The Infernal city

For my daughter, Dorothy Nellah Joyce Keyes. Welcome, Nellah.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank everyone involved in The Elder Scrolls for such rich material to work with. Specifically, thanks to Kurt Kuhlmann, Bruce Nesmith, Pete Hines, and Todd Howard for their input and guidance. I would be remiss to neglect mentioning the Imperial Library website, which was also an invaluable resource in writing this book.

As always, thanks to my agent, Richard Curtis. Thanks to my friend Annaïg Houesnard for being a good sport about me lifting her name.

Thanks also to my editor, Tricia Narwani, editorial assistant Mike Braff, and copy editor Peter Weissman, production manager Erin Bekowies, production editor Shona McCarthy, marketing manager Ali T. Kokmen, publicist David Moench, and, of course, the publisher, Scott Shannon. For the wonderful cover, thanks go out to illustrator Paul Youll and designer Dreu Pennington-McNeil.

PROLOGUE

When Iffech felt the sea shudder, he knew. The wind had already fallen like a dead thing from the sky, gasping as it succumbed upon the iron swells, breathing its last to his mariner’s ears. The sky always knew first; the sea was slow—dreadful slow—to come around.

The sea shook again—or, rather, seemed to drag beneath their keel. Up in the crow’s nest Keem screamed as he was tossed out like a kitten. Iffech watched him twist and almost impossibly catch the rigging with those Cathay Raht claws of his.

“Stendarr!” Grayne swore, in her South Niben twang. “What was that? A tsunami?” Her feeble human gaze searched out through the dusk.

“No,” Iffech murmured. “I was off the Summerset Isles when the sea tried to swallow them, and I felt one of those pass under us. And another, when I was younger, off the coast of Morrowind. In deep water you don’t feel much. This is deep water.”

“Then what?” She brushed her silver and gray bangs off her useless eyes.

Iffech twitched his shoulders in imitation of a human shrug and ran his claws through the patchy fur of his forearm. The still air smelled sweet, like rotting fruit.

“See anything, Keem?” he called up.

“My own death, nearly,” the Ne Quin-alian cat shouted back, his voice rasping hollow, as if the ship was in a box. He lithely hauled his sleek body back into the nest. “Nothing on the sea,” he continued after a moment.

“Under it, then,” Grayne said nervously.

Iffech shook his head. “The wind,” he said.

And then he saw it, in the south, a sudden blackness, a crackle of green lightning, and then a form like a tall thunderhead billowed into being.

“Hold on!” he shouted.

And now came a clap like thunder but forty times louder, and a new fist of wind that snapped the mainmast, taking poor Keem to the death he had nearly seen. Then all was still again, except for the roaring in his damaged ears.

“By the gods, what can it be?” he barely heard Grayne ask.

“The sea doesn’t care,” Iffech said, watching the dark mass move toward them. He looked around his ship. All of the masts were broken, and it appeared that half the crew was already gone.

“What?”

“Not many Khajiit take to the sea,” he said. “They’ll bear it for trade, to move skooma around, but few there are who love her. But I’ve adored her since I could mewl. And I love her because she doesn’t care what the gods or daedra think. She’s another world, with her own rules.”

“What are you going on about?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I feel it, I don’t think it. But don’t you think—doesn’t it feel like …” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

Grayne stared out toward the thing.

“I see it, now,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I saw an Oblivion gate open once,” she said. “When my father worked in Leyawiin. I saw things—it feels a little like that. But Martin’s sacrifice—they say it can’t happen again. And it doesn’t look like a gate.”

It wasn’t shaped like a thunderhead, Iffech realized. More like a fat cone, point down.

Another wind was starting up, and on it something unbelievably foul.

“It doesn’t matter what it is,” he said. “Not to us.”

And a few instants later it didn’t.

Sul’s throat hurt, so he knew he had been screaming. He was soaked with sweat, his chest ached, and his limbs were trembling. He opened his eyes and forced his head up so he could see where he was.

A man stood in the doorway with a drawn sword. His eyes were very wide and blue beneath a shock of curly, barley-colored hair. Swearing, Sul reached for his own weapon where it hung on the bedpost.

“Just hold on there,” the fellow said, backing up. “It’s just you’ve been hollering so, I was worried something was happening to you.”

The dreamlight was still fading, but his mind was starting to turn. If the fellow had wanted him dead, he probably would be.

“Where am I?” he asked, taking a grip on his longsword, despite his reasoning.

“In the Lank Fellow Inn,” the man replied. And then, after a pause, “In Chorrol.”

Chorrol. Right.

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Sul said. “Nothing to concern you.”

“Ah, yes.” The man looked uncomfortable, “Do you, umm, scream like that every—”

“I won’t be here tonight,” Sul cut him off. “I’m moving on.”

“I didn’t mean to offend.”

“You didn’t,” Sul replied.

“The breakfast is out, down there.”

“Thank you. Please leave me.”

The man closed the door. Sul sat there for a moment rubbing the lines in his forehead. “Azura,” he murmured. He always knew the prince’s touch, even when it was light. This had not been light.

He closed his eyes and tried to feel the sea jump beneath him, to hear the old Khajiit captain’s words, see again through his eyes. That thing, appearing in the sky—everything about it stank of Oblivion. After spending twenty years there, he ought to know the smell.

“Vuhon,” he sighed. “It must be you, Vuhon, I think. Why else would the prince send me such a vision? What else would matter to me?”

No one answered, of course.

He remembered a little more, after the Khajiit had died. He had seen Ilzheven as he last saw her, pale and lifeless, and the smoking shatterlands that had once been Morrowind. Those were always there in his dreams, whether Azura meddled with them or not. But there had been another face, a young man, Colovian probably, with a slight bend in his nose. He seemed familiar, as if they had met somewhere.

“That’s all I get?” Sul asked. “I don’t even know which ocean to look in.” The question was directed at Azura, but he knew it was rhetorical. He also knew he was lucky to get even that. He dragged his wiry gray body out of bed and went over to the washbasin to splash water in his face and blink red eyes at himself in the mirror. He started to turn away when he noticed, behind him in the reflection, a couple of books propped in an otherwise empty shelf. He turned, walked over, and lifted the first.

TALES OF SOUTHERN WATERS, it announced.

He nodded his head and opened the second.

THE MOST CURRENT AND HIGH ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ATTREBUS, this one read.

And there, on the frontispiece, was an engraving of a young man’s face with a slightly crooked nose.

For the first time in years Sul uttered a hoarse laugh. “Well, there you go,” he said. “I’m sorry I doubted you, my Prince.”

An hour later, armed and armored, he rode south and east, toward madness, retribution, and death. And though he had long ago forgotten what happiness was, he imagined it must have been a bit like what he felt now.

ONE

A pale young woman with long ebon curls, and a male with muddy green scales and chocolate spines, crouched on the high rafters of a rotting villa in Lilmoth, known by some as the Festering Jewel of Black Marsh.

“You’re finally going to kill me,” the reptile told the woman. His tone was thoughtful, his saurian features composed in the faint light bleeding down through the cracked slate roof.

“Not so much kill you as get you killed,” she answered, pushing the tight rings of her hair off her face and pressing her slightly aquiline nose and gray-green gaze toward the vast open space beneath them.

“It works out the same,” the other hissed.

“Come on, Glim,” Annaïg said, tossing herself into her father’s huge leather chair and clasping her hands behind her neck. “We can’t pass this up.”

“Oh, I think it can be safely said that we can,” Mere-Glim replied. He lounged on a low weavecane couch, one arm draped so as to suspend over a cypress end table whose surface was supported by the figure of a crouching Khajiit warrior. The Argonian was all silhouette, because behind him the white curtains that draped the massive bay windows of the study were soaked in sunlight.

“Here are some things we could do instead.” He ticked one glossy black claw on the table.

“Stay here in your father’s villa and drink his wine.” A second claw came down. “Take some of your father’s wine down to the docks and drink it there.” The third. “Drink some here and some down at the docks …”

“Glim, how long has it been since we had an adventure?”

His lazy lizard gaze traveled over her face.

“If by adventure you mean some tiring or dangerous exercise, not that long. Not long enough anyway.” He wiggled the fingers of both hands as if trying to shake something sticky off them, a peculiarly Lilmothian expression of agitation. The membranes between his digits shone translucent green. “Have you been reading again?”

He made it sound like an accusation, as if “reading” was another way of referring to, say, infanticide.

“A bit,” she admitted. “What else am I to do? It’s so boring here. Nothing ever happens.”

“Not for lack of your trying,” Mere-Glim replied. “We very nearly got arrested during your last little adventure.”

“Yes, and didn’t you feel alive?” she said.

“I don’t need to ‘feel’ alive,” the Argonian replied. “I am alive. Which state I would prefer to retain.”

“You know what I mean.”

“Hff. That’s a bold assertion,” he sniffed.

“I’m a bold girl.” She sat forward. “Come on, Glim. He’s a were-crocodile. I’m certain of it. And we can get the proof.”

“First of all,” Mere-Glim said, “there’s no such thing as a were-crocodile. Second, if there were, why on earth would we care to prove it?”

“Because … well, because people would want to know. We’d be famous. And he’s dangerous. People around there are always disappearing.”

“In Pusbottom? Of course they are. It’s one of the dodgiest parts of town.”

“Look,” she said. “They’ve found people bitten in half. What else could do that?”

“A regular crocodile. Lots of things, really. With some effort, I might be able to do it, too.” He fidgeted again. “Look, if you’re so sure about this, get your father to talk Underwarden Ethten into sending some guards down there.”

“Well, what if I’m wrong? Father would look stupid. That’s what I’m saying, Glim. I need to know for sure. I must find some sort of proof. I’ve been following him—”

“You’ve what?” He gaped his mouth in incredulity.

“He looks human, Glim, but he comes and goes out of the canal like an Argonian. That’s how I noticed him. And when I looked where he came out—I’m sure the first few steps were made by a crocodile, and after that by a man.”

Glim closed his mouth and shook his head.

“Or a man stepped in some crocodile tracks,” he said. “There are potions and amulets that let even you gaspers breathe underwater.”

“But he does it all the time. Why would he do that? Help me be sure, Glim.”

Her friend sibilated a long hiss. “Then can we drink your father’s wine?”

“If he hasn’t drunk it all.”

“Fine.”

She clapped her hands in delight. “Excellent! I know his routine. He won’t be back in his lair until nightfall, so we should go now.”

“Lair?”

“Sure. That’s what it would be, wouldn’t it? A lair.”

“Fine, a lair. Lead on.”

And now here we are, Annaïg thought.

They had made their way from the hills of the old Imperial quarter into the ancient, gangrenous heart of Lilmoth—Pusbottom. Imperials had dwelt here, too, in the early days when the Empire had first imposed its will and architecture on the lizard people of Black Marsh. Now only the desperate and sinister dwelt here, where patrols rarely came: the poorest of the poor, political enemies of the Argonian An-Xileel party that now dominated the city, criminals and monsters.

They found the lair easily enough, which turned out to be a livable corner of a manse so ancient the first floor was entirely silted up. What remained was vastly cavernous and rickety and not that unusual in this part of town. What was odd was that it wasn’t full of squatters—there was just the one. He had furnished the place with mostly junk, but there were a few nice chairs and a decent bed.

That’s about all they got to see before they heard the voices, coming in the same way they had—which was to say the only way. Annaïg and Glim were backed up in the corner, and here the walls were stone. The only way to go was up an old staircase and then even farther, using the ancient frame of the house as a ladder. Annaïg wondered what sort of wood—if wood it was—could resist decomposition for so long. The wall-and floorboards here had been made of something else, and were almost like paper.

So they had to take care to stay on the beams.

Glim hushed himself; the figures in the group below were gazing up—not at them, but in their vague direction.

Annaïg took a small vial from the left pocket of her double-breasted jacket and drank its contents. It tasted a bit like melon, but very bitter.

She felt her lungs fill and empty, the elastic pull of her body around her bones. Her heart seemed to be vibrating instead of beating, and the oddest thing was, she couldn’t tell if this was fear.

The faint noises below suddenly became much louder, as if she was standing among them.

“Where is he?” one of the figures asked. They were hard to make out in the dim light, but this one looked darker than the rest, possibly a Dunmer.

“He’ll be here,” another said. He—or maybe she—was obviously a Khajiit—everything about the way he moved was feline.

“He will,” a third voice said. Annaïg watched as the man she had been following for the last few days approached the others. Like them, he was too far away to see, but she knew him by the hump of his back, and her memory filled in the details of his brutish face and long, unkempt hair.

“Do you have it?” the Khajiit asked.

“Just brought it in under the river.”

“Seems like a lot of trouble,” the Khajiit said. “I’ve always wondered why you don’t use an Argonian for that.”

“I don’t trust ’em. Besides, they have ripper eels trained to hunt Argonians trying to cross the outer canal. They’re not so good at spotting me, especially if I rub myself with eel-slime first.”

“Disgusting. You can keep your end of the job.”

“Just as long as I get paid for it.” He pulled off his shirt and removed his hump. “Have a look. Have a taste, if you want.”

“Oh, daedra and Divines,” Annaïg swore, from the beam they crouched on. “He’s not a were-croc. He’s a skooma smuggler.”

“You’re finally going to kill me,” Glim said.

“Not so much kill you as get you killed.”

“It works out the same.”

And now Annaïg was quite sure that what she felt was fear. Bright, terrible, animal fear.

“By the way,” the Khajiit below said, lowering his voice. “Who are those two in the rafters?”

The man looked up. “Xhuth! if I know,” he said. “None of mine.”

“I hope not. I sent Patch and Flichs up to kill them.”

“Oh, kaoc’,” Annaïg hissed. “Come on, Glim.”

As she stood, something wisped through the air near her, and a shriek tore out of her throat.

“I knew it,” Glim snapped.

“Just—come on, we have to get to the roof.”

They ran across the beams, and someone behind her shouted. She could hear their footfalls now—why hadn’t she before? An enchantment of some sort?

“There.” Glim said. She saw it; part of the roof had caved in and was resting on the rafters, forming a ramp. They scrambled up it. Something hot and wet was trying to pull out of her chest, and she hysterically wondered if an arrow hadn’t hit her, if she wasn’t bleeding inside.

But they made it to the roof.

And a fifty-foot fall.

She pulled out two vials and handed one to Mere-Glim.

“Drink this and jump,” she said.

“What? What is it?”

“It’s—I’m not sure. It’s supposed to make us fly.”

“Supposed to? Where did you get it?”

“Why is that important?”

“Oh, Thtal, you made it didn’t you? Without a formula. Remember that stuff that was supposed to make me invisible?”

“It made you sort of invisible.”

“It made my skin translucent. I looked like a bag of offal walking around.”

She drank hers. “No time, Glim. It’s our only hope.”

Their pursuers were coming up the ramp, so she jumped, wondering if she should flap her arms or …

But what she did was fall, and shriek.

But then she wasn’t falling so fast, and then she was sort of drifting, so the wind actually pushed her like a soap bubble. She heard the men hollering from the roof, and turned to see Glim floating just behind her.

“See?” she said. “You need to have a little faith in me.”

She barely got the sentence out before they were falling again.

Later, battered, sore, and stinking of the trash pile that broke their final fall, they returned to her father’s villa. They found him passed out in the same chair Annaïg had been in earlier that morning. She stood looking at him for a moment, at his pale fingers clutched on a wine bottle, at his thinning gray hair. She was trying to remember the man he had been before her mother died, before the An-Xileel wrested Lilmoth from the Empire and looted their estates.

She couldn’t see him.

“Come on,” she told Glim.

They took three bottles of wine from the cellar and wound their way up the spiral stair to the upper balcony. She lit a small paper lantern and in its light poured full two delicate crystal goblets.

“To us,” she said.

They drank.

Old Imperial Lilmoth spread below them, crumbling hulks of villas festooned with vines and grounds overgrown with sleeping palms and bamboo, all dark now as if cut from black velvet, except where illumined by the pale phosphorescences of lucan mold or the wispy yellow airborne shines, harmless cousins of the deadly will-o’-wisps in the deep swamps.

“There now,” she said, refilling her glass. “Don’t you feel more alive?”

He blinked his eyes, very slowly. “Well, I certainly feel more aware of the contrast between life and death,” he replied.

“That’s a start,” she said.

A small moment passed.

“We were lucky,” Glim said.

“I know,” she replied. “But …”

“What?”

“Well, it’s no were-croc, but we can at least report the skooma dealers to the underwarden.”

“They’ll have moved by then. And even if they catch them, that’s a drop of water in the ocean. There’s no stopping the skooma trade.”

“There certainly isn’t if no one tries,” she replied. “No offense, Glim, but I wish we were still in the Empire.”

“No doubt. Then your father would still be a wealthy man, and not a poorly paid advisor to the An-Xileel.”

“It’s not that,” she said. “I just—there was justice under the Empire. There was honor.”

“You weren’t even born.”

“Yes, but I can read, Mere-Glim.”

“But who wrote those books? Bretons. Imperials.”

“And that’s An-Xileel propaganda. The Empire is rebuilding itself. Titus Mede started it, and now his son Attrebus is at his side. They’re bringing order back to the world, and we’re just—just dreaming ourselves away here, waiting for things to get better by themselves.”

The Argonian gave his imitation shrug. “There are worse places than Lilmoth.”

“There are better places, too. Places we could go, places where we could make a difference.”

“Is this your Imperial City speech again? I like it here, Nn. It’s my home. We’ve known each other since we were hatchlings, yes, and if you didn’t already know you could talk me into almost anything, you do now. But leaving Black Marsh—that you won’t get me to do. Don’t even try.”

“Don’t you want more out of life, Glim?”

“Food, drink, good times—why should anyone want more than that? It’s people wanting to ‘make a difference’ causing all the troubles in the world. People who think they know what’s better for everyone else, people who believe they know what other people need but never bother to ask. That’s what your Titus Mede is spreading around—his version of how things ought to be, right?”

“There is such a thing as right and wrong, Glim. Good and evil.”

“If you say so.”

“Prince Attrebus rescued an entire colony of your people from slavery. How do you think they feel about the Empire?”

“My people knew slavery under the old Empire. We knew it pretty well.”

“Yes, but that was ending when the Oblivion crisis happened. Look, even you have to admit that if Mehrunes Dagon had won, if Martin hadn’t beaten him—”

“Martin and the Empire didn’t beat him in Black Marsh,” Glim said, his voice rising. “The An-Xileel did. When the gates opened, Argonians poured into Oblivion with such fury and might, Dagon’s lieutenants had to close them.”

Annaïg realized that she was leaning away from her friend and that her pulse had picked up. She smelled something sharp and faintly sulfurous. Amazed, she regarded him for a moment.

“Yes,” she finally said, when the scent diminished, “but without Martin’s sacrifice, Dagon would have eventually taken Black Marsh, too, and made this world his sportground.”

Glim shifted and held out his glass to be refilled.

“I don’t want to argue about this,” he said. “I don’t see that it’s important.”

“You sounded as if you thought so for a second there, old friend. I thought I heard a little passion in your voice. And you smelled like you were spoiling for a fight.”

“It’s just the wine,” he muttered, waving it off. “And all of the excitement. For the rest of the night, can we just celebrate that your ‘flying’ potion wasn’t a complete failure?”

She was starting to feel warm in her belly, the wine at its business.

“Well, yes,” she said. “I suppose that’s worth a toast or two.”

They drank those, and then Glim looked a little sidewise at her.

“Anyway—” he began, then stopped.

“What?”

