Lord of Souls: An Elder Scrolls Novel Read online

  “And you decided you were more important than the prince?”

  “Yes. If you knew anything about him, you would probably agree.”

  “And yet Hierem wants him dead.”

  “Apparently.”

  “Then why hasn’t the Emperor had the minister arrested?”

  “When the Emperor first placed me in the ministry, he didn’t have any particular worries about Hierem, only the sort of general paranoia a successful monarch must have. For most of the past ten years, the minister has been above suspicion, but a year or so ago he began testing me, first subtly, then overtly. It became clear he wanted his own private intelligence and eliminations organization, one not connected to the Penitus Oculatus or known to the Emperor. The attack on Attrebus was—surprising. I didn’t see that coming. It’s only because some of the assassins got greedy that the prince survived. The Emperor isn’t ready to move against Hierem yet because he doesn’t believe we know everything, and because the minister is politically important—very important. The Emperor has survived because he waits until he knows where all the forces are and their strengths before he strikes. Right now, Hierem thinks his actions are invisible. We want to keep it that way a bit longer. That’s where you come in, if you’re up to it.”

  “Up to what?”

  “Hierem trusts me now, completely I believe. But that limits me. And I can’t trust anyone else in the ministry. I can open certain doors, but I need someone who can walk through them. Can you be that man?”

  Colin considered for a moment. Arese might be telling the truth and she might be lying; in a way, it didn’t matter. If he agreed to help her, it gave him a chance to find the answers he sought, even if she was steering him away from them. If he told her no, it was pretty certain he was staying on this island for eternity.

  “I can be that man,” he told her.

  TWO

  When he smelled blood, Mere-Glim turned in the deep waters of the Marrow Sump, trying to find the source. Blood wasn’t an unusual smell in these waters; bodies were dumped here every day, many still feebly struggling against death. But this blood was not only fresh, it had a certain rotten scent he’d come to know all too well.

  He closed his eyes and flared his reptilian nostrils, and when he identified the current that carried the smell, he struck out along it, his webbed hands and feet propelling him swiftly through the clear waters. It took him only a few moments before he could see the erratically twitching figure trying to reach the surface.

  By the time he reached her, the life was dimming from her eyes. He wasn’t sure if she ever actually saw him. Blood still roiled in clouds from her nostrils and gaping mouth. He reached around her from behind and kicked purposefully toward the surface, but by the time he reached it, she had gone limp.

  He took her into the skraw caves along the shoreline anyway, and laid her out on the little bier his coworkers had made from woven cane and grass for the dead to rest on. In the sunlight she’d looked old, worn, with black bags beneath her eyes and hair like lank kelp, but here in the phosphorescence from the cave walls she appeared younger, more like the ten or fifteen years she probably actually was. On Umbriel, people were born as adults, and those born to be skraws, to tend and harvest the sump, had nothing that resembled a childhood.

  He heard others approaching and looked over his shoulder to see his friend Wert and a young skraw named Oluth.

  “Joacin,” Wert sighed. “I knew she couldn’t last much longer.”

  “I’m sorry,” Glim told him. “I couldn’t reach her in time.”

  “It wouldn’t have mattered,” Wert said. “If you had, she might have lived another day.”

  “A day is a day,” Glim said.

  Wert knelt and studied the woman’s face for a long moment, his own visage more long and doleful than usual.

  “When do we move forward?” he asked without looking up. “Isn’t it time to take the next step?”

  “We’re done with the maps,” Oluth blurted. He was young, probably no more than three years old; his skin had only the barest hint of the jaundice that plagued the older skraws.

  “Good,” Glim replied.

  “So—like Wert said—what’s next?” the hatchling went on eagerly.

  “I’m still planning that,” Glim told him.

  “You excited everyone, Glim,” Wert said. “You gave us all hope. But now—some say that you’re stalling.”

  “We have to be prepared,” Glim said. “We have to be careful. Once we start, there’s no turning back. Does everyone understand that?”

