Mervidia (11 page)

Ambrose exerted more effort to blend in with the rest of the crowd, lowering his head and le
tting his staff settle down further in the grip of his tentacles. As much as he derided Uchenna for his gaudy robes, Ambrose knew that his staff, a long shaft of rune-inscribed bone crowned with a large black pearl, was as distinctive of an identifier as the domo’s clothing. The kalku knew that he would not stay unnoticed much longer.

Despite the danger of being discovered, Ambrose stayed, watching as House Yellowtail swam by in all their
military glory. Next came House Ignis. Some considered the neondra, who split their time between their fields and martial training, a pale imitation of their higher ranking cousins. Others felt that Ignis was truer to their merwin roots by being both farmers and warriors, a contrast to the more numerous Yellowtails who focused solely on warfare.

Ambrose did not care.

His attention was focused on the next house as it came into view.
House Tenebris,
he thought mockingly,
the house of my birth, back before I transcended such arbitrary things as where my mother lived when she squirted out my egg. It is now ruled over by my brother,
Domo
Thaddeus,
he thought bitterly, twisting his brother’s title in his head,
based solely on the fact that his egg hatched before mine.
So much of the structure of things in Mervidia was based on chance and luck, while everything else was decided by lies and deceit.
Power should be the deciding factor,
Ambrose thought bitterly.
Perhaps now that Beryl is dead and the Divine Family is all but extinct, this city will return to its truer self, its purer self, and strength will be the deciding factor on who rules Mervidia.

With that thought still echoing in his head, Ambrose’s eyes found his brother, riding a ray like the rest of the High Houses,
leading the other members of House Tenebris. He was trapped behind other
superior
houses because of the ridiculous traditions that had been force fed to every merwin since birth, like a mother regurgitating chewed fish into the mouth of a child. Ambrose felt the anger rising in his chest, though not for the reason he had thought it would. Part of him felt sorry for his brother, caged by outdated tradition. But, he was also angry on his brother’s behalf; angry that Thaddeus was bound to a lower ranking than he truly deserved because of the silly decrees of a monarch who had been dead for nearly a hundred cycles. Despite their differences, Ambrose still felt a genuine affection for his brother. More than that, he had respect for Thaddeus; something he felt towards very few other merwin.

Luckily, Thaddeus kept his gaze locked forward, disdainful of the teeming masses of merwin around him and did not notice his brother watching him as he passed.
Ambrose did not feel slighted though. Instead, he felt proud of his sibling and the way he held himself above the lesser creatures around him. Thaddeus was just as untouched by the Queen’s death as Ambrose. The kalku wished that he had had more of a hand in it.

The rest of the procession proceeded as expected; a dull parade of each house, its represent
atives decreasing in stature and number as they passed. After the High Houses swam by, the lower houses followed, skittering across the ocean floor on giant spider crabs. Faera, who were grouped together also by house, were too small for manta rays or crustacean mounts. Instead, they rode luminous gulper fish in the funeral procession.

Eventually, the last houses, if their pitiful conglomerations of kin could even truly be called that, swam by, propelled by their own tails
. Their numbers were so small that by the time they passed the crowd had already begun to disperse.

Finally, a contingent of
jellod machi brought up the rear of the procession, ending the pompous cavalcade, with an even more absurd display of supposed symbolism. Allegedly signifying the healing that would begin after the dead monarch was interred in King’s Reef, Ambrose had a different view of their place.
Such potential, wasted,
he thought.
The ability to wield the power of the oceans and you simpletons use it to protect the weak instead of shore up the strong.

Ambrose turned and swam away from the sad display, his tentacles writhing behind him as he propelled himself through the water.
He took his staff in hand, retrieving it from his tentacles, and made his way towards King’s Reef, the burial place of kings and queens for generations. The interment ceremony was nominally only for family and close friends. However, he knew that members from the Coral Assembly and the High Houses would be there as well. Political protocol demanded it.

I am sure they won’t mind one more prominent merwin,
he thought wryly,
to pay his respects, of course.
A full smile parted Ambrose’s black lips, revealing his sharp teeth in a feral grin.

Making his way through the deserted side passages of the city was easy; nearly every merwin in Mervidia had turned out to watch the funeral procession.
In short order, Ambrose swam out of the city and rapidly covered the distance from Mervidia’s outlying buildings to King’s Reef. He could just barely make out the city lights from the edge of the small crowd gathered to lay Queen Beryl to rest.

Ambrose
had arrived just as Nayan was beginning the burial rites. She had her webbed hands splayed out on the red kelp-wrapped body and was entreating the spirits of the monarchs, who now lived in the large bank of blood-red coral, to accept Beryl into their embrace. The jellod machi had exchanged her usual simple yellow shawl from the funeral procession, for a short, vibrant gold-hued cape, trimmed in white pearls for the burial ceremony. Ambrose could feel Nayan drawing upon the magic of the ocean and the seafloor beneath them. She began building the mystical connection between the lifeless body in front of her and the expansive living coral growth, where the Queen would be interred.

From his own studies, Ambrose was familiar with the ritual.
A small cone had been carefully cut from the coral and set aside. Then, a hollow had been hewn farther into the reef, just large enough to accommodate Beryl’s corpse. Once the connection between body and reef had been magically established, the queen’s remains would then be placed into the tomb and resealed. Over time, the coral would grow, filling the chamber and absorbing Beryl’s body, making it a part of the overall bioherm. According to legend, King’s Reef got its distinctive red color from the blood of monarchs who had been buried there. Their lifeblood fed the thick ridge of coral and kept the mass vibrant and ever growing.

