“So I gather,” Sul said. “Interesting, that bird. The dwemer used to make similar toys, before the world swallowed them up. Do you know where it’s from?”
“She said it came from her mother, and I gather her mother was middling nobility from Highrock.”
“Well, things move around,” Sul grunted. “Let me see it.”
“See here—” Attrebus began, but the look in the Dunmer’s eyes stopped him. He stood and extended Coo. Sul took her, examined her a bit. The little door wouldn’t unclasp for him.
“Smart,” Sul said. “Only opens for who it was sent to.”
“I believe so,” Attrebus replied. “Radhasa couldn’t make it work.”
“Why didn’t you tell her?” Sul asked, prodding the fire, snapping a swarm of sparks toward the sky. “This Annaïg. Why didn’t you tell her you’ve lost all of your guard?”
“I don’t want to discourage her.”
“You’d rather give her false hope?”
“I don’t intend to give up.”
“That’s good,” Sul said. “It’s better that way.”
“As opposed to what?”
Sul didn’t answer right away, but instead drew his sword and examined the edge a bit before resheathing it. Finally he looked up at Attrebus.
“Here’s my worry,” Sul said. “I’ll make it plain right away, so it’s not between us from here on out. Let’s start with this: I’m going to find Umbriel. When I do, there’s going to be slaughter, pure and simple. I’m going to bring it down. It’s been suggested to me that you can help me, and that’s why I followed you, that’s why I killed your captors. But I saw your fight with the Redguard—I was waiting to be sure of where the others were before I made my move, and it was clear she had no intention of killing you. I heard the conversation.”
“She was lying,” Attrebus said.
“She wasn’t,” Sul replied. “You’re telling yourself that now because you’re too weak to face it. But like she said, you’re not fundamentally stupid. The branch already has too much weight on it—it’s starting to creak. You barely managed to get through your talk with the Breton girl without getting weepy—”
“My friends have just been killed!” Attrebus heard himself shout. “Friends, lovers, companions, all dead. Of course I’m not myself!”
Sul waited for him to finish, then started again.
“In days or weeks that branch will crack, and down you’ll come. You’ll realize how right she was, and the world will turn over, and my worry is, will you be any use to me then? Will any of these principles you think you adhere to—honor, courage, honesty—survive it? Or are you just a child, playing at these things, as you played at being a warrior and commander?”
“You’re wrong about this,” Attrebus snapped. “Based on one conversation you overheard, you conclude she was right? Granted, she could outfight me—”
“A child with palsy could outfight you.”
“I’d been wounded, tied to a horse for days—”
“This isn’t an argument, Prince Attrebus.”
“Look, I’ll swear it even now. I will stop Umbriel, or I will die trying.”
“You’re not listening to me,” Sul said. “I’m trying to help you.”
“By telling me that everything I believe about myself is a lie?”
Sul’s eyes were fragments of the fire, lifting up to burn him.
And yet when he spoke, it wasn’t to Attrebus, and it wasn’t in Tamrielic. The only part of it the prince caught was the name “Azura”—one of the daedric princes. Then the Dunmer sighed harshly.
“Everyone faces that, you spoiled child. Most simply turn away and continue with their delusions—only a few are forced to accept the truth.”
“Not everyone, not like this,” Attrebus said. “I’m a prince—I’m supposed to be Emperor one day. If what Radhasa says is true, I’ve been mocked my whole life without ever knowing it.”
“Your ‘whole life’ is a heartbeat,” Sul said.
“Maybe to you. But if people have been laughing at me—”
“Enough,” Sul snarled. “Enough. I’ve done far more for you than I should. I’ve tried to warn you, but instead I’m just going to have to wait and see what the baby does. How’s this, then? With or without you, I’ll do what I’ve set out to do. If it comes to it, I’ll cut off your head and revive it now and then to talk to the bird. Would that be a fair price for you breaking that vow you pledged so earnestly just now?”
