by Jean Lee
Not that Charlotte notices. “Mutilation? You’re the banshees who screamed Orna’s stuff to pieces. Who mmmf.”
Liam’s hand clamps tight against Charlotte’s mouth and nudges her to look beyond the mermaid’s shoulder.
A wall.
It towers above them, surely taller than Rose House. Yet it stands incomplete: the wall runs about the width of Rose House, but the lake waters continue on either side. And directly in front of them there’s a large hole in the wall, as if it was built that way. Unlike the Wall above, this one allows life to grow upon it: seaweed, old and frayed as an ancient mariner’s hair, yes, but still, it is something growing upon the rock around that hole. The hole has a pull to it, a current that barely touches them with soft fingertips, but it is there, palpable, and Liam’s wings feel its pull. He has not known such a pull since traveling the Water Road so very long ago… “Where does that go?”
Blinkey sneers, steps backward. “Nowhere. Everywhere.”
“On pain of death, we’re bound by magic to remain within the Wall of River Vine—”
“Is that what you are afraid of?” Blinkey grins, displaying two solid rows of teeth shaped like little white Ws.
Charlotte feels the muscles in Liam’s arm tighten as he replies, “I am not afraid.”
“Think, Blinkey: your queeny can’t talk to us if these cursed tattoos kill us first.” Charlotte holds her right wrist up actually hoping the thorns will start moving. But they don’t.
Blinkey lazily twirls her spear as she steps out of the air bubble back into the water. The magic that reshapes her legs into a tail comes and goes, but the smile has not yet left her face.
Charlotte wishes it would.
Liam can’t take his eyes off the hole in the wall, or the seaweed that fails to sway with the current flowing through the wall. The seaweed is still. Resistant. It keeps all its fronds away from the hole. The water beyond the hole, it looks… dark, unfathomable.
Blinkey uncoils her rope, and the green luminescence unfolds once more, only now it forms a bubble around Charlotte and Liam. So this is what it looks like inside the balloons of all those dumb school projects with the glue and string, Charlotte thinks and eyes Liam’s dagger. Figures we’ve got the magical pointy thing inside, of all places.
Blinkey squeaks, clicks, tugs. The netted bubble lifts from the stone. Charlotte and Liam hold each other closely—they have to, what with being groundless and sliding together on the curved surface.
Blinkey’s mouth splits into its magic star, and her scream drives small and fast at the hole, like a snowball that poofs into a million scraps of light swirling through, a liquid comet tail.
Blinkey turns to them. Sneers.
A sudden lurching, and all the humors in Charlotte fill her throat, but the Voice pulls them back down.: Show no emotion. Hold tight. “Where are you taking us?”
Liam clenches his jaw. He’s statue-still, but Charlotte smells his fear as he eyes the approaching hole filled with… aquatic fireflies?… and surrounded by old, frayed seaweed. Her hand slides down Liam’s wrist and into his palm. They’re poised silent and motionless in their bubble of air.
Blinkey holds her bone spear outward until its tip touches the swirling fireflies.
Everything surges. A million bright threads unspool and crash together in one focal point before them, pulling eyes and bone and heart and voice and—
Their bubble-net floats, peacefully, steadily, bordered by a semicircle of small glowing lights and guided through the hole. So, we went through that shit topside only to be fed to a mob of sparkly angler fish. You know, Day, I’d like to just call a do-over, please.
But her wish isn’t granted. As the lights come closer, Charlotte sees the sparkly angler fish for what they really are—bright orbs that dangle like lanterns from the bone spears of more mermaid-type people. Lots of unfriendly, blinkey, mermaid-type people.
Liam studies first his mark, then the hole behind them. Light recoils into its center. The seaweed waves around it, mobile once more, like hair over a hag’s cloudy eye. “We’re beyond Lake Aranina. The ocean?”
A slow, double-lidded blink, then: “Lake. Ocean. Fresh. Salt. Always, you gill-less are keen to split and divide the waters. No better than ruby sharks, the lot of you.”
