by Greg Keyes
“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.
Impossibly, the tigers increased their speed, and the tributary grew nearer, but now he could hear the beasts snorting and bellowing, closer and closer, a wall falling on him …
And suddenly he saw the tiger Sul was riding make a peculiar leap that took it over the edge of the cliff.
Then Sha’jal was in the air, too.
The fall opened below him as if in a dream. Everything seemed to be moving quite slowly. They were nearly parallel to the cliff, and Sha’jal was lashing out at something—a tree, growing up from below them. He caught it and then all of the blood rushed from his head as they swung down and in toward the cliff face.
When his senses returned, he was fetched up hard against some sort of recess in the rock wall; he could see the trunk of the tree rising from somewhere lower, but even as he watched, it was smashed from view by the rain of cattle that began pouring down a few yards in front of them. He looked right and left, and incredibly, all of the Khajiit and Sul were there, pressed against the back of the shallow rock shelter. Flakes of shale rained on their heads, and he could only hope that the weight of the wild cattle didn’t break it.
They kept coming, bleating, eyes rolling, legs flailing.
Lesspa started laughing, and the other Khajiit quickly joined her. After a moment, Attrebus found himself chuckling, too, not even certain why.
And, finally—as the last of the light was fading—the beasts stopped falling.
“Quickly, now,” Sul said. “I think we can work our way down on this side. We don’t have much time.”
Sul proved right—their hideaway was part of a larger erosional gully, probably an earlier channel of the tributary. They were able to step and slide their way down it.
The river was choked with dead and dying cattle, and the water stank of their blood, urine, and feces.
They continued downstream, crossing the tributary a few moments later. Attrebus could barely see now, but the Khajiit and Sul seemed to be having little trouble, and the strand along the river was sandy and relatively flat. And then a new, silvery light shone as a moon rose into the sky.
Above, two horns blared, quite near.
Upstream, another answered in a voice so incredibly deep and primal that Attrebus suddenly felt like a rabbit in the open, surrounded by wolves. It chased all thought from him, and before he knew it he was dashing forward in mindless terror.
Something caught him from behind, and he swung violently, trying to break the grip before realizing it was Sul …
“Easy,” he said. “Snap out of it.”
“That’s Hircine,” Attrebus said. “It’s over.”
“Not yet,” Sul said. “Not yet.”
The horn sounded again, and now he heard wolves baying.
“Keep together,” Sul warned them. “When we get there, we’ll have to be quick.”
Dark figures watched them from both rims of the canyon, and strange bestial sounds drifted down, but apparently the other drivers were content just to keep them bottled in and let their master have the kill.
They rushed on, breathless, limping. Sul shouted something, but Attrebus couldn’t make it out because of the wolves. He glanced behind him, and in the moonlight saw an enormous silhouette shaped like a man, but with the branching horns of a stag.
“He’s here!”
“So are we!” Sul shouted. “Ahead there, you see, where the canyon narrows. It’s just through there.”
It was all running then, following Sul. The howls grew closer, so near that he could already feel the teeth in his back. The canyon narrowed until it was only about twenty feet wide.
“Another fifty yards!” Sul shouted.
“That’s too far,” Lesspa said. She stopped and shouted something in Khajiit. They all turned to face the hunt.
“We’ll catch up after we’ve killed him,” she said.
“Lesspa—”
But Sul grabbed his arm and yanked him along.
“Don’t spit on their sacrifice,” he said. “The only way to make it worthwhile is to survive.”
Behind them he heard Lesspa’s warrior shriek, and a wolf howled in pain.
He tried to concentrate on keeping his feet working beneath him and off the fire in his chest. He was terrified, but he wanted to stand with Lesspa, to stop running.
And yet he knew he couldn’t.
The walls of the canyon narrowed further, until they were only about ten feet apart. The shingle vanished, and they were running in swiftly moving water. And something was splashing behind them.
Then he took a step, and nothing was under it—the river dropped away into empty space. He didn’t see any bottom.
EIGHT
Annaïg passed a bit of what had once been a soul along a wire drawn through a glass globe full of greenish vapor. As she watched, droplets formed on the wire and then quickly condensed into beadlike crystals. She waited for them to set properly, then carefully unsealed the two hemispheres of the globe and slid the wire out, so the tiny formations tinged and settled in the hollow glass and shone little tiny opals.
“There’s that down,” she murmured. “Forty-eight more courses to go.”
Lord Irrel’s tastes tended toward the inane. No meal of less than thirty courses ever pleased him, and fifty or more was safest.
Almost everything he ate was the product of some process involving stolen souls. She’d been squeamish about that at first, but like a butcher getting used to blood, she had become less focused on what it was and more on what to do with it. At times she still wondered if she was destroying the last bit of a person, the final part of them that made them them. Toel assured her that wasn’t how it worked, that the energy that came to the kitchens came from the ingenium, which had already processed it to purity.