Attrebus couldn’t meet those eyes anymore, and turned instead to the living heart of the fire, which was certainly cooler.
“Yes,” he mumbled. But now he was afraid. What did this man really want? What did Sul really need from him? Was it even true they had the same goal?
But then he suddenly understood that didn’t matter. Every single thing Sul had told him could be true, but that still wouldn’t put Sul on the right side of things. Maybe he was planning something even worse than whatever the master of Umbriel was up to.
In the end, they might be enemies—that would certainly explain this attempt to undermine him even more than Radhasa had. Maybe he and Radhasa had been working together and then had a falling-out.
Maybe Sul was the man she had been planning to sell him to, and this was all part of some elaborate game of his, breaking the will of a prince, reducing him to believing he was nothing …
He felt like screaming. He wanted to be alone, to think, to be free of fear long enough to sort through the confusion. He had a horse now …
But then again, running might be exactly what Sul wanted. Sure, he could keep his vow and go after Annaïg and Umbriel himself, but Sul would be at his back the whole time. Hadn’t his father always said it was better to have your enemies where you could see them?
For now, that was probably his only choice. He had to keep his wits about him, think for himself, and not let Sul toy with him. He would work with the Dunmer as long as their goals appeared to be the same, and be ready the moment they weren’t. He was a Mede, after all. A Mede.
Annaïg thought that the first explosion was a vat shattering; it had happened before, especially at the Oroy station.
But the second was much louder, while sounding somehow farther away.
And then the screaming began. Some of it sounded like warlike howls, some like shrieks of terror and pain, but everything in Umbriel was still frightfully strange, and none of it gave her any purchase on what was happening.
Luc hopped down from the shelves and crouched behind her. For her part, Annaïg climbed up onto the table to get a better view, but the wavering air above the fire pits obscured the far end of the kitchens. Still, the scamps were all swarming in that direction, leaping through the wires, grills, and racks above the pits. Beyond, a black curtain of flame and smoke occluded what the shimmering air did not. Only in the central aisle could she see anyone, and there the cooks and their helpers were black silhouettes, crowded shoulder-to-shoulder.
“You,” Qijne snapped, from off to her left. “What are you standing about for?”
“What’s happening?”
Slyr was with her, and the rest of the staff from Ghol’s station, along with a motley collection of the largest and most dangerous-looking cooks in the kitchen, including Dest, a hulking ogrelike fellow with black and yellow fur. They were all armed to the teeth with butchering knives and cleavers.
“Don’t ask stupid questions,” Qijne snapped. “Come, now.”
The closed around her, moving at a trot, through the huge boilers, parsers, and stills, the pulsing soul-cable, and into territory Annaïg had never seen—high-chambered rooms filled with long, watery trenches in which she caught glimpses of serpentine movement. As they went along, chefs darted out and made adjustments to the equipment, until at last they came to a stair leading up.
“All of it, now,” Qijne said.
“But they’re coming,” Slyr protested. “Look, you can see them.”
She pointed back the way they ha
d come, and Annaïg made out, darting in and amidst the strange machinery, a handful of chefs, cooks, and tenders.
“They let them live, in hopes we would delay,” Qijne said. “We won’t. Do it. Send your hob.”
“Yes, Chef.”
They continued up the stairs, but a moment later a vast rumble began.
Annaïg found herself pushed up against Slyr.
“What’s happening?” she asked.
“Qijne’s purging the kitchens,” she said.
“Purging them?”
“We’re invaded, Annaïg.”
“Invaded?” She had a surge of sudden wild hope.
“By another kitchen. It hasn’t happened in years.”
They had reached the top of the stairs now, and emerged through a massive iron valve into a cavernous room. Dest closed and sealed it. Then the chefs began laying various odd-looking packages about in front of it.
Slyr was still hustling her back, toward the far end of the cavern.
“What now?” Annaïg asked.
“We wait. The kitchens are full of fire and thirty kinds of toxins. If anyone survives that, we’ll fight them here.”
