Lord of Souls: An Elder Scrolls Novel (8 page)

Next to the sump, he liked this place most, and sometimes better. Part of it was the feeling of freedom the place afforded, but part of it was a familiarity that spoke to him almost below the level of consciousness, a sense of intrinsic belonging he’d lost months ago.

The view, however, was disturbing. If he looked to the horizons,
he saw plains and forest, softened and made beautiful by distance. If he looked down, however, that was another story. Any open ground revealed the thousands of corpses walking, animated by Umbriel’s larvae.

The ground was very open now. Umbriel had changed direction, taking them east over vast mountains, and below them was heath and snow, and few trees to hide the undying. They seemed numberless, and—perhaps worst of all—organized, marching in a rough semblance of ranks.

“I haven’t seen you lately,” a pleasant feminine voice quietly said.

He glanced up but already knew who it was.

“Hello, Fhena,” he said.

With her charcoal complexion and red eyes, Fhena might have been a Dunmer woman of about twenty years. But she was no more Dunmer than Wert was human, and since Umbrielians were born adult, he’d reckoned from their earlier conversations she was probably no more than five or six years old. She wore her usual blouse and knee-shorts; today the former was green and the latter yellow.

“Did you bring me more orchid shrimp?” she asked hopefully.

“No,” he said, “but I thought you might like these.”

He handed her a pouch, which she took with an expression of purest delight. But when she saw what was inside, her look wandered toward puzzlement.

“Kraken barnacles,” he explained.

She pulled one out of the bag. It was about the size and shape of a large shark tooth, smooth and dark green, with a wet, tube-like appendage sticking out of the wide end.

She bit the tooth-shaped shell.

“Hard,” she said.

“Here,” he said. “Let me show you.”

He took the barnacle, gave it a squeeze so the shell cracked, then pulled out the soft mass inside by the projecting stalk. He handed it to Fhena, who bit into it, chewed a moment, and then laughed.

“Good, yes?” Glim said. “Those are native to the seas around Lilmoth, where I grew up. The taskers must have collected some and brought them up, because they’ve suddenly started growing in the sump.”

“Delicious,” she agreed. “You always find some way to surprise me.”

“I’m glad to be of service,” Mere-Glim said.

“But I’m not often able to repay the favor,” she replied.

“You might today,” he said. “Tell me about the trees.”

“The trees?”

“Yes.” He tapped on the nearest branch.

“I’m not sure what to say about them,” she replied.

“Well,” he said, trying to think how to go about this, “I’ve noticed that they produce nuts and fruit and even grains, of a sort. But what else?”

“What else?” She clapped her hands. “Salt and sugar, acid and wine, vinegar and sulfur, iron and glass. The trees have a talent for making things—they just have to be told how.”

“Who tells them?”

She looked thoughtful. “Well, I’m not sure,” she said. “They’ve been making most things for so long, I think they may have forgotten. Or at least they don’t talk about it. They just tell us when something needs doing, or collecting, or when something isn’t right and them in the kitchens must help.”

“Wait a minute,” Glim said. “The trees talk to you?”

“Of course. Can’t you hear them?”

“Almost,” Glim said. “Almost. But what does it mean?”

Her eyes had widened, and he realized his spines were puffed out and he was giving off his fighting odor. He tried to calm himself.

“What’s this about, Glim?” she asked.

“It’s about me,” he said. “It’s about my people, and why they died.”

“I don’t understand,” she said. “But I can see how upset you are. Can you explain?”

Glim thought about that for a long moment. Annaïg would tell him not to trust the girl; she didn’t trust anyone on Umbriel. But Fhena had only ever helped him.

“I would like to explain,” he finally said. “Because it might mean something to you. It might make you think of something. So don’t be afraid to interrupt me.”

“I won’t,” she replied.

“I’ve told you before; I’m from a place named Black Marsh. My people call themselves the Saxhleel, and others call us Argonians.”

“I remember. And you said all of your people are the same.”

“The same? Yes, compared to your people. We all have scales, and breathe beneath the water, that sort of thing. Umbriel chooses your form when you are born. Mine is chosen by—ah—heritage.”

“What do you mean?”

“It’s not important right now. We can talk about that later. What’s important is this; there is another race in Black Marsh—the Hist. They are sentient trees, and we are—connected to them. They are many and they are one, all attached at the root, and we, too, are joined to that root. Some say we were created by the Hist, to see for them the world where they cannot walk. They can call us or send us away. When we are named, we take of the sap of the Hist, and we are changed—sometimes a little, sometimes very much.”

“What do you mean, ‘changed’?”

“A few twelves of years ago, our country was invaded from Oblivion. The Hist knew it was going to happen, and called our people back to Black Marsh. Many of us were altered, made ready for the war that we had to fight. Made stronger, faster—able to endure terrible things.”

“I’m starting to understand,” Fhena said. “You’re saying the Hist are much like the trees of our gyre.”

“Yes. But not the same. They don’t speak to me as the Hist did. But you say they speak to you.”

“Not in words,” she replied. “They dream, they experience, they communicate needs. I can’t imagine them making a plan, as you describe.”

“But their sap can alter things, like that of the Hist.”

“Oh, yes. But as I said, usually they have to be told.” She put her hand on his shoulder. “I still don’t understand why this is so upsetting to you.”

