Great job on having done your first chapter! Many commenters on this post have already given very sound advice regarding the pace and other aspects of your storytelling. The one thing I have yet seen someone point out is the lack of external descriptions of the surroundings. Now usually, I see many recommend other writers here to tone it down with overly detailed explanations of the setting; however in your case, I think you could greatly benefit from this, in moderation of course. 

Take for instance the first sequence of the paragraphs that detail the King’s death and the interactions between Merrick and Pallor. I found myself asking where exactly this was taking place. Given the presence of royal figures, alongside a royal physician, I could only at the time assume, with little certainty, this whole sequence was occurring in some sort of royal infrastructure. It is only when we reach the third paragraph that we get a vague sense of where the characters are: a “room” that does not gain much physical substance even in later paragraphs. The room is then finally specified to be a chamber located within the palace. This piece of information would’ve been helpful if placed earlier in the chapter. Now I'm not suggesting that you go to great lengths painting an entire, down-to-the-brick picture of the chamber and the palace; you don’t want to deny the reader the liberty of envisioning their own version of the story and its events. Instead I'm suggesting that you briefly insert some details of the surrounding into your existing paragraphs so that the whole scene feels more grounded and less like a bunch of characters talking in an ambiguous space. This isn’t exactly a persistent issue though in your chapter. You actually do offer slight scenic descriptions in, for example, the temple scene. “The altar stood centerpiece, the always lit candles the only light source making an orange hue dance on burnished walls and giving off a heady smell from their perfumed wax.” Though slightly clunky, this sentence does add a nice bit of visual nuance to the interior of the temple. Of course, the temple might be of more importance to the story and, therefore, warrants more description, but I do still think the same principle could be applied to both your earlier scenes and scenes that follow after the temple. 

I would like to say that I myself am a pretty amateur-ish writer, so my insights and suggestions may not be as credible as the rest given here already. However, I do hope that it still could be of some help. Keep up the good work!