The Infernal City Read online

  “We don’t have any pork pickle,” she replied. “It’s not the specific ingredients that matter—it’s the principles of composition, the balance of essences, flavors, oils, and herbs.”

  Saying that, she emptied the spices she had ground a bit before with mortar and pestle, and the earthy scents of coriander, cardamom, lady’s mantel seeds, and ginger wafted about the kitchen. She added two handfuls of crushed rice, stirred that a bit, covered it with a finger of coconut milk, and set it to simmer with a lid on the pot. When the porridge was done, she ladled it into bowls and added slices of venison sausage, red ham, and pickled watermelon rind.

  “That looks disgusting,” Mere-Glim said.

  “Not done yet,” she said. She broke two eggs and dropped them, raw, into each bowl.

  Glim perked up and his tongue licked out. “Goose eggs?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Maybe I will try it.”

  She set a bowl in front of him, and after an experimental bite, he began downing it with gusto. Annaïg tucked into her own.

  “I already feel better,” Mere-Glim said.

  “See?”

  “Yes, yes.”

  She took another bite.

  “So tell me more about this ‘floating city,’” she said. “When is it supposed to be here?”

  “Ix said they outpaced it for three days and it never changed course before they finally got the wind they needed to really leave it behind. It was headed straight here, he said, and will arrive sometime early tomorrow at the pace it’s coming.”

  “So what did he figure it was?”

  “A big chunk of rock, shaped like a top. They could see buildings on the rim. The ship’s wind-caller didn’t like it. Quit the minute they got into port and left town, fast, on a horse.”

  “What didn’t the wind-caller like?”

  “He kept saying it wasn’t right, that none of his magicks could tell him anything about it. Said it smelled like death.”

  “Did anyone take word to the Organism?”

  “I can never understand you two when you’re together,” a soft voice wisped. She turned her gaze to the door and found her father standing there. “That smells good,” he went on. “Is there any for me?”

  “Sure, Taig,” she said. “I made plenty.”

  She ladled him up a bowl and passed it. He took a spoonful and closed his eyes.

  “Better than Tenithar’s,” he said. “Always in the kitchen, weren’t you? You learned well.”

  “Do you know anything about this?” Annaïg said, a bit impatiently. It always bothered her, talking to her father, and she knew it shouldn’t, and that bothered her twice. But he sounded so soul-weak, as if most of his spirit had leaked out of him.

  “I wasn’t kidding,” he said. “You’ve been like this since you were children. I recognize a few words here and there …”

  Annaïg waved the old complaint aside. “This—flying city that’s supposed to be heading toward us. Do you know anything about that?”

  “I know the stories,” he sighed, picking at the stew. “It started with Urvwen—”

  Annaïg rolled her eyes. “Crazy old Psijic priest. Or whatever they call themselves.”

  “Said he felt something out in the deep water, a movement of some kind. So, yes, he’s crazy and the An-Xileel are irritated by him, especially Archwarden Qajalil, so he was dismissed. But then there were the reports from the sea, and the Organism sent out some exploratory ships.”

  “And?”

  “They’re still out there, looking for a phantom probably. After all, Urvwen has been spreading his message down at the docks. No wonder if sailors are seeing things.”

  “My cousin’s ship put to sea from Anvil three weeks ago,” Mere-Glim said. “He did not talk to Urvwen.”

  Her father’s face tightened oddly, the way it did when he was trying to hide something.

  “Taig!” she said.

  “Nothing,” he replied. “It’s nothing to worry about. If it’s dangerous the An-Xileel will meet it with the same might that drove the Empire out of Black Marsh and the Dunmer out of Morrowind. But what would a flying city want with Lil-moth?”

  “What do the Hist say?” Annaïg asked.

  The spoon hesitated halfway up to her father’s lips, then continued. He chewed and swallowed.

  “Taig!”

  “The city tree said it was nothing to worry about.”

  Mere-Glim made a high, scratchy humming sound and fluttered his eyes. “What do you mean? The ‘city’ tree?” He hesitated, as if he had said too much.

