The Infernal city

The horse started forward, and, slung over its back, he watched the wheel ruts in the road.

She was lying, of course. Gulan and the rest were probably tracking them. Some of them probably were dead, but most of them must have made it. He’d never lost more than three of his personal guard in one battle anywhere, including the Battle of Blinker Creek.

So she was lying, and they were coming. He just had to stay alive until they found him.

How long had he been out? Where were they?

The immediate answer to that last was that they were on a hunting trail of some sort, surrounded by massive oak and ash trees. The land rolled a bit, so it was a good guess they weren’t in the Niben Valley anymore, which meant that he must have been unconscious for at least a few days.

His best guess was that they were somewhere in the West Weald, and by the sun, traveling mostly south.

So where were they going?

He looked to Radhasa, riding slightly ahead of him.

“You said you were supposed to kill me,” he croaked. “Why didn’t you?”

“Because I’m going to sell you,” she replied. “I know a certain very eccentric Khajiit who collects people like you. He’ll pay more than ten times what I was offered to kill you. So we’re off to Elsweyr. Think of it as a holiday. A really, really long holiday that will be no fun at all.”

“Radhasa,” he said, “that’s insane. People know what I look like. Someone between here and there is going to recognize me.”

“You haven’t seen your face since I whacked it,” she replied. “Looks a little different at the moment. And we’ll keep the bandages on. Once we get you where you’re going, there’s going to be a real limited selection of people you’re likely to meet, and it won’t matter to any of them who you are.”

“My father,” he said. “He’d pay more yet to get me back. Have you thought of that?”

“He might,” she agreed. “But I don’t think I would survive that. Too many resources at his disposal, too many ways to trap us.”

“Those resources are bent on you already.”

“No, not anytime soon, I think.”

“When he finds the bodies—”

“Don’t worry about that,” she said. “It’s covered.” She chuckled.

“What are you laughing about?”

“Good thing you don’t like being addressed as ‘Prince,’” she replied. “Because you’re never going to hear anyone call you that again.”

She snapped her reins and broke into a trot. His horse, leaded to hers, followed suit.

FOUR

The day after talking with Attrebus, Annaïg felt energized, despite the lack of sleep. She went early to her work archiving the plants, animals, and minerals that appeared on her table every morning. She surveyed what was before her for a moment, then glanced up at the cabinets and drawers that climbed the wall to the ceiling.

“Luc,” she said quietly.

The hob peered out of the empty cabinet it habitually slept in.

“Luc,” it echoed.

“Luc, you know what’s in all of those cabinets up there?”

“Luc knows.”

“Do you find them by name?”

“If Luc has name.”

“And if you don’t have the name?” she pressed.

“Then describe—color, taste, smell.”

“I see.”

She thought about that for a moment, and then got some of the eucalyptus distillation they had used before.

“Smell this, Luc.”

The creature wrinkled its wide nostrils at it.

“I don’t know the name of what I’m looking for, but it is black and smells a bit like this. I want you to search the cabinets and bring me anything that fits that description, one container at a time.”

“Yes, Luc find.”

He bounded off, and Annaïg took a deep breath. She hadn’t dared instruct the beast to bring things only when she was alone; it could tell Qijne, and that would raise questions.

Glim had been right about one thing—she needed to re-create the elixir that had allowed them to fly here. Once Attrebus was near, it might be the only way to reach him. In any case, she needed options. Being able to fly would be a big one.

She set to work on what was before her—arrowroot, silk leeches, and cypress needles. Luc brought her a bottle. She sniffed it, and got an intensely stringent, herbal, minty smell.

“Not that one,” she said.

Luc bounded back off.

She remembered the sound of the prince’s voice. He’d believed her, hadn’t he? A prince. And he had talked to her like she was important. She’d always known that was how it would be, if they met, but to have it actually happen …

“You’re awfully cheerful for a dead woman,” Slyr commented from just behind her.

Annaïg jumped about a foot, her heart racing. “It’s the lack of sleep,” she said. “Makes me giddy.” She lifted her pen and scribbled a few notes regarding the willow bark on the table in front of her.

“I need you.”

“That’s nice to hear,” Annaïg replied. “But this is my time for cataloging. Remember?”

“Yes, well that was before we were put in charge if Lord Ghol’s victuals,” she snapped.

Annaïg shrugged. “If you think you can talk Qijne into releasing me from this duty, I won’t argue.”

“You’re only saying that because you know I wouldn’t dare.”

“That’s true,” Annaïg replied. “On the other hand, Lord Ghol is bored, yes? We need something new, and that’s likely to come from these things.”

“Yes, well, Oorol was using the ingredients you identified, and it didn’t help him.”

“That’s because he didn’t understand them,” she said. “Any more than you do.”

Slyr stiffened, and for a moment Annaïg thought she had gone too far, but then the other woman relaxed. “You’re right. That’s why I need you. How often are you going to make me repeat it?”

“I’m in this, too.”

“She won’t kill you,” Slyr replied. “She needs you.”

“She’s insane,” Annaïg said. “You can’t use logic to predict Qijne.”

Slyr chuckled bitterly. “You’ve a big mouth,” she said. “You may be right, but she’s not entirely unpredictable—if she hears you said anything like that—”

“She won’t,” Annaïg said simply.

Slyr stepped back. “Really, you looked beaten and ready for the sump last night. Now you’re full of sliwv. What happened last night? Did you cozy up to someone? Pafrex, maybe?”

“Pafrex? The bumpy fellow with quills?”

“Or maybe you’ve trained your hob … unconventionally?”

“Okay, that’s disgusting,” Annaïg said.

“Disgust,” Luc chimed in. “Disgust is what?”

Annaïg felt a sudden flush. The hob was holding out a bottle of something black toward her.

“Just put that down, Luc,” she said. “Forget that and fetch me that snake over there,” she said.

“Luc!” the hob replied, bounding across the huge table to retrieve the viper she indicated.

Slyr was frowning down at her. Annaïg couldn’t tell if it had anything to do with the bottle.

“Look,” Annaïg said, “I am helping you. I’ve an idea.”

“And what is that?” Slyr demanded.

Annaïg lifted the serpent carefully, behind the head, even though it was as stiff as a rod. Most of the animals came like this—not dead, but sort of paralyzed, frozen even though they weren’t cold. Their hearts didn’t beat and they didn’t age. They had to be released from that state by a rod Qijne carried. Still, with something this deadly, it was hard for her to trust a spell she didn’t understand.

“The Argonians call this a moon-adder,” Annaïg explained. “When it bites, it injects venom that—in most beings—is almost instantly fatal. Argonians, however, can survive it, and in fact sometimes seek the venom out.”

“Why would they do that?”

“It provides them daril, which means something like ‘seeing everything in ecstasy.’”

“Ah. It is a drug, then. We have many of those, but they are not so much in fashion. Besides, we don’t want to poison Ghol.”

“No, no. I’m sure that would be bad. The venom is just a starting point. From what Glim told me, daril unfolds in stages, no stage like the last, and it confuses the senses. You see sounds, hear tastes, smell sights.”

“Again, we have such drugs.”

“The venom is transformed by a certain agent in Argonian blood—”

“If this is another attempt to find out where your friend is, I can only reiterate that not even Qijne knows where he is—or even has the ability to discover it.”

“I know,” Annaïg said, swallowing the sudden lump in her throat. “I don’t actually need Argonian blood. I’m just explaining. It comes down to this: I think I can make a metagastrologic.”

“This is a nonsense word.”

“No. It’s something I’ve read about, something the Ayleids—ancient people from my world—once used in their banquets.”

“A drug.”

“Yes, but the only sense that they affect is taste—nothing else. No general hallucination, no loss of clarity. Look, the essential flavors are sweet, sour, salty, and hot, right?”

“Of course. And with the lower lords like Ghol you can add dead, quick, and ethereat, at the same level.”

“Really? How interesting.” She wanted to know more about that, but didn’t want her idea to lose momentum. “Anyway,” she pushed on, “a good dish will still balance those essentials, yes?”

“Yes. Or contrast them.”

“So with a metagastrologic, the first taste of the dish will have a certain balance of flavors, but as it lingers on the tongue, they begin to change. Salty is confused for sweet, ah—ethereat for hot, and so forth. And it will keep happening, different each time.”

Slyr just looked at her for a long moment.

“You can do this?” she finally asked.

“Yes.”

“Such a dish would have to be carefully thought out, so that no matter what inversion of flavors occurred, most would be pleasurable.”

“It would require a chef of some skill,” Annaïg agreed.

“Well,” Slyr sighed, “it will not be boring, at least. I will go work on a foundation.”

Annaïg tried not to watch her depart, but she finally stole a glance to make sure she was gone. Then she closed her eyes and thanked the gods, carefully opened the bottle, and smelled its contents.

“That’s not it either, Luc,” she said. “Keep trying. But—um, I’ll ask you to see them, okay? I don’t want you interrupting my chain of thought. Just keep them in your cabinet.”

“Luc do,” the hob said, and started toward the wall.

“First go and find the chef and tell her we need this snake quickened.”

“Luc do.” He bounded off.

A few moments later he came back following Qijne’s hob, which had the baton. Annaïg placed the viper on the table, put the sharp edge of a cleaver on its neck, and touched it with the baton.

When it twitched to life, it jerked back and nearly slipped free, but its head caught and she put all her weight on the cleaver so the edge bit, then followed the skull back to the neck, slicing cleanly through. The body fell away, twitching, which gave the hobs something to hoot about.

She expressed the venom into a glass vial and set to work.

Hours passed, and so absorbed was she in the task that she hadn’t realized Qijne was watching her.

“Chef?”

“What’s your hob doing going through the cabinets? Everything up there is known to me already.”

“But not to me,” Annaïg answered. “And if I’m to be a proper cook to Lord Ghol, I need to be familiar with all of it.”

Qijne’s expression didn’t change, but her glaze flickered down to Annaïg’s work in progress.

“Not really doing anything you’re supposed to do,” she observed.

“This is for the meal,” she said. “An additive.”

“Explain.”

Annaïg went back over the general properties of the metagastrologic.

The chef tilted her head slowly left, then right. “You’re cooking, in other words. When you’re supposed to be cataloging.”

“I am, Chef.”

“Which is not what I told you to do.”

“No, Chef. But Slyr is worried—”

“Slyr? Slyr put you up to this?”

“No, Chef. It was my idea. We failed last night. I didn’t want us to fail again.”

“No, no of course not,” Qijne said vaguely. Her eyes lost focus. “Carry on. Only know that if it does not please him, I will kill Slyr and cut off one of your feet, right?”

“Right, Chef.”

“That’s not a joke, if you think I’m joking.”

“I don’t think you’re joking, Chef,” Annaïg said.

After the meal went up, Slyr wandered off, her face pinched with fear. Annaïg slipped off, too, and had a look at her locket, but got nothing but darkness. She went back to the dormitory to wait for her meal.

A bit later Slyr rushed into the room.

“Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”

She followed the chef through the winding corridors and great pantries of the kitchen and into what appeared to be a wine cellar—there were thousands of bottles of something, anyway, racked all around her.

“Through here.” Slyr was indicating a sort of hole in the wall just barely wide enough to slip through.

It led into a small chamber illuminated by faint light. Once in it, she could see the light came from the sky—the chamber was at the bottom of a high, narrow shaft.

Slyr handed her a bottle and a basket of something that smelled really good.

“He wasn’t bored,” she said. “In fact, he sent one of his servants to commend me.” She looked up shyly. “Us.”

“That’s good news.”

“News worth celebrating,” Slyr said. “Try the wine.”

It was dry and delicious, with a fragrance she couldn’t quite place but that reminded her of anise. The basket was filled with pastry rolls stuffed with a sort of buttery meat.

“What is it?” she asked, holding up the roll she was eating.

“Orchid shrimp. They live in the sump.”

“It’s delicious.”

“It was supposed to go to the Prixon Palace servants for their night ration. I snatched a few.”

“Thank you,” Annaïg said.

“Yes, yes,” Slyr said. “Eat. Drink.”

“What about Qijne?”

“She may be—ah, as you said. But when we succeed, so does she. Lord Ghol was on the verge of becoming the patron of another kitchen. When kitchens lose patrons, people start wondering whether the master chef ought to be replaced. We did well, so she’ll look the other way a bit if we take very discreet privileges.”

“What sort of privileges?”

“Well … this is about it. Having a little of the good stuff and not being watched too closely at night.”

Annaïg felt her face burn a bit. “Ah, Slyr—”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” the chef replied. “I just thought you would enjoy being here, where you can see the sky. And no noisy, smelly dormitory. I love being here, alone—I don’t think anyone else knows about it. I just don’t dare come here often.”

“Well, then,” Annaïg said, “I am flattered, then.”

Slyr became a little sloppy after the first bottle of wine.

“I have heard something about your friend,” she confided.

Annaïg nearly choked on her drink. “Really?” she gasped. “About Glim? He’s okay?”

“He’s in the sump.”

It jagged through her like lightning.

“What?” she whispered.

But Slyr smiled.

“No, not like that,” she assured her. “He’s not dead. He’s working in the sump. The guy who brought the shrimp mentioned him. He can breathe underwater, did you know that? All of the sump tenders are talking about him.”

“Of course he can breathe underwater,” she replied. “He’s an Argonian.”

“Another of your nonsense words? There are more like him?’

She remembered the slaughter at Lilmoth. “I hope so,” she said.

“Oh,” Slyr said. “They’re down there.”

“Don’t you ever—” But she stopped herself. She couldn’t trust anyone here with thoughts of somehow stopping Umbriel.

But Slyr was waiting for her to finish.

“Have you ever been above?” she asked instead.

“To the palaces? No. But it is my dream to.” She looked up and her forehead wrinkled. “What are those?” she asked.

Annaïg followed her regard up to the small patch of night sky.

“Stars,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen stars before?”

“No. What are they?”

“Depends on who you ask or what books you read. Some say they are tiny holes in Mundus, the world, and the light we see is Aetherius beyond. Others believe they are fragments of Magnus, who made the world.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Yes.”

And so they ate, and drank, and talked, and for the first time in many, many days Annaïg felt like a real person again.

When Slyr finally curled up to sleep with her blanket, she opened her locket again.

There wasn’t anything there, which meant Coo wasn’t with Attrebus. She waited, hoping he would answer, but after an hour or so she fell asleep, and her dreams were troubled.

FIVE

To Colin, the corpses looked like broken dolls flung down by a child in a tantrum. He couldn’t imagine any of them ever having been alive, breathing, talking, feeling. He couldn’t find any empathy even for the worst of the lot—those burnt to char—and he knew he ought to. He should at least feel sick or repelled, filled with the fear of such a thing happening to him, but he just couldn’t find anything like that in him.

Well, Prince, he thought, congratulations. Well done.

“Stay away from the bodies,” he told the royal guardsmen. He didn’t have to tell his own people; they were professionals. “Put sentinels on the road and in the woods. Stop any wagons and route foot and horse traffic well around this. Tell them a bunch of ogres have set up camp and we have to clear ’em out.

“Gerring, you start the search for witnesses. Every house, every shack in the area. Hand, you go to Ione and Pell’s Gate. Guilliam—you take Sweetwater and Eastbridge. Be discreet. See who’s saying what in the taverns. You know what to do.”

He nodded at a flurry of “Yes, inspector” but kept his gaze on the scene.

Most had been struck by arrows and had either died of that or of having their throats very professionally slit later. A sizable fraction had been immolated, presumably by sorcery. The attackers, interestingly, either hadn’t had any casualties or—if they had—didn’t leave them behind.

The arrows he recognized as belonging to an insurgent faction from County Skingrad that called themselves the “Natives.” A number of the bodies had been beheaded, a practice also in keeping with that same nasty bunch of thugs.

He stopped in front of one body that was burnt but not incinerated. Bits of clothing and jewelry still clung to it and a notably large ring. The head was missing.

“Too convenient,” he murmured as he took a closer look at the ring. As he suspected, it was the signet ring of Crown Prince Attrebus.

Of course, if it had been the Natives, they would certainly have singled out Attrebus’s head as the best trophy. But then, why leave the ring?

“Oh, sweet gods,” someone gasped. “It’s the prince.”

Irritated, Colin turned to find Captain Pundus dismounted and standing a few feet away.

“Captain, I asked you to stay clear of the bodies.”

Pundus reddened. “See here, I’m the leader of this expedition. Who do you imagine you are, shouting orders at me and my men?”

“You were the leader of this expedition until we found this,” Colin said, parting his hands. “Now I am in charge.”

“On whose authority?”

Colin removed a scroll from his haversack and handed it to the captain.

“You know the Emperor’s signature, I assume?”

Pundus’s eyes were trying to pop out of his head. He nodded rapidly.

“Good. Then set your men to divert traffic, as I requested, and advise them not to speak of anything they’ve seen here. I advise you the same.”

“Yes, sir,” the captain said.

“After I’m done, we’ll need wagons, enough to hold the bodies. We’ll want them covered, as well. See if you can locate some in the nearby towns. And again, not a word.”

“Sir.” The captain nodded, remounted, and rode off.

He looked around a few more moments, then took a deep breath. He found the spark in himself that belonged not to the world, but to Aetherius, to the realm of pure and complete possibility.

He was lucky—this was easy for him. If he’d needed to start a fire or walk on water, it would require training, a mental sequence worked out by someone else to convince him that such things could be done. But for what he was doing, he need only focus and pay attention, look beneath the rock that everyone else didn’t notice.

The scene darkened and blurred, and for a moment he thought there was nothing left, but then he saw two spectral forms. One, a woman, was staring down at her body. The other, a man, was crouched into the roots of a large tree.

The man was closer, so he took the few steps necessary. He was already starting to feel himself weakening, the spark fading, so he knew he should hurry.

“You,” he said. “Listen to me.”

Vacant eyes turned to him. “Help me,” the ghost said. “I’m hurt.”

“Help is on the way,” Colin lied. “You need to tell me what happened here.”

“It hurts,” the specter said. “Please.”

“You came here with Prince Attrebus,” Colin pursued.

The man laughed harshly. “Help me up. I just want to go home. If I can get home, I’ll be fine.”

“Who hurt you? Tell me!”

“Gods!” He breathed raggedly, then stopped. His head dropped against the tree.

A moment later it rose again.

“Help me,” he said. “I’m hurt.”

Colin felt a sudden surge of anger at the pitiful thing.

“You’re dead,” he snapped. “Have some dignity about it.”

Almost shaking with fury, he went over to the other spirit.

“What about you?” he asked. “Anything left of you?”

“What you see,” the woman murmured. “Your accent—you’re Colovian, like me.”

“Yes,” he replied. “Where are you from?”

“I was born near Mortal, down on the river.”

“That’s a nice place,” he said, feeling his anger leave him. “Peaceful, with all of those willows.”

“There were willows all around my house,” she replied. “I won’t see them again.”

“No,” he said softly. “I’m sorry, you won’t.”

She nodded.

“Listen,” Colin said, “I need your help.”

“If I can.”

“Do you remember what happened here? Who attacked you? Anything?”

She closed her eyes. “I do,” she said. “We were with the prince, off following some half-cocked scheme of his. Headed for Black Marsh, of all places. We were ambushed.” She sighed. “Attrebus. I knew he would get me killed someday. Is he dead, too?”

“I don’t know. I was hoping you did.”

“I didn’t see. First there was fire, and then something hit me, hard. I didn’t even get to fight.”

“Why were you going to Black Marsh?”

“Something about a flying city and an army of undead. I didn’t listen that closely. His quests were usually pretty safe, well in hand before we even arrived, if you know what I mean.”

“The Emperor forbade him to go. He disobeyed.”

