“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“Regardless of what happens tomorrow, there’s something I have to tell you before I die.”
“You’re not going to die,” Izar said crossly, “but, fine, tell me.”
“It relates to Antares.”
Izar stiffened. He had not told Zaurak what Osmundea had told him. He wanted to speak to Antares about it first. “What about Antares?” Izar said, turning his head to look at Zaurak.
Zaurak’s eyes stared straight ahead, his pupils like circles of black ice. “Twenty-seven years ago, when my leg got caught in shark-skinning equipment and Antares paid for my medical care out of pocket, I felt deeply indebted to him and intensely loyal. I thought it was a sense of benevolence that had led him to help me. I did not know that he wanted something from me. Two years later, I finally came to understand.
“Antares phoned me late one night and ordered me to meet him at midnight. He asked me to bring with me my Worker Directory, a register containing the names and phone numbers of all the fishermen at Ocean Dominion. As director of operations, I alone had access to the Worker Directory. I also prided myself on knowing my fishermen by name. I did not ask Antares any questions but, trusting him, arrived at midnight upon the trawler he indicated. It belonged to a giant of a man named Alshain Ankaa.”
Izar closed his eyes at the name.
“Antares, Alshain, and I set out into the night sea. Eventually, Alshain stopped the trawler and gave Antares a pearl-colored potion called moonmumble—made of liquid moonlight, he said—to transform him into a merman. I’d never heard of moonmumble or a human-merperson transformation before, and scoffed at the idea, but I was left with my tongue hanging out of my mouth when Antares dove overboard and disappeared under the waves. As Alshain and I waited for him to return, Alshain told me that Antares had transformed once before, almost four years before that day. His visit had had something to do with legend and lore underwater.”
Legend and lore . . . Zaurak’s voice mingled with Osmundea’s in Izar’s mind.
“Anyhow, Antares soon returned to the waves. But he was not alone; he was wrestling with a mermaid over a merboy. In the tussle, Antares tried to slash her throat with some sort of half-shell, but he ended up gashing the merboy’s jaw.”
Zaurak’s gaze traced the hook-shaped scar on Izar’s face. Izar thought of covering it with a hand, but found that his hands could not move.
“Antares knocked the mermaid unconscious and dragged the child onto the trawler. Alshain and I urged him to return the child to his mother, but Antares claimed the child was his son. He said the boy’s mother was demented and he was rescuing the boy from her. I trusted Antares and believed every word he said. Alshain gave Antares a golden potion called sunsin—constituted of liquid sunlight—to turn him human again. Antares ordered Alshain to also give sunsin to the boy, as well as another potion—one that would lapse his memory of the water and enable him to have a ‘fresh, happy start on land.’
“Upon drinking sunsin, Antares started convulsing on the trawler during his transformation from merman back to human. Alshain came to stand over the boy but did not give him sunsin. I held the boy in my arms. He was shaking so severely that the blood from his cut was splattering all over my shirt. When his body stilled, I saw that his tail had separated into legs and his chest was moving up and down, powered by lungs. Alshain strode up to me and said the boy’s transformation proved the truth of Antares’s words, that the boy was his son. The boy had to be half-human and half-merperson—a hummer, Alshain said—otherwise he could not have transformed without a potion. Alshain emptied a vial of a pale-blue potion at the boy’s lips, to lapse his memory of the water.”
That was why Izar remembered nothing of his life before that day.
“I hoped we would return to Menkar and the ghastly night would be over, but Antares asked me to phone a fisherman with a son of a similar age and appearance as the boy on deck. Looking at the boy, I thought immediately of an Ocean Dominion fisherman on the island of Mira, Heze Virgo, who’d had a son just about three years ago, a boy with curly brown hair, like the one I was holding in my arms. I found Heze’s phone number in my Worker Directory. I called him and handed the phone to Antares, who ordered Heze to meet us in the waters near Mira with his wife and boy, otherwise his fisherman position with Ocean Dominion would be terminated. Heze hurried over to our trawler in his fishing dinghy, his wife Capella and their boy cowering behind him in the little boat. What Antares did next is something that has haunted me since.”
Goosebumps crawled up Izar’s arms. He thought of Rigel Nihal, the drunken neighbor of the Virgos, whom he’d encountered when he’d visited the Virgos’ hovel.
“Antares bounded out of the trawler into the fishing dinghy and, before anyone could react, bludgeoned the family to death with a club. He hurled their bodies overboard. Soon after, the boy on the platform started to awaken, his memory wiped clean. By this time, I was so sick to my stomach that I had gone belowdecks—that’s why you don’t remember me from that night. . . . The next day, Antares told Menkar Daily that he’d happened to arrive while the fishing family was being drowned by merpeople. He told them that he’d managed to rescue the boy, and, most magnanimously, decided to adopt him.”
Zaurak shook out his leg angrily on the floor, then, crying out in pain, grabbed his thigh with both hands. “I wish Antares hadn’t saved my leg,” he bellowed, “for it led me to feel indebted to him—which was why he’d saved it to begin with. I thought often of going to the Office of the Police Commissioner, but I was an accomplice to the killings—I had been on the trawler; I had dialed Heze Virgo. Plus, the chief police commissioner, that corrupt buzzard with his handlebar moustache, Canopus Corvus, has always been in Antares’s pocket. Antares practically pays his whole salary, in the form of hefty donations to the Office of the Police Commissioner. As such, Antares can rely on Canopus’s loyalty whenever he requires it.”
Izar remembered his visit to Canopus that night, when the gash across his jaw had been bleeding a path down his face. Canopus had written everything Antares had said as though it was found in a history textbook. He had not questioned; he had not sought any other witnesses or alternate accounts. And when such an account had arrived—Rigel had discovered all three bodies—Canopus must have spoken to Antares about it directly. In the middle of the night, Antares had made the bodies disappear from the grave.
“Everything that you know about your past is a lie,” Zaurak continued in a tortured voice, “and I’ve played my part in it. I’m sorry, Izar. I’ll never forgive myself. . . .”
Zaurak’s voice trailed off, but even if it hadn’t, Izar no longer possessed the capacity to listen.
Why would Antares have gone to all this trouble to abduct him from the water? he wondered. Because Izar was a hummer, and hummers were inventive, and Antares needed something invented—underwater fire. Antares had tested Izar’s intelligence that first day itself by asking him to construct a replica of his house. Izar had passed the test; had he failed, Antares might have thrown him back into the ocean. Antares had also kindled a fascination of underwater fire in Izar that first day by lighting a match and dropping it in a glass of water.
But why would Antares have killed the Virgos, Izar wondered, when he could easily have told the world a simpler story? He could have said, for instance, that he’d discovered Izar as a wandering orphan on shore and decided to adopt him. No, Antares had killed the Virgos to ensure that Izar grew up with a lifelong loathing of merpeople, believing they’d murdered his biological parents. Antares had wanted Izar to have no qualms about harming merpeople and their world.