The Infernal city es-1

by Gregory Keyes

  “A … thanks.”

  “I mean it as a compliment.”

  “I’ll take it that way, then.”

  She perched on one of the smaller branches and crossed her legs. “Where you come from—is everyone strange, like you?” she asked, plucking one shrimp from her sack and biting its head off.

  “Well, of course where I’m from doesn’t exist anymore, thanks to Umbriel.” At least the place that I grew up doesn’t. Everyone I know there is probably dead.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. But what I meant—”

  “I know what you meant,” he replied. “Where I was from—is called Black Marsh. That’s where my people are from. But there are other sorts of people, just as there are here.”

  “What do you mean, ‘other sorts of people’?”

  Right, he remembered. They’re really all just worms. Their appearance is superficial.

  “Well, there is a whole race of people, for instance, who look a lot like you. We call them the Dunmer, and they used to live in Morrowind, which is what’s below us now. Now most of them are gone.”

  “Used to live?”

  “There was an explosion,” he said. “A volcano erupted and destroyed most of their cites. Then my people came in and killed or drove out more.”

  “Why? To claim their souls?”

  “No, because—it’s a long story. The Dunmer have preyed on my people for centuries. We paid them back for that. The few that remain are scattered. Most are on Soulstheim, an island far north of here.”

  She clapped her hands in delight. “I don’t understand half of what you’re saying. More than half.”

  “That makes you happy?”

  “Yes! Because it gives me questions. I love questions. Like—what’s a volcano?”

  “It’s a mountain that has fire inside of it.”

  “See? So what’s a mountain?”

  It went on like that for a while, and he actually found himself enjoying it, but finally he knew it was best he go, so he said so.

  “Can we meet again?” she asked.

  “I’ll try to come back.” He gathered his courage to ask his question, but she swam ahead of him.

  “I found your friend!” she said. “I should have told you to start with, but I was afraid you would leave without talking to me if I did.”

  “You know where Annaïg is? She’s alive?”

  “I’m sorry—were you hoping she was dead?”

  “No, I—where is she?”

  “I didn’t mention you, when I was asking,” she assured him. “She’s very famous in the kitchens, especially after the slaughter.”

  “Slaughter?”

  “She was in one kitchen, but then another kitchen invaded it to capture her. Like your story about your people invading Morrowind, I guess. And now she’s in a much higher kitchen.”

  “Do you know which one?”

  She concentrated for a moment. Then her face brightened again. “Toel,” she said. “Toel Kitchen.”

  “And do you know where it is?”

  Her face fell. “I don’t. I don’t know my way around outside of the Fringe Gyre. I could ask Kalmo or someone else who makes deliveries, but then they might want to know why I’m asking.”

  “It’s okay,” he said. “Don’t ask, for now. I don’t want to get you in trouble. It’s enough to know she’s alive.”

  “I’m glad I was helpful,” Fhena said.

  “You’ve no idea,” Mere-Glim told her. He hesitated, and then touched his muzzle to her cheek. She jerked away in surprise.

  “Why did you do that?” she asked.

  “It’s called a kiss,” he said, feeling stupid. “Humans and mer do it to express—”

  “I know what a kiss is,” she replied. “We do it during procreation. Not like that, though. Are you asking me to procreate?”

  “No,” Mere-Glim said. “No. That was a different kind of kiss—it just expresses thanks. I’m not trying … No.”

  “I wonder if we even could?” she wondered.

  “I’m going now,” Glim said, and hurried away.

  Mere-Glim woke from nightmares of emptiness and pain and it was a moment before he understood someone was whispering his name. He sat up, grunting, and made out Wert’s features in the dim light.

  “What is it?” he asked.

  “Come with me,” Wert replied. “We want to talk to you.”

  He groggily followed Wert through the skraw passages and then out of them, into a place that had a stale sort of smell to it, as if it wasn’t used very often. Light wands had been placed in a little pile, and around it stood eight other skraws.

