parallel to the cliff, and Sha’jal was lashing out at something—a tree, growing up from below them. He caught it and then all of the blood rushed from his head as they swung down and in toward the cliff face.
When his senses returned, he was fetched up hard against some sort of recess in the rock wall; he could see the trunk of the tree rising from somewhere lower, but even as he watched, it was smashed from view by the rain of cattle that began pouring down a few yards in front of them. He looked right and left, and incredibly, all of the Khajiit and Sul were there, pressed against the back of the shallow rock shelter. Flakes of shale rained on their heads, and he could only hope that the weight of the wild cattle didn’t break it.
They kept coming, bleating, eyes rolling, legs flailing.
Lesspa started laughing, and the other Khajiit quickly joined her. After a moment, Attrebus found himself chuckling, too, not even certain why.
And, finally—as the last of the light was fading—the beasts stopped falling.
“Quickly, now,” Sul said. “I think we can work our way down on this side. We don’t have much time.”
Sul proved right—their hideaway was part of a larger erosional gully, probably an earlier channel of the tributary. They were able to step and slide their way down it.
The river was choked with dead and dying cattle, and the water stank of their blood, urine, and feces.
They continued downstream, crossing the tributary a few moments later. Attrebus could barely see now, but the Khajiit and Sul seemed to be having little trouble, and the strand along the river was sandy and relatively flat. And then a new, silvery light shone as a moon rose into the sky.
Above, two horns blared, quite near.
Upstream, another answered in a voice so incredibly deep and primal that Attrebus suddenly felt like a rabbit in the open, surrounded by wolves. It chased all thought from him, and before he knew it he was dashing forward in mindless terror.
Something caught him from behind, and he swung violently, trying to break the grip before realizing it was Sul …
“Easy,” he said. “Snap out of it.”
“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 running then, following Sul. The howls grew closer, so near that he could already feel the teeth in his back. The canyon narrowed until it was only about twenty feet wide.
“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 running.
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 running in swiftly moving water. And something was splashing behind them.
Then he took a step, and nothing was under it—the river dropped away into empty space. He didn’t see any bottom.
EIGHT
Annaig passed a bit of what had once been a soul along a wire drawn through a glass globe full of greenish vapor. As she watched, droplets formed on the wire and then quickly condensed into beadlike crystals. She waited for them to set properly, then carefully unsealed the two hemispheres of the globe and slid the wire out, so the tiny formations tinged and settled in the hollow glass and shone little tiny opals.
“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
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. Annaig did not know her, but she was dressed as a pantry worker.
“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.”
Annaig’s spirit lifted in a sudden rush. Mere-Glim worked in the sump, or at least so Slyr had said.
“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 tunnels leading away. There were also two large square holes in the walls that didn’t seem to go anywhere until she realized they were shafts going up and down. In fact, as she watched, a large crate came into one of them from above. Several workers sitting on the top of it got down and began unfastening the latches on the front.
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,” Annaig told her.
She bowed and hurried off.
“Well,” Annaig asked. “What’s this?”
“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, annalines, and dash clams.
“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.
