by Greg Keyes
She came to a door and rapped on it. A slit opened; soft words were spoken. Then the door swung out a crack and she entered.
He quickly examined the building. There were no ground-floor windows, of course—not in this neighborhood, but the house had three stories, and on the third he made one out. He couldn’t see ladders or drainpipes to climb, but the building next door was so close he was able to brace his arms and legs and go up it as he might a chimney.
Annaïg just managed to hide the amulet before Slyr came out of the corridor. The other woman looked around, puzzled.
“Who were you talking to?” she asked.
“To myself,” Annaïg replied. “It helps me think.”
“I see.” She stood there for a moment, looking uncomfortable.
“Do you want something?” Annaïg inquired.
“Don’t kill me,” Slyr blurted.
“What the Xhuth! are you talking about?” Annaïg demanded. “You were there—you heard Toel. If I had wanted you dead, you would be dead.”
“I know,” she cried, wringing her hands. “It didn’t make any sense. The only thing I can think of is that you want to do it yourself, when I’m not expecting it. You could probably think of something really inventive and nasty. Look, I know you’re probably mad at me—”
“‘Probably’ mad at you?” Annaïg exploded. “You tried to kill me!”
“Yes, I see now how that might upset you,” Slyr said. “To be fair, I wasn’t expecting to have to deal with any sort of … Well, this.”
“Yes,” Annaïg said, measuring her words. “Yes, I understand that because you imagined I would be dead. Now I’m not, and because you haven’t a decent bone in your body, you assume no one else does.”
In that instant, her anger constricted violently into the most vicious rage she’d ever known. She felt a sudden jerk on her wrist and then something slid around her pointer finger and stiffened.
Qijne’s filleting knife. Of course—all she needed was to really want to kill someone. And she could. Two steps …
“Please, don’t joke with me,” Slyr pleaded. “I can’t even sleep, I’m so miserable.”
Annaïg willed her heart to slow. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “You’ve been sleeping with Toel.”
Slyr blinked. “I’ve been procreating with Toel,” she admitted, “but you don’t imagine he lets me stay in his bed all night! I’ve been sleeping in the halls, terrified of what you’re going to do next.”
“Next? I haven’t done anything to you.”
“You didn’t poison the Thendow frills this morning?”
“They were poisoned?”
“Well,” she hedged, “not that I could tell. But I heard you were down there, handling them, and that doesn’t make much sense unless you were up to something. And you knew I was supposed to make the decoction of Thendow—”
“You aren’t dead, are you?”
“Of course not! I made Chave do the Thendow.”
“Unbelievable,” Annaïg said. “And did Chave die?”
“You’re clever enough to make something that would only affect me—I know you are. My hairs are all over our room.”
Annaïg rolled her eyes. “I’m not going to kill you, Slyr. At least not today.”
But then she remembered her appointment with Glim, and she shot the other woman a nasty smile.
“But there’s always tomorrow.”
“I’ll do anything,” Slyr said. “Anything you ask.”
“Perfect. Then go away and don’t talk to me again unless it’s pertaining to our work.”
It was probably twenty minutes after the woman left that the knife slowly withdrew back to Annaïg’s wrist.
The kitchen wasn’t still at night; the hobs were there, cleaning, jabbering in a language she didn’t know. She had wondered about that, from time to time. Everyone she had spoken to claimed that everyone came out of the sump, went back to the sump, and so forth. But what about the hobs and scamps? Were they “people” in the sense that chefs and skraws were? Or were they like the foodstuff that came from the sump and the Fringe Gyre—things that grew and reproduced in a normal sort of way?
Maybe Glim knew. After all, he’d been working in the sump.
The hobs gave her curious looks as she passed through the kitchen. She wasn’t worried—she doubted they would say anything to their masters, but if they did, it would be too late.