He grinned his lizard grin and shook his head.

“You may not have to go looking for trouble. From what I heard, it might be coming for us.”

“What’s this?”

“The Wind Oracle put into port today.”

“Your cousin Ixtah-Nasha’s boat.”

“Yah. Says he saw something out on the deep, something coming this way.”

“Something?”

“That’s the crazy part. He said it looked like an island with a city on it.”

“An uncharted island?”

“An unmoored island. Floating in the air. Flying.”

Annaïg frowned, set her glass down and wagged a finger at him. “That’s not funny, Glim. You’re teasing me.”

“No, I wasn’t going to tell you. But the wine …”

She sat up straighter in her chair. “You’re serious. Coming this way?”

“’Swat he said.”

“Huh,” she replied, taking up the wine again and sinking back into her chair. “I’ll have to think about that. A flying city. Sounds like something left over from the Merithic era. Or before.” She felt her ample mouth pull in a huge smile. “Exciting. I’d better go see Hecua tomorrow.”

And so they finished that bottle, and opened another—an expensive one—and outside the rains came, as they always did, a moving curtain, glittering in the lamplight, clean and wet, washing away, for the moment, Lilmoth’s scent of mildew and decay.

TWO

A boy was once born with a knife instead of a right hand, or so Colin had heard. Rape and attempted murder planted him in his mother, but she had lived and turned all of her thoughts toward vengeance. She laughed when he carved his way out of her and went gleefully into the world to slaughter all who had wronged her and many who had not. And when his victims were drowning in their own blood, they might ask, “Who are you?” and he would answer simply, “Dalk,” which in the northern tongue is an old word for knife.

According to the legend, it happened in Skyrim, but assassins liked the story, and it wasn’t that uncommon for a brash young up-and-coming killer to take that alias and daydream of making that cryptic reply.

The knife in Colin’s hand didn’t feel remotely a part of him. The handle was slick and clammy, and it made his arm feel huge and obvious, hanging by his side just under the edge of his cloak.

Why hadn’t the man noticed him? He was just standing there, leaning against the banister of the bridge, staring off toward the lighthouse. He came here each Loredas, after visiting his horse at the stables. Often he met someone here; there was a brief conversation, and they would part. He never spoke to the same person twice.

Colin continued toward him. There was traffic on the bridge—mostly folks from Weye going home for the night with their wagons and the things they hadn’t sold at market, lovers trying to find a nice place to be secret.

But it was thinning out. They were almost alone.

“There you are,” the man said.

His face was hard to see, as it was cast in shadow by a watch-light a little farther up. Colin knew it well, though. It was long and bony. His hair was black with a little gray, his eyes startling blue.

“Here I am,” Colin replied, his mouth feeling dry.

“Come on over.”

A few steps and Colin was standing next to him. A group of students from the College of Whispers were loudly approaching.

“I like this place,” the man said. “I like to hear the bells of the ships and see the light. It reminds me of the sea. Do you know the sea?”

Shut up! Colin thought. Please don’t talk to me.

The students were dithering, pointing at something in the hills northwest.

“I’m from Anvil,” Colin said, unable to think of anything but the truth.

“Ah, nice town, Anvil. What’s that place, the one with the dark beer?”

“The Undertow.”

The man smiled. “Right. I like that place.” He sighed and ran his fingers through his hair. “What times, eh? I used to have a beautiful villa on the headland off Topal Bay. I had a little boat, two sails, just for plying near the coast. Now …” He raised his hands and let them drop. “But you didn’t come here for any of that, did you?”

The students were finally moving off, talking busily in what sounded like a made-up language.

“I guess not,” Colin agreed. His arm felt larger than ever, the knife like a stone in his hand.

“No. Well, it’s simple today. You can tell them there’s nothing new. And if anyone asks, tell them that no food, no wine, no lover’s kiss is as beautiful as a long, deep, breath.”

“What?”

“Astorie, book three. Chapter—What are you holding there?”

Stupidly, Colin looked down at the knife, which had slipped from the folds of his cloak and gleamed in the lamplight.

Their eyes met.

“No!” the man shouted.

So Colin stabbed him—or tried. The man’s palms came up and the knife cut into them. Colin reached with his left hand to try to slap them aside and thrust again, this time slicing deep into the forearm.

“Just stop it!” the man gasped. “Wait a minute, talk—”

The knife slipped past the thrashing limbs and sank into his solar plexus. His mouth still working, the fellow staggered back, staring at his hand and arm.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

Colin took a step toward the man, who slumped against the banister.

“Don’t,” he wheezed.

“I have to,” Colin whispered. He stooped down. The man’s arms came up, too weak now to stop Colin from cutting his throat.

The corpse slipped to a sitting position. Colin slid down next to him and watched the students, distant now, entirely unaware of what had just happened.

Unlike the two men coming from the city, who were walking purposefully toward him. Colin put his arms around the dead man’s shoulders, as if the fellow had passed out from drinking and he was keeping him warm.

But there wasn’t any need for that. One of the pair was a tall bald man with angular features, the other an almost snoutless Khajiit. Arcus and Khasha.

“Into the river with him now,” Arcus said.

“Just catching my breath, sir.”

“Yes, I saw. Quite a fracas, when all we asked you to do was slit his throat.”

“He … he fought.”

“You were careless.”

“First time, Arcus,” Khasha said, smoothing his whiskers and twitching his tail impatiently. “How slick were you? Let’s get him in the river and be gone.”

“Fine. Lift, Inspector.”

When Colin didn’t move, Arcus snapped his fingers.

“Sir? You meant me?”

“I meant you. Sloppily done, but you did do it. You’re one of us now.”

Colin took the dead man’s legs, and together they heaved him over. He hit the water and lay there, floating, staring up at Colin.

Inspector. He’d been waiting three years to be called that.

Now it sounded like just another word.

“Put on this robe,” Khasha said. “Hide the blood until we get you cleaned up.”

“Right,” Colin said dully.

He got his documents the next day, from Intendant Marall, a round-faced man with an odd ruff of beard beneath his chin.

“You’ll lodge in the Telhall,” Marall told him. “I believe they already have a case for you.” He put down the pen and looked hard at Colin. “Are you well, son? You look haggard.”

“Couldn’t sleep, sir.”

The intendant nodded.

“Who was he, sir?” Colin blurted out. “What did he do?”

“You don’t want to know that, son,” Marall said. “I advise you not to try and find out.”

‘“But sir—”

“What does it matter?” Marall said. “If I told you he was responsible for the kidnapping and murder of sixteen toddlers, would that make you happy?”

“No, sir.”

“What if I told you his crime was to make a treasonous joke about her majesty’s thighs?”

Colin blinked. “I can’t imagine—”

“You’re not supposed to imagine, son. Yours is not the power of life and death. That lies far above you. It comes, in essence, from the authority of the Emperor. There is always a reason, and it is always a good one, and it is not your business, do you understand? You do not imagine, you do not think. You do what you’re told.”

“But I’ve been trained to think, sir. This office trained me to think.”

“Yes, and you do it very well. All of your instructors agree on that. You’re a very bright young man, or the Penitus Oculatus would not have approached you in the first place, and you have done very well here. But any thinking you do, you see, is in service to your job. If you’re asked to find a spy in the Emperor’s guard, you must use every bit of logic at your disposal. If you’re asked to quietly discover which of Count Caro’s daughters has been poisoning his guests, again, use your forensic training. But if you’re given a clear order to steal, injure, poison, stab, or generally do murder, your brain is only to help you with the method and the execution. You are an instrument, a utensil of the Empire.”

“I know that, sir.”

“Not well enough, or you wouldn’t be asking these questions.” He stood up. “You’re from Anvil, I seem to remember. One of the city guardsmen recommended you for testing.”

“Regin Oprenus, yes sir.”

“Without his recommendation, what would you be doing right now?”

“I don’t know, sir.”

But he did, in a general way. His father was dead, his mother barely got by doing laundry for the better off. He’d managed to teach himself to read, but his education wouldn’t have gone much further than that, and if it had, it wouldn’t have been of any use to him. At best he might have worked in the shipyard or managed to hire onto a ship. The Imperial invitation had been a dream come true, offering him everything he’d wanted as a young boy.

And that was still the case, despite … this. And now he would draw a salary. He could send his mother some of that before she worked herself to death.

“This is the test, isn’t it?” he said. “Not last night. Now.”

The intendant ghosted a little smile. “Both were tests, son. And this isn’t the last, just the last official one. Every day on this job is a new challenge. If you’re not up to it, the time to say so is now, before you’re in over your head.”

“I’m up to it, sir,” Colin said.

“Very well, then, Inspector. Take the rest of the day off. Report for duty tomorrow.”

Colin nodded and walked away, in search of his new lodgings.

THREE

When Annaïg awoke, Mere-Glim was still sprawled on the floor, his breath rasping loudly.

“Oh!” she muttered as she rose, pressing her throbbing temples, feeling her belly turn.

How much wine had they drunk?

She stumbled her way to the kitchen, winced at the sun as she unshuttered the windows. She built a fire in the stove, then opened the walk-in pantry in the diffuse light and considered the sausages hanging in bundles, the long blades of salted pogfish, barrels of flour, salt, sugar, rice, the pitiful basket of mostly wilted vegetables.

There were eggs on the counter, still warm, so Tai-Tai must be up and doing his job, which wasn’t always the case.

And there was her mother’s antique leather-bound spice case with its seventy-eight bottles of seeds and dried leaves.

Everything she needed.

Mere-Glim wandered in a few minutes after the garlic and chilies hit the oil and the air went sharp and pungent.

“I’m too sick to eat,” he complained.

“You’ll eat this,” Annaïg told him. “And you’ll like it. Old Tenny used to make this for Dad, before we couldn’t afford her anymore.”

“If that’s so, why is it different every time you make it? Last time it had peanuts and pickled pork, not chilies and garlic.”

“We don’t have any pork pickle,” she replied. “It’s not the specific ingredients that matter—it’s the principles of composition, the balance of essences, flavors, oils, and herbs.”

Saying that, she emptied the spices she had ground a bit before with mortar and pestle, and the earthy scents of coriander, cardamom, lady’s mantel seeds, and ginger wafted about the kitchen. She added two handfuls of crushed rice, stirred that a bit, covered it with a finger of coconut milk, and set it to simmer with a lid on the pot. When the porridge was done, she ladled it into bowls and added slices of venison sausage, red ham, and pickled watermelon rind.

“That looks disgusting,” Mere-Glim said.

“Not done yet,” she said. She broke two eggs and dropped them, raw, into each bowl.

Glim perked up and his tongue licked out. “Goose eggs?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Maybe I will try it.”

She set a bowl in front of him, and after an experimental bite, he began downing it with gusto. Annaïg tucked into her own.

“I already feel better,” Mere-Glim said.

“See?”

“Yes, yes.”

She took another bite.

“So tell me more about this ‘floating city,’” she said. “When is it supposed to be here?”

“Ix said they outpaced it for three days and it never changed course before they finally got the wind they needed to really leave it behind. It was headed straight here, he said, and will arrive sometime early tomorrow at the pace it’s coming.”

“So what did he figure it was?”

“A big chunk of rock, shaped like a top. They could see buildings on the rim. The ship’s wind-caller didn’t like it. Quit the minute they got into port and left town, fast, on a horse.”

“What didn’t the wind-caller like?”

“He kept saying it wasn’t right, that none of his magicks could tell him anything about it. Said it smelled like death.”

“Did anyone take word to the Organism?”

“I can never understand you two when you’re together,” a soft voice wisped. She turned her gaze to the door and found her father standing there. “That smells good,” he went on. “Is there any for me?”

“Sure, Taig,” she said. “I made plenty.”

She ladled him up a bowl and passed it. He took a spoonful and closed his eyes.

“Better than Tenithar’s,” he said. “Always in the kitchen, weren’t you? You learned well.”

“Do you know anything about this?” Annaïg said, a bit impatiently. It always bothered her, talking to her father, and she knew it shouldn’t, and that bothered her twice. But he sounded so soul-weak, as if most of his spirit had leaked out of him.

“I wasn’t kidding,” he said. “You’ve been like this since you were children. I recognize a few words here and there …”

Annaïg waved the old complaint aside. “This—flying city that’s supposed to be heading toward us. Do you know anything about that?”

“I know the stories,” he sighed, picking at the stew. “It started with Urvwen—”

Annaïg rolled her eyes. “Crazy old Psijic priest. Or whatever they call themselves.”

“Said he felt something out in the deep water, a movement of some kind. So, yes, he’s crazy and the An-Xileel are irritated by him, especially Archwarden Qajalil, so he was dismissed. But then there were the reports from the sea, and the Organism sent out some exploratory ships.”

“And?”

“They’re still out there, looking for a phantom probably. After all, Urvwen has been spreading his message down at the docks. No wonder if sailors are seeing things.”

“My cousin’s ship put to sea from Anvil three weeks ago,” Mere-Glim said. “He did not talk to Urvwen.”

Her father’s face tightened oddly, the way it did when he was trying to hide something.

“Taig!” she said.

“Nothing,” he replied. “It’s nothing to worry about. If it’s dangerous the An-Xileel will meet it with the same might that drove the Empire out of Black Marsh and the Dunmer out of Morrowind. But what would a flying city want with Lil-moth?”

“What do the Hist say?” Annaïg asked.

The spoon hesitated halfway up to her father’s lips, then continued. He chewed and swallowed.

“Taig!”

“The city tree said it was nothing to worry about.”

Mere-Glim made a high, scratchy humming sound and fluttered his eyes. “What do you mean? The ‘city’ tree?” He hesitated, as if he had said too much.

“Lorkhan’s bits, Glim,” Annaïg said. “We’re not visitors here, you know.”

He nodded. She hated how he was when he spoke straight Tamrielic. He didn’t sound like himself.

“It’s just, the Hist, they are all—connected. Of the same mind. So why mention the city tree in particular?”

Her father’s eyes searched about a bit aimlessly, and he sighed again. “The An-Xileel in Lilmoth talk only to the city tree.”

“What’s the difference?” Annaïg said. “Like Glim said, they’re all connected at the root, right? So what the city tree says is what they all say.”

Glim’s face was like stone. “Maybe not,” he said.

“What’s that mean?”

“Annaïg—” her father started. His voice sounded strained.

When he didn’t continue for a moment, she raised her hands. “What, Taig?”

“Thistle, this might be a good time for you to visit your aunt in Leyawiin. I’ve been thinking you ought to anyway. I went so far as to set aside money for the voyage, and there is a ship leaving at dawn.”

“That sounds worried to me, Taig. It sounds like you think something’s wrong.”

“You’re all that’s left me that matters,” the old man said. “Even if the risk is small …” He opened his hands but would not meet her eye. Then his forehead smoothed and he stood. “I have to go. I am called to the Organism this morning. I will see you tonight, and we can discuss this further. Why don’t you pack, in case you decide to take the trip?”

For a moment she saw farther; Leyawiin was an ocean voyage away, but from there she could reach the Imperial City, even if all she had were her own two feet. Maybe …

“Can Glim go?”

“I’m sorry, I’ve only money for one passage,” he replied.

“I wouldn’t go anyway,” Glim said.

“Right, then,” her father said. “I’ll be off. I’ll have dinner brought from the Coquina, Thistle. No need to cook tonight. And we’ll talk about this.”

“Right, Taig,” she said.

As soon as he was out of earshot, she leveled a finger at Mere-Glim. “You go down to the docks and see what that crazy priest has to say, and anything else you can find out. I’m going to Hecua’s.”

“Why Hecua’s?”

“I need to fine-tune my new invention.”

“Your falling potion, you mean?”

“It saved our lives,” she pointed out.

“On a related note,” Glim said, “why, by the rotting wells, are you worried about flying at this time?”

“How else are we going to get up on a flying island, by catapult?”

“Ahh …” Mere-Glim sighed. “Ah, no.”

“Look at me, Glim,” Annaïg said.

Slowly, reluctantly, he did so.

“I love you, and I’d love to have you along, but if you don’t want to go, no worries. I’m not going to give you a hard time. But I’m going, Xhu?”

He held her gaze for a moment, and then his nostrils contracted.

“Xhu,” he said.

“Meet you here at noon.”

As Mere-Glim followed Lilmoth’s long slump to the bay Imperials named Oliis, he felt the cloud-rippled sky gently pressing on him, on the trees, on the ancient ballast-stone paving. He wondered, which is to say that he gave his mind its way, let it slip away from speech into the obscure nimbus of pure thinking.

Words hammered thought into shape, put it in cages, bound it in chains. Jel—the tongue of his ancestors—was the closest speech to real thought, but even Annaïg—who knew as much Jel as anyone not of the root—her throat couldn’t make all the right sounds, couldn’t shade the meanings enough for him to really converse with her.

He was four people, really. Mere-Glim the Argonian, when he spoke the language of the Empire, which cut his thoughts into human shapes. When he spoke to his mother or siblings he was Wuthilul the Saxhleel. When he spoke with a Saxhleel from the deep forest, or even with a member of the An-Xileel, he was a Lukiul, “assimilated,” because his family had been living under Imperial ways for so long.

When he spoke with Annaïg he was something else, not between the two, but something very different from either. Glim.

But even their shared language was far from true thought.

True thought was close to the root.

The Hist were many, and they were one. Their roots burrowed deep beneath the black soil and soft white stone of Black Marsh, connecting them all, and thus connecting all Saxhleel, all Argonians. The Hist gave his people life, form, purpose. It was the Hist who had seen through the shadows to the Oblivion crisis, who called all of the people back to the marsh, defeated the forces of Mehrunes Dagon, drove the Empire into the sea, and laid waste to their ancient enemies in Morrowind.

The Hist were of one mind, but just as he was four beings, the mind of the Hist could sometimes escape itself. It had happened before. It had happened in Lilmoth.

If the city tree had separated itself, and the An-Xileel with it, what did that mean?

And why was he going to do what Annaïg had asked him to do rather than trying to discover what was happening to the tree whose sap had molded him?

But he was, wasn’t he?

He stopped and stared into the bulbous stone eyes of Xhon-Mehl the Fisher, once Ascendant Organ Lord of Lilmoth. Now all that was visible of him was his lower snout up to his head. The rest of him was sunken, like most of ancient Lilmoth, into the soft, shifting soil the city had been built on. If one could swim through mud and earth, there were many Lilmoths to discover beneath one’s webbed feet.

An image arose behind his eyes; the great stepped pyramid of Ixtaxh-thtithil-meht. Only the topmost chamber still jutted above the silt, but the An-Xileel had excavated it, room by room, pumping it out and laying magicks to keep the water from returning. As if they wanted to go back, not forward. As if something were pulling them back to that ancient Lilmoth …

He stopped, realizing he was still walking without knowing exactly where he was going, but then he knew. The undertow of his thoughts had brought him here.

To the tree. Or part of it. The city tree was said to be three hundred years old, and its roots and tendrils pushed and wound through most of lower Lilmoth, and here was a root the size of his thigh, twisting its way out of a stone wall. Everything else around him had become waterish, blurred, but as he laid his webbed hand on the rough surface, the colors sharpened and focused.

He stood there, no longer seeing the crumbling, rotted Imperial warehouses, but instead a city of monstrous stone ziggurats and statues pushing up to the sky, a place of glory and madness. He felt it tremor around him, smelled anise and burning cinnamon, and heard chanting in antique tongues. His heart thumped oddly as he watched the two moons heave themselves through the low mist of smoke and fog that rolled through the streets, and the waters surged beneath them, around them, beyond the sky.

