darker than the rest, possibly a Dunmer.
“He’ll be here,” another said. He—or maybe she—was obviously a Khajiit—everything about the way he moved was feline.
“He will,” a third voice said. Annaig watched as the man she had been following for the last few days approached the others. Like them, he was too far away to see, but she knew him by the hump of his back, and her memory filled in the details of his brutish face and long, unkempt hair.
“Do you have it?” the Khajiit asked.
“Just brought it in under the river.”
“Seems like a lot of trouble,” the Khajiit said. “I’ve always wondered why you don’t use an Argonian for that.”
“I don’t trust ’em. Besides, they have ripper eels trained to hunt Argonians trying to cross the outer canal. They’re not so good at spotting me, especially if I rub myself with eel-slime first.”
“Disgusting. You can keep your end of the job.”
“Just as long as I get paid for it.” He pulled off his shirt and removed his hump. “Have a look. Have a taste, if you want.”
“Oh, daedra and Divines,” Annaig swore, from the beam they crouched on. “He’s not a were-croc. He’s a skooma smuggler.”
“You’re finally going to kill me,” Glim said.
“Not so much kill you as get you killed.”
“It works out the same.”
And now Annaig was quite sure that what she felt was fear. Bright, terrible, animal fear.
“By the way,” the Khajiit below said, lowering his voice. “Who are those two in the rafters?”
The man looked up. “Xhuth! if I know,” he said. “None of mine.”
“I hope not. I sent Patch and Flichs up to kill them.”
“Oh, kaoc’,” Annaig hissed. “Come on, Glim.”
As she stood, something wisped through the air near her, and a shriek tore out of her throat.
“I knew it,” Glim snapped.
“Just—come on, we have to get to the roof.”
They ran across the beams, and someone behind her shouted. She could hear their footfalls now—why hadn’t she before? An enchantment of some sort?
“There.” Glim said. She saw it; part of the roof had caved in and was resting on the rafters, forming a ramp. They scrambled up it. Something hot and wet was trying to pull out of her chest, and she hysterically wondered if an arrow hadn’t hit her, if she wasn’t bleeding inside.
But they made it to the roof.
And a fifty-foot fall.
She pulled out two vials and handed one to Mere-Glim.
“Drink this and jump,” she said.
“What? What is it?”
“It’s—I’m not sure. It’s supposed to make us fly.”
“Supposed to? Where did you get it?”
“Why is that important?”
“Oh, Thtal, you made it didn’t you? Without a formula. Remember that stuff that was supposed to make me invisible?”
“It made you sort of invisible.”
“It made my skin translucent. I looked like a bag of offal walking around.”
She drank hers. “No time, Glim. It’s our only hope.”
Their pursuers were coming up the ramp, so she jumped, wondering if she should flap her arms or …
But what she did was fall, and shriek.
But then she wasn’t falling so fast, and then she was sort of drifting, so the wind actually pushed her like a soap bubble. She heard the men hollering from the roof, and turned to see Glim floating just behind her.
“See?” she said. “You need to have a little faith in me.”
She barely got the sentence out before they were falling again.
Later, battered, sore, and stinking of the trash pile that broke their final fall, they returned to her father’s villa. They found him passed out in the same chair Annaig had been in earlier that morning. She stood looking at him for a moment, at his pale fingers clutched on a wine bottle, at his thinning gray hair. She was trying to remember the man he had been before her mother died, before the An-Xileel wrested Lilmoth from the Empire and looted their estates.
She couldn’t see him.
“Come on,” she told Glim.
They took three bottles of wine from the cellar and wound their way up the spiral stair to the upper balcony. She lit a small paper lantern and in its light poured full two delicate crystal goblets.
“To us,” she said.
They drank.
Old Imperial Lilmoth spread below them, crumbling hulks of villas festooned with vines and grounds overgrown with sleeping palms and bamboo, all dark now as if cut from black velvet, except where illumined by the pale phosphorescences of lucan mold or the wispy yellow airborne shines, harmless cousins of the deadly will-o’-wisps in the deep swamps.
“There now,” she said, refilling her glass. “Don’t you feel more alive?”
He blinked his eyes, very slowly. “Well, I certainly feel more aware of the contrast between life and death,” he replied.
“That’s a start,” she said.
A small moment passed.
“We were lucky,” Glim said.
“I know,” she replied. “But …”
“What?”
“Well, it’s no were-croc, but we can at least report the skooma dealers to the underwarden.”
“They’ll have moved by then. And even if they catch them, that’s a drop of water in the ocean. There’s no stopping the skooma trade.”
“There certainly isn’t if no one tries,” she replied. “No offense, Glim, but I wish we were still in the Empire.”
“No doubt. Then your father would still be a wealthy man, and not a poorly paid advisor to the An-Xileel.”
“It’s not that,” she said. “I just—there was justice under the Empire. There was honor.”
“You weren’t even born.”
“Yes, but I can read, Mere-Glim.”
“But who wrote those books? Bretons. Imperials.”
“And that’s An-Xileel propaganda. The Empire is rebuilding itself. Titus Mede started it, and now his son Attrebus is at his side. They’re bringing order back to the world, and we’re just—just dreaming ourselves away here, waiting for things to get better by themselves.”
The Argonian gave his imitation shrug. “There are worse places than Lilmoth.”
“There are better places, too. Places we could go, places where we could make a difference.”
“Is this your Imperial City speech again? I like it here, Nn. It’s my home. We’ve known each other since we were hatchlings, yes, and if you didn’t already know you could talk me into almost anything, you do now. But leaving Black Marsh—that you won’t get me to do. Don’t even try.”
“Don’t you want more out of life, Glim?”
“Food, drink, good times—why should anyone want more than that? It’s people wanting to ‘make a difference’ causing all the troubles in the world. People who think they know what’s better for everyone else, people who believe they know what other people need but never bother to ask. That’s what your Titus Mede is spreading around—his version of how things ought to be, right?”
