Gregory Keyes - The Infernal city

What surprised him was how fast they were. Somehow he’d imagined them slower. He and Sul weren’t fighting forward anymore, but had their backs to the Dunmer’s summoning and were trying to keep from being surrounded. They were still moving toward their arrival point, but not very quickly, and the dead were now thick on all sides. Attrebus and Sul wielded their weapons more like machetes than swords, chopping as if to clear a jungle path of vines—except the vines kept coming back.

Treb knew it was over when one of them fell and caught him around the leg, holding on with horrible strength. He chopped down at it, and one of those in front of him leapt forward and grappled his sword arm.

Then he went down in a wave of slimy, slippery, disgusting bodies. He had time for one short howl of despair.

I’m sorry Annaïg, he thought. I tried.

He waited for the knife or teeth or claws that would end him, but it didn’t happen. In fact, once they had him and Sul immobilized, they stood them both back up. Attrebus renewed his struggles, but quickly found there wasn’t much point.

“What are they doing?” he asked Sul.

But his answer didn’t come from the Dunmer; everything seemed to spin around, and the bleak landscape of Morrowind vanished.

The window was barred and latched, but he had a small magic for that, and soon he was standing in someone’s bedroom, which fortunately was empty. He found the stairs and made his way down until he barely heard voices. He sat in the darkened stairs, beat down his worries, focused, and listened .

“… would have known?” Arese was saying.

“Anyone,” a male voice rumbled. “Anyone who knows you failed to pass on Gulan’s warning concerning the prince’s activities.”

“That is a limited number of people,” she said. “What about the woman, Radhasa?”

“I’ve not heard from her. She was supposed to lie low after the massacre—else how could she explain her survival? This note isn’t signed.”

“Why on Tamriel would a blackmailer sign their name to a note?”

“I see your point.”

“But if not her, that leaves me with you,” she said. “Or someone else in your organization.”

“Impossible.”

“I argued against using you people in the first place,” she snorted.

“The job was done.”

“The job was not done. Attrebus lives, and someone has implicated me in the bargain.”

“You’ve no proof Attrebus lives,” the man asserted. “That’s only a rumor.”

“Wrong. A courier arrived from Water’s Edge this morning with news that he is alive. It went straight to the Emperor. He’s keeping it quiet, but troops have already been sent.”

That’s news, Colin thought. He’d written the “blackmail” letter himself, to draw her out, but he hadn’t heard anything about a courier.

“Well, then,” the man said. “I don’t leave a job unfinished. I deal with it, at no extra charge.”

“That won’t do. Not now.”

The man laughed. “Now, let’s not get silly,” he said. “If you don’t want me to finish the job, fine, but you’re not getting your money back. Don’t forget who I am.”

“You’re a glorified thug,” Arese replied. “That’s who you are.”

“I love your type,” the man snarled. “You pay me to do murder so you can pretend your hands are clean, so you can continue to think yourself better than me. I have news for you—you’re worse, because you don’t have the guts to put down your own dogs.”

“I wouldn’t say that,” she replied, a colder note in her voice.

“You’re not threatening me.”

Colin heard several doors open, and he could all but see the man’s guards coming in. But then he heard something else, a sort of ripping sound accompanied by a rush of air and glass shattering. Every hair on his body pricked up.

The next thing he heard was something human ears were not meant to receive, the human brain not meant to interpret, the primal feral sound of which the lion’s roar or the wolf’s growl were faint shadows. Harsh yellow light shone up the stairs, and then darkness.

Then the screaming began, very human and beyond all terror. Colin began to shiver, then to shake. He was still shaking when the last of the screams abruptly choked off and he felt something ponderous moving through the house. Searching.

When light returned, Attrebus first thought he was plunging through a shimmering sky, but it took only a moment to understand that although he was in the air, he wasn’t falling, but supported. The shimmer was glass—or what appeared to be glass—and it was all around him; was in fact what held him up in so strange a fashion that it took a moment to sort out how .

Some forty feet below him was a web that might have been two hundred feet in diameter. It looked very much like a spider’s web, anchored to three metallic spires, an upthrust of stone, and a thicker tower of what appeared to be porcelain. Below the web was a long drop into a cone-shaped basin half full of emerald water and covered with strange buildings everywhere else. The web was made of glasslike tubes about the thickness of his arm. Every few feet along any given tube another sprouted and rose vinelike toward the sky. These in turn branched into smaller tendrils so that the whole resembled a gigantic bed of strange, transparent sea creatures—and indeed, most of them undulated, as if in a current.

Attrebus was about ten feet from the top of the bushy structure, where the strands were no thicker than a writing quill, and these were what held him up. They clustered thickly on the soles of his boots, pressed his back and torso and every part of him except his face with firm, gentle pressure.

He tried to take a step, and they moved with him, reconfiguring so he didn’t fall. They cut the sunlight into colors like so many prisms, but it was nevertheless not difficult to see in any direction. He noticed Sul a few feet away, similarly borne.

“You did it!” he shouted. The crystalline strands shivered at his voice and rang like a million faint chimes. “We got away.”

“I didn’t do anything,” Sul replied, shaking his head. “I never got close enough to the door to escape into Oblivion.”

“Then where are we?” Treb asked.

“In my home,” a voice answered.

Attrebus looked higher up and saw someone walking down toward them, the transparent tubules shifting to meet his feet.

He appeared to be a Dunmer of average size, his gray hair pulled back in a long queue. He wore a sort of loose umber robe with wide sleeves and black slippers.

“Amazing,” the man said. “Sul. And you, I take it, are Prince Attrebus. Welcome to Umbriel.”

“Vuhon,” Sul snarled.

The only strange thing about the man’s appearance, Attrebus noticed, were his eyes—they weren’t red, like a Dunmer’s; the orbs where milky white and the surrounds black.

“Once,” the man said. “Once I was called that. You may still use that name, if you find it convenient.”

Sul howled, and Attrebus saw his hand flash as when he’d fought and burned Sharwa, but the balefire coruscated briefly in the filaments and then faded. Attrebus ran forward, lifting Flashing, but after a few steps the web suddenly went rigid like the glass it resembled, and he couldn’t move anything below his neck.

“Please try to behave yourselves,” Vuhon said. “As I said, this is my home.” He let himself slump into a sitting position a few feet above them, and the strands formed something like a chair.

“You’ve come here to kill me, I take it?” he asked Sul.