Greg Keyes - Lord of Souls

“Why did you kill them?” he asked.

“Because otherwise, I would have had to kill you,” she snapped. “Now I have to account for them, pretend I sent them on a mission to someplace fatal. Otherwise, the two of them would have wondered why you were still walking, and after a while that wonder would have spread its way up to the minister himself.”

“I don’t understand,” Colin said.

“I’m risking my neck for you, you idiot,” Arese snapped suddenly. “Can’t you see that?”

“I can see it,” he replied. “I just don’t get why.”

She pulled a knife from her belt and stalked toward him. His chest tightened, but she merely cut the ropes that held his hands behind his back. Then she stepped back a bit and untied her pants, loosening the laces and pulling one side down, exposing her hip.

“You know what that is?” she asked, indicating a small black tattoo of a wolf’s head.

He did, of course. It was the Emperor’s personal brand, worn only by his innermost circle.

He didn’t say anything, but she saw he recognized it, and pulled the breeches back up, tying them again.

“He put me in the minister’s office ten years ago,” she said. “No one knows but him and me. And now you.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Because I need help, and I think we may have a common purpose.”

“What’s that?”

“To discover why Minister Hierem wants Prince Attrebus dead.”

“Does he?”

“I should know,” she said. “I made the arrangements for the ambush on his orders.”

“Why?” Colin exploded. “If you’re loyal to the Emperor-”

She barked a laugh. “You knew,” she said. “You were there, weren’t you? When I took care of Calvur and his thugs. I knew someone was there!” She closed her eyes for a moment, looking very tired.

“I didn’t mean for the prince to come to harm,” she said. “If I could have gotten word to the Emperor, I would have. It was impossible at the time, at least without revealing myself to Hierem. In the end, a decision had to be made.”

“And you decided you were more important than the prince?”

“Yes. If you knew anything about him, you would probably agree.”

“And yet Hierem wants him dead.”

“Apparently.”

“Then why hasn’t the Emperor had the minister arrested?”

“When the Emperor first placed me in the ministry, he didn’t have any particular worries about Hierem, only the sort of general paranoia a successful monarch must have. For most of the past ten years, the minister has been above suspicion, but a year or so ago he began testing me, first subtly, then overtly. It became clear he wanted his own private intelligence and eliminations organization, one not connected to the Penitus Oculatus or known to the Emperor. The attack on Attrebus was-surprising. I didn’t see that coming. It’s only because some of the assassins got greedy that the prince survived. The Emperor isn’t ready to move against Hierem yet because he doesn’t believe we know everything, and because the minister is politically important-very important. The Emperor has survived because he waits until he knows where all the forces are and their strengths before he strikes. Right now, Hierem thinks his actions are invisible. We want to keep it that way a bit longer. That’s where you come in, if you’re up to it.”

“Up to what?”

“Hierem trusts me now, completely I believe. But that limits me. And I can’t trust anyone else in the ministry. I can open certain doors, but I need someone who can walk through them. Can you be that man?”

Colin considered for a moment. Arese might be telling the truth and she might be lying; in a way, it didn’t matter. If he agreed to help her, it gave him a chance to find the answers he sought, even if she was steering him away from them. If he told her no, it was pretty certain he was staying on this island for eternity.

“I can be that man,” he told her.

When he smelled blood, Mere-Glim turned in the deep waters of the Marrow Sump, trying to find the source. Blood wasn’t an unusual smell in these waters; bodies were dumped here every day, many still feebly struggling against death. But this blood was not only fresh, it had a certain rotten scent he’d come to know all too well.

He closed his eyes and flared his reptilian nostrils, and when he identified the current that carried the smell, he struck out along it, his webbed hands and feet propelling him swiftly through the clear waters. It took him only a few moments before he could see the erratically twitching figure trying to reach the surface.

By the time he reached her, the life was dimming from her eyes. He wasn’t sure if she ever actually saw him. Blood still roiled in clouds from her nostrils and gaping mouth. He reached around her from behind and kicked purposefully toward the surface, but by the time he reached it, she had gone limp.

He took her into the skraw caves along the shoreline anyway, and laid her out on the little bier his coworkers had made from woven cane and grass for the dead to rest on. In the sunlight she’d looked old, worn, with black bags beneath her eyes and hair like lank kelp, but here in the phosphorescence from the cave walls she appeared younger, more like the ten or fifteen years she probably actually was. On Umbriel, people were born as adults, and those born to be skraws, to tend and harvest the sump, had nothing that resembled a childhood.

He heard others approaching and looked over his shoulder to see his friend Wert and a young skraw named Oluth.

“Joacin,” Wert sighed. “I knew she couldn’t last much longer.”

“I’m sorry,” Glim told him. “I couldn’t reach her in time.”

“It wouldn’t have mattered,” Wert said. “If you had, she might have lived another day.”

“A day is a day,” Glim said.

Wert knelt and studied the woman’s face for a long moment, his own visage more long and doleful than usual.

“When do we move forward?” he asked without looking up. “Isn’t it time to take the next step?”

“We’re done with the maps,” Oluth blurted. He was young, probably no more than three years old; his skin had only the barest hint of the jaundice that plagued the older skraws.

“Good,” Glim replied.

“So-like Wert said-what’s next?” the hatchling went on eagerly.

“I’m still planning that,” Glim told him.

“You excited everyone, Glim,” Wert said. “You gave us all hope. But now-some say that you’re stalling.”

“We have to be prepared,” Glim said. “We have to be careful. Once we start, there’s no turning back. Does everyone understand that?”

“They do,” Wert said. “They’re ready to do what you say, Glim. But you have to say something.”

Glim felt his heart sink. “Soon,” he said.

“How soon?”

“I’ll let you know.”

Wert frowned, but nodded. Then he turned to Oluth.

“Go with Glim. He’ll show you about the lower sump. You’ll be working down there with him.”

“It’ll be an honor,” Oluth said.

Glim waited for Oluth to go take the vapors and felt guilty. The caustic fumes allowed the skraws to breathe underwater, but they also killed them young, as they had just killed Joacin. Of all the skraws, he was the only one who hadn’t been born on Umbriel, the only Argonian-the only one who didn’t need the vapors to breathe beneath the surface.

When the youngster joined him in the shallows, Glim took him down below the midway of the cone-shaped body of water and showed him the cocooned figures fastened to the wall. Inside each was something that had started as a worm smaller than his least claw, but were now in various stages of becoming inhabitants of Umbriel. He brushed against one near term, a lanky female who-in appearance-would be human. Next to her grew a brick-red creature with horns, and farther along a man with the dusky skin of a Dunmer. All began as worms, however, and beneath appearances they were all Umbrielians. He tried not to be annoyed by Oluth’s eagerness as he explained the procedures for tending the unborn and moving them to the birthing pools when their time came, and how to know that time. He could tell the boy was only half paying attention. He kept glancing around, especially down, to the bottom of the sump, where the actinic glare of the connexion with the ingenium lay.