The merpeople float back with their lantern-spears, widening their circle, distancing themselves from the air bubble. An armed guard comes into view, sitting upon a giant floating shell with little tentacles sticking out the back. Blinkey tosses him the bubble-net’s rope. To Liam, she says, “Here we have no tribes, no houses. We are Stellaqui, and we are one people, of one water, the Undersky.”
Another armed guard pulls the bubble close to the floating tentacle-shell thing, where a creepy little black eye just, stares. And stares.
Charlotte debates piercing their air-bubble with Liam’s dagger just to make that thing stop staring. “Do ya mind?”
Liam’s eyes dart among the net’s spaces. “I’ve never seen a nautilus this size.”
“You know what that thing is?”
“My lack of swimming skills doesn’t render me completely ignorant of all matters water-folk. Nautili are to them what horses are to you.”
“The More You Know,” Charlotte mumble-sings to herself as she kneels to look through the net’s biggest opening.
Blinkey dolphin-clicks orders to depart.
The lantern-bearing merfolk escort them, three on each side, each with an orb to light the way, as they maneuver through hulks of pointed metal poking up from the earth like lopsided gravestones. Charlotte counts the seconds to traverse a stretch of sandy rust. “We’re in some sort of shipwreck graveyard.”
“The ocean, I knew it!” A smile grows on Liam’s lips, one corner at a time.
Charlotte sniffs skeptically. “I don’t think so. Shouldn’t we smell at least a little salt?”
“All their cities are said to be in the oceans,” Liam says, brow furrowed, “with the lakes reserved… Damnation, what did the Kingborn Histories say… something about study…”
“Well duh, studying’s kinda required with history.” Charlotte makes a face, but not so much over Liam’s memory as over the lack of activity from her mark. No prickling, no choking or killing or whatever. This thing has always been eager to kill her before. Its apathy now makes this trip really surreal… compared to psycho heart-eating half-dead half-people.
She should probably stop thinking about that. “Why would merpeople want to hang out in a human boat graveyard?”
“For study… they… study…” Liam breaks off, voice small, mouth unable to close. The storms in his eyes grow blue-white from some sort of reflection…
Charlotte turns to see the source of blue-white.
A dome hides among the broken hulls. Thin swirls of bioluminescence coast along its surface as though flowing in their own current. The bioluminescent dome is framed by six bone-white, curved, ridged beams that radiate outward from the center at the top of the dome and arc downward, anchored to the sandy floor.
“No. No, no no no, those can’t be… spines. Whales don’t get coliseum-big,” mutters Charlotte, her eyes now coliseum-big.
“The ancient leviathan,” Liam whispers.
Everyone halts before one of the spines. Blinkey slides the end of her bone spear between two vertebrae on the spine and turns her spear like a key.
A cracking sound—a horizontal fissure between two vertebrae on two adjacent spines forms, widens, and that part of the dome slides upward, opening a square-ish window just large enough for Blinkey, the nautilus rider, and the bubble to move through. Liam catches Blinkey’s smirk as their netted bubble floats by her and says to Charlotte. “The Kingborn Claudius once said, ‘No bone is wasted among the Stellaqui.’”
Blinkey nods with approval. “An apt truth as we arrive here, in the Library.”
The spine seals behind them.
4
Shelved
Some library. Where are the boo
kshelves? Charlotte cranes and swivels her neck, jerky-bird fashion, this way and that.
Angler lights hang from every other vertebra along the spines of the dome. The coliseum feel carries on inside the dome, with its wide central atrium encircled by four open-floored levels. Each floor is securely anchored to the six leviathan spines, like inward facing ribs. Not a stairwell in sight—sink or swim, apparently—Blinkey and the others guide the bubble through the water along the lowest level surrounding the atrium. Charlotte sees stones grouped together just like the wall outside the leviathan dome, but this “wall” must have fallen over, since it lies flat on its side in the center of the Library’s atrium floor. The hole within it is much larger than the other, and dark. Very dark.
The bubble passes some barred enclosures or rooms shaped by bone and—aw, jeez, that’s gotta be skin.
The levels above them are crowded with display cases, with various mermaids and mermen huddled around, observing, debating. “What, you got an art show going on?”