In the end she felt sure she would have been more bothered by dismembering human corpses, even though there was nothing there to feel or know what was happening.
A soft clearing of the throat behind her caused her to turn. A young woman with red skin and horns stood there, looking a little worried. Annaïg did not know her, but she was dressed as a pantry worker.
“Pardon me, Chef,” the woman said. “Do not think I presume, and I’m certain what your answer will be, but a skraw is here with a delivery, and he says he will only give it to you.”
“A skraw?”
“That’s what they call them that work in the sump.”
Annaïg’s spirit lifted in a sudden rush. Mere-Glim worked in the sump, or at least so Slyr had said.
“Well,” she said, trying to keep her composure, “I suppose I have a moment. Take me to this fellow.”
She followed the woman through the pantries and beyond, to the receiving dock, where she had never been. It wasn’t particularly imposing, merely a room with various tunnels leading away. There were also two large square holes in the walls that didn’t seem to go anywhere until she realized they were shafts going up and down. In fact, as she watched, a large crate came
into one of them from above. Several workers sitting on the top of it got down and began unfastening the latches on the front.
She did not see Mere-Glim. Instead, there was a dirty-looking fellow in a sort of loincloth holding a large bucket.
“This is him, Chef.”
“Very good—you may go,” Annaïg told her.
She bowed and hurried off.
“Well,” Annaïg asked. “What’s this?”
“Nothing, lady,” the man croaked. He looked unhealthy, jaundiced. “Only I was told to deliver this just to you.”
She peered into the bucket, which seemed to be filled with phosphor worms, annalines, and dash clams.
“That’s it?”
“That’s it, lady.”
“Very good, then. I’ll take them.”
She took the bucket and went back up, hoping no one would see her, torn between hope that the bucket contained something from Glim and worry that it was all some weird practical joke.
She stopped in the pantry and put the seafoods in their various holding tanks, and was leaning toward the practical joke end of things when her hand found something smooth and familiar.
Her locket.
She clutched it tight, realizing dizzily that this was one of the best moments of her young life. To have Glim back. And her mother’s amulet. And hope—she hadn’t realized just how resigned she had become to Umbriel. With no way to contact Treb, she’d tried not to think about him, which was to say not to think of escape. Yes, she’d found what she needed in order to leave, but hadn’t even put them together yet.
She realized she must be grinning as if mad, so she took a moment to compose herself, slipped the amulet in her pocket, and went back to work. She went by the tree-wine vats first, however, and, making certain no one was in the area, flipped open the amulet.
Inside was a little piece of some sort of hide or vellum, and although it was damp, the letters hadn’t run. It was in the private hand that she and Glim had invented as children.
Annaïg: I found you and I’ve found the sky. I know more than I did. Let me know what and when and where. You can send a note by any of the skraws.
She placed the locket in one of her drawers. The note she dipped in vitriol and watched it dissolve. Then she returned to her cooking station.
She was putting a film on the soup when Slyr came over from her station.
“Could you try this?” she asked. “I’ve been experimenting with condensations of those black, bumpy fruit. I forget what you call them.”
“Blackberries?”
“That’s right. Only they’re not black, are they? Their juice is almost the color of blood.”
“Sure,” Annaïg said. She took the spoon, which had little droplets like perspiration on it, and carefully licked them off. They tasted a little like blackberries, but more like lemon and turpentine.
“That’s pretty good,” she said, “at least by the lord’s standards. I should think it would go nicely on white silk noodles.”
“That was my thought,” Slyr said. “Thanks for your advice.” She tilted her head. “I was looking for you earlier. I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“I went down to the pantry to check on a few things,” she said.
“Ah,” Slyr said. “That explains it.”
But her tone hinted that it didn’t.
Annaïg sighed as the woman walked off. Slyr grew more jealous by the day, even though she had learned to hide it pretty well. Slyr seemed convinced that she was trysting with Toel at every possible moment. Sometimes she felt like telling her about Toel’s offer and conditions, but worried that might actually make things worse.
She finished filming the soup, then went back to her work with the tree-wine, thinking she might find the privacy there to open her locket.
She had just reached the vats when she felt a funny scratch in the back of her throat. Her nose was numb, her head was ringing, and suddenly her heart was beating strangely.
“Slyr!” she gasped, stumbling forward. Her lungs felt like they were closing. She shut her eyes, focusing on the taste, the scent, the feel of the stuff Slyr had given her, then leaned against her cabinet, rifling for ingredients. The ringing was growing louder, and all her extremities were cold.
She built a picture of the poison in her mind, tried to think what would settle it, pacify it, break it apart, but everything was happening too fast. She fell onto the table, spilling jars and shattering vials. She let her instincts take over, just operating by smell, drinking some of this, a finger dab of that …
The ringing crescendoed, and she went away.