His thoughts melted together.

He wasn’t sure how long it was before his mind complicated itself again, but his hand was still on the root. He lifted it and backed away, and after a few long breaths he began walking, and in the thick night around him, the massive structures softened, thinned, and went mostly away, until he was once again in the Lilmoth where his body was born.

Mostly away. But he felt it now, the call the An-Xileel felt, and he realized that a part of him had already known it.

He knew something else, too. The tree had cut him off from the vision before it had run its course.

That was troubling.

Gulls swarmed the streets like rats near the waterfront, most of them too greedy or stupid to even move out of his way as he picked his way through fish offal, shattered crabs, jellyfish, and seaweed. Barnacles went halfway up the buildings here. This part of town had sunk so low that when a double tide came, it flooded deep. The docks themselves floated, attached to a massive long stone quay whose foundations were as ancient as time and whose upper layer of limestone had been added last year. He made his way up the central ramp to the top of it. Here was a city in itself; since the An-Xileel forbade all but licensed foreigners in the city, the markets had all crowded themselves here. Here, a fishmonger held a flounder up by the tail, selling from a single crate of silver-skinned harvest. There, a long line of sheds with the Colovian Traders banner hawked trinkets of silver and brass, cooking pots, cutlery, wine, cloth. He had worked here, for a while. A group of his matriline cousins had set up a business selling Theilul, a liquor made of distilled sugarcane. They’d originally sold the cane, but since their fields were twenty miles from town, they’d found it easier to transport a few cases of bottles than many wagonloads of cane—and far more profitable.

He knew where to find Urvwen; right in the thick of it all, where the great stone cross that was the waterfront joined.

The Psijic wasn’t yelling, as usual. He was just sitting there, looking through the crowd and past the colorful masts of the ships to the south, toward where the bay came to the sea. His bone-colored skin seemed paler than usual, but when the silvery eyes found Mere-Glim approaching, they were full of life.

“You want to know, don’t you?” he said.

For a moment Mere-Glim had trouble responding, the experience with the tree had been so powerful. But he let words shape his thoughts again.

“My cousin said he saw something out at sea.”

“Yes, he did. It’s nearly here.”

“What is nearly here?”

The old priest shrugged. “Do you know anything about my order?”

“Not much.”

“Few do. We don’t teach our beliefs to outsiders. We counsel, we help.”

“Help with what?”

“Change.”

Mere-Glim blinked, trying to find his answer there.

“Change is inevitable,” Urvwen went on. “Indeed, change is sacred. But it is not to be unguided. I came here to guide; the An-Xileel—and the city council—the ‘Organism’ that they so thoroughly control—do not listen.”

“They have a guide—the Hist.”

“Yes. And their guide brings change, but not the sort that ought to be encouraged. But they do not listen to me. Truth be told, no one here listens to me, but I try. Every day I come here and try to have some effect.”

“What’s coming?” Mere-Glim persisted.

“Do you know of Arteum?” the old man asked.

“The island you Psijics come from,” Glim answered him.

“It was removed from the world once. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“Such things happen.” He nodded, more to himself, it seemed, than to Mere-Glim.

“Has something been removed from the world?” he asked.

“No,” Urvwen said, lowering his voice. “Something has been removed from another world. And it has come here.”

“What will it do?”

“I don’t know. But I think it will be very bad.”

“Why?”

“It’s too complicated to explain,” he sighed. “And even if you understood my explanation, it wouldn’t help. Mundus—the world—is a very delicate thing, you know. Only certain rules keep it from returning to the Is/Is Not.”

“I don’t understand.”

The Psijic waved his hands. “Those boats out there—to sail and not founder—the sails and the ropes that hoist them, control them—tension must be just so, they must adjust as the winds change, if a storm comes they may even have to be taken down …” He shook his head. “No, no—I feel the ropes of the world, and they have become too tight. They pull in the wrong directions. And that is never good. That is what happened in the days before the Dragonfires first burned—”

“Are you talking about Oblivion? I thought we can’t be invaded by Oblivion anymore. I thought Emperor Martin—”

“Yes, yes. But nothing is so simple. There are always loopholes, you see.”

“Even if there aren’t loops?”

Urvwen grinned at that but didn’t reply.

“So this—city,” Mere-Glim said. “It’s from Oblivion.”

The priest shook his head, so violently Mere-Glim thought it might come off.

“No, no, no—or yes. I can’t explain. I can’t—go away. Just go away.”

Mere-Glim’s head was already hurting from the conversation. He didn’t need to be told twice, although technically he had been.

He wandered off to find his cousins and procure a bottle of Theilul. Annaïg could wait a bit.

FOUR

Hecua’s single eye crawled its regard over Annaïg’s list of ingredients. Her wrinkled dark brow knotted in a little frown.

“Last try didn’t work, did it?”

Annaïg puffed her lips and lifted her shoulders. “It worked,” she said, “just not exactly the way I wanted it to.”

The Redguard shook her head. “You’ve the knack, there’s no doubt about that. But I’ve never heard of any formula that can make a person fly—not from anywhere. And this list—this just looks like a mess waiting to happen.”

“I’ve heard Lazarum of the Synod worked out a way to fly,” Annaïg said.

“Hmm. And maybe if there was a Synod conclave within four hundred miles of here, you might have a chance of learning that, after a few years paying their dues. But that’s a spell, not a synthesis. A badly put-together spell likely won’t work at all—alchemy gone wrong can be poison.”

“I know all of that,” Annaïg said. “I’m not afraid—nothing I’ve ever made turned out too bad.”

“It took me a week to give Mere-Glim his skin back.”

“He had his skin,” Annaïg pointed out. “It was just translucent, that’s all. It didn’t hurt him.”

Hecua buzzed her lips together in disdain. “Well, there’s no talking to the young, is there?” She held up the list and began picking through the bottles, boxes, and canisters on the shelves that made up the walls of the place.

While she did so, Annaïg wandered around the shelves, too, studying their contents. She knew she didn’t have everything she needed. It was like cooking; there was one more taste needed to pull everything together. She just didn’t have any idea what it was.

Hecua’s place was huge. It had once been the local Mages’ Guild hall, and there were still three or four doddering practitioners who were in and out of the rooms upstairs. Hecua honored their memberships, even though there was no such organization as the Mages’ Guild anymore. No one much cared; the An-Xileel didn’t care, and neither the College of Whispers nor the Synod—the two Imperially recognized institutions of magic—had representatives in Lilmoth, so they hadn’t anything to say about it either.

She opened bottles and sniffed the powders, distillations, and essences, but nothing spoke to her. Nothing, that is, until she lifted a small, fat bottle wrapped tightly in black paper. Touching it sent a faint tingle traveling up her arm, across her clavicle, and up into the back of her throat.

“What is it?” Hecua asked, and Annaïg realized her gasp must have been audible.

She held the container up.

The old woman came and peered down her nose at it.

“Oh, that,” she said. “I’m really not sure, to tell you the truth. It’s been there for ages.”

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“I pulled it from the back, while I was dusting.”

“And you don’t know what it is?”

She shrugged. “A fellow came in here years ago, a few months after the Oblivion crisis. He was sick with something and needed some things, but he didn’t have money to pay. But he had that. He claimed he’d taken it from a fortress in Oblivion itself. There was a lot of that back then; we had a big influx of daedra hearts and void salts and the like.”

“But he didn’t say what it was?”

She shook her head. “I felt sorry for him, that’s all. I imagine it’s not much of anything.”

“And you never opened it to find out?”

Hecua paused. “Well, no, you can see the paper is intact.”

“May I?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Annaïg broke the paper with her thumbnail, revealing the stopper beneath. It was tight, but a good twist brought it out.

The feeling in the back of her throat intensified and became a taste, a smell, bright as sunlight but cold, like eucalyptus or mint.

“That’s it,” she said, as she felt it all meld together.

“What? You know what it is?”

“No. But I want some.”

“Annaïg—”

“I’ll be careful, Aunt Hec. I’ll run some virtue tests on it.”

“Those tests aren’t well proven yet. They miss things.”

“I’ll be careful, I said.”

“Hmf,” the old woman replied dubiously.

The house, as usual, was empty, so she went to the small attic room where she had all of her alchemical gear and went to work. She did the virtue tests and found the primary virtue was restorative and the secondary was—more promisingly—one of alteration. The tertiary and quaternary virtues didn’t reveal themselves even so vaguely.

But she knew, knew right to her bones, that this was right. And so she passed hours with her calcinator, and in the end she was turning a flask containing a pale amber fluid that bent light oddly, as if it were a half a mile of liquid instead of a few inches.

“Well,” she said, sniffing it. Then she sighed. It felt right, smelled right—but Hecua’s warning was not to be taken lightly. This could be poison as easily as anything. Maybe if she just tasted a little …

At that moment she heard a sound on the stairs. She stayed still, listening for it to repeat itself.

“Annaïg?”

She sighed in relief. It was only her father. She remembered he had been bringing food home, and a glance out her small window proved it was near dinnertime.

“Coming, Taig,” she called, corking the potion and stuffing it in her right skirt pocket. She started up, then paused.

Where was Glim? He’d been gone an awfully long time.

She went to a polished cypress cabinet and withdrew two small objects wrapped in soft gecko skin. She unwrapped them carefully, revealing a locket on a chain and a life-sized likeness of a sparrow constructed of a fine metal the color of brass but as light as paper. Each individual feather had been fashioned exquisitely and separately, and its eyes were garnets set in ovals of some darker metal.

As her fingers touched it, it stirred, ruffling its metal wings.

“Hey, Coo,” she whispered.

She hesitated then. Coo was the only thing of value her mother had left her that hadn’t been stolen or sold. Sending her out was a risk she didn’t often take. But Glim had had more than enough time to get to the waterfront and back, hours and hours more. It was probably nothing—maybe he was drinking with his cousins or something—but she was eager to find out what the Psijic priest had to say.

“Go find Glim,” she whispered to the bird, conjuring the image of her friend in her secret eye. “Speak only to him, hear only at his touch.”

She purred, lifted her wings, and drifted more than flew out of the open window.

“Annaïg?”

Her father’s voice again, nearer. She went out, closing the door behind her.

She met him near the top of the winding flight. He was red in the face from wine or exertion or probably both.

“Why didn’t you just ring the bell, Taig?” she asked.

“Sometimes you don’t come down right away,” he said, stepping aside. “After you.”

“What’s the rush?” she asked, descending past him.

“We were going to talk,” he said.

“About the trip to Leyawiin?”

“That, and other things,” he replied.

The stair came to a landing, and then continued down.

“What other things?”

“I haven’t been a very good father, Thistle. I know that. Since your mother died—”

There was that annoying tone again. “It’s been fine, Taig. I’ve got no complaints.”

“Well, you should. I know that. I tell myself that I’ve been doing what’s needed to keep us alive, to keep this house …” He sighed. “And in the end, all meaningless.”

They passed the next landing.

“What do you mean, meaningless?” she asked. “I love this house.”

“You think I don’t know anything about you,” he said. “I do. You pine to leave here, this place. You dream of the Imperial City, of studying there.”

“I know we don’t have the money, Taig.”

He nodded. “That’s been the problem, yes. But I’ve sold some things.”

“Like what?”

“The house, for one.”

“What?” She stopped with her foot on the floor of the antechamber, just noticing the men there, four of them—an Imperial with a knobby nose, an orc with dark green hide and low, brushy brows, and two Bosmeri who might have been twins with their fine, narrow faces. She recognized the orc and the Imperial as members of the Thtachalxan, or “Drykillers,” the only non-Argonian guard unit in Lilmoth.

“What’s going on, Taig?” she whispered.

He rested his hand on her shoulder. “I wish I had more time, Thistle,” he murmured. “I wish I could go with you, but this is how it is. Your aunt will see you get to the Imperial City. She has friends there.”

“What’s happening, Taig? What do you know?”

“It doesn’t matter,” he said. “Best you not find out.”

She brushed his hand from her shoulder. “I’m not going to Leyawiin,” she said. “Certainly not without a better explanation and certainly not without you—and Glim.”

“Glim …” He exhaled, then his face changed into a visage utterly alien to her. “Don’t worry about Glim,” he said. “There’s nothing to be done there.”

“What do you mean?”

She could hear the panic building in her voice. It was as if it had pulled itself outside of her and become a thing of its own.

“Tell me!”

When he didn’t answer, she turned and strode for the door.

The orc stepped in her way.

“Don’t hurt her,” her father said.

Annaïg turned and ran, ran as fast as she could toward the kitchen and other door, the one that led to the garden.

She was only halfway there when hard, callused hands clamped on her arm.

“I owe yer father,” the orc growled. “So you’ll be coming with me, girl.”

She writhed in his grasp, but the others were all around her.

Her father leaned in and kissed her forehead. He stank of black rice wine.

“I love you,” he said. “Try to remember that, in the days and years to come. That in the end I did right by you.”

With half a bottle of Theilul sloshing in his belly, Mere-Glim made his wobbly way back toward the old Imperial district. He knew Annaïg was going to be irritated with him for not returning sooner, but at the moment he didn’t care that much. Anyway, it wasn’t much fun watching her concoct her smelly compounds, which is what she had surely been doing all afternoon. He hadn’t spent much time with his cousins lately—or with anyone except Annaïg, really. If he had, he might have known he wasn’t alone in feeling a bit cut off from the tree, that only the An-Xileel and other, even wilder people from the deep swamps seemed to enjoy complete rapport with it.

That was bothersome in a lot of ways, and perhaps most bothersome was that his mind—like many of his people—had a hard time believing in coincidence. If the tree was doing something strange at the same time a flying city appeared from nowhere, it seemed impossible that there wasn’t some connection.

Maybe Annaïg’s father was right—after all, the old man did work with the An-Xileel. Maybe it was time to go, away from Lilmoth and its rogue tree.

If it was rogue. If all the Hist weren’t involved. Because if they were, he would have to get out of Black Marsh entirely.

A light rain began splattering the mud-covered path as he passed beneath the pocked, eroded limestone arch that had once marked the boundary of the Imperial quarter. He whirl-jumped as a fluttering motion at the edge of his vision opened ancient templates—but what he saw there wasn’t a venin-bat or blood-moth. It took him a moment to sort out that it was Annaïg’s metal bird, Coo.

She must really be irritated, he thought. She rarely used Coo for anything.

He blew out some of the water that had collected in his nose and flipped open the little hatch that covered the mirror.

He didn’t find Annaïg gazing back at him, though. It was dark, which meant the locket was closed.

But it was emitting faint sounds.

He pressed the bird nearer his ear. At first he didn’t hear much—breathing, the muffled voices of two men. But then suddenly a man was shouting, and a woman shrieked.

He knew that shriek like he knew his own—it was Annaïg.

“Back here, girl!” a hoarse voice growled.

“Just tell my father you put me on the ship!” he heard Annaïg shout. “He’ll never know the difference.”

“Maybe he wouldn’t,” Hoarse Voice grunted. “But I would, yeah? So on the boat you go.”

Annaïg then vented a string of profanities, some of which she almost certainly had made up on the spot, because Mere-Glim hadn’t heard them before, and he had pretty much heard all of her arsenal of swear-words and phrases—or thought he had.

With a grunt he turned around and started back down toward the docks. It seemed Annaïg’s father did know something, something so bad he’d had his own daughter kidnapped to get her out of town.

Well, that was great. Now he felt worse about everything.

He began to run.

FIVE

Annaïg thought she would have a chance to escape when they reached the ship, but her father’s thugs—and his money—seemed to convince the captain, an Argonian so old that patches of his scales had become translucent. She and her things were placed in a small stateroom—about the size of a closet, actually—and that was bolted from the outside, with the promise that she would be free to wander the ship once they were a few leagues from land.

That didn’t stop her from trying to find a way out, of course. The small window was no help, since she couldn’t shape-shift into a cat or ferret. She tried screaming for help, but they were facing away from the docks, so there was no one to hear her above the general din. She couldn’t find a way through the door, and as it turned out, if someone had built any sort of secret doors or panels into the bulkhead, they were far too clever for her.

That left crying, which she actually started before completing her search. Her tears were thoroughly mixed—anger, grief, and terror. Her father would never think of treating her like this unless he was certain that remaining meant death. So why had he decided to stay and die? Why did he get that choice and not her?

Once she got past the noisy stage of crying and settled into more dignified, ladylike sniffling, she realized someone was saying her name. She looked at the door and window, but the sound was funny, very small …

And then she remembered, and felt really stupid.

She took off the locket and opened it up and there was Glim’s familiar face. His mouth was slightly open and his teeth were showing, indicating his agitation.

“Glim!” she whispered.

“Where are you?” he asked.

“I’m on a ship—”

“Did you get the name?”

“The Tsonashap—‘Swimming Frog.’”

The tiny figure of his head turned this way and that.

“I see it,” he said at last. “It’s making ready.”

“I’m in a small stateroom near the bow,” she told him. “There’s a short corridor—” She stopped and bit her lip. “Glim, don’t try it,” she said at last. “I think … I think something really awful is about to happen. Trying to get me out of here—you’ll only get caught. Get out of Lilmoth, as far and as fast as you can.”

Glim blinked slowly.

“I’m going to close the bird and put it away now,” he said.

“Glim—” But the image vanished.

Annaïg sighed, shut the locket and her eyes. She felt tired, hungry, worn-out.

Glim was coming, wasn’t he?

The first hour, she waited anxiously, preparing herself to spring into action. But then she felt the boat moving on the water. She looked out the window and saw the lanterns on the quay receding.

“Xhuth!” she swore. “Waxhuthi! Kaoc’!”

But the lights, uninterested in her expletives, continued to dim and dwindle.

She opened the locket, but no image greeted her. She held it up to her ear, but she didn’t hear anything, either.

Had he heeded her advice, or had he been caught, injured, murdered? In her whirling thoughts he was all of them. Glim, missing an arm; Glim, headless; Glim bound in chains and about to be thrown overboard …

Something rattled at her door, and her heart actually skipped a beat. She’d always thought that was just an expression. She stood, fingers knotted in fists she didn’t really know how to use, waiting.

The door opened, a snout appeared, and large reptilian eyes that sagged deep in their wrinkled sockets.

“Captain,” she said, making her voice as cold as possible.

“We’re in deep water,” he grated. “Don’t be foolish and try to swim for it. You’ll not make it, not with the sea-drakes hereabouts.”

He glanced down at her clenched hands and flashed his own claws, shaking his head.

“Never think that,” he said. “I’d see you safe to your destination, but no one attacks a captain on his ship and doesn’t pay hard. It’s law.”

“Law? Kidnapping is against the law!”

“This isn’t kidnapping, it’s your father’s wish—and you aren’t old enough to go against his wish, at least not in this sort of matter. So best resign.”

He hadn’t said anything about Glim, and she was afraid to ask.

She loosened her fingers. “Very well. I’m free to move about the ship?”

“Within reason.”

“Right. Here’s me moving, then.”

She pushed past him into the brief hall, up the steps, and onto the deck.

Above her, sails billowed and snapped in the plentiful wind that always drove off the coast early in the night, and the bow cut a furrow through a sea lacquered in silver and bronze by the two great moons above. For a moment her fear and dismay were overcome by an unexpected rush of joy at the beauty of it, the adventure it seemed to promise. Across the sea to the Empire, and everything she’d always wanted. Her father’s last, best—almost only—gift to her.

She went and stood with her hands braced on the bulward and looked out across the waters. They were sailing south, out of the bay, and then they would go west, along the mangroved coast of Black Marsh, until they reached the Topal Sea, and then they would turn north.