  “Lorkhan’s bits, Glim,” Annaïg said. “We’re not visitors here, you know.”

  He nodded. She hated how he was when he spoke straight Tamrielic. He didn’t sound like himself.

  “It’s just, the Hist, they are all—connected. Of the same mind. So why mention the city tree in particular?”

  Her father’s eyes searched about a bit aimlessly, and he sighed again. “The An-Xileel in Lilmoth talk only to the city tree.”

  “What’s the difference?” Annaïg said. “Like Glim said, they’re all connected at the root, right? So what the city tree says is what they all say.”

  Glim’s face was like stone. “Maybe not,” he said.

  “What’s that mean?”

  “Annaïg—” her father started. His voice sounded strained.

  When he didn’t continue for a moment, she raised her hands. “What, Taig?”

  “Thistle, this might be a good time for you to visit your aunt in Leyawiin. I’ve been thinking you ought to anyway. I went so far as to set aside money for the voyage, and there is a ship leaving at dawn.”

  “That sounds worried to me, Taig. It sounds like you think something’s wrong.”

  “You’re all that’s left me that matters,” the old man said. “Even if the risk is small …” He opened his hands but would not meet her eye. Then his forehead smoothed and he stood. “I have to go. I am called to the Organism this morning. I will see you tonight, and we can discuss this further. Why don’t you pack, in case you decide to take the trip?”

  For a moment she saw farther; Leyawiin was an ocean voyage away, but from there she could reach the Imperial City, even if all she had were her own two feet. Maybe …

  “Can Glim go?”

  “I’m sorry, I’ve only money for one passage,” he replied.

  “I wouldn’t go anyway,” Glim said.

  “Right, then,” her father said. “I’ll be off. I’ll have dinner brought from the Coquina, Thistle. No need to cook tonight. And we’ll talk about this.”

  “Right, Taig,” she said.

  As soon as he was out of earshot, she leveled a finger at Mere-Glim. “You go down to the docks and see what that crazy priest has to say, and anything else you can find out. I’m going to Hecua’s.”

  “Why Hecua’s?”

  “I need to fine-tune my new invention.”

  “Your falling potion, you mean?”

  “It saved our lives,” she pointed out.

  “On a related note,” Glim said, “why, by the rotting wells, are you worried about flying at this time?”

  “How else are we going to get up on a flying island, by catapult?”

  “Ahh …” Mere-Glim sighed. “Ah, no.”

  “Look at me, Glim,” Annaïg said.

  Slowly, reluctantly, he did so.

  “I love you, and I’d love to have you along, but if you don’t want to go, no worries. I’m not going to give you a hard time. But I’m going, Xhu?”

  He held her gaze for a moment, and then his nostrils contracted.

  “Xhu,” he said.

  “Meet you here at noon.”

  As Mere-Glim followed Lilmoth’s long slump to the bay Imperials named Oliis, he felt the cloud-rippled sky gently pressing on him, on the trees, on the ancient ballast-stone paving. He wondered, which is to say that he gave his mind its way, let it slip away from speech into the obscure nimbus of pure thinking.

 
; Words hammered thought into shape, put it in cages, bound it in chains. Jel—the tongue of his ancestors—was the closest speech to real thought, but even Annaïg—who knew as much Jel as anyone not of the root—her throat couldn’t make all the right sounds, couldn’t shade the meanings enough for him to really converse with her.

  He was four people, really. Mere-Glim the Argonian, when he spoke the language of the Empire, which cut his thoughts into human shapes. When he spoke to his mother or siblings he was Wuthilul the Saxhleel. When he spoke with a Saxhleel from the deep forest, or even with a member of the An-Xileel, he was a Lukiul, “assimilated,” because his family had been living under Imperial ways for so long.

  When he spoke with Annaïg he was something else, not between the two, but something very different from either. Glim.

  But even their shared language was far from true thought.

  True thought was close to the root.

