“More,” Slyr snapped. “This is boar, yes?”
“It smells like it,” Annaig replied.
“And this goes to the grounds workers in Prixon Palace, and they don’t like it burnt, like they do in the Oroy Mansion, see. So higher, and then send your scamp on the walk up there to swing a cover over it.”
Annaig kept hauling on the wheel. Sweat was pouring from her now, and she was starting to feel herself moving past fatigue into some whole new state of being.
“What did you mean, about there being no fire?” Slyr asked.
“There’s not. It’s just rocks. Fire is when you burn something. Wood, paper, something.”
Slyr frowned. “Yes, I guess fire can mean that, too—like when grease falls. Right. But why would we cook by burning wood? If we did, all of the trees in the Fringe Gyre would be gone in six days.”
“Then what makes the rocks hot?”
“They’re hot,” Slyr said. “They are, that’s all. Okay, send your scamp.”
She pointed at the metal hemisphere suspended on a boom from the ceiling, and the scamp scrambled up into the metal beams and wires above the heat. He pushed the dome—which ought to have been searing—and positioned it over the smoking hog carcass. Annaig kept cranking until the grill came in contact with the dome.
“There,” Slyr said. “We’re well above the flames. So what else can we put up there? What do we need to cook slowly?”
“We could braise those red roots.”
“The Helsh? Yes, we could.” She seemed surprised, for a moment, but covered it quickly.
“These little birds—they would cook nicely up there.”
“They would, but those are going to Oroy Mansion—”
“—and they like everything burnt there.”
“Yes.”
Annaig was sure Slyr almost smiled, but then she was directly back to business.
“So get on with it,” she said.
And so she burned, braised, roasted, and seared things for what felt like days, until at last Slyr led her to a dark dormitory with about twenty sleeping mats. A table supported a cauldron, bowls, and spoons. She stood in line, legs shaking with fatigue, helped herself, and then slid down against the wall near the pallet Slyr indicated was hers.
The stew was hot and pungent, unfamiliar meat and odd, nutty grains, and at the moment it seemed like the best thing she had ever eaten.
“When you finish that, I advise you to sleep,” Slyr told her. “In six hours you’re back to work.”
Annaig nodded, looking around for Glim.
“They’ve taken your friend,” Slyr said.
“What? To where?”
“I don’t know. It was obvious he didn’t know much about cooking, and there’s curiosity about what he is exactly.”
“Well, when will they bring him back?”
Slyr’s face took on a faintly sympathetic cast. “Never, I should think,” she replied.
She left, and Annaig curled into a ball and wept quietly. She pulled out her pendant and opened it.
“Find Attrebus,” she whispered. “Find him.”
Mere-Glim wondered what would happen if he died. It was generally believed that Argonians had been given their souls by the Hist, and when one died, one’s soul returned to them, to be incarnated once more. That seemed reasonable enough, under ordinary circumstances. In the deepest parts of his dreams or profound thinking were images, scents, tastes that the part of him that was sentient could not remember experiencing. The concept the Imperials called “time” did not even have a word in his native language. In fact, the hardest part of learning the language of the Imperials was that they made their verbs different to indicate when something happened, as if the most important thing in the world was to establish a linear sequence of events, as if doing so somehow explained things better than holistic apprehension.
But to his people—at least the most traditional ones—birth and death were the same moment. All of life—all of history—was one moment, and only by ignoring most of its content could one create the illusion of linear progression. The agreement to see things in this limited way was what other peoples called “time.”
And yet how did this place, this Umbriel, fit into all of that? Because he was cut off from the Hist. If he died here, where would his soul go? Would it be consumed by the ingenium Wemreddle had spoken of? And what of his people so consumed? Where they gone forever, wrenched from the eternal cycle of birth and death? Or was the cycle, the eternal moment, only the Argonian way of avoiding an even more comprehensive truth?
He decided to stop thinking about it. This sort of thing made his head hurt. Concentrate on the practical and what he really knew; he knew that he’d been overpowered by creatures with massive, crablike arms, snatched away from Annaig, and brought here. He didn’t know why.
Fortunately, someone entered the room, rescuing him from any more attempts at reflection.
The newcomer was a small wiry male and might well have been a Nord, with his fine white hair and ivory, vein-traced skin. And yet there was something about the sqaurish shape of his head and slump of his shoulders that made him seem somehow quite alien. He wore a sort of plain olive frock-coat over a black vest and trousers.
He spoke a few words of gibberish. When Glim didn’t answer, he reached into the pocket of his coat and withdrew a small glass vial. He pantomimed drinking it and then handed it to Glim.
Glim took it, wondering how it would feel to kill the man. He surely wouldn’t get far …
But if they wanted to talk to him, they must want him alive.
He drank the stuff, which tasted like burning orange peel.
The fellow waited for a moment, then cleared his throat. “Can you understand me now?”
“Yes,” Mere-Glim said.
“I’ll get directly to the point,” the man said. “It has been noticed that you are of an unknown physical type, or at least one that hasn’t been seen in my memory, which is quite long.”
“I’m an Argonian,” he said.
“A word,” the man said. “Not a word that signifies to me.”
“That is my race.”
“Another word I do not know.” The little man cocked his head. “So it is true, then? You are from outside? From someplace other than Umbriel?”
“I’m from here, from Tamriel.”
“Exciting. Another meaningless word. This is Umbriel, and no place else.”
“Your Umbriel is in my world, in my country, Black Marsh.”
“Is it? I daresay it isn’t. But as interesting as this subject may be to you, it holds little appeal for me. What I’m interested in is what you are. What part of Umbriel you will become.”
“I don’t understand.”
“You aren’t the first newcomer here, but you may be the first with that sort of body. But Umbriel will remember your body, and others with similar corpora will come along in time—many or a few, depending on what use you are.”
“What if I’m of no use at all?”
“Then we can’t permit Umbriel to learn your form. We must cut your body away from what inhabits it and send it back out into the void.”
“Why not simply let me go? Return me to Tamriel? Why kill me?”
“Ah, a soul is too precious for that. We could not think of letting one waste. Now, tell me about this form of yours.”
“I am as you see me,” he replied.
“Are you some sort of daedra?”
Glim gaped his mouth. “You know what daedra are?” He asked. “The man we talked to below didn’t.”
“Why should he?” the man said. “We have incorporated daedra in the past, but none exist here now.
“No.”