“We weren’t sure what to believe,” she said. “Might’ve been part of the game. There were other times like that.” She shook her head. “I wish I could help you more.”

“I think you’ve helped me quite a lot,” Colin said. He looked around at the carnage. “Are you staying here, do you think?”

“I don’t know much about being dead,” she said, “but it doesn’t feel that way. I feel something tugging at me, and it’s stronger all the time.” She smiled. “Maybe I only stayed to talk to you.”

“Are you afraid?”

“No,” she said. “It doesn’t feel bad.” She cocked her head. “You, though—something wrong with you, countryman.”

“I’m fine.”

“You’re far from fine,” she said. “You take care of yourself. Maybe next time you see a willow, think of me.”

“I will.”

She smiled again.

He pulled back into himself and the sun returned. They were all just broken dolls again. He thought his head was ringing, but then he understood that it was just birds singing.

He was starving. Unsteadily, he went to find something to eat, and to hear the reports.

SIX

“Draeg’s late,” Tsani told Radhasa, her golden tail twitching in agitation. “Really late.”

Attrebus, nearly asleep in the saddle, tried to appear actually asleep, in hopes they might let something useful drop if they thought he couldn’t hear them.

It had taken him two days to figure out there were eight of them, because no more than four were riding guard on him at any given time. The others, he guessed, were scouts—one in front, one in back, one on each flank, and probably pretty far out. Radhasa was a constant, but he was just too out of it at first to realize the other faces were rotating. Now, after a week, he knew all of their names. Tsani, one of four Khajiit in the group, the others being Ma-fwath, J’yas, and Sharwa. Besides Radhasa, there was a flaxen-haired Breton woman named Amelia, a one-handed orc named—not too surprisingly—Urmuk One Hand. He’d had an iron ball fixed to his stump. The missing Draeg was the Bosmer he’d seen earlier, on awakening.

Radhasa didn’t say anything, just tugged at her mount’s reins to guide him down the steep path through increasingly more arid country. In the last few days the land had risen, and the thick forest and lush meadows of the West Weald had devolved into scrubby oaks and tall grass. Now, on the southern side of the hills, trees were more like big bushes, except when they came to a stream or pool, and tall grass prevailed in clearings.

His spirits had been sinking with the altitude, because he was certain they were already in Elsweyr. It would be more difficult for his friends to find him here; few of them had ever been south of the border, and the cats were less than friendly with the Empire they had once been a part of. Any force that tried to retrieve him might be seen as an invasion.

But then he saw a glimmer of hope in the situation.

By the time they were camping for the night, it was clear to everyone Draeg was probably more than delayed. The glimmer brightened.

“Trolls, probably,” Radhasa opined. “The hills stink with them.”

“I can’t imagine Draeg having trouble with a troll—or much else for that matter,” Sharwa said. “More likely he just decided this deal was too dangerous.”

“We were supposed to kill him,” Tsani said. “That’s what we were paid to do. Now we potentially have two powerful enemies—the Emperor and our employer.”

“He will be thought dead,” Radhasa replied. “There’s nothing to worry about.”

“I’m not—at least not enough to scratch at the money. But Draeg—he’s a worrier.”

“Well, more for us, then,” Radhasa said. “Tsani, you go back and take his position.”

“Fine. Are we going into Riverhold?”

“Are you crazy? It’s swarming with Imperial agents. We’d have to keep his highness gagged, and that might attract attention. No, there’s a little market town a few miles west of there, Sheeraln. Ma-fwath and J’yas will go in and trade our horses for slarjei and water.”

They came to the crest of the last of the hills before sundown, and the plains of Anequina stretched out to the horizon. He’d always imagined Elsweyr as an unrelieved desert, but here it was green. The tall grass of the upland prairies had been replaced by a short stubble, but that still seemed a far cry from the naked sand he’d been expecting. Streams were visible by the swaying palms, light-skinned cottonwood, and delicate tamarisk that lined them. A herd of red cattle grazed in the near distance.

Riverhold was visible a bit east, sprung up at the convergence of three dusty-looking roads. The walls were saffron, irregular, and not particularly high. Behind them, domes and towers of faded azure and cream, vermilion and chocolate, gold and jet, crowded together like a gaggle of overdressed courtiers waiting in the foyer of the throne room. It was a city that seemed at once tired and exuberant.

He wished they were going there.

But instead they did as Radhasa planned—they followed a goat trail into a copse of trees along a meandering stream, where he was forced to dismount. Then Ma-fwath and J’yas took the horses.

“Bathe,” Radhasa told him. “You’re starting to smell.”

“Hard to do with these bands on.”

“You promise to be good?”

His heart sped a bit. “Yes,” he said.

“Swear it on your honor that you won’t try to run.”

“On my honor,” he replied.

She shrugged, came up behind him, and untied the ropes.

“There,” she said. “Go, then, bathe.”

He stripped off his stinking clothes, feeling watched and somehow ashamed. Radhasa had seen him undressed before—had helped undress him, in fact. He hadn’t felt in the least uncomfortable then. Now he hurried into the water and submerged himself as quickly as possible.

The water was cool, and felt unbelievably good. He let it wash over him, closing his eyes and trying to concentrate only on the sensation.

It might have been a half an hour before he opened them. When he did, he saw that Radhasa was the only one besides himself in the camp. She was sitting with her back to a tree, not quite facing him. She seemed deep in thought.

Between him and her lay a pile of gear, and protruding from it was the hilt of his sword, Flashing.

He didn’t hesitate, but launched himself out of the water toward the weapon. Radhasa saw him, but even then didn’t seem to understand the situation until he actually had the weapon in his hand. Then she came slowly to her feet.

“You promised,” she accused. “On your honor.”

“I promised not to run,” he corrected.

She drew her sword. “Ah,” she said. “I see.”

He circled her, waiting. She wasn’t in armor, so there was no advantage there. And he’d fought her before, knew her signals.

He feinted, but she didn’t twitch. He cut deeper, and she evaded with a quick sidestep. Then she did what he knew she would; her whole body sagged, the tell that she was about to make a hard attack.

She started forward; he threw up his parry and stepped to meet her …

Except that her attack was suddenly short, and he was blocking nothing but air. Then she was in motion again, cutting at his exposed legs. He tried to jump back, but he had too much momentum, and so dropped his blade to parry.

But that was also a feint, and in an instant she was inside, right on him, and her off-weapon hand wrenched at his grip in a strange, painful manner, and then he was facedown on the ground. Flashing thumped to earth a few feet away.

Radhasa stepped back.

“Want to try again?”

Growling, he once more took up the blade and came at her with his famous six-edge attack, but halfway through it her point was at his throat.

“Again?” she asked.

Enraged, he flew at her with everything, but almost without seeming to work at it she had him disarmed and on the ground once more.

“You—You lost on purpose, when you were applying,” he said.

“You think?”

He climbed back to his feet. “You’ll have to kill me,” he said.

“No I won’t. I’ll just knock you out again.”

“Why did you do this? For entertainment?”

Her usually beautiful face twisted into something rather ugly.

“I wanted you to know,” she said. “I hate losing, and I hate pretending to lose.”

“Then why did you? Back at my villa?”

“Orders, Prince.”

“From your employer? To get me to let my guard down?”

She rolled her eyes. “From Gulan, you idiot. Don’t you understand yet? You’re a worse than mediocre fighter. You’ve never fought a fair fight in your life. You’ve never been in a battle that wasn’t a rigged, foregone conclusion. Until now.”

Attrebus suddenly realized he’d missed something about Radhasa; she wasn’t merely deceptive, treacherous, and greedy—she was completely insane.

“Sure,” he said. “Whatever you say. Clearly you hate me, although I don’t know why. I was nice to you, took you into my guard.”

“I don’t hate you as such,” she said, “I just hate what you are. It’s not your fault really—this was done to you. Yet I can’t help feeling that if you’d ever used your brain just once, if you had the slightest ability to step outside of your narcissistic little world—”

“You’ve been with me two days. What do you know about me?”

“Everyone interviewed for your guard is told, Attrebus. And they all talk, don’t they? How could they not? The way you blustered about as if they were your friends, the casual, everyday condescension—I don’t see how any of them stood it for more than two days. I mean, yes, the pay is good, and in general you’re assured fairly safe situations, but Boethiah’s ass, it’s annoying.”

A slow, gentle cold was working its way up from his belly.

“This isn’t true,” he said. “My men loved me.”

“They mocked you behind your back. The least of them was worth three of you. Did you really think you’re the hero in the songs, in the books? Were the odds really ten-to-one at Dogtrot Ford?”

“Some authors tend to exaggerate, but it’s all basically true. I can’t help the mistakes some bard in Cheydinhal makes. But I did those things.”

“At Dogtrot Ford you faced half your number, and they weren’t insurgents, they were condemned criminals told that if they survived, they would be freed.”

“That’s a lie.”

He felt dizzy, very dizzy. He leaned against a tree.

“You’re starting to see it, aren’t you? Because somewhere in that skull of yours you have at least half of your father’s brain.”

“Just shut up,” he said. “I’ve no idea why you’re saying this, but I won’t listen to it anymore. Kill me, tie me back up, but just shut up, for the love of the Divines.”

She wrinkled her brow and leaned on her sword. “Are you really that dense?”

He charged at her, howling. A moment later he was on the ground again.

“If it’s any consolation,” she said, placing her foot on his throat, “even if by some fluke you managed to kill me, Urmuk and Sharwa have been watching the whole time.”

As she said it, he saw the orc and the Khajiit appear from behind a copse of bamboo.

The boot came off of his neck. He turned his head and saw someone else—a lean, hawk-nosed man with charcoal skin and molten red eyes striding purposefully into the clearing. Had he missed someone?

“You there!” Sharwa shouted. “What do you—”

The man kept coming, but he thrust out his arm, and his hand flashed white-hot. Sharwa’s hideous yowl was like nothing Attrebus had ever heard before.

Radhasa kicked him in the head, and he rolled, groaning, sparks flashing behind his eyes. Sobbing in pain, he came to his feet and rubbed the tears from his eyes.

He was just in time to see the orc lose his other hand, making him—presumably—Urmuk the Handless. The newcomer’s long, copper-colored blade pulled right through his wrist, then angled up to deflect a murderous head blow from Radhasa. Urmuk stumbled back and tripped over Sharwa, who seemed to be trying to stand, despite the smoke rising from her chest.

Radhasa jumped back and continued to retreat. Attrebus didn’t blame her. This wasn’t a man—this was some daedra summoned from the darkness beyond the world, a fiend.

“What do you want?” Radhasa screamed. “You’ve no business with us.”

The fiend didn’t say anything. He just picked up the pace, half running toward Radhasa, and then suddenly bounding forward. She planted herself and then danced nimbly aside as his blade soughed by her, and her own weapon came down two-handed toward the juncture of his neck and shoulder.

He caught her blade with his off-weapon hand. Attrebus saw Radhasa close her eyes, and then his blade went in through the pit of her left arm so deeply the point came out through her ribs on the other side.

He withdrew the weapon and stalked toward Urmuk, who was holding the bleeding stump of his wrist. Whatever Urmuk was, he wasn’t a coward, and he hurled the massive weight of his body at his attacker, clubbing at him with the iron ball he had fixed to his left hand. Sharwa was crawling away on her belly.

Urmuk fell and the fiend turned on Sharwa.

“You can’t,” Attrebus managed. “She’s injured—”

But her head was off by then.

And now the fiend turned on him.

Attrebus snapped out of his paralysis and ran toward his sword, but when he had it, he saw the killer was merely watching him.

Attrebus brought his weapon to guard.

“I killed a Bosmer back in the hills and a Breton on the ridge back there,” the man said. His voice was hard and scratchy. “I make there are two more—Khajiit. Where are they?”

“They went to some village,” he replied. “To change the horses for slarjei, whatever they are.”

“Slarjei are better in the desert than horses,” the man said. “How long have they been gone?”

“An hour, maybe.”

“Well, Prince Attrebus, we ought to be going, then.”

“Who are you? How do you know who I am?”

“My name is Sul.”

“Did my father send you?”

“He did not,” Sul replied.

Now that he was closer and not in constant motion, Attrebus had a better look at him. He was old, his dark skin pulled in tightly against his bones. His hair was black and gray and cropped nearly to his skull.

“Who, then?”

“My reasons are my own,” he replied. “Would you rather I hadn’t come?”

“I don’t know the answer to that yet, do I?” Attrebus said.

“I’m not here to kill you,” Sul assured him. “I’m not here to hurt you. We have a common destiny, you and I. We both seek the island that flies.”

Attrebus blinked. He felt as if the earth kept shifting beneath his feet. “You know of it?”

“I just said so.”

“And what is your concern with it?”

“I will destroy it or send it back to Oblivion. Isn’t that what you want?”

“I … yes.” What was happening?

“Then we are together, yes?” Sul said. “Now, should we go or wait around so that I have to fight the other two as well?”

“You didn’t have much trouble with these,” Attrebus noticed.

“Most men die surprised,” Sul said. “One of those two might have a surprise for me. I don’t fight anyone without a reason. I have you, and I don’t want slarjei unless we need to go south into the desert. Do we need to go south?”

“No.”

“Well, pick the direction, and let’s be off.”

Attrebus stared at him, teasing that out. Then he understood. “You don’t know where Umbriel is.”

Sul barked out something that might have been a laugh. “Umbriel. Of course. Vuhon …” He trailed off. “No, I don’t know where it is.”

“How do I know you won’t kill me as soon as I tell you?”

“Because I need you,” Sul said.

“Why?”

“I’m not sure. But I know I do.”

Attrebus considered his reply for a long moment. But really, what did he have to lose?

“East,” he said. “It’s over Black Marsh now, heading north.”

“North toward Morrowind,” Sul sighed. “Of course.”

“Does that mean something to you?”

“Nothing that matters right now. Very well. East we go, then.”

“Let me get my things,” Attrebus said.

“Hurry, then.”

Attrebus was glad Coo was in Radhasa’s haversack and not on her body. The idea of approaching her, seeing what Sul made of her, made him sick. True, she was a lying traitor, but she had been warm in the bed with him not long ago. Alive and beautiful, sweaty, enthusiastic—or so she had seemed. Of all of the women he’d been with, she was the first to be—well, dead. At least so far as he knew. It was upsetting.

Sul gathered a few things from the bodies, then led him upstream among the trees for some distance until they finally came to three horses—two roan geldings that looked as though they were from the same mother and a brown mare. One of the roans was packed up, the other two horses were saddled.

“Ride the gelding,” Sul said.

Attrebus sighed, feeling that was somehow fitting. A few moments later he was riding east with the man who had saved his life, wondering what would happen if he tried to run north, to Cyrodiil, to home.

And he had to admit that at the moment he didn’t have the courage or the confidence to find out.

SEVEN

Colin curbed the impulse to pace, but although he had walked into the room of his own free will—and there was no evidence that he couldn’t leave it—he felt caged somehow. But his mind had been spinning for two days now, and the thread it turned out was beginning to look more like a garrote.

The vanishment of Prince Attrebus wasn’t his first case—it was his third. The first had been simple enough; he’d planted spurious intelligence in the minister of war’s office and waited for it to come out somewhere. When one of their agents in a local Thalmor nest reported it, he easily backtracked the leak to a mid-level official who was apparently hemorrhaging information to a mistress who was—as it turned out—a Thalmor sympathizer. It was simple, clean. No arrests and no bodies. Once the leak was known, it was more useful to leave it in place.

His second assignment had been to discover the whereabouts of a certain sorcerer named Laeva Cuontus. He’d found her without ever knowing why he was looking for her. He didn’t know what happened to her after he reported her location, and he didn’t want to know.

When he’d been sent out with the patrol to locate Prince Attrebus, it hadn’t seemed that odd. Apparently the prince often had to be shadowed, and it didn’t require a particularly senior member of the organization to do the job of what amounted to a bit of tracking, questioning, and bribing.

But now he was in the middle of something pretty bad, and a sensation between his sternum and his pelvis told him that it hadn’t been an accident that such a junior inspector had been sent to discover such nasty business.

He didn’t have any proof of that, of course. Just that feeling, and the certainty that he was missing some piece of the puzzle. And now he was in a well-furnished room on the second floor of the ministry, which was apparently the office of no one.

He turned as Intendant Marall entered the room, followed by two other men. One was Remar Vel, administrator of the Penitus Oculatus. The other …

“Your majesty,” he blurted, taking a knee. He felt suddenly in awe, an emotion he hadn’t experience in a while. As a child he’d worshipped this man. Apparently some part of him still did.

“Rise up,” the Emperor said.

“Yes, highness.”

The Emperor just stood there for a moment, hands clasped behind his back.

“You were there,” he finally said. “Is my son dead?”

Colin considered his answer for a moment. If anyone else had asked him … But this wasn’t anyone else.

“Sire,” he said, “I do not believe so.”

Titus Mede’s eyes widened slightly and his brow relaxed, but that was his only reaction.

“And yet his body was recovered,” Administrator Vel said drily.

“A body, sir,” Colin said. “A headless body.”

“It’s said that the rebels in that area take heads,” the Emperor said. “Other heads were taken.”

“I don’t believe the Natives were responsible, majesty.”

“Why not? They’re vicious enough, and we have information, do we not, that they are supplied and funded by our ‘quiet enemies’?”

“You mean the Thalmor, majesty.”

“They are in everything, these days.”

“And yet I don’t see how killing your son advances their aims.”

“Who are you to say what their aims are?” Vel snapped. “You’ve only been an inspector for a month.”

“Yes, sir, that’s true. But my training focus was the Thalmor.”

“Which does not include—by any means—everything we know about them. Their aims are obscure.”

“I respectfully disagree, sir. I may well not be privy to many details, but their goal is clear—the pacification and purification of all of Tamriel—to bring about a new Merithic era.”

“We have an inkling of their long-term goals, Inspector, but their intermediate plans are less scrutable.”

“Begging your pardon, sir, but not always. When they took Valenwood, that was pretty straightforward, and quite logical—they put the old Aldmeri Dominion back together, which makes perfect sense in terms of their ideology. Their harassment of refugees from the Summerset Isles and Valenwood also fits their broader pattern, as does what little we know of their activities in Elsweyr. But the murder of a prince—I’ve tried many ways of looking at that, and it doesn’t make sense.”

Vel started to retort to that, but the Emperor shook his head and held up his hand. Then he spoke again to Colin.

“What is your opinion? If my son is not dead, do you believe him kidnapped? And if so, by whom, and for what purpose? And why leave this trail that seems to lead to the Thalmor?”

Colin took a another deep breath, and began to lie.

“If we assume that much of the ‘evidence’ left for us was false,” he began, “then I might suggest it’s someone interested in drawing our attention to the Thalmor. A distraction to keep our eyes turned, perhaps even coax us into a fight.”

“Leyawiin?” the Emperor muttered. “They are still restless under our rule.”

“Maybe it’s not someone restless under your rule, majesty. Maybe it’s someone who would prefer someone else inherit the throne.”

“My brother?” He massaged his head. “It’s not impossible. I do not like to think it.”

“Sire,” Vel said, “your brother did not hatch this plot. He is more than adequately surveiled.”

“He is perhaps more clever than you think,” Mede replied. “But lay that aside. If we find my son, we find our enemy. So I want him found.” He frowned and stroked his upper lip. “Captain Gulan was among the dead?”

“He was,” Vel replied.

“Is there any question regarding his identity?”

