Lord of Souls

SEVEN

Hierem appeared and Colin struck from behind, cupping his left palm to the minister’s forehead and thrusting his knife toward the base of his skull.

“No!” Hierem shouted. He sounded exactly like the man on the bridge, before Colin had stabbed him.

Colin flinched. He dropped the knife and shifted his grip to a choke hold.

“What are you doing?” Letine yelled, lifting her own dagger.

“No, don’t kill him,” Colin said. “We still don’t know what he was up to. We need to-”

“You don’t understand,” Letine said, stepping up to deliver the blow.

It never landed. The blade hit something an inch from Hierem’s throat and exploded in a blinding flash of light. Letine shrieked and fell back. Colin tried to tighten his grip, but suddenly Hierem was as slippery as an oiled snake, slithering free of his grasp as if from a child.

“You really don’t understand,” Hierem said.

Colin dropped and got his knife, but as soon as he touched it, he again remembered the man he’d murdered, and all those corpses by the road, like broken dolls. He took a deep, shuddering breath, but he knew it was pointless. It didn’t matter what happened here today. It didn’t matter what happened anywhere, ever, because in the end there was nothing. He looked at the knife and felt a sob heave up from his chest. Then he slumped down to the floor.

“I can’t imagine what you think you’re up to, Arese,” Hierem said, stepping toward the woman. Her eyes looked blind, unfocused.

“Colin?” she shouted.

“He’s not much use to you, I’m afraid,” Hierem said. “He’s a bit glum right now.”

A sharp report rang from the walls in the room, and suddenly something appeared, something shaped a bit like a man but covered in black scales, with three scythelike fingers on each hand. It hopped, birdlike, toward Hierem, and Colin noticed it had sickles on its feet, too-one on each foot.

Hierem jabbed his fist at it, and although he didn’t hit it, the thing went flying back into the wall. It bounced up and came back at the mage.

“He’s done something to you, Colin,” Letine shouted. “Overcome it!”

That was probably true, Colin thought, but it didn’t matter. There was no redemption. His hands were never going to be clean.

The daedra attacked again, but this time Hierem failed to deflect it completely; it skittered by, and one of its foreclaws caught the minister across the chest. His robe ripped with an oddly metallic sound, and Colin saw he had on some sort of mail beneath. That had torn, as well, and the mage started to bleed.

Snarling, Hierem turned, struck the daedra with his hand, and it collapsed. It wasn’t dead, but didn’t seem to be able to move, as if it suddenly weighed a few extra tons.

“Colin!” Letine shouted as something like lightning jagged from her hand and struck Hierem. It shivered about the minister and then seemed to reverse itself, knocking Letine to the floor.

All Colin could hear now was Hierem’s harsh breathing. The minister examined his wound and shrugged.

“So much for assassins,” he muttered. “I should ask why and who sent you, but it doesn’t matter, or won’t soon enough. What concerns me more is where the prince and his companion have got off too.”

“Oblivion take you, and your plans,” Letine gasped, trying to rise.

“Ah!” he sighed. “Arese! I am so disappointed in you-or should I say proud of you? You found out what I was up to, didn’t you? I thought someone had been in my things.”

“It’s the tower,” she said, pushing herself away from him with her hands, trying to get her legs to work. “It’s the key. I didn’t get it until Colin remembered one of the symbols meant ‘echo.’ The White-Gold Tower is an echo of the ur-tower, the first object of our reality the gods created. It’s one of the axes of creation.”

Hierem smiled. “Umbriel thinks it can emancipate him from Clavicus Vile, make him free of the prince forever. Possibly it would if I gave him the chance. But I see you know I’ve found another use for it.”

He reached into a pocket and produced a cylinder about an inch in diameter and six inches long. He gave it a little shake and it telescoped out to about three feet. It seemed to be a dull reddish black with glowing, scarlet daedric script all over it.

Some things matter, Colin told himself. They matter.

Hierem pointed the tube at Letine. Colin felt the moment slow down, understanding that when it was over the woman he’d kissed, touched, made love to, was going to be dead.

He got the knife, raised it to throw.

Hierem must have seen, because he swung the weapon toward him. Colin’s knife went over the minister’s shoulder and spanged into the wall.