  The Hist were many, and they were one. Their roots burrowed deep beneath the black soil and soft white stone of Black Marsh, connecting them all, and thus connecting all Saxhleel, all Argonians. The Hist gave his people life, form, purpose. It was the Hist who had seen through the shadows to the Oblivion crisis, who called all of the people back to the marsh, defeated the forces of Mehrunes Dagon, drove the Empire into the sea, and laid waste to their ancient enemies in Morrowind.

  The Hist were of one mind, but just as he was four beings, the mind of the Hist could sometimes escape itself. It had happened before. It had happened in Lilmoth.

  If the city tree had separated itself, and the An-Xileel with it, what did that mean?

  And why was he going to do what Annaïg had asked him to do rather than trying to discover what was happening to the tree whose sap had molded him?

  But he was, wasn’t he?

  He stopped and stared into the bulbous stone eyes of Xhon-Mehl the Fisher, once Ascendant Organ Lord of Lilmoth. Now all that was visible of him was his lower snout up to his head. The rest of him was sunken, like most of ancient Lilmoth, into the soft, shifting soil the city had been built on. If one could swim through mud and earth, there were many Lilmoths to discover beneath one’s webbed feet.

  An image arose behind his eyes; the great stepped pyramid of Ixtaxh-thtithil-meht. Only the topmost chamber still jutted above the silt, but the An-Xileel had excavated it, room by room, pumping it out and laying magicks to keep the water from returning. As if they wanted to go back, not forward. As if something were pulling them back to that ancient Lilmoth …

  He stopped, realizing he was still walking without knowing exactly where he was going, but then he knew. The undertow of his thoughts had brought him here.

  To the tree. Or part of it. The city tree was said to be three hundred years old, and its roots and tendrils pushed and wound through most of lower Lilmoth, and here was a root the size of his thigh, twisting its way out of a stone wall. Everything else around him had become waterish, blurred, but as he laid his webbed hand on the rough surface, the colors sharpened and focused.

  He stood there, no longer seeing the crumbling, rotted Imperial warehouses, but instead a city of monstrous stone ziggurats and statues pushing up to the sky, a place of glory and madness. He felt it tremor around him, smelled anise and burning cinnamon, and heard chanting in antique tongues. His heart thumped oddly as he watched the two moons heave themselves through the low mist of smoke and fog that rolled through the streets, and the waters surged beneath them, around them, beyond the sky.

  His thoughts melted together.

  He wasn’t sure how long it was before his mind complicated itself again, but his hand was still on the root. He lifted it and backed away, and after a few long breaths he began walking, and in the thick night around him, the massive structures softened, thinned, and went mostly away, until he was once again in the Lilmoth where his body was born.

  Mostly away. But he felt it now, the call the An-Xileel felt, and he realized that a part of him had already known it.

  He knew something else, too. The tree had cut him off from the vision before it had run its course.

  That was troubling.

  Gulls swarmed the streets like rats near the waterfront, most of them too greedy or stupid to even move out of his way as he picked his way through fish offal, shattered crabs, jellyfish, and seaweed. Barnacles went halfway up the buildings here. This part of town had sunk so low that when a double tide came, it flooded deep. The docks themselves floated, attached to a massive long stone quay whose foundations were as ancient as time and whose upper layer of limestone had been added last year. He made his way up the central ramp to the top of it. Here was a city in itself; since the An-Xileel forbade all but licensed foreigners in the city, the markets had all crowded themselves here. Here, a fishmonger held a flounder up by the tail, selling from a single crate of silver-skinned harvest. There, a long line of sheds with the Colovian Traders banner hawked trinkets of silver and brass, cooking pots, cutlery, wine, cloth. He had worked here, for a while. A group of his matriline cousins had set up a business selling Theilul, a liquor made of distilled sugarcane. They’d originally sold the cane, but since their fields were twenty miles from town, they’d found it easier to transport a few cases of bottles than many wagonloads of cane—and far more profitable.

  He knew where to find Urvwen; right in the thick of it all, where the great stone cross that was the waterfront joined.