Before entering the pantries, she stopped and looked back, and for a moment she almost seemed to see herself, or a sort of ghost of herself, the person she might have become if she’d followed Toel’s advice instead of her heart. The ghost looked confident, effective, filled with secrets.
Annaïg turned and left her there, to fade.
The dock, unlike the kitchen, was very quiet, and dark, and she had no light. She stood there, waiting, starting to feel it all unravel. What if it was all a trap of some sort, a trick, a game?
But then she heard something wet move.
“Glim?”
“Nn!”
And he was there, his faintly chlorine scent, the familiar rasp of his breath, his big damp scaly arms crushing her to his chest.
“You’re getting me wet, you big lizard,” she said.
“Well, if you want me to leave …”
She hit him on the arm and pushed back. “Daedra and Divines it’s good to see you, Glim. Or almost see you. I thought I had lost you.”
“I found Qijne’s body,” he said, “and the others from her kitchen—” He choked off into a weird, distressed gasping sound that she hadn’t heard since they were both children.
“Let’s not talk through our chance,” she said, patting his arm. “Plenty of time to talk later.”
Glim snorted. “No one is going to try and stop us,” he said. “No one here can conceive of leaving the place.”
“Toel would stop me, if he knew,” she said. “So let’s not dally.”
And so Glim guided her onto one of the big dumbwaiter things, and shortly they began ascending,
“I’ve never been up this,” Glim said. “But I suspect it’s a lot easier than the route I’ve been using. And you won’t have to breathe underwater.”
“Which is nice,” she replied. “Although I’ve got that covered, if it comes to it.” She patted her pockets.
“Do you?” he asked. His voice sounded a bit odd.
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said. “Nothing that matters now.”
They arrived at a dock not unlike the one they’d left, but Glim found a stairway that took them up and out to the Fringe Gyre. Both moons were out, making a glowing ocean of the low clouds that came up almost to Umbriel’s rim. The gyre fanned below them, as fantastic a forest as she could ever imagine. And behind—the dazzling spires of Umbriel as she had never seen them—at night from the highest level. Even Toel was far below her. One tower rose higher than all of them by far, a fey thing that might have been spun from glass and gossamer. Who lived there? What were they like?
She took a deep breath and turned firmly away. It didn’t matter.
Then she handed Glim his dose.
“Drink,” she said. “Your desires guide you, do you understand? We want to be as far west of here as we can get.”
“I’ll just follow you,” Glim said.
She took his hand. “We’ll go together.”
And they drank, and they dropped away from Umbriel, and flew over the lambent clouds.
Sul furrowed his brow and mumbled something under his breath. The air before them shivered and coruscated, and suddenly a monstrous daedra with the head of a crocodile stood between them and the walking dead. It turned to face Sul, its reptilian eyes full of hatred, but he barked something at it, and with a snarl it turned and rushed into their attackers.
Sul waded in behind the thing, and Attrebus followed. He hacked at the rotting, boiled corpse of an Argonian; he hit its upper arm, and Flashing sheared through the decomposing fl
esh as if it were cheese, hit the bone, and slid down to cut through the elbow joint. The thing came on, heedless of its loss, and he had to fight the urge to vomit. It reached for him again and he cut off its head, which of course didn’t stop it either, so he next chopped at its knees.
The next one to come at him had a short sword, which it jabbed at him in a thoroughly unsophisticated way. He cut the arm off and then slashed at its legs, so it fell, too.
What surprised him was how fast they were. Somehow he’d imagined them slower. He and Sul weren’t fighting forward anymore, but had their backs to the Dunmer’s summoning and were trying to keep from being surrounded. They were still moving toward their arrival point, but not very quickly, and the dead were now thick on all sides. Attrebus and Sul wielded their weapons more like machetes than swords, chopping as if to clear a jungle path of vines—except the vines kept coming back.
Treb knew it was over when one of them fell and caught him around the leg, holding on with horrible strength. He chopped down at it, and one of those in front of him leapt forward and grappled his sword arm.
