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. Qijn
e. 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. “Ba
ck 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?”
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