Greg Keyes - Lord of Souls

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.

There wasn’t much sun left, but he wanted to be in it, to try to forget the thing in the apartment. He went through the Market District and bought apples, pork pies, and lemon water from street vendors, then found a good place on the roof of a building overlooking the alley behind Arese’s house. There he ate and read the journal, stalked by pigeons trying to get at his scraps.

Huerc described the preparations for the trip in detail, and it became clear to him that she thought the Emperor, at least, was aware of the trip. Hierem had explained that the secrecy and misdirection were to avoid any of the Emperor’s enemies learning what he was about. She hadn’t been privy to the meeting with the An-Xileel, but worked out that some agreement had been reached. She’d been led to believe that Hierem was there to propose an alliance against the Thalmor. But he was vague about what the negotiations actually entailed. Most interesting, the agreement involved Hierem performing some sort of ritual at the City Tree.

She had written: The tree is enormous. The only one I have ever seen taller was in Valenwood, but the Hist was more massive, more spread out. And I could feel a palpable presence in it. I had never quite credited the Argonian claims that the trees are intelligent, but when I stood in its presence, I could no longer doubt it. Further, I thought I felt a certain malevolence in it, but that might well have been my imagination, for the whole situation was anything but friendly. The An-Xileel have been uniformly rude and arrogant, the city itself is a festering, putrid place. From the moment I entered Lilmoth, I have wanted nothing more than to leave it. The minister, on the other hand, seems quite excited, almost jubilant. The An-Xileel sang to the tree, an awful cacophonous chant that went on so long that I might have drifted off a bit. At some point, Hierem added his voice to theirs, but in a sort of counterpoint. He lit a brazier, and I’m sure he did some sort of sorcery. In his younger years he was in the leadership of the Mages’ Guild, before that organization utterly collapsed, and so I know him capable of these things, but I was still somehow surprised. It was my impression that he was calling something, for he repeated the word “Umbriel” many times. It seemed like a name, although the language he spoke was not one I knew, and so I may have been mistaken, for nothing came, although everyone seemed pleased anyway. Tomorrow we sail for home, and I could not be happier.

He read on, but the only other passage of interest to him was one in which she began to question whether the Emperor had authorized or was aware of their trip, and she had determined to ask Hierem about it.

He read the final few sentences with a little chill: At lunch today Hierem repeated his assertions, but I still have my doubts. I have a meeting with the Emperor tomorrow. I will ask him myself. I hope I shall feel better. My stomach is unsettled, and there is pain in my joints. Perhaps the soup did not suit me.

Colin thumbed back through earlier parts of the book, but it was dark now. He settled against a chimney, watching Arese’s unlit window. Neither moon was in the sky, but there were no clouds, and the stars were glorious. He rested there, letting the fall of night ease into him; first the swifts, then the fluttering of bats, the lonely imprecation of a barn owl. Tree frogs chirped and insects whirred. A dog barked somewhere in the Market District and was answered nearby, which set off a chorus of canine comment from all quarters of the city. A couple argued not far away about what the proper price of the cockles for dinner might have been, and the strains from a lute drifted along in the breeze.

Arese would be with her sister now. He had a few more hours to wait, a little more time to decide what to do, whether to show Arese the journal or not. Was she really an agent of the Emperor?

He’d been assigned to find Prince Attrebus. The prince had gone, against his father’s wishes and in secret, to find and fight the menace of the flying city. He hadn’t gotten far; Colin had found his entire bodyguard slaughtered-and it seemed, at first, the prince, too. Attrebus, it turned out, was a careful creation of his father and his ministers. All of the battles and duels he had won were set up that way, and the bards and authors who sang and wrote of him were heavily subsidized by the court. The prince himself hadn’t known this; few outside his guard had. Whenever the prince decided to go off on some sort of adventure, his right-hand man Gulan always reported it to the office of the Prime Minister, and it had been handled.

But not this time-or at least not the way it usually was. This time the prince had been ambushed. That was what had led Colin to investigate Arese; he knew Gulan had gone to her, as usual. He discovered that she had set up the attack on the prince herself, and later followed her to a house where-as he listened-she killed the crime boss who had facilitated it, along with all of his guard and household. He still didn’t know if she had summoned something or transformed into the nightmare that had turned the house into an abattoir.

And yet, Arese had admitted this to him. She had offered an explanation for it.