  “What is this?” Glim asked.

  Wert cleared his voice. “You stood up to the overseer,” he said.

  “I was angry,” Glim replied. “And I’m not used to being treated like that.”

  “He’d never felt the pain before,” another of the skraws said. “I’ll bet he wouldn’t do it again.”

  “Well?” Wert said.

  “Well, what?”

  “Would you stand up to him again?”

  “I don’t know. If I had reason to. It’s only pain.”

  “He might have killed you. Probably the only reason he didn’t is that there’s only one of you, and you’re so valuable. But that’ll change soon.”

  “Why are you asking me this?” Glim snapped. “Why do you care?”

  “You said it yourself,” Wert said. “Why should we have to take the vapors? I didn’t really understand you when you started talking that way. It’s hard to think like that. But you’ve been most of your life without overseers. Things occur to you that don’t to us.”

  “It’s never occurred to you that your lives could be better?”

  “No. But now you’ve brought it up, see? Now it’s hard to make the thought go away.”

  “And you’ve spread it around.”

  “Right.”

  “So what do you want with me?”

  “Let’s say we want free of the vapors—just that one thing. How do we go about that?”

  Glim almost felt like laughing. Here was Annaïg’s resistance, such as it was.

  “Well,” he said slowly, “I haven’t thought about it. I’m not sure I want to.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean this isn’t my sort of thing,” Glim replied. “I’m not interested in leading a revolution.”

  “But that’s not right,” Wert blurted. “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

  “Situation? You haven’t done anything yet, have you?”

  “Situation,” Wert repeated, tapping his head.

  “Look—” Glim began, but then stopped. He could use this, couldn’t he? If they thought he was leading them in some sort of insurrection, he could use them to get to Annaïg.

  He saw they were all watching him expectantly.

  “Look,” he said again, “without the sump, no one is born. Probably more than half of the food supply comes from here, and I’ll bet the Fringe Gyre needs water from here to produce the rest. And we control the sump.”

  “But the overseers control us.”

  “But they can’t—or won’t—do what we do. What if things started going wrong? Mysteriously? We don’t tell anyone that we’re behind it, and they punish us, but if things keep going wrong—if water doesn’t go where it’s supposed to, if the orchid shrimp die because we forget to scatter the nutrients, well, we’ll make a point. They can’t kill us all, because then who would see that new skraws are born? And then we let them know that all we ask for everything to go back to normal is something better than the vapors, something that doesn’t hurt you so much.”

  He saw they were all just staring at him, dumbstruck.

  “That’s crazy,” one of them finally said.

  “No,” Wert breathed. “It’s genius. Glim, how do we start?”

  “Quietly,” he said. “For now, the only thing I want you to do is make maps.”

  “Map
s?”

  “Maps of any place we deliver to—food, nutrients, sediment—anything. I want to know where the siphons at the bottom of the Drop go and why. Do we have access to the ingenium through any of them?”

  “I mean, what’s a map?” Wert asked.

  Glim hissed out a long sigh, and then began to explain.

  SEVEN

  Attrebus screeched involuntarily and the Khajiit howled; the sensation was like falling—not down, but in all directions at once. The moons were gone, and in their place a ceiling of smoke and ash. Stifling heat surrounded them and the air stank of sulfur and hot iron. They stood on black lava, and lakes of fire stretched off before them.

  “Stay together!” Sul shouted. He took a step, and again the unimaginable sensation, and now they were in utter darkness—but not silence, for all around them were chittering sounds and the staccato scurrying of hundreds of feet.

  They were in an infinite palace of colored glass.

  They were on an icy plane with a burning sky.

  They were standing by a dark red river, and the smell of blood was nearly suffocating.

  They were in the deepest forest Attrebus had ever seen.

  He was braced for the next transition, but Sul was suddenly swearing.

  “What?” Attrebus said. “Where are we? Is this still Oblivion?”

