will do. I will show them what real retribution is.”
With that, he left her, and she worked in silence.
She felt like humming, but suppressed the urge for fear that her good cheer might be noticed. Her plan was working better than she had ever imagined. This was the first time Toel had said anything about it, but the rumors had been thick this last week, and Toel had come to ask her to develop a recipe for breathing underwater. All of the major kitchens were at one another’s throats, and they were all so vicious and mean it didn’t occur to any of them to question closely how it had all started. Glim and the skraws didn’t have to do much to keep things going-just a little nudge here and there. In fact, for the first time since she had been in Umbriel, she heard people talking about the skraws in glowing terms-how quickly they fixed what was broken, how good and uncomplaining they were. That was very good news, because it meant that Glim might achieve his goal without ever having to risk a confrontation between the skraws and the lords-when Toel’s kitchen was triumphant, she could reasonably suggest a replacement for the vapors as their reward. She’d already been given the perfect excuse to invent a safer drug.
That wouldn’t matter in the long run, of course, but it would make Glim happy.
The other thing that had Annaig suppressing her humming was how well her menu was coming along. Thanks to the skraws, she knew the tastes, fashions, and fetishes of not only Lord Rhel, but also most of those attending his tasting. She knew which ones Rhel liked and which ones he despised, and part of her planning was that the meal itself subtly insult and discomfit the latter. She knew he had a great sense of whimsy, and above all that he was partial to the new, strange, surprising-but also that he prided himself on a sort of coarseness of taste, of mortal indulgence. In this, he seemed to ape Umbriel himself, the eponymous master of this place, who was known to dine on the lowest sorts of matter at times. Rhel had been heard to say that such tastes reflected not the lack of refinement, but the fulfillment of it.
She worked, and her mood only improved as the day went on.
Glim rode the tree and bellowed in delight.
His claws gripped about the tendril-thin branch tips, and the wind, the spin of Umbriel, and the long rippling undulation of the trees did the rest. Fhena’s musical laugh sang nearby, where she clung to her own branch.
“I told you!” she shouted.
“You did!” he admitted. “It’s better than flying, I can tell you that.”
“You’ve flown? How?”
“Never mind,” he said. “It doesn’t matter.”
It was merely exciting, at first, but after a few moments he began to feel the trees, their own joy in their existence, in the process of merely being, and he felt himself gently tugged into a state of pure thought, where no words existed to constrain his feelings, where no logic tried to make sense and order of the world, and there was only color, smell, touch, feeling, motion. When Fhena finally cajoled him back to thicker branches, he went only reluctantly, and he felt more refreshed-and more himself-than he had in a long time.
“Thank you,” he said. “That was-wonderful.”
“Isn’t it?” she said. “Sometimes I dream of just letting go, of never coming back.”
“Right,” Glim said. “But you have to come back.”
“Why?” she asked.
“Well, because-you would die.”
“And return to Umbriel and be born again. People do it all the time.”
“Die?”
“Ride the branches and let go. They say sometimes the mood just hits you and you can’t help it.”
“How do you know what someone who lets go was thinking?”
“Well, my friend Jinel got the feeling, but Qwern caught him. But he just went out the next day and let go anyway.”
Glim remembered the ghost of the feeling, of near-perfect peace.
“You didn’t think to warn me about that before I did it?” he wondered.
“Warn you? Why?”
“Because-” He stopped, then started again. “Listen, don’t do it again, okay? I don’t want you to die.”
“Well, I wouldn’t die, silly, just go back into Umbriel.”
“Right-and be born as someone else, someone who doesn’t remember me, who isn’t my friend.”
“I wouldn’t have to remember you,” Fhena said. “I would know you, Mere-Glim, whatever form I wore.” She brightened. “Maybe I would even be born in a form like yours. Wouldn’t that be fun?”
Something like a quick hot tide seem to fill him up, and his mouth worked in embarrassment.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Please,” he said, “just promise me-no more branch riding.”
“That’s an awful lot to promise,” she said. “But if you’re asking, I guess I will.”
“Good. Thank you.”
But she had reminded him of something he’d been trying not to think about.
“What now?” Fhena asked.
“Now?” he sighed. “Well, speaking of being reborn, I have to go back to the sump and check on the recent implantations.”
“Stay a little longer,” she pleaded.
“I have to go,” he said. “Besides, you’ve got your own work to do. I don’t want to get you in trouble.”
“Well, very well. Tomorrow?”
“Tomorrow.”
He left, but the thought of Fhena as an Argonian-or at least in the form of one-stayed with him. In fact, he was so distracted that he realized he’d reached the implantations and had just been staring at them for several moments before he really saw them.
They looked so much like small Saxhleel. Their eyes were very large.
He’d known since he first saw them, but put it off. He couldn’t face it then.
No matter what happened with the kitchens and the lords, the skraws wouldn’t be free of the vapors. They would die, one by one, and be replaced by things that looked like him, that didn’t need the vapors to breathe beneath the waves. When they were all dead, the agony of the skraws would be over.
But that meant Wert and Oluth and everyone he actually knew was going to die horribly. He’d hoped to save them, to give them a better life, but instead his mere existence as a template had doomed them irrevocably to misery.
And they were so close. Toel’s kitchen would win, and the skraws would be rewarded with a healthier life. Then let the worms become Argonians, and the skraws live out their remaining years decently.
So he did what he had to do. He carefully killed them all, took them back up the Fringe Gyre, and threw them over the edge, where their tiny figures became smoke and then nothing.
It was the morning before the day of the banquet when Toel came to her, his eyes icy with fury. He wore a shirt and pair of breeches that appeared to be made of sharkskin, or something similar. He placed garments like them on her table.
“Put those on. You’re going with us.”
“Chef?”
“I have good information that the sump feed from our midden is going to be sabotaged again,” he said. “Soon.”
“But that’s okay,” she said. “That won’t affect the meal, at this point.”
“It’s not that,” Toel shouted. “I’ve simply had enough of this. Someone is going to die for this presumption, and I’m going to be there to see it. And so are you.”
Mere-Glim drifted nearly still amid twenty-foot-long strands of slackweed, watching the party approaching the maw where the midden was supposed to empty into the sump. They weren’t skraws, and swam even more clumsily. They were armed with long, wicked-looking spears, and there were six of them.
He waited until they had passed into darkness, then followed behind them into the dark fissure, trying to decide what he could do.
He hoped the armed figures would make some noise his comrades would hear, but they moved pretty quietly and altogether without talking.
