by Greg Keyes
“I am your friend,” he said. “Of course I am. And I’ve been doing what you ask, haven’t I? All I am saying is—maybe it’s time you helped me.”
“I’m still in no position to manufacture enough water-breathing serum to make a difference,” she said. “I would if I could.”
“I understand that,” he replied. “What I need right now are weapons.”
“What?”
“The tubes that bring processed waste from the midden to the sump are living things. There is a series of sphincters that pass the waste along or hold it back, as needed. I need something that will paralyze the sphincters and an antidote for that. I need concoctions to taint foods, to make them unpleasant or inedible without rendering them poisonous. I need weapons of sabotage for the skraws to wage their rebellion with. I won’t need large amounts of them—just enough. You know how to make these things.”
“I do,” she said. “Let me think a moment.”
She closed her eyes and felt the pull toward the world below, so close, so impossibly far away. So far, none of her experimentation had given her any hope that she and Glim could leave without fading into nothingness. But there was still some chance she could destroy her prison. Glim was giving her an opportunity to learn how to sabotage Umbriel, and a network to do it with. How could she refuse?
“Okay,” she said finally. “But we have to do this carefully. We have to be smart. The first thing is, Toel’s kitchen has to keep running, at least for now. At the same time, we can’t be seen as immune to these attacks, or we’ll draw attention. I think it’s also best that—at first—no one knows the skraws are doing this.”
“I don’t understand,” Glim said. “We’re trying to pressure the lords into doing something about the vapors. If they don’t know it’s us—”
“I really don’t think you know what you’re dealing with,” Annaïg told him. “As soon as they suspect the skraws, the kitchens—or worse, I’m sure, the lords—will come after you. I’ve seen what that means.”
“They can’t kill us all.”
“No, but they can kill you. They can find out who the other leaders are and kill them.”
“Maybe.”
“Try it my way,” she urged. “When everything is completely bollixed up, when they see how vulnerable they are, you step in and set things right, asking only that the vapors be replaced by something more humane.”
“What’s your way?” Glim asked.
“Well—at first we make the kitchens think they’re attacking one another.”
“How is that?”
“The banquet, the one I needed the ninth savor for. Umbriel himself will be in attendance. Four kitchens are competing to win the honor of cooking that meal. Would it be so surprising if they started sabotaging one another?”
“Now I’m starting to see,” Glim said. “And of course, your kitchen would in the end benefit the most from this—competition.”
“Yes.”
Glim scratched his arms. “I don’t hate this idea,” he said. “But why do you want Toel to succeed?”
“Because if he succeeds, I succeed. He might get advanced and take me with him.”
“Why do you care about that?”
“Because the closer I am to the heart of things, the more damage I can do. And the more I can help the skraws.”
He nodded. “That makes sense,” he said. “I’ll talk to the others.”
“And I’ll start work on the things you need. Now come on, let’s go back down before we’re noticed.”
“I’m going to stay up here awhile,” he said. “Listen to the trees.”
“I’ll see you later, then.”
She felt stirrings of guilt, because she didn’t like to deceive Glim, but he had lost all sense of things. She loved him, and she needed him—and if she had to, for both of their sakes, and the sake of the world—she would use him.
Toel’s expression began as disgust but quickly became so murderous that Annaïg felt a rush of fear. Then she noticed it wasn’t the vaporessence of fermented duck egg she had given him to try that he was reacting to—he was smelling something else more generally in the air.
“It’s the water filters,” she explained. “Sump slurry has them clogged.”
“I know what it is,” Toel said, his voice cold. “Do not presume, you. I know every scent of this kitchen. If a single lampen invades the cilia tubules, my nose aches from the stench. We are sabotaged—again. I will not bear it. I will not bear it!”
“But who would do such a thing?” Annaïg asked.
“Phmer possibly,” he snarled. “That’s the problem, isn’t it? It could be her, or it could be Luuniel or Ashdre.”
“Why? Is this kind of thing usual during a competition?”
“Not at all,” he fumed. “It is far outside of the bounds. Very far. Too far.” He slammed the flat of his hand on the table. “This sort of contest happens all the time. We are all of us rivals. But never before has this sort of wholesale sabotage occurred. Now they strike at us, we strike at them—it escalates.”
“Wait,” Annaïg said. “We’ve been doing this as well?”
“Well, of course,” he replied. “Once a war is begun, only a fool will not fight. But after our last response to Phmer’s affronts, I should have thought the matter settled. But now she—or one of the others—they come back at us.”
“Why don’t the lords step in?”
“Because there is no law concerning this. Outright invasion is governed by strict rules, but this picking and picking at things … Anyway, even though we’re usually able to discover who has been tampering with us, it’s not enough proof for a lord, you understand. They do not understand instinct and intuition the way we do.”
“Who started it?” she asked as guilelessly as possible.
“Most think it was Ashdre. He had the least chance of winning.” He chuckled a mean sort of laugh. “He has none now. Between Phmer and us, Ashdre’s kitchen is crippled. Luuniel isn’t much better off.”
