The Infernal City (5 page)

When he spoke with Annaïg he was something else, not between the two, but something very different from either. Glim.

But even their shared language was far from true thought.

True thought was close to the root.

The Hist were many, and they were one. Their roots burrowed deep beneath the black soil and soft white stone of Black Marsh, connecting them all, and thus connecting all Saxhleel, all Argonians. The Hist gave his people life, form, purpose. It was the Hist who had seen through the shadows to the Oblivion crisis, who called all of the people back to the marsh, defeated the forces of Mehrunes Dagon, drove the Empire into the sea, and laid waste to their ancient enemies in Morrowind.

The Hist were of one mind, but just as he was four beings, the mind of the Hist could sometimes escape itself. It had happened before. It had happened in Lilmoth.

If the city tree had separated itself, and the An-Xileel with it, what did that mean?

And why was he going to do what Annaïg had asked him to do rather than trying to discover what was happening to the tree whose sap had molded him?

But he was, wasn’t he?

He stopped and stared into the bulbous stone eyes of Xhon-Mehl the Fisher, once Ascendant Organ Lord of Lilmoth. Now all that was visible of him was his lower snout up to his head. The rest of him was sunken, like most of ancient Lilmoth, into the soft, shifting soil the city had been built on. If one could swim through mud and earth, there were many Lilmoths to discover beneath one’s webbed feet.

An image arose behind his eyes; the great stepped pyramid of
Ixtaxh-thtithil-meht. Only the topmost chamber still jutted above the silt, but the An-Xileel had excavated it, room by room, pumping it out and laying magicks to keep the water from returning. As if they wanted to go back, not forward. As if something were pulling them back to that ancient Lilmoth …

He stopped, realizing he was still walking without knowing exactly where he was going, but then he knew. The undertow of his thoughts had brought him here.

To the tree. Or part of it. The city tree was said to be three hundred years old, and its roots and tendrils pushed and wound through most of lower Lilmoth, and here was a root the size of his thigh, twisting its way out of a stone wall. Everything else around him had become waterish, blurred, but as he laid his webbed hand on the rough surface, the colors sharpened and focused.

He stood there, no longer seeing the crumbling, rotted Imperial warehouses, but instead a city of monstrous stone ziggurats and statues pushing up to the sky, a place of glory and madness. He felt it tremor around him, smelled anise and burning cinnamon, and heard chanting in antique tongues. His heart thumped oddly as he watched the two moons heave themselves through the low mist of smoke and fog that rolled through the streets, and the waters surged beneath them, around them, beyond the sky.

His thoughts melted together.

He wasn’t sure how long it was before his mind complicated itself again, but his hand was still on the root. He lifted it and backed away, and after a few long breaths he began walking, and in the thick night around him, the massive structures softened, thinned, and went mostly away, until he was once again in the Lilmoth where his body was born.

Mostly away. But he felt it now, the call the An-Xileel felt, and he realized that a part of him had already known it.

He knew something else, too. The tree had cut him off from the vision before it had run its course.

That was troubling.

Gulls swarmed the streets like rats near the waterfront, most of them too greedy or stupid to even move out of his way as he picked his way through fish offal, shattered crabs, jellyfish, and seaweed. Barnacles went halfway up the buildings here. This part of town had sunk so low that when a double tide came, it flooded deep. The docks themselves floated, attached to a massive long stone quay whose foundations were as ancient as time and whose upper layer of limestone had been added last year. He made his way up the central ramp to the top of it. Here was a city in itself; since the An-Xileel forbade all but licensed foreigners in the city, the markets had all crowded themselves here. Here, a fishmonger held a flounder up by the tail, selling from a single crate of silver-skinned harvest. There, a long line of sheds with the Colovian Traders banner hawked trinkets of silver and brass, cooking pots, cutlery, wine, cloth. He had worked here, for a while. A group of his matriline cousins had set up a business selling Theilul, a liquor made of distilled sugarcane. They’d originally sold the cane, but since their fields were twenty miles from town, they’d found it easier to transport a few cases of bottles than many wagonloads of cane—and far more profitable.

He knew where to find Urvwen; right in the thick of it all, where the great stone cross that was the waterfront joined.

The Psijic wasn’t yelling, as usual. He was just sitting there, looking through the crowd and past the colorful masts of the ships to the south, toward where the bay came to the sea. His bone-colored skin seemed paler than usual, but when the silvery eyes found Mere-Glim approaching, they were full of life.

“You want to know, don’t you?” he said.

For a moment Mere-Glim had trouble responding, the experience with the tree had been so powerful. But he let words shape his thoughts again.

“My cousin said he saw something out at sea.”

“Yes, he did. It’s nearly here.”

“What is nearly here?”

The old priest shrugged. “Do you know anything about my order?”

“Not much.”

“Few do. We don’t teach our beliefs to outsiders. We counsel, we help.”

“Help with what?”

“Change.”

Mere-Glim blinked, trying to find his answer there.

“Change is inevitable,” Urvwen went on. “Indeed, change is sacred. But it is not to be unguided. I came here to guide; the An-Xileel—and the city council—the ‘Organism’ that they so thoroughly control—do not listen.”

“They have a guide—the Hist.”

“Yes. And their guide brings change, but not the sort that ought to be encouraged. But they do not listen to me. Truth be told, no one here listens to me, but I try. Every day I come here and try to have some effect.”

