“When we arrived, there was someone—or something—waiting for us. But it wasn’t Vile. It was shaped like a man, but dark, with eyes like holes into nothing. He had a sword, and as we lay there, it laughed and tossed it through the rift we’d come through. I tried to follow it, but it was too late.”
“Waiting for you? How did it know you were coming?”
“He called himself Umbra, and like Vile, he had a thing for souls. He’d been attracted to the rift by the ingenium and had even tried to enlarge it, with no success. So he’d cast a fortune and learned that a day was coming when it would briefly widen, and so there he was.”
“Just to throw a sword through it?”
“Apparently. Umbra took us captive—he was powerful, almost as powerful as a daedra prince. In fact, it was the power of a daedra prince—he’d somehow managed to cut a piece from Clavicus Vile himself.”
“Cut a piece? Of a daedra prince?”
“Not a physical piece, like an arm or a heart,” Sul clarified. “Daedra aren’t physical beings like you and me. But the effect was similar—Vile was, in a sense, injured. Badly so. And Umbra became stronger, though still not so strong as Vile. Not strong enough to escape his realm once Vile circumscribed it against him.
“Circumscribed?”
“Changed the nature of the ‘walls’ of his realm, made them absolutely impermeable to Umbra and the power he had stolen. Understand, at all costs the prince didn’t want Umbra to escape. The circumscription was so strong he couldn’t even go through the rift himself—but the sword could.”
“Again, why the sword?” Attrebus wondered.
“Umbra claimed to have once been captive in the weapon. He feared that if Vile got his hands on it, he would return him to it.”
“This is making me dizzy,” Attrebus said.
“But you wanted to hear everything, remember?” Sul snapped. “Well, let’s keep it simple then, shall we? Clavicus Vile was nursing his wounds and hunting for Umbra. Umbra used his stolen power to conceal himself in one of the cities at the fringe of Vile’s realm. But he still couldn’t escape. Vuhon promised him that if Umbra spared his life, he would build a new ingenium, capable of escaping even Vile’s circumscription. Umbra agreed, and I suppose that’s what they did.”
“They brought the city with them?”
Sul shrugged. “I don’t know about that part. I never saw much of the city. Vuhon wasn’t very happy with me. He only kept me alive to torture. After a few years he forgot about me and I escaped. I had some arts, and since the forbidding wasn’t on me, I managed to leave Vile’s realm, albeit into another part of Oblivion.”
“So it’s Umbra that wants the sword, not Vuhon?”
“It might be either. Maybe Vuhon has turned against Umbra and seeks to imprison him. Whatever the case, we can’t let them have it.”
Attrebus opened his mouth, but Sul jerked his head from side to side. “Enough. You know what you need to know for now.”
“I—So I allow all this—we still can’t get there in time.”
“No,” Sul said. “As I said, there is a way. If we survive it.”
“What way would that be?”
“We’ll take a shortcut. Through Oblivion.”
And he left Attrebus there with the willows and soft, gliding voices of the night birds.
FOUR
“Perfect,” Toel opined, his mysterious little grin turning into something a bit larger. He dipped his finger in the little bowl of viscous mist and brought the bit that clung to it up to his lips for another taste. With his other hand he stroked the back of her neck lightly, familiarly, and she felt her cheeks warm.
“I’ve come to expect the very best from you,” he said. “Come around this afternoon so we can discuss your progress here.”
He gave a perfunctory nod to the rest of the staff and then left.
Still embarrassed, Annaïg studied her vapor another moment. When she looked up, the rest of the cooks had returned silently to their jobs. All except Slyr.
“Another evening with Toel,” she said softly. “How he must enjoy your conversation.”
Annaïg felt a bit of sting from that. “I hope you don’t think anything else is going on.”
“What would I know?” she replied. “I’ve never been invited to Lord Toel’s quarters. How can I imagine what might go on there?”
“It sounds like you’ve been imagining it quite a lot,” Annaïg returned. “But if you’re fantasizing about anything improper, that’s nothing to do with me.”
“Him having you there at all is improper,” Slyr countered. “It’s bad for morale.”
“Well, maybe you ought to tell him that.”
Slyr looked back down at the powders she was sifting.
“I’m sorry,” she said after a moment. “You know I worry.”
“You’re still here, aren’t you?”
“It’s only been a few days,” she said. “He never even speaks to me.”
Annaïg snorted a little laugh. “Now you’re talking like he’s your lover.”
Slyr looked back up. “I just worry, that’s all.”
“Well, worry over this for a bit, then,” she replied, rising to her feet. “I need to go check on the root wine vats.”
Toel’s kitchen was very different from Qijne’s inferno. There was only one pit of hot stone and one oven, and neither was of particular size. In their place were long tables of polished red granite. Some supported brass steaming chambers, centrifuges, a hundred kinds of alchemical apparatuses. Others were entirely for the preparation of raw ingredients. While the production of distillations, infusions, and precipitations of soul-stuff had been a minor part of Qijne’s kitchen, here more than half the cooking space was dedicated to the coquinaria spiritualia. The rest of the cavernous kitchen was devoted to one thing—feeding trees.
She remembered the strange collar of the vegetation that depended from the edge and rocky sides of Umbriel. She didn’t know much about trees, so it hadn’t occurred to her to wonder how they survived. As it turned out, plants—like people and animals—needed more than sunlight and water to live. They also needed food of a sort, and Toel’s kitchen made that food. Huge siphons drew water and detritus from the bottom of the sump and brought it into holding vats, where it was redirected into parsers that separated out the matter most useful to the trees. What wasn’t used was returned to the sump. What remained was fortified by the addition of certain formulae before being pumped to the roots through a vast ring beneath Umbriel’s rim. Toel wanted her to learn all of the processes in his kitchen, so she spent an hour or so each day with the vats, and ostensibly she was experimenting with some of the formulae to try and improve upon them.
In fact, the vats were very far from everything else, and very quiet. And, in a large cabinet in the work area, was the most complete collection of materials she had ever seen.
Dimple, her new hob, was already there when she arrived, and had found four substances for her to examine. None of them smelled right, so she sent him away and went back to her experiment with the tree-wine. She wondered if trees tasted anything, if they knew one “flavor” of tree-wine from another. She stirred a reagent of calprine into her flask wand and watched it turn yellow.
After a moment she saw Dimple return with more containers.
Absorbed in what she was doing, she didn’t actually look at what he’d brought, but when she took a break, she rubbed her eyes and turned her attention there.