  “They do,” Wert said. “They’re ready to do what you say, Glim. But you have to say something.”

  Glim felt his heart sink. “Soon,” he said.

  “How soon?”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  Wert frowned, but nodded. Then he turned to Oluth.

  “Go with Glim. He’ll show you about the lower sump. You’ll be working down there with him.”

  “It’ll be an honor,” Oluth said.

  Glim waited for Oluth to go take the vapors and felt guilty. The caustic fumes allowed the skraws to breathe underwater, but they also killed them young, as they had just killed Joacin. Of all the skraws, he was the only one who hadn’t been born on Umbriel, the only Argonian—the only one who didn’t need the vapors to breathe beneath the surface.

  When the youngster joined him in the shallows, Glim took him down below the midway of the cone-shaped body of water and showed him the cocooned figures fastened to the wall. Inside each was something that had started as a worm smaller than his least claw, but were now in various stages of becoming inhabitants of Umbriel. He brushed against one near term, a lanky female who—in appearance—would be human. Next to her grew a brick-red creature with horns, and farther along a man with the dusky skin of a Dunmer. All began as worms, however, and beneath appearances they were all Umbrielians. He tried not to be annoyed by Oluth’s eagerness as he explained the procedures for tending the unborn and moving them to the birthing pools when their time came, and how to know that time. He could tell the boy was only half paying attention. He kept glancing around, especially down, to the bottom of the sump, where the actinic glare of the connexion with the ingenium lay.

  “You’re curious about that?” Glim asked.

  “That’s the ingenium,” Oluth said. “That’s the heart and soul of Umbriel. If we controlled that …”

  “Even if we could do it,” Glim said, “that would be too much.”

  “But if we’re to really revolt, carry the fight to the lords—”

  “SSht, husst, slow down,” Glim said. “Who ever said anything about taking the fight to anyone? Or fighting at all?”

  “Well, I guess we thought it would come to that,” Oluth said.

  “Who is ‘we’?” Glim asked.

  “Oh.” He looked embarrassed. “I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

  “Tell me what?”

  “The younger skraws. We call ourselves the Glimmers. We’ve pledged to follow you and help you.”

  Glim absorbed that, feeling claustrophobic.

  “Listen to me,” he said. “Our goals are simple: We want a substitute for the vapors, so you don’t have to tear your lungs up and die early just to do your job. We’re looking for ways to inconvenience the lords, to make them aware of your needs. We don’t want it to come to a fight.”

  “Right,” Oluth said. “Inconvenience them. Like how?”

  “Well, what do we skraws do? We keep the sump working. That means food, water, nutrients for everyone on Umbriel and the fringe gyre—and of course, we bring the newborns into the world. We just need to emphasize our worth by showing what happens if things don’t get done down here—or if things break, clog up, and so forth. Do you understand?”

  Oluth nodded vigorously. “I do!” he said. Then his gaze darted past Glim. “What’s that?”

  Glim followed his regard to a small embryo sac, nearly transparent, and the thing curled in it. It wa
s still small, but it wasn’t like a baby—more like an unfinished and undersized adult. It had scales and was a pale pink color with huge eyes and tiny little claws.

  “It’s an Argonian,” he said.

  “It looks a little like you.”

  “Soon enough it will look a lot like me,” Mere-Glim said. “I’m an Argonian.”

  He’d known it was going to happen, but now that it had, he felt a sort of sick spot in his gut.

  He needed to see Annaïg.

  “I really am sorry I tried to kill you,” Slyr told Annaïg.

  Annaïg blinked and glanced up at the gray-skinned woman fidgeting across the table from her.

  “Have you tried again, or is this still about last week?” she asked.

  Slyr’s red eyes widened. “I haven’t tried again, I swear.”

  “Right. So you’ve apologized already,” Annaïg said. “This means you’re now wasting my time.”

