The Infernal City (8 page)

“Turn!” she shouted, but nothing happened. As the stone loomed nearer and nearer, she desperately tried to imagine another destination—her house, her father’s house back in Lilmoth.

That worked, for they turned, slightly, then a bit more. But then Glim grunted, trying to shake himself free, and they were suddenly yanked back toward the thing. Annaïg felt her grip breaking, and knew even if she managed to turn, she was going to lose Glim. He wanted to go down, but more than that, he wanted to go to that thing.

So she picked the deepest crevasse she could see and focused on it, and the wind became a thunder in her ears. Glim’s will appeared to relent, and they began to pick up speed. Something seemed to draw through her, as if she had somehow passed through a sieve and not been shredded, and then that, too, was past. Walls of black stone reached around her like an immense cloak, and then she felt weight return, and the sure grip of the world renew.

Annaïg stirred and pushed up with aching limbs. Her arms seemed spindly and weak, her legs boneless.

Her palms were pressed against thick-grained basalt, and she saw she rested at the base of the vertical crevasse she had aimed for; a sliver of light was visible, relatively narrow but rising hundreds of feet. It felt somehow as if she were in a temple, and the sky itself some holy image.

Glim was a few yards away, thrashing feebly.

“Glim,” she hissed. Echoes took up even that faint cry.

“Nn?” His head twisted in her direction. He seemed to be back in his eyes.

“You break anything?” she asked him.

He rolled into a sitting position and shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “Where are we?”

“We’re on the thing. The flying island.”

“How?”

“You don’t remember anything, do you?”

“No, I—I remember climbing the spur. And then …”

His pupils rapidly dilated and shrank, as if he was trying to focus on something that wasn’t there.

“The Hist,” he said. “The tree. It was talking to me, filling me up. I couldn’t hear anything else.”

“You were pretty out of it,” she confirmed.

“I’ve never felt like that,” he said. “There were a lot of us, all walking in the same direction, all with the same mind.”

“Walking where?”

“Toward something.”

“This place, maybe?”

“I don’t know.”

“Well, we’re here now. What is the tree telling you now?”

“Nothing,” he murmured. “Nothing at all. I’ve never felt that, either. It’s always there, in the background, like the weather. Now …” He looked out at the light. “They say if you go far enough from Black Marsh, you can barely hear the Hist. But this—it’s like I’ve been cut away from the tree. There’s not even a whisper.”

“Maybe it’s something about this place,” she said.

“This place,” he repeated, as if he couldn’t imagine anything else to say.

“We flew up here,” she said.

“Your gunk worked.”

“It did.”

“Congratulations.”

“That I’m not so sure about,” she murmured.

“But this is what you wanted, yes, to be up here?”

“I changed my mind,” she said. “In the end it was you who wanted to come here—only you wanted to go beneath, down to the ground. I wanted to go back to town. This was the compromise.”

A sudden snap and flurry sounded behind them, and they turned just in time to see a handful of dark figures come hurtling out of some dark apertures in the stone wall. At first her only impression was of wings rushing by, but one of the things circled tight, came back, and beat around their heads before settling on long, insectile legs.

It resembled a moth, albeit a moth nearly her size. Its wings were voluptuous, velvety, dark green and black. Its head was merely a black polished globe with a long, wickedly sharp needle projecting out like a nose. Its six legs, ticking nervously beneath it, ended in similar points.

It leaned toward her and seemed to sniff, making a low fluting noise. Then it smelled Glim.

The moment stretched, and Annaïg tried to keep her panic in a little box, way in the back of her head.

Nothing to see here
, she thought at it.
We’re not intruders, nothing of the kind. I was born right here, on this very spot …

Its wings beat and it flew off with preternatural speed.

Annaïg realized she had been holding her breath, and let it out.

“What the Iyorth was that?” Glim snarled.

“I’ve no idea,” she replied. She stood and limped toward the light, where the things had flown. Glim followed.

A few steps brought them to the aperture, which turned out to be only about twelve feet wide. Below was a cliff that was more than sheer, it actually curved to vanish beneath them.

“I reckon we’re somewhere on the bottom third of the cone,” she said.

Farther below was jungle, and not much to see, but the space between the island and the treetops was pretty busy.

Near the island, the air was full of the moth-things flying in baroque patterns, like some crazy aerial dance. As she watched, some peeled away and dove straight down, and as they passed a certain altitude they suddenly became vague and smokelike, and she now recognized them as the things she had seen from the spur.

She saw, too, the bright threads, following the flying creatures down into the trees and then suddenly licking back up, vanishing somewhere beneath them.

“What am I seeing?” she wondered aloud.

“I think it’s what we’re
not
seeing,” he replied. “What’s down there beneath the trees.”

“I fear you’re right.”

The day waxed on. Now and then more fliers went past them, and occasionally they had a glimpse down through the canopy, where something was moving, but the opening was never enough to discern what.

And then, inevitably, they reached the rice plantations south of Lilmoth, and finally they had a fuller picture.

The distance fooled her, at first, and she thought she was seeing some sort of ant, or insect, as if maybe the fliers were transforming into a land-bound form.

