t have to be a machi to know that Odette would be a member of the Coral Assembly one day.

On the far wall of the
antechamber, the double doors there opened.

Ah, just who we were all waiting for… well, and for me, of course
, Kiva smiled, still hiding in her shadow. The Assembly might think her too angry and upset to show up at the meeting after what had happened to her fellow faera house.
Oh, I am here, and I
am
angry.

Entering the room were half a dozen
Palace Guard escorting Beryl’s cousin, Cassondra, who was as equally restrained as Iago, although her wrists were tightly bound in front of her instead of behind her back like the regent’s. Kiva pondered the pink-haired ethyrie.
I never dreamed
you
would be so shrewd. What a clever scheme, young one, to get your brother eaten by your family’s beloved shark mounts. I wonder what story you told him to lure him out there in the middle of the night. I cannot wait to hear
that
tale.

Kiva had been one of the Assembly me
mbers who Druitt had approached, claiming to be a witness to Cassondra sabotaging the frilled shark pen’s gate.
A well placed piece, Odette,
Kiva credited the octolaide.
And, perfect timing having him come forward now, when the Fangs lay not on a merwin’s brow but upon a pillow on an empty throne.
With the precious ethyries’ crimes stacking up, we will have another merwin race on the throne in no time,
Kiva grinned.

While all eyes were on Cassondra, her fuchsia back and tail tendrils trailing elegantly behind her as she swam along with her escort, Kiva darted down from her hiding spot.
She settled in next to Druitt, who was the only merwin who noticed her descent. He nodded to her respectfully. Kiva bobbed her head forward, but did not dignify the ethyrie by fully bending her neck to return the respectful gesture. If he noticed the slight, Druitt did not react; he simply looked back at Cassondra, whose captors had stopped before Iago’s escort. The regent, despite being a prisoner as well, would be taken into the Coral Assembly meeting first.
Some merwin are respectful of tradition
, Kiva thought, as she glanced from the gathering in the antechamber to the four Assembly members that were obviously choosing to cast that practice aside given Iago’s actions.
And some are not. Honestly, I would be in there as well, if I had not wanted to test the waters first.

“Well, the prisoners are here.
Do we get started without Domo Kiva?” Vaschel asked Damaris, who shrugged in response. The distraught-looking Queen Mother’s attention was on Cassondra.
She must be as shocked as her sister-in-law, Ghita, right now,
Kiva thought.

“I am right here, Domo Vaschel,” Kiva stated in an even, nonchalant tone of voice.
The faera soaked in the startled looks the merwin gave her, just then realizing that she was present.
Boo
, she said inwardly and stifled a snicker. The entertaining moment past, she frowned, letting some of her troubled feelings bubble to the surface. After all, she would be expected to look distraught after the slaughter of a faera house.
Sure, I am upset and angry, but I am smart too,
Kiva said to herself
.
Breete’s death makes for one less faera house chomping at my tail for my seat on the Coral Assembly.
Truth be told, House Stonegem’s domo had been getting on her nerves of late. Taking on the job to assassinate the Queen was a bold move, one that could have gotten the domo one tail flick closer to an Assembly seat. After recent events, Kiva was glad she had turned down that particular contract.

Vaschel nodded, acknowledging her presence.

“After you,
Lord Regent
,” Kiva said, with as much seething contempt as she could muster. She stared at the ethyrie leader as if she was ready to plunge a dagger in his heart right then and there.

The remaining Assembly members in the
antechamber swam into the council chamber behind Iago and his Serfins, closely followed by Cassondra and her escort. Only Odette would remain in the exterior room; she was not a prisoner, a witness, a guard, nor a member of the Coral Assembly. She sat on one of the benches with her tentacles flowing appealingly around her like a skirt. The octolaide was calm and wore a content grin, happy to wait patiently outside.

Druitt was admitted last into the Assembly room.
After the exterior guards closed the great, uklod bone double doors, the black-tailed ethyrie was directed by Domo Vaschel to remain by the entryway with Cassondra and her guards until he was called upon to speak.

Kiva swam to her seat and
as usual floated above it, so as not to have to look up at her fellow Coral Assembly members. The spell-shaped coral chairs had all been made to look the same in an attempt to demonstrate equality amongst the Coral Assembly members. That detail didn’t work out so well for the small faera, as she was half the size or smaller than all the other merwin present.

On this particular occasion, Kiva didn’t mind so much not sitting; she wanted to be ready to move should the meeting
descend into bloodshed. Pushing strands of her sand-colored hair out of her face with a swirling-green-tattooed hand, she fixed Quag with a look that silently promised him that he would be the first merwin to die.
By the Deeps he is ugly,
she thought.
Mervidia would thank me for ridding it of that particular mutated mockery of a merwin, even if he was not the one that would be blocking the exit.