“No, sire,” Vel said. “He was killed by arrowshot, and his head was not taken. Sire, I know it isn’t easy to accept, but we must consider the possibility that the body we have is that of the prince, the inspector’s opinion notwithstanding. It is the right size and shape—”

“My son had a birthmark on his right side, just where the ribs end. I have seen the corpse; that portion of it is charred while other parts are not. Like the inspector, I find that too convenient. And it does not feel like Attrebus. So—I believe him alive. Someone has him. I want him found. Inspector, is there any indication of where the attackers went?”

“They broke into smaller parties and left in different directions. But I would look south for Attrebus, your highness.”

“And why is that, Inspector?”

“Because it is the only direction in which there were no tracks whatsoever, sire.”

The Emperor grunted and nodded. “Inspector, Intendant, Administrator,” he said, addressing the three, and left.

Vel waited a moment and followed him, shooting Colin an unpleasant look.

“That wasn’t the brightest thing you could have done,” Marall said.

“The Emperor asked my opinion,” Colin said. “Isn’t it my duty to give it?”

Marall sighed. “The Emperor doesn’t care if you get assigned to sewer cases for the rest of your life—or worse, sent to spy on Nords. It’s better if these things go up the chain of command. Now, Vel appears to be less well-informed than his most junior inspector.”

“I fully intended to follow that chain,” Colin said. “I came here believing Administrator Vel was going to hear my report. It isn’t my fault that the Emperor was present.”

Marall nodded. “You’re right, of course. It’s just your inexperience showing. You shouldn’t have so bluntly disagreed with a superior. There are more subtle ways to go about things.”

How subtle is a knife? Colin angrily thought, but then pushed that away.

“I’m still learning, sir.”

“If Attrebus is alive, and they find him on your counsel, you will gain the Emperor’s favor, and that will be a good thing for you. But if they do not find him, or if that body is him, then the Emperor will not think of you again. I advise you to keep as quiet as possible now, and find some way to come to Vel’s attention in a more positive way.”

“In that case,” Colin said, “I wonder if I could be reassigned?”

“Oh, I can guarantee that,” the intendant said. “Vel will put you under a rock. The only question is for how long.”

When he emerged from the palace, night had fallen and the sky blazed down upon the Imperial City. He was tired, but he wanted a walk and a pint. He needed to think.

He was missing something. He had an idea what it might be, and that went well with the stroll and the ale.

In Anvil, where he was born, darkness brought quiet to the city; people went home or to the pubs and taverns, but the streets were pretty empty.

Not so here, at least not in the Market District, which was his destination. The streets were crowded with trinket vendors and soothsayers, self-styled prophets of any daedra or Divine imaginable. Women, mostly comely ones, stood outside of alehouses, flirting to attract business, and there were others of both genders and all races flirting to sell somewhat different wares. Beggars choked the edges of walkways, and little stalls were turning out the enticing smell of roasted oysters, fried cheese, bread, skewered meats, and burnt sugarcane.

People wandered in crowds, as if afraid the city would swallow them up if they found themselves alone for long.

The Crown’s Hammer was off the main thoroughfare, around a corner and almost hidden in an alley. It was a half-timbered building, very old. He pushed his way in the front door.

The barkeep was a withered old fellow who favored Colin with a nod.

“You’re having?” he asked as he cleaned a mug with a rag that looked slightly dirtier than the container it was wiping out.

“Ale,” Colin said.

The man nodded, held the glass under the tap of a wooden keg and filled it with a rich, dark red liquid.

Colin paid for the drink and then found a table in a corner. He took a seat where he could see the door, and sipped at the ale. It was strong, sweet, and had just a taste of juniper, a Colovian Highland style now popular throughout western Cyrodiil, but hard to find here in the East.

The place was nearly empty when he came in, but it was starting to fill up now, because the patrol and the soldiers were changing shifts. The Hammer catered to Colovians, and Colovians in this part of the world were mostly military.

So he wasn’t surprised when Nial Sextius walked in, noticed him, and grinned.

“Colin, lad,” he said. “It’s been an age.”

“It’s good to see you, Nial,” he replied. “I was hoping you would be in tonight. Have a seat—let me buy you a drink.”

“Well, fine, if I can have the next round.”

When they were both looking over foam, Nial cracked his knuckles and settled his elbows on the table. He was a big man, thick in every dimension, with a ruddy, wind-worn complexion that made him look older, although he and Colin were of an age.

“Where’ve you been?” he asked. “It’s almost two years. I thought you’d left town.”

“No, just very busy,” Colin said.

Nial wagged a finger at him. “Come to think of it, you were a little thin on why you’re all the way over here last time we talked. Distracted me with that story about my sister.”

“Yah,” Colin said, taking a drink. “I—ah, work in the palace.”

Nial’s eyes widened. “And don’t I, too?” he asked. “So why haven’t I seen trace of you?”

“I’m in a different part of the palace, I guess. In the tower.”

“Doing what? Making ladies’ dresses?”

“Studying,” he said. “In school, as it were.”

“In school? But that—” He stopped, rolled his eyes and took a drink. Then he lowered his voice. “Ah, Colin, you’re one of them—you’re a specter, aren’t you?”

“I serve the Empire, same as you,” Colin said.

“Not the same as me,” Nial disagreed. “Col, why?”

“They offered me a way up, Nial. A way so my mam doesn’t have to work herself to death. I’m sorry if that doesn’t make sense to you.”

“Now, don’t get your back up, scruff,” Nial said. “I’m just surprised, is all. I don’t fancy most of your fellows, but I’ll make an exception for you.”

“I don’t fancy some of my fellows,” Colin said. “But I don’t fancy being judged either. If the Emperor didn’t think we mattered, we wouldn’t exist.”

“Fine, like I said,” Nial said. His voice dropped even lower. “So, see here,” he said. “Maybe you’d know, then. Is all this true about Prince Attrebus?”

“I don’t know what you’ve heard.”

“Heard he finally got himself—and all of his guard—murdered.”

“It looks like that,” Colin said. “Did you know any of them?”

“Yeah, a few. I thought about applying a few years back, but I didn’t think I could handle it, you know?”

“The danger, you mean?”

Nial grunted out a laugh. “That’s funny,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“You mean you’re a specter, and you don’t know about the prince?”

“Not my field of expertise,” Colin said.

“Well, he was just for show, you know. Only he didn’t know it.”

Colin nodded. That fit with the picture forming in his head. So why hadn’t he been briefed about that before being sent to fetch the prince back?

“Well, he walked into a bit of danger this time,” Colin said.

“Yeah.”

“I wonder how? I mean, he must have been watched, if what you say is true.”

Nial thumped his glass on the table. “You’re prying me, aren’t you? In specting.”

Colin sighed. “It’s this, Nial,” he said. “I’m new to all of this. I think there’s something strange going on, and I’m not sure who to trust. Except you. I believe I can trust you.”

Nial stared at him for several long moments, then took his mug back up.

“What, then?”

“The Emperor asked about a man named Gulan, specifically. He wanted to know if his body was found.”

“Was it?”

“Yeah.”

Nial nodded. “Gulan was Attrebus’s right hand. He kept him out of trouble. Whenever the prince would try and go be a hero in the wrong place, Gulan would bring it to the attention of the Emperor, and something would happen to stop it.”

“Well, he didn’t this time, it seems. He didn’t report directly to the Emperor, did he?”

“No, he’d go through the prime minister’s office.”

Colin nodded. Now he was sure about what he was missing.

“Thanks, Nial,” he said.

“You look tired, boy,” Nial said. “Are you all right?”

“I’m fine. I have some trouble sleeping, that’s all.”

“You used to sleep so sound thunder wouldn’t wake you,” Nial said.

“Things change,” Colin said. He studied the table for a moment, before looking back up at his friend. “Look, try to forget we had this conversation. Don’t ask any questions, just leave it be.”

“I might be able to help,” Nial said.

“You’ve helped me more than enough. Now, come on. Let’s talk about something else.”

“Yeah, like what?”

“Like what a slut your sister is, for instance.”

“If it weren’t true, I’d thwack you for that. Maybe I should thwack you anyway. Let’s have another round while I think it over.”

“That’s good for me,” Colin replied.

He finished the ale and watched Nial walk off to fetch two more. There wasn’t anything else to do tonight, and it felt good to talk to a friend. It had been a long time since he’d done that.

And it might well be the last.

EIGHT

Qijne glared down at the trays and the food they contained.

“Explain,” she snapped. “Start with the fish.”

“Annaïg calls it ‘catfish,’” Slyr said. “The taskers bring us quite a lot of them.”

“I’m aware of that,” Qijne said. “We’ve burned hundreds for the Oroy mansion workers. What I want to know is, why are you sending a complete fish to Lord Ghol? It’s far too coarse for his palate.”

Why question us? Annaïg wondered. Except for that first time, we’ve done nothing but succeed. Can’t you just trust us?

She could not, of course, say that out loud.

“That’s true, Chef,” she said instead. “He will be surprised by it, I believe.”

“Not pleasantly, I should imagine by looking at it.”

“Ah, yes, but when he touches or breathes on it, it will deliquesce. That will release a series of odors viandic; the fish will liquefy and mingle with the void and fire salts there around the fish, which will then release their essences. That will lead nicely into the second course, here, a cold broth of tadpole bones garnished with live frog eggs. Finally, the white froth of Terriswort will cause his palate to vividly recall each aroma and taste—but in reverse order.”

“Another of your metagastrologics?”

“Yes, Chef.”

“These are tricks, stunts,” Qijne complained. “You hazard boring him.”

“I think he will be pleased,” Slyr said. “But if you have any suggestions, I would be most happy to hear them, Chef.”

Qijne narrowed her eyes, clearly trying to decide if she should feel insulted. Annaïg had to stop herself from holding her breath.

The moment passed, ending when Qijne simply walked off.

“That’s it, then,” Slyr said. “Let’s send it up.”

The news from above was good that evening. She and Slyr hadn’t been back to the little room with its view of the night sky in days, but that night they celebrated there again. Slyr brought baubles as well as food this time—little coils of glass that glowed like small suns.

And after Slyr was asleep, Annaïg felt her amulet wake.

“Thank Dibella,” she murmured. She lifted a coil, rose and tiptoed out of the room into the cellar, and only then did she open the locket.

And there was Prince Attrebus, looking back at her. The light seemed to be firelight, for shadows flickered about him, but his face was bruised and battered. His eyes were full of concern, but now his features relaxed in relief.

“There you are,” he said. “I was worried about you.”

“And I about you, your highness. It’s been days. I’ve tried to contact you—”

He nodded. “I’ve been unable to respond,” he said. “I …” He trailed off. He seemed different—not the assertive, confident man she remembered from their earlier conversation.

“I understand, Prince Attrebus,” she said. “You’re a busy man.”

He nodded. “I want you to know,” he said, “that I am coming, as I promised. But it may be that …”

Again he didn’t finish. He seemed very vulnerable.

But then something seemed to strengthen him and his tone became firmer, more familiar.

“Have you discovered anything new?”

“Yes. I’ve found a place where I can see the sky—a way in and out. And I’m trying to re-create the tonic that Glim and I used to reach this place.”

“That’s good,” he said. “Perhaps I can find something like that on my way there. We should pass through Rimmen in a few days, and then Leyawiin.”

That sounded a little odd, as if he didn’t have his mages with him, but maybe he preferred to handle certain things himself.

“I’ve always wanted to see Rimmen,” she told him. “They say the Akaviri built a magnificent shrine there, the Tonenaka. They say it houses ten thousand statues. And the canals are said to be amazing.”

“Well, I’ve never been there either,” Attrebus said. “But I’ll tell you about it next time we speak.”

“That would be wonderful, Prince.”

“I shan’t be dawdling there, though,” he went on. “Time is of the essence. But I’m sure I’ll see something worth mentioning.” He paused. “I find titles cumbersome in conversation. I would prefer you did not use them.”

“What should I call you, your highness?”

“Attrebus will do, or ‘Treb.’ It will save time when we talk.”

“I’ll try,” she said. “It seems strange to be so familiar with you.”

“Try it, for my sake.”

There was that troubled look again.

“Are you—well, Attrebus? Is something wrong?”

“There have been some setbacks here,” he said. “I won’t bore you with the details.”

“It wouldn’t be boring,” she said.

“Well, then I’d rather not talk about it,” he modified.

She realized then that his eyes were glistening a bit.

“I must go now,” he said. “Keep yourself safe, above all. Will you do that?”

“I will,” she said.

He nodded, and then his image vanished behind Coo’s door.

She stood there for a moment, a bit breathless, then snuck back into the shaft-room. Slyr didn’t look as if she had stirred.

Annaïg sat with her back against the wall.

Something was wrong with the prince. That didn’t bode well, did it?

But at the moment there wasn’t much she could do but continue to stay alive, try to get in touch with Glim, rediscover the secret of flying …

Actually, that was quite a lot, wasn’t it? Her hands were full.

So she needed her rest. No use to worry about things that were, at the moment, beyond her.

But she hoped Attrebus—he’d asked her to call him Attrebus!—she hoped he was all right.

Attrebus closed the little door on the bird. This was the first time he’d seen her face; her green eyes and generous, sensual lips, a nose that some might consider a bit large, but belonged perfectly on her face. Hair like dark twists of black silk.

The face of the woman he’d failed.

“Well, she, at least, is alive,” he told Sul, who sat on the other side of the small fire they’d built.

“So I gather,” Sul said. “Interesting, that bird. The dwemer used to make similar toys, before the world swallowed them up. Do you know where it’s from?”

“She said it came from her mother, and I gather her mother was middling nobility from Highrock.”

“Well, things move around,” Sul grunted. “Let me see it.”

“See here—” Attrebus began, but the look in the Dunmer’s eyes stopped him. He stood and extended Coo. Sul took her, examined her a bit. The little door wouldn’t unclasp for him.

“Smart,” Sul said. “Only opens for who it was sent to.”

“I believe so,” Attrebus replied. “Radhasa couldn’t make it work.”

“Why didn’t you tell her?” Sul asked, prodding the fire, snapping a swarm of sparks toward the sky. “This Annaïg. Why didn’t you tell her you’ve lost all of your guard?”

“I don’t want to discourage her.”

“You’d rather give her false hope?”

“I don’t intend to give up.”

“That’s good,” Sul said. “It’s better that way.”

“As opposed to what?”

Sul didn’t answer right away, but instead drew his sword and examined the edge a bit before resheathing it. Finally he looked up at Attrebus.

“Here’s my worry,” Sul said. “I’ll make it plain right away, so it’s not between us from here on out. Let’s start with this: I’m going to find Umbriel. When I do, there’s going to be slaughter, pure and simple. I’m going to bring it down. It’s been suggested to me that you can help me, and that’s why I followed you, that’s why I killed your captors. But I saw your fight with the Redguard—I was waiting to be sure of where the others were before I made my move, and it was clear she had no intention of killing you. I heard the conversation.”

“She was lying,” Attrebus said.

“She wasn’t,” Sul replied. “You’re telling yourself that now because you’re too weak to face it. But like she said, you’re not fundamentally stupid. The branch already has too much weight on it—it’s starting to creak. You barely managed to get through your talk with the Breton girl without getting weepy—”

“My friends have just been killed!” Attrebus heard himself shout. “Friends, lovers, companions, all dead. Of course I’m not myself!”

Sul waited for him to finish, then started again.

“In days or weeks that branch will crack, and down you’ll come. You’ll realize how right she was, and the world will turn over, and my worry is, will you be any use to me then? Will any of these principles you think you adhere to—honor, courage, honesty—survive it? Or are you just a child, playing at these things, as you played at being a warrior and commander?”

“You’re wrong about this,” Attrebus snapped. “Based on one conversation you overheard, you conclude she was right? Granted, she could outfight me—”

“A child with palsy could outfight you.”

“I’d been wounded, tied to a horse for days—”

“This isn’t an argument, Prince Attrebus.”

“Look, I’ll swear it even now. I will stop Umbriel, or I will die trying.”

“You’re not listening to me,” Sul said. “I’m trying to help you.”

“By telling me that everything I believe about myself is a lie?”

Sul’s eyes were fragments of the fire, lifting up to burn him.

And yet when he spoke, it wasn’t to Attrebus, and it wasn’t in Tamrielic. The only part of it the prince caught was the name “Azura”—one of the daedric princes. Then the Dunmer sighed harshly.

“Everyone faces that, you spoiled child. Most simply turn away and continue with their delusions—only a few are forced to accept the truth.”

“Not everyone, not like this,” Attrebus said. “I’m a prince—I’m supposed to be Emperor one day. If what Radhasa says is true, I’ve been mocked my whole life without ever knowing it.”

“Your ‘whole life’ is a heartbeat,” Sul said.

“Maybe to you. But if people have been laughing at me—”

“Enough,” Sul snarled. “Enough. I’ve done far more for you than I should. I’ve tried to warn you, but instead I’m just going to have to wait and see what the baby does. How’s this, then? With or without you, I’ll do what I’ve set out to do. If it comes to it, I’ll cut off your head and revive it now and then to talk to the bird. Would that be a fair price for you breaking that vow you pledged so earnestly just now?”

Attrebus couldn’t meet those eyes anymore, and turned instead to the living heart of the fire, which was certainly cooler.

“Yes,” he mumbled. But now he was afraid. What did this man really want? What did Sul really need from him? Was it even true they had the same goal?

But then he suddenly understood that didn’t matter. Every single thing Sul had told him could be true, but that still wouldn’t put Sul on the right side of things. Maybe he was planning something even worse than whatever the master of Umbriel was up to.

In the end, they might be enemies—that would certainly explain this attempt to undermine him even more than Radhasa had. Maybe he and Radhasa had been working together and then had a falling-out.

Maybe Sul was the man she had been planning to sell him to, and this was all part of some elaborate game of his, breaking the will of a prince, reducing him to believing he was nothing …

He felt like screaming. He wanted to be alone, to think, to be free of fear long enough to sort through the confusion. He had a horse now …

But then again, running might be exactly what Sul wanted. Sure, he could keep his vow and go after Annaïg and Umbriel himself, but Sul would be at his back the whole time. Hadn’t his father always said it was better to have your enemies where you could see them?

For now, that was probably his only choice. He had to keep his wits about him, think for himself, and not let Sul toy with him. He would work with the Dunmer as long as their goals appeared to be the same, and be ready the moment they weren’t. He was a Mede, after all. A Mede.

Annaïg thought that the first explosion was a vat shattering; it had happened before, especially at the Oroy station.

But the second was much louder, while sounding somehow farther away.

And then the screaming began. Some of it sounded like warlike howls, some like shrieks of terror and pain, but everything in Umbriel was still frightfully strange, and none of it gave her any purchase on what was happening.

Luc hopped down from the shelves and crouched behind her. For her part, Annaïg climbed up onto the table to get a better view, but the wavering air above the fire pits obscured the far end of the kitchens. Still, the scamps were all swarming in that direction, leaping through the wires, grills, and racks above the pits. Beyond, a black curtain of flame and smoke occluded what the shimmering air did not. Only in the central aisle could she see anyone, and there the cooks and their helpers were black silhouettes, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder.

“You,” Qijne snapped, from off to her left. “What are you standing about for?”

“What’s happening?”

Slyr was with her, and the rest of the staff from Ghol’s station, along with a motley collection of the largest and most dangerous-looking cooks in the kitchen, including Dest, a hulking ogrelike fellow with black and yellow fur. They were all armed to the teeth with butchering knives and cleavers.

“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Qijne snapped. “Come, now.”

The closed around her, moving at a trot, through the huge boilers, parsers, and stills, the pulsing soul-cable, and into territory Annaïg had never seen—high-chambered rooms filled with long, watery trenches in which she caught glimpses of serpentine movement. As they went along, chefs darted out and made adjustments to the equipment, until at last they came to a stair leading up.

“All of it, now,” Qijne said.

