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“That’s Hircine,” Attrebus said. “It’s over.”
“Not yet,” Sul said. “Not yet.”
The horn sounded again, and now he heard wolves baying.
“Keep together,” Sul warned them. “When we get there, we’ll have to be quick.”
Dark figures watched them from both rims of the canyon, and strange bestial sounds drifted down, but apparently the other drivers were content just to keep them bottled in and let their master have the kill.
They rushed on, breathless, limping. Sul shouted something, but Attrebus couldn’t make it out because of the wolves. He glanced behind him, and in the moonlight saw an enormous silhouette shaped like a man, but with the branching horns of a stag.
“He’s here!”
“So are we!” Sul shouted. “Ahead there, you see, where the canyon narrows. It’s just through there.”
It was all ru
“Another fifty yards!” Sul shouted.
“That’s too far,” Lesspa said. She stopped and shouted something in Khajiit. They all turned to face the hunt.
“We’ll catch up after we’ve killed him,” she said.
“Lesspa—”
But Sul grabbed his arm and yanked him along.
“Don’t spit on their sacrifice,” he said. “The only way to make it worthwhile is to survive.”
Behind them he heard Lesspa’s warrior shriek, and a wolf howled in pain.
He tried to concentrate on keeping his feet working beneath him and off the fire in his chest. He was terrified, but he wanted to stand with Lesspa, to stop ru
And yet he knew he couldn’t.
The walls of the canyon narrowed further, until they were only about ten feet apart. The shingle vanished, and they were ru
Then he took a step, and nothing was under it—the river dropped away into empty space. He didn’t see any bottom.
EIGHT
A
“There’s that down,” she murmured. “Forty-eight more courses to go.”
Lord Irrel’s tastes tended toward the inane. No meal of less than thirty courses ever pleased him, and fifty or more was safest.
Almost everything he ate was the product of some process involving stolen souls. She’d been squeamish about that at first, but like a butcher getting used to blood, she had become less focused on what it was and more on what to do with it. At times she still wondered if she was destroying the last bit of a person, the final part of them that made them them. Toel assured her that wasn’t how it worked, that the energy that came to the kitchens came from the ingenium, which had already processed it to purity.
In the end she felt sure she would have been more bothered by dismembering human corpses, even though there was nothing there to feel or know what was happening.
A soft clearing of the throat behind her caused her to turn. A young woman with red skin and horns stood there, looking a little worried. A
“Pardon me, Chef,” the woman said. “Do not think I presume, and I’m certain what your answer will be, but a skraw is here with a delivery, and he says he will only give it to you.”
“A skraw?”
“That’s what they call them that work in the sump.”
A
“Well,” she said, trying to keep her composure, “I suppose I have a moment. Take me to this fellow.”
She followed the woman through the pantries and beyond, to the receiving dock, where she had never been. It wasn’t particularly imposing, merely a room with various tu
She did not see Mere-Glim. Instead, there was a dirty-looking fellow in a sort of loincloth holding a large bucket.
“This is him, Chef.”
“Very good—you may go,” A
She bowed and hurried off.
“Well,” A
“Nothing, lady,” the man croaked. He looked unhealthy, jaundiced. “Only I was told to deliver this just to you.”
She peered into the bucket, which seemed to be filled with phosphor worms, a
“That’s it?”
“That’s it, lady.”
“Very good, then. I’ll take them.”
She took the bucket and went back up, hoping no one would see her, torn between hope that the bucket contained something from Glim and worry that it was all some weird practical joke.
She stopped in the pantry and put the seafoods in their various holding tanks, and was leaning toward the practical joke end of things when her hand found something smooth and familiar.
Her locket.
She clutched it tight, realizing dizzily that this was one of the best moments of her young life. To have Glim back. And her mother’s amulet. And hope—she hadn’t realized just how resigned she had become to Umbriel. With no way to contact Treb, she’d tried not to think about him, which was to say not to think of escape. Yes, she’d found what she needed in order to leave, but hadn’t even put them together yet.
She realized she must be gri
Inside was a little piece of some sort of hide or vellum, and although it was damp, the letters hadn’t run. It was in the private hand that she and Glim had invented as children.
A
She placed the locket in one of her drawers. The note she dipped in vitriol and watched it dissolve. Then she returned to her cooking station.
She was putting a film on the soup when Slyr came over from her station.
“Could you try this?” she asked. “I’ve been experimenting with condensations of those black, bumpy fruit. I forget what you call them.”
“Blackberries?”
“That’s right. Only they’re not black, are they? Their juice is almost the color of blood.”
“Sure,” A
“That’s pretty good,” she said, “at least by the lord’s standards. I should think it would go nicely on white silk noodles.”
“That was my thought,” Slyr said. “Thanks for your advice.” She tilted her head. “I was looking for you earlier. I couldn’t find you anywhere.”
“I went down to the pantry to check on a few things,” she said.
“Ah,” Slyr said. “That explains it.”
But her tone hinted that it didn’t.
A