“You’ve got more spirit than I imagined,” Hierem said.

Colin tried to keep his face neutral, but he knew the sorcerer must have seen something in his eyes, because he started to turn as the daedra came on him from behind. Hierem screamed then, as the great curved claws butchered him, but he didn’t scream for long.

Feeling a little lighter, Colin slowly came to his feet as the daedra savaged the minister’s body and then vanished. He walked toward Letine, who was coming unsteadily to her feet. He caught her by the shoulder and helped her stand.

“Thanks,” she said. She was shaking.

“What was he talking about?” Colin asked. “I thought you didn’t find out anything about the-”

The knife slipping in under his ribs cut him off. Letine stepped back, leaving him to stare at the hilt protruding from his torso.

“What?” he asked, dropping to his knees.

Her eyes were wide, her mouth formed an O, and she looked stricken. She reached for the hilt of the knife, as if she thought she could somehow undo what she had done.

“Colin…” she said. Then her expression grew harder.

“I’m sorry, Colin,” she said. “Ten years. Ten years!” Fury strained her voice to the breaking point. “I’m owed something. Hierem owes me. And I’m going to collect.” She picked up the rod Hierem had dropped and went through his clothing. Colin didn’t see if she took anything. He kept looking at the knife in him.

She paused at the doorway-he couldn’t tell if she was trying to decide whether to finish him off or wanted to tell him something.

She did neither-she simply left.

He realized he was having a hard time breathing. She had probably hit his lung.

Annaig watched as the poison began to flow from the tree-wine, knowing there was no going back at this point. Whether it worked or not, Umbriel was going to know, and probably sooner than later.

Which meant it was time to leave the kitchens. She picked up her bag and threw it across her shoulders, hoping she hadn’t left anything she needed, but not willing to stop and think about it. She wondered if Attrebus and Sul were on Umbriel yet, but that, too, would wait until she was someplace else.

She wished she knew where Glim had gone.

She was almost to the pantry when she heard the commotion, and when she entered the corridor, she saw Glim in the pantry shaking workers off and trying to reach the corridor, where Yeum and six cooks were lined up, fully armed.

“Xhuth,” she muttered. She fumbled in her bag until she found a glass vial and tossed it to shatter on the floor, just behind Yeum. The chef turned, but the yellow cloud had already engulfed her and the rest. As they collapsed, unconscious, Annaig held her breath and jumped over them.

“Glim,” she said, “what in the world are you doing?”

“You have to stop it, Annaig,” he said. He sounded urgent, but there wasn’t any anger in his voice. “Stop poisoning the trees.”

“Glim-there is no stopping it. It’s done. I’m sorry, I know how you feel-”

“You don’t know anything,” he said. “They just want to go home.”

“This isn’t making any sense to me,” she said. “This is it, Glim. We’re out of time. All we can do now is try to escape.”

“But-”

“We have to get out of here now! If you have something to tell me, tell me while we’re leaving.”

She got onto the lift that brought things to and from the Fringe Gyre and activated it, and they began to rise.

“The trees,” Glim said. “I understand them now. They changed me so I could help them.”

“Help them do what?”

“Go home.”

“And where is that?” she demanded.

“I don’t know-somewhere else. Not Tamriel. Isn’t that what we want?”

“What I want is for all of this to die, Glim.”

“I can feel it, too,” Fhena said. “Don’t you understand? If it kills the trees, it will kill all of us-including Glim.”

The lift reached the top.

“We’d better hide,” Annaig said. “They’ll be after us soon.”

“Aren’t you listening?”

But Annaig’s head was whirling. It was too much, wasn’t it? Could she really be expected to listen to all of this, put up with it?

“Just-one thing at a time,” she said.

Her locket was begging for attention.

In the gray, unnatural mist, Mazgar bent to her oars, feeling the longboat glide through the water. She felt Brenn huddled close behind her, crowded there by the five other soldiers stuffed into the small craft. As unnatural as the concealing mist was the silence. The lack of chatter and even of breathing left her feeling unsettled. Even the water of the great lake bore their passage without so much as a single lap of oar in water.