One Stellaqui swims down from one of the upper levels with a small display case cradled in her arms. A translucent coat covers her torso, pink and wavy like a jellyfish. She dolphin-calls to Blinkey as she approaches. Their bubble slows.
“Mac an Donias.” Liam’s face is ashen. “I thought the kingborn’s tale a dream, not truth.”
Charlotte follows Liam’s gaze to the case in the mermaid’s arms. It’s not flat at all, but like a shadow box, with something spread out and pinned open. At first glance it’s no different than one of those pictures she’d make as a little kid, where she’d paint on one side of the paper and then fold the paper over to double the image. Or like a Rorschach test.
But then she sees the amber eyes. Together. Squashed. Bulging. At her. Diamond black pupils swollen. Muzzle and jaw outlining the split head, stretched and broken in a scream preserved. Tongue pulled out and split along one side of the muzzle. Red fur cut and peeled back like a banana to reveal muscle, and that’s peeled back to show blood vessels and nerves and some whitish tissue, and that’s peeled back to show organs, all open and stretched and open and dead and open—
Charlotte gasps, searches the upper levels to see something, anything that isn’t a halved fox staring at her. There, a giant moth, fuzzy at the edges with long, warped wings. But it has fur. Mane. Tail. A stomach peeled back to show half-eaten meat, undigested feathers.
There’s a mountain lion, split open.
A bear, split open.
A wolf, split open.
One case holds something too long for a wolf. Hairless, but with limbs. A small mouth. Fingers, winged by skin.
Ho-lee SHIT.
Charlotte rolls back against Liam’s side and holds his arm before she can blink again. Her mouth hangs open. She’s not even sure she’s breathing, but she’s hearing Liam whisper so very clearly, “We will leave this place whole or join the graves of your boats.”
Not the most encouraging thing Liam’s ever said, but anything sounds better than a display box.
A Stellaqui mermaid person swims up to the top of the dome. Blinkey clicks to the other guard, who takes off in the opposite direction, down and out through the dark central hole. Light bursts and crashes in upon the bubble trail behind them both, and then thin green tendrils unspool from the dome’s top all the way down to the hole in the atrium floor. The mermaid at the top of the dome calls down to Blinkey, and the tendrils begin to curl up, pulling the water up with it like shades on a window, providing an air pocket large enough to fill the entire atrium.
The bubble clings to the floor—coarse, a stone mottled by sand. The net twitches around the bubble, and it’s all Charlotte can do not to start twitching herself. Liam whispers numbers into her hair, counting the merfolk on the still water-filled upper levels—“twelve, fourteen, eighteen…”
Only Blinkey remains on the air-filled ground floor. “Well, trespassers,” she says as her tail splits into legs, “it is time I leave you to the librarians. Trust me when I say they are thrilled to have you here.” She tugs at the net’s rope, and the net splits apart and shrinks to a small coil at her hip. She pops the bubble with her spear. “You are welcome to one last meal before interrogation if you wish. We are curious to study the stages of digestion in both human and Velidevour.” She smiles, double-blinks, and bows them toward an enclosure with a wave of her fin. The walls, bench, table—all are carved from bone.
Charlotte narrows her eyes. “What do you guys make toilets out of? Turtle shell?”
Blinkey spins her spear’s staff to thwack Charlotte’s cheek before Liam can stop her. “We do not kill for single parts, unlike your kind.”
“Do that again.” Liam unsheathes his blood dagger. Sparks pulse weakly beneath his welts from the merfolk net, oozing a yellow pus Charlotte can only describe as smelling fishy. His curls limply frame his face, but his shoulders and feet are steady in defiance of all poison and pain. He wraps his fingers around the base of the blade. “Just try.”
“Hey, it’s my mouth she hit, jeez.” Charlotte’s still rubbing it as she slides off to the side, farther from Liam, out of reach lest Blinkey jabs at him, freeing her for a flank attack. If Blinkey goes for her, then Liam’s free to strike. Thank you, late night westerns.
Blinkey’s fins slide the dagger lazily between them, but her curled mouth says she’s none too pleased. “I said, inside. Now.”
“Y-yeah, no.” Charlotte nods to the dark hole, their one sure exit. “That looks good, though.”
