The Infernal city es-1

by Gregory Keyes

  “The walking dead, you mean?”

  “Yes, the larvae. Once incorporated, they can be brought here with certain incantations, bearing raw materials, beasts, what have you. But intelligent beings with desirable souls—”

  “Are all already dead by the time your gatherers begin their work.”

  “Did you interrupt me? I’m sure you didn’t.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “I’m sorry, Chef.”

  “I’m sorry, Chef.”

  Qijne nodded. “Yes, that’s how it is. And those of us in the kitchens don’t have the power to send them farther, or the incantations to bring them back here. Once the gatherers move very far from Umbriel, contact is lost.”

  This is good, Annaïg thought. I’m learning weaknesses already. Things that will help Attrebus.

  “So here we are,” she said.

  Annaïg looked at the table Qijne was indicating. It was littered with leaves, bark, half-eviscerated animals, roots, stones, and what have you. There was also a ledger, ink, and a pen.

  “I want to know about these things. I want you to list and describe every substance you know of that might be of use to me, and describe as well how to find them. You will do this for half of your work period. For the remainder of your shift you will cook—first you will learn how things are down here, then you will create original things. And they had better be original, do you understand?”

  “I don’t—it’s overwhelming, Chef.”

  “I will assign you a scamp and a hob and put a chef over you. That is far more than most that come here are given. Count your fortunes.” She waved at one of her gang, a woman with the gray skin and red eyes of a Dunmer.

  “Slyr. Take charge of this one.”

  Slyr lifted her knife. “Yes, Chef.”

  Qijne nodded, turned and strode off.

  “She’s right, you know,” Slyr said. “You don’t know how lucky you are.”

  Annaïg nodded, trying to read the other woman’s tone and expression, but neither told her anything.

  A moment later a yellowish, sharp-toothed biped with long pointy ears walked up.

  “This is your scamp,” she said. “We use the scamps for hot work. Fire doesn’t bother them very much.”

  “Hello,” Annaïg said.

  “They take orders,” Slyr said. “They don’t talk. You don’t really need it now, so you ought to send it back to the fires. Your hob—” She snapped her fingers impatiently.

  Something dropped through Annaïg’s peripheral vision and she started and found herself staring into a pair of large green eyes.

  It was one of the monkeylike creatures she’d seen on entering the kitchen. Closer up, she saw that, unlike a monkey, it was hairless. It did have long arms and legs, though, and its fingers were extraordinarily long, thin, and delicate.

  “Me!” it squeaked.

  “Name him,” Slyr said.

  “What?”

  “Give him a name to answer to.”

  The hob opened his mouth, which was both huge and toothless, so that for an instant it resembled an infant—and more specifically looked like her cousin Luc when he was a child. It capered on the table.

  “Luc,” she said. “You’ll be Luc.”

  “Luc, me,” it said.

  “I’ll be back to get you when it’s time to cook,” Slyr said. “This you’ll do on your own.” She glanced askance at Glim. “What about him?”

  “He knows as much about these things as I do,” Annaïg lied. “I need him.”

  “Very well.” And Slyr, too, walked off to some other task.

  Annaïg realized that she and Glim were alone with Luc the hob.

  “Now what?” Glim asked.

  “They want—”

  “I didn’t understand the words, but it’s pretty clear what they want you to do. But are you going to do it?”

  “I don’t see I have much choice,” she replied.

  “Sure. No one is watching us at the moment. We could escape back to the Midden through the garbage chute and then …”

  “Right,” she said. “And then what?”

  “Okay,” he grumbled. “Use some of this stuff to make another bottle of flying stuff. Then down the chute, back away, gone.”

  “I thought we were agreed on this.”

  “But you’ll be helping them, don’t you see? Helping them destroy our world.”

  “Glim, I’m learning a lot, and quickly. Think about it—this is the perfect place for me. If I could have asked for a better chance to sabotage Umbriel, I couldn’t have thought of anything better. Given a little time, who knows what I can make here?”

  “Yes,” he said. “I see that. But what about me?”

  “Do as I do. Talk to me now and then as if you’re telling me something. Write down the things I tell you to.”

  “What about that?” he asked of the hob.

  She considered the thing. “Luc,” she said, “fetch me those whitish-green fronds at the far end of the table.”

  “Yes, Luc me,” the hob said, bounding away and back, bearing the leaves.

  “This,” Annaïg dictated, “is fennel fern. It soothes the stomach. It’s used in poultices for thick-eye …”

  She had almost forgotten where she was when Slyr returned, hours later.

  “Time to cook,” Slyr said.

  Annaïg rubbed her eyes and nodded. She gestured vaguely at some of the nearby equipment. “I’m really interested in distilling essences,” she began. “How does this—”

  Slyr coughed up an ugly little laugh. “Oh, no, love. You don’t start there. You start in the fire.”

  “But there isn’t any fire,” she complained minutes later as she turned the hot metal wheel. The grill before her rose incrementally.

  “More,” Slyr snapped. “This is boar, yes?”

  “It smells like it,” Annaïg replied.

  “And this goes to the grounds workers in Prixon Palace, and they don’t like it burnt, like they do in the Oroy Mansion, see. So higher, and then send your scamp on the walk up there to swing a cover over it.”