Then she adjusted scale and understood that they were mostly Argonians and humans, although there were a large number of crawling horrors that must have come out of the sea. She recognized some of them as Dreughs, from her books. Others resembled huge slugs and crabs with hundreds of tentacle-limbs, but for these she had no names.

Many of them were marching all in the same direction, but others ran off in swarms. It was all very abstract and puzzling, until they reached a village Annaïg guessed to be Hereguard Plantation, one of the few farms still run mostly by Bretons. She could see a group of them, drawn up behind a barricade.

It wasn’t long before they were fighting, and Annaïg’s horror mounted. She wanted desperately to look away, but it was as if she no longer controlled her muscles.

She saw a wave of Argonians and sea monsters wash over the barricade, and like arrows of mist, the moth-things plunged into the fray. Wherever they fell, a silvery thread followed, striking the body and reeling back up, brighter. The moths simply vanished.

The wave passed, leaving the bodies of the dead Bretons behind, pushing on into the village.

But then the dead stirred. They came to their feet and joined the march.

Annaïg was sick then, and although there was little in her belly to lose, she bent double, retching. It spent her, and she lay trembling, unable to watch more.

“So,” she heard Glim say after a moment. “So this is what the tree wanted.”

She heard the pain in her friend’s voice, and despite how she felt, dragged herself back to the edge and opened her eyes.

Again her first impression failed her. She imagined she was seeing an Argonian army, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, ready to slay this foul enemy as they had the forces of Dagon in times past.

But then she got it.

“They’re just standing there. They aren’t fighting.”

Glim nodded. “Yes.”

The air was thick with fliers and threads.

“I don’t understand,” Annaïg wailed. “Why does the tree want your people to die?”

“Not all of us,” Glim whispered. “Just the Lukiul. The assimilated. The tainted. The An-Xileel, the Wild Ones—they’ve gone away. They’ll come back, after this is over, and every Imperial taint will be scoured.”

“It’s mad,” she said. “We have to do something.”

“What? In three hours every living thing in Lilmoth will be dead. Worse than dead.”

“Look, we’re here. We’re the only ones who have any chance of doing anything. We have to try!”

Glim watched the slaughter below for another few breaths, and in that moment she feared he was going to fling himself down to join his people.

But then he let out the long, undulating hiss that signified resignation.

“Okay,” he repeated in Tamrielic. “Let’s see what we can do.”

They left the edge and walked back into the crack. The holes that the fliers had come through were high, and the climb looked difficult, but the split in the island continued back, gradually sloping down. Daylight was soon behind them, and while the ghost of it followed them for a while, eventually they were in near complete darkness. She wished she’d foreseen this—one of her earliest concoctions had been to help her see at night. But without any proper materials or equipment, there wasn’t any way to make one now.

The going was easy enough, though—the walls remained about twice her shoulder-width apart, so it was easy enough to keep a hand on each rough surface. The floor was a little uneven, but after a few stumbles her feet grew cautious enough.

She could hear Glim breathing, but after they left the ledge, he hadn’t said anything, which was just as well, because not only would it be foolish to make any more noise than necessary, she didn’t feel like talking, either.

She reckoned they had gone a few hundred yards when she saw light once again, at first just a veneer on the stone, but soon enough to see where they were stepping again. A good thing, too, because the path led them to another cliff.

This one opened in the belly of the mountain, a vast, dome-shaped cavity open at the bottom so they could once more see the destruction of Lilmoth. They were already over the old Imperial quarter, where her house was.

“Taig,” she whispered.

“I’m sure he left,” Glim hissed. “The tree couldn’t affect him.”

She just shook her head and turned her sight away, and through tear-gleamed eyes she saw masses of the threads shooting down—so many it looked almost like rain. She followed their course and saw them, thousands of them, in every nook and cranny of the stone. She couldn’t make out much; they, too,
seemed vaguely insectile, but she saw the thin, stone-colored tubes the threads issued from, because the rest of whatever-they-were were concealed in circular masses of what appeared to be the same material. They looked a lot like spider egg sacs, but larger, much larger.

“Here,” Glim murmured.

She had almost forgotten him. She turned to follow his pointing knuckles and saw steps hewn into the stone, leading up.

There wasn’t any other way to go except back, and so Annaïg started up, filled with a sudden, panicked determination. She had to
do
something, didn’t she? If she could get up there, cut those things loose, maybe the horror would end.

The steps wound up a few feet and vanished back into another tunnel. This one was illuminated with a palpable phosphorescence. It twisted to curve steeply skyward, and Annaïg realized they were making their way up above the domed space. Almost immediately it began branching, but she kept to her left, and after several breathless moments they came to a silvery-white cable, emerging from the stone below them and vanishing into the ceiling.

“It looks like the threads,” she whispered. “Only bigger.”

“Not bigger,” Glim said. “More.”

A little closer, she saw what he meant. The cable was composed of hundreds of threads wound together.

She reached out to touch it.

“Well, that’s not smart,” Glim said.

“I know,” she replied, trying to sound brave. Closing her eyes, she touched the back of her hand to it.