Lord of Souls: An Elder Scrolls Novel

by Greg Keyes

  “But I’m not often able to repay the favor,” she replied.

  “You might today,” he said. “Tell me about the trees.”

  “The trees?”

  “Yes.” He tapped on the nearest branch.

  “I’m not sure what to say about them,” she replied.

  “Well,” he said, trying to think how to go about this, “I’ve noticed that they produce nuts and fruit and even grains, of a sort. But what else?”

  “What else?” She clapped her hands. “Salt and sugar, acid and wine, vinegar and sulfur, iron and glass. The trees have a talent for making things—they just have to be told how.”

  “Who tells them?”

  She looked thoughtful. “Well, I’m not sure,” she said. “They’ve been making most things for so long, I think they may have forgotten. Or at least they don’t talk about it. They just tell us when something needs doing, or collecting, or when something isn’t right and them in the kitchens must help.”

  “Wait a minute,” Glim said. “The trees talk to you?”

  “Of course. Can’t you hear them?”

  “Almost,” Glim said. “Almost. But what does it mean?”

  Her eyes had widened, and he realized his spines were puffed out and he was giving off his fighting odor. He tried to calm himself.

  “What’s this about, Glim?” she asked.

  “It’s about me,” he said. “It’s about my people, and why they died.”

  “I don’t understand,” she said. “But I can see how upset you are. Can you explain?”

  Glim thought about that for a long moment. Annaïg would tell him not to trust the girl; she didn’t trust anyone on Umbriel. But Fhena had only ever helped him.

  “I would like to explain,” he finally said. “Because it might mean something to you. It might make you think of something. So don’t be afraid to interrupt me.”

  “I won’t,” she replied.

  “I’ve told you before; I’m from a place named Black Marsh. My people call themselves the Saxhleel, and others call us Argonians.”

  “I remember. And you said all of your people are the same.”

  “The same? Yes, compared to your people. We all have scales, and breathe beneath the water, that sort of thing. Umbriel chooses your form when you are born. Mine is chosen by—ah—heritage.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “It’s not important right now. We can talk about that later. What’s important is this; there is another race in Black Marsh—the Hist. They are sentient trees, and we are—connected to them. They are many and they are one, all attached at the root, and we, too, are joined to that root. Some say we were created by the Hist, to see for them the world where they cannot walk. They can call us or send us away. When we are named, we take of the sap of the Hist, and we are changed—sometimes a little, sometimes very much.”

  “What do you mean, ‘changed’?”

  “A few twelves of years ago, our country was invaded from Oblivion. The Hist knew it was going to happen, and called our people back to Black Marsh. Many of us were altered, made ready for the war that we had to fight. Made stronger, faster—able to endure terrible things.”

  “I’m starting to understand,” Fhena said. “You’re saying the Hist are much like the trees of our gyre.”

  “Yes. But not the same. They don’t speak to me as the Hist did. But you say they speak to you.”

  “Not in words,” she replied. “They dream, they experience, they communicate needs. I can’t imagine them making a plan, as you describe.”

  “But their sap can alter things, like that of the Hist.”

  “Oh, yes. But as I said, usually they have to be told.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “I still don’t understand why this is so upsetting to you.”

  “The Hist are supposed to be unified,” Glim said, “but at times certain trees have gone rogue, broken away from the others. It happened long, long ago in my city, and I think it happened again, not long before your world entered mine. A rogue tree helped Umbriel somehow, do you understand? It helped kill many, many of my people so they could serve Umbriel as dead things. And now I think it may have helped summon Umbriel here in the first place. Can you remember—”

  But Fhena’s eyes had become unfocused with memory. He stopped and waited.

  “We were in the void,” she said. “Nothing around. And then the trees began to sing a strange song, one I had never heard before. They sang and sang. It was beautiful. No one could remember such a thing happening before. And then we were here. They still sing it, but quietly now. Listen.”