  “Yes,” he said “We’ve been interrupted. He must have sniffed out my spoor and laid a trap.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This is part of a trail I made to escape Oblivion,” he said. “It took me years to make it. It starts in Azura’s realm and ends in Morrowind. I used the sympathy of Dagon’s gate to enter his realm at the point my trail crossed it, so we really started in the middle. A few more turns and we would have been there. Now …”

  He scratched the stubble on his chin and glanced at the leaves overhead.

  “We’re lucky,” he murmured. “We have some time before dark. We might have a chance.”

  “A chance against whom?” Attrebus asked

  “The Hunter,” Sul answered. “The Father of the Manbeasts—Prince Hircine.”

  In the distance Attrebus heard the sound of a horn, then another behind him.

  “We’re being hunted by a daedra prince?”

  “The Hungry Cat, we call him,” Lesspa said. She actually sounded excited. “I knew coming with you was the thing to do. There could be no worthier opponent than Prince Hircine.”

  “That may be,” Attrebus said, “but I don’t intend to die here, no matter how honorable a death it might be.”

  “He won’t necessarily kill us,” Sul said absently, turning slowly, looking out through the curiously clear forest and its enormous trees. “He didn’t kill me, the time he caught me. He just kept me here for a few years.”

  “How did you escape?”

  “That’s a very long story, and I didn’t do it without help.”

  “Well, being held here won’t do either.”

  “He’ll probably kill us,” Sul said. He pointed. “It’s that way—another door that will put us back on track. It’s in a more difficult place, which is why I prefer this one—but it will do.”

  “And if it’s trapped, too?”

  “Hircine always gives a chance,” Lesspa said. “That’s his way.”

  “She’s right,” Sul agreed. “It’s not sport if the prey can’t escape.”

  The horns sounded again, and a third joined them, in the direction Sul had just pointed.

  “That’s bad,” Attrebus remarked.

  “Those are Hircine’s drivers,” Sul said, “not the prince himself. We haven’t heard his horn—you’ll know it when you do, believe me. If we can get past the driver, we might have a chance.”

  “We’ll get past him,” Lesspa said. “Mount behind me, Prince Attrebus. Sul, you ride S’enjara with Taaj.”

  Attrebus climbed up behind Lesspa. There was no saddle, or anything to hold onto but her, so he reached around her waist.

  The tigers began at an easy lope that was still far faster than Attrebus could have run. Lesspa had a lance in her left hand, and so did Taaj. The other two Khajiit had small but efficient-looking bows.

  The horns sounded again, the loudest now being the one they were headed toward.

  Because of the lack of understory, and because the huge trees were spaced so far apart, they caught glimpses of Hircine’s driver from a fair distance, but it wasn’t until the last thirty yards that Attrebus saw what they faced.

  The driver himself might have been a massive albino Nord with long, sinewy arms. He was bare to the waist and covered in blue tattoos. His mount was the largest bear Attrebus had ever seen, and four only slightly smaller bears ran along with him.

  “Bears,” Lesspa sighed. It sounded as if she were happy. She shouted a few orders in her native dialect.

  The archers wheeled and began firing, but Sha’jal was suddenly moving so fast that Attrebus nearly fell off. Everything to the sides blurred; only their destination was clear, and getting larger with terrifying speed.

  Sha’jal bellowed out a deafening roar and bounded up on one of the bears, using it as a step to kick himself even higher, and all of the weight went out of Attrebus as they soared straight at the driver. He brought up a spear with a leaf-shaped blade bigger than some short swords, but not quick enough to hit the huge cat. Lesspa’s lance went true into the driver’s chest, but the resulting impact spun them half around, and Attrebus finally lost his grip. He hit the ground on his shoulder, felt pain jar through his skeleton, but all he could think of were the bears all around him, so he scrambled back up despite the pain.