  Annaïg kept hauling on the wheel. Sweat was pouring from her now, and she was starting to feel herself moving past fatigue into some whole new state of being.

  “What did you mean, about there being no fire?” Slyr asked.

  “There’s not. It’s just rocks. Fire is when you burn something. Wood, paper, something.”

  Slyr frowned. “Yes, I guess fire can mean that, too—like when grease falls. Right. But why would we cook by burning wood? If we did, all of the trees in the Fringe Gyre would be gone in six days.”

  “Then what makes the rocks hot?”

  “They’re hot,” Slyr said. “They are, that’s all. Okay, send your scamp.”

  She pointed at the metal hemisphere suspended on a boom from the ceiling, and the scamp scrambled up into the metal beams and wires above the heat. He pushed the dome—which ought to have been searing—and positioned it over the smoking hog carcass. Annaïg kept cranking until the grill came in contact with the dome.

  “There,” Slyr said. “We’re well above the flames. So what else can we put up there? What do we need to cook slowly?”

  “We could braise those red roots.”

  “The Helsh? Yes, we could.” She seemed surprised, for a moment, but covered it quickly.

  “These little birds—they would cook nicely up there.”

  “They would, but those are going to Oroy Mansion—”

  “—and they like everything burnt there.”

  “Yes.”

  Annaïg was sure Slyr almost smiled, but then she was directly back to business.

  “So get on with it,” she said.

  And so she burned, braised, roasted, and seared things for what felt like days, until at last Slyr led her to a dark dormitory with about twenty sleeping mats. A table supported a cauldron, bowls, and spoons. She stood in line, legs shaking with fatigue, helped herself, and then slid down against the wall near
the pallet Slyr indicated was hers.

  The stew was hot and pungent, unfamiliar meat and odd, nutty grains, and at the moment it seemed like the best thing she had ever eaten.

  “When you finish that, I advise you to sleep,” Slyr told her. “In six hours you’re back to work.”

  Annaïg nodded, looking around for Glim.

  “They’ve taken your friend,” Slyr said.

  “What? To where?”

  “I don’t know. It was obvious he didn’t know much about cooking, and there’s curiosity about what he is exactly.”

  “Well, when will they bring him back?”

  Slyr’s face took on a faintly sympathetic cast. “Never, I should think,” she replied.

  She left, and Annaïg curled into a ball and wept quietly. She pulled out her pendant and opened it.

  “Find Attrebus,” she whispered. “Find him.”

  Mere-Glim wondered what would happen if he died. It was generally believed that Argonians had been given their souls by the Hist, and when one died, one’s soul returned to them, to be incarnated once more. That seemed reasonable enough, under ordinary circumstances. In the deepest parts of his dreams or profound thinking were images, scents, tastes that the part of him that was sentient could not remember experiencing. The concept the Imperials called “time” did not even have a word in his native language. In fact, the hardest part of learning the language of the Imperials was that they made their verbs different to indicate when something happened, as if the most important thing in the world was to establish a linear sequence of events, as if doing so somehow explained things better than holistic apprehension.

  But to his people—at least the most traditional ones—birth and death were the same moment. All of life—all of history—was one moment, and only by ignoring most of its content could one create the illusion of linear progression. The agreement to see things in this limited way was what other peoples called “time.”

  And yet how did this place, this Umbriel, fit into all of that? Because he was cut off from the Hist. If he died here, where would his soul go? Would it be consumed by the ingenium Wemreddle had spoken of? And what of his people so consumed? Where they gone forever, wrenched from the eternal cycle of birth and death? Or was the cycle, the eternal moment, only the Argonian way of avoiding an even more comprehensive truth?

  He decided to stop thinking about it. This sort of thing made his head hurt. Concentrate on the practical and what he really knew; he knew that he’d been overpowered by creatures with massive, crablike arms, snatched away from Annaïg, and brought here. He didn’t know why.

  Fortunately, someone entered the room, rescuing him from any more attempts at reflection.

  The newcomer was a small wiry male and might well have been a Nord, with his fine white hair and ivory, vein-traced skin. And yet there was something about the sqaurish shape of his head and slump of his shoulders that made him seem somehow quite alien. He wore a sort of plain olive frock-coat over a black vest and trousers.

  He spoke a few words of gibberish. When Glim didn’t answer, he reached into the pocket of his coat and withdrew a small glass vial. He pantomimed drinking it and then handed it to Glim.

  Glim took it, wondering how it would feel to kill the man. He surely wouldn’t get far …

  But if they wanted to talk to him, they must want him alive.

  He drank the stuff, which tasted like burning orange peel.

  The fellow waited for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Can you understand me now?”

  “Yes,” Mere-Glim said.

  “I’ll get directly to the point,” the man said. “It has been noticed that you are of an unknown physical type, or at least one that hasn’t been seen in my memory, which is quite long.”

  “I’m an Argonian,” he said.

  “A word,” the man said. “Not a word that signifies to me.”

  “That is my race.”

  “Another word I do not know.” The little man cocked his head. “So it is true, then? You are from outside? From someplace other than Umbriel?”

