The Infernal City (37 page)

Annaïg felt sheer exhilaration as she rushed through the air. The first time she’d been too terrified to even begin to enjoy it. This time she felt it was the most wonderful thing she’d ever done.

She glanced back at the receding bulk of Umbriel. Nothing was following them. No one seemed to have noticed, and no one would until Toel came looking for her. By then she and Glim would be a hundred miles away.

She gripped Glim’s hand harder, just a friendly squeeze, but something about it felt strange. She glanced at over at him.

At first she thought he was surrounded by a stray wisp of cloud, but then she saw it was
him
, starting to bleed like a water-color that had been spilled on.

And, looking at her hand, so was she.

Attrebus fell silent for a long moment. Sul could practically see the thoughts turning in his head. The boy he’d rescued from kidnappers wouldn’t have thought about it at all—he had believed himself the hero the ballads spoke of, and that man would never turn on a companion.

But he knew that Attrebus was a little more pragmatic now. He might even be capable of making the right decision, to sacrifice him, buy himself time.

It didn’t matter. He couldn’t die, not before he killed Vuhon. And Vuhon had made a mistake just now.

And Attrebus had given him almost all the time he needed.

Sul closed his eyes.

“How long do I have to make my decision?” he heard Attrebus ask.

“Not long,” Vuhon said. “Sul, what are you—”

Pain jagged through Sul, crippling, nightmarish hurt that once would have paralyzed him. But he’d felt it before, and worse, and all he had to do was reach through it, past their confinement, through the walls between worlds to find it there, waiting. Angry.

“Come!”
he commanded.

“You shouldn’t have told me we were in Oblivion!” Sul shouted.

And all around them glass whinged and shattered.

Colin had to run. Out the window, down the street, away. Everything in him screamed for him to run.

That’s how mice die, the small sane part of him thought. They see the shadow of the hawk, they run …

He remembered the man he’d stabbed again, the confusion in
his eyes as the blade struck him, the desire to live, to breathe just a little longer. Had he been the hawk then? He hadn’t felt like one.

A boy was once born with a knife instead of a right hand …

He felt tired. He wanted to give up, get it over with. But there was a rot in the core of the Empire, in the palace itself. And only he seemed to care.

So he drew himself in, held the darkness to him closer than a lover, and tried to clear his mind as he heard the thing come around the corner.

He felt its gaze touch him, but he kept his own on the floor, knowing that if he saw it, he would lose all control. The stairs creaked beneath its weight, and he felt it brush by him. It paused for a long moment, then continued up.

A few moments later it came down, turned back around the corner. After what seemed an eternity, he felt the air wrench again, followed by the quiet opening and closing of the door. The house was still.

He sat there, unable to move, until the smell of smoke brought him out of it. Heart thudding, he ran downstairs.

The fire was already everywhere on the ground floor, but he could still see that the bodies looked almost as if they had exploded. It would take hours to figure out how many of them there were.

He went back up and out through the window. He wished he’d been able to search the house, to find some clue as to Arese’s reason for wanting the prince dead.

And for that matter, why she hadn’t killed the prince herself.

A few questions in the right places would tell him which crime lord had just died, but that was moot at this point. No, he’d found out what he really wanted to know—Arese arranged the massacre.

The next question—the most dangerous one—was whether she was working alone, or just the point of a larger knife.

Attrebus had the barest glimpse of something horrible before he found himself suddenly free of both detention and support; he was falling. He reached out desperately and caught one of the broken tubes, which was whipping about like a dying snake.

He turned his gaze up and saw the thing again, a phantasmal mass of chitinoid limbs and wings that felt like scorpion and hornet and spider all together. A lot of the strands—including those holding him—had been shattered by its arrival, but plenty were groping at it now from farther away, trying to wrap it up as it surged toward Vuhon. It tore through them, but they slowed it down.

Vuhon—still supported—stood, and a long whip of white-hot flame lashed out at the thing. One of its claws fell off, but the same attack sheared through the protecting tubes.

Attrebus was now below and behind Vuhon, and the tendrils seemed to have forgotten him. He sheathed Flashing so as to free both hands. The tube he held was now swaying rhythmically; when it came nearest Vuhon, he grabbed another and began climbing toward him. The nearer he got, the easier it was, for the web was still thickest beneath the enemy.

Another flaming chunk of beast fell past him, and he tried to climb faster. If Vuhon was distracted by the thing, he might have a chance, but if he wasn’t, that whip of flame would turn on him.

He was still twenty feet away when what passed for the daedra’s head came off, and Vuhon’s quick gaze found him. Suddenly the tendrils became rigid again, and Attrebus howled in frustration.

That was when Sul came hurtling down from above and smashed into the glassy foliage that held him. Attrebus had a glimpse of him, of the blood on his lips and the drooling from his nose, and then Sul’s wiry hand pushed through to grasp his shoulder. The Dunmer’s eyes were tortured and his voice cracked.

“Not now,” he said.

The falling-everywhere-at-once sensation hit him again, and Umbriel vanished.

EPILOGUE

Annaïg sat with Glim for an hour weeping, turning her gaze out to a world that wouldn’t have her anymore.

“I don’t understand,” Glim murmured. “We weren’t born here.”

Annaïg looked at her friend’s forlorn face, sighed, and wiped away her tears.

Enough of that, she thought.

“I don’t understand either,” she said. “But I’m going to.”

“What do you mean?” Glim asked.

“We can’t leave. We have to go back, and I have to figure out how to—cure this, fix it, whatever’s causing this.”

“Everything doesn’t have a cure or a fix,” Glim replied. “Sometimes there really isn’t any going back.”

No,” she said softly, thinking of Lilmoth, of her father, of a life now more like the memory of a dream than anything that had ever been real. She had been dreaming, hadn’t she? Playacting. This was the first real thing that had ever happened to her.

“No,” she repeated. “Glim, we go forward. But I promise you, forward will one day take us away from here. Just … not now.”

And so they sat together for a while longer before going back down to the dock, and there they said their goodbyes.

Coming out of the pantry, she stopped at the threshold. Even the hobs were gone now, and the kitchen—for another few hours—would be truly silent.

And she imagined she saw herself again, that ghost of her with that faint smile on her face, looking confident, effective, filled with secrets.

“Okay,” she said, softly. “Okay.”

And she entered the kitchen.