“But they’re coming,” Slyr protested. “Look, you can see them.”

She pointed back the way they had come, and Annaïg made out, darting in and amidst the strange machinery, a handful of chefs, cooks, and tenders.

“They let them live, in hopes we would delay,” Qijne said. “We won’t. Do it. Send your hob.”

“Yes, Chef.”

They continued up the stairs, but a moment later a vast rumble began.

Annaïg found herself pushed up against Slyr.

“What’s happening?” she asked.

“Qijne’s purging the kitchens,” she said.

“Purging them?”

“We’re invaded, Annaïg.”

“Invaded?” She had a surge of sudden wild hope.

“By another kitchen. It hasn’t happened in years.”

They had reached the top of the stairs now, and emerged through a massive iron valve into a cavernous room. Dest closed and sealed it. Then the chefs began laying various odd-looking packages about in front of it.

Slyr was still hustling her back, toward the far end of the cavern.

“What now?” Annaïg asked.

“We wait. The kitchens are full of fire and thirty kinds of toxins. If anyone survives that, we’ll fight them here.”

“I don’t understand. Why would another kitchen invade?”

Slyr blinked and looked at her as if she were stupid. “To get you,” she said.

“How—How do you know that?”

“From what I saw, it has to be one of the upper kitchens, the ones that serve the greater lords. They could have attacked as we defended, with venomous gases. Instead they sent cooks. That tells me they want someone alive, and that must be you.”

“So everyone we left down there—”

“Not just dead, dissolved,” Slyr replied.

“Then—”

But a hollow boom filled the chamber, and another. Then a silence settled.

“Be ready,” Qijne said. “They were prepared.”

“Ah, sumpslurry,” Slyr moaned. “How could anything survive all that?”

“That’s a rhetorical question, I take it,” Annaïg said, trying hard not to shake.

The door glowed white-hot for an instant, then turned into a drifting vapor.

“Ready!” Qijne repeated.

For a few heartbeats nothing happened. Then a monster leapt through the door. Annaïg’s first impression was of a bull-sized lion with a thousand eyes set on squirming stalks. She had no second impression, for the packages Qijne’s people had scattered in front of the door suddenly revealed their natures and became variously fire, force, cold, and vitriol. The monster, whatever it was, was disintegrated.

But behind it, through the newly formed fog, poured hordes of cooks.

In appearance they were the same mixture of physical types that Annaïg was becoming used to in the kitchens. They wore gold and black.

Qijne screamed like some sort of bird of prey and ran at the attackers, her staff behind her.

In only seconds they were enveloped, and although Slyr kept trying to push Annaïg back, after a moment the fighting was all around her. Blood spurted up her chest and face as a cleaver chopped someone’s arm off; she slipped and fell, blinded by the blood in her eyes. When she managed to wipe it out, she saw Minn staggering by, clutching her bleeding gut, her face dissolving into yellow worms. She tried to scream, and might have, but if so, her voice was lost in the din.

All of a sudden Qijne was there, pulling her up from another fall. One of her ears was missing and much of her left arm had turned a strange gray color.

Qijne pulled her close.

“He won’t have you,” she shouted in Annaïg’s ear.

Then she pulled back, and Annaïg saw her arm come up, and as blood sprayed from nearby, she saw it outline a long, wickedly curved nothing protruding from the chef’s finger. She stared at it, unable to move, knowing what came next.

But then Slyr buried her cleaver in Qijne’s neck, and the chef’s eyes fluttered. Annaïg felt something tug at her neck and thought her throat had been cut before realizing the invisible blade had sliced through her locket chain. Slyr hacked again, and then Qijne staggered back, swiping her hand at Slyr, but the slate-skinned woman, trying to step back, slipped over a body. Then Qijne toppled, knocking Annaïg over yet once again.

They landed face-to-face. Qijne still wasn’t dead. She was trying to get her hand back up. Annaïg grabbed her wrist. The blade was invisible again, but Annaïg felt something at her forehead, and a lock of hair fell past her nose.

She shrieked and pushed the hand back. For a long moment Qijne resisted, but then the spurting from her neck slowed to a trickle and her eyes went dull.

Annaïg lay there, panting, oblivious to the chaos still reigning around her. She kept hold of the hand and saw—inside the sleeve—a sort of tightness on Qijne’s arm, as if it were constricted by an unseen band. She tugged at it, but couldn’t find any sort of catch, buckle, or tie. She was just in the process of carefully laying the arm aside when something brushed her wrist and then, to her horror, cinched around it. Reflexively she grabbed at it with her other hand, but all she could feel was a sort of gummy torus, encircling her wrist. There was no blade.

She realized that it was almost silent now. She began to turn, but someone grabbed her up by the back of her jacket, and a moment later she was standing unsteadily on her feet again. Corpses were sprawled all around her. Slyr was a few feet away, held by two unfamiliar men. Everyone else she knew from the kitchen was dead.

From the press of black and gold before her, a man emerged. He might have been a Breton, with his high, delicate cheekbones and sensuous lips. He put a finger to his chin, and she saw it was long, slim, manicured. He wore the clothing of a chef, but it was as black as his hair.

He turned sky blue eyes first on Slyr, then on Annaïg.

“So,” he murmured in a silky voice. “You two are responsible for Lord Ghol’s last several meals?”

Slyr lifted her chin. “We are,” she said.

“Very well, then. You have nothing to fear. I am Chef Toel. You belong to me now.”

He touched his finger to her lips, and everything faded to black.

NINE

“Something’s moving up there,” Attrebus said.

Sul nodded. “I know,” he replied.

Of course you do, Attrebus thought sullenly.

Earlier that day the short-grass prairie had abruptly dropped off into one of the strangest landscapes Attrebus had ever seen. It looked as if a massive flood had stripped everything away but the dirt, and then cut that up into a labyrinth of arroyos and gullies. It was beautiful, in a way, because the vibrant rust, umber, olive, and yellow strata of the soil were exposed, like one of those thirty-layer cakes that Cheydinhal was famous for.

From above, it was fine to look on. But once in the maze, Attrebus felt mostly claustrophobic. And now someone or something was stalking them, up on those crumbly ridges.

“What if they attack us?”

“If they wanted to do that, we’d already have arrows in us,” Sul grated. “They’ll let us know what they want soon enough.”

That didn’t make Attrebus feel any more comfortable. Not that he’d been at ease before—not just because of the terrain, but because he found himself obsessively combing back through the events of his life. It wasn’t that he fully believed Radhasa and Sul—but he conceded that there might be some element of truth to their rantings, an element they were exaggerating.

Sul, annoyingly enough, proved correct about those spying on them. The trail they were following bottled tighter, until it was only a few yards wide, and as they turned a corner, they found themselves facing four Khajiit.

Attrebus had known many Khajiit, of course. Some of his guard had been of the cat-people, and they were common enough in the Empire. But he had never seen any quite like this.

What struck his eye first were their mounts—monstrous cats that stood as high as a large horse at the shoulder. Their forelimbs were as thick as columns and half again as long as their rears, giving them an apelike appearance. Their coats were tawny, ribboned with stripes the color of dried blood, and their feral yellow eyes seemed to promise evisceration—and that was only to start with.

Two of the riders seemed hardly less bestial, although they wore shirts that covered their torsos, and cravats around their necks. Where their fur was visible, it was pale yellowish-green spotted with black. Their faces were altogether more catlike than any Khajiit he’d ever met, and they slouched forward on their mounts.

The third rider was more like what Attrebus was used to, with features that were more manlike, although still unmistakably feline. And the final rider had such fine, delicate features, she might easily have been of merish blood, had her face not been splotched with irregular black rings.

“Well, there,” the woman said in a beautiful, lilting voice. “Who do we have here traveling on our road?”

Attrebus cleared his throat, but Sul spoke more quickly.

“No one of consequence,” he said. “Just two wayfarers going east.”

Attrebus realized that—out of sheer habit—he’d been about to tell them exactly who he was. Sul had known that, too, hadn’t he?

“East, you say?” the woman said. “East is good. The moons come from there. We’re in favor of east. We’re going there. But east for you—not so good, I think. East is not so friendly to men and mer, except, you know, in Rimmen. But how could you get there? And on our road?”

Attrebus heard a shuffle behind him, and a glance showed him what he should have known—there were two more riders behind him.

“We’ve no need to go to Rimmen,” Sul replied.

“Rude,” the woman said. “Where are my manners? Would you ride with us? Accept our protection?”

“We would be honored,” Sul replied.

“Now wait a moment—” Attrebus began.

“The whelp is speaking out of turn,” Sul cut in. “We would be honored. I had no idea the East was so fretful. And of course, we offer Je’m’ath in return for your kindness.”

“Ah,” the woman said. “You also have manners, outlander. Very well. Travel with my brothers and cousins and me. We are happy to share what we have.”

And with that, they turned their mounts and rode east.

The trail soon debouched into a broad wash, a stream only inches deep but several yards across. Olive, tamarisk, and palm traced its outline, and beyond it three large tents had been pitched.

The air buzzed with metallic-looking dragonflies.

They’ve been waiting here, Attrebus thought. For us, or someone like us.

To him, that didn’t bode well, but Sul seemed pretty relaxed about the whole situation. Did he imagine he could kill all of the Khajiit, if it came down to it?

It seemed possible. He remembered Sul’s philosophy about fighting. Maybe he was just biding his time.

“Come,” the woman said. “Let’s have cake.”

The tents were set up facing a small circle of stones within which ashes faintly smoked. They were ushered to sit, and when they complied, all of the Khajiit that accompanied them joined them. Even the tigerlike mounts folded themselves down next to their riders.

From the tents, Attrebus heard excited mewing and talking, and several very small kittenish faces poked out of one of the flaps and were just as quickly drawn back in.

After a moment what seemed to Attrebus to be a very old female came out, bearing a tray of small, round cakes, a bowl, and a narrow-necked bottle of rose-colored glass.

She knelt in front of Sul, placed a small cloth on the ground, then a cake on the cloth. With a precise movement of her hand, she pinched some sort of powder from a small bowl in the tray and sprinkled it on the cake. Then she took the bottle and let exactly four drops of golden liquid drip on it.

She moved to him, and then each of the Khajiit in turn, repeating the ritual gesture for gesture.

“Now we’ll tell our names,” the merish-looking woman said.

This near, she seemed even more beautiful and exotic than she had at a distance, and he noticed with a bit of surprise that the marks on her face were tattoos, rather than natural. Maybe she wasn’t a cat after all.

“I am Lesspa,” she said. “Our clan is F’aashe.” She motioned with her knuckles toward the Khajiit to her left. “She is M’kai, my sister. There is Taaj, my maternal cousin. There is Sha’jal, my brother …”

Attrebus blinked. She seemed to be indicating one of the mounts.

He remembered something now, from his lessons as a boy—or was it the story his nurse had told him, about the four Khajiit and the riding kite?

He didn’t know anything about these people at all, did he?

She finished naming everyone. Then he and Sul gave their names—he called himself simply “Treb”—and they all lifted the cakes.

“Touch it to your mouth, but do not eat,” Sul said as Attrebus opened his mouth. “That will satisfy the spirit of the ceremony. Khajiit food can be dangerous for us.”

Lesspa nodded knowingly, but did not add anything.

So Attrebus watched the Khajiit first lick and then devour the sweets, while his belly growled.

After that, the rest of the camp turned out—another eight adults and about twelve children of various ages. They quickened the fire and set about making a stew of some sort.

“Can I eat that?” he asked Sul.

“If you want. I’m pretty sure it’s honey and date soup. The cakes had moon-sugar in them. It’s a drug, the same stuff they make skooma out of.”

“They don’t seem to be feeling any ill effects,” Attrebus said.

“Because they’re Khajiit—they eat the stuff every day, in one form or the other—and they’re more naturally tolerant of it. Built different from you. Doesn’t help them with skooma, though—there are plenty of Khajiit addicts.”

“Lesspa doesn’t look like she’s all that different from us.”

Sul snorted. “Some used to think that the Khajiit were another variety of mer. But it’s the moons—the phases they’re in when the kits are born determines how they turn out.”

“So the mount—that really is her brother? They had the same parents?”

“Yes. But I’d stay away from that subject, if I were you. It’s too easy to say the wrong thing.”

Attrebus nodded, feeling stupid. Sul seemed to know everything, and he was starting to feel as if he knew very little. Whenever he went someplace he hadn’t been, he always received a briefing about it. That had always been enough—it hadn’t occurred to him to learn much about any place he had no business with. It made him wonder what important things he didn’t know about Black Marsh.

But what really nagged him was that he had known Khajiit, been practically brothers with them. And yet he hadn’t been aware of the most fundamental facts of their existence.

He tried to remember conversations he might have had with the cats in his guard, and realized he couldn’t remember any that went on for more than a few sentences.

So maybe they hadn’t been his friends. Maybe he really hadn’t known most of his guard that well.

Which led him back to the festering question: Was Sul right about everything?

This depressing train of thought was interrupted by Lesspa returning her attention to them. She folded lithely down into a squat that looked as if it ought to hurt but clearly didn’t.

“Now,” she said, “we discuss Je’m’ath.”

“Very well,” Sul replied. “How can we help you?”

“Moon-sugar is scarce here, but plentiful in Rimmen. But the new potentate there forbids our clans inside the walls, and will not sell us sugar. You’re not Khajiit. You go into Rimmen, get the sugar.”

“Why won’t he sell you sugar?”

“Doesn’t like the free clans. He’s outlawed us on our own land. Khajiit that work in the walls have all they want, but we won’t live like that, yes? We won’t.”

“That sounds reasonable,” Sul said. “But our path takes us beyond Rimmen, to the border.”

“Ours turns back from here.”

Sul nodded thoughtfully. “Very well.”

“Wait a minute,” Attrebus said.

“No,” Sul said. “You don’t understand this.”

“I’m starting to. You promise not to kill us if we help you get moon-sugar?”

“We protect you,” Lesspa said.

“Yes, you protect us from you.”

“You meet us first,” Lesspa said. “That’s good for you. There is no order in the North. Bandits, killers, prey even on weak Khajiit, and your kind is very unpopular on these plains. Miles to Rimmen. Many more to the border. We help you survive, you help us.”

“What if we say no? You’ll kill us?”

“No. We ate cake with you. Maybe kill you next time, but not now. Still, you’ll die soon enough without us.”

Attrebus looked at Sul. “Is she right?”

“Probably. The last time I was here, this was all still in the Empire and pacified. Things have changed.”

“Pacified,” Lesspa said. “Yes. Not now. All is wild. The mane was assassinated, you know? There is war in the South. Here, just chaos and potentate.”

“Look,” Attrebus said, trying to force a little gravity into his voice. “What Sul and I are doing is very important. Something very, very bad is happening in Black Marsh, something that could destroy us all. You should be proud to help us. There would be much honor in that.”

“We will help you. And you will give us Je’m’ath. Then you will go find this bad thing, and we will go west.”

“Agreed,” Sul snapped before Attrebus could say anything else.

Annaïg didn’t reply that night, but he didn’t let it concern him. Likely she was just asleep or busy. He went to sleep still sour over the bargain Sul had made and annoyed that Lesspa naturally assumed the Dunmer was the leader.

The next day he had to grudgingly admit things might have worked out for the best. Twice before noon they met other bands of Khajiit who plainly wanted to kill Sul and him. The first bunch offered to buy them, and the second actually had to be backed down by a show of force.

They left the badlands and entered a ragged steppe of thorn-scrub. It lifted and rolled in long undulations. Two days on that and finally, over a distant hill they could see a golden gleam.

“Rimmen,” Lesspa said. “We dare go no nearer.”

“That’s still a long way,” Sul said. “What’s between here and there?”

“Rimmen’s patrols. Traders. Not so dangerous for you in there, but dangerous for us.” She handed him a plain leather bag. “Get a good deal.”

And so they left Lesspa and her clan and continued on toward Rimmen.

“This is a waste of time,” Attrebus complained. “We’re going to lose a day.”

“No we aren’t,” Sul said. “We’re just going to ride on to the border. We’ve no business in Rimmen.”

At first Attrebus wasn’t sure he’d heard right.

“But you took their oath,” he protested when it sank in. “Bound us to do it. We have their money!”

“Which I’m sure will be of use to us.”

“But they kept their end of the bargain,” Attrebus said. “We can’t—”

“We can,” Sul replied. “I’ve broken much deeper oaths than this. I survived it. This is not only a waste of time, it’s dangerous. We’ll be breaking the law, supplying them with contraband.”

“The law doesn’t sound fair,” Attrebus said.

“Fair? What do you even mean by that? No law is fair to everyone. A law against stealing is unfair to thieves. The thing to think about is whether you’ll be able to save your precious Annaïg if you’re clapped in a dungeon or beheaded.”

And something burst in Attrebus.

“What can I do anyway?” he shouted. “You say I’m not a tenth the man I think I am, right? So what are we going to do, the two of us, against this thing? With me being so useless and all?”

To his horror, he heard his voice crack and realized he was starting to cry.

“Here we go,” Sul said.

“What do you care anyway? I can’t imagine you care if Umbriel kills everyone.”

“That’s right, I don’t,” Sul admitted.

“But—then why? Why are you bothering, if you don’t care?”

Sul glared at him, and Attrebus suddenly saw something in those terrible eyes he hadn’t seen before: pain.

“I loved someone,” Sul snarled. “She was murdered. My homeland was destroyed, my people decimated and scattered to the winds. I lost everything. Those responsible for that must pay, and one of them is on Umbriel. Is that simple enough for you?”

His speech struck Attrebus dumb for a moment. Not so much the words as the tone, the sheer tortured flatness of Sul’s voice.

“I’m sorry,” he finally said.

“Just ride,” Sul snapped.

But he couldn’t let it go. “You mean to say that you were there when the Red Mountain exploded? You know what happened?”

Sul didn’t answer.

“It must be terrible. I can’t imagine—”

“Please, for the favor of Mephala don’t tell me what you can and can’t imagine. Just do what I say.”

His tone was still odd, and Attrebus still didn’t exactly trust the man. But he was starting to believe him, at least as far as Umbriel was concerned. And in other things.

He took a deep breath. “It’s true, isn’t it? What Radhasa said about me?”

“Oh, thank the gods,” Sul intoned, “we’re back to you again. Are you still worried about the shame? About everyone knowing but you?”

“Wouldn’t you be?”

“But they don’t,” Sul said, his voice softening a bit. “Most people in the world don’t know you’re a fraud.”

“My father, my mother, most of the court—they all must have been sniggering behind my back.”

“So what? More people believe in you than don’t.”

“They believe in a lie. You just said it.”

“Then become the truth, you idiot. Become what they think you are.”

Attrebus let that sink in for a moment.

“You think that’s possible?”

“I don’t know. But we can find out.”

“You’ll help me?”

“I suppose I must,” Sul sighed.

“Why?”

“You said it yourself—it’s just the two of us. We have to get to Morrowind, and we have to get there before Umbriel.”

“Why? What’s in Morrowind? How do you know Umbriel is going there?”

“It is, just trust me. And we’ll never beat it on foot or horseback. I think I might know the way, but we’ll need to make it to the Niben Valley first. And it would be helpful to have allies. The legendary Prince Attrebus ought to be able to drum up a few.”

Attrebus thought that over and found that it made some sense. “Thank you,” he finally said.

Sul nodded reluctantly.

“But here’s the thing …” Attrebus continued.

“What now?”

“Prince Attrebus wouldn’t take Lesspa’s money and betray his oath. He’d get the moon-sugar and bring it back to her.”

For a long moment Sul didn’t say anything, but then his shoulders seemed to relax slightly.

