“Fermented sea grapes. Each of the four wines is prepared of a different grape—oval, bell sea, beaded cushion, and parasol—so it’s of a slightly different shade of green.”
Izar nodded. He braced his elbows apart on the table, sitting straight with effort. They had swum all morning to reach this Purple Claw village, and the swim had been equivalent to jogging steadily for hours without a break. Izar had slowed a few times, but the shark had turned his huge head to smirk at him—yes, he’d actually smirked—and Izar had bit his tongue and continued to keep pace with the monster and the mermaid.
Upon arriving in Purple Claw, they’d obtained directions from passersby to the Ministry of Meristem. Coralline had asked to speak with an administrator in the Under-Ministry of Residential Affairs. But there was a long queue of people seeking addresses, and Coralline and Izar had been given an appointment for an hour later. Izar had concluded that the government process was just as slow and bureaucratic underwater as on land.
With nothing to do during their hour of wait, they’d decided to get lunch at Taeiniata, the nearest restaurant to the Ministry. Coralline had deposited Altair and Nacre in a neighboring patch of grass, and Pavonis had rushed off to explore Purple Claw, saying he was fulfilling his “dreams of travel.” Izar preferred it this way: without the three nuisance animals.
He looked down at his dark-gray waistcoat. Its buttons were thirty small white shells called baby’s ears. It had taken him an eternity to do up the column of buttons. He had not seen a need for a waistcoat, but Coralline had said, “No one will serve us if you’re not dressed,” and her seahorse had added, “Nudity is inappropriate and unacceptable.” Izar supposed it was similar on land—he would be unable to gain entrance to any decent restaurant without a shirt—but he didn’t view his current body as his own, so he didn’t care to tend it in any way. Conceding to Coralline and Altair nevertheless, he’d purchased a handful of waistcoats from a little shop called Panache, located around a bend in the lane from Taeiniata.
Morena arrived with two plates. She placed one in front of Coralline, brimming with soft flaps of olive-green leaves, and the other in front of Izar, towering with light-green sheets that he thought looked awfully like lettuce. She handed them each a pair of stone-sticks, which Izar thought resembled chopsticks. Coralline attacked her plate enthusiastically while Izar found himself chewing as thoroughly as a rabbit. Appearing to take pity on him, Coralline placed a leaf from her plate onto a corner of his. Sampling it, he found that it was flavorful and fragrant, melting on his tongue, much better than his bland ulva.
Sipping his parasol wine, Izar asked Coralline questions about life in the ocean. She answered him patiently.
Merpeople settlements tended to be located at a depth of anywhere from one hundred to six-hundred-and-sixty feet below the waves, she said. The minimum range was determined by safety—keeping a distance from humans and ships—and the maximum range was determined by sunlight—almost no light penetrated beyond six-hundred-and-sixty feet, the boundary of the Sunlight Zone. Because most parts of the ocean went deeper than six-hundred-and-sixty feet, while some were shallower than one hundred, merpeople settlements tended to be scattered throughout Meristem as isolated pockets, she said. The rest of Meristem consisted of open ocean and deep sea. Constituting half the surface of the earth, the deep sea commenced at about five thousand feet below the surface (or one mile). Entirely pitch-black, it was almost as foreign an expanse to merpeople as to humans, Coralline said.
Izar concluded that as birds flew high but not extremely high, generally staying within a few hundred feet of the surface of the earth, so merpeople lived deep, but not extraordinarily deep, staying within the Sunlight Zone. As birds never crossed the ozone, merpeople never entered the deep sea.
Merpeople told time in two ways, Coralline told him: the hue of the waters and sand-clocks. She pointed out a sand-clock to him on the mantel of Taeiniata. It was an hourglass filled with fine white sand, with twenty-four notches carved onto its lower bulb, one for every hour of the day. The time was a little after noon now.
He glanced at the menu and asked Coralline what it was printed upon. Parchment, she said, made of treated, pressed sargassum, a tall, common brown algae that tended to grow in thick masses near coral reefs. He asked her how ink didn’t run in water. Because it was formulated from any of a variety of oleaginous algae, she said—fatty, oil-filled algae—and oil and water could not dissolve in each other.
Perhaps it was the wine, but Izar found himself relaxing. Things could be a lot worse than they were. For one, she was not half bad to look at, his mermaid companion. More importantly, his enemies, led by Zaurak, would be unable to find him in the ocean. They would not know he had transformed into a merman. And even if they did know, even if Alshain had told Zaurak, it would be impossible for them to locate him in the Atlantic, hundreds of feet below the waves.
Izar breathed deeply—for the first time in days, he was safe.
Doubt beset Coralline as she hovered with Izar before Tang Tarpon’s door.
The roof of Tang’s house was partially caved in, and the gray walls were decrepit, their shale deeply scratched, as though someone had taken a dagger to them. And yet Tang’s home looked no worse than the others in his town of Hog’s Bristle.
There was a stagnancy in the waters themselves of Hog’s Bristle, a restless unhappiness—Coralline sensed it as clearly as she sensed the day morphing from late afternoon to early evening, the passage of time evident to her in a dulling of the waters. Loiterers were everywhere, lingering among worn shops and dilapidated homes, staring at passersby. A thickset loiterer with a square face hovered directly across from Tang’s home, staring openly at her. Coralline could see at a glance why Hog’s Bristle was ranked the most unsafe settlement in Meristem year after year in the annual Settlement Status rankings prepared by the Under-Ministry of Residential Affairs. The safety situation in Hog’s Bristle seemed so dire, in fact, that even the structure of homes appeared impacted: Most houses had tiny windows, perhaps so that thieves could not squeeze in through them.
Coralline looked up as a shadow traveled above her—Pavonis. He was tingling to explore Hog’s Bristle, she knew, exhilarated by the town’s “dangerous edge,” but she had asked him to stay overhead while she and Izar met with Tang—just in case. Nothing could happen to her so long as he was there, she believed. As for Altair and Nacre, she’d deposited them all too gladly in a rocky alcove close by—they’d bickered incessantly throughout the three-hour swim from Purple Claw to Hog’s Bristle.
Coralline knocked on Tang’s door . . . and waited . . . and waited. The administrator in the Under-Ministry of Residential Affairs in Purple Claw had looked through the Register of Residents of Meristem and had told Coralline and Izar that Tang Tarpon lived in Hog’s Bristle. He had provided them an address, which Coralline had scribbled in her parchment-pad, but she thought now that perhaps the address had not been updated. Maybe Tang had moved. Izar was about to knock as well, when the door flew open.
Tang Tarpon’s hair fell to his shoulders in thick gray clumps. His nose was globular and pocked in places. His scales were a limp-brown color and his waistcoat was so stained that Coralline could not tell its original shade. The grooves around his mouth and eyes suggested he was about sixty years old.
His gaze shifted from Coralline to Izar and back, and he blinked, as though trying to prevent their faces from blurring in his vision. “Why are you bothering me?” he slurred, clutching the doorknob for support.