  The Psijic wasn’t yelling, as usual. He was just sitting there, looking through the crowd and past the colorful masts of the ships to the south, toward where the bay came to the sea. His bone-colored skin seemed paler than usual, but when the silvery eyes found Mere-Glim approaching, they were full of life.

  “You want to know, don’t you?” he said.

  For a moment Mere-Glim had trouble responding, the experience with the tree had been so powerful. But he let words shape his thoughts again.

  “My cousin said he saw something out at sea.”

  “Yes, he did. It’s nearly here.”

  “What is nearly here?”

  The old priest shrugged. “Do you know anything about my order?”

  “Not much.”

  “Few do. We don’t teach our beliefs to outsiders. We counsel, we help.”

  “Help with what?”

  “Change.”

  Mere-Glim blinked, trying to find his answer there.

  “Change is inevitable,” Urvwen went on. “Indeed, change is sacred. But it is not to be unguided. I came here to guide; the An-Xileel—and the city council—the ‘Organism’ that they so thoroughly control—do not listen.”

  “They have a guide—the Hist.”

  “Yes. And their guide brings change, but not the sort that ought to be encouraged. But they do not listen to me. Truth be told, no one here listens to me, but I try. Every day I come here and try to have some effect.”

  “What’s coming?” Mere-Glim persisted.

  “Do you know of Arteum?” the old man asked.

  “The island you Psijics come from,” Glim answered him.

  “It was removed from the world once. Did you know that?”

  “I did not.”

  “Such things happen.” He nodded, more to himself, it seemed, than to Mere-Glim.

  “Has something been removed from the world?” he asked.

  “No,” Urvwen said, lowering his voice. “Something has been removed from another world. And it has come here.”

  “What will it do?”

  “I don’t know. But I think it will be very bad.”

  “Why?”

  “It’s too complicated to explain,” he sighed. “And even if you understood my explanation, it wouldn’t help. Mundus—the world—is a very delicate thing, you know. Only certain rules keep it from returning to the Is/Is Not.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  The Psijic waved his hands. “Those boats out there—to sail and not founder—the sails and the ropes that hoist them, control them—tension must be just
so, they must adjust as the winds change, if a storm comes they may even have to be taken down …” He shook his head. “No, no—I feel the ropes of the world, and they have become too tight. They pull in the wrong directions. And that is never good. That is what happened in the days before the Dragonfires first burned—”

  “Are you talking about Oblivion? I thought we can’t be invaded by Oblivion anymore. I thought Emperor Martin—”

  “Yes, yes. But nothing is so simple. There are always loopholes, you see.”

  “Even if there aren’t loops?”

  Urvwen grinned at that but didn’t reply.

  “So this—city,” Mere-Glim said. “It’s from Oblivion.”

  The priest shook his head, so violently Mere-Glim thought it might come off.

  “No, no, no—or yes. I can’t explain. I can’t—go away. Just go away.”

  Mere-Glim’s head was already hurting from the conversation. He didn’t need to be told twice, although technically he had been.

  He wandered off to find his cousins and procure a bottle of Theilul. Annaïg could wait a bit.

  FOUR

  Hecua’s single eye crawled its regard over Annaïg’s list of ingredients. Her wrinkled dark brow knotted in a little frown.

  “Last try didn’t work, did it?”

  Annaïg puffed her lips and lifted her shoulders. “It worked,” she said, “just not exactly the way I wanted it to.”

  The Redguard shook her head. “You’ve the knack, there’s no doubt about that. But I’ve never heard of any formula that can make a person fly—not from anywhere. And this list—this just looks like a mess waiting to happen.”

  “I’ve heard Lazarum of the Synod worked out a way to fly,” Annaïg said.

  “Hmm. And maybe if there was a Synod conclave within four hundred miles of here, you might have a chance of learning that, after a few years paying their dues. But that’s a spell, not a synthesis. A badly put-together spell likely won’t work at all—alchemy gone wrong can be poison.”

  “I know all of that,” Annaïg said. “I’m not afraid—nothing I’ve ever made turned out too bad.”