“Right,” he said.

Rimmen had elegant bones of ivory-colored stone with few towers but many domes. Soldiers—human soldiers—met them at the gate, searched them, questioned them, and eventually passed them through. For another hundred yards they snaked through the twists and turns of an entry overlooked by platforms for archers, mages, and siege weapons. That brought them to the market, a bustling, colorful plaza empty in the middle but girdled by tents and stalls and bounded by canals. A broad avenue flanked by even more expansive waterways continued on to what was clearly the palace, an ancient-looking structure raised up on a high, tiered stone substructure. The tiers held some buildings, and apparently earth, because he could see trees growing there. Surmounting that was a cylindrical building with a large golden dome. Water cascaded down the sides of the palace, feeding the pool that encircled it.

Attrebus wondered where all of the water came from.

Off to the eastern side of the palace, he could see the odd curly-edged roof of what had to be the Akaviri temple Annaïg had mentioned. The only place he’d ever seen with similar architecture was Cloud Ruler Temple, which he had viewed from a distance when he was ten, hunting with his father’s traveling court in the mountains north of Bruma. He remembered that trip with fondness—he’d killed his first bear.

Or maybe he hadn’t, now that he thought of it. It had been moving a little strangely when he saw it, hadn’t it? Had it already been wounded? Poisoned? Ensorcelled?

Why would his father have done that? Why all of this?

He pushed that down, trying to focus. He’d promised Annaïg a description of Rimmen.

He was surprised that fewer than half of the people he saw were Khajiit, and many of those lolled about with wild or vacant eyes, skooma pipes clutched in their hands. It was a strange sight to see in an open, public square. He began to understand Lesspa and her people better.

They left the plaza, crossing a canal on a footbridge and thence down a narrow street where gently chiming bells were depended between the flat roofs of the buildings and viridian moths flittered in the shadows. The addicts were even thicker here, a few watching them and holding out their hands for money; but most were shivering, lost in their visions.

They arrived at their destination, a smaller square with a fortified building surrounded by guards in purple surcoats and red sashes. A sign proclaimed the place to be KINGDOM OF RIMMEN STATE STORE.

Once again they were searched, questioned, and then passed into a low-ceilinged room where twenty or so people stood on line at a counter. Only one person, an Altmer, seemed to be dealing with the customers, but others worked behind him, wrapping paper packages into even larger paper packages.

“This was your idea,” Sul pointed out. He handed him the bag of coins.

“What do I do?” Attrebus asked.

“You’ve never stood on line, have you?”

“No.”

“Well, embrace the experience. I’m going to sit down. When you get to the man at the counter, I’ll come back.”

As bored as the man at the counter seemed from a distance, he somehow seemed even less enthusiastic when Attrebus and Sul reached him an hour later.

He took the gold, looked it over, and then weighed it.

“What do you want? He asked.

“Moon-sugar.”

“Forty pounds, then,” he said.

“Sixty,” Attrebus challenged. He’d bargained before, for fun.

“There’s no negotiation,” the mer said wearily. “Outlanders! Look, the price is fixed by the office of the potentate. Take it or leave it, I really don’t care.”

“We’ll take it,” Sul said.

“It is my mandatory duty to warn you that if you sell or attempt to sell moon-sugar in the Kingdom of Rimmen,” the man said, “you will be subject to a fine of triple the worth of the sugar. If you sell or attempt to sell more than two pounds, you will be subject to execution. Do you understand these terms?”

“Yes,” Sul said. Attrebus just nodded, feeling his face warm.

“Very well. Your name here, please.” He shoved a ledger at Attrebus.

He hesitated, then signed it Uriel Tripitus.

The rest was easy. They packed the stuff on their horses, rode out of Rimmen, and headed west.

They reached Lesspa’s camp near sundown. She was there, along with the others, crouched around the fire. She watched them come, her expression odd but unreadable. Her mouth moved, though, as if she was trying to say something.

Sul stopped.

“This isn’t right,” he said. “Something isn’t right.”

“Dismount!” someone shouted. “This is Captain Evernal of the Kingdom of Rimmen regulators. Remove your weapons and make your beasts available for search.”

Beyond the fire, Attrebus could now make out figures, moving from cover.

A lot of them.

ONE

Mere-Glim swam through a forest of sessile crabs. Their squat, thorny bodies attached to the floor of the sump were barely noticeable, but their tiny, venomous claws were set on the ends of twenty-foot-long yellow and viridian tentacles that groped lazily after him.

The quick silver blades of nickfish whipped about him, dodging among the crabs. He saw one that didn’t dodge fast enough; it struggled only an instant before the toxin killed it and it was dragged slowly downward.

Glim missed Annaïg. He missed Black Marsh, and hoped desperately that something was left of it.

But he liked the sump. It was strange and beautiful and mostly quiet. And since he did his jobs well—or at least they thought he did—he was mostly left alone. When he was with the other skraws, he took care not to show exactly how fast he could swim. That way—on days like this—he had a little time to explore.

He moved into deeper water, searching for the opening he’d seen a few days before. So far none of the passages he’d found went anywhere interesting, but he continued to hope. This one he’d noticed because of the efflorescence of life around it, as if the water coming down was more nourishing somehow.

He found it, a rather low-ceilinged passage, and began swimming up it. It wasn’t long before he emerged from the water, but as he’d hoped, the tunnel continued at a steepening angle, so he began to climb.

Not much later he began to hear a peculiar sound, an inconstant musical note, a very low whistle, and as he ascended, it grew louder.

He could see light before he recognized it as the wind blowing over the hole he now saw above. Excited, he quickened his pace.

When he got there, he knew it had been worth the climb.

He stood between forest and void.

Below the ledge he stood on was a fall of a few thousand feet to the verdant green canopy and meandering black rivers of his homeland. That took his breath, but the trees nearly kept it.

At his back a massive trunk as big around as a gate tower sprouted from the stone, its roots dug into the cliff over hundreds of feet like the tentacles of some huge octopus. It split into four enormous limbs, one of which passed just over his head and out, like a ceiling above him, twisting gradually left as it did so, and dropping down to eventually obscure some of the landscape below. This was the lowest limb visible; but above him they were so thick he couldn’t see the sky.

He stood there for a long moment, letting language leave him, letting it all fill him as shapes, colors, smells. He had a profound feeling of familiarity and peace.

And sound—the musical piping of thirty kinds of strange birds, a distant voice singing in words he couldn’t make out—and the wind, soughing through the branches as Umbriel slowly rotated.

And very faintly, the screams from below.

In that long moment, he felt something. A sort of hum in the air, or beneath it. Or in his head.

And after a moment he realized it was coming from the trees. He walked over and put his hand against the bark, and it grew louder, a sort of murmuring. The bark, the leaves …

And then he understood; they resembled the Hist.

They weren’t; the leaves were too oblate, the bark less fretted, the smell a bit off. But it could be a cousin to them, as red oaks and white oaks were cousins.

Intrigued, he climbed up the leaning back of the tree and out onto one of the branches, following along its very gentle upward and outward slope. A troop of monkeylike creatures went by on another branch, each of them bearing a net-sack held on by a tumpline across their foreheads. The sacks were full of fruit, the kind the skraws called bloodball. A little later he saw some blood-ball himself, growing on vines that wound in and out of the branches. More curiously, as the branch got higher and he could see the sun, he found fruit and peculiar masses of grass heavy with seed growing directly out of the trunk tree itself, as if planted there. He was examining it when he heard a little gasp.

He turned to find a young woman with the coloring of a Dunmer staring at him in apparent horror. She wore a broad-brimmed hat, knee-length pants, and a loose shirt. Her feet were bare.

She took a step back.

“I mean you no harm,” Mere-Glim said in his softest voice. “I was just exploring the tree.”

“You surprised me,” the woman said. “I’ve never seen anyone who looks like you.”

“I work in the sump,” he said.

“Oh. That explains it. I’ve never met anyone from there.” She paused. “Do you like it, the sump?”

“I do,” Glim replied. “I like the water and the things that live in it. And it’s interesting, helping people be born.” He glanced around. “But this—this is beautiful, too. You must like it here.”

“It’s funny you should ask that,” she said. “Because I never thought about that until—well, until all of that appeared below us.” She gestured toward Black Marsh.

“What was there before?”

“Well—nothing. The elder tree-tenders say that there was a time before when there was a sky, and land beneath—some even say that long ago Umbriel didn’t fly, that it was planted like those moss-oats there. Isn’t that a funny notion? To live planted?”

“It’s how I’ve always lived until lately,” Glim told her.

“What do you mean?”

“I’m from down there,” he said, gesturing at Black Marsh.

As the words left his mouth, he wished he could suck them back in. If she told anyone, word would get around that he’d been here. He hadn’t exactly been forbidden to come here, but lack of explicit permission to do something usually amounted to forbid-dance on Umbriel.

“Down there?” she said. “That’s amazing. What’s it like? How did you get here?”

“I flew here,” he said. “I thought everyone on Umbriel must know about that. Everyone in the kitchens seemed to.”

“You were in the kitchens?” A little tremor ran through her.

“Yes. Why?”

“Was it horrible? I’ve heard terrible things. My friend Kalmo takes grain to five of them, and he said—”

“Do you know how to reach the kitchens from here?” he interrupted.

“No, but I can always ask Kalmo.”

“Could you do that?”

“Now? I’m not sure where he is.”

“No, just ask him next time you see him. I have a friend that works there I’d like to talk to.”

“But then how will I tell you?”

“I’ll come back,” he said. “You can tell me when you’re usually here, and I’ll meet you.”

“Okay,” she said. “But—you have to do something for me.”

“What’s that?”

“Orchid shrimp. We almost never get to have them—our kitchen doesn’t use them much. Please?”

“I can do that,” he assured her.

“And you have to tell me about down there.”

“Next time,” he promised. “Right now I need to go.”

“Next time, then,” she said. “You can find me here every day about this time.”

“Good.” He paused uncomfortably. “And would you mind, ah, not mentioning me to anyone? I’m not sure I’m supposed to be up here.”

“Who would I mention? You haven’t told me your name.”

“Mere-Glim.”

“That’s a strange name. But then it would be, wouldn’t it? My name is Fhena.”

Glim nodded, not knowing what else to say, so he turned and reluctantly retraced his steps back down the tree, through the tunnel, and into the sump again.

But now he had a way out. If he could find Annaïg, if she had reproduced her flying potion.

There were still many ifs.

He went back down the Drop, but none of the sacs had changed color in the few hours he’d been gone, so he went quickly back to the shallows, because Wert had asked him to collect a few singe anemones—Wert was really supposed to do it, but the stingers couldn’t get through Glim’s scales, so the skraw had asked him to do it.

He went to the place in the shallows where they grew thickest, and found that area particularly messy with bodies. He tried to ignore them, as he usually did, but a familiar face caught his eye.

It was the woman from the kitchen, the one who had Annaïg. Qijne. Even in death her gaze was terrifying.

Suddenly frantic, he began searching through the corpses. They all wore the tattered remnants of the same uniform. What happened to kill them all? Some sort of accident? A mass execution?

He continued, each time fearing the next lifeless face would be Annaïg’s, but even after he went over them twice, she wasn’t there. But that didn’t mean anything. A carrion scorp or any of several large bottom feeders could have dragged her off.

He was about to begin a third search when a gleam caught his eyes, something in the sand.

He reached down and pulled it up—Annaïg’s magic locket.

He felt like something hot was vibrating in him when he got back to the skraw warrens. When he took Wert the anemones, he found him with Eryob, their overseer.

“You’re late,” Eryob said. His gaze moved to the anemones. Then to Wert. “Did you send him to do your work?”

“Wert does his job, and more,” Mere-Glim bristled. “I was just helping him out. Everything got done.”

Eryob’s bushy red eyebrows sank so low they nearly covered his eyes. “That’s not the point, skraw.”

“Well, enlighten me,” Glim snapped. “What is the point? And who are you to make it? You don’t inhale the vapors. You don’t pick around corpses or bring anyone up to be born. What does the sump need with you? Just leave us alone and everything will get done. In fact—”

He didn’t get to finish. Eryob lifted his fist and uncurled it, and black pain exploded in Glim’s head. His limbs spasmed and he toppled to the floor. It went on for a long time.

TWO

Heat woke her, suffocating heat wrapped around her body, burned into her lungs. She gasped and flailed; the air seemed incredibly heavy and murky. She wrapped her arms around herself, feeling only slick, wet skin.

She heard a whimper and then a strangled shriek. She made out a silhouette a few feet from her, revealed in the dim illumination from four fuzzy-looking globes of a dark amber color, one in each direction, all above her.

“Slyr?”

“Yes,” the frantic voice answered. “What’s happening? We’re being burned alive!”

Annaïg swung her feet down and found the floor, wincing at the heat of the stone against her soles. The air hurt to move through, too, especially when she found the vent in the floor it was coming out of. She jumped back with a shriek.

“It’s steam,” she said.

“Why? What are they doing to us?”

Annaïg recalled the battle, and Toel’s blue eyes. Then he had touched her lips. That was all she remembered.

She found a wall and began working down it and soon discovered a seam that might be a door.

Slyr had joined her in exploring now, panting hoarsely.

“I don’t know what’s going on,” Annaïg said. “But I … I think this isn’t meant to kill us. It’s hot, but not that hot. And I don’t think it’s getting worse.”

“Right,” Slyr said. “You must be right. Why would he go through the trouble of capturing us only to kill us? He wouldn’t do that, would he?” She sounded as if she were trying to convince herself.

“I don’t know Toel,” Annaïg said. “I don’t know anything about him.”

“Why do you think I do?” Slyr snapped.

There was something strange about her tone.

“I didn’t say you did,” Annaïg replied.

Slyr was silent for a moment.

“Well, I do know a bit,” she finally offered. “He—” She stopped, then laughed softly. She folded back down on her bench.

“What?”

“I think they’re cleaning us,” she replied. “I’ve heard they use steam to draw the impurities from the body.”

“I’ve heard of that,” Annaïg remembered. “In Skyrim they do it, and it’s come and gone as a fashion in Cyrodiil. Black Marsh is already a steaming jungle and Argonians don’t sweat, so it never caught on there.”

Her breathing slowed as panic faded. Now that the surprise and fear were gone, the pervasive heat actually felt pretty nice.

“What else do you know about Toel?”

“Everyone has heard of Toel,” Slyr said. “Most master chefs of the higher kitchens are born to it, but Toel started down with us. When he wants something, he will do whatever is necessary to get it.”

“Clearly,” Annaïg replied.

“More than you know. Qijne and her kitchen served three lords. Toel serves a much greater one, but that is still a dangerous thing. Bargains must have been struck, and probably a few assassinations accomplished.”

“A few?”

“Other than the rest of our kitchen, I mean.”

“They’re all dead, aren’t they?”

“I didn’t see anyone moving.”

Annaïg was starting to feel a little dizzy. It wasn’t getting any hotter, but the heat was beginning to sit more heavily on her.

“I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t know many of them very well, but you …”

“I hated most of them,” Slyr said. “And I was indifferent to most of the rest.”

“But you saved my life. Qijne was trying to kill me.”

“You’re—ah—different,” Slyr said.

“Well—thank you.”

Slyr crossed her arms. “Besides, he came for you. If you were dead, what use would I be to him?”

“Don’t sell yourself short.”

“I don’t,” Slyr said softly.

An awkward pause followed.

“I hope they let us out of here soon,” Annaïg ventured, to try to lighten things.

“Yes.”

But it was too hot to talk after that. Annaïg sat with her head on her knees, closed her eyes and pretended she was on the levee at Yor-Tiq, back in Black Marsh, lazing in the sun while Glim went diving for trogfish. It was a difficult fantasy to maintain; images of the slaughter kept coming back to her, especially Qijne’s dying gaze.

Remembering that, she felt at her wrist. It was still there, the torus. They hadn’t noticed it when they took her clothes. If she could figure out how to use it, she would at least have one small advantage.

She squeezed it, tried to think the blade out, but nothing worked, and the heat made her so tired she finally stopped trying.

Just as she thought she couldn’t take any more, light came flooding through what she had earlier guessed was a door, and behind it the sweet kiss of cool air.

“Out, and into the pool with you,” a voice said. Annaïg hesitated, embarrassed at her lack of clothing but anxious to get out of the heat. She saw the mentioned pool ahead. It looked cool, lovely.

Slyr was already on her way, so she followed. To her surprise, she didn’t see anyone, although the voice had sounded near.

The water was so shockingly cold that for an instant she thought she might lose consciousness. Her yelp literally got closed in her throat.

“Kaoc’!” she finally managed.

“Sumpslurry!” Slyr gasped.

Their gazes met, held for an instant—and then together they began laughing. It just exploded out of Annaïg, as if it had been bottled and pent up for a thousand years. The feeling wasn’t happiness; it was more like being crazy.

But it was a lot better than crying.

“You should have seen your expression,” Slyr giggled when she finally got control of herself.

“I’m sure it was no more ridiculous than yours,” she replied.

“Lords, this is cold.”

Annaïg took in the new chamber then; it had low ceilings of cloth woven in complicated, curvilinear patterns of gold, hyacinth, lime, and sanguine. It draped down the walls, giving the appearance that they were in a large, very oddly shaped tent. Globes like those in the sweat-room, but brighter, depended here and there, filling the chamber with a pleasant golden light. On the near wall, two golden robes hung.

“I hope those are ours,” she said.

“Not yet they aren’t,” the voice from earlier said. “Back in the heat with you.”

This time her gaze found the speaker—a froglike creature about two feet high, mottled orange, yellow, and green. It was crouched above the doorway.

“We have to go back in there?” Annaïg said.

“You’re both extremely polluted,” the thing said. “This could take a while. But at least you seem to be enjoying it.”

She wasn’t enjoying it an hour later, when the alternating heat and cold had rendered all the strength out of her. She was also starving. But finally the frog-thing gave a little nod and sent them across the room to the robes.

The fabric was like nothing she had ever touched before, utterly smooth, almost like a liquid. She thought she had never felt anything better.

“Come along,” the creature said, hopping down from its perch and landing, to stand on its hind limbs. It waddled off, through a slit in the cloth that draped the walls and into a smooth, polished corridor.

After a few turns he led them into a room appointed much as the pool-room had been, except the drapery was of more muted, autumn shades. Her heart struck up a bit when she saw a small, low table set with a pitcher of some sort of liquid and bowls of fruits, fern fronds, and small condiment bowls.

“Eat,” the creature said. “Rest. Be ready to speak with Lord Toel.”

Annaïg didn’t have to be told twice.

The pitcher contained an effervescent beverage that had almost no taste, but reminded her of honeysuckle and plum, though it wasn’t sweet. The fruits were all unknown to her: a small orange berry with a tough rind but sweet, lemony pulp inside; a black, lozenge-shaped thing with no skin that was a bit chewy and was a lot like soft cheese; tiny berries no larger than the head of a needle, but clustered in the thousands, which exploded into vapor on touching her tongue. The ferns were the least pleasant, but the various jellies in the small bowls clung viscously to them, and those were delightfully strange.

She couldn’t taste alcohol in the drink, but by the time she felt sated, things were getting pleasantly spinny.

“This is nice,” Annaïg said, looking around. There were two beds, also on the floor. “Do you think this is our room? One room just for the two of us?”

“Like our little hideaway in Qijne’s kitchen.”

“But bigger. And with beds. And—ah—interesting food.”

Slyr closed her eyes. “I’ve dreamed of this,” she said. “I knew it would be better.”

“Congratulations,” Annaïg said.

Slyr shook her head. “It’s because of you. These things you come up with … when Toel figures that out, I’ll be out of his kitchen, just as your lizard-friend was out of Qijne’s.”