“That’s good, then,” Annaïg said. “It seems we’re faring better than the others.”
“It seems, it seems. But all of the others hate me, you know, because I rose up from below. They disdain me, they pine for my failure. And lesser chefs, they are watching this. Possibly they are even behind some of the vandalism, hoping to see me fall and take my place. And sooner, not later, they will think to come against me together.”
“Have you no protection? Couldn’t you post guards?”
“Post them where? In the sump? In the midden? Below the filters? Even if I had a hundred guards, there would be no way to cover every vulnerable place. No, the only thing we can do is set a harsher example. And that I will do. I will show them what real retribution is.”
With that, he left her, and she worked in silence.
She felt like humming, but suppressed the urge for fear that her good cheer might be noticed. Her plan was working better than she had ever imagined. This was the first time Toel had said anything about it, but the rumors had been thick this last week, and Toel had come to ask her to develop a recipe for breathing underwater. All of the major kitchens were at one another’s throats, and they were all so vicious and mean it didn’t occur to any of them to question closely how it had all started. Glim and the skraws didn’t have to do much to keep things going—just a little nudge here and there. In fact, for the first time since she had been in Umbriel, she heard people talking about the skraws in glowing terms—how quickly they fixed what was broken, how good and uncomplaining they were. That was very good news, because it meant that Glim might achieve his goal without ever having to risk a confrontation between the skraws and the lords—when Toel’s kitchen was triumphant, she could reasonably suggest a replacement for the vapors as their reward. She’d already been given the perfect excuse to invent a safer drug.
That wouldn’t matter in the long run, of course, but it would make Glim happy.
The other thing that had Annaïg suppressing
her humming was how well her menu was coming along. Thanks to the skraws, she knew the tastes, fashions, and fetishes of not only Lord Rhel, but also most of those attending his tasting. She knew which ones Rhel liked and which ones he despised, and part of her planning was that the meal itself subtly insult and discomfit the latter. She knew he had a great sense of whimsy, and above all that he was partial to the new, strange, surprising—but also that he prided himself on a sort of coarseness of taste, of mortal indulgence. In this, he seemed to ape Umbriel himself, the eponymous master of this place, who was known to dine on the lowest sorts of matter at times. Rhel had been heard to say that such tastes reflected not the lack of refinement, but the fulfillment of it.
She worked, and her mood only improved as the day went on.
Glim rode the tree and bellowed in delight.
His claws gripped about the tendril-thin branch tips, and the wind, the spin of Umbriel, and the long rippling undulation of the trees did the rest. Fhena’s musical laugh sang nearby, where she clung to her own branch.
“I told you!” she shouted.
“You did!” he admitted. “It’s better than flying, I can tell you that.”
“You’ve flown? How?”
“Never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
It was merely exciting, at first, but after a few moments he began to feel the trees, their own joy in their existence, in the process of merely being, and he felt himself gently tugged into a state of pure thought, where no words existed to constrain his feelings, where no logic tried to make sense and order of the world, and there was only color, smell, touch, feeling, motion. When Fhena finally cajoled him back to thicker branches, he went only reluctantly, and he felt more refreshed—and more himself—than he had in a long time.
“Thank you,” he said. “That was—wonderful.”
“Isn’t it?” she said. “Sometimes I dream of just letting go, of never coming back.”
“Right,” Glim said. “But you have to come back.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Well, because—you would die.”
“And return to Umbriel and be born again. People do it all the time.”
“Die?”
“Ride the branches and let go. They say sometimes the mood just hits you and you can’t help it.”
“How do you know what someone who lets go was thinking?”
“Well, my friend Jinel got the feeling, but Qwern caught him. But he just went out the next day and let go anyway.”
Glim remembered the ghost of the feeling, of near-perfect peace.
“You didn’t think to warn me about that before I did it?” he wondered.
“Warn you? Why?”
“Because—” He stopped, then started again. “Listen, don’t do it again, okay? I don’t want you to die.”
“Well, I wouldn’t die, silly, just go back into Umbriel.”
“Right—and be born as someone else, someone who doesn’t remember me, who isn’t my friend.”
“I wouldn’t have to remember you,” Fhena said. “I would know you, Mere-Glim, whatever form I wore.” She brightened. “Maybe I would even be born in a form like yours. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Something like a quick hot tide seem to fill him up, and his mouth worked in embarrassment.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Please,” he said, “just promise me—no more branch riding.”
“That’s an awful lot to promise,” she said. “But if you’re asking, I guess I will.”
“Good. Thank you.”
But she had reminded him of something he’d been trying not to think about.
“What now?” Fhena asked.
“Now?” he sighed. “Well, speaking of being reborn, I have to go back to the sump and check on the recent implantations.”
“Stay a little longer,” she pleaded.
“I have to go,” he said. “Besides, you’ve got your own work to do. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Well, very well. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
He left, but the thought of Fhena as an Argonian—or at least in the form of one—stayed with him. In fact, he was so distracted that he realized he’d reached the implantations and had just been staring at them for several moments before he really saw them.