  She took his hand and pressed it to the bark. It was strange, the roughness of the tree and the supple warmth of her hand, and for a moment that was all he experienced. But then she began to hum, and something seemed to turn in his head, and the soft burring that was all he had ever heard from the Fringe Gyre before suddenly sharpened and he heard it in tune with Fhena’s humming, a faint, rising and falling tone, along with a thousand harmonics, as if each seed and leaf had its own note to add. And he knew that melody, had known it since before his birth. The Hist sang it.

  But the Fringe version was a little different—simpler. Still, it drew him, pulling him out of language and thought, and for a long, long time he knelt there with Fhena’s hand on his, feeling newborn, empty, at one.

  FIVE

  Most traps are simple, Colin thought. It’s why they work.

  Delia Huerc’s apartment had seemed simple. It had been reoccupied since her death, so he’d had to wait until the current owner—a Khajiit rug-seller named Lwef-Dim—was gone. It was an old place, full of shadows, once-weres, and might-have-beens, and so opening his spectral eyes was easy enough. And there she was, a slip of a ghost, still waiting. Ghosts usually moved on, except in locations with the power to hold them and feed them, but this place had given him hope—and it hadn’t disappointed.

  But then he saw that it wasn’t Delia. It wasn’t even a ghost. It was something left to deal with the likes of him. It contorted in his overvision, a chimera that refused to settle on a shape, then bloomed fully into Mundus, the world, and brought harm to him. He failed to dodge its blow, but whatever hit him still wasn’t actually matter; it was worse, traveling though his arm, through every layer of muscle, every vessel of blood, the bone and spongy marrow, leaving detailed and unbelievable agony behind. At first he thought the arm was actually off, but then he saw it was still there, a mass of spasming muscle.

  He tumbled away without thinking and drew the blade from his belt as reflexively, his training working well below the level of thought. The thing came for him and he cut at it with the translucent weapon. The apparition shivered and made a sound he hardly heard, so high-pitched was it, but the windows of the apartment shattered.

  So it didn’t like the blade, which was good. He’d brought it in case he had to fend off a ghost, and luckily whatever this was, it was at least offended by the consecrations bound into its crystalline metal.

  But he wasn’t sure if he’d actually hurt it, so he backed away, trying to focus on it, to forget the feeling of death eating at his arm and understand what he was facing.

  It came again, and this time he noticed a sort of center and stabbed at that. He felt resistance, and it made the sound again, but this time shudders of pain that weren’t his own racked through him, so he thrust again, and then again. A yellowish mist whipped at his head, he felt something like a razor pass through his brain, and colors exploded, seemed to spill out of him. He couldn’t feel his limbs, and realized he was in a jumble on the floor.

  The presence loomed over him.

  Feeling oddly detached, Colin closed his eyes against the thing and reached into the middle of himself, where his little star was, the tiny piece of him that had come from beyond the world and even Oblivion, from Aetherius, the realm of pure light and magic.

  As pain and then cold gripped him, he made the star a sun.

  The force and light of it blew his eyelids and m
outh open, and radiance shredded through the specter like a high wind through smoke. This time it didn’t manage to make a sound, but was instantly and utterly gone.

  Colin lay there then, watching the slight rise and fall of his chest, unable to remember what he was supposed to be doing. He didn’t recognize where he was either. And he couldn’t move.

  He ought to have panicked, but he was too tired.

  Across the room, a woman he did not know was watching him, silent, unmoving.

  He remembered being a boy in the city of Anvil, tarring boats and staring out to sea, dreaming of distant lands. He remembered his mother, her back permanently bent from her work scrubbing clothes.

  He remembered killing a man. He hadn’t known his name. It was on a bridge, and the man was looking out across water at a light. The man had seen his knife and tried to fend off the sharp blade with his hands. He tried to beg, but Colin had stabbed him until all of his life spilled out.

  He remembered that was his final test before becoming an inspector.