But that could work both ways. When the arrows started falling, she didn’t hear them either, or the screams of those they hit. Her first clue was when a man in the boat ahead of her clutched at a shaft in the side of his neck; only then did she notice the cloud of fletched death swooping down on them.

Fortunately, Ram and Dextra were ahead of her, hefting their shields to catch most of the darts coming their way.

But while all eyes were turned up, Mazgar felt something seize her oar. She jerked at it, and then the boat heaved up on one side.

The wormies were in the water.

Ahead, the mist was suddenly incandescent with bursts of orange and azure.

So much for surprise, she thought.

The boat started to flip, so she jumped clear into the water. To fight the panic being submerged always brought on, she concentrated instead on finding the bottom with her feet, as all around her the upper bodies of wormies appeared, water draining from the cavities in their faces and chests.

She set her footing in the muddy bottom and boxed away the nearest before drawing her close-work dagger. Ram, Dextra, Martin, and a Redguard whose name she didn’t know formed a diamond formation around Brennus and started pushing toward shore. She went for their hands first; grab with her left, sever at the wrist with her knife, cut the side of the neck, move on. She was slower in the water, but so-thank Mauloch-were they.

She saw Ram had one on his back and cut its arm off at the elbow, ruining its grip, but then another hail of arrows dropped into the water and Ram went down anyway, screaming soundlessly and gripping at a shaft in his sternum.

Mazgar felt a pleasant shock, and then the wormies fell away from them, moving off to other targets. She was relieved-because that meant Brenn was alive-but turned to confirm it anyway. He nodded at her.

By the time they reached the shore, the survivors of the first two waves of boats had formed a double line, one to face the enemy coming from the sea, the other looking landward. Sound came back-battle cries, screams of pain, terse orders passed up and down the lines. She found Prossos and he put her in the front line, which suited her fine. She drew Sister, which was more suited to this sort of work.

And work it was going to be.

She had started the day with five hundred soldiers. Their job was to cross Lake Rumare from the north, there to join with a massive push toward the northwest side of the city. That’s where the enemy was massed most deeply, and lately had begun actively trying to break through the gate that led to the Imperial prison. It was also where Umbriel would arrive, if it continued on the course it was presently following.

Now she stood with something between two and three hundred comrades. They looked to be lined up against three times that.

Still, they gained ground steadily. The land was pretty flat here, and the archers who had plagued them earlier either seemed to have been dealt with or more likely couldn’t make decent shots with ranks so close. As they pushed forward, their line formed a wedge, to prevent the wormies from outflanking them with their numbers and rolling them up. After that, they settled into a bloody pace. Someone off to her left starting bellowing “General Slaughter’s Comely Daughter” a little off-key, and a few heartbeats later the whole cohort was shouting the response, and it started to feel like a party.

A blond man to her right dropped with a leaf-shaped spear pushed all the way through him. She felt a tap on her shoulder and nodded, dragging the wounded man back as an orc half again her size filled the gap.

In the empty center of the phalanx, she yelled for a healer, but it was clear Blondie wasn’t going to make it.

He knew it, too.

“It’s okay,” he managed. “Just be quick.”

She nodded and closed his eyes. Then she took off his head with a single blow, followed by both hands and feet. Sometimes they came back, even without heads.

She took her ten-minute rest and had a long drink of water while watching the huge bulk of Umbriel draw ever nearer.

Brennus fell in with her.

“I know that’s hard,” he said. “I’m sorry you had to do it.”

“Orders are orders,” she said. “Especially when they make sense.”

“I know,” he said. “That doesn’t make it easy.”

“How long before it gets to the walls, you think?” she asked, jabbing her tusks toward the flying city.

“Hours,” he said, “unless the Emperor has some tricks to try still.”

“I heard from that rat-face, Solein, that they made two more tries to invade by air.”

“We’re not supposed to spread it around, but yes, both just as unsuccessful as that first one. But the wall might be a different matter; the Synod and the College of Whispers will give it all they’ve got, you can be sure of that. And they’ve had a long while to prepare defenses.”

Mazgar handed him the skin. “I’ll let them worry about that,” she said. “I’ve got my own job to think about.”

She clapped him on the shoulder and went back to take her place on the line.