Greg Keyes - Lord of Souls

“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. Annaig 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.