Lord of Souls

FOUR

“That was even stranger than the last meal,” Yeum said, sipping her wine. The two of them sat at one of the cutting tables. The last dish had gone up for Umbriel’s banquet, and the rest of the kitchen swirled around their still point, cleaning up. “I liked it, especially the one with that plant, what is it called…?”

“Marshmerrow,” Annaig replied. “It grows in Morrowind, one of the countries we passed over.”

“It was delicious. Before, I would have questioned the choice-but I’ve heard that since Rhel’s tasting, the other lords have begun demanding coarser, less spiritual food. You’ve started a trend.”

“More a fad, I would think,” Annaig said.

Inwardly, she wasn’t so certain about the meal. She’d heard that Umbriel often ate plain matter, but beyond that neither the skraws nor anyone else knew anything about his specific tastes. She’d had two things to go on-Attrebus’s assertion that he’d at least once been a fully corporeal Dunmer, and Rhel’s preferences, which seemed in that light perhaps an aping of his master’s appetites. In any case, it was done now.

Hours passed and no one came down, so she bid Yeum goodnight and went to her bed.

Sleep eluded her, however, despite her fatigue, so instead she rose and went to her old workbench in the kitchens, where the tree-wine vats were, and idly sifted through the powders and potions while she thought.

She was a chef now, master of a kitchen, and not a negligible one. But for how long? She doubted there was anywhere to go from here but down. She might have tried to poison Umbriel, but she knew in her gut that any such attempt would fail, and she’d lose any chance she had of accomplishing anything. But if Attrebus was right, if Umbriel, the ingenium that kept it aloft, and the Histlike trees Mere-Glim had discovered were all connected by a flow of soul-force, then she ought to be able to poison the whole system. Lord Umbriel was likely untouchable; she knew where the ingenium was, but Glim hadn’t found any way to reach it other than through the apparently deadly connexion at the bottom of the sump.

But the trees-them, she could reach.

And so she began making a poison.

Some believed that poison was the antithesis of food, but Annaig knew better. Most food was poison to one extent or another, especially plants, many of which had to be pounded or soaked or boiled or all three to divest them of enough toxins to make them even edible. Too many beans eaten raw could be fatal-the same was true of almonds, cherry pits, apple seeds. Nutmeg, when taken in large amounts, could give strange visions, and in higher doses, death. Alcohol, while pleasant, was indisputably a poison. The body dealt with these things, but over time, eventually, the body failed. Everything one ate brought one closer to one’s last meal, and not just in a metaphorical sense.

So while she hadn’t made much in the way of poison, it came as naturally to her as cooking or concocting tonics to allow flight or breathing water. And in learning how to use the stolen souls that pulsed through the cables of Umbriel, she now had the knowledge to create a venin of a more than merely physical nature. She could blacken the whole system if she did things right. And she could make gallons of it-tons, maybe-before anyone questioned what she was doing, now that the kitchen was hers.

She worked almost until dawn, when she had something she was almost happy with. The only problem was testing it, and she couldn’t think of any good way to do that. In the end she knew she would have to take a risk.

She hid it in her cabinet. Tomorrow she would work on it a bit more, and then set up a larger production in the tree-wine vats-and then, well, she would see.

She had sent Slyr to certain destruction. She had killed Toel. Neither were good people, but if in the end their deaths didn’t serve some higher purpose, she didn’t think she could bear it. If she was now a murderer, it had to have been for something.

And maybe, as Umbriel died, she and Glim might find a way off of it. Maybe. But if not… such was life. Everyone died.

When she reached her room, she found two men and a woman waiting for her. They wore simple robes of gray and white. They didn’t seem armed, but when they asked her to go with them, she didn’t argue. They took her directly to Toel’s balcony. Two of them gripped her beneath her arms, and she gasped as they all lifted silently into the night air, rising up through the glittering, shifting web of glasslike strands she had only seen from below, and farther, to a fragile-looking spire, the tallest in the city. Umbriel was a massive inkiness below, and above, the stars were glorious. Masser was a gargantuan opal dome on the horizon.

They took her through an opening in the spire and put her down. Then they left.

It was more a gazebo than a room, with a floor of polished mica and a dome of nearly black jade supported by silvery filaments pulsing with souls. A single figure welcomed her, a Dunmer with a long white braid, dressed in a robe similar to the ones her escorts had worn.

“I haven’t had a meal like that in a long time,” the man said.