  Slyr didn’t reply, but she didn’t leave either, just stood there, shuffling her feet a bit. Trying not to let her irritation show, Annaïg bent back to her task of emulsifying horse brains and clove oil, whisking the gray matter vigorously and adding the oil a few drops at a time. When it reached the consistency of mayonnaise, she set it aside.

  Slyr was still standing there.

  “What?” Annaïg exploded.

  “I—you haven’t assigned anything for me to do.”

  “Fine. I assign you to go sit in our quarters.”

  “I have to work,” Slyr said. “Toel thinks little enough of me as it is. If he finds me idle—I worry, Annaïg.”

  Annaïg closed her eyes and counted to four. When she opened them, she half expected to see Slyr lunging at her with a knife, but Slyr was still just standing there looking pitiful.

  “Go husk the durian,” she said.

  “But—”

  “What now?”

  “Durian is so smelly.” She waved the back of her hand at Annaïg’s preparations. “What are you doing there?”

  She’s just spying, Annaïg thought. Trying to steal my ideas.

  It didn’t matter, though, did it?

  “I’m extracting terror,” she said.

  “Come again?”

  She lifted the emulsion. “Terror, fear, happiness—any strong emotion leaves something of itself in the brain.”

  “But if the soul has fled, hasn’t all of that gone with it?”

  Annaïg smiled, despite the company, and scraped some of the emulsion into a glass cylinder, divided three-quarters of the way down by a thin membrane.

  “What’s that?” Slyr asked, indicating the divider.

  “It’s the humorous membrane from a chimera-eel,” she replied. “It’s what allows them to change color to suit their emotions. I’ve altered this one to let only terror through.”

  “You’re filtering horse-terror through eel-skin?”

  “Very specially prepared eel-skin,” she replied. She placed the tube in a small centrifuge and cranked the handle, spinning the vial. After a few moments she detached it and held it up, showing a pale yellow ichor in the bottom.

  “That’s terror?” Slyr said. She sounded skeptical.

  “Do you want to understand this or not?” Annaïg asked.

  “I do. Please. I’m sorry.”

  “Sit down, then—you’re making me nervous, hovering there.”

  Slyr scootched onto a stool and folded her hands in her lap.

  “You were right, in a way—terror—or any emotion—isn’t merely chemical. But the substance acts as a vessel, a shaper of soul stuff, just as—at a higher level—does the brain and body.” She opened a small valve on the bottom of the tube and let the liquid empty into a small glass cone. She then sealed a second, identical cone base-to-base with the first to form a spiculum. She shook the container so that the liquid coated the interior surface evenly, then slid the whole thing into a coil of translucent fibers that in turn was connected to a pulsing cable of the same material that came up through the floor and workbench.

  “Now we pass soul energy through it,” Annaïg said. “The chemical terror will attract what it needs to become the real thing.”

  For a moment nothing happened; then the spiculum took on a faint lavender glow, and quite abruptly became opaque. Annaïg waited another moment then removed the spiculum and shook it again. The coating inside the crystal sloughed free and settled into one end, a viscous powder. She unsealed the hlzu gum that held the spiculum together with spirits of coatin. Then she emptied a bit of the newly formed substance into a horn spoon and carefully handed it to Slyr.

  “And there you have it,” she said.

  Slyr blinked at the lavender stuff.

  “Am I to taste this?”

  “You may if you wish.”

  “Perhaps not,” Slyr said, dipping her finger into it experimentally. A bit clung there, and she rubbed it back and forth. “It feels—” But then her face transformed; her eyes became huge, and the veins on her neck stood out as she suddenly began shrieking. She fell from her stool and twisted into a fetal position, fighting for the air she needed to keep screaming.

  “Or you can just touch it,” Annaïg said. “It’s absorbed just as readily through the skin.”

  Slyr’s only response was to quiver uncontrollably—she was past screaming now.

  For Annaïg, the next few seconds stretched thin and brittle; part of her wanted to continue watching the other woman suffer. Anger was beautiful, because its core was the absence of all doubt. When anger wrapped you up in yourself and you knew that you were right and righteous—that the very universe was in agreement with you—at that moment you were a god, and anyone who crossed or disagreed with you was worse than wrong, they were heretics, apostates, twisted in the very womb. Slyr deserved this. And much, much more.

