Lord of Souls: An Elder Scrolls Novel Read Online Free PDF

eel-skin,” she replied. She placed the tube in a small centrifuge and cranked the handle, spinning the vial. After a few moments she detached it and held it up, showing a pale yellow ichor in the bottom.
    “That’s terror?” Slyr said. She sounded skeptical.
    “Do you want to understand this or not?” Annaïg asked.
    “I do. Please. I’m sorry.”
    “Sit down, then—you’re making me nervous, hovering there.”
    Slyr scootched onto a stool and folded her hands in her lap.
    “You were right, in a way—terror—or any emotion—isn’t merely chemical. But the substance acts as a vessel, a shaper of soul stuff, just as—at a higher level—does the brain and body.” She opened a small valve on the bottom of the tube and let the liquid empty into a small glass cone. She then sealed a second, identical cone base-to-base with the first to form a spiculum. She shook the container so that the liquid coated the interior surfaceevenly, then slid the whole thing into a coil of translucent fibers that in turn was connected to a pulsing cable of the same material that came up through the floor and workbench.
    “Now we pass soul energy through it,” Annaïg said. “The chemical terror will attract what it needs to become the real thing.”
    For a moment nothing happened; then the spiculum took on a faint lavender glow, and quite abruptly became opaque. Annaïg waited another moment then removed the spiculum and shook it again. The coating inside the crystal sloughed free and settled into one end, a viscous powder. She unsealed the hlzu gum that held the spiculum together with spirits of coatin. Then she emptied a bit of the newly formed substance into a horn spoon and carefully handed it to Slyr.
    “And there you have it,” she said.
    Slyr blinked at the lavender stuff.
    “Am I to taste this?”
    “You may if you wish.”
    “Perhaps not,” Slyr said, dipping her finger into it experimentally. A bit clung there, and she rubbed it back and forth. “It feels—” But then her face transformed; her eyes became huge, and the veins on her neck stood out as she suddenly began shrieking. She fell from her stool and twisted into a fetal position, fighting for the air she needed to keep screaming.
    “Or you can just touch it,” Annaïg said. “It’s absorbed just as readily through the skin.”
    Slyr’s only response was to quiver uncontrollably—she was past screaming now.
    For Annaïg, the next few seconds stretched thin and brittle; part of her wanted to continue watching the other woman suffer. Anger was beautiful, because its core was the absence of all doubt. When anger wrapped you up in yourself and you knew that youwere right and righteous—that the very universe was in agreement with you—at that moment you were a god, and anyone who crossed or disagreed with you was worse than wrong, they were heretics, apostates, twisted in the very womb. Slyr deserved this. And much, much more.
    Then why, beneath the wonderful, purifying rage, did she feel sick? Why did she suspect that
she
was the one in the wrong?
    Because she wasn’t really angry at Slyr. She was angry because all her hopes of escaping Umbriel were destroyed. She was angry at the stupidity of a little girl who thought she could save the world like a hero from the songs, and now was going to spend what little of her life remained in a disgusting place among disgusting people.
    And one of those people was Slyr. But somehow she couldn’t watch her lose her mind.
    So, with a sigh, she unstoppered the bottle she’d fixed for herself, in case she had an accident during the experiment, and waved it under Slyr’s nose. The other woman inhaled, gasped, gave one great shake, then sagged. She was still breathing hard but her eyes were clear.
    “S-Summpslurry,” Slyr managed, her breath still ragged.
    She traveled her gaze over her body, as if fearing she was missing limbs.
    “You stopped it, didn’t you? You could have let it go on and on.”
    “For a