“But if not her, that leaves me with you,” she said. “Or someone else in your organization.”
“Impossible.”
“I argued against using you people in the first place,” she snorted.
“The job was done.”
“The job was not done. Attrebus lives, and someone has implicated me in the bargain.”
“You’ve no proof Attrebus lives,” the man asserted. “That’s only a rumor.”
“Wrong. A courier arrived from Water’s Edge this morning with news that he is alive. It went straight to the Emperor. He’s keeping it quiet, but troops have already been sent.”
That’s news, Colin thought. He’d written the “blackmail” letter himself, to draw her out, but he hadn’t heard anything about a courier.
“Well, then,” the man said. “I don’t leave a job unfinished. I deal with it, at no extra charge.”
“That won’t do. Not now.”
The man laughed. “Now, let’s not get silly,” he said. “If you don’t want me to finish the job, fine, but you’re not getting your money back. Don’t forget who I am.”
“You’re a glorified thug,” Arese replied. “That’s who you are.”
“I love your type,” the man snarled. “You pay me to do murder so you can pretend your hands are clean, so you can continue to think yourself better than me. I have news for you—you’re worse, because you don’t have the guts to put down your own dogs.”
“I wouldn’t say that,” she replied, a colder note in her voice.
“You’re not threatening me.”
Colin heard several doors open, and he could all but see the man’s guards coming in. But then he heard something else, a sort of ripping sound accompanied by a rush of air and glass shattering. Every hair on his body pricked up.
The next thing he heard was something human ears were not meant to receive, the human brain not meant to interpret, the primal feral sound of which the lion’s roar or the wolf’s growl were faint shadows. Harsh yellow light shone up the stairs, and then darkness.
Then the screaming began, very human and beyond all terror. Colin began to shiver, then to shake. He was still shaking when the last of the screams abruptly choked off and he felt something ponderous moving through the house. Searching.
When light returned, Attrebus first thought he was plunging through a shimmering sky, but it took only a moment to understand that although he was in the air, he wasn’t falling, but supported. The shimmer was glass—or what appeared to be glass—and it was all around him; was in fact what held him up in so strange a fashion that it took a moment to sort out
Some forty feet below him was a web that might have been two hundred feet in diameter. It looked very much like a spider’s web, anchored to three metallic spires, an upthrust of stone, and a thicker tower of what appeared to be porcelain. Below the web was a long drop into a cone-shaped basin half full of emerald water and covered with strange buildings everywhere else. The web was made of glasslike tubes about the thickness of his arm. Every few feet along any given tube another sprouted and rose vinelike toward the sky. These in turn branched into smaller tendrils so that the whole resembled a gigantic bed of strange, transparent sea creatures—and indeed, most of them undulated, as if in a current.
Attrebus was about ten feet from the top of the bushy structure, where the strands were no thicker than a writing quill, and these were what held him up. They clustered thickly on the soles of his boots, pressed his back and torso and every part of him except his face with firm, gentle pressure.
He tried to take a step, and they moved with him, reconfiguring so he didn’t fall. They cut the sunlight into colors like so many prisms, but it was nevertheless not difficult to see in any direction. He noticed Sul a few feet away, similarly borne.
“You did it!” he shouted. The crystalline strands shivered at his voice and rang like a million faint chimes. “We got away.”
“I didn’t do anything,” Sul replied, shaking his head. “I never got close enough to the door to escape into Oblivion.”
“Then where are we?” Treb asked.
“In my home,” a voice answered.
Attrebus looked higher up and saw someone walking down toward them, the transparent tubules shifting to meet his feet.
He appeared to be a Dunmer of average size, his gray hair pulled back in a long queue. He wore a sort of loose umber robe with wide sleeves and black slippers.
“Amazing,” the man said. “Sul. And you, I take it, are Prince Attrebus. Welcome to Umbriel.”
“Vuhon,” Sul snarled.
The only strange thing about the man’s appearance, Attrebus noticed, were his eyes—they weren’t red, like a Dunmer’s; the orbs where milky white and the surrounds black.
“Once,” the man said. “Once I was called that. You may still use that name, if you find it convenient.”
Sul howled, and Attrebus saw his hand flash as when he’d fought and burned Sharwa, but the balefire coruscated briefly in the filaments and then faded. Attrebus ran forward, lifting Flashing, but after a few steps the web suddenly went rigid like the glass it resembled, and he couldn’t move anything below his neck.
“Please try to behave yourselves,” Vuhon said. “As I said, this is my home.” He let himself slump into a sitting position a few feet above them, and the strands formed something like a chair.
“You’ve come here to kill me, I take it?” he asked Sul.
“What do you think?” Sul said, his voice flat with fury.
“I just
“You murdered Ilzheven, destroyed our city and our country, left our people to be driven to the ends of the earth. You have to pay for that.”
Vuhon cocked his head.
“But I didn’t do any of that, Sul,” he said softly.
Sul snarled and tried to move forward again, without success.
Vuhon made a languid sort of sign with his hand, and the glassy vines rustled. A moment later they handed up to each of them a small red bowl full of yellow spheres that did not appear to be fruit. Vuhon took one and popped it in his mouth. A faint green vapor vented from his nostrils.
“You should try them,” he said.
“I don’t believe I will,” Attrebus said.
Vuhon shrugged and turned his attention back to Sul.
“Ilzheven died when the ministry hit Vivec City, old friend,” he said. “And the ministry hit Vivec City because you destroyed the ingenium preventing it falling.”
“You were draining the life out of her,” Sul accused.
“Very slowly. She would have lived for months.”
“What are you talking about?” Attrebus demanded. “Sul, what’s he saying?”
Sul didn’t answer, but Vuhon turned toward Attrebus.
“He told you about the ministry? How we devised a method to keep it airborne?”
“Yes. By stealing souls.”
“We couldn’t find any other way to do it,” Vuhon allowed. “Given time, perhaps we could have. At first we had to slaughter slaves and prisoners outright, as many as ten a day. But then I found a way to use the souls of the living, although only certain people had souls—well, for simplicity’s sake, let us say ‘large’ enough. We only needed twelve at a time, then. A vast improvement. Ilzheven was chosen because she had the right sort of soul.”
“You chose her because she wouldn’t love you,” Sul contradicted. “Because she loved me instead.”
“We were always competitive, you and I, weren’t we?” Vuhon said, almost absently, as if just remembering. “Even as boys. But we were friends right up until the minute you burst into the ingenium chamber and starting trying to cut Ilzheven free.”
“I meant only to free