  A good thing, too, because one was coming right for him. He drew Flashing, made a wild stroke, and staggered aside as the bear lunged for his throat. Flashing bounced off the beast’s skull, leaving a cut that appeared to only make it madder. Then it reared up over him, giving him the opportunity to thrust his blade into its belly. It bawled and threw its weight on him, wrenching his weapon from his hand. He threw up his arms to protect his head and tried to roll aside.

  He was only partly successful; the beast came down on his lower body, claws ripping into his byrnie. He kicked at the crushing weight, but it was only the bear rolling off to lick at its wounded belly that freed him. Heaving for breath, he took Flashing back up and chopped though its neck.

  A flash like lightning lit the trees; he turned and saw another of the bears topple, smoking, as Sul leapt over it and toward the heart of the fray. The white giant was gone, and in its place something between a man and a bear was fighting the Sench-tigers. It hurled two away, but even as it did, Sha’jal leapt on the driver’s back and closed his viselike jaws behind his neck. The other Khajiit were finishing off the mount. The other bears lay in brown heaps.

  The were-bear bawled and tried to shake free. Sul strode up almost casually and cut him from crotch to sternum.

  The tigers plunged into the were-beasts’ steaming entrails. They were quick about it, and before Attrebus had taken another twenty breaths, they were mounted again, riding hard as the other horns drew nearer. By the sound of it, one of the drivers was behind them and the other was coming from their left flank.

  “Hold on!” Lesspa yelled. He was just wondering why when they were suddenly moving downhill in what amounted to a controlled fall. They burst into open sunlight and bounded over a stream as they left the forest behind and plunged downslope to a grassy savanna. A red sun was just touching the horizon, painting bloody the river that meandered across the flatland. Of course, this was Oblivion, so it might be blood. Off to what he presumed was the south, he saw a herd of some large beasts, but before he could figure out what they were, they were on the plain and he couldn’t make them out anymore. They were in the same general direction as one of the drivers who was approaching and blowing, so he hoped that whatever they were, they might slow him down.

  “More our element, grassland,” Lesspa told him.

  It was only then that he noticed
that M’qar was riderless.

  “Where’s J’lasha?” he asked Lesspa.

  “On Khenarthi’s path,” she replied.

  “I’m sorry.”

  “He died well. There’s no sorrow in that.”

  A herd of antelopes with twisting horns scattered at their approach.

  Lesspa slowed Sha’jal to a walk and dismounted. Taaj and Sul followed her lead.

  “The other drivers are still coming,” Attrebus pointed out.

  “The Sench are sprinters, not distance runners,” Lesspa replied. “They need to get their wind back if we’re to run again.”

  They were parallel to the river now, which had dug itself a respectable ditch here, at least a hundred feet deep. It made Attrebus nervous to have a sheer drop on one side and riders coming from every other direction. He told Sul so.

  “A tributary comes in up ahead,” Sul told him. “It makes a gentler slope going in, and we can get down into the canyon there. The door we’re looking for is up the canyon another mile or so.”

  “You really think we’ll make it?”

  “Hircine himself won’t show up until after it’s dark. He hunts with a pack of werewolves. Until then all we have to do is avoid the drivers.”

  “Ground is shaking,” Lesspa observed.

  Attrebus felt it, too. At first he wondered if it wasn’t some characteristic of Hircine’s plane; he’d heard that Oblivion realms were often unstable. But then he saw the cloud of dust off to the south and understood the truth; what he felt was the thunder of thousands of hooves.

  “We probably want to avoid that, too,” he pointed out.

  “The driver,” Sul growled.

  “To mount!” Lesspa called, then sang out in Khajiit.

  Once again the tigers dug in and flew along the edge of the precipice. He could see the stampede now, but could only tell that the herd was brown.

  “Up ahead!” Sul shouted. “You see, there? That’s where we go down.”

  Attrebus could see it, all right, and could see that they were never going to make it, not at the speed that herd was moving. In less than a minute they were close enough for him to see they were some sort of wild cattle, albeit cattle that probably stood six feet high at the shoulders and had horn-spans almost that wide.