“What’s coming?” Mere-Glim persisted.

“Do you know of Arteum?” the old man asked.

“The island you Psijics come from,” Glim answered him.

“It was removed from the world once. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“Such things happen.” He nodded, more to himself, it seemed, than to Mere-Glim.

“Has something been removed from the world?” he asked.

“No,” Urvwen said, lowering his voice. “Something has been removed from another world. And it has come here.”

“What will it do?”

“I don’t know. But I think it will be very bad.”

“Why?”

“It’s too complicated to explain,” he sighed. “And even if you
understood my explanation, it wouldn’t help. Mundus—the world—is a very delicate thing, you know. Only certain rules keep it from returning to the Is/Is Not.”

“I don’t understand.”

The Psijic waved his hands. “Those boats out there—to sail and not founder—the sails and the ropes that hoist them, control them—tension must be just so, they must adjust as the winds change, if a storm comes they may even have to be taken down …” He shook his head. “No, no—I feel the ropes of the world, and they have become too tight. They pull in the wrong directions. And that is never good. That is what happened in the days before the Dragonfires first burned—”

“Are you talking about Oblivion? I thought we can’t be invaded by Oblivion anymore. I thought Emperor Martin—”

“Yes, yes. But nothing is so simple. There are always loopholes, you see.”

“Even if there aren’t loops?”

Urvwen grinned at that but didn’t reply.

“So this—city,” Mere-Glim said. “It’s from Oblivion.”

The priest shook his head, so violently Mere-Glim thought it might come off.

“No, no, no—or yes. I can’t explain. I can’t—go away. Just go away.”

Mere-Glim’s head was already hurting from the conversation. He didn’t need to be told twice, although technically he had been.

He wandered off to find his cousins and procure a bottle of Theilul. Annaïg could wait a bit.

Hecua’s single eye crawled its regard over Annaïg’s list of ingredients. Her wrinkled dark brow knotted in a little frown.

“Last try didn’t work, did it?”

Annaïg puffed her lips and lifted her shoulders. “It worked,” she said, “just not exactly the way I wanted it to.”

The Redguard shook her head. “You’ve the knack, there’s no doubt about that. But I’ve never heard of any formula that can make a person fly—not from anywhere. And this list—this just looks like a mess waiting to happen.”

“I’ve heard Lazarum of the Synod worked out a way to fly,” Annaïg said.

“Hmm. And maybe if there was a Synod conclave within four hundred miles of here, you might have a chance of learning that, after a few years paying their dues. But that’s a spell, not a synthesis. A badly put-together spell likely won’t work at all—alchemy gone wrong can be poison.”

“I know all of that,” Annaïg said. “I’m not afraid—nothing I’ve ever made turned out too bad.”

“It took me a week to give Mere-Glim his skin back.”

“He had his skin,” Annaïg pointed out. “It was just translucent, that’s all. It didn’t
hurt
him.”

Hecua buzzed her lips together in disdain. “Well, there’s no talking to the young, is there?” She held up the list and began picking through the bottles, boxes, and canisters on the shelves that made up the walls of the place.

While she did so, Annaïg wandered around the shelves, too, studying their contents. She knew she didn’t have everything she needed. It was like cooking; there was one more taste needed to pull everything together. She just didn’t have any idea what it was.

Hecua’s place was huge. It had once been the local Mages’ Guild hall, and there were still three or four doddering practitioners who were in and out of the rooms upstairs. Hecua honored their memberships, even though there was no such organization as the Mages’ Guild anymore. No one much cared; the An-Xileel didn’t care, and neither the College of Whispers nor the Synod—the two Imperially recognized institutions of magic—had representatives in Lilmoth, so they hadn’t anything to say about it either.

She opened bottles and sniffed the powders, distillations, and essences, but nothing spoke to her. Nothing, that is, until she lifted a small, fat bottle wrapped tightly in black paper. Touching it sent a faint tingle traveling up her arm, across her clavicle, and up into the back of her throat.

“What is it?” Hecua asked, and Annaïg realized her gasp must have been audible.

She held the container up.

The old woman came and peered down her nose at it.

“Oh, that,” she said. “I’m really not sure, to tell you the truth. It’s been there for ages.”

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“I pulled it from the back, while I was dusting.”

“And you don’t know what it is?”

She shrugged. “A fellow came in here years ago, a few months after the Oblivion crisis. He was sick with something and needed some things, but he didn’t have money to pay. But he had that. He claimed he’d taken it from a fortress in Oblivion itself. There was a lot of that back then; we had a big influx of daedra hearts and void salts and the like.”

“But he didn’t say what it was?”

She shook her head. “I felt sorry for him, that’s all. I imagine it’s not much of anything.”

“And you never opened it to find out?”

Hecua paused. “Well, no, you can see the paper is intact.”

“May I?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Annaïg broke the paper with her thumbnail, revealing the stopper beneath. It was tight, but a good twist brought it out.

The feeling in the back of her throat intensified and became a taste, a smell, bright as sunlight but cold, like eucalyptus or mint.

“That’s it,” she said, as she felt it all meld together.

“What? You know what it is?”

“No. But I want some.”

“Annaïg—”

“I’ll be careful, Aunt Hec. I’ll run some virtue tests on it.”

“Those tests aren’t well proven yet. They miss things.”

“I’ll be careful, I said.”

“Hmf,”
the old woman replied dubiously.