“That won’t happen,” Annaïg said. “Without you, I wouldn’t have known where to start, and now I don’t know where to start again. I need you.”

“Toel will have cooks of more use to you.”

“He won’t,” Annaïg said. “It’s both of us or neither.”

Slyr shook her head. “You’re a strange one,” she said. “But I—” She put her head down.

“What?”

“I said I didn’t care about anyone in Qijne’s kitchen. But if you had died, I think I might be sad.”

Annaïg smiled. “Thanks,” she said.

“Okay,” Slyr said, rising unsteadily. “Do you care which bed?”

“No. You choose.”

Annaïg soon found her own bed. Like the robe, it was a delight, especially after weeks of hard pallets and stone floor.

She was dropping off to sleep, feeling content for the moment, at least in a creature sort of way.

She thought maybe she should open her locket, contact Attrebus, let him know how things had changed.

But then it struck her: Her amulet was gone.

Even with worry as her bedmate, when she woke the next morning she was more rested and felt better than she had in a long time, even before coming to Umbriel. Slyr was still dead to the world, but the frog-creature had returned and was waiting patiently near the table.

“You’ll break your fast with Lord Toel,” he said.

“Let me wake Slyr,” she said.

“Not her,” it said. “Only you.”

Slyr’s fears from the night before were still fresh in her mind. “I’d rather—” She began.

“You’d rather not protest Lord Toel’s wishes,” the thing interrupted.

She nodded, reminding herself that she had a greater mission. Besides, she could never put in a good word for the other woman if she never got to talk to Toel.

“What’s your name?” she asked the creature.

“Dulgiijbiddiggungudingu,” it sputtered. “Gluuip.”

She starred at the froth the name had formed on the creature’s mouth.

“Dulbig—” she started.

“Dulg will do,” he added.

“Lead the way, Dulg.”

“You don’t imagine you’re going in that?” Dulg asked. He gestured toward a curtained area.

She followed his gesture, and in the enclosure discovered a gold and black gown. Like everything else here, it might have been spun of spider silk, or something far finer.

She never wore things like this. It clung embarrassingly to her contours and was uselessly ornamented with fine beaded webs at the cuffs and collars. She felt clunky and far more out of her element than she had in Qijne’s fire pits. Although her father held a noble title in High Rock that had once had currency in Black Marsh, since before she was born there had been no balls, no cotillions, no evenings at the theater. All of that—and the frippery that went with it—was swept away when the Argonians retook control of their land.

And good riddance to that, at least. Or so she had always thought.

But she felt herself wondering if Attrebus would think she looked passable in this outfit.

“Come, come,” Dulg called impatiently. “Your hair and face must be tended to.”

An hour later, after the services of a silent, slight, blondish man, Dulg finally led her through a suite of richly furnished rooms and into a chamber with fresh air pouring through a large door and beyond …

Toel was there, but she could not make her gaze focus on him. There was too much else to wonder at.

She was outside, and Umbriel rose and fell all around her.

She stood on an outjut in a cliff face that was steep but not vertical, and that looked out on a vast, conical basin. Below her spread an emerald green lake and, above, the city grew from the stone itself, twisting spires and latticed buildings that might have been built with colored wire, whole castles hanging like bird cages from immensely thick cables. Higher still, the rocky rim of the island supported gossamer towers in every hue imaginable, and what appeared to be an enormous spiderweb of spun glass that broke the sunlight into hundreds of tiny rainbows.

“You like my little window?” Toel asked.

She stiffened, afraid to say anything for fear it might be the wrong thing, but just as fearful of saying nothing.

“It’s beautiful,” she said. “I didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know that anything in Umbriel could be beautiful, you mean?”

She opened her mouth to try and correct her mistake, but he shook his head.

“How could you, laboring down in the pits? How could you have imagined this?”

She nodded.

“Do you fear me, child?” he asked.

“I do,” she admitted.

He smiled slightly at that, and then walked closer to the rail, putting his back to her. If she were quick and strong, she might send him toppling over.

But of course he knew that. She could tell by the easy confidence with which he moved. He knew she couldn’t—or wouldn’t—do any such thing.

“Do you like your quarters?” he asked.

“Very much,” she replied. “You are very generous.”

“I’ve elevated you,” he said. “Things are better here. I think you will find your work more enjoyable, more stimulating.”

He turned and walked to a small table furnished with two chairs.

“Sit,” he said. “Join me.”

She complied, and a slight man in a vest with many buttons brought them a drink that hissed and fizzed and was mostly vapor. It tasted like mint, sage, and orange peel and was nearly intolerably cold.

“Now,” Toel said. “Tell me about this place you are from.”

“Lord?”

“What is it like, how was your life there? What did you do? That sort of thing.”

She wondered at first why she felt so surprised, but then it occurred to her that no one—not even Slyr—had ever asked her about her life before coming to Umbriel—not unless it concerned her knowledge of plants and minerals.

“There’s not much left of it, I think,” she said.

“No, I imagine not. And yet some of it lives in you yet, yes? And in Umbriel.”

“You mean because their souls were consumed here?”

“Not merely consumed,” he replied. “Mostly, yes, Umbriel must use living energy to remain aloft and functioning. But some of it is cycled, transformed, reborn—it’s not all lost. Take solace in that, if you can. If you cannot, it’s no matter to me, really, but a waste of your time and energy.”

“You think grieving a waste?”

“What else could it be? Anger, fear, ecstasy—these states of mind might produce something useful. Grief and regret produce nothing except bad poetry, which is actually worse than nothing. Now. Speak of what I asked you.”

She closed her eyes, trying to decide where to start, what to say. She didn’t want to tell him anything that might help Umbriel and its masters.

“My home was in a city called Lilmoth,” she said. “In the Kingdom of Black Marsh. I lived with my father. He was—”

Toel held up a finger. “Pardon me,” he said. “What is a father?”

“Maybe I used the wrong word,” she said. “I’m still learning this dialect.”

“Yes. I know of no such word.”

“My father is the man who sired me.”

Again the blank stare.

She shifted and held her hand up, palms facing each other.

“Ah, a man and woman, they, ahh … procreate—”

“Yes,” Toel said. “That can be very entertaining.”

She felt her face warm and nodded.

“You think so, too, I see. Very interesting. So a father is the man you used to procreate with?”

“No. Oh, no. That would be—no. I mean I’ve never—” She shook her head and started again. “A man and woman—my father and mother—they procreated and had me.”

“‘Had you’?”

“I was born to them.”

“You’re not making sense, dear.”

“After they procreated, I was conceived, and I grew in my mother until I was born.”

He sat back, and for the first time she saw his eyes flash with real astonishment. It looked very strange on him, as if he had never been surprised at anything.

“Do you mean to say that you were inside of a woman? And came out of her?”

“Yes.”

“Like a parasite—like a Zilh worm or chest borer?”

“No, it’s normal, it’s—weren’t you …?”

“That’s revolting!” he said, and laughed. “Absolutely revolting. Did you eat her corpse after you came out?”

“Well, it didn’t kill her.”

“How big were you?”

She shaped her hands to indicate the size of a newborn.

“Well, I have to say, this is already one of the most interesting—and disturbing—conversations I’ve ever had.”

“Then you people aren’t born?”

“Of course we are. Properly, from the Marrow Sump.”

“So when you use the word ‘procreate’—”

“It simply means sex. Copulation. It has no other sense, that I know of.”

Annaïg suddenly felt the world rearranging itself around her. She had been assuming that all the talk about coming from the sump and returning to it was a metaphor, a way of talking about life and death.

But Toel wasn’t kidding, she was sure of that.

“Please, go on. Tell me more such disgusting things.”

And so they talked on. After his initial outburst, however, he did not interrupt her much; he listened, with only the occasional question, usually concerning terms he didn’t know. She talked mostly about her life in Black Marsh, about history, about the secession of Black Marsh from the Empire and the subsequent collapse of the Empire. She did not say anything about the revival of the Empire, about the Emperor or Attrebus—but it was a challenge, because the way he listened, the way he hung on her every word, made her want to keep talking, to not let it stop, to keep that attention on her forever.

When she finally forced herself to stop, he steepled his fingers under his lip. Then he nodded out at his world.

“You speak of vast forests and deserts, of countries whose size almost surpasses my imagination. I have never walked such lands—I never will. This, Umbriel, is the only world I can ever know. This, Umbriel, is your home now, and the only place you will ever know again. The sooner you understand that, the better. Waste no time on what you have lost, for you will never have it again.”

“But my world is all around you,” she said. “I could take you there, show it to you …”

He shook his head. “It is not so simple. The outside of Umbriel, in a sense, is in your world. But here, where you find yourself now—surely you observed the larvae, saw how they lose corporeal form when they move fully into your plane. The same would be true of me, were I to leave. My body would dissolve, and Umbriel would reclaim the stuff of my soul. There is no leaving for me. Or you.”

“But I am not from Umbriel,” she said. “I am not a part of it.”

“Not yet,” Toel said. “But in time you will be as much a part of Umbriel as I am.”

THREE

The man who had named himself Captain Evernal stepped from behind the tent. He was fortyish, with tanned skin, blond hair, and an impressive mustache.

Attrebus could see twenty men, but he suspected there were more.

“What’s this?” Sul asked.

Evernal shrugged. “That depends on your business here.”

“We have no business here,” Sul replied.

“You’re a mile off the main road.”

“Is that a crime?”

“It isn’t,” Evernal said. “But it suggests you were coming to this camp, since there isn’t anything else in this direction.”

“Happenstance. We were sightseeing. Hoping to run across a flock of greems. The lad here has never seen one.”

“Well, then,” the captain said. “You won’t mind us searching your packs.”

Sul gestured at their mounts. Four of the regulators strode over. It didn’t take them long to find the moon-sugar.

“Well, this is interesting,” the captain said.

Attrebus saw Sul’s shoulders relax, slightly.

Oh, Divines, he’s going to try it, Attrebus thought.

“Why is it interesting?” Attrebus blurted. “I paid a fair price for that.”

“Then surely you were warned about the penalties of trafficking with the wild cats.”

“There’s no trafficking here,” Attrebus said. “I’ve not offered to sell anything.”

Evernal rolled his eyes. “Oh, come now.”

Attrebus drew himself straighter. “No, you come now, Captain Evernal. Do you have a charge to make? Based on what evidence?”

“Evidence? I don’t need evidence,” Evernal said. “I know very well that you bought that sugar for these cats. Look around you—there’s no court involved. No witnesses.”

“I see. Then you’re bandits, plain and simple.”

“We’re regulators. We uphold the law.”

Attrebus snorted. “Do you even know what a contradiction is? You just as much as said you could murder us with impunity, and you specifically bragged there are no courts involved. You’re a common brigand, sir.”

Evernal reddened, but some of his men had uneasy expressions, which suggested he’d hit a nerve.

“Go,” Evernal finally said. “Leave the sugar.”

Attrebus felt his stomach unclench a bit. But then he saw the expression on Lesspa’s face.

“What about them?” he asked.

“I told you to go. Count your blessings and do it.”

“Come on,” Sul said.

But then Attrebus noticed something. He pushed away his uncertainties, pulled his center tight.

“No,” he said.

“No?” the captain repeated incredulously.

“Who do you think I am?” Attrebus thundered. “I know you by your Nibenese accent, Evernal. You may work for the thug who runs Rimmen, but your body and soul belong to the Empire. Who do you think I am?”

He saw Evernal waver and his eyes widen.

“Milord …”

“Wrong title,” Attrebus snapped. “Try again. My likeness is common enough, even here, I’m sure.”

The captain swallowed audibly. “My Prince,” he managed. “Your face is a bit bruised, and …”

“Is it?” Attrebus said. “I suppose that it is. And so you are to be forgiven for that. For that. But I do not care to have my business questioned or my escort detained.”

Evernal looked around at the Khajiit.

“Escort?”

“It is my business, Captain. We’ll be out of your territory in a day, and you’ll never see any of us here again.”

“It’s not that simple, highness—”

“It is,” Attrebus said. “Look around you. There are no courts here.”

Evernal sighed and stepped near. “I fought for your father,” he said. “I’ve heard much of you. But work has been scarce in Cyrodiil.”

Attrebus softened his tone. “Then you know in your heart what’s right. And you know my reputation. I’m on a mission of greatest gravity, and already I am too much delayed. Will you really let it be said that you hindered Prince Attrebus Mede?”

“No, Prince,” Evernal replied. “I would not.”

Attrebus clapped him on the shoulder. “Good man,” he said.

Evernal bowed, then beckoned to his men. In a few moments they were alone with the Khajiit.

“That was quite a gamble,” Sul said when they were gone. “Telling them who you were. What if they had decided to ransom you?”

Attrebus smiled, suddenly feeling a bit shaky.

“I saw he was wearing the badge of the eighteenth legion,” he said. “Just under his cloak, pinned next to a lock of some girl’s hair. I knew he’d not only fought for my father, but that he was still proud of it.”

Sul’s glare lessened a bit.

“You’re trembling,” he said.

Attrebus sat down on the ground. “Right,” he said, running his hands through his hair. “I didn’t really think. I’ve made so many speeches—and people cheered and followed my orders. But if all of that was a lie—”

“You sounded like a prince,” Sul assured him. “Confident, in command, imperious.”

“Yes, but if I had given it any thought …”

“It’s a good thing you didn’t,” Sul replied. “For Evernal, the tales about you are true. You acted the part, and where we might have died, we live.”

“Become who they think I am,” Attrebus muttered.

Lesspa was approaching, so he stood.

She regarded him silently for a moment, then scratched herself on the chin and reached over to scratch his.

“You brought it,” she said. “Another might have taken our money. And what you did just now—we are grateful.”

“You protected us,” Attrebus said. “I couldn’t do any less.”

She nodded. “Your words ring like music. You are really the prince?”

“I am.”

One of the tents was down, and the Khajiit were already folding it.

“We will be ready in less than an hour. I pray you wait.”

“You said you were going back west. I must go east.”

“They would have taken our kits and slain the old ones,” she said, “imprisoned the rest of us until we became city-ghosts, sniveling in the dust, begging for skooma. It was not your concern. You reached out from your interests to embrace ours. That is Sei’dar, an important thing to us.” She smiled. “Besides—you survive, you are Emperor, yes? That’s not a bad friend to have.”

East of Rimmen the land rose from the dust in a series of rolling ridges covered in brush and scrub oak, and eventually—as they ascended higher—timber.

The hills were swarming with Khajiit renegades organized around rough hill forts, but they kept their distance, which they certainly had Lesspa and her companions to thank for.

By noon the next day they were descending into the lower Niben Valley, and he was back in the Empire. It was like walking down into a cloud, so much wetter was the air of County Bravil than the Elsweyr steppes. Thick mats of fern and moss muffled their footsteps and a canopy of ash, oak, and cypress kept the sun from them.

It seemed to make Lesspa’s people nervous.

They reached the Green Road near sundown and made camp there.

“What now?” Sul asked.

Attrebus considered the road. Dusk was settling and the frogs in the marshes below were singing to Masser as it rose above the trees. Willows rustled in the evening breeze, and the jars and whills tested their voice against a forlorn owl. Fireflies winked up from the ferns.

“North takes me back home,” he said. “My father might listen to me now, give me troops.”

“Do you really think so?”

“No. The only thing that’s changed is that I lost the men and women he did trust me with. He’ll still think Umbriel is no immediate threat. He’ll put me in an extremely comfortable prison to make sure I don’t run off again, at least not until I’ve supplied an heir.”

“What then? You said Umbriel was traveling north, toward Morrowind. I think it’s going to Vivec City, or what’s left of it. If that’s true, we need to beat Vuhon there.”

“You said that before. You didn’t explain it.”

He saw the muscles clench in Sul’s jaw. “Where is it now?” the Dunmer demanded. “How fast is it moving?”

“I’m not sure of either of those things. It’s moving slowly, or it was. It took the better part of a day to cover the distance from the south coast of Black Marsh to Lilmoth, which Annaïg said is around fifteen miles.”

“Thirty miles in a day and a night, then. That only gives us a few days.”

“To get to Vivec City? Through the Valus Mountains? We can’t do that in twenty days. What if we went to Leyawiin, got a ship there—”

“No, not unless you know someone with a flying ship. We’d have to sail all the way up to the top of the world and come back down, or else land and go overland through wasteland.”

“Walk back, then. Why do we have to beat it to Vivec City?”

“Because I believe there is a thing there, something the master of Umbriel needs. Something he fears.”

“You seem to know everything about Umbriel except where to find it—and now I’ve told you that. I think it’s time you told me what you know.”

Sul snorted. “Don’t let your success with the regulators go to your head. You’re not my prince, boy.”

“I never said I was. But I’ve told you everything I know. You can return the favor.”

Sul’s eyes flamed silently for a moment, then he scratched his chin.

“I don’t know much about this flying city of yours—not specifically. I believe its master is a man named Vuhon. He vanished into Oblivion forty-three years ago, and now I think he’s come back.”

“This is the man who killed your woman.”

Sul went rigid. “We will not speak of her,” he said in a low, dangerous tone. “There was once a place in Vivec City—the Ministry of Truth.”

“I’ve heard of it,” Attrebus said. “It was considered a wonder of the world. A moon from Oblivion, floating above the Temple District.”

“Yes. Held there by the power of our god, Vivec. But Vivec left, or was destroyed, and his power began to fade, and with it the spells that kept the velocity of the ministry in check.”

“What do you mean?”

“It fell from the sky, you understand? It was traveling quickly, more quickly than you can imagine. Vivec stopped it with the power of his will. But the velocity was still there, ready to be unleashed. Do you see what that meant?”

“You’re saying it would complete its fall as if it had never been interrupted.”

“That’s what our best feared, yes. And one of our best was Vuhon. Along with others, he built an ingenium, a machine that continued to hold the ministry aloft. But there was a … cost.”

“What cost?”

“The ingenium required souls to function.”

Attrebus felt pinpricks along his spine.

“Umbriel—Annaïg says it takes the souls of the living …”

“You see?”

“But what happened?”

Sul was silent for so long this time that Attrebus thought he wouldn’t speak again, but he finally sighed.

“The ingenium exploded. It hurled Vuhon into Oblivion. Then the ministry crashed into the city, and Vvardenfell exploded.”

“The Red Year,” Attrebus gasped. “He caused that?”

“He was responsible. He and others. And now he has returned.”

“For what?”

“I don’t know what designs he has on Tamriel, but I’m sure he has them, and I’m sure they aren’t pleasant ones,” Sul responded. “But I think his immediate objective is a sword, an ancient and dangerous weapon. It’s tied somehow to Umbriel and Vuhon.”

“You’ve been hunting Vuhon all of these years?”

“I spent many of them merely surviving.”

“You were in Morrowind when all of this happened?”

Sul made an ugly sound that Attrebus later would realize was the man’s bitterest chuckle.

“I was in the ministry,” he answered, “I was also thrown into Oblivion. For thirty-eight years.”

“With Vuhon?”

Sul rubbed his forehead. “The ingenium used souls to keep a sort of vent into Oblivion open, specifically into the realm of the daedra prince, Clavicus Vile. You know of him, I assume?”

“Of course. He has a shrine not far from the Imperial City. They say you can make a pact with him, given the right cantations.”

“That’s true,” Sul agreed. “Although a pact with Vile is one you’re likely to regret. He’s not the most amiable of Oblivion princes.”

“And yet he allowed Vuhon to draw energies from his realm?”

Sul cracked his neck. “Vile has a thing for souls,” he said, “and if he noticed the rift at all, he probably enjoyed what was coming through more than he missed the energies going out. It’s even possible that Vuhon made a formal bargain with the prince. I just don’t know.” He gestured at a log and sat on it. Attrebus followed suit.