Or she could throw herself in the water and swim what she guessed to be west, brave the sea-drakes, and with more luck than she deserved reach land. But by the time she made it back to Lil-moth, it would be too late. The city—or whatever it was—was supposed to arrive in the morning.

Still …

“Hold your breath,” someone whispered behind her, and then she was lifted and falling, and a blink afterward stunned and wet. She gasped for air and clawed at her captor, trying to climb up on his head, but a strong hand clamped over her nose and mouth before she could so much as scream, and suddenly she was beneath, enclosed by the sea, moving though it in powerful pulses. She knew she shouldn’t breathe, but after a few moments she had to try, to suck in something, anything, to make the need stop.

But she couldn’t do it, even when she wanted to.

She woke with air whistling in and a voice behind her.

“Keep quiet,” he said. “We’re behind them, but a keen eye will spot us.”

“Glim?”

“Yes.”

“Are you rescuing me or trying to kill me?”

“I’m not sure myself,” he said.

“The captain said something about sea-drakes.”

“A distinct possibility,” he said. “So here’s what we’ll do. You hang tight to my shoulders. Don’t kick or try to help—let me swim for both of us. Try to keep your head under if you can, but I’ll be shallow enough so you can lift it out for a few breaths when you need to. Right?”

“Okay.”

“Let’s go, then.”

Glim began digging at the water then, and after finding his pace with a human clinging to his back, he settled into a powerful, almost gliding measure. On land, Glim was strong, but here he seemed really powerful—a crocodile, a dolphin. After a few panicked moments, she had her head bobbing in and out of the water in rhythm with him and was actually beginning to enjoy the ride. She had never been a good swimmer, and the sea always seemed somehow deeply unfriendly, but now she felt almost a part of it.

It was just then, as the last of her fears melted away, that Glim rolled and turned so quickly that she nearly lost her grip. The cadence broken, she gulped water, only barely managing not to inhale.

Then the water itself seemed to slap at them. Glim was going even faster now, weaving and rolling, not giving her any chance to breathe at all. Again, a vortex seemed to jerk at them, and as they spun she caught a glimpse of an immense dark shape against the moonlight glowing down through the water—something like a crocodile, but with paddles instead of legs.

And much, much bigger.

Glim dove deeper, and her lungs began to scream again, but just as suddenly, he turned back up and in an instant they broke free of the sea’s grasp, hurling into the air, where the black gas in her chest found its way out and one sweet sip of the good stuff got in before they struck once more down through the silvery surface. Agony ripped along her leg, and then Glim was doing his crazy dance again, and something scraped at her arm and she screamed bubbles into the water as her fingers began to lose their grip.

But then they stopped, and Glim was hauling her up out of the water. He sat her down on something hard, and she sagged there, gasping, tears of pain seeping from her eyes.

“Are you okay?” Glim asked.

She felt her leg. Her hand came away sticky.

“I think it bit me,” she said.

“No,” he said, squatting to examine her. “If it had, you wouldn’t have a leg. You must have scraped against the reef.”

“Reef?” She brushed her eyes and looked around.

They weren’t on land—at least, not the mainland. Instead they rested on a tiny island hardly more than a few inches above the water. Indeed, at high tide it would certainly be below water.

“She’s too big to follow us in here,” he said. “Looks like the captain wasn’t kidding about sea-drakes.”

“I guess not.”

“Well, from here on out we only have sharks to worry about.”

“Yes, well at least I’m bleeding,” Annaïg managed to quip.

“Yah. So maybe the next half mile won’t be boring.”

But if there were sharks around, they didn’t fancy the taste of Breton blood, because they made it to the shore without incident. If shore it could be called—it was actually a nearly impenetrable wall of mangroves, crouched in the water like thousands of giant spiders with their legs interlocked. Annaïg was pleased with the image until she remembered that it was from an Argonian folktale, one which claimed that’s exactly what mangroves had once been, before they earned the wrath of the Hist in some ancient altercation and were transformed.

Somehow Glim found them a way through the mess, and finally to the sinking remnants of a raised road.

“How far do you think we are from Lilmoth?” she asked.

“Ten miles, maybe,” Glim replied. “But I’m not sure we’re well-advised to go back there.”

“My father’s there, Glim. And your family, too.”

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do for them.”

“What’s happening? Do you know?”

“I think the city tree has gone rogue, just as it did in ancient times. A lot of people say this one grew from a single fragment of the root that survived the elder’s killing, more than three hundred years ago.”

“Rogue? How?”

“It doesn’t talk to us anymore. Only to the An-Xileel and the Wild Ones. But I think it must be talking to this thing coming from the sea.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Only because we don’t know everything.”

“So you think we should just abandon the town?”

He did his imitation of a human shrug.

“You know I can’t,” she said.

“I know you want to be a hero like those people in your books. Like Attrebus Mede and Martin Septim. But look at us—we aren’t armed, even if we knew how to fight, which we don’t. We can’t handle this, Nn.”

“We can warn people.”

“How? If the predictions are true, the flying island will reach Lilmoth before we do, by hours.”

She hung her head and nodded. “You’re right.”

“I am.”

She held the image of her father for a moment. “But we don’t know what’s going to happen. We still might be able to help.”

“Nn—”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait. It’s coming from the south, right?”

“Oh, no.”

“We have to find high ground. We have to be able see where it is.”

“No, really, we don’t.” She gave him the look, and he sighed. “I just rescued you. How determined are you to die, anyway?”

“You know better than that.”

“Fine. I think I know a place.”

The place was an upthrust of rock that towered more than a hundred feet above the jungle floor. It seemed unclimbable, but that proved not to be a problem when Glim led her to a cave opening in the base of the soft limestone. It led steadily upward, and in some places stairs had been carved. Faded paintings that resembled coiled snakes, blooming flowers, and more often than not nothing recognizable at all decorated the climb, and an occasional side gallery held often bizarre stone carvings of half-tree, half-Argonian figures.

“You’ve been here before, I take it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, and made no other comment, even when she began hinting that one ought to be forthcoming.

Rose was blooming in the east by the time they scaled the last of the stairs and stood on the moss and low ferns on the flat summit of the tabletop. It was quiet, dreamlike, and everything suddenly seemed turned around and impossible. What was she doing here, chasing this fantasy? Nothing was happening, nothing ever happened …

“Xhuth!” Glim breathed, just as the bright line of the sun lit the bay on fire.

Her first impression was of a vast jellyfish, its massive dark body trailing hundreds of impossibly slender, glowing tentacles. But then she saw the solidity of it, the mountain ripped from its base and turned over. The mass of it, the terrifying size.

She had been picturing a perfect cone, but this had crevasses and crags, crude, sharp, unweathered angles, as if it had just been torn from the ground the day before. The top seemed mostly as flat as the summit they stood upon, but there were shapes there, towers and arches—and most strangely, a long, drooping fringe depending from the upper edge like an immense lace collar, but twisted about by the wind and then frozen in its disheveled state. It was still south of them and a bit west, but its movement was clear enough.

She watched it, frozen, unable to find a response.

Something faint broke the silence, a sort of susurrus, a buzzing. She fumbled in the pockets of her dress, found the vial marked with an ear, and took a draft.

The hum sharpened into not one voice, but many. Vague, gibbering cries, unholy shrieks of agony and fear, babbling in languages she did not know. It sent scorpions down her back.

“What …?” She strained at the jungle floor below the island, where the sounds seemed to be coming from, but couldn’t make anything out through morning haze, distance, and thick vegetation.

She turned her attention back to the island, to the glowing strands it trailed. They might have been spider silk spun from lightning, some flashing briefly brighter than others. She realized they weren’t trailing, but dropping down from the center of the base, vanishing into the treetops, flashing white and then withdrawn into the island’s belly. As some came up, others descended, creating her original impression of a constant train of them.

Amidst the bright strands, something darker moved.

Swarms of something—they might have been hornets or bees, but given the distance, that would make them huge—emerged from the stone walls and hurtled toward the jungle below. But at some invisible line a few hundred feet below the island, they suddenly dissolved into streamers of black smoke, then vanished into the treetops. Unlike the threads, they did not reappear.

“Glim—” she whispered.

She turned and saw him going back down the steps. Only his head was visible.

“No, Glim, I’ve changed my mind,” she said, trying to keep her voice low, despite the distance. “We’ll wait for it to pass. It’s doing something—”

Glim’s head vanished from view.

Seized with fresh terror, she bolted after him. He was easily caught—he wasn’t moving fast—but when she did catch him, his eyes were oddly blank.

“Glim, what is it?”

“Going back, back to start over,” he murmured vaguely. Or at least that’s what she thought he meant, because he was speaking in Jen, a deeply ambiguous tongue. He might have been saying, “Going back to be born,” or any of ten other things that made no sense.

“Something’s wrong,” she said. “What is it?”

“Back,” he replied. He kept walking.

For another ten steps she watched him go, trying to understand, but then she knew she didn’t have time to understand, because the howling and screaming was beneath them now, echoing up through the caverns.

Whatever they were, they were coming.

She caught up with him and tickled him under the jaw. When his mouth gaped reflexively—she’d had a lot of fun with that when they were kids—she poured the contents of a vial into it. He closed his mouth and coughed.

She drank her own dose. It felt like a cold iron rod was being pushed down her esophagus, and she coughed, violently.

The world spun dizzily …

No, it wasn’t the world. It was her. She and Glim were out of the cave and ten feet above the summit, then twenty, but spinning crazily. She thrashed, trying to catch his hand before they drifted too far apart, and finally got his wrist.

That stabilized them a bit, which was good, but now they were picking up speed, and they were aimed straight at the floating island.

“Turn!” she shouted, but nothing happened. As the stone loomed nearer and nearer, she desperately tried to imagine another destination—her house, her father’s house back in Lilmoth.

That worked, for they turned, slightly, then a bit more. But then Glim grunted, trying to shake himself free, and they were suddenly yanked back toward the thing. Annaïg felt her grip breaking, and knew even if she managed to turn, she was going to lose Glim. He wanted to go down, but more than that, he wanted to go to that thing.

So she picked the deepest crevasse she could see and focused on it, and the wind became a thunder in her ears. Glim’s will appeared to relent, and they began to pick up speed. Something seemed to draw through her, as if she had somehow passed through a sieve and not been shredded, and then that, too, was past. Walls of black stone reached around her like an immense cloak, and then she felt weight return, and the sure grip of the world renew.

SIX

Annaïg stirred and pushed up with aching limbs. Her arms seemed spindly and weak, her legs boneless.

Her palms were pressed against thick-grained basalt, and she saw she rested at the base of the vertical crevasse she had aimed for; a sliver of light was visible, relatively narrow but rising hundreds of feet. It felt somehow as if she were in a temple, and the sky itself some holy image.

Glim was a few yards away, thrashing feebly.

“Glim,” she hissed. Echoes took up even that faint cry.

“Nn?” His head twisted in her direction. He seemed to be back in his eyes.

“You break anything?” she asked him.

He rolled into a sitting position and shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Where are we?”

“We’re on the thing. The flying island.”

“How?”

“You don’t remember anything, do you?”

“No, I—I remember climbing the spur. And then …”

His pupils rapidly dilated and shrank, as if he was trying to focus on something that wasn’t there.

“The Hist,” he said. “The tree. It was talking to me, filling me up. I couldn’t hear anything else.”

“You were pretty out of it,” she confirmed.

“I’ve never felt like that,” he said. “There were a lot of us, all walking in the same direction, all with the same mind.”

“Walking where?”

“Toward something.”

“This place, maybe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we’re here now. What is the tree telling you now?”

“Nothing,” he murmured. “Nothing at all. I’ve never felt that, either. It’s always there, in the background, like the weather. Now …” He looked out at the light. “They say if you go far enough from Black Marsh, you can barely hear the Hist. But this—it’s like I’ve been cut away from the tree. There’s not even a whisper.”

“Maybe it’s something about this place,” she said.

“This place,” he repeated, as if he couldn’t imagine anything else to say.

“We flew up here,” she said.

“Your gunk worked.”

“It did.”

“Congratulations.”

“That I’m not so sure about,” she murmured.

“But this is what you wanted, yes, to be up here?”

“I changed my mind,” she said. “In the end it was you who wanted to come here—only you wanted to go beneath, down to the ground. I wanted to go back to town. This was the compromise.”

A sudden snap and flurry sounded behind them, and they turned just in time to see a handful of dark figures come hurtling out of some dark apertures in the stone wall. At first her only impression was of wings rushing by, but one of the things circled tight, came back, and beat around their heads before settling on long, insectile legs.

It resembled a moth, albeit a moth nearly her size. Its wings were voluptuous, velvety, dark green and black. Its head was merely a black polished globe with a long, wickedly sharp needle projecting out like a nose. Its six legs, ticking nervously beneath it, ended in similar points.

It leaned toward her and seemed to sniff, making a low fluting noise. Then it smelled Glim.

The moment stretched, and Annaïg tried to keep her panic in a little box, way in the back of her head.

Nothing to see here, she thought at it. We’re not intruders, nothing of the kind. I was born right here, on this very spot …

Its wings beat and it flew off with preternatural speed.

Annaïg realized she had been holding her breath, and let it out.

“What the Iyorth was that?” Glim snarled.

“I’ve no idea,” she replied. She stood and limped toward the light, where the things had flown. Glim followed.

A few steps brought them to the aperture, which turned out to be only about twelve feet wide. Below was a cliff that was more than sheer, it actually curved to vanish beneath them.

“I reckon we’re somewhere on the bottom third of the cone,” she said.

Farther below was jungle, and not much to see, but the space between the island and the treetops was pretty busy.

Near the island, the air was full of the moth-things flying in baroque patterns, like some crazy aerial dance. As she watched, some peeled away and dove straight down, and as they passed a certain altitude they suddenly became vague and smokelike, and she now recognized them as the things she had seen from the spur.

She saw, too, the bright threads, following the flying creatures down into the trees and then suddenly licking back up, vanishing somewhere beneath them.

“What am I seeing?” she wondered aloud.

“I think it’s what we’re not seeing,” he replied. “What’s down there beneath the trees.”

“I fear you’re right.”

The day waxed on. Now and then more fliers went past them, and occasionally they had a glimpse down through the canopy, where something was moving, but the opening was never enough to discern what.

And then, inevitably, they reached the rice plantations south of Lilmoth, and finally they had a fuller picture.

The distance fooled her, at first, and she thought she was seeing some sort of ant, or insect, as if maybe the fliers were transforming into a land-bound form.

Then she adjusted scale and understood that they were mostly Argonians and humans, although there were a large number of crawling horrors that must have come out of the sea. She recognized some of them as Dreughs, from her books. Others resembled huge slugs and crabs with hundreds of tentacle-limbs, but for these she had no names.

Many of them were marching all in the same direction, but others ran off in swarms. It was all very abstract and puzzling, until they reached a village Annaïg guessed to be Hereguard Plantation, one of the few farms still run mostly by Bretons. She could see a group of them, drawn up behind a barricade.

It wasn’t long before they were fighting, and Annaïg’s horror mounted. She wanted desperately to look away, but it was as if she no longer controlled her muscles.

She saw a wave of Argonians and sea monsters wash over the barricade, and like arrows of mist, the moth-things plunged into the fray. Wherever they fell, a silvery thread followed, striking the body and reeling back up, brighter. The moths simply vanished.

The wave passed, leaving the bodies of the dead Bretons behind, pushing on into the village.

But then the dead stirred. They came to their feet and joined the march.

Annaïg was sick then, and although there was little in her belly to lose, she bent double, retching. It spent her, and she lay trembling, unable to watch more.

“So,” she heard Glim say after a moment. “So this is what the tree wanted.”

She heard the pain in her friend’s voice, and despite how she felt, dragged herself back to the edge and opened her eyes.

Again her first impression failed her. She imagined she was seeing an Argonian army, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, ready to slay this foul enemy as they had the forces of Dagon in times past.

But then she got it.

“They’re just standing there. They aren’t fighting.”

Glim nodded. “Yes.”

The air was thick with fliers and threads.

“I don’t understand,” Annaïg wailed. “Why does the tree want your people to die?”

“Not all of us,” Glim whispered. “Just the Lukiul. The assimilated. The tainted. The An-Xileel, the Wild Ones—they’ve gone away. They’ll come back, after this is over, and every Imperial taint will be scoured.”

“It’s mad,” she said. “We have to do something.”

“What? In three hours every living thing in Lilmoth will be dead. Worse than dead.”

“Look, we’re here. We’re the only ones who have any chance of doing anything. We have to try!”

Glim watched the slaughter below for another few breaths, and in that moment she feared he was going to fling himself down to join his people.

But then he let out the long, undulating hiss that signified resignation.

“Okay,” he repeated in Tamrielic. “Let’s see what we can do.”

They left the edge and walked back into the crack. The holes that the fliers had come through were high, and the climb looked difficult, but the split in the island continued back, gradually sloping down. Daylight was soon behind them, and while the ghost of it followed them for a while, eventually they were in near complete darkness. She wished she’d foreseen this—one of her earliest concoctions had been to help her see at night. But without any proper materials or equipment, there wasn’t any way to make one now.

The going was easy enough, though—the walls remained about twice her shoulder-width apart, so it was easy enough to keep a hand on each rough surface. The floor was a little uneven, but after a few stumbles her feet grew cautious enough.

She could hear Glim breathing, but after they left the ledge, he hadn’t said anything, which was just as well, because not only would it be foolish to make any more noise than necessary, she didn’t feel like talking, either.

She reckoned they had gone a few hundred yards when she saw light once again, at first just a veneer on the stone, but soon enough to see where they were stepping again. A good thing, too, because the path led them to another cliff.

This one opened in the belly of the mountain, a vast, dome-shaped cavity open at the bottom so they could once more see the destruction of Lilmoth. They were already over the old Imperial quarter, where her house was.

“Taig,” she whispered.

“I’m sure he left,” Glim hissed. “The tree couldn’t affect him.”

She just shook her head and turned her sight away, and through tear-gleamed eyes she saw masses of the threads shooting down—so many it looked almost like rain. She followed their course and saw them, thousands of them, in every nook and cranny of the stone. She couldn’t make out much; they, too, seemed vaguely insectile, but she saw the thin, stone-colored tubes the threads issued from, because the rest of whatever-they-were were concealed in circular masses of what appeared to be the same material. They looked a lot like spider egg sacs, but larger, much larger.

“Here,” Glim murmured.

She had almost forgotten him. She turned to follow his pointing knuckles and saw steps hewn into the stone, leading up.

There wasn’t any other way to go except back, and so Annaïg started up, filled with a sudden, panicked determination. She had to do something, didn’t she? If she could get up there, cut those things loose, maybe the horror would end.

The steps wound up a few feet and vanished back into another tunnel. This one was illuminated with a palpable phosphorescence. It twisted to curve steeply skyward, and Annaïg realized they were making their way up above the domed space. Almost immediately it began branching, but she kept to her left, and after several breathless moments they came to a silvery-white cable, emerging from the stone below them and vanishing into the ceiling.

“It looks like the threads,” she whispered. “Only bigger.”

“Not bigger,” Glim said. “More.”

A little closer, she saw what he meant. The cable was composed of hundreds of threads wound together.

She reached out to touch it.

“Well, that’s not smart,” Glim said.

“I know,” she replied, trying to sound brave. Closing her eyes, she touched the back of her hand to it.

Something whirred about in her head and she felt a sudden giddy surge.