“And see your way to the Queen’s seat?” Blinkey thrusts her spear at Charlotte, its serrated edges piercing right through the pathetic linen of Charlotte’s shirt and grazing her skin. “I think not.”
Liam’s leap is perfect.
He hunches back on the balls of his feet and soars several feet into the air. He is poised to summon the blood sword out of his dagger, drive the blade through this Stellaqui and the very rock beneath her feet, and send all to ash and ruin. He grips the blade, ready for the prick he must always pay to call the magic forth. He is a moment from the creature’s head—
But the sword does not come.
And Liam’s body crashes in a spray of his own blood, chest slamming against the kelp-head, taking Blinkey down, sliding into Charlotte, and turning the three of them into a muddled heap. Charlotte rolls off first before Blinkey’s star-mouth-scream can find her. Air shivers with its power in a ball form, blowing past Charlotte and cracking the rib-bars of an enclosure.
“No screaming in libraries!” Charlotte spits the words from a smirking mouth and grabs a rib, wielding it like a weapon Something’s swimming in the corner of her vision on a floor above them, and she wishes she had paid more attention to that one scene of Robin Hood with the staffs.
Liam rolls and swings the dagger round to find Blinkey’s fin—
—blocked by the mermaid. Her spear’s shaft meets the blade with a cold ting! and she thrusts it forward to meet his face—
But he is up, dagger on the defense, free hand uncertain whether to be a fist or a hook on that spear. The fins are too difficult to see, but his eagle-eyes follow the spear, enabling him to block every thrust. The droplets of his own blood are freckles on the white shaft and blade. Blinkey’s star-mouth peels back for another scream, but Liam dodges well enough that the scream merely brushes his arm. He can’t hide a wince—it feels like his arm was dragged along broken glass. He senses something above him, leaps and rolls towards Charlotte—
Green luminescence spirals out and strikes the floor.
Charlotte looks up.
Three water-folk circle above them like sharks, each with their own net-rope.
“Could really use that sword, Liam.”
He flashes his hand to Charlotte, revealing the slender trail of blood his blade left behind. “It won’t come. Can’t? This element—"
A battering ram—Blinkey—pounds his spine and sends him flying several feet into the middle of the atrium. Blinkey lands on her webbed feet and
turns her stony eyes on Charlotte, clicking noises wild in her throat as she prepares to kick again—
Green ropes thwip from above. Liam seizes the burning rope before it can snare him. Sparks fly around his fingers; painful cries fly through his gritted teeth, but he still holds and yanks the rope as hard as he can, dragging the merman out of the water and into the atrium where he falls with a flop, still tail-finned, face-down and stuck as Liam kneels on his back and strikes his head with the butt of the blood dagger.
Charlotte swings the rib in front of her to block Captain’s first kick, second, third. The mermaid’s sneer gives way to snarls as she fails to land a strike with spear or foot. “C’mon, Blinkey, you can do better than that,” Charlotte taunts as she back-steps toward the wall, or more specifically, the hole in the wall. We take the fight to the hole, we leave through the hole. YES, she grins.
“Fine.” Blinkey’s snarl swirls to form the star-mouth—
“Oooh, shit.”
The short burst pummels Charlotte into Liam and sends them both sliding to a halt into the fallen wall, their necks nearly snapping over the wall’s edge.
Blinkey jumps into the air, up through the water ceiling, and back down to land inches from Charlotte’s hip. She grabs Charlotte’s neck and lifts her close enough to touch her nose: “And that’s Captain Blinkey to you, gill-less.”
Charlotte readies her left hook. “And that’s Charlotte to—YEOW!” Like punching a goddamn brick wall! She’d done that once during a fight, missing the bastard’s face and punching a storage shed wall instead. She had to tape her fingers for weeks and pray the mistake didn’t cost her her music.
Fucking did it again. Same hand too, dammit. “What the hell are you? Rock?”
Another rope thwips down past Charlotte’s shoulder. Liam grabs it—
Captain Blinkey’s star-mouth quivers like it wants to smile—
—until Liam yanks another merman down on top of her. “Now, Charlotte!”