“When we arrived, there was someone—or something—waiting for us. But it wasn’t Vile. It was shaped like a man, but dark, with eyes like holes into nothing. He had a sword, and as we lay there, it laughed and tossed it through the rift we’d come through. I tried to follow it, but it was too late.”

“Waiting for you? How did it know you were coming?”

“He called himself Umbra, and like Vile, he had a thing for souls. He’d been attracted to the rift by the ingenium and had even tried to enlarge it, with no success. So he’d cast a fortune and learned that a day was coming when it would briefly widen, and so there he was.”

“Just to throw a sword through it?”

“Apparently. Umbra took us captive—he was powerful, almost as powerful as a daedra prince. In fact, it was the power of a daedra prince—he’d somehow managed to cut a piece from Clavicus Vile himself.”

“Cut a piece? Of a daedra prince?”

“Not a physical piece, like an arm or a heart,” Sul clarified. “Daedra aren’t physical beings like you and me. But the effect was similar—Vile was, in a sense, injured. Badly so. And Umbra became stronger, though still not so strong as Vile. Not strong enough to escape his realm once Vile circumscribed it against him.

“Circumscribed?”

“Changed the nature of the ‘walls’ of his realm, made them absolutely impermeable to Umbra and the power he had stolen. Understand, at all costs the prince didn’t want Umbra to escape. The circumscription was so strong he couldn’t even go through the rift himself—but the sword could.”

“Again, why the sword?” Attrebus wondered.

“Umbra claimed to have once been captive in the weapon. He feared that if Vile got his hands on it, he would return him to it.”

“This is making me dizzy,” Attrebus said.

“But you wanted to hear everything, remember?” Sul snapped. “Well, let’s keep it simple then, shall we? Clavicus Vile was nursing his wounds and hunting for Umbra. Umbra used his stolen power to conceal himself in one of the cities at the fringe of Vile’s realm. But he still couldn’t escape. Vuhon promised him that if Umbra spared his life, he would build a new ingenium, capable of escaping even Vile’s circumscription. Umbra agreed, and I suppose that’s what they did.”

“They brought the city with them?”

Sul shrugged. “I don’t know about that part. I never saw much of the city. Vuhon wasn’t very happy with me. He only kept me alive to torture. After a few years he forgot about me and I escaped. I had some arts, and since the forbidding wasn’t on me, I managed to leave Vile’s realm, albeit into another part of Oblivion.”

“So it’s Umbra that wants the sword, not Vuhon?”

“It might be either. Maybe Vuhon has turned against Umbra and seeks to imprison him. Whatever the case, we can’t let them have it.”

Attrebus opened his mouth, but Sul jerked his head from side to side. “Enough. You know what you need to know for now.”

“I—So I allow all this—we still can’t get there in time.”

“No,” Sul said. “As I said, there is a way. If we survive it.”

“What way would that be?”

“We’ll take a shortcut. Through Oblivion.”

And he left Attrebus there with the willows and soft, gliding voices of the night birds.

FOUR

“Perfect,” Toel opined, his mysterious little grin turning into something a bit larger. He dipped his finger in the little bowl of viscous mist and brought the bit that clung to it up to his lips for another taste. With his other hand he stroked the back of her neck lightly, familiarly, and she felt her cheeks warm.

“I’ve come to expect the very best from you,” he said. “Come around this afternoon so we can discuss your progress here.”

He gave a perfunctory nod to the rest of the staff and then left.

Still embarrassed, Annaïg studied her vapor another moment. When she looked up, the rest of the cooks had returned silently to their jobs. All except Slyr.

“Another evening with Toel,” she said softly. “How he must enjoy your conversation.”

Annaïg felt a bit of sting from that. “I hope you don’t think anything else is going on.”

“What would I know?” she replied. “I’ve never been invited to Lord Toel’s quarters. How can I imagine what might go on there?”

“It sounds like you’ve been imagining it quite a lot,” Annaïg returned. “But if you’re fantasizing about anything improper, that’s nothing to do with me.”

“Him having you there at all is improper,” Slyr countered. “It’s bad for morale.”

“Well, maybe you ought to tell him that.”

Slyr looked back down at the powders she was sifting.

“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “You know I worry.”

“You’re still here, aren’t you?”

“It’s only been a few days,” she said. “He never even speaks to me.”

Annaïg snorted a little laugh. “Now you’re talking like he’s your lover.”

Slyr looked back up. “I just worry, that’s all.”

“Well, worry over this for a bit, then,” she replied, rising to her feet. “I need to go check on the root wine vats.”

Toel’s kitchen was very different from Qijne’s inferno. There was only one pit of hot stone and one oven, and neither was of particular size. In their place were long tables of polished red granite. Some supported brass steaming chambers, centrifuges, a hundred kinds of alchemical apparatuses. Others were entirely for the preparation of raw ingredients. While the production of distillations, infusions, and precipitations of soul-stuff had been a minor part of Qijne’s kitchen, here more than half the cooking space was dedicated to the coquinaria spiritualia. The rest of the cavernous kitchen was devoted to one thing—feeding trees.

She remembered the strange collar of the vegetation that depended from the edge and rocky sides of Umbriel. She didn’t know much about trees, so it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder how they survived. As it turned out, plants—like people and animals—needed more than sunlight and water to live. They also needed food of a sort, and Toel’s kitchen made that food. Huge siphons drew water and detritus from the bottom of the sump and brought it into holding vats, where it was redirected into parsers that separated out the matter most useful to the trees. What wasn’t used was returned to the sump. What remained was fortified by the addition of certain formulae before being pumped to the roots through a vast ring beneath Umbriel’s rim. Toel wanted her to learn all of the processes in his kitchen, so she spent an hour or so each day with the vats, and ostensibly she was experimenting with some of the formulae to try and improve upon them.

In fact, the vats were very far from everything else, and very quiet. And, in a large cabinet in the work area, was the most complete collection of materials she had ever seen.

Dimple, her new hob, was already there when she arrived, and had found four substances for her to examine. None of them smelled right, so she sent him away and went back to her experiment with the tree-wine. She wondered if trees tasted anything, if they knew one “flavor” of tree-wine from another. She stirred a reagent of calprine into her flask wand and watched it turn yellow.

After a moment she saw Dimple return with more containers.

Absorbed in what she was doing, she didn’t actually look at what he’d brought, but when she took a break, she rubbed her eyes and turned her attention there.

One of the jars was half filled with a black liquid. She blinked and hesitated, not wanting to get her hopes up too high, not wanting to be disappointed again.

She knew it by its smell.

“That’s it, then,” she whispered. “Everything I need.”

But she felt oddly empty, because that wasn’t really true.

She didn’t have Mere-Glim and the knowledge she needed to destroy Umbriel. Or her locket, so Attrebus would know where she was.

If Attrebus was still alive. The last time they’d spoken, there was something about him, vulnerability. And the way he talked to her, as if he cared, as if he was risking his life just for her …

She shook that thought off and read the label on the jar.

ICHOR OF WINGED TWILIGHT.

Well, that made sense. She put it in the little cabinet that was for her private use, along with the other ingredients she needed, and a great many she did not. Then she finished out the hour and went back to help with dinner.

Slyr watched her dress in yet another new outfit that Dulg had appeared with, a simple green gossamer slip of a gown. The other woman was halfway through a bottle of wine already.

“Don’t forget me,” she said as Annaïg left.

As usual, she met him on his balcony. They sipped a red slurry that—despite being cold—burned her throat gently as it went down.

“Lord Irrel sent his compliments,” Toel said.

“He enjoyed your meal, then.”

Toel nodded. “The meal was not uninspired,” he said. “I am an artist. But you have added so much to my palette, and the special touches you invent—Lord Irrel is usually pleased with what I make him, but lately his compliments have come more frequently and sincerely.”

“I’m happy to have helped, then.”

She felt a little giddy, and realized that whatever was in her drink was already having an effect.

“With me you will become great,” he said. “But there is more to being great than being an artist. You must also have vision, and the strength to do the thing that must be done. Do you understand?”

“I think so, Chef.”

“And you must learn to make choices uncolored by any sort of passion.”

Annaïg took another drink, not liking the direction the conversation was going.

“When I took you from Qijne, I spared Slyr as well. But since she has been here, I haven’t felt justified in that decision. I rather think she should go.”

“Without her, I would never have come to your attention,” Annaïg said. “Without her, I would never have learned so much in so little time.”

“And yet how far you have outstripped her, and how slowly she is learning the ways of my kitchen. Do you really believe she has any business being here?”

“She saved my life,” Annaïg said. “Qijne would have killed me.”

“Yes, I know that,” he replied. “In that moment she was very useful to me, and to you. But that moment is gone.”

“I pray you,” she said.

“Don’t pray to me,” he said. “I give this decision to you. You could have Sarha or Loy for assistants—with them you would learn quickly, rise quickly. You could work directly for me, as my understudy. But so long as Slyr is here, she will be your only assistant. But if you ask me to rid you of her, I will do it in an instant.”

“Let her stay, please.”

“As I said,” he went on, disappointment evident in his voice, “it’s your choice, and remains your choice. I hope you will try to consider that decision without passion or sympathy. I hope you will be great.”

“I will try to be great,” Annaïg said. “But I hope to do it without betraying my friends.”

“Does this work, where you are from?”

“I … I don’t know. Sometimes, I hope.”

He nodded and his gaze found hers, and in his eyes she saw something both frightening and compelling. She felt again the caress on the back of her neck, and her belly tingled.

“There is another decision I give you to make,” he said, very softly. “Like the first, you are free to make it on any evening I have you here.”

She couldn’t find any words, or even think straight. She had flirted with a few boys, kissed a few, but it had always seemed clumsy and ridiculous, and she’d certainly never been swept away by the sort of passion she had read of.

But this wasn’t a boy. This was a man, a man who wanted her, wanted her very badly, who could probably take her if he desired it.

She realized she was breathing hard.

“I—ah …” she started. “I wonder if I can have some water.”

He smiled, and leaned back, and signed for water to be brought, and she sat there the rest of the evening feeling drunk and foolish and very much a little girl. He could see right through it all, through any manner and bearing she tried to fabricate.

But beneath all of that there was this other, little voice, the one that reminded her that it should always be her choice, that it shouldn’t be something someone could condescend to give you. And that voice didn’t go away, and when dinner was over she returned to her room, where Slyr had passed out, alone.

FIVE

A short morning’s ride brought them to a hill overlooking Water’s Edge, a bustling market town that—like Ione—had done most of its growing in the last few decades. During the years when the old Empire was collapsing, it had served as a free port when Bravil and Leyawiin were independent and often at odds with each other, and Water’s Edge had been protected by both and by what remained of the Imperial navy. Even enemies needed some neutral ground for trade, a place where conflict was set aside.

And now that the Empire was reunited, it was growing still, attracting entrepreneurs and tradesmen from crime-ridden Bravil especially.

“I don’t understand why we didn’t just go to Bravil,” Attrebus complained to Sul. “That’s at least in the right direction.”

“This was closer,” Sul replied. “Distance doesn’t matter so much as time. We’re short of time as it is. If I can get the things I need here, we have a far better chance of succeeding.”

“And if you can’t get what you need?”

“The College of Whispers has a cynosure here,” the Dunmer replied. “The things I’m after aren’t terribly uncommon.”

“I should think opening a portal into oblivion would require something rather extraordinary.”

“It does,” Sul said. “But I already have that.” He tapped his head, then swung himself up on his horse.

Attrebus began saddling his own mount.

“What are you doing?” the Dunmer asked.

“You said you wanted allies. I’m going to see what I can do.”

Sul looked as if he tasted something bad. “Let me check things out first,” he said. He switched his reins and rode off.

Attrebus watched him go, then resumed making his horse ready.

“You’re going into town, too?” Lesspa asked.

Attrebus nodded. “Yes. There’s a garrison there, and I know the commander. I need to send word to my father I’m still alive. I might even be able to recruit a few more men.”

“We aren’t enough for you, Prince?”

“Yes,” Attrebus said. “About that. I appreciate your help up to this point, but you deserve to know what we’re up against. When you’ve heard me out, if you still want to go, that’s great. But if you don’t, I’ll understand.”

“My ears are twitching,” she replied.

And so he told her about Umbriel—or at least everything he knew about it—and about Sul’s plan to reach Morrowind. When he finished, she just regarded him for a moment. Then she made a little bow.

“Thank you,” she said. Then she walked back over to her people.

He finished saddling, then splashed a bit of cold water from the stream on his face and shaved. By the time he was done with that, he noticed one of the Khajiit tents was already down.

He sighed, but part of him was relieved. He needed them, yes, but the thought of leading more people to be slaughtered was a hard one.

His mood lifted a little as he entered the town and felt—for the first time since crossing the border—that he was really back in the Empire, in his element. The shops—many with freshly painted signs—cheered him, as did the children laughing and playing in the streets. A question merrily answered by a girl drawing water from the well at the town center sent him toward the Imperial garrison, a couple of wooden barracks flanking an older building of dark stone. A guard stood outside the door, wearing his father’s colors.

“Good day,” the guard said as he drew near.

“Good day to you,” Attrebus replied, watching for the glimmer of recognition, but either the man did not know his face or was good at concealing his reactions. “Can you tell me who is on post here?”

“That would be Captain Larsus,” the fellow said.

“Florius Larsus?” Attrebus asked.

“The same,” the guard replied.

“I should like to see him,” Attrebus said.

“Very good. And whom shall I say is calling?”

“Just tell him it’s Treb,” he replied.

The guard’s eyes did widen a bit, and he went into the building. A moment later the door swung open and Florius appeared. He looked irritated at first, but when his gaze settled on Attrebus, his jaw hung open.

“By the Divines,” he said. “You’re supposed to be dead!”

“I hope I get to have my own opinion about that,” he answered.

Larsus bounded over to him and clapped him on the shoulders. “Great gods, man, get in here. Do you even know how many men your father has out looking for you?”

Attrebus followed him into a simple but ample room with a desk, a few bookshelves, and a cabinet from which Larsus produced a bottle of brandy and two cups.

“If everyone thinks I’m dead, then why does my father have men out searching for me?”

“Well, he doesn’t believe it. But the rumor is they found your body.”

“Some rumors are better than others.”

Larsus poured the brandy and passed the cup to Attrebus.

“Well, it’s good to see you alive,” the captain said. “But don’t keep me in suspense. Tell me what happened.”

“My companions were all slain, and I was taken captive. They took me to Elsweyr with the intention of selling me, but they ended up dying instead. And so here I am.”

“That’s—I don’t know what to say. Are you alone?”

“Yes,” Attrebus lied.

“Well, you look well enough. A little battered—listen, I’ll arrange for your transport home immediately, and send a courier ahead to let your father know the good news.”

“Send the courier,” Attrebus said. “But I won’t be returning to the Imperial City.”

Larsus frowned, but at that moment another fellow entered the room—a man with sallow Breton features and curly black hair. He looked familiar—Attrebus was sure he had seen him at court, or at least in the palace.

“Riente,” Larsus said. “See who it is!”

Riente cocked his head to the side, and then bowed. “Your highness,” he said. “It’s wondrous to see you alive.”

“Captain Larsus and I were just discussing that,” Attrebus said.

“Well, I shouldn’t intrude, then,” Riente said. “I only came to report that the matter at the Little Orsinium Tavern is cleared up.”

“Thank you, Riente.”

“Captain, majesty,” he said, bowing again before vanishing through the door whence he’d come.

Larsus turned back to Attrebus. “Now, Treb, what are you talking about? My orders are to return you to the Imperial City without delay.”

“I’m giving you different orders,” Attrebus said.

“You can’t countermand your father.” He paused and looked a bit sheepish. “My orders include permission to restrain you if necessary.”

“But you won’t do that.”

Larsus hesitated again. “I will.”

Attrebus leaned forward. “Listen, Florius. I always thought we were friends, but recent events make me wonder. I know now that my life, up until now, has been something of a fantasy. Perhaps you, like so many, only pretended to like me. But I remember those days after we first met, when we were six? Did it really all go back so far?”

Larsus colored. “No,” he said. “We were friends, Treb. We are. But the Emperor …”

“I can’t go back, not yet. There are things I must do. And I need your help.”

Larsus sighed. “What things?”

And so for the second time that day, Attrebus recounted what he knew of Umbriel.

“I’ve heard of it,” Larsus acknowledged. “But this doesn’t change anything. When the Emperor learns I’ve let you go, it’s my head.”

“I won’t let that happen.”

“How can you prevent it, if you’re in Morrowind, probably dead?”

“I’m asking you to go with me, Florius. It’s the real thing this time, not the playacting of before. But this needs doing, and I’d like you at my side.”

“Just the two of us?”

“I lied. There is one other.”

“I—even if you can keep me out of the dungeons, this will end my career, Treb.”

“If we succeed, all will be forgiven. My father could never punish a savior of Cyrodiil—the people would never have it, and you know how quickly stories about me get around. I’ll write letters to my biographers—the story of our quest will be circulating in days.” He raised his voice, like a bard. “‘The prince, all thought him dead, but he rose up from defeat and went to find the foe …’” He returned to normal speech. “My father will have to embrace the story. And your part in it.”

Florius squinted, as if Attrebus’s words were still there in the air to be examined.

Then he nodded. “Very well,” he said. He rustled through the desk. “Write your letters and post them at the Gaping Frog—it’s just off the town square. I’ll send your father a message by Imperial courier, informing him of your safety—and my resignation. I’ll meet you at the Frog in, say, three hours.”

“I knew I could count on you, Florius.”

“I’m a fool,” Florius said.

“But you’re my fool now.”

“Go on. I’ll see you in three hours.”

The Gaping Frog was almost empty when Attrebus made his way in and took a seat at the smoothest table he saw, which still had its share of nicks, scratches, and knife-scribed autographs. The place was mostly empty, rather sunny for a tavern, smelling pleasantly of ale and some sort of stew. He had an ale and wrote two more or less identical letters to his best-known biographers and posted them with the barkeep, a female orc with two broken teeth. Then—it being about midday—he had a bowl of what turned out to be mutton daube and two more ales, and sat there, feeling full and civilized, wondering how Sul had made out.

The few people who had come in for lunch wandered out, until it was just Attrebus and the barkeep. But less than a minute after the last of the other patrons left, the door opened again. He looked up, thinking it might be Florius come a bit early, but instead it was a group of people. At first he didn’t understand what was wrong with their faces, but then he understood; they were wearing masks. And all of them had naked blades.

He bolted up, drawing his own sword, Flashing. The barkeep made an odd sound, and he saw her stagger and then drop heavily behind the counter.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Show your faces.” He made a wild cut at the one nearest, but stepped back as his companions moved to circle him.

The door burst open again, and the man on his left jerked his head to look. Attrebus thrust with Flashing, catching him in the ribs. The man cursed and fell back, clutching his side, even as one of his companions cut at Treb’s head. Attrebus dropped, feeling the wake of the blade on his scalp.

He was struggling to get his blade back up when something big hit his only remaining attacker. The other three were busy defending their own lives against Lesspa and her cousins, and he now saw that it was Lesspa’s brother, Sha’jal, savaging the man at his feet.

By the time he got around them, the rest of the fray was over.

Attrebus rushed to the bar, but the barkeep was dead with a knife in her right eye.

“Are you all right?” Lesspa asked.

“I am, thanks to you,” he replied. “I thought you were leaving.”

“No, no. We sent the kits and the old ones back with a few warriors, but the rest of us stay with you. We’ve been watching out for you. These fellows with their masks, they didn’t seem to have the best of intentions.”