She saw now that the hole was larger than the cable that came up through it and, lying flat she was able to make out the jungle floor again. Below her, the ropelike structure unwound itself, sending threads off in every direction. She could see some of them vanishing into the web sacs.

“If we cut this, we’ll get a lot of them,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘get’ them? What do you think will happen?”

“They’re all connected here.”

“Okay.”

“Then if we cut it …” She flailed off, gesturing.

“You think it will, what, shut this whole thing down? Destroy this island?”

“It might. Glim, we have to do something.”

“You keep saying that.” He sighed. “What will you cut it with?”

“Try your claws.”

He blinked, then stepped forward and experimentally raked his claws across the thing. He shivered and stepped back, then hit it again, with such force that the cord vibrated.

It wasn’t scratched.

“Any other ideas?”

“Maybe if we can find a sharp rock—” She broke off. “Do you hear that?”

Glim nodded.

“Xhuth!”

Because somewhere in the passages, she could hear voices shouting, several of them.

“Come on,” she said, and started up another branch of the tunnel.

They kept going, taking random branches, but the voices were gradually growing louder, and there was little doubt in her mind now that they were being pursued.

Whenever they came to a turn that seemed to go down, she took it, reasoning that so far they hadn’t been bothered by anything from that direction, but inevitably the passages seemed to move them upward.

She couldn’t have known, could she? How big this was all going to be, how utterly beyond her? It was ridiculous.

As if the gods had decided to punctuate that thought, the tunnel suddenly debouched onto a steep ledge that vanished into the interior space of the island.

She drew up short, panting, but Glim grabbed her arm and they were suddenly skittering down the tilted surface. Her surprise was so complete that all thought was pushed from her brain by white light, so when the Argonian caught a knob at the edge and swung them sharply down and under, she had nothing to be relieved about. She found herself on a rounded, springy surface.

It was one of the web sacs.

Glim pulled her up to where the thing was anchored to the stone, the sloping shelf now a ceiling above them, and they crouched there, trying to calm their breathing for many long moments.

A voice suddenly spoke above them, in a tongue that sounded teasingly familiar. The voice might have been that of a man or mer. Another, stranger voice replied. This time she caught a few words; it was Merish dialect of some sort. She closed her eyes, focusing on the sounds.

“—could be dead already,” she made out.

“We can’t take that chance. He’ll have our heads if another vehrumas gets them.”

“Who else is looking for them?”

“Word gets around fast. Come on, let’s try this way.”

The two continued talking, but the sounds grew gradually more distant until they faded away.

As the voices diminished, she heard Mere-Glim resume breathing.

“I don’t suppose you understood any of that?” he asked.

“Remember how you used to make fun of me for studying old Ehlnofex?” she asked.

“A dead language? Yes.” His throat expanded and he huffed. “They were speaking Ehlnofex?”

“No, but it was enough like it for me to understand it.”

“And?”

“Someone saw us fly up here. They’re searching for us.”

“Who?”

“Whoever lives here. There was a word I didn’t understand—vehrumas—but it sounds like there are more than one bunch trying to find us.”

“Wonderful. So what do we do?”

To her surprise, she suddenly knew.

She fumbled in her jacket and pulled out Coo.

“Go to the Imperial City,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. “Find Crown Prince Attrebus. Speak only to him, hear only in his presence. He will help us.” She saw him in her mind’s eye, her own imagining based on the portraits she had seen.

Coo clicked and tinged, and then flew off, dodging gracefully through the filaments, diminishing, a speck, gone.

“How does that help us?” Glim asked. “Why should Attrebus care what happens to us?”

“This thing isn’t stopping at Lilmoth,” she told him. “It’ll go on, through all of Tamriel. And you’re right, we can’t stop it, you and I. Most likely we’ll die or be captured. But if we can survive a little while, until Coo reaches Attrebus—”

“Listen to yourself.”

“—if Coo reaches him, and at least one of us survives, we can tell him what’s happening. Attrebus has armies, battlemages, the resources of an empire. What he doesn’t have is any information about this place.”

“Neither do we. And it will be days, at least, before Coo reaches the Imperial City—if he does.”

“Then we have to survive,” she said. “Survive and learn.”

“Survive what? We don’t even know what we’re up against.”

“Well, then let’s find out.”

“I have a better idea,” Glim said, pointing to the oily black snout emerging from the cocoon. “Let’s grab onto one of those strands and ride it to the ground.”

Annaïg frowned. “They’re moving too fast. Anyway, then we’d just be down there where everything is dying.”

He paused, looked at her as if she was crazy, and then rolled his eyes.

“You were kidding,” she said.

“I was kidding,” he confirmed.

The filaments that anchored the web sacs to the stone gave them purchase to climb down to the next ledge, where they found another tunnel. They went in quietly, mindful of what had happened before. As before, the way tended either upward and outward or back into the vault. After perhaps an hour they came across one of the now familiar cables.

Less familiar was the person licking it.

He hadn’t seen them yet.

It was a man, naked from the waist up and clad in loose, dirty trousers rolled tight at his waist. His shape and features were those of a human or mer, except that his eyes were a bit larger than normal and recessed more deeply into his face. His hair was unkempt, greasy, and dingy yellow.

She motioned Glim back, but the fellow’s gaze snapped over to them, and he stopped licking the cable.

“Lady!” he exclaimed, in the same dialect she’d heard before, bending his head and battering his forehead with his knuckles. “Lady, this isn’t at all what it looks like!”

Annaïg just stared for a moment.

“Lady?” the man repeated. She saw fear in his eyes, but puzzlement as well. Clearly he thought he knew who—or more likely, what—she was.

The man’s eyes widened further and he stepped back as Glim emerged.

“What is it, then?” Annaïg asked, trying to sound haughty. “What is it if it’s not what it looks like?”

“Mistress,” the man replied. “I hope you understand what you saw just now was just appearances. I wouldn’t actually—”

“Lick the cable? That’s exactly what it looked like you were doing.”

The man’s eyes narrowed. “That’s a funny accent, lady. Some of the words are strange. I’ve never heard them. And your companion …”

“Who are you?” Annaïg asked, feeling her feeble attempt at a bluff crumbling.

“Wemreddle,” the man replied. “Wemreddle of the Bolster Midden, in fact, if you must know.” He lifted a finger and shook it. “You’re not supposed to be here either.” He waved violently at Glim. “And there’s no such thing as you, you know. No. No such thing as you. You’re the ones they’re talking about. The ones from outside. From down there.”

“Look,” Annaïg said, “we don’t mean anyone any harm—”

“No, listen,” Wemreddle said. “I’m of the Bolster Midden, didn’t I tell you? What business do I have with them upstairs? Sump take them and keep them. But come on now. I’ll get you safe and cozy. Come on with me.”

“He’s not armed,” Glim lisped, in their private cant. “I can kill him.”

“You’ve never killed anyone.”

“I can do it.” There was a new hardness in his voice.

Wemreddle stepped back. “I mean to help.”

“Why?”

“Because I hate all this,” he said. “I hate them at the top of the chutes. And you—you might be able to help with them.”

“Why do you say that?”

“This new place. You know things about it? The plants, the minerals, the ways of things. They say you flew here without wings.”

“I know a little,” she said.

“Yes. That’s powerful knowledge. Enough to change things. Will you come?”

Annaïg looked sidewise at Glim, but his expression offered no opinion.

“This might be what we’re looking for,” she told him.

“I can’t follow him. What’s he saying?”

“I think he’s with some disenchanted group, a resistance maybe. They want our help against another faction. We can exploit this, as Irenbis did the various factions of Cheydinhal.”

“Irenbis?”

“Irenbis Songblade.”

“That’s from a book, isn’t it?”

“It’s a chance, Glim. You agreed we have to do something.”

“Something it is, then,” he replied.

SEVEN

“What is that?” Annaïg asked, trying not to gag at the stench. Her belly was already empty and her throat and chest ached.

“That’s the Midden,” Wemreddle said. “Of the four lower Middens, Bolster has the richest scent.”

“Rich?” Annaïg drew another breath, this one worse than the last. “I wouldn’t describe it as rich. How far away is it?”

“We’ve still some way to go,” Wemreddle said. Then, defensively, “If you wouldn’t say rich, then what? Savor the layers of complexity, the contrast of ripe, rotten, and almost raw, the depth and diversity of it.”

“I—”

“No, no, wait. When we’re there you’ll understand better. Appreciation will come.”

Annaïg somehow doubted that. It seemed more likely that her lungs would close themselves and suffocate her rather than take in any more of the waxing stench. As they progressed, the floor and walls of the tunnels became first slick and then coated in a dank, putrid sheen, and she began to picture herself climbing up through the bowels of some enormous beast.

“What is this place?” she asked. “Where is it from?”

“This place?”

“The whole—island. Floating mountain, whatever you want to call it.

“Oh. You mean Umbriel.”

“Umbriel?”

“Yes, Umbriel, it’s called.”

“And why is it here?”

Again he looked puzzled. “Here is here,” he said.

“No, I mean why have you come to my world? Why are you attacking it?”

“Well, I’m not, am I? I’m just in the Bolster Midden.”

“Yes, but why has Umbriel come here?” she persisted.

“I’ve no idea. Does it matter?”

“People are dying down there. There must be a reason.”

He stopped and scratched his head. “Well, yes, Umbriel needs souls. Lots and lots of souls—there’s no secret there. But he could get those plenty of places. If you’re asking why here in particular, I’m afraid I’ve no way of knowing that.”

“You mean it’s just feeding?” Annaïg asked, incredulous.

“Well, we’ve lots of mouths to feed, don’t we,” he replied with an air of diffidence.

“Why do they become—if their souls are taken up here—why do their bodies keep going?”

“Do I really have to explain this?”

“If I’m going to help you, I think I deserve whatever explanation you can give me.”

“Oh, very well. Look, something beneath us dies. The soul-spinners nick the soul with their lines, and then the larvae fly down and get all snug in the bodies—which then harvest more souls. You see?”

“The larvae have wings and round heads?”

“Yes. See, you do know this.”

“I saw one of them,” she replied. “It seemed like it should have been perfectly capable of murder on its own.”

“In Umbriel, sure. But they have to leave Umbriel to find souls, which means they lose their substance.”

“So that’s what I saw,” Annaïg said. “But why?”

“Why what?”

“Why do they become ethereal?”

“That’s a big word,” Wemreddle said.

“Yes, but—”

“I don’t know,” Wemreddle said. “I’ve never thought about it. You fall in water, you get wet. Stray from Umbriel, you lose substance. It’s just how things are.”

Annaïg digested that for a moment.

“Very well. But how does it start? I mean, if larvae can’t kill anything unless they have a soulless body to steal, how do the first ones get bodies?”

“I don’t know that either.”

“And what becomes of the souls?”

“Most go to the ingenium, which keeps Umbriel aloft and moving. Some go to the vehrumasas.”

“I don’t know that word,” she said. “What does it mean?”

“The place where they prepare food. Where the furnaces are.”

“Kitchens? You people eat souls?”

“Not all of us. I don’t—I’m not that elevated. But them at the top, and Umbriel himself, or course—well, they like their delicacies. We don’t see that in the Middens, do we?”

“And yet you were licking the cable,” she said.

He blushed. “It’s not against nature to want a taste, is it? Just a little taste?”

Annaïg had a sudden, unpleasant thought.

“Are the lords—are you—daedra?”

“What’s a daedra?” Wemreddle asked.

“You’ve never heard of daedra?” she asked. “But didn’t this city come from Oblivion?”

Wemreddle just looked blankly at her.

“There are sixteen daedric princes,” Annaïg explained. “Some are just—well, evil. Mehrunes Dagon, for instance—he tried to destroy our world, back before I was born. Others—like Azura—aren’t supposed to be so bad. Some people worship them, especially the Dunmer. But besides the princes, there are all sorts of minor daedra. Some people can conjure them and make them do their bidding.”

“We do the bidding of the lords,” Wemreddle said. “If I were a daedra, would I know it?”

“Maybe not,” Annaïg realized. “What is the name of your highest lord?”

“Umbriel, of course.”

“There’s no prince that goes by that name,” she mused, “although I suppose a daedric prince could be known by any number of names.”

Wemreddle seemed entirely disinterested in the conversation, so she let it drop. She had so many new questions now, she didn’t know what to ask next, so instead of questioning him further, she filled Glim in on what Wemreddle had been telling her.

“It’s horrible,” she said. “What if it’s really aimless? If our world is being destroyed just so this thing can keep in the air? What if there is no other agenda?”

“There must be more to it than that,” Glim responded. “There has to be. Otherwise why would Umbriel ally with the city tree? Why would it spare anyone?”

“Maybe it didn’t. If the tree is insane, as you think, it might have just imagined an alliance.”

“It’s possible.” He snicked his teeth together. “You were right, in a way,” he said. “It sounds as if we were to stop the flow of souls to this ingenium of theirs, then this would turn into just another rock.”

“Maybe. Could it be that simple?”

“I doubt it will be simple,” the Argonian replied.

They walked in silence for a bit, while Annaïg turned it all over in her head.

When they finally reached the Bolster Midden, she was sure of her earlier impression, for she could think of nothing to compare it to other than the gorged, bloated stomach of a giant.

And the smell—well, it was bad. Glim’s nictating membranes kept shutting, and Glim could wade through the most noisome fen without really noticing.

But this wasn’t a noisome fen, and she was, in fact, beginning to understand Wemreddle’s bizarre assertion. Animal was here, sweetly, sulfurously rotten, but there was also blood still so fresh she could taste the iron in the middle of her tongue. She made out rancid oil, buttery cream, old wine-braising liquid, fermenting again with strange yeasts and making pungent vinegars. Fresh herbs mingled with the cloying molder of tubers and onions gone to liquid.

Best of all were the thousand things she didn’t recognize, some deeply revolting and some like a welcome home to a place she’d never been. Some smells were more than that, not only engaging the taste buds and nostrils, but sending weird tingles across her skin and shimmering colors when she closed her eyes.

“You see?”

She nodded dumbly and looked around more carefully.

If this was the belly of a giant, he had many esophagi; more stuff fell periodically from five different openings in the vaulted stone ceiling.

In places, the trash moved.

“What’s that?” she asked.

“The worms,” Wemreddle replied. “They keep the Midden turning, make it all pure to siphon into the Marrow Sump.”

“Marrow Sump?”

“It’s where everything goes, and where everything comes from.”

That seemed like it would take a longer explanation, so she let it go for more immediate concerns.

“What’s up there?” she asked, indicating the apertures above.

“The kitchens, of course. What else?” He pointed at each of the holes in turn. “Aghey, Qijne, Lodenpie, and Fexxel.”

“And what do you do down here?”

“Hide. Try not to be noticed. They sent us down here a long time ago to tend the worms, but the worms pretty much tend themselves.”

“So where is everyone else?”

“In the rock. I’ll fetch them. But first let me find you a safe place, yes?”

“That sounds good,” Annaïg said.

A narrow ledge went around the Midden like a collar, albeit one whose dog had outgrown it a bit; here and there they found themselves trudging through offal and pools of putrescence. Light came dimly from no obvious source, but she didn’t try to make out what they were stepping through.

At last they came to a small cave, rudely furnished with a sleeping mat and not much else.

“You wait here,” he said. “Try not to make much sound.”

And with that Wemreddle was gone.

“I can’t breathe this forever,” Glim muttered. Their guide had been gone for a long time, although without the sun, moon, or stars, it was hard to tell exactly how long. Annaïg figured it was hours, though.

“At least we’re breathing,” she pointed out.

“Well, as long as we’re settling for the least,” he replied.

“Glim …” She put a hand on his shoulder.

He snapped his teeth. “I need to eat something,” he said.

“Me, too,” she said. The wait had given the shock and adrenaline time to wear off, and now she was ravenous. “I can go out there, see what I can sort out.”

He shook his head. “That’s disgusting.”

“Some of it is still food.”

“Stay here. You’ve no idea what those worms might do, or what else might be out there.”

“What, then?”

“I’ve been thinking,” he said.

“Not your strong suit.”

“Yes. But I’ve been doing it, nonetheless. Four kitchens above us, and four other Middens. Do you know how much refuse that suggests, if this is even close to typical?”

“A lot.”

“Yes. Which suggests that somewhere up there, a lot of people or—something—are doing a lot of eating.”

“I did see what looked like a city along the rim.”

“I think we’re still far below the rim,” he said. “Still, I’m thinking there must be thousands on this island, at least.”

“Okay.”

“And Wemreddle, the trash keeper, wants you to help with some sort of revolution. Against who knows what and who knows how many? There’s a daedra prince up there, for all we know. I’m not sure we want to be a part of this.”

“So you think we should leave before he gets back.”

“I think we should go looking for food. In the kitchens. See what we’re up against. We can always come back here if the trash-tender still seems like a good bet.”

“How will we know that until we meet the rest of them?”

“Of whom?”

“Whoever he went to get. The underground. The resistance.”

“You and your books,” Glim muttered. “Resistance.”

“Look around you, Glim. When people are forced to live in places like this, there’s usually a resistance.”

“Lots of people lived like this in Lilmoth,” Glim replied. “They didn’t resist anything.”

“Well, maybe they should have,” she retorted. “Maybe then the An-Xileel couldn’t have—”

“It was the tree, Nn, not the An-Xileel. The Hist decide.”

“The city tree is psychotic.”

“Maybe.”

“You said it’s happened before, one Hist breaking with the others.”

“You’re changing the subject.”

“Fine. We might as well have some options. Do you know how to get to these kitchens?”

“Of course not. But we know where they are.” He pointed up.

“Fair enough,” she conceded. Her hand still on his shoulder, she pushed up to standing. Then she noticed some figures approaching along the path that had brought them there. “Oops. Too late. Wemreddle’s back.”

“That’s not much of a resistance,” Glim noted. “Six besides him.”

“At least they’re armed.”

Like Wemreddle, they all appeared to be human or mer. They wore uniforms—yellow shirts, aprons, black pants—and they carried an assortment of large knives and cleavers. The only one who was dressed differently was a fellow with thick, curly red hair and beard. His shirt was a black-and-yellow tartan pattern.

Wemreddle was trailing the lot. The red-beard spoke.

“It’s true, you’re really from the world beyond?”

“Yes,” Annaïg said.

“And you have knowledge of its plants, animals, herbs, minerals, essences, and so on?”

“Some,” she replied. “I have studied the art of alchemy—”

“Come with us, then.”

“To where?”

“To my kitchen. Fexxel’s kitchen.”

“Wemreddle,” Annaïg exploded. “You piece of—”

“They’ll let me come up,” the man simpered. “They’ll let me work up there. This is for the best. You’ll be protected. You need that.”

“Protection from whom?”

“Me, for one,” another voice shouted.

A second group was approaching, twice as large as Fexxel’s, and just as heavily armed.

Fexxel spun. “You worm,” he roared at Wemreddle. “I bargained in good faith with you!”

“I didn’t tell her! I swear it!”

Annaïg could make out the newcomer now. She wore a checked indigo-and-lapis shirt, apron, and indigo pants. Her face was angular, drawn, hard, and her teeth gleamed like opals in the dim light.

“He didn’t, actually,” the woman said. “One of your own betrayed you. More’s the pity for the poor worm, because I don’t owe him anything.”

Wemreddle began a sort of soft wailing.

“I’ll have them, Fexxel.”

“I have right, Qijne. I have claim.”

“The Midden is neutral territory.”

“I found them first.”

“Well, you can take it up with someone next time you come out of the sump,” she replied. “Or you can walk back to your kitchen in the meat you’re wearing.”