Then he went down in a wave of slimy, slippery, disgusting bodies. He had time for one short howl of despair.
I’m sorry Annaïg, he thought. I tried.
He waited for the knife or teeth or claws that would end him, but it didn’t happen. In fact, once they had him and Sul immobilized, they stood them both back up. Attrebus renewed his struggles, but quickly found there wasn’t much point.
“What are they doing?” he asked Sul.
But his answer didn’t come from the Dunmer; everything seemed to spin around, and the bleak landscape of Morrowind vanished.
The window was barred and latched, but he had a small magic for that, and soon he was standing in someone’s bedroom, which fortunately was empty. He found the stairs and made his way down until he barely heard voices. He sat in the darkened stairs, beat down his worries, focused, and listened.
“… would have known?” Arese was saying.
“Anyone,” a male voice rumbled. “Anyone who knows you failed to pass on Gulan’s warning concerning the prince’s activities.”
“That is a limited number of people,” she said. “What about the woman, Radhasa?”
“I’ve not heard from her. She was supposed to lie low after the massacre—else how could she explain her survival? This note isn’t signed.”
“Why on Tamriel would a blackmailer sign their name to a note?”
“I see your point.”
“But if not her, that leaves me with you,” she said. “Or someone else in your organization.”
“Impossible.”
“I argued against using you people in the first place,” she snorted.
“The job was done.”
“The job was not done. Attrebus lives, and someone has implicated me in the bargain.”
“You’ve no proof Attrebus lives,” the man asserted. “That’s only a rumor.”
“Wrong. A courier arrived from Water’s Edge this morning with news that he is alive. It went straight to the Emperor. He’s keeping it quiet, but troops have already been sent.”
That’s news, Colin thought. He’d written the “blackmail” letter himself, to draw her out, but he hadn’t heard anything about a courier.
“Well, then,” the man said. “I don’t leave a job unfinished. I deal with it, at no extra charge.”
“That won’t do. Not now.”
The man laughed. “Now, let’s not get silly,” he said. “If you don’t want me to finish the job, fine, but you’re not getting your money back. Don’t forget who I am.”
“You’re a glorified thug,” Arese replied. “That’s who you are.”
“I love your type,” the man snarled. “You pay me to do murder so you can pretend your hands are clean, so you can continue to think yourself better than me. I have news for you—you’re worse, because you don’t have the guts to put down your own dogs.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she replied, a colder note in her voice.
“You’re not threatening me.”
Colin heard several doors open, and he could all but see the man’s guards coming in. But then he heard something else, a sort of ripping sound accompanied by a rush of air and glass shattering. Every hair on his body pricked up.
The next thing he heard was something human ears were not meant to receive, the human brain not meant to interpret, the primal feral sound of which the lion’s roar or the wolf’s growl were faint shadows. Harsh yellow light shone up the stairs, and then darkness.
Then the screaming began, very human and beyond all terror. Colin began to shiver, then to shake. He was still shaking when the last of the screams abruptly choked off and he felt something ponderous moving through the house. Searching.
When light returned, Attrebus first thought he was plunging through a shimmering sky, but it took only a moment to understand that although he was in the air, he wasn’t falling, but supported. The shimmer was glass—or what appeared to be glass—and it was all around him; was in fact what held him up in so strange a fashion that it took a moment to sort out how.
Some forty feet below him was a web that might have been two hundred feet in diameter. It looked very much like a spider’s web, anchored to three metallic spires, an upthrust of stone, and a thicker tower of what appeared to be porcelain. Below the web was a long drop into a cone-shaped basin half full of emerald water and covered with strange buildings everywhere else. The web was made of glasslike tubes about the thickness of his arm. Every few feet along any given tube another sprouted and rose vinelike toward the sky. These in turn branched into smaller tendrils so that the whole resembled a gigantic bed of strange, transparent sea creatures—and indeed, most of them undulated, as if in a current.
