The Infernal City Read Online Free PDF Page A

said. “I’ll be off. I’ll have dinner brought from the Coquina, Thistle. No need to cook tonight. And we’ll talk about this.”
    “Right, Taig,” she said.
    As soon as he was out of earshot, she leveled a finger at Mere-Glim. “You go down to the docks and see what that crazy priest has to say, and anything else you can find out. I’m going to Hecua’s.”
    “Why Hecua’s?”
    “I need to fine-tune my new invention.”
    “Your falling potion, you mean?”
    “It saved our lives,” she pointed out.
    “On a related note,” Glim said, “why, by the rotting wells, are you worried about flying at this time?”
    “How else are we going to get up on a flying island, by catapult?”
    “Ahh …” Mere-Glim sighed. “Ah, no.”
    “Look at me, Glim,” Annaïg said.
    Slowly, reluctantly, he did so.
    “I love you, and I’d love to have you along, but if you don’t want to go, no worries. I’m not going to give you a hard time. But I’m going, Xhu?”
    He held her gaze for a moment, and then his nostrils contracted.
    “Xhu,” he said.
    “Meet you here at noon.”

    As Mere-Glim followed Lilmoth’s long slump to the