The Infernal City (7 page)

“We’re in deep water,” he grated. “Don’t be foolish and try to swim for it. You’ll not make it, not with the sea-drakes hereabouts.”

He glanced down at her clenched hands and flashed his own claws, shaking his head.

“Never think that,” he said. “I’d see you safe to your destination, but no one attacks a captain on his ship and doesn’t pay hard. It’s law.”

“Law? Kidnapping is against the law!”

“This isn’t kidnapping, it’s your father’s wish—and you aren’t old enough to go against his wish, at least not in this sort of matter. So best resign.”

He hadn’t said anything about Glim, and she was afraid to ask.

She loosened her fingers. “Very well. I’m free to move about the ship?”

“Within reason.”

“Right. Here’s me moving, then.”

She pushed past him into the brief hall, up the steps, and onto the deck.

Above her, sails billowed and snapped in the plentiful wind that always drove off the coast early in the night, and the bow cut a furrow through a sea lacquered in silver and bronze by the two great moons above. For a moment her fear and dismay were overcome by an unexpected rush of joy at the beauty of it, the adventure it seemed to promise. Across the sea to the Empire, and everything she’d always wanted. Her father’s last, best—almost only—gift to her.

She went and stood with her hands braced on the bulward and looked out across the waters. They were sailing south, out of the bay, and then they would go west, along the mangroved coast of Black Marsh, until they reached the Topal Sea, and then they would turn north.

Or she could throw herself in the water and swim what she guessed to be west, brave the sea-drakes, and with more luck than she deserved reach land. But by the time she made it back to Lil-moth, it would be too late. The city—or whatever it was—was supposed to arrive in the morning.

Still …

“Hold your breath,” someone whispered behind her, and then she was lifted and falling, and a blink afterward stunned and wet. She gasped for air and clawed at her captor, trying to climb up on his head, but a strong hand clamped over her nose and mouth before she could so much as scream, and suddenly she was beneath, enclosed by the sea, moving though it in powerful pulses. She knew she shouldn’t breathe, but after a few moments she had to try, to suck in something, anything, to make the need stop.

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 susurrus, 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.