Attrebus was about ten feet from the top of the bushy structure, where the strands were no thicker than a writing quill, and these were what held him up. They clustered thickly on the soles of his boots, pressed his back and torso and every part of him except his face with firm, gentle pressure.
He tried to take a step, and they moved with him, reconfiguring so he didn’t fall. They cut the sunlight into colors like so many prisms, but it was nevertheless not difficult to see in any direction. He noticed Sul a few feet away, similarly borne.
“You did it!” he shouted. The crystalline strands shivered at his voice and rang like a million faint chimes. “We got away.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Sul replied, shaking his head. “I never got close enough to the door to escape into Oblivion.”
“Then where are we?” Treb asked.
“In my home,” a voice answered.
Attrebus looked higher up and saw someone walking down toward them, the transparent tubules shifting to meet his feet.
He appeared to be a Dunmer of average size, his gray hair pulled back in a long queue. He wore a sort of loose umber robe with wide sleeves and black slippers.
“Amazing,” the man said. “Sul. And you, I take it, are Prince Attrebus. Welcome to Umbriel.”
“Vuhon,” Sul snarled.
The only strange thing about the man’s appearance, Attrebus noticed, were his eyes—they weren’t red, like a Dunmer’s; the orbs where milky white and the surrounds black.
“Once,” the man said. “Once I was called that. You may still use that name, if you find it convenient.”
Sul howled, and Attrebus saw his hand flash as when he’d fought and burned Sharwa, but the balefire coruscated briefly in the filaments and then faded. Attrebus ran forward, lifting Flashing, but after a few steps the web suddenly went rigid like the glass it resembled, and he couldn’t move anything below his neck.
“Please try to behave yourselves,” Vuhon said. “As I said, this is my home.” He let himself slump into a sitting position a few feet above them, and the strands formed something like a chair.
“You’ve come here to kill me, I take it?” he asked Sul.
“What do you think?”
Sul said, his voice flat with fury.
“I just said what I think—I merely phrased it as a question.”
“You murdered Ilzheven, destroyed our city and our country, left our people to be driven to the ends of the earth. You have to pay for that.”
Vuhon cocked his head.
“But I didn’t do any of that, Sul,” he said softly. “You did. Don’t you remember?”
Sul snarled and tried to move forward again, without success.
Vuhon made a languid sort of sign with his hand, and the glassy vines rustled. A moment later they handed up to each of them a small red bowl full of yellow spheres that did not appear to be fruit. Vuhon took one and popped it in his mouth. A faint green vapor vented from his nostrils.
“You should try them,” he said.
“I don’t believe I will,” Attrebus said.
Vuhon shrugged and turned his attention back to Sul.
“Ilzheven died when the ministry hit Vivec City, old friend,” he said. “And the ministry hit Vivec City because you destroyed the ingenium preventing it falling.”
“You were draining the life out of her,” Sul accused.
“Very slowly. She would have lived for months.”
“What are you talking about?” Attrebus demanded. “Sul, what’s he saying?”
Sul didn’t answer, but Vuhon turned toward Attrebus.
“He told you about the ministry? How we devised a method to keep it airborne?”
“Yes. By stealing souls.”
“We couldn’t find any other way to do it,” Vuhon allowed. “Given time, perhaps we could have. At first we had to slaughter slaves and prisoners outright, as many as ten a day. But then I found a way to use the souls of the living, although only certain people had souls—well, for simplicity’s sake, let us say ‘large’ enough. We only needed twelve at a time, then. A vast improvement. Ilzheven was chosen because she had the right sort of soul.”
“You chose her because she wouldn’t love you,” Sul contradicted. “Because she loved me instead.”
“We were always competitive, you and I, weren’t we?” Vuhon said, almost absently, as if just remembering. “Even as boys. But we were friends right up until the minute you burst into the ingenium chamber and starting trying to cut Ilzheven free.”