  “I’m from here, from Tamriel.”

  “Exciting. Another meaningless word. This is Umbriel, and no place else.”

  “Your Umbriel is in my world, in my country, Black Marsh.”

  “Is it? I daresay it isn’t. But as interesting as this subject may be to you, it holds little appeal for me. What I’m interested in is what you are. What part of Umbriel you will become.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “You aren’t the first newcomer here, but you may be the first with that sort of body. But Umbriel will remember your body, and others with similar corpora will come along in time—many or a few, depending on what use you are.”

  “What if I’m of no use at all?”

  “Then we can’t permit Umbriel to learn your form. We must cut your body away from what inhabits it and send it back out into the void.”

  “Why not simply let me go? Return me to Tamriel? Why kill me?”

  “Ah, a soul is too precious for that. We could not think of letting one waste. Now, tell me about this form of yours.”

  “I am as you see me,” he replied.

  “Are you some sort of daedra?”

  Glim gaped his mouth. “You know what daedra are?” He asked. “The man we talked to below didn’t.”

  “Why should he?” the man said. “We have incorporated daedra in the past, but none exist here now. Are you daedra?”

  “No.”

  “Very well, good, that makes things less complicated. Those spines on your head. What is their function?”

  “They make me handsome, I suppose, to others of my race. More to some than to others. I try to take care of them.”

  “And that membrane between your fingers?”

  “For swimming.”

  “Swimming?”

  “Propelling oneself through water. My toes are webbed as well.”

  “You move through water?” The fellow blinked.

  “Often.”

  “Beneath the surface?”

  “Yes.”

  “How long can you remain beneath before having to surface for air?”

  “Indefinitely. I can breathe water.”

  The fellow smiled. “Well, you see, how interesting. What Umbriel lacks, it will seek out.”

  Glim shifted on his feet, but since he didn’t understand what the man was talking about, he didn’t answer.

  “The sump. Yes, I think you might do well in the sump. But let’s finish the interview, shall we? Now, your skin—those are scales, are they not?”

  ONE

  He saw the blow coming from the shift of the Redguard’s shoulder, but it was fast, so fast his dodge to the right almost didn’t succeed, and although the edge didn’t bite, the flat skimmed his bicep. He swung his sword at her ribs, but that same quickness danced her just beyond the reach of his blade.

  “Right idea, Attrebus,” he heard Gulan shout.

  She backed off a bit, her gaze fixed on his. “Yes,” she said. “Try that again.”

  “Got your breath yet?”

  “I’ll have yours in a minute,” she replied. She appeared to relax, but then suddenly blurred into motion.

  He backpedaled, but once again her speed surprised him. He caught her attack on the flat of his weapon and felt the weight of her steel smack against the guard. Then she was past, and he knew she would take a cut at his head from back there, so he dropped, rolled, and came back up.

  He saw it again, that slight slumping before she renewed her attack. Again he parried and broke the distance, but not quite so much.

  She circled, he waited. Her shoulders sagged, and he suddenly threw himself forward behind his blade, so that while she was starting to step and lift her weapon, his point hit her solar plexus and she went down, hard.

  He followed her and—as his people cheered—put the dull, rounded point in her face.

  “Yield?”

  She coughed and winced. “Yi
eld,” she agreed.

  He offered her his hand and she took it.

  “Nice attack,” she said. “I’m glad we were at blunts.”

  “You’re very fast,” he said. “But you have a little tell.”

  “I do?”

  “Well, I’m not sure I want you to know,” he said. “Next time it might not be blunts.”

  She seemed to be favoring one foot, so he offered her his shoulder. He helped her limp over to the edge of the practice ground, where his comrades watched from their ale-benches.

  “Bring us each a beer, will you?” he called to Dario the pitcher-boy.

  “Aye, Prince,” he replied.

  He sat her down a bit apart from the others and watched as she unlaced her practice armor.

  “What was your name again?” he asked her.

  “Radhasa, Prince,” she replied.

  “And your father was Tralan the Two-Blade, from Cespar?”

  “Yes, Prince,” she replied.

  “He was a good man, one of my father’s most valued men.”

  “Thank you, highness. It’s nice to hear that.”

  He focused his regard on her more frankly as the armor came off. “He was not the handsomest of men. In that, you don’t resemble him much.”

  Her already dark face darkened a bit more, but her eyes stayed fixed boldly on his. “So, you … think I’m a handsome man?”

  “If you were a man you would be, but I don’t see much mannish about you either.”

  “I’ve heard the prince is a flatterer.”

  “Here’s our drink,” he said as Dario arrived with the beer.

  Beer always tasted perfect after a fight, and this time was no different.

  “So why do you seek my service instead of my father’s?” he asked her. “I’m sure he would receive you well.”

  She shrugged. “Prince Attrebus, your father sits the throne as Emperor. In his service, I think I would see little in the way of action. With you, I expect rather the opposite.”

  “Yes,” he said, “that is true. The Empire is still reclaiming territory, both literally and figuratively. There are many battles yet to fight before our full glory is reclaimed. If you ride with me, death will always be near. It’s not always fun, you know, and it’s not a game.”