Gregory Keyes - The Infernal city

For my daughter , Dorothy Nellah Joyce Keyes . Welcome, Nellah .

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would first like to thank everyone involved in The Elder Scrolls for such rich material to work with. Specifically, thanks to Kurt Kuhlmann, Bruce Nesmith, Pete Hines, and Todd Howard for their input and guidance. I would be remiss to neglect mentioning the Imperial Library website, which was also an invaluable resource in writing this book.

As always, thanks to my agent, Richard Curtis. Thanks to my friend Annaïg Houesnard for being a good sport about me lifting her name.

Thanks also to my editor, Tricia Narwani, editorial assistant Mike Braff, and copy editor Peter Weissman, production manager Erin Bekowies, production editor Shona McCarthy, marketing manager Ali T. Kokmen, publicist David Moench, and, of course, the publisher, Scott Shannon. For the wonderful cover, thanks go out to illustrator Paul Youll and designer Dreu Pennington-McNeil.

PROLOGUE

When Iffech felt the sea shudder, he knew. The wind had already fallen like a dead thing from the sky, gasping as it succumbed upon the iron swells, breathing its last to his mariner’s ears. The sky always knew first; the sea was slow—dreadful slow—to come around.

The sea shook again—or, rather, seemed to drag beneath their keel. Up in the crow’s nest Keem screamed as he was tossed out like a kitten. Iffech watched him twist and almost impossibly catch the rigging with those Cathay Raht claws of his.

“Stendarr!” Grayne swore, in her South Niben twang. “What was that? A tsunami?” Her feeble human gaze searched out through the dusk.

“No,” Iffech murmured. “I was off the Summerset Isles when the sea tried to swallow them, and I felt one of those pass under us. And another, when I was younger, off the coast of Morrowind. In deep water you don’t feel much. This is deep water.”

“Then what?” She brushed her silver and gray bangs off her useless eyes.

Iffech twitched his shoulders in imitation of a human shrug and ran his claws through the patchy fur of his forearm. The still air smelled sweet, like rotting fruit.

“See anything, Keem?” he called up.

“My own death, nearly,” the Ne Quin-alian cat shouted back, his voice rasping hollow, as if the ship was in a box. He lithely hauled his sleek body back into the nest. “Nothing on the sea,” he continued after a moment.

“Under it, then,” Grayne said nervously.

Iffech shook his head. “The wind,” he said.

And then he saw it, in the south, a sudden blackness, a crackle of green lightning, and then a form like a tall thunderhead billowed into being.

“Hold on!” he shouted.

And now came a clap like thunder but forty times louder, and a new fist of wind that snapped the mainmast, taking poor Keem to the death he had nearly seen. Then all was still again, except for the roaring in his damaged ears.

“By the gods, what can it be?” he barely heard Grayne ask.

“The sea doesn’t care,” Iffech said, watching the dark mass move toward them. He looked around his ship. All of the masts were broken, and it appeared that half the crew was already gone.

“What?”

“Not many Khajiit take to the sea,” he said. “They’ll bear it for trade, to move skooma around, but few there are who love her. But I’ve adored her since I could mewl. And I love her because she doesn’t care what the gods or daedra think. She’s another world, with her own rules.”

“What are you going on about?”

“I’m not sure,” he admitted. “I feel it, I don’t think it. But don’t you think—doesn’t it feel like …” He didn’t finish. He didn’t need to.

Grayne stared out toward the thing.

“I see it, now,” she said.

“Yes.”

“I saw an Oblivion gate open once,” she said. “When my father worked in Leyawiin. I saw things—it feels a little like that. But Martin’s sacrifice—they say it can’t happen again. And it doesn’t look like a gate.”

It wasn’t shaped like a thunderhead, Iffech realized. More like a fat cone, point down.

Another wind was starting up, and on it something unbelievably foul.

“It doesn’t matter what it is,” he said. “Not to us.”

And a few instants later it didn’t.

Sul’s throat hurt, so he knew he had been screaming. He was soaked with sweat, his chest ached, and his limbs were trembling. He opened his eyes and forced his head up so he could see where he was.

A man stood in the doorway with a drawn sword. His eyes were very wide and blue beneath a shock of curly, barley-colored hair. Swearing, Sul reached for his own weapon where it hung on the bedpost.

“Just hold on there,” the fellow said, backing up. “It’s just you’ve been hollering so, I was worried something was happening to you.”

The dreamlight was still fading, but his mind was starting to turn. If the fellow had wanted him dead, he probably would be.

“Where am I?” he asked, taking a grip on his longsword, despite his reasoning.

“In the Lank Fellow Inn,” the man replied. And then, after a pause, “In Chorrol.”

Chorrol. Right .

“Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Sul said. “Nothing to concern you.”

“Ah, yes.” The man looked uncomfortable, “Do you, umm, scream like that every—”

“I won’t be here tonight,” Sul cut him off. “I’m moving on.”

“I didn’t mean to offend.”

“You didn’t,” Sul replied.

“The breakfast is out, down there.”

“Thank you. Please leave me.”

The man closed the door. Sul sat there for a moment rubbing the lines in his forehead. “Azura,” he murmured. He always knew the prince’s touch, even when it was light. This had not been light.

He closed his eyes and tried to feel the sea jump beneath him, to hear the old Khajiit captain’s words, see again through his eyes. That thing, appearing in the sky—everything about it stank of Oblivion. After spending twenty years there, he ought to know the smell.

“Vuhon,” he sighed. “It must be you, Vuhon, I think. Why else would the prince send me such a vision? What else would matter to me?”

No one answered, of course.

He remembered a little more, after the Khajiit had died. He had seen Ilzheven as he last saw her, pale and lifeless, and the smoking shatterlands that had once been Morrowind. Those were always there in his dreams, whether Azura meddled with them or not. But there had been another face, a young man, Colovian probably, with a slight bend in his nose. He seemed familiar, as if they had met somewhere.

“That’s all I get?” Sul asked. “I don’t even know which ocean to look in.” The question was directed at Azura, but he knew it was rhetorical. He also knew he was lucky to get even that. He dragged his wiry gray body out of bed and went over to the washbasin to splash water in his face and blink red eyes at himself in the mirror. He started to turn away when he noticed, behind him in the reflection, a couple of books propped in an otherwise empty shelf. He turned, walked over, and lifted the first.