She came back on Toel’s balcony on a white couch draped with sheets. Toel himself sat a few feet away, looking over a scroll. She must have made a noise, because he turned, smiling.
“Well, there you are,” he said. “That was very near.”
“What happened?”
“You were poisoned, of course. She used ampher venin. Its effects are delayed, but once symptoms develop, it works very quickly. Sound familiar?”
She nodded, realizing to her dismay that under the sheets she didn’t have any clothes on.
“You should have died, but you didn’t,” he continued. “You somehow concocted a stabilizer. That kept you alive the half an hour before someone noticed you lying there. Without me, of course, you would have died anyway, but it is … remarkable.”
“I didn’t know what I was doing,” she replied.
“On some level you did,” he replied. He put his hands on his knees. “Well,” he said. “How shall I have her executed?”
“Slyr?” She felt a stab of anger, bordering on hatred. What had she ever done to Slyr to deserve murder? It was quite the opposite, wasn’t it? She had protected her.
And yet, execution …
He must have seen it in her face, because he sighed, crossed his legs, and sat back in his chair.
“Don’t tell me,” he said.
“She’s just afraid,” Annaïg said.
“You mean jealous,” Toel replied. “Envious.”
“It’s all the same thing, really,” Annaïg said. “She—I think she is not only afraid for her position here, she also desires your, ah … affections.”
He smiled. “Well, once my ‘affections’ are bestowed, they are not easily forgotten.”
“What do you mean?”
He rolled his eyes. “Are you really so naive? You don’t know?”
“I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“How do you suppose you came to my attention? How do you think I so easily bypassed Qijne’s outer security? Why do you think Slyr fought so hard to save your life?”
“She betrayed Qijne?”
“She saw a chance to rise. I admire that in her—I came from a lowlier position than hers, and my desire to better myself brought me here. She has the ambition but not the talent—you have the talent but not the ambition.”
Oh, I have ambition all right, Annaïg thought. The ambition to bring all of you down.
But did she? If she could find some way to destroy Umbriel, could she do it, and doom all of these people?
But she thought of Lilmoth and knew that she could.
Why, then, couldn’t she bring herself to let Toel kill Slyr, who, after all, had just tried to murder her? Who had betrayed her comrades in Qijne’s kitchen to violent death? Surely this was someone who deserved to die.
But she couldn’t say it, and she knew it. It was too personal, too close.
“Let her live,” Annaïg said. “Please.”
“The terms remain the same,” he said. “She remains your assistant. What makes you think she won’t try again?”
Because I won’t be here, she thought.
“She won’t,” she told him.
He made a tushing noise. “You really don’t have it, do you? I thought you might be great, perhaps even greater than me one day, but you can’t do what must be done.”
He signed, and one of Toel’s guards p
ushed Slyr from just beyond the door. The woman’s red eyes brimmed with misery.
“What’s wrong with you?” Slyr asked. “I don’t understand you at all.”
“I thought we were friends,” Annaïg replied.
“We were,” Slyr said. “I think we were.”
“That’s beautiful,” Toel said. “Touching. Now listen to me, both of you. Annaïg may have no drive, but she is more than a curiosity. She gives this kitchen the edge over the others, and I will brook no threat to her. Slyr, if she slips in the kitchen and cracks her head, you will die in the most horrible manner I can conceive, and I’m sure you’ve heard the rumors. I don’t care if Umbriel himself walks down here and strikes her down by his own hand, you will still suffer and perish. Only her breathing body keeps you alive. Do you understand?”
Slyr bowed her head. “I do, Chef,” she murmured.
“Very well.” He lifted his chin toward a servant in the corner. “When Annaïg is steady enough, bring her her clothes and return her to her rooms.”
“And this one?” the guard said, indicating Slyr.
“She’s shown initiative,” he said, “misguided, but there it is. Clean her up and bring her to my quarters.”
Slyr’s eyes registered disbelief, but then her lips curled in triumph.
Molag Bal take them all, Annaïg thought. I’m getting off this damned rock.
NINE
Annaïg was still weak from the effects of the poison, but she insisted on sleeping in her own quarters that night, and Toel’s servants allowed her her wish. Slyr did not return—a fact for which she was extremely grateful.
That night she wrote Glim a note, in the same argot he’d written hers in. It was very simple.
Glim. I’m glad you’re alive. I’ve got what we need. I’m ready to go. How soon, and where? Love.
The next day, still pale and tending to tremble, she went early to the pantry. She found a skraw—not the same one—a woman this time.
“What do you have here?” she asked her.
“Thendow frills,” the skraw wheezed. “Sheartooth loin. Glands from duster stalks …”
After a few moments, the pantry workers stopped their curious stares and went back to their business. They probably figured if one of the chefs wanted to come down and do their jobs, who were they to argue?