Gregory Keyes - The Infernal city

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.

Something whirred about in her head and she felt a sudden giddy surge.

She saw now that the hole was larger than the cable that came up through it and, lying flat she was able to make out the jungle floor again. Below her, the ropelike structure unwound itself, sending threads off in every direction. She could see some of them vanishing into the web sacs.

“If we cut this, we’ll get a lot of them,” she said.

“What do you mean, ‘get’ them? What do you think will happen?”

“They’re all connected here.”

“Okay.”

“Then if we cut it …” She flailed off, gesturing.

“You think it will, what, shut this whole thing down? Destroy this island?”

“It might. Glim, we have to do something.”

“You keep saying that.” He sighed. “What will you cut it with?”

“Try your claws.”

He blinked, then stepped forward and experimentally raked his claws across the thing. He shivered and stepped back, then hit it again, with such force that the cord vibrated.

It wasn’t scratched.

“Any other ideas?”

“Maybe if we can find a sharp rock—” She broke off. “Do you hear that?”

Glim nodded.

“Xhuth!”

Because somewhere in the passages, she could hear voices shouting, several of them.

“Come on,” she said, and started up another branch of the tunnel.

They kept going, taking random branches, but the voices were gradually growing louder, and there was little doubt in her mind now that they were being pursued.

Whenever they came to a turn that seemed to go down, she took it, reasoning that so far they hadn’t been bothered by anything from that direction, but inevitably the passages seemed to move them upward.

She couldn’t have known, could she? How big this was all going to be, how utterly beyond her? It was ridiculous.

As if the gods had decided to punctuate that thought, the tunnel suddenly debouched onto a steep ledge that vanished into the interior space of the island.

She drew up short, panting, but Glim grabbed her arm and they were suddenly skittering down the tilted surface. Her surprise was so complete that all thought was pushed from her brain by white light, so when the Argonian caught a knob at the edge and swung them sharply down and under, she had nothing to be relieved about. She found herself on a rounded, springy surface.

It was one of the web sacs.

Glim pulled her up to where the thing was anchored to the stone, the sloping shelf now a ceiling above them, and they crouched there, trying to calm their breathing for many long moments.

A voice suddenly spoke above them, in a tongue that sounded teasingly familiar. The voice might have been that of a man or mer. Another, stranger voice replied. This time she caught a few words; it was Merish dialect of some sort. She closed her eyes, focusing on the sounds.

“—could be dead already,” she made out.

“We can’t take that chance. He’ll have our heads if another vehrumas gets them.”

“Who else is looking for them?”

“Word gets around fast. Come on, let’s try this way.”

The two continued talking, but the sounds grew gradually more distant until they faded away.

As the voices diminished, she heard Mere-Glim resume breathing.

“I don’t suppose you understood any of that?” he asked.

“Remember how you used to make fun of me for studying old Ehlnofex?” she asked.

“A dead language? Yes.” His throat expanded and he huffed. “They were speaking Ehlnofex?”

“No, but it was enough like it for me to understand it.”

“And?”

“Someone saw us fly up here. They’re searching for us.”

“Who?”

“Whoever lives here. There was a word I didn’t understand—vehrumas—but it sounds like there are more than one bunch trying to find us.”

“Wonderful. So what do we do?”

To her surprise, she suddenly knew.

She fumbled in her jacket and pulled out Coo.

“Go to the Imperial City,” she said, her voice surprisingly steady. “Find Crown Prince Attrebus. Speak only to him, hear only in his presence. He will help us.” She saw him in her mind’s eye, her own imagining based on the portraits she had seen.

Coo clicked and tinged, and then flew off, dodging gracefully through the filaments, diminishing, a speck, gone.

“How does that help us?” Glim asked. “Why should Attrebus care what happens to us?”

“This thing isn’t stopping at Lilmoth,” she told him. “It’ll go on, through all of Tamriel. And you’re right, we can’t stop it, you and I. Most likely we’ll die or be captured. But if we can survive a little while, until Coo reaches Attrebus—”

“Listen to yourself.”

“—if Coo reaches him, and at least one of us survives, we can tell him what’s happening. Attrebus has armies, battlemages, the resources of an empire. What he doesn’t have is any information about this place.”