“I hope it pleased you, lord,” Annaig replied. The words were hardly out before she wanted to suck them back in; the man had spoken in clear, perfect Tamrielic, not the strange Merish dialect of Umbriel. She had answered in the same language.

He chuckled softly, probably at her expression.

“I thought so,” he said. “The references to the cuisine of my homeland were rather too obvious.”

“Are you Lord Umbriel?”

“I am Umbriel,” he said. “I am me, I am my city and my people. You aren’t part of me, though. And yet I didn’t invite you here or have you captured. They’ve been hiding you from me, down there in the kitchens. Using you in their little intrigues, I expect. Where are you from?”

“Black Marsh,” she replied. “From Lilmoth.”

“Everyone in Lilmoth is supposed to be dead, certain particular Argonians aside. How is it you are here, and alive?”

“It was an accident,” she replied. “I made an elixir that gave my body flight.”

“And you chose to come here?”

“No, I didn’t,” she replied. “I was trying to flee, actually. Anyway, I was south of Lilmoth, not in the city.”

“I suppose you lost family there? Friends?”

“My father,” she said, trying to keep calm, to keep away from where her feelings lived. She wondered if her invisible knife could kill Umbriel. Six steps, a swift swing…

“And you’re angry with me about that?”

“At first, yes,” she said. “But I have learned a certain pragmatism. I have done well here in Umbriel. I have risen to a fairly high place in a short time.”

“Indeed you have,” Umbriel replied. “You made no attempt to poison me last night, which can be interpreted in several ways. One would be that you’ve no wish to harm me. Another would be that you were too smart to try.”

“Or perhaps a little of both,” she replied.

“That’s an interesting answer,” Umbriel said. “I like it.”

“My father and I weren’t close,” Annaig told him, “and I had no real love for Lilmoth. I always dreamed of leaving, going somewhere exotic and exciting.”

“And here you are,” he said, a neutral little smile at the edge of his lips.

“Yes, Lord Umbriel.”

He tapped his forehead, and the line of his mouth flattened out. “What bothers me is this,” he said, his voice rising a bit. It was shocking, like seeing a shark fin break the surface of a perfectly placid bay.

“Part of me, long ago, was Dunmer. How in all of the worlds and not-world could you have known that?”

“I did not know it, lord,” she said.

“And yet several of your dishes were obviously inspired by the high cuisine of Morrowind. Why would you make such things if you had no inkling of my history?”

His tone was very dangerous now, and she felt herself trembling involuntarily.

“Lord, since I’ve been on Umbriel, the familiar components the taskers have brought me were first from Black Marsh and then from Morrowind. I was inspired by the ingredients, my lord. Marshmerrow begs to be made into hluurn or echar, urgandil into vverm. I learned something of Lord Rhel’s tastes by asking questions of those who know him. I could find no one to question about you, so I guessed that Rhel, as your valet, would have discrimination similar to yours. There is no more to it than that.”

“There isn’t?” He seemed to be calming a bit.

“No, my lord.”

“Well,” he said, pacing suddenly like a caged tiger. “Well, in that case, there is this other thing.”

“What is that, lord?”

“There is an Argonian in the sump. Did you know that? Did he come with you?”

She was paralyzed for a moment, but she knew that if she dissembled and he knew she was lying, it was all over. A lot of the people who had actually seen them arrive together were dead, but she could not be certain they all were.

“Yes,” she said. “He is my friend.”

“Did you have him kill Toel for you?”

“My lord-”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said, waving her off. “The chefs are always murdering one another. But it seems your Argonian friend is up to a bit more than that. He’s organized some sort of rebellion among the skraws. That’s going to stop.”

“Are you asking me to talk to him, lord?”

“No. I’m asking you to kill him.”

Her throat closed, and for a second she couldn’t breathe. “L-Lord?” she stuttered.

“He’s hard to catch, this one, and the skraws are loyal to him. And even if I were to really bend my mind to it and catch him, killing him would only make him a martyr. I don’t need that at the moment, any more than I can afford to slaughter all of the skraws and start again.”

She tried to still her shaking, which had grown worse. “What do you want me to do, then?”

“He’s the only Argonian in the sump. It should be simple enough to introduce something into the water that will kill him without affecting anything else. I want it to look as if he died of natural causes. Do that for me.”

She tightened her mind, pushed herself further out-away from her weak corpus-and met Umbriel’s gaze squarely.

“I will, lord,” she promised.

And so she returned to her kitchen, and she made a poison.