The Infernal City

by Greg Keyes

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

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

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

  “Glim?”

  “Yes.”

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

  “I’m not sure myself,” he said.

  “The captain said something about sea-drakes.”

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

  “Okay.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

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

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

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

  And much, much bigger.

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

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

  “Are you okay?” Glim asked.

  She felt her leg. Her hand came away sticky.

  “I think it bit me,” she said.

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

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

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

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

  “I guess not.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s happening? Do you know?”

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

  “Rogue? How?”

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

  “That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Only because we don’t know everything.”

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

  He did his imitation of a human shrug.

  “You know I can’t,” she said.

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

  “We can warn people.”

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

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

  “I am.”

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

  “Nn—”

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

  “Oh, no.”

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

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

  “You know better than that.”

  “Fine. I think I know a place.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Amidst the bright strands, something darker moved.

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

  “Glim—” she whispered.

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

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

  Glim’s head vanished from view.

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

  “Glim, what is it?”

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

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

  “Back,” he replied. He kept walking.

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

  Whatever they were, they were coming.

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

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

  The world spun dizzily …

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

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

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

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

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

  SIX

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

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

  Glim was a few yards away, thrashing feebly.

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

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

  “You break anything?” she asked him.

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

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

  “How?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Walking where?”

  “Toward something.”

  “This place, maybe?”

  “I don’t know.”

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

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

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

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

  “We flew up here,” she said.

  “Your gunk worked.”

  “It did.”

  “Congratulations.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Its wings beat and it flew off with preternatural speed.

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

  “What the Iyorth was that?” Glim snarled.

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What am I seeing?” she wondered aloud.

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

  “I fear you’re right.”

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

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

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

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

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

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