“Take their masks off,” Attrebus said, bending toward the corpse nearest him.

Four of them were unfamiliar, but the fourth was Riente, the fellow from Florius’s office.

“Florius!” he swore.

He ran the two hundred yards back to the garrison, not caring if the cats were with him or not. He shoved the door open, blade in hand.

Florius was in his chair, with his head on the table. There wasn’t much blood; he’d been stabbed at the base of the skull.

“It told you to wait,” Sul said. “I should have tied you up before I left.”

“He was going with us,” Attrebus said. “I talked him into it. I killed him.”

“You killed him the moment he knew who you were. There was a guard dead, too—did you talk to a guard?”

“Yes,” he said, feeling sick.

“The massacre of your men, and now this? You need to ask yourself—who wants you dead?”

Attrebus closed his eyes, trying to concentrate. “I’ve seen Riente before. In the Imperial City. And some of the things Radhasa said made it sound like someone there had hired her. I assumed it was some criminal faction, but … I don’t know who could want me murdered.”

“It’s not just anyone,” Sul said. “It’s someone with a lot of connections. They may have scried you were coming here, but from your description it sounds more likely that they put someone here, in Bravil, Leyawiin—anyplace they thought you might turn up.”

“One of the dukes, my uncle maybe. Maybe someone who doesn’t want me to be Emperor.”

“Yes, but why now? Why not a year ago, in your sleep with venom from some woman’s lips? Why not a year from now?”

“You think it has something to do with Umbriel?”

“What else could it be?” Sul demanded. “Track back. Who knew what you were up to?”

“Gulan. My father. Annaïg. Hierem, my father’s minister. But we weren’t in private—others surely heard.”

Sul’s eyes went a bit strange for a moment, as if something Attrebus had said registered with him, but then it was gone.

“Ah, well,” he said. “It’s moot for the moment.”

“Florius is dead. It’s not moot.”

“For the moment, I said. I found the things we needed. When both moons are in the sky tonight, we’ll go where no one will follow—that, you can be sure of. Now, I’m going back to town to sell the horses, because we can’t take them with us, and to pick up more supplies for the trip. This time, stay put. I’ll take some of the cats to help.”

Sul returned a few hours before sundown, and under his direction they began to hike north, first on the trail, then through the bottomlands. At dusk they reached their destination—the ruins of an Oblivion gate, not notably different from the one at Ione, except there wasn’t a town built around it. They gathered on the glassy, fused earth, and Attrebus and the cats knelt in a circle around Sul, who walked among them dabbing a red ointment from a small jar and marking each of their foreheads, and finally his own.

When he was finished, he stoppered the jar and put it in his haversack.

“Get what you need,” he said. “We’ll be traveling light. When we start, stay close to me, as close as you can. We’ll be moving fast.”

Attrebus shouldered his pack and put his hand on Flashing’s hilt. He faced the Khajiit. There were four of the massive Senchetigers and four riders. Lesspa with Sha’jal, Taaj with S’enjara, M’kai with Ahapa, and J’lasha riding M’qar.

“You’re sure about this, all of you?” Attrebus asked them.

“Our lances are with you,” Lesspa said.

“Only our lances,” M’kai added. “I hope you know how to use them.”

His accent was so thick and his tone so solemn that it took a snicker from Taaj before he realized M’kai was joking.

“We’re ready, Prince,” Lesspa said.

“Okay,” he told Sul. “I’m ready, too. You can start whenever.” He looked up at the moons.

Sul nodded and the sky shattered.

SIX

The landscape beneath Mere-Glim had changed considerably since he’d last been in the Fringe Gyre. Gone the dense forest, winding rivers, and oxbow lakes, all replaced by ash-colored desert and jagged peaks. That meant they were out of Black Marsh at last, and well over Morrowind.

He’d never been out of his homeland before.

Not that it mattered anymore. He was dead to the Hist, and almost everyone he knew was dead. For all intents and purposes, he hadn’t been in Black Marsh since he and Annaïg had come upon Umbriel. Crossing a border was just a formality.

Of course, he could jump. Why shouldn’t he? His body would be too broken to become one of the living dead he could see massed in every direction now that the concealing canopy was gone.

He hissed. Maybe later. Annaïg was probably dead, but until he was sure, he would go through the motions as if they mattered.

So back up the tree he went, retracing his path to where he’d met Fhena.

True to her word, she appeared within half an hour, smiling. Her grin broadened when he handed her a sack full of orchid shrimp.

“I thought you might not be coming back,” she said.

“I … got in trouble last time,” he said.

Her smile vanished. “I didn’t tell anyone,” she said. “I promise.”

“It wasn’t that,” he said. “I got distracted on the way back. I was late. Since then I’ve had to be a little more careful.”

“Well, I’m glad you came back. Everyone else I meet—they’re all pretty much the same. You’re very strange.”

“A … thanks.”

“I mean it as a compliment.”

“I’ll take it that way, then.”

She perched on one of the smaller branches and crossed her legs. “Where you come from—is everyone strange, like you?” she asked, plucking one shrimp from her sack and biting its head off.

“Well, of course where I’m from doesn’t exist anymore, thanks to Umbriel.” At least the place that I grew up doesn’t. Everyone I know there is probably dead.”

“I know. I’m sorry. But what I meant—”

“I know what you meant,” he replied. “Where I was from—is called Black Marsh. That’s where my people are from. But there are other sorts of people, just as there are here.”

“What do you mean, ‘other sorts of people’?”

Right, he remembered. They’re really all just worms. Their appearance is superficial.

“Well, there is a whole race of people, for instance, who look a lot like you. We call them the Dunmer, and they used to live in Morrowind, which is what’s below us now. Now most of them are gone.”

“Used to live?”

“There was an explosion,” he said. “A volcano erupted and destroyed most of their cites. Then my people came in and killed or drove out more.”

“Why? To claim their souls?”

“No, because—it’s a long story. The Dunmer have preyed on my people for centuries. We paid them back for that. The few that remain are scattered. Most are on Soulstheim, an island far north of here.”

She clapped her hands in delight. “I don’t understand half of what you’re saying. More than half.”

“That makes you happy?”

“Yes! Because it gives me questions. I love questions. Like—what’s a volcano?”

“It’s a mountain that has fire inside of it.”

“See? So what’s a mountain?”

It went on like that for a while, and he actually found himself enjoying it, but finally he knew it was best he go, so he said so.

“Can we meet again?” she asked.

“I’ll try to come back.” He gathered his courage to ask his question, but she swam ahead of him.

“I found your friend!” she said. “I should have told you to start with, but I was afraid you would leave without talking to me if I did.”

“You know where Annaïg is? She’s alive?”

“I’m sorry—were you hoping she was dead?”

“No, I—where is she?”

“I didn’t mention you, when I was asking,” she assured him. “She’s very famous in the kitchens, especially after the slaughter.”

“Slaughter?”

“She was in one kitchen, but then another kitchen invaded it to capture her. Like your story about your people invading Morrowind, I guess. And now she’s in a much higher kitchen.”

“Do you know which one?”

She concentrated for a moment. Then her face brightened again. “Toel,” she said. “Toel Kitchen.”

“And do you know where it is?”

Her face fell. “I don’t. I don’t know my way around outside of the Fringe Gyre. I could ask Kalmo or someone else who makes deliveries, but then they might want to know why I’m asking.”

“It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t ask, for now. I don’t want to get you in trouble. It’s enough to know she’s alive.”

“I’m glad I was helpful,” Fhena said.

“You’ve no idea,” Mere-Glim told her. He hesitated, and then touched his muzzle to her cheek. She jerked away in surprise.

“Why did you do that?” she asked.

“It’s called a kiss,” he said, feeling stupid. “Humans and mer do it to express—”

“I know what a kiss is,” she replied. “We do it during procreation. Not like that, though. Are you asking me to procreate?”

“No,” Mere-Glim said. “No. That was a different kind of kiss—it just expresses thanks. I’m not trying … No.”

“I wonder if we even could?” she wondered.

“I’m going now,” Glim said, and hurried away.

Mere-Glim woke from nightmares of emptiness and pain and it was a moment before he understood someone was whispering his name. He sat up, grunting, and made out Wert’s features in the dim light.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Come with me,” Wert replied. “We want to talk to you.”

He groggily followed Wert through the skraw passages and then out of them, into a place that had a stale sort of smell to it, as if it wasn’t used very often. Light wands had been placed in a little pile, and around it stood eight other skraws.

“What is this?” Glim asked.

Wert cleared his voice. “You stood up to the overseer,” he said.

“I was angry,” Glim replied. “And I’m not used to being treated like that.”

“He’d never felt the pain before,” another of the skraws said. “I’ll bet he wouldn’t do it again.”

“Well?” Wert said.

“Well, what?”

“Would you stand up to him again?”

“I don’t know. If I had reason to. It’s only pain.”

“He might have killed you. Probably the only reason he didn’t is that there’s only one of you, and you’re so valuable. But that’ll change soon.”

“Why are you asking me this?” Glim snapped. “Why do you care?”

“You said it yourself,” Wert said. “Why should we have to take the vapors? I didn’t really understand you when you started talking that way. It’s hard to think like that. But you’ve been most of your life without overseers. Things occur to you that don’t to us.”

“It’s never occurred to you that your lives could be better?”

“No. But now you’ve brought it up, see? Now it’s hard to make the thought go away.”

“And you’ve spread it around.”

“Right.”

“So what do you want with me?”

“Let’s say we want free of the vapors—just that one thing. How do we go about that?”

Glim almost felt like laughing. Here was Annaïg’s resistance, such as it was.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I haven’t thought about it. I’m not sure I want to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this isn’t my sort of thing,” Glim replied. “I’m not interested in leading a revolution.”

“But that’s not right,” Wert blurted. “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“Situation? You haven’t done anything yet, have you?”

“Situation,” Wert repeated, tapping his head.

“Look—” Glim began, but then stopped. He could use this, couldn’t he? If they thought he was leading them in some sort of insurrection, he could use them to get to Annaïg.

He saw they were all watching him expectantly.

“Look,” he said again, “without the sump, no one is born. Probably more than half of the food supply comes from here, and I’ll bet the Fringe Gyre needs water from here to produce the rest. And we control the sump.”

“But the overseers control us.”

“But they can’t—or won’t—do what we do. What if things started going wrong? Mysteriously? We don’t tell anyone that we’re behind it, and they punish us, but if things keep going wrong—if water doesn’t go where it’s supposed to, if the orchid shrimp die because we forget to scatter the nutrients, well, we’ll make a point. They can’t kill us all, because then who would see that new skraws are born? And then we let them know that all we ask for everything to go back to normal is something better than the vapors, something that doesn’t hurt you so much.”

He saw they were all just staring at him, dumbstruck.

“That’s crazy,” one of them finally said.

“No,” Wert breathed. “It’s genius. Glim, how do we start?”

“Quietly,” he said. “For now, the only thing I want you to do is make maps.”

“Maps?”

“Maps of any place we deliver to—food, nutrients, sediment—anything. I want to know where the siphons at the bottom of the Drop go and why. Do we have access to the ingenium through any of them?”

“I mean, what’s a map?” Wert asked.

Glim hissed out a long sigh, and then began to explain.

SEVEN

Attrebus screeched involuntarily and the Khajiit howled; the sensation was like falling—not down, but in all directions at once. The moons were gone, and in their place a ceiling of smoke and ash. Stifling heat surrounded them and the air stank of sulfur and hot iron. They stood on black lava, and lakes of fire stretched off before them.

“Stay together!” Sul shouted. He took a step, and again the unimaginable sensation, and now they were in utter darkness—but not silence, for all around them were chittering sounds and the staccato scurrying of hundreds of feet.

They were in an infinite palace of colored glass.

They were on an icy plane with a burning sky.

They were standing by a dark red river, and the smell of blood was nearly suffocating.

They were in the deepest forest Attrebus had ever seen.

He was braced for the next transition, but Sul was suddenly swearing.

“What?” Attrebus said. “Where are we? Is this still Oblivion?”

“Yes,” he said “We’ve been interrupted. He must have sniffed out my spoor and laid a trap.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is part of a trail I made to escape Oblivion,” he said. “It took me years to make it. It starts in Azura’s realm and ends in Morrowind. I used the sympathy of Dagon’s gate to enter his realm at the point my trail crossed it, so we really started in the middle. A few more turns and we would have been there. Now …”

He scratched the stubble on his chin and glanced at the leaves overhead.

“We’re lucky,” he murmured. “We have some time before dark. We might have a chance.”

“A chance against whom?” Attrebus asked

“The Hunter,” Sul answered. “The Father of the Manbeasts—Prince Hircine.”

In the distance Attrebus heard the sound of a horn, then another behind him.

“We’re being hunted by a daedra prince?”

“The Hungry Cat, we call him,” Lesspa said. She actually sounded excited. “I knew coming with you was the thing to do. There could be no worthier opponent than Prince Hircine.”

“That may be,” Attrebus said, “but I don’t intend to die here, no matter how honorable a death it might be.”

“He won’t necessarily kill us,” Sul said absently, turning slowly, looking out through the curiously clear forest and its enormous trees. “He didn’t kill me, the time he caught me. He just kept me here for a few years.”

“How did you escape?”

“That’s a very long story, and I didn’t do it without help.”

“Well, being held here won’t do either.”

“He’ll probably kill us,” Sul said. He pointed. “It’s that way—another door that will put us back on track. It’s in a more difficult place, which is why I prefer this one—but it will do.”

“And if it’s trapped, too?”

“Hircine always gives a chance,” Lesspa said. “That’s his way.”

“She’s right,” Sul agreed. “It’s not sport if the prey can’t escape.”

The horns sounded again, and a third joined them, in the direction Sul had just pointed.

“That’s bad,” Attrebus remarked.

“Those are Hircine’s drivers,” Sul said, “not the prince himself. We haven’t heard his horn—you’ll know it when you do, believe me. If we can get past the driver, we might have a chance.”

“We’ll get past him,” Lesspa said. “Mount behind me, Prince Attrebus. Sul, you ride S’enjara with Taaj.”

Attrebus climbed up behind Lesspa. There was no saddle, or anything to hold onto but her, so he reached around her waist.

The tigers began at an easy lope that was still far faster than Attrebus could have run. Lesspa had a lance in her left hand, and so did Taaj. The other two Khajiit had small but efficient-looking bows.

The horns sounded again, the loudest now being the one they were headed toward.

Because of the lack of understory, and because the huge trees were spaced so far apart, they caught glimpses of Hircine’s driver from a fair distance, but it wasn’t until the last thirty yards that Attrebus saw what they faced.

The driver himself might have been a massive albino Nord with long, sinewy arms. He was bare to the waist and covered in blue tattoos. His mount was the largest bear Attrebus had ever seen, and four only slightly smaller bears ran along with him.

“Bears,” Lesspa sighed. It sounded as if she were happy. She shouted a few orders in her native dialect.

The archers wheeled and began firing, but Sha’jal was suddenly moving so fast that Attrebus nearly fell off. Everything to the sides blurred; only their destination was clear, and getting larger with terrifying speed.

Sha’jal bellowed out a deafening roar and bounded up on one of the bears, using it as a step to kick himself even higher, and all of the weight went out of Attrebus as they soared straight at the driver. He brought up a spear with a leaf-shaped blade bigger than some short swords, but not quick enough to hit the huge cat. Lesspa’s lance went true into the driver’s chest, but the resulting impact spun them half around, and Attrebus finally lost his grip. He hit the ground on his shoulder, felt pain jar through his skeleton, but all he could think of were the bears all around him, so he scrambled back up despite the pain.

A good thing, too, because one was coming right for him. He drew Flashing, made a wild stroke, and staggered aside as the bear lunged for his throat. Flashing bounced off the beast’s skull, leaving a cut that appeared to only make it madder. Then it reared up over him, giving him the opportunity to thrust his blade into its belly. It bawled and threw its weight on him, wrenching his weapon from his hand. He threw up his arms to protect his head and tried to roll aside.

He was only partly successful; the beast came down on his lower body, claws ripping into his byrnie. He kicked at the crushing weight, but it was only the bear rolling off to lick at its wounded belly that freed him. Heaving for breath, he took Flashing back up and chopped though its neck.

A flash like lightning lit the trees; he turned and saw another of the bears topple, smoking, as Sul leapt over it and toward the heart of the fray. The white giant was gone, and in its place something between a man and a bear was fighting the Sench-tigers. It hurled two away, but even as it did, Sha’jal leapt on the driver’s back and closed his viselike jaws behind his neck. The other Khajiit were finishing off the mount. The other bears lay in brown heaps.

The were-bear bawled and tried to shake free. Sul strode up almost casually and cut him from crotch to sternum.

The tigers plunged into the were-beasts’ steaming entrails. They were quick about it, and before Attrebus had taken another twenty breaths, they were mounted again, riding hard as the other horns drew nearer. By the sound of it, one of the drivers was behind them and the other was coming from their left flank.

“Hold on!” Lesspa yelled. He was just wondering why when they were suddenly moving downhill in what amounted to a controlled fall. They burst into open sunlight and bounded over a stream as they left the forest behind and plunged downslope to a grassy savanna. A red sun was just touching the horizon, painting bloody the river that meandered across the flatland. Of course, this was Oblivion, so it might be blood. Off to what he presumed was the south, he saw a herd of some large beasts, but before he could figure out what they were, they were on the plain and he couldn’t make them out anymore. They were in the same general direction as one of the drivers who was approaching and blowing, so he hoped that whatever they were, they might slow him down.

“More our element, grassland,” Lesspa told him.

It was only then that he noticed that M’qar was riderless.

“Where’s J’lasha?” he asked Lesspa.

“On Khenarthi’s path,” she replied.

“I’m sorry.”

“He died well. There’s no sorrow in that.”

A herd of antelopes with twisting horns scattered at their approach.

Lesspa slowed Sha’jal to a walk and dismounted. Taaj and Sul followed her lead.

“The other drivers are still coming,” Attrebus pointed out.

“The Sench are sprinters, not distance runners,” Lesspa replied. “They need to get their wind back if we’re to run again.”

They were parallel to the river now, which had dug itself a respectable ditch here, at least a hundred feet deep. It made Attrebus nervous to have a sheer drop on one side and riders coming from every other direction. He told Sul so.

“A tributary comes in up ahead,” Sul told him. “It makes a gentler slope going in, and we can get down into the canyon there. The door we’re looking for is up the canyon another mile or so.”

“You really think we’ll make it?”

“Hircine himself won’t show up until after it’s dark. He hunts with a pack of werewolves. Until then all we have to do is avoid the drivers.”

“Ground is shaking,” Lesspa observed.

Attrebus felt it, too. At first he wondered if it wasn’t some characteristic of Hircine’s plane; he’d heard that Oblivion realms were often unstable. But then he saw the cloud of dust off to the south and understood the truth; what he felt was the thunder of thousands of hooves.

“We probably want to avoid that, too,” he pointed out.

“The driver,” Sul growled.

“To mount!” Lesspa called, then sang out in Khajiit.

Once again the tigers dug in and flew along the edge of the precipice. He could see the stampede now, but could only tell that the herd was brown.

“Up ahead!” Sul shouted. “You see, there? That’s where we go down.”

Attrebus could see it, all right, and could see that they were never going to make it, not at the speed that herd was moving. In less than a minute they were close enough for him to see they were some sort of wild cattle, albeit cattle that probably stood six feet high at the shoulders and had horn-spans almost that wide.

Impossibly, the tigers increased their speed, and the tributary grew nearer, but now he could hear the beasts snorting and bellowing, closer and closer, a wall falling on him …