The Infernal City (24 page)

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.

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?