“The Hist are supposed to be unified,” Glim said, “but at times certain trees have gone rogue, broken away from the others. It happened long, long ago in my city, and I think it happened again, not long before your world entered mine. A rogue tree helped Umbriel somehow, do you understand? It helped kill many, many of my people so they could serve Umbriel as dead things. And now I think it may have helped summon Umbriel here in the first place. Can you remember—”

But Fhena’s eyes had become unfocused with memory. He stopped and waited.

“We were in the void,” she said. “Nothing around. And then the trees began to sing a strange song, one I had never heard before. They sang and sang. It was beautiful. No one could remember such a thing happening before. And then we were here. They still sing it, but quietly now. Listen.”

She took his hand and pressed it to the bark. It was strange,
the roughness of the tree and the supple warmth of her hand, and for a moment that was all he experienced. But then she began to hum, and something seemed to turn in his head, and the soft burring that was all he had ever heard from the Fringe Gyre before suddenly sharpened and he heard it in tune with Fhena’s humming, a faint, rising and falling tone, along with a thousand harmonics, as if each seed and leaf had its own note to add. And he knew that melody, had known it since before his birth. The Hist sang it.

But the Fringe version was a little different—simpler. Still, it drew him, pulling him out of language and thought, and for a long, long time he knelt there with Fhena’s hand on his, feeling newborn, empty, at one.

Most traps are simple, Colin thought. It’s why they work.

Delia Huerc’s apartment had seemed simple. It had been reoccupied since her death, so he’d had to wait until the current owner—a Khajiit rug-seller named Lwef-Dim—was gone. It was an old place, full of shadows, once-weres, and might-have-beens, and so opening his spectral eyes was easy enough. And there she was, a slip of a ghost, still waiting. Ghosts usually moved on, except in locations with the power to hold them and feed them, but this place had given him hope—and it hadn’t disappointed.

But then he saw that it wasn’t Delia. It wasn’t even a ghost. It was
something
left to deal with the likes of him. It contorted in his overvision, a chimera that refused to settle on a shape, then bloomed fully into Mundus, the world, and brought harm to him. He failed to dodge its blow, but whatever hit him still wasn’t actually matter; it was worse, traveling though his arm, through every layer of muscle, every vessel of blood, the bone and spongy marrow, leaving detailed and unbelievable agony behind. At first
he thought the arm was actually off, but then he saw it was still there, a mass of spasming muscle.

He tumbled away without thinking and drew the blade from his belt as reflexively, his training working well below the level of thought. The thing came for him and he cut at it with the translucent weapon. The apparition shivered and made a sound he hardly heard, so high-pitched was it, but the windows of the apartment shattered.

So it didn’t like the blade, which was good. He’d brought it in case he had to fend off a ghost, and luckily whatever this was, it was at least offended by the consecrations bound into its crystalline metal.

But he wasn’t sure if he’d actually hurt it, so he backed away, trying to focus on it, to forget the feeling of death eating at his arm and understand what he was facing.

It came again, and this time he noticed a sort of center and stabbed at that. He felt resistance, and it made the sound again, but this time shudders of pain that weren’t his own racked through him, so he thrust again, and then again. A yellowish mist whipped at his head, he felt something like a razor pass through his brain, and colors exploded, seemed to spill out of him. He couldn’t feel his limbs, and realized he was in a jumble on the floor.

The presence loomed over him.

Feeling oddly detached, Colin closed his eyes against the thing and reached into the middle of himself, where his little star was, the tiny piece of him that had come from beyond the world and even Oblivion, from Aetherius, the realm of pure light and magic.

As pain and then cold gripped him, he made the star a sun.

The force and light of it blew his eyelids and mouth open, and radiance shredded through the specter like a high wind through
smoke. This time it didn’t manage to make a sound, but was instantly and utterly gone.

Colin lay there then, watching the slight rise and fall of his chest, unable to remember what he was supposed to be doing. He didn’t recognize where he was either. And he couldn’t move.

He ought to have panicked, but he was too tired.

Across the room, a woman he did not know was watching him, silent, unmoving.

He remembered being a boy in the city of Anvil, tarring boats and staring out to sea, dreaming of distant lands. He remembered his mother, her back permanently bent from her work scrubbing clothes.

He remembered killing a man. He hadn’t known his name. It was on a bridge, and the man was looking out across water at a light. The man had seen his knife and tried to fend off the sharp blade with his hands. He tried to beg, but Colin had stabbed him until all of his life spilled out.

He remembered that was his final test before becoming an inspector.

As his memory returned, so did the feeling in his legs and arms. It was as if a million needles had been thrust into them.

By the time he could push himself up, he knew where he was again. He faced the woman, who still hadn’t said anything. She was a Redguard, with tight, curly hair and a strong, handsome face. She was probably about fifty.

“Are you Delia Huerc?” he asked.

Her eyes moved at the sound of her name, but otherwise she didn’t react.

Some ghosts remembered everything, some nothing. Some didn’t even know they were dead.

“You went to Black Marsh, with Prime Minister Hierem. Do you remember that?”

Her head turned a bit. She looked down, and her hand came up a little.

He followed the gesture and saw she was pointing at one of the baseboards. He went over to it and found it loose. In a hollow in the wall he discovered a soft leather bag, and in that a book.

“May I look at this?” he asked.

Her hand dropped back to her side but she didn’t answer, so he opened it. It was written mostly in Tamrielic, with some asides in Yoku, which he had passing knowledge of. It was a journal, and flipping toward the end, he found several pages of entries about Black Marsh. He’d only read a page when he heard steps in the hall and realized he’d been on the floor most of the day.

He went out the empty window, taking the book with him. Delia watched him go without objection.