  As his memory returned, so did the feeling in his legs and arms. It was as if a million needles had been thrust into them.

  By the time he could push himself up, he knew where he was again. He faced the woman, who still hadn’t said anything. She was a Redguard, with tight, curly hair and a strong, handsome face. She was probably about fifty.

  “Are you Delia Huerc?” he asked.

  Her eyes moved at the sound of her name, but otherwise she didn’t react.

  Some ghosts remembered everything, some nothing. Some didn’t even know they were dead.

  “You went to Black Marsh, with Prime Minister Hierem. Do you remember that?”

  Her head turned a bit. She looked down, and her hand came up a little.

  He followed the gesture and saw she was pointing at one of the baseboards. He went over to it and found it loose. In a hollow in the wall he discovered a soft leather bag, and in that a book.

  “May I look at this?” he asked.

  Her hand dropped back to her side but she didn’t answer, so he opened it. It was written mostly in Tamrielic, with some asides in Yoku, which he had passing knowledge of. It was a journal, and flipping toward the end, he found several pages of entries about Black Marsh. He’d only read a page when he heard steps in the hall and realized he’d been on the floor most of the day.

  He went out the empty window, taking the book with him. Delia watched him go without objection.

  There wasn’t much sun left, but he wanted to be in it, to try to forget the thing in the apartment. He went through the Market District and bought apples, pork pies, and lemon water from street vendors, then found a good place on the roof of a building overlooking the alley behind Arese’s house. There he ate and read the journal, stalked by pigeons trying to get at his scraps.

  Huerc described the preparations for the trip in detail, and it became clear to him that she thought the Emperor, at least, was aware of the trip. Hierem had explained that the secrecy and misdirection were to avoid any of the Emperor’s enemies learning what he was about. She hadn’t been privy to the meeting with the An-Xileel, but worked out that some agreement had been reached. She’d been led to believe that Hierem was there to propose an alliance against the Thalmor. But he was vague about what the negotiations actually entailed. Most interesting, the agreement involved Hierem performing some sort of ritual at the City Tree.

  She had written:

  The tree is enormous. The only one I have ever seen taller was in Valenwood, but the Hist was more massive, more spread out. And I could feel a palpable presence in it. I had never quite credited the Argonian claims that the trees are intelligent, but when I stood in its presence, I could no longer doubt it. Further, I thought I felt a certain malevolence in it, but that might well have been my imagination, for the whole situation was anything but friendly. The An-Xileel have been uniformly rude and arrogant, the city itself is a festering, putrid place. From the moment I entered Lilmoth, I have wanted nothing more than to leave it.

  The minister, on the other hand, seems quite excited, almost jubilant.

  The An-Xileel sang to the tree, an awful cacophonous chant that went on so long that I might have drifted off a bit. At some point, Hierem added his voice to theirs, but in a sort of counterpoint. He lit a brazier, and I’m sure he did some sort of sorcery. In his younger years he was in the leadership of the Mages’ Guild, before that organization utterly collapsed, and so I know him capable of these things, but I was still somehow surprised.

  It was my impression that he was calling something, for he repeated the word “Umbriel” many times. It seemed like a name, although the language he spoke was not one I knew, and so I may have been mistaken, for nothing came, although everyone seemed pleased anyway.

  Tomorrow we sail for home, and I could not be happier.

  He read on, but the only other passage of interest to him was one in which she began to question whether the Emperor had authorized or was aware of their trip, and she had determined to ask Hierem about it.

  He read the final few sentences with a little chill:

  At lunch today Hierem repeated his assertions, but I still have my doubts. I have a meeting with the Emperor tomorrow. I will ask him myself.

  I hope I shall feel better. My stomach is unsettled, and there is pain in my joints. Perhaps the soup did not suit me.

