“I didn’t mean to offend.”
“You didn’t,” Sul replied.
“The breakfast is out, down there.”
“Thank you. Please leave me.”
The man closed the door. Sul sat there for a moment rubbing the lines in his forehead. “Azura,” he murmured. He always knew the prince’s touch, even when it was light. This had not been light.
He closed his eyes and tried to feel the sea jump beneath him, to hear the old Khajiit captain’s words, see again through his eyes. That thing, appearing in the sky—everything about it stank of Oblivion. After spending twenty years there, he ought to know the smell.
“Vuhon,” he sighed. “It must be you, Vuhon, I think. Why else would the prince send me such a vision? What else would matter to me?”
No one answered, of course.
He remembered a little more, after the Khajiit had died. He had seen Ilzheven as he last saw her, pale and lifeless, and the smoking shatterlands that had once been Morrowind. Those were always there in his dreams, whether Azura meddled with them or not. But there had been another face, a young man, Colovian probably, with a slight bend in his nose. He seemed familiar, as if they had met somewhere.
“That’s all I get?” Sul asked. “I don’t even know which ocean to look in.” The question was directed at Azura, but he knew it was rhetorical. He also knew he was lucky to get even that. He dragged his wiry gray body out of bed and went over to the washbasin to splash water in his face and blink red eyes at himself in the mirror. He started to turn away when he noticed, behind him in the reflection, a couple of books propped in an otherwise empty shelf. He turned, walked over, and lifted the first.
TALES OF SOUTHERN WATERS, it announced.
He nodded his head and opened the second.
THE MOST CURRENT AND HIGH ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ATTREBUS, this one read.
And there, on the frontispiece, was an engraving of a young man’s face with a slightly crooked nose.
For the first time in years Sul uttered a hoarse laugh. “Well, there you go,” he said. “I’m sorry I doubted you, my Prince.”
An hour later, armed and armored, he rode south and east, toward madness, retribution, and death. And though he had long ago forgotten what happiness was, he imagined it must have been a bit like what he felt now.
ONE
A pale young woman with long ebon curls, and a male with muddy green scales and chocolate spines, crouched on the high rafters of a rotting villa in Lilmoth, known by some as the Festering Jewel of Black Marsh.
“You’re finally going to kill me,” the reptile told the woman. His tone was thoughtful, his saurian features composed in the faint light bleeding down through the cracked slate roof.
“Not so much kill you as get you killed,” she answered, pushing the tight rings of her hair off her face and pressing her slightly aquiline nose and gray-green gaze toward the vast open space beneath them.
“It works out the same,” the other hissed.
“Come on, Glim,” Annaïg said, tossing herself into her father’s huge leather chair and clasping her hands behind her neck. “We can’t pass this up.”
“Oh, I think it can be safely said that we can,” Mere-Glim replied. He lounged on a low weavecane couch, one arm draped so as to suspend over a cypress end table whose surface was supported by the figure of a crouching Khajiit warrior. The Argonian was all silhouette, because behind him the white curtains that draped the massive bay windows of the study were soaked in sunlight.
“Here are some things we could do instead.” He ticked one glossy black claw on the table.
“Stay here in your father’s villa and drink his wine.” A second claw came down. “Take some of your father’s wine down to the docks and drink it there.” The third. “Drink some here and some down at the docks …”
“Glim, how long has it been since we had an adventure?”
His lazy lizard gaze traveled over her face.
“If by adventure you mean some tiring or dangerous exercise, not that long. Not long enough anyway.” He wiggled the fingers of both hands as if trying to shake something sticky off them, a peculiarly Lilmothian expression of agitation. The membranes between his digits shone translucent green. “Have you been reading again?”
He made it sound like an accusation, as if “reading” was another way of referring to, say, infanticide.
“A bit,” she admitted. “What else am I to do? It’s so boring here. Nothing ever happens.”
“Not for lack of your trying,” Mere-Glim replied. “We very nearly got arrested during your last little adventure.”
“Yes, and didn’t you feel alive?” she said.
“I don’t need to ‘feel’ alive,” the Argonian replied. “I am alive. Which state I would prefer to retain.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Hff. That’s a bold assertion,” he sniffed.
“I’m a bold girl.” She sat forward. “Come on, Glim. He’s a were-crocodile. I’m certain of it. And we can get the proof.”
“First of all,” Mere-Glim said, “there’s no such thing as a were-crocodile. Second, if there were, why on earth would we care to prove it?”
“Because … well, because people would want to know. We’d be famous. And he’s dangerous. People around there are always disappearing.”
“In Pusbottom? Of course they are. It’s one of the dodgiest parts of town.”
“Look,” she said. “They’ve found people bitten in half. What else could do that?”
“A regular crocodile. Lots of things, really. With some effort, I might be able to do it, too.” He fidgeted again. “Look, if you’re so sure about this, get your father to talk Underwarden Ethten into sending some guards down there.”
“Well, what if I’m wrong? Father would look stupid. That’s what I’m saying, Glim. I need to know for sure. I must find some sort of proof. I’ve been following him—”
“You’ve what?” He gaped his mouth in incredulity.
“He looks human, Glim, but he comes and goes out of the canal like an Argonian. That’s how I noticed him. And when I looked where he came out—I’m sure the first few steps were made by a crocodile, and after that by a man.”
Glim closed his mouth and shook his head.
“Or a man stepped in some crocodile tracks,” he said. “There are potions and amulets that let even you gaspers breathe underwater.”