Annaïg could see Fexxel was trembling, whether with fear or fury, it was hard to say.

“It might be worth it,” he said. “You outnumber us, but I’ll kill you before I go down.”

“Ah, determination,” Qijne said, stepping forward, away from her companions. “Passion. Do you really have such passions, Fexxel? Or is this all superficial, like your cooking?”

Her arm whipped out and a bright, bloody line appeared on Fexxel’s cheek. His eyes widened and his mouth worked, but for the moment no sound came out.

Annaïg was still trying to understand what had happened. Qijne’s hand had been about a foot from Fexxel’s face, and she hadn’t seen a weapon in it. Nor did she now.

Fexxel found his voice. “You crazy bitch!” he screeched, blood pouring through the fingers he had pressed to his face.

“See?” Qijne said. “Just blood under there, nothing else. Go home, Fexxel, or I’ll make a pie of you.”

Fexxel heaved several great breaths, but he didn’t say anything else. Instead he left, as instructed, and his followers went with him, glancing back often.

Qijne turned her gaze on Annaïg. Her eyes were as black as holes in the night.

“And you, my dear, are the cook?”

“I—I can cook.”

“And what is this?” she asked, stabbing a finger toward Glim.

“Mere-Glim. He’s an Argonian. He doesn’t speak Mer.”

Qijne cocked her head. “Mer,” she said experimentally, then seemed to dismiss the word—and Glim—with a shake of her head. “Well,” she said. “Come, then. We’ll go to my kitchen.”

Annaïg lifted her chin. “Why should I?” she asked.

Qijne blinked again, then leaned in close and spoke in a casual, confidential manner. “I don’t need all of you, you know. Your legs, for instance—not very useful to me. More of a problem, really, if I imagined you were prone to running off.”

Each word was like an icicle driven in her back. There was no doubt that the woman was serious.

Qijne patted her on the shoulder. “Come along,” she said.

And she came, telling herself that this was what she needed to be doing, trying to learn something about the enemy, trying to find out how to stop this unholy thing.

But it was hard to keep that in her head, because she had never in her life been more afraid of anyone than she was of Qijne.

EIGHT

“This isn’t a kitchen,” Annaïg whispered to Glim. “This is …”

But she had no word for it.

Her first impression was of a forge, or furnace, because enormous rectangular pits of almost white-hot stone lined up down the center of a vast chamber carved and polished from the living rock. Above the pits innumerable metal grates, boxes, cages, and baskets depended from chains, and vast sooty hoods sucked most of the heat and fumes up higher still into Umbriel. Left and right, red maws gaped from the walls—ovens, obviously, but really more like furnaces. Between them, beings strange and familiar crowded and hurried about long counters and cabinets, wielding knives, cleavers, pots, pans, saws, awls, and hundreds of unidentifiable implements.

Though the smells here were generally cleaner than those of the Midden, they were just as varied, and decidedly more alien.

So was the staff; many of them resembled the peoples she knew—there were in particular many who looked like mer; there were others for which—like the place itself—she had no name. She saw thick figures with brick-red skin, fierce faces, and small horns on their heads, working next to ghostly pale blue-haired beings, spherical mouselike creatures with stripes, and a veritable horde of monkeylike creatures with goblinesque faces. These last scrambled along the shelves and cabinets, tossing bottles and tins from shelves in the stone that rose sixty feet along the walls, although in most of the room the ceiling crushed down almost to the level of the tallest head.

But Qijne led her through all of this, past searing chunks of meat, huge snakelike creatures battering against the bars of their cages as the heat killed them, cauldrons that smelled of leek and licorice, boiling blood, molasses.

After a hundred paces the cooking pits were replaced by tables crowded with more delicate equipment of glass and bright metal. Some were clearly made for distillation, this made obvious by the coils that rose above; others resembled retorts, parsers, and fermentation vats. Along the walls were what amounted to vaster versions of these things, distilling, parsing, and fermenting tons of material.

It was breathtaking, and for a moment Annaïg forgot her situation in wonder of it.

But then something caught her eye that brought it all back: a cable, the thickest she had seen yet, pulsing with the pearly light of soul stuff and, more specifically, the life force of the people of Lil-moth. It passed through various glass collars filled with liquid and colored gases, and insectile filaments and extremely fine tubing coiled and wound into what might be condensation chambers.

She felt tears forming, and trembled with the effort to keep them back.

For the first time since entering the kitchens, Qijne spoke.

“You like my kitchen,” she said. “I see it.”

Her throat caught, but then breath came, and something seemed to rise up through her, inflating her. She focused her gaze on Qijne’s eyes.

“It’s amazing,” she admitted. “I don’t understand most of it.”

“You really know nothing of Umbriel, do you?”

“Only that it is murdering people.”

“Murdering? That’s a strange word.”

“It’s the right word. Why? Why is Umbriel doing this?”

“What a meaningless question,” Qijne said. “And how unknowable.” She took Annaïg’s chin between thumb and forefinger. “I’ll let you know what questions are worth asking, little thing. Give me all the attention and love you possess, and you will thrive here. Otherwise, it’s the sump. Yes?”

“Yes.”

“Very well. My kitchen.” She opened her arms as if to take it all in. “There are many appetites in Umbriel. Some are coarse—meat and tubers, offal and grain. Other habitants have more spiritual appetites, subsisting on distilled essences, pure elements, tenebrous vapors. The loftiest of our lords require the most refined cuisine, that which has as its basis the very stuff of souls. And above all, they crave novelty. And that, my dear, is where you come in.”

“So that’s why you want me? To help you invent new dishes?”

“There are many sorts of dishes, dear. Umbriel needs more than raw energy to run. The sump needs tending; the Fringe Gyre needs feeding. Raw materials must be found or created. Poisons, balms, salves, entertainments, are all in great demand. Drugs to numb, to please, to bring fantastic visions. All of these things and more are done in the kitchens. And we must stay ahead of others, you see? Stay in favor. And that means new, better, more powerful, deadlier, more interesting.”

Annaïg nodded. “And you believe I can help you.”

“We’ve just passed through a void; we were nearing the end of our resources. Now this whole pantry is open to us, and you know more about it than I do. I can admit that, you see? In the end you have more to learn from me than I from you, but at this moment you are my teacher. And you will help me make my kitchen the strongest.”

“What’s to stop the other kitchens from kidnapping their own help?”

She shook her head. “Most of us cannot go far from Umbriel without losing our corpus. There are certain, specialized servants we use to collect things from below.”

“The walking dead, you mean?”

“Yes, the larvae. Once incorporated, they can be brought here with certain incantations, bearing raw materials, beasts, what have you. But intelligent beings with desirable souls—”

“Are all already dead by the time your gatherers begin their work.”

“Did you interrupt me? I’m sure you didn’t.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I’m sorry, Chef.”

“I’m sorry, Chef.”

Qijne nodded. “Yes, that’s how it is. And those of us in the kitchens don’t have the power to send them farther, or the incantations to bring them back here. Once the gatherers move very far from Umbriel, contact is lost.”

This is good, Annaïg thought. I’m learning weaknesses already. Things that will help Attrebus.

“So here we are,” she said.

Annaïg looked at the table Qijne was indicating. It was littered with leaves, bark, half-eviscerated animals, roots, stones, and what have you. There was also a ledger, ink, and a pen.

“I want to know about these things. I want you to list and describe every substance you know of that might be of use to me, and describe as well how to find them. You will do this for half of your work period. For the remainder of your shift you will cook—first you will learn how things are down here, then you will create original things. And they had better be original, do you understand?”

“I don’t—it’s overwhelming, Chef.”

“I will assign you a scamp and a hob and put a chef over you. That is far more than most that come here are given. Count your fortunes.” She waved at one of her gang, a woman with the gray skin and red eyes of a Dunmer.

“Slyr. Take charge of this one.”

Slyr lifted her knife. “Yes, Chef.”

Qijne nodded, turned and strode off.

“She’s right, you know,” Slyr said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

Annaïg nodded, trying to read the other woman’s tone and expression, but neither told her anything.

A moment later a yellowish, sharp-toothed biped with long pointy ears walked up.

“This is your scamp,” she said. “We use the scamps for hot work. Fire doesn’t bother them very much.”

“Hello,” Annaïg said.

“They take orders,” Slyr said. “They don’t talk. You don’t really need it now, so you ought to send it back to the fires. Your hob—” She snapped her fingers impatiently.

Something dropped through Annaïg’s peripheral vision and she started and found herself staring into a pair of large green eyes.

It was one of the monkeylike creatures she’d seen on entering the kitchen. Closer up, she saw that, unlike a monkey, it was hairless. It did have long arms and legs, though, and its fingers were extraordinarily long, thin, and delicate.

“Me!” it squeaked.

“Name him,” Slyr said.

“What?”

“Give him a name to answer to.”

The hob opened his mouth, which was both huge and toothless, so that for an instant it resembled an infant—and more specifically looked like her cousin Luc when he was a child. It capered on the table.

“Luc,” she said. “You’ll be Luc.”

“Luc, me,” it said.

“I’ll be back to get you when it’s time to cook,” Slyr said. “This you’ll do on your own.” She glanced askance at Glim. “What about him?”

“He knows as much about these things as I do,” Annaïg lied. “I need him.”

“Very well.” And Slyr, too, walked off to some other task.

Annaïg realized that she and Glim were alone with Luc the hob.

“Now what?” Glim asked.

“They want—”

“I didn’t understand the words, but it’s pretty clear what they want you to do. But are you going to do it?”

“I don’t see I have much choice,” she replied.

“Sure. No one is watching us at the moment. We could escape back to the Midden through the garbage chute and then …”

“Right,” she said. “And then what?”

“Okay,” he grumbled. “Use some of this stuff to make another bottle of flying stuff. Then down the chute, back away, gone.”

“I thought we were agreed on this.”

“But you’ll be helping them, don’t you see? Helping them destroy our world.”

“Glim, I’m learning a lot, and quickly. Think about it—this is the perfect place for me. If I could have asked for a better chance to sabotage Umbriel, I couldn’t have thought of anything better. Given a little time, who knows what I can make here?”

“Yes,” he said. “I see that. But what about me?”

“Do as I do. Talk to me now and then as if you’re telling me something. Write down the things I tell you to.”

“What about that?” he asked of the hob.

She considered the thing. “Luc,” she said, “fetch me those whitish-green fronds at the far end of the table.”

“Yes, Luc me,” the hob said, bounding away and back, bearing the leaves.

“This,” Annaïg dictated, “is fennel fern. It soothes the stomach. It’s used in poultices for thick-eye …”

She had almost forgotten where she was when Slyr returned, hours later.

“Time to cook,” Slyr said.

Annaïg rubbed her eyes and nodded. She gestured vaguely at some of the nearby equipment. “I’m really interested in distilling essences,” she began. “How does this—”

Slyr coughed up an ugly little laugh. “Oh, no, love. You don’t start there. You start in the fire.”

“But there isn’t any fire,” she complained minutes later as she turned the hot metal wheel. The grill before her rose incrementally.

“More,” Slyr snapped. “This is boar, yes?”

“It smells like it,” Annaïg replied.

“And this goes to the grounds workers in Prixon Palace, and they don’t like it burnt, like they do in the Oroy Mansion, see. So higher, and then send your scamp on the walk up there to swing a cover over it.”

Annaïg kept hauling on the wheel. Sweat was pouring from her now, and she was starting to feel herself moving past fatigue into some whole new state of being.

“What did you mean, about there being no fire?” Slyr asked.

“There’s not. It’s just rocks. Fire is when you burn something. Wood, paper, something.”

Slyr frowned. “Yes, I guess fire can mean that, too—like when grease falls. Right. But why would we cook by burning wood? If we did, all of the trees in the Fringe Gyre would be gone in six days.”

“Then what makes the rocks hot?”

“They’re hot,” Slyr said. “They are, that’s all. Okay, send your scamp.”

She pointed at the metal hemisphere suspended on a boom from the ceiling, and the scamp scrambled up into the metal beams and wires above the heat. He pushed the dome—which ought to have been searing—and positioned it over the smoking hog carcass. Annaïg kept cranking until the grill came in contact with the dome.

“There,” Slyr said. “We’re well above the flames. So what else can we put up there? What do we need to cook slowly?”

“We could braise those red roots.”

“The Helsh? Yes, we could.” She seemed surprised, for a moment, but covered it quickly.

“These little birds—they would cook nicely up there.”

“They would, but those are going to Oroy Mansion—”

“—and they like everything burnt there.”

“Yes.”

Annaïg was sure Slyr almost smiled, but then she was directly back to business.

“So get on with it,” she said.

And so she burned, braised, roasted, and seared things for what felt like days, until at last Slyr led her to a dark dormitory with about twenty sleeping mats. A table supported a cauldron, bowls, and spoons. She stood in line, legs shaking with fatigue, helped herself, and then slid down against the wall near the pallet Slyr indicated was hers.

The stew was hot and pungent, unfamiliar meat and odd, nutty grains, and at the moment it seemed like the best thing she had ever eaten.

“When you finish that, I advise you to sleep,” Slyr told her. “In six hours you’re back to work.”

Annaïg nodded, looking around for Glim.

“They’ve taken your friend,” Slyr said.

“What? To where?”

“I don’t know. It was obvious he didn’t know much about cooking, and there’s curiosity about what he is exactly.”

“Well, when will they bring him back?”

Slyr’s face took on a faintly sympathetic cast. “Never, I should think,” she replied.

She left, and Annaïg curled into a ball and wept quietly. She pulled out her pendant and opened it.

“Find Attrebus,” she whispered. “Find him.”

Mere-Glim wondered what would happen if he died. It was generally believed that Argonians had been given their souls by the Hist, and when one died, one’s soul returned to them, to be incarnated once more. That seemed reasonable enough, under ordinary circumstances. In the deepest parts of his dreams or profound thinking were images, scents, tastes that the part of him that was sentient could not remember experiencing. The concept the Imperials called “time” did not even have a word in his native language. In fact, the hardest part of learning the language of the Imperials was that they made their verbs different to indicate when something happened, as if the most important thing in the world was to establish a linear sequence of events, as if doing so somehow explained things better than holistic apprehension.

But to his people—at least the most traditional ones—birth and death were the same moment. All of life—all of history—was one moment, and only by ignoring most of its content could one create the illusion of linear progression. The agreement to see things in this limited way was what other peoples called “time.”

And yet how did this place, this Umbriel, fit into all of that? Because he was cut off from the Hist. If he died here, where would his soul go? Would it be consumed by the ingenium Wemreddle had spoken of? And what of his people so consumed? Where they gone forever, wrenched from the eternal cycle of birth and death? Or was the cycle, the eternal moment, only the Argonian way of avoiding an even more comprehensive truth?

He decided to stop thinking about it. This sort of thing made his head hurt. Concentrate on the practical and what he really knew; he knew that he’d been overpowered by creatures with massive, crablike arms, snatched away from Annaïg, and brought here. He didn’t know why.

Fortunately, someone entered the room, rescuing him from any more attempts at reflection.

The newcomer was a small wiry male and might well have been a Nord, with his fine white hair and ivory, vein-traced skin. And yet there was something about the sqaurish shape of his head and slump of his shoulders that made him seem somehow quite alien. He wore a sort of plain olive frock-coat over a black vest and trousers.

He spoke a few words of gibberish. When Glim didn’t answer, he reached into the pocket of his coat and withdrew a small glass vial. He pantomimed drinking it and then handed it to Glim.

Glim took it, wondering how it would feel to kill the man. He surely wouldn’t get far …

But if they wanted to talk to him, they must want him alive.

He drank the stuff, which tasted like burning orange peel.

The fellow waited for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Can you understand me now?”

“Yes,” Mere-Glim said.

“I’ll get directly to the point,” the man said. “It has been noticed that you are of an unknown physical type, or at least one that hasn’t been seen in my memory, which is quite long.”

“I’m an Argonian,” he said.

“A word,” the man said. “Not a word that signifies to me.”

“That is my race.”

“Another word I do not know.” The little man cocked his head. “So it is true, then? You are from outside? From someplace other than Umbriel?”

“I’m from here, from Tamriel.”

“Exciting. Another meaningless word. This is Umbriel, and no place else.”

“Your Umbriel is in my world, in my country, Black Marsh.”

“Is it? I daresay it isn’t. But as interesting as this subject may be to you, it holds little appeal for me. What I’m interested in is what you are. What part of Umbriel you will become.”

“I don’t understand.”

“You aren’t the first newcomer here, but you may be the first with that sort of body. But Umbriel will remember your body, and others with similar corpora will come along in time—many or a few, depending on what use you are.”

“What if I’m of no use at all?”

“Then we can’t permit Umbriel to learn your form. We must cut your body away from what inhabits it and send it back out into the void.”

“Why not simply let me go? Return me to Tamriel? Why kill me?”

“Ah, a soul is too precious for that. We could not think of letting one waste. Now, tell me about this form of yours.”

“I am as you see me,” he replied.

“Are you some sort of daedra?”

Glim gaped his mouth. “You know what daedra are?” He asked. “The man we talked to below didn’t.”

“Why should he?” the man said. “We have incorporated daedra in the past, but none exist here now. Are you daedra?”

“No.”

“Very well, good, that makes things less complicated. Those spines on your head. What is their function?”

“They make me handsome, I suppose, to others of my race. More to some than to others. I try to take care of them.”

“And that membrane between your fingers?”

“For swimming.”

“Swimming?”

“Propelling oneself through water. My toes are webbed as well.”

“You move through water?” The fellow blinked.

“Often.”

“Beneath the surface?”

“Yes.”

“How long can you remain beneath before having to surface for air?”

“Indefinitely. I can breathe water.”

The fellow smiled. “Well, you see, how interesting. What Umbriel lacks, it will seek out.”

Glim shifted on his feet, but since he didn’t understand what the man was talking about, he didn’t answer.

“The sump. Yes, I think you might do well in the sump. But let’s finish the interview, shall we? Now, your skin—those are scales, are they not?”

ONE

He saw the blow coming from the shift of the Redguard’s shoulder, but it was fast, so fast his dodge to the right almost didn’t succeed, and although the edge didn’t bite, the flat skimmed his bicep. He swung his sword at her ribs, but that same quickness danced her just beyond the reach of his blade.

“Right idea, Attrebus,” he heard Gulan shout.

She backed off a bit, her gaze fixed on his. “Yes,” she said. “Try that again.”

“Got your breath yet?”

“I’ll have yours in a minute,” she replied. She appeared to relax, but then suddenly blurred into motion.

He backpedaled, but once again her speed surprised him. He caught her attack on the flat of his weapon and felt the weight of her steel smack against the guard. Then she was past, and he knew she would take a cut at his head from back there, so he dropped, rolled, and came back up.

He saw it again, that slight slumping before she renewed her attack. Again he parried and broke the distance, but not quite so much.

She circled, he waited. Her shoulders sagged, and he suddenly threw himself forward behind his blade, so that while she was starting to step and lift her weapon, his point hit her solar plexus and she went down, hard.

He followed her and—as his people cheered—put the dull, rounded point in her face.

“Yield?”

She coughed and winced. “Yield,” she agreed.

He offered her his hand and she took it.

“Nice attack,” she said. “I’m glad we were at blunts.”

“You’re very fast,” he said. “But you have a little tell.”

“I do?”

“Well, I’m not sure I want you to know,” he said. “Next time it might not be blunts.”

She seemed to be favoring one foot, so he offered her his shoulder. He helped her limp over to the edge of the practice ground, where his comrades watched from their ale-benches.