  Colin thumbed back through earlier parts of the book, but it was dark now. He settled against a chimney, watching Arese’s unlit window. Neither moon was in the sky, but there were no clouds, and the stars were glorious. He rested there, letting the fall of night ease into him; first the swifts, then the fluttering of bats, the lonely imprecation of a barn owl. Tree frogs chirped and insects whirred. A dog barked somewhere in the Market District and was answered nearby, which set off a chorus of canine comment from all quarters of the city. A couple argued not far away about what the proper price of the cockles for dinner might have been, and the strains from a lute drifted along in the breeze.

  Arese would be with her sister now. He had a few more hours to wait, a little more time to decide what to do, whether to show Arese the journal or not. Was she really an agent of the Emperor?

  He’d been assigned to find Prince Attrebus. The prince had gone, against his father’s wishes and in secret, to find and fight the menace of the flying city. He hadn’t gotten far; Colin had found his entire bodyguard slaughtered—and it seemed, at first, the prince, too. Attrebus, it turned out, was a careful creation of his father and his ministers. All of the battles and duels he had won were set up that way, and the bards and authors who sang and wrote of him were heavily subsidized by the court. The prince himself hadn’t known this; few outside his guard had. Whenever the prince decided to go off on some sort of adventure, his right-hand man Gulan always reported it to the office of the Prime Minister, and it had been handled.

  But not this time—or at least not the way it usually was. This time the prince had been ambushed. That was what had led Colin to investigate Arese; he knew Gulan had gone to her, as usual. He discovered that she had set up the attack on the prince herself, and later followed her to a house where—as he listened—she killed the crime boss who had facilitated it, along with all of his guard and household. He still didn’t know if she had summoned something or transformed into the nightmare that had turned the house into an abattoir.

  And yet, Arese had admitted this to him. She had offered an explanation for it.

  Most traps are simple.

  He sighed, ran his hand through his hair, felt the breeze on his face.

  He heard a faint noise that seemed somehow out of place and opened his eyes.

  Fifteen yards away he saw the shadowed figure of a man, dressed in the black quilted jerkin so many of the Dark Brotherhood affected these days. The fellow was in profile, kneeling on the roof of the building across the alley. As Colin watched, he slipped like a spider down a rope too dark and thin to make out from his vantage point. He settle
d, still like a spider, on the casement of Arese’s window. After a moment Colin saw the window reflect starlight as it swung open, and then, a few heartbeats later, shut again.

  The breeze picked up. It felt cool, and Colin realized he was sweating.

  Someone wanted Arese dead.

  He hesitated long enough to feel ashamed, trying to sort out what the smart thing to do was. If she died, he could step out of this whole thing.

  But then he would never know what was going on, and maybe he would have to watch the Empire collapse knowing he might have done something.

  But it was more than that. There had been something about her, brittleness, vulnerability …

  He recognized her, he understood in that moment. She was what he might become after a few years of this. He had seen, however briefly, the hollow place in her, the weariness. He still wasn’t sure if he believed her or if they were on the same side.

  But he didn’t want her to die.

  He looked back up at the sky. Almost time for her to come home, of course. The assassin would know that, too, wouldn’t he?

  He didn’t have any rope or cord. He could make the jump to the window, maybe, but the odds were against it, and it wouldn’t be quiet. But he could jump to the next building, get to her front door before she did, and avoid the whole confrontation.

  But then he saw light in the window—not in the room itself, but diffuse light, coming from another room.

  Muttering a curse, he stepped back a few paces, assessed the distance, and leapt.

  His toes hit the window ledge and he curled forward, elbows over his eyes. Glass panes shattered but the wooden frame did not, and so he bounced back, spine toward the street thirty feet below. He kicked a foot through one of the broken panes and managed to hook it on the wood, which swung him back and smacked his shoulders into the brick. Gasping, he jerked up, tightening his stomach muscles, and drew himself up to the window.

  By the time he got it open, of course, someone was coming for him.

  He dove past and to the side of the dark blur and rolled toward the lantern-lit room farther in, drawing his knife. He absently noticed that his hands were slick with blood.