“I don’t understand. Why would another kitchen invade?”
Slyr blinked and looked at her as if she were stupid. “To get you,” she said.
“How—How do you know that?”
“From what I saw, it has to be one of the upper kitchens, the ones that serve the greater lords. They could have attacked as we defended, with venomous gases. Instead they sent cooks. That tells me they want someone alive, and that must be you.”
“So everyone we left down there—”
“Not just dead, dissolved,” Slyr replied.
“Then—”
But a hollow boom filled the chamber, and another. Then a silence settled.
“Be ready,” Qijne said. “They were prepared.”
“Ah, sumpslurry,” Slyr moaned. “How could anything survive all that?”
“That’s a rhetorical question, I take it,” Annaïg said, trying hard not to shake.
The door glowed white-hot for an instant, then turned into a drifting vapor.
“Ready!” Qijne repeated.
For a few heartbeats nothing happened. Then a monster leapt through the door. Annaïg’s first impression was of a bull-sized lion with a thousand eyes set on squirming stalks. She had no second impression, for the packages Qijne’s people had scattered in front of the door suddenly revealed their natures and became variously fire, force, cold, and vitriol. The monster, whatever it was, was disintegrated.
But behind it, through the newly formed fog, poured hordes of cooks.
In appearance they were the same mixture of physical types that Annaïg was becoming used to in the kitchens. They wore gold and black.
Qijne screamed like some sort of bird of prey and ran at the attackers, her staff behind her.
In only seconds they were enveloped, and although Slyr kept trying to push Annaïg back, after a moment the fighting was all around her. Blood spurted up her chest and face as a cleaver chopped someone’s arm off; she slipped and fell, blinded by the blood in her eyes. When she managed to wipe it out, she saw Minn staggering by, clutching her bleeding gut, her face dissolving into yellow worms. She tried to scream, and might have, but if so, her voice was lost in the din.
All of a sudden Qijne was there, pulling her up from another fall. One of her ears was missing and much of her left arm had turned a strange gray color.
Qijne pulled her close.
“He won’t have you,” she shouted in Annaïg’s ear.
Then she pulled back, and Annaïg saw her arm come up, and as blood sprayed from nearby, she saw it outline a long, wickedly curved nothing protruding from the chef’s finger. She stared at it, unable to move, knowing what came next.
But then Slyr buried her cleaver in Qijne’s neck, and the chef’s eyes fluttered. Annaïg felt something tug at her neck and thought her throat had been cut before realizing the invisible blade had sliced through her locket chain. Slyr hacked again, and then Qijne staggered back, swiping her hand at Slyr, but the slate-skinned woman, trying to step back, slipped over a body. Then Qijne toppled, knocking Annaïg over yet once again.
They landed face-to-face. Qijne still wasn’t dead. She was trying to get her hand back up. Annaïg grabbed her wrist. The blade was invisible again, but Annaïg felt something at her forehead, and a lock of hair fell past her nose.
She shrieked and pushed the hand back. For a long moment Qijne resisted, but then the spurting from her neck slowed to a trickle and her eyes went dull.
Annaïg lay there, panting, oblivious to the chaos still reigning around her. She kept hold of the hand and saw—inside the sleeve—a sort of tightness on Qijne’s arm, as if it were constricted by an unseen band. She tugged at it, but couldn’t find any sort of catch, buckle, or tie. She was just in the process of carefully laying the arm aside when something brushed her wrist and then, to her horror, cinched around it. Reflexively she grabbed at it with her other hand, but all she could feel was a sort of gummy torus, encircling her wrist. There was no blade.
She realized that it was almost silent now. She began to turn, but someone grabbed her up by the back of her jacket, and a moment later she was standing unsteadily on her feet again. Corpses were sprawled all around her. Slyr was a few feet away, held by two unfamiliar men. Everyone else she knew from the kitchen was dead.