  Then why, beneath the wonderful, purifying rage, did she feel sick? Why did she suspect that she was the one in the wrong?

  Because she wasn’t really angry at Slyr. She was angry because all her hopes of escaping Umbriel were destroyed. She was angry at the stupidity of a little girl who thought she could save the world like a hero from the songs, and now was going to spend what little of her life remained in a disgusting place among disgusting people.

  And one of those people was Slyr. But somehow she couldn’t watch her lose her mind.

  So, with a sigh, she unstoppered the bottle she’d fixed for herself, in case she had an accident during the experiment, and waved it under Slyr’s nose. The other woman inhaled, gasped, gave one great shake, then sagged. She was still breathing hard but her eyes were clear.

  “S-Summpslurry,” Slyr managed, her breath still ragged.

  She traveled her gaze over her body, as if fearing she was missing limbs.

  “You stopped it, didn’t you? You could have let it go on and on.”

  “For a few hours, yes.”

  “It would have driven me mad.”

  Annaïg shrugged, still feeling angry and helpless, and now trying not to cry. What was wrong with her?

  “I’m not so convinced you’re sane as it is,” she said.

  Slyr chuckled harshly. “I soiled myself,” she said.

  “I didn’t need to know that,” Annaïg replied.

  “I guess not.” Her eyes dropped down. “Toel doesn’t care what happens to me. No one does. No one would have even reprimanded you—”

  “I’m not like you, Slyr,” Annaïg said.

  Slyr shakily came to her feet and gathered her clothing around her.

  “Maybe not,” she said. “But you’re closer than you were.”

  And then she left. Annaïg almost thought the woman had a faint look of triumph on her face.

  When Slyr was gone, Annaïg’s tears came.

  For a long time after being trapped on Umbriel, she hadn’t cried. She watched the city she grew up in destroyed, and although she hadn’t seen it, in her heart she knew her father was dead, and Hecua, and every other soul she had ever known before co
ming to this place, to Umbriel—which was responsible for all of that murder. She had kept it all in, bound up with hope and purpose, freighted by the need to survive to get from one day to the next—and yes, at times by wonder, by the sheer alien assault on the senses that was Umbriel.

  But after Slyr poisoned her, those bands began to fray, and when at last she was ready to escape, to leave Umbriel, they had broken, because she wouldn’t have to live each day in fear any longer, because she didn’t need such unnatural control. And then she and Mere-Glim had flown out across the night to where Prince Attrebus was waiting, with his strength, his courage to sustain her.

  But Umbriel hadn’t let them go, and now …

  “You cry far too much,” a soft voice said behind her.

  She closed her eyes, but he knew, so she didn’t bother to wipe them. It would only show further weakness.

  She turned with her cheeks still glistening and stood up from her stool.

  “Chef Toel,” she said.

  When she first met Toel, she’d thought him darkly, devilishly handsome, and his unbelievably blue eyes had absorbed her. Now he only seemed dangerous, like a viper.

  He looked meaningfully at the purplish substance in the crystal cone.

  “What have you there?” he asked

  “Terror, Chef.”

  “Well, give us a taste, then.”

  She hesitated. “It’s quite strong, Chef.”

  “I’ll take care, then.”

  She doled him out a bit and watched as he carried it to his lips and let it touch his tongue. His eyes widened dreamily and he hissed before taking several shuddering breaths. Little sparks danced on his skin, and she felt the tiny hairs on her face pull toward him.

  Then he looked down at her, his gaze still a little strange.

  “Exquisite,” he murmured. “You have so much talent, little one. Such beautiful ideas. If only you had—well, a little drive. A bit of ambition.”

  He smiled slightly. “I saw Slyr. She looked as if she’d seen the worst thing in the world.”

  “She tasted it, Chef.”