“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 Annaïg 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?”
“There is such a thing as right and wrong, Glim. Good and evil.”
“If you say so.”
“Prince Attrebus rescued an entire colony of your people from slavery. How do you think they feel about the Empire?”
“My people knew slavery under the old Empire. We knew it pretty well.”
“Yes, but that was ending when the Oblivion crisis happened. Look, even you have to admit that if Mehrunes Dagon had won, if Martin hadn’t beaten him—”
“Martin and the Empire didn’t beat him in Black Marsh,” Glim said, his voice rising. “The An-Xileel did. When the gates opened, Argonians poured into Oblivion with such fury and might, Dagon’s lieutenants had to close them.”
Annaïg realized that she was leaning away from her friend and that her pulse had picked up. She smelled something sharp and faintly sulfurous. Amazed, she regarded him for a moment.
“Yes,” she finally said, when the scent diminished, “but without Martin’s sacrifice, Dagon would have eventually taken Black Marsh, too, and made this world his sportground.”
Glim shifted and held out his glass to be refilled.
“I don’t want to argue about this,” he said. “I don’t see that it’s important.”
“You sounded as if you thought so for a second there, old friend. I thought I heard a little passion in your voice. And you smelled like you were spoiling for a fight.”
“It’s just the wine,” he muttered, waving it off. “And all of the excitement. For the rest of the night, can we just celebrate that your ‘flying’ potion wasn’t a complete failure?”
She was starting to feel warm in her belly, the wine at its business.