From the press of black and gold before her, a man emerged. He might have been a Breton, with his high, delicate cheekbones and sensuous lips. He put a finger to his chin, and she saw it was long, slim, manicured. He wore the clothing of a chef, but it was as black as his hair.
He turned sky blue eyes first on Slyr, then on Annaïg.
“So,” he murmured in a silky voice. “You two are responsible for Lord Ghol’s last several meals?”
Slyr lifted her chin. “We are,” she said.
“Very well, then. You have nothing to fear. I am Chef Toel. You belong to me now.”
He touched his finger to her lips, and everything faded to black.
NINE
“Something’s moving up there,” Attrebus said.
Sul nodded. “I know,” he replied.
Of course you do, Attrebus thought sullenly.
Earlier that day the short-grass prairie had abruptly dropped off into one of the strangest landscapes Attrebus had ever seen. It looked as if a massive flood had stripped everything away but the dirt, and then cut that up into a labyrinth of arroyos and gullies. It was beautiful, in a way, because the vibrant rust, umber, olive, and yellow strata of the soil were exposed, like one of those thirty-layer cakes that Cheydinhal was famous for.
From above, it was fine to look on. But once in the maze, Attrebus felt mostly claustrophobic. And now someone or something was stalking them, up on those crumbly ridges.
“What if they attack us?”
“If they wanted to do that, we’d already have arrows in us,” Sul grated. “They’ll let us know what they want soon enough.”
That didn’t make Attrebus feel any more comfortable. Not that he’d been at ease before—not just because of the terrain, but because he found himself obsessively combing back through the events of his life. It wasn’t that he fully believed Radhasa and Sul—but he conceded that there might be some element of truth to their rantings, an element they were exaggerating.
Sul, annoyingly enough, proved correct about those spying on them. The trail they were following bottled tighter, until it was only a few yards wide, and as they turned a corner, they found themselves facing four Khajiit.
Attrebus had known many Khajiit, of course. Some of his guard had been of the cat-people, and they were common enough in the Empire. But he had never seen any quite like this.
What struck his eye first were their mounts—monstrous cats that stood as high as a large horse at the shoulder. Their forelimbs were as thick as columns and half again as long as their rears, gi
ving them an apelike appearance. Their coats were tawny, ribboned with stripes the color of dried blood, and their feral yellow eyes seemed to promise evisceration—and that was only to start with.
Two of the riders seemed hardly less bestial, although they wore shirts that covered their torsos, and cravats around their necks. Where their fur was visible, it was pale yellowish-green spotted with black. Their faces were altogether more catlike than any Khajiit he’d ever met, and they slouched forward on their mounts.
The third rider was more like what Attrebus was used to, with features that were more manlike, although still unmistakably feline. And the final rider had such fine, delicate features, she might easily have been of merish blood, had her face not been splotched with irregular black rings.
“Well, there,” the woman said in a beautiful, lilting voice. “Who do we have here traveling on our road?”
Attrebus cleared his throat, but Sul spoke more quickly.
“No one of consequence,” he said. “Just two wayfarers going east.”
Attrebus realized that—out of sheer habit—he’d been about to tell them exactly who he was. Sul had known that, too, hadn’t he?
“East, you say?” the woman said. “East is good. The moons come from there. We’re in favor of east. We’re going there. But east for you—not so good, I think. East is not so friendly to men and mer, except, you know, in Rimmen. But how could you get there? And on our road?”
Attrebus heard a shuffle behind him, and a glance showed him what he should have known—there were two more riders behind him.
“We’ve no need to go to Rimmen,” Sul replied.
“Rude,” the woman said. “Where are my manners? Would you ride with us? Accept our protection?”
“We would be honored,” Sul replied.
“Now wait a moment—” Attrebus began.
“The whelp is speaking out of turn,” Sul cut in. “We would be honored. I had no idea the East was so fretful. And of course, we offer Je’m’ath in return for your kindness.”
“Ah,” the woman said. “You also have manners, outlander. Very well. Travel with my brothers and cousins and me. We are happy to share what we have.”
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