As Ambrose looked at the bright red colony, one of his tentacles twitched involuntarily as he remembered the sting of King’s Reef.
In his younger days, shortly after leaving House Tenebris, Ambrose had gotten it into his head to exhume one of the kings from Mervidia’s past, hoping that the body might retain its connection to the burial reef. If it had, he would have had a powerful source of necrotic energy upon which to draw for his magical endeavors. Unfortunately, all he had gotten for his troubles were some swollen hands and tentacles and a useless jar of gelatinous remains.

The reef was covered in tiny stingers that injected a painful toxin into whatever unfortunate creature came into contact with it.
The more superstitious and narrow-minded machi said that it was the spirits of the dead kings and queens protecting their families. Ambrose, and other intelligent kalku, knew the truth. It was just a reef, nothing more.

King’s Reef itself was grey-white.
Another symbiotic colony of coral grew along its surface, giving it its distinctive crimson color. The larger reef gave the colony of red coral a base on which to grow. In turn, the toxin of the coral’s stingers would kill smaller fish and other sea creatures, providing protection and bodies upon which the reef could feed.

In past discussions with other practitioners,
Ambrose had commented on the similarities between the relationship of King’s Reef to the colony of red coral on its surface and Mervidia to the kalku, but his analogy had been met with scorn. Both the machi and his own house had found the comparison distasteful. Nayan, and the other magically gifted young merwin, had put forth a different analogy. She had said that the Divine Family was the heart of Mervidia, allowing the city to remain vibrant and growing, while the merwin lived on its surface, defending it in a mutually beneficial relationship. Of course, the jellod also stated that it was the machi who supported this relationship, nurturing and guiding it along the right path so that the city as a whole flourished. Had that been all she had said, Ambrose would have been content to let her theory pass as the innate ramblings of a naïve child. Unfortunately, Nayan had continued her analogy, likening the kalku to parasitic bottom dwelling fish, who fed off the dead and decaying matter that sank to the seafloor, produced by the reef’s unfortunate need to defend itself from the other creatures of the deep.

It had been the last conversation Ambrose had had with the
jellod machi. If his brother Thaddeus had not stopped him, it would have been the last conversation that Nayan had had with anyone. Ambrose had left House Tenebris shortly thereafter. He had realized that, at its heart, Mervidia was weak. The city clung to an outdated and ludicrous tradition that power came from the family into which you had the fortune to be born. The machi perpetuated this myth because the Divine Family protected the jellod healers as long as they did. The rest of the merwin played along, because it made them feel safe. What they did not realize was that power, true power, came from what one was able to take and willing to do to take it. Until Mervidia woke from its dream of archaic tradition and illusion of security, Ambrose wanted no part of it. So, he had carved out his own cave in the rock near the Deep Mines and enjoyed the occasional company of the grogstack, who were under no such illusion that anything but strength provided refuge from the Deeps.

Well, most of them,
Ambrose thought as his eyes scanned the small crowd of mourners and came to rest on Quag. The huge grogstack floated docilely, a tamed shark swimming around the tail of his master. Uchenna, the master in question, hovered by Quag’s side, his dutiful wife Odette appearing appropriately somber.

On Quag’s other side drifted the
grogstack’s wife. Though he did not know her name, Ambrose was familiar with the female merwin. She was surprisingly pretty for her race, looking for the most part like a seifeira, but without the usual tattoos adorning her skin. She had a pleasant shade of blue-hued skin, frilled ears, and a shapely tail. However, despite the obvious seifeira blood that ran through her veins, her other features marked her clearly as a grogstack. A single tendril of flesh hung from each side of her head, starting at her temples and ending an arm span away in strange grey frills. Similar growths sprouted from her waist as well. The tendrils did not move on their own, instead waving with the motion of the water around them.

Quag’s wife’s hands were her most noticeabl
y divergent feature though. They were huge, nearly as long as the arms that supported them and incredibly wide. They were dark grey in color and thickly webbed all the way to the sharp talons at the end of each finger. The fact that they contained an extra joint, like her husband’s hands, was by far the most
normal
thing about them.

Ambrose shook his head at the sad state into which the supposed leader of the
grogstack had allowed himself to be coerced.
Such a strong merwin to be tamed and caged,
he thought.

As Ambrose looked away from Quag, he noticed Odette’s eyes on him.
She alone, so far, had noticed his presence at the gravesite. A familiar thrill ran though his body, and he couldn’t help but smile as he thought of Odette’s embrace again. She must have seen his grin, as a similar knowing smile appeared on her face as well. However, remembering where she was, Odette’s eyes darted to her husband, and she lowered her head, the smile vanishing as quickly as it had appeared.

Ambrose tore his gaze away from Odette and watched as Beryl’s body was slipped into
the small niche that had been carved out for it. A young jellod, wearing protective shark skin gloves, lifted the cone of coral from the ocean floor and gently pushed it into place. Nayan placed her naked hand against the red coral cap and slowly
healed
the reef, sealing the dead monarch’s burial chamber. As the Jellod channeled restorative energy into the blood-colored coral, one of the other machi, a young male merwin, struck the ceremonial kultrun that hung from his waist. The hollowed out cylinder of uklod bone made a deep resonate thrum as it was hit eight times with an ensorcelled merwin bone.

Despite his disdain for the machi, Ambrose was
somewhat impressed at how Nayan barely flinched, as she continued to hold her hand pressed against the stinging coral, sealing the cap into place and beseeching the spirits of the kings and queens that had come before Beryl to accept her into their embrace.

Ambrose knew that traditionally, out of respect for the dead, he was supposed to wait until the burial ceremony was finished before leaving, but he had matters to attend to that were far more important than this inane spectacle.
Besides, it only served to reinforce a ridiculous tradition that venerated a family that had long outlived its purpose. It also further elevated a bunch of weak-willed sorcerers, who should have been putting their magical talents to far better use.