“Bring us each a beer, will you?” he called to Dario the pitcher-boy.

“Aye, Prince,” he replied.

He sat her down a bit apart from the others and watched as she unlaced her practice armor.

“What was your name again?” he asked her.

“Radhasa, Prince,” she replied.

“And your father was Tralan the Two-Blade, from Cespar?”

“Yes, Prince,” she replied.

“He was a good man, one of my father’s most valued men.”

“Thank you, highness. It’s nice to hear that.”

He focused his regard on her more frankly as the armor came off. “He was not the handsomest of men. In that, you don’t resemble him much.”

Her already dark face darkened a bit more, but her eyes stayed fixed boldly on his. “So, you … think I’m a handsome man?”

“If you were a man you would be, but I don’t see much mannish about you either.”

“I’ve heard the prince is a flatterer.”

“Here’s our drink,” he said as Dario arrived with the beer.

Beer always tasted perfect after a fight, and this time was no different.

“So why do you seek my service instead of my father’s?” he asked her. “I’m sure he would receive you well.”

She shrugged. “Prince Attrebus, your father sits the throne as Emperor. In his service, I think I would see little in the way of action. With you, I expect rather the opposite.”

“Yes,” he said, “that is true. The Empire is still reclaiming territory, both literally and figuratively. There are many battles yet to fight before our full glory is reclaimed. If you ride with me, death will always be near. It’s not always fun, you know, and it’s not a game.”

“I don’t think that it is,” she said.

“Very good,” he said. “I like your attitude.”

“I hope to please you, Prince.”

“You can start pleasing me by calling me simply Attrebus. I do not stand on ceremony with my personal guard.”

Her eyes widened. “Does that mean …?”

“Indeed. Finish this beer and then go see Gulan. He will see you equipped, horsed, and boarded. And then, perhaps, you and I shall speak again.”

Annaïg saw the murder from the corner of her eye.

She was preparing a sauce of clams, butter, and white wine to go on thin sheets of rice noodle. Of course, none of those things were exactly that; the clams were really something called “lampen,” but they tasted much like clams. The butter was actually the fat rendered from something which—given Slyr’s description—was some sort of pupa. The wine was wine, and it was white, but it wasn’t made from any grape she had ever tasted. The noodles were made from a grain a bit like barley and a bit like rice. She was just happy to be doing something more sophisticated than searing meat, and actually enjoying the alien tastes and textures. The possibilities were exciting.

Qijne was at the corner of her vision, and she made a sort of gesture, a quick wave of her arm.

But then something peculiar happened. Oorol, the under-chef whose territory was Ghol Manor, suddenly lost his head. Literally—it fell off, and blood jetted in spurts from the still-standing body.

Qijne stepped away from the corpse as a hush fell over the kitchen. She watched what was left of Oorol fold down to the floor.

“Not good,” Slyr murmured.

Qijne’s voice rose up, a shriek that somehow still carried words in it.

“Lord Ghol was bored by his prandium! For the fourth time in a row!”

She stood there, staring around, her chest heaving and her eyes flickering murderously about the room.

“And now we have a mess to clean up and an underchef to replace.”

Her jittering gaze suddenly focused on Annaïg.

“Oh, sumpslurry,” Slyr faintly breathed. “No.”

“Slyr,” Qijne shouted. “Take this station. Bring her with you.”

“Yes, Chef!” Slyr shouted back. She turned and began gathering her knives and gear.

“Now we’re in it,” Slyr said. “Deep in it.”

“She k-killed him,” Annaïg stuttered.

“Yes, of course.”

“What do you mean, ‘of course’?”

“Look, we cook for three lords, right? Prixon, Oroy, and Ghol. Most of what we make is for their staff and slaves. That’s all you and I have been cooking—that’s all I’ve ever cooked. That’s not too dangerous. But feeding the lords themselves is—it’s not easy. It’s not only that they are feckless in their tastes, but they compete with one another constantly. Fashions in ingredients, flavor, presentation, color—all these can change very quickly. And now we’re cooking for Ghol, who doesn’t know what he likes. Oorol was pretty good—he managed to entertain Ghol for the better part of a year.”

Annaïg tried to do the calculations in her head; from various conversations, she reckoned the Umbrielian year at just over half a year on Tamriel.

“That’s not very long,” she said.

“It’s not. Hurry, now, we’ve got to subdue his staff, find out what they know, and have an acceptable dinner for him.”

“How did she—what did she kill him with?”

“We call it her filet knife, but no one really knows. You can’t see it, can you? And at times it seems longer than others. We’re not quite sure how long it can get. Now come along, unless you have more useless questions to slow us down and speed us toward the sump.”

“I do have a question. I don’t think it’s useless.”

“What?” the chef snapped impatiently.

“When you say we have to subdue his staff—”

“We’ll see. It might mean a fight. Have a knife in your hand, but hold it discreetly.”

Slyr’s previous staff had consisted of six cooks. Their new staff had eight—Annaïg and Slyr made ten.

In this case, “subduing” them simply meant calming them down and getting them to work, which Slyr managed with a minimum of slapping around, so they were soon discussing the lord’s tastes, or at least what little seemed consistent about them. To make things even more fun, it turned out he was having another of the lords—one who used another kitchen entirely—over for dinner, and about him, they knew nothing.

“What was the last thing he liked?” Slyr asked Minn, who had been Oorol’s second.

“A broth suspire made from some sort of beast the taskers brought,” Minn said. “There was an herb, too.”

“Ah. From outside.”

“Can you describe them?” Annaïg asked. “The beast and the herb?”

“I can show them to you,” Minn replied. They walked over to the cutting counter.

“That’s a hedgehog,” Annaïg said. “The plant”—she crushed the pale green leaves between her fingers and smelled them—“eucalyptus.”

“But we used both again today, and you saw the result.”

“You reason from that that he’s tired of these things?” Slyr asked. “Were they prepared in the same way?”

“Not at all. We toasted the bones to reveal the marrow and infused all with a vapor of the—ah—youcliptus?”

“That doesn’t sound good at all,” Annaïg said.

Slyr rolled her eyes. “Quickly now, I don’t need to say this again, so get it the first time. Some in Umbriel—us, the slaves, the laborers and tenders, farmers and harvesters, fishers and such—we eat things of gross substance. Meat, grain, vegetable matter. The greatest lords of this city dine only on infusions and distillations of spirituous substance. But between us and them there are the lower lords and ladies who still require matter to consume, but also have some degree of liquor spiritualis infused in their diet. But because they desire the highest status—which most will never achieve—they pretend to it, preferring to dine mostly on vapors, scents, gases. Of course, they must consume some amount of substance. They like broths, marrows, gelatins—” She sighed. “Enough. I will explain more later. For now we have to make something.” She turned to Minn. “What else can you tell me of his tastes?”

In the end they made a dish of three things: a foam of the roe of an Umbrielian fish, delicate crystals like spherical snowflakes made of sugar and twelve other ingredients that would sublimate on touching the tongue, and a cold, thin broth of sixteen herbs—including the eucalyptus—which had the aroma of each ingredient but tasted like nothing at all.

The servers took it away, leaving Slyr wringing her hands.

With good cause, because as they were all turning in for the night, Qijne found Annaïg and Slyr.

“It bored him,” she said. “Again, he’s bored. Make it right, will you?”

And then she left.

“We’re dead,” Slyr moaned. “Dead already.”

Annaïg was light-headed, almost to the point of being sick. Her teeth felt on edge from the foreign, probably toxic elements she had been handling. When she closed her eyes, she kept seeing Oorol’s head come off, and the blood, and his strange, slow slump to the floor.

In her third hour of sleeplessness, she felt her amulet wake against her skin.

The slippery voice of a nightbird drew the sleep from Attrebus and delivered it to the moons. He rose, taking a moment to study Radhasa’s slumbering form. Then he went out on the balcony to gaze out at the darkened but still-wondrous city, at the White-Gold Tower rising to meet the stars. He’d chosen this villa for just this view. He loved looking at the palace—not so much being in it.

A glance to the left showed him Gulan’s silhouette, at the far end of the balcony, which fronted several rooms.

“Surely you aren’t on guard,” Attrebus said.

“She’s new,” his friend answered, nodding his head toward Attrebus’s room. “Your father wouldn’t approve.”

“My father believes that anything between a commander and one of his soldiers weakens his authority. I believe that friends fight better and more loyally than mere employees. I drink with my warriors, share their burdens. You and I are friends. Do you think I’m weak?”

Gulan shook his head. “No, but we are not—ah—so intimate.”

Attrebus snorted. “Intimate? You and I are far more intimate that Radhasa and me. Sex is sex, just another kind of fight. I love all of my people equally, you know, but not for all of the same qualities. Radhasa has qualities that inspire a particular kind of friendship.”

“So do Corintha, Cellie, and Fury.”

“Yes, and there is no jealousy there, no more than if I play cards with Lupo instead of Eiswulf.” He cocked his head. “Why bring this up now? Do you know something I don’t?”

Gulan shook his head. “No,” he replied. “That’s just me, a worrier. You’re right, they all love you, and she’ll be no different.”

“Still, it’s good you can tell me these worries,” Attrebus said. “I’m not afraid to hear what you’re thinking, not like my father, surrounded by his flunkies who tell him only what he wants to hear. I love him, Gulan, and I respect him for everything he’s done. But it’s the things he hasn’t done, won’t do …” He trailed off.

“This is about Arenthia, isn’t it?”

“We only need a small force,” Attrebus said. “A thousand, let’s say. The locals will rise and fight with us, I know they will—and then we gain a foothold in Valenwood.”

“Give him time. He may yet come around.”

“I’m restless, Gulan. We haven’t done anything worthy of us in months. And yet there’s so much to be done!”

“Perhaps he has plans for you here, Treb.”

“What sort of plans? What have you heard?”

Gulan’s lips pulled back from his teeth.

“What?”

“Some say it’s time for you to marry.”

“Marry? Why in the world would I want to do that? I’m only twenty-two, for pity’s sake.”

“You’re the crown prince. You’re expected to produce an heir.”

“Has my father talked to you about this? Behind my back? Did he tell you to put this in my ear?”

Gulan drew back a bit. “No, of course not. But there are rumors in the court. I hear them.”

“There are always rumors in the court. That’s why I hate it so.”

“You’ll have to get used to it someday.”

“Not anytime soon. Maybe never—maybe I’ll perish gloriously in battle before it comes to that.”

“That’s not funny, Treb. You shouldn’t talk like that.”

“I know,” he sighed. “I’ll go to court soon, see if he’s planning on saying anything to my face. And if he won’t give us the men to go to Arenthia, maybe he’ll let us go north to train. There are plenty of bandits up around Cheydinhal. It would be something.”

Gulan nodded, and Attrebus clapped him on the shoulder.

“I didn’t mean to accuse you of anything, old friend. It’s just that, when it comes to matters like this, I find myself unaccountably irritated.”

“No harm,” Gulan said.

“I think I’m okay here,” he said. “I’ve subdued her. Go to bed.”

Gulan nodded and vanished into his room. Attrebus stayed at the rail, contemplating the night sky and hoping Gulan was wrong. Marriage? It could be forced on him. Would his father do that? It didn’t really matter, he supposed. He wouldn’t let a wife keep him home, away from his proper business. If that was his father’s intention, he was going to be disappointed.

A faint whir caught his attention, and he turned to find what at first seemed a large insect darting toward him. He leapt back, suppressing a cry, his hand going for a weapon that wasn’t there.

But then it settled on the balustrade, and he saw that it was something much more curious—a bird made all of metal. It was exquisite, really. It sat there, staring at him with its artificial eyes. It seemed to be expecting something from him.

He noticed that there was a little hinged door, like an oddly shaped locket.

He reached, then hesitated. It could be some sort of bizarre assassin’s device—he might open it to find a poisoned needle pricking him, or some dire magic unleashed.

But that seemed a little complicated. Why not put poison on the bird’s talon and have it scratch him? It could have done that if it had wanted to. Still …

He went back into his room, found his dagger, and returning with it and standing to the side, flipped the locket open.

The bird chirped a bright little tune, then fell silent. Otherwise, nothing happened. Inside was a dark, glassy surface.

“What are you?” he wondered aloud.

But it didn’t answer, so he decided to leave it where it was and have Yerva and Breslin examine it in the morning—they knew a lot more about this sort of thing than he did.

As he turned to go, however, he heard a woman’s voice, so faint he couldn’t make it out. He thought for a moment it was Radhasa, waking, but it came again, and this time he was sure it was coming from behind him. From the bird.

He went back and peered into the opening.

“Hello?” the voice came.

“Yes, hello,” he said. “Who is this?”

“Oh, thank the Divines,” the woman said. “I had almost given up hope. It’s been so long.”

“Are you—ah—Look, I feel silly talking to a bird. Can you get to that right off? And perhaps talk a bit louder?”

“I’m sorry, I can’t talk louder. I don’t want to be discovered. That’s Coo you have there; she’s enchanted, and I have this locket with me, so we can speak to one another. If it were lighter, we could see each other as well. I can sort of make out your head.”

“I don’t see anything.”

“Yes, it’s pitch-dark here.”

“Where? Where are you?”

“We’re still over Black Marsh, I think. I’ve only had a few glimpses of the outside.”

“Over Black Marsh?”

“Yes. There’s a lot to explain, and it’s urgent. I sent Coo to find Prince Attrebus …” The voice faltered. “Oh, my. You are the prince, aren’t you? Or else Coo wouldn’t have opened.”

“Indeed, I am Prince Attrebus.”

“Your highness, forgive me for addressing you in such a familiar manner.”

“That’s no matter. And who might you be?”

“My name is Annaïg—Annaïg Hoïnart.”

“And you’re in some sort of captivity?”

“Yes—yes, Prince Attrebus. But it’s not me I’m worried about. I have a lot to tell you and not much time before dawn. I believe our entire world is in terrible danger.”

“I’m listening,” he replied.

And he did listen as her husky lilt carried him through the night across the Cyrodiil and fetid Black Marsh, to a place beyond imagination and a terror the mind shuddered to grasp. And when at last she had to go, and the moons were wan ghosts in a milky sky, he straightened and looked off east. Then he went to his wardrobe-room, where Terz his dresser was just waking.

“I’ll be going to court,” he told Terz.

Titus Mede had been—and was—many things. A soldier in an outlaw army, a warlord in Colovia, a king in Cyrodiil, and Emperor.

And to Attrebus, a father. They looked much alike, having the same lean face and strong chin, the same green eyes. He’d gotten his own slightly crooked nose and blond hair from his mother; his father’s hair was auburn, although now it was more than half silver.

His father sat back in his armchair. He removed the circlet from his curly locks, rubbed his thickly lined forehead, and sighed.

“Black Marsh?”

“Black Marsh, Father, that’s what she said.”

“Black Marsh,” he repeated, settling the crown back on his head. “Well, then?”

“Well what, sire?”

“Well, then, why are we discussing this?” He turned his head toward his minister, an odd, pudgy man with thick eyebrows and mild blue eyes. “Hierem, can you tell me why we’re discussing this?”

Hierem sniffed. “I’ve no idea, majesty,” he said. “Black Marsh is rather a thorn in our side, isn’t it? The Argonians refuse our protection. Let them deal with their problems.”

Something swept through Attrebus so strong he couldn’t identify it at first. But then he understood: certainty. Before there was a question about who Annaïg might actually be, what her motives were. She could easily have been some sort of sorceress, tricking him to his doom.

He’d wanted to believe her—his every instinct told him she was genuine. Now he knew his instincts were dead-on, once again.

“You already knew about this,” he accused.

“We’ve heard things,” the minister replied.

“Heard th …” He sputtered off. “Father—a flying city, an army of walking dead—this doesn’t concern you?”

“You said they were moving north, toward Morrowind and at a snail’s pace. Our reports say the same. So no, I’m not concerned.”

“Not even enough to send a reconnaissance?”

“The Synod and College of Whispers have both been tasked to discover what they can,” Hierem said. “And of course some specialists are on their way. But there is no need for a military expedition until they threaten our borders—certainly not one led by the crown prince.”

“But Annaïg may not survive that long.”

“So it’s the girl?” Hierem said. “That’s why you want to mount an expedition into Black Marsh? For the sake of a girl?”

“Don’t speak to me like that, Hierem,” Attrebus warned. “I am your prince, after all. You seem to forget that.”

“It’s not the girl,” his father snorted. “It’s the adventure. It’s the book they’ll write about it, the songs they will sing.”

Attrebus felt his cheeks burn. “Father, that’s nonsense. You say it’s not our problem, but when it’s made everyone in Black Marsh and Morrowind into corpse-warriors, it will then turn on us. Every day we wait its army grows stronger. Why not fight a small battle now rather than a huge one later?”

“Are you now lecturing me on strategy and tactics?” his father snapped. “I took this city with under a thousand men. I routed Eddar Olin’s northward thrust with barely twice that, and I hammered this empire back together with a handful of rivets. Do not dare to question that I have this situation in hand.”

“Besides,” Hierem added, “you don’t know that it is coming here at all, Prince. It seems to have come from nowhere, probably it will return there.”

“That’s a stupid assumption to make.”

“If it comes for any part of the Empire, we will be ready for it,” the Emperor said. “You will not chase after this thing. That is my last word on the matter.”

The tone was final. Attrebus glared at his father and the minister, then, after the most perfunctory of bows, he spun on his heel and left.

He sat outside on the steps for a few moments, trying to cool off, get his thoughts together. He was almost ready to leave when he looked up at approaching footsteps.

It was a young man with a thin ascetic face, freckles, and red hair. He wore an Imperial uniform.

“Treb!”

Attrebus stood and the two clapped each other in a hug.

“You’re thin, Florius,” he said. “Your mother’s not feeding you anymore?”

“Not so much. It’s mostly your father doing that now.”

Treb stepped back and regarded his old friend. “You made captain! Congratulations.”

“Thank you.”

“I should never have let my father have you,” Attrebus said. “You should be riding with me.”

“I should like that,” Florius said. “It’s been a long time since we had an adventure together. Do you remember that time we snuck off into the market district—”

“I remember my father’s guards dragging us back by the ears,” Attrebus said. “But if you want to arrange a transfer …”

“I’ve been assigned to command the garrison at Water’s Edge,” Florius said. “But maybe when that assignment’s done.”

“I’ll come looking for you,” Attrebus said. “Divines, it’s good to see you Florius.”

“Do you have time for a drink?”

He paused, then shook his head. “No—I need to see to something right now. But I will see you in future.”

“Right, then,” Florius said, and the two men parted company.

Attrebus nodded to himself and went to meet Gulan. He found him near the gate.

“How did it go?” Gulan asked.

“Gather everyone at my house in Ione. We can supply there and be on our way by tomorrow. Be quiet about it.”

“That well, eh?” He shifted. “You’re going against the Emperor’s wishes? Are you sure you want to do that?”

“I’ve done it before.”

“Which is why he’s likely to suspect, and have you watched.”

“Which is why we’re being discreet. Disperse the guard as if I’ve given them a holiday, and have them come individually to Ione. You and I will take the way through the sewers.”

Gulan looked doubtful but he nodded.

Attrebus clapped him on the shoulder.

“You’ll see, old friend. This will be our greatest victory yet.”

TWO

“You’re the new skraw,” the man said. It wasn’t a question.

Mere-Glim nodded, trying to size the fellow up. He looked more or less like one of Annaïg’s race, although with a noticeable yellowish cast to his skin and eyes. He had a long, doleful face and red hair. He was wearing the same black loincloth that Glim now wore.

“My name is Mere-Glim,” he offered.

“Yeah? You can call me Wert. And what are you, Mere-Glim? They say you don’t need the vapors.”

They’d been walking through a stone corridor, but now they entered a modest cave. Water poured from an opening in the wall, ran in a stream across the floor, and vanished into a pool in the middle of the chamber. Several globes of light were fixed to the ceiling, nearly obscured by the ferns growing around them. The rest of the cave was felted in moss. Mere-Glim found it pleasant.

“Eh?”

Glim realized he’d been asked a question.

“My people call ourselves Saxhleel,” he said. “Others call us Argonians. I’m not sure what you mean by vapors.”

“You didn’t come out of the sump,” Wert said. “Nothing like you has ever come out of the sump. Which means you ain’t from Umbriel, ain’t that so?”

“It is,” Glim replied.

“So I reckon you’re one o’ them they was searching for, down below.”

“They found us.”

“Makes you—well, there ain’t no word for it, is there? A From-Somewhere-Elser. Well, then, welcome to the sump. Lovely place to work.” He chuckled, but that turned abruptly into a nasty cough. He covered his mouth with the back of his hand, and Glim noticed it came away bloody.

“Vapors,” Wert explained.

“What are they?”

“Well, see, I’m told you can breathe down there. But none of us can, not without the vapors. We go to the yellow cave, and we breathe ’em in for a while, and then we can stay under until they wear off.”

“How long is that?”

“Depends. A few hours, usually. Long enough to get some work done.”

“So what do we do?”

“Well, I’m to show you, I am,” Wert said. “That’s where we’re on to right now. I’ll go take the vapors—I won’t be back here, because if I don’t get in the water right away, I’ll suffocate. So you just swim out and wait for me. Don’t wander by yourself. And please don’t try to run away. You won’t make it, and I’ll pay the price.”

He watched Wert go, then walked over to the pool and lowered himself in, letting the mild current take him along. The pool bent into a tube, and he could see light ahead. A moment later he emerged in shallow water, just about as deep as he was tall.

The sump spread out before him, a nearly perfectly circular lake in the bottom of a cone-shaped cavity. Umbriel City climbed up and away from him in all directions. Some of it hung above him. He thought that if crows could build cities, they would look something like this—vain, shiny, lopsided, brash, and bragging.

A few moments later Wert’s head appeared a few yards out. He gestured for Glim to follow.

The shallows teemed with strange life: slender, swaying amber rods covered in cilia, swimmers that seemed like some strange cross of fish and butterfly, living nets composed of globes propelling themselves with water-jets and dragging fine webs between them, centipede-things as long as his arm and little shrimplike things no bigger than his thumb-claw.

He stopped when he saw the body. At first he saw only a thick school of silver fish, but they parted at his approach. It had been a woman with dark skin and hair; now bones were showing in places and worms clustered on exposed organs. Shuddering, he turned away, but then he saw another, similar swarm of fish. And another to his right. He started at something in the edge of his vision, but it was only Wert.

“They drop the bodies from above or send them down the slides. This is where they start.” His voice was weird, thick with the water in his lungs.

“Why were they killed?”

“What do you mean? Most just died of something or other. I suppose a few mighta been executed. But this is where we all end, ain’t it—in the sump.” He waved his hand vaguely. “We collect a lot of stuff for the kitchens here. Orchid shrimp, Rejjem sap, Inf fronds. Other things we fish for deeper, especially shear-teeth. You’ll learn about that, but mostly you’ll work in the deep sump. That’s perfect for you. So come on, let’s go to the Drop.”

They swam on, with the water getting gradually deeper at first. He didn’t have to be told what the Drop was—he knew it when he saw it. The sump became a steeply curving cone that drove deep into the stone of Umbriel. And at the very bottom, in the narrowest place, an actinic light flashed, like a ball of lightning.

“What’s that?” he asked.

“That’s the conduit to the ingenium,” Wert said. “The sump takes care of our bodies—the ingenium takes care of our souls and keeps the world running. I’d stay well clear of the conduit, if I was you. Or me, now that I think of it.”

Well, Glim thought. There’s something Annaïg would want to report to her prince. If only I had some way of talking to her. He glanced at Wert; he seemed not to be a bad fellow, but in the bigger picture—Annaïg’s picture—that wouldn’t matter. Though Wert could temporarily breathe underwater, his body was clumsy, not built for swimming. Glim knew he could easily escape him. If he killed him first, that would probably give him more time.

But if he survived long enough to find Annaïg and give her this bit of news, then what? How could he hide when he was the only one of his kind on Umbriel? He couldn’t. Not for long.

No, before he did something like that he’d need to have a lot more information to pass on. Could the ingenium be damaged from the sump? From anywhere? If so, how?

They descended about two-thirds of the way down the sump, and Wert began moving toward what appeared to be translucent sacs stuck to the wall. There were hundreds of them, maybe thousands, in all shapes and sizes. As he drew nearer, he could make out vague forms within the sacs.

“These are being born,” Wert said.

Curious, Glim moved closer, and to his astonishment found himself looking into a face. The eyes were closed, the features not fully formed, but it wasn’t a child’s face; it was that of an adult—just softer, flabbier than most. It was also hairless.

“I don’t understand.”

Wert grinned, plucked something from the water, and handed it to Glim. It was a sort of worm, very soft. It pulsed in and out, and with every contraction, a little jet of water squirted from one end of it. Other than that, it was featureless.

“That’s a proform,” Wert said. “When someone dies, the ingenium calls one of these down to the conduit and gives it a soul. It comes back up here and attaches to the wall, and someone grows.”

“That’s interesting,” Glim said. He looked at the proform. “You all start as this? No matter what you end up looking like? This is what you really are?”

“You’ve got funny questions in your head,” Wert said. “We are what we are.”

“And everyone is born like this?”

“Everyone, from lord and lady to me and—well, not you. At least not yet.”

“How are they born?”

“Well, that’s one of your jobs—to recognize when one of these is about to start breathing. You can tell by the color of the sac—it gets a sheen, like this one. Then you swim that up to the birth pool—that’s another cave up in the shallows.”

“What if you don’t do it in time?”

“They die, of course. That’s why this job is the most important, really. And it’s why you’re so suited for it, see? Nah, they won’t waste you much on gathering. This is where you’ll be.” He doubled over suddenly, and Glim realized he was coughing. A dark stain spread from his mouth and nostrils.

“Are you okay?”

Wert gradually unfolded, then nodded.

“Why do the vapors hurt you like that?”

“Why is water wet? I don’t know. But I have to go up soon. Not lasting so long, this time. So let’s go see the birthing pool.”

As they started back up, Glim glanced back down toward the light, but he didn’t see it. Instead he saw a maw full of teeth gaping at him.

“Xhuth!” he gargled, jerking himself to the side and stroking hard to turn.

The fish turned, too, but not before he saw the thing was fifteen feet long, at least. Its tail was long, whiplike, and it had two great swimming fins set under it, like a whale.

But those teeth would shame a shark to blush.

“Sheartooth!” Wert shouted. “You’ve made it mad somehow.”

Glim swam desperately, but the head kept right toward him, so he slashed at it with his claws. They caught but didn’t tear the creature’s tough hide. He let go, then struck again, this time at the back, behind the head, and there he dug in. It couldn’t bite him there.

It could try, though. It thrashed like a snake in a hot skillet; he saw Wert stab at it with his spear, only to be struck by the tail. The skraw went limp in the water.

Wonderful.

He was starting to get dizzy and his arms and shoulders were aching. He’d have to do something soon.

Here’s hoping your belly is softer, he thought. He let go with one set of claws and swung underneath. He was almost thrown clear, but one of the fins actually buffeted him back to the belly, and he slashed with all his might. Again his claws caught. He sank in the other hand.

The sheartooth gyred into a loop, and the force was such that he knew he could only hold on for another few seconds.

But the same force dragged Glim down the belly, opening it up like a gutting knife, and he was engulfed in a cloud of blood.

He kicked hard and swam free of the still-twisting monster, but it had lost interest in him, focusing instead on its own demise.

He realized suddenly that he’d forgotten Wert.

He had drifted down fifty or sixty feet. His eyes were closed and his chest was moving oddly.

Glim slung Wert over his back and kicked straight for the surface. He could feel the man quivering on his back. The light of the sun seemed a long way off.

He burst into air and reversed his hold, keeping Wert’s head out of the sump as he vomited water from his lungs and began to struggle. His eyes opened, looking wild. He began to make a horrible sucking sound that wasn’t breathing.

“Should I take you back under?” Glim asked.

Wert shook his head violently, but Glim wasn’t sure if that meant yes or no.

But then he seemed to draw a real breath, and then another. They reached the shallows, where Glim could stand and Wert could lean against him.

“Shearteeth—usually not so vicious,” he said. “Usually don’t attack us. Something about you set it off. Maybe because the sump was still learning you. Thought you were—intruder.”

He glanced at Glim. “Thanks, by the way. I wouldn’t have made it back up.”

“I thought you were going to die anyway.”

“It’s always bad between,” Wert explained. “You don’t want to be underwater when you start breathing air again, but then again, you still can’t breathe air.”

“That’s horrible,” Glim said. “There must be some better way to do this.”

“Sometimes a lord or lady will come down for a swim, and they have other ways, not like the vapors. But the vapors are cheap, my friend. And so are we—always more of us being born. You’re different—for now.”

“For now?”

“Well, the sump knows you now. So does the ingenium. I wouldn’t be surprised to see a few more of your sort, pretty soon. And when there are enough of you—well, you’ll be cheap, too.”

THREE

When Attrebus, Gulan, and Radhasa arrived at Ione, dawn was just leaking into the sky. It was cool, and the breeze smelled of dew and green leaves. A rooster gave notice to the hens it was time to face the day. The town was waking, too—smoke from hearths coiled up through the light fog and people were already about in the streets.

“It’s not much to look at, this town,” Radhasa noticed.

Attrebus nodded. Ione wasn’t picturesque; a few of the houses were rickety wooden structures faded gray, but most were of stone or brick and simply built. Even the small chapel of Dibella was rather plain.

“It’s not very old,” he said. “There wasn’t anything here at all fifty years ago. Then—well, do you know what that is?”

They had reached the town square, and he didn’t have to point to indicate what he was asking about.

The square was mostly stone, oddly cracked and melted as if from terrible heat or some stranger force. Two bent columns projected up in the middle, each about ten feet high, and together they resembled the truncated horns of an enormous steer.

“Yes, I’ve seen them before—the ruins of an Oblivion gate.”

“Right. Well, when this one opened, it opened right in the middle of a company of soldiers recalled from the south to fortify the Imperial City. More than half of them were killed, including the commander. They would have all died, but a captain named Tertius Ione managed to pull the survivors together and withdraw. But rather than retreat all the way to the Imperial City, he instead recruited farmers and hunters from the countryside and Pell’s Gate. Then he made them into something more than what they were. They returned and slaughtered the daedra here, and when they were done with that, he led them through the gate itself.”

“Into Oblivion?”

“Yes. He’d heard that the gate at Kvatch had been closed somehow by entering it. So Ione went in with about half of his troops and left the rest here, to guard against anything else coming out.”

“It looks like he closed it.”

“It closed, but Captain Ione was never seen again. One of his men—a Bosmer named Fenton—appeared weeks later, half dead and half mad. From what little he said that made sense, they reckoned Ione and the rest sacrificed themselves to give Fenton the chance to sabotage the portal. The Bosmer died the next day, raving. Anyway, Ione was gone for a long time before the gate exploded, and in the meantime his company built some fortifications and simple buildings. Once the gate was gone, it was a convenient and relatively safe place, so a lot of people stayed, and over time the town grew.”

He turned about, spreading his arms. “That’s why I like this Ione. Because it’s new, because it speaks to the spirit of heroism that lies at the heart of each of us. Yes, there are no quaint old buildings or First Era statues, but it’s an honest place built by brave people.”

“And you have a house here?” Radhasa asked.

“A hunting lodge, in the hills just across town.”

“That’s quite a hunting lodge,” the Redguard said when they entered the gate.

Something about the tone irked him, made him feel a bit defensive. It wasn’t that big. It was built on the plan of an ancient Nord longhouse, each beam and cornice festooned with carvings of dragons, bulls, boars, leering wild men, and dancing, longtressed women.

“I suppose after the simplicity of Ione, it comes as a bit of a shock,” Attrebus admitted. “My uncle built it about fifteen years ago. He used to bring me down here, and left it to me when he died.”

“No, I didn’t mean to criticize it.”

And yet, he somehow felt she had been critical of something.

He pushed past it. There were other matters at hand now.

“They’re all here, Gulan?” he asked.

“They are.”

“And the provisions?”

“You had plenty in your stores. More than we can carry.”

“Well, I don’t see any reason to dally, then.”

He raised his voice and spread his arms.

“It’s good to have you with me, my brothers and sisters in arms,” he called out. “Give us a shout. The Empire!”

“The Empire!” they erupted enthusiastically.

“Today we ride to the unknown, fellows. Against something I believe to be as deadly and dangerous to our world as that Oblivion gate down there was when it opened—maybe more so. We’ve never done anything this dangerous; I’ll tell you that now.”

“What is it, Treb?” That was Joun, an orc of prodigious size even for his race.

He settled his hands on his hips and lifted his chin. Then he laid it out for them.

When he was finished, the silence that followed had an odd, unfamiliar quality to it.

“I know there are only fifty-two of us,” he said, “but just below us Captain Ione went into Oblivion with fewer than that and shut down that gate. The Empire expects no less from us—and we are better equipped in every way than he was. Even better, we have someone there, inside this monstrous thing—someone to lead us in, help us find the heart and rip it out. We can do this, friends.”

“We’re with you, Treb!” Gulan shouted, and the rest of them joined him, but it seemed, somehow, that a note was still missing. Had he finally asked too much of them?

No, they would follow him, and this would knit them all the more tightly as a band.

“An hour, my friends, to settle yourselves for the ride. Then we begin.”

But as they dispersed, there seemed to be much furtive whispering.

The grass still sparkled with dew when they reached the Red Ring Road, the vast track that circumscribed Lake Rumare. Across the morning gold of the lake stood the Imperial City itself, a god’s wagon-wheel laid down on an island in the center of the lake. The outer curve of the white wall was half in shadow, and he could make out three of what would—in any other city—be deemed truly spectacular guard towers. But those were dwarfed by the magnificent spoke of the wheel—the White-Gold Tower, thrusting up toward the unknowable heavens.

He saw Radhasa also staring at the tower.

“It was there before the city,” he told her. “Long before. It is very old, and no one is quite sure what it does.”

“What do you mean, ‘what it does’?”

“Well—understand first I’m not a scholar of the tower.”

“Understood. But you must know more than I.”

“Well, some think that the White-Gold Tower—and some other towers around Tamriel—help, well, hold the world up, or something like that. Others believe that before the Dragon broke, the tower helped protect us from invasion from Oblivion.”

“It holds up the world?”

“I’m not saying it right,” he replied, realizing he couldn’t actually remember the details of that tutorial. “They help keep Mundus—the World—from dissolving back into Oblivion. Or something like that. Anyway, everyone seems to agree it has power, but no one knows exactly what kind.”

“Okay,” she replied, and shrugged. “So how do we get to Black Marsh?”

“We’ll come to a bridge in a bit and cross the Upper Niben. From there we’ll take the Yellow Road southeast until we cross the Silverfish River. Then it’s overland—no roads after that except the ones we make.” He grinned at the thought of being in wild country again.

“I wish I knew more about Cyrodiil.”

“Well, you have an opportunity to learn now.”

She was silent for a moment. “This person—the spy on the floating island—how do you speak to them?”

“You don’t believe me?”

“Of course I ‘believe’ you, my Pri—ah, Treb. I’m just curious. Do you have some sort of scrying ball, like in the old tales?”

“Something like that,” he replied.

“Very mysterious,” she answered.

“Must keep a bit of mystery,” he replied.

“We certainly must,” she said with a flirty grin.

At noon they stopped to water the horses in the springs near the overgrown ruins of Sardarvar Leed, where the ancient Ayleid elves had once herded his ancestors, bred them for work and pleasure. Attrebus found a quiet spot and took the bird from his haversack.

He saw Annaïg’s hands, working at some sort of dough, the cherry red fire pits beyond, and the hellish creatures that swarmed about the place. He dared not say anything now, but something in him needed to see what she saw, to make sure she was alive and well. His father and Hierem were right, in a way; this was in part about Annaïg. She’d picked him to send Coo to because she believed in him, because she knew that he would answer her prayers and do this thing that needed doing, even if that meant opposing his own father.

He had no intention of letting her down, and tonight, when they could whisper to each other across the leagues, he would give her the good news that he was on the way.

He was still thinking about that an hour later when he heard a dull whump and half of his men caught fire. For a moment he could only stare, as if watching a theatric. He saw Eres and Klau staggering, beating their hands at the blue flames that engulfed them, their mouths working to produce sounds unrecognizable as human. There was Gulan, not burning but trying to beat the fire off of Pash, but then he suddenly had strange quills growing from his back.

It finally settled through to his brain that they were ambushed, and he drew his sword, looking wildly for the enemy as arrows came whirring from every direction. Radhasa was still next to him, her own weapon drawn and an odd look of joy on her face.

The last thing he saw was her blade swinging toward his head.

He clambered up from black depths, but it was a slippery slope. He had little moments when he thought he was awake, but they were full of pain and strange movement, and in the end might have just been a dream within a dream, a little of the Dark Lady’s whimsy. A little hope before the nightmares had him again.

Finally, though, he opened his eyes, and bright light filled them. His head throbbed furiously, and there was blood caked in his mouth and nostrils. He was facedown in the dirt and one eye was covered tightly by a cloth of some kind.

He tried to push up, but his hands were behind him, and from the pain in his wrists he knew they must be bound.

He tried to call out, but all that emerged was a croak.

“There you are,” a feminine voice said. He flopped his head over and saw Radhasa, sitting against a tree, eating an apple. Her horse was behind her, and so was his, along with a Khajiit and a Bosmer he’d never seen before, speaking in low tones a few yards away.

“You tried to kill me,” he said.

“No, I didn’t. I hit you with the flat. Could just as easily have been the edge.” She smiled. “I was supposed to kill you, though.”

“Why?”

“If I told you that, then I would have to kill you,” she replied. “Don’t worry your pretty head about it, Treb.”

“Where—what happened to the rest?”

“Ah, well, there’s the pity. Some pretty good people just died for you.”

He tried to understand that. “How many, traitor? How many of my people did you kill?”

“Well, unless you still count me—I’m thinking you don’t—I would have to say everyone.”

“Everyone?”

“Yep. Even little Dario.” She licked juice from her fingers.

“He’s just a boy!”

“Not anymore. Graduated with the rest of them.”

“Why?” he sobbed. His eyes stung with tears.

“Again, not telling. A little mystery, remember? Like your bird here.” She smiled. “How does it work?”

“I’m going to kill you!” he screamed. “You hear me?”

He lifted his head to direct his shout to the strangers. “Did she tell you who I am? Do you know what you’ve done?”

Incredibly, they laughed.

“All right,” Radhasa said. “Break’s over. Get him horsed, fellows, and let’s move along.”

He tried to fight, but his head was ringing and his limbs were sapped of energy, but most of all he couldn’t concentrate, couldn’t get his mind to stand still. What was happening? This didn’t happen, not to him. How could all of his friends be dead?