The Psijic waved his hands. “Those boats out there—to sail and not founder—the sails and the ropes that hoist them, control them—tension must be just so, they must adjust as the winds change, if a storm comes they may even have to be taken down …” He shook his head. “No, no—I feel the ropes of the world, and they have become too tight. They pull in the wrong directions. And that is never good. That is what happened in the days before the Dragonfires first burned—”
“Are you talking about Oblivion? I thought we can’t be invaded by Oblivion anymore. I thought Emperor Martin—”
“Yes, yes. But nothing is so simple. There are always loopholes, you see.”
“Even if there aren’t loops?”
Urvwen grinned at that but didn’t reply.
“So this—city,” Mere-Glim said. “It’s from Oblivion.”
The priest shook his head, so violently Mere-Glim thought it might come off.
“No, no, no—or yes. I can’t explain. I can’t—go away. Just go away.”
Mere-Glim’s head was already hurting from the conversation. He didn’t need to be told twice, although technically he had been.
He wandered off to find his cousins and procure a bottle of Theilul. Annaig could wait a bit.
FOUR
Hecua’s single eye crawled its regard over Annaig’s list of ingredients. Her wrinkled dark brow knotted in a little frown.
“Last try didn’t work, did it?”
Annaig puffed her lips and lifted her shoulders. “It worked,” she said, “just not exactly the way I wanted it to.”
The Redguard shook her head. “You’ve the knack, there’s no doubt about that. But I’ve never heard of any formula that can make a person fly—not from anywhere. And this list—this just looks like a mess waiting to happen.”
“I’ve heard Lazarum of the Synod worked out a way to fly,” Annaig said.
“Hmm. And maybe if there was a Synod conclave within four hundred miles of here, you might have a chance of learning that, after a few years paying their dues. But that’s a spell, not a synthesis. A badly put-together spell likely won’t work at all—alchemy gone wrong can be poison.”
“I know all of that,” Annaig said. “I’m not afraid—nothing I’ve ever made turned out too bad.”
“It took me a week to give Mere-Glim his skin back.”
“He had his skin,” Annaig pointed out. “It was just translucent, that’s all. It didn’t
Hecua buzzed her lips together in disdain. “Well, there’s no talking to the young, is there?” She held up the list and began picking through the bottles, boxes, and canisters on the shelves that made up the walls of the place.
While she did so, Annaig wandered around the shelves, too, studying their contents. She knew she didn’t have everything she needed. It was like cooking; there was one more taste needed to pull everything together. She just didn’t have any idea what it was.
Hecua’s place was huge. It had once been the local Mages’ Guild hall, and there were still three or four doddering practitioners who were in and out of the rooms upstairs. Hecua honored their memberships, even though there was no such organization as the Mages’ Guild anymore. No one much cared; the An-Xileel didn’t care, and neither the College of Whispers nor the Synod—the two Imperially recognized institutions of magic—had representatives in Lilmoth, so they hadn’t anything to say about it either.
She opened bottles and sniffed the powders, distillations, and essences, but nothing spoke to her. Nothing, that is, until she lifted a small, fat bottle wrapped tightly in black paper. Touching it sent a faint tingle traveling up her arm, across her clavicle, and up into the back of her throat.
“What is it?” Hecua asked, and Annaig realized her gasp must have been audible.
She held the container up.
The old woman came and peered down her nose at it.
“Oh, that,” she said. “I’m really not sure, to tell you the truth. It’s been there for ages.”
“I’ve never seen it before.”
“I pulled it from the back, while I was dusting.”
“And you don’t know what it is?”
She shrugged. “A fellow came in here years ago, a few months after the Oblivion crisis. He was sick with something and needed some things, but he didn’t have money to pay. But he had that. He claimed he’d taken it from a fortress in Oblivion itself. There was a lot of that back then; we had a big influx of daedra hearts and void salts and the like.”
“But he didn’t say what it was?”
She shook her head. “I felt sorry for him, that’s all. I imagine it’s not much of anything.”
“And you never opened it to find out?”
Hecua paused. “Well, no, you can see the paper is intact.”
“May I?”
“I don’t see why not.”
Annaig broke the paper with her thumbnail, revealing the stopper beneath. It was tight, but a good twist brought it out.
The feeling in the back of her throat intensified and became a taste, a smell, bright as sunlight but cold, like eucalyptus or mint.
“That’s it,” she said, as she felt it all meld together.
“What? You know what it is?”
“No. But I want some.”
“Annaig—”
“I’ll be careful, Aunt Hec. I’ll run some virtue tests on it.”
“Those tests aren’t well proven yet. They miss things.”
“I’ll be careful, I said.”
The house, as usual, was empty, so she went to the small attic room where she had all of her alchemical gear and went to work. She did the virtue tests and found the primary virtue was restorative and the secondary was— more promisingly—one of alteration. The tertiary and quaternary virtues didn’t reveal themselves even so vaguely.
But she knew, knew right to her bones, that this was right. And so she passed hours with her calcinator, and in the end she was turning a flask containing a pale amber fluid that bent light oddly, as if it were a half a mile of liquid instead of a few inches.
“Well,” she said, sniffing it. Then she sighed. It felt right, smelled right—but Hecua’s warning was not to be taken lightly. This could be poison as easily as anything. Maybe if she just tasted a little …
At that moment she heard a sound on the stairs. She stayed still, listening for it to repeat itself.
“Annaig?”
She sighed in relief. It was only her father. She remembered he had been bringing food home, and a glance out her small window proved it was near dinnertime.
“Coming, Taig,” she called, corking the potion and stuffing it in her right skirt pocket. She started up, then paused.
Where was Glim? He’d been gone an awfully long time.
She went to a polished cypress cabinet and withdrew two small objects wrapped in soft gecko skin. She unwrapped them carefully, revealing a locket on a chain and a life-sized likeness of a sparrow constructed of a fine metal the color of brass but as light as paper. Each individual feather had been fashioned exquisitely and separately, and its eyes were garnets set in ovals of some darker metal.
As her fingers touched it, it stirred, ruffling its metal wings.