They looked so much like small Saxhleel. Their eyes were very large.
He’d known since he first saw them, but put it off. He couldn’t face it then.
No matter what happened with the kitchens and the lords, the skraws wouldn’t be free of the vapors. They would die, one by one, and be replaced by things that looked like him, that didn’t need the vapors to breathe beneath the waves. When they were all dead, the agony of the skraws would be over.
But that meant Wert and Oluth and everyone he actually knew was going to die horribly. He’d hoped to save them, to give them a better life, but instead his mere existence as a template had doomed them irrevocably to misery.
And they were so close. Toel’s kitchen would win, and the skraws would be rewarded with a healthier life. Then let the worms become Argonians, and the skraws live out their remaining years decently.
So he did what he had to do. He carefully killed them all, took them back up the Fringe Gyre, and threw them over the edge, where their tiny figures became smoke and then nothing.
It was the morning before the day of the banquet when Toel came to her, his eyes icy with fury. He wore a shirt and pair of breeches that appeared to be made of sharkskin, or something similar. He placed garments like them on her table.
“Put those on. You’re going with us.”
“Chef?”
“I have good information that the sump feed from our midden is going to be sabotaged again,” he said. “Soon.”
“But that’s okay,” she said. “That won’t affect the meal, at this point.”
“It’s not that,” Toel shouted. “I’ve simply had enough of this. Someone is going to die for this presumption, and I’m going to be there to see it. And so are you.”
Mere-Glim drifted nearly still amid twenty-foot-long strands of slackweed, watching the party approaching the maw where the midden was supposed to empty into the sump. They weren’t skraws, and swam even more clumsily. They were armed with long, wicked-looking spears, and there were six of them.
He waited until they had passed into darkness, then followed behind them into the dark fissure, trying to decide what he could do.
He hoped the armed figures would make some noise his comrades would hear, but they moved pretty quietly and altogether without talking.
They stopped to examine the tertiary sphincter, already closed, and then swam to the side, toward the maintenance tunnels. These were narrow, flattened tubes that worked around the big valve into the last of the seven chambers that waste from the middens passed through. It was dark with sludge, but not nearly as thick as it should have been. They produced some sort of underwater lanterns, and the beams stabbed through the murk, revealing a wide-eyed Wert holding a nutrient injector.
“You there,” a man’s voice said. “What are you doing?”
Wert’s mouth worked soundlessly for a moment.
“Just checking the muscle, sir,” he said. “These have been seizing up lately.”
“Yes, they have,” the man said. His companions were positioning themselves in a hemisphere around Wert. “I wonder why you have a nutrient injector. Those are used by farmers, on the Fringe Gyre. To my knowledge they have no purpose in the sump.”
“Well, it fell, I guess—from up there,” Wert attempted lamely. “I was wondering what it was.”
“Don’t lie to me!” the man exploded. “Unbelievable! Phmer has turned the skraws against me! No wonder!”
“Phmer?” Wert said, puzzled.
“Not just the skraws,” another said. “The nutrient injector—they must have help from the Fringe Gyre.”
“Well,” the man said. “We’ll see about all of
that. If the skraws and the farmers are involved, the lords will have to take notice.” He poked his spear toward Wert. “You’ll tell us everything, skraw.”
“It’s just me,” Wert said. “No one else is involved. Just me.”
“I doubt that. But we’ll be sure before it’s over. I’ll find everything in that little mind of yours.”
Glim was convinced the man was telling the truth. That meant trouble not only for the skraws, but for Fhena.
The first man probably never knew he was there before Glim’s claws sheared through his neck. The second had only time for a short shriek. The third—the man doing most of the talking—he was quick. He managed to get his spear up fast enough to cut a gash along Glim’s belly before Glim grabbed the shaft and slammed his thorny crest into the man’s face, the man then gurgling and drifting toward the bottom.
Glim spun in time to avoid another spear, this one wielded by a red-skinned woman with horns. They were all so clumsy, so slow. He dodged the tip and disemboweled her. A merish-looking woman was thrashing about with the injector in her back, and Cilinil appeared from somewhere and wrapped her long legs and arms around another, while Wert drove one of the spears through that one’s neck.
Glim felt a humming in his veins he’d never known, a terrible, black joy that made it hard to think.
The fellow he had butted was coming back. Glim swam down, caught him by the hair, and pulled him up to eye level.
“Incredible,” the man said weakly. “Do you know who I am? Have you no idea what you’ve done?”
“None,” Glim snarled.
“I am Chef Toel. Do you understand? Now let me go.”
“I don’t think I can do that,” Glim said.
“No?” Toel’s eyes suddenly glowed a strange silver color and the water started to hiss with bubbles.
“Xhuth!” Glim gasped as agony coursed up his arms. The muscles clenched uncontrollably and his fingers lost their grip. Toel came toward him, snarling, and his remaining companion was coming from the side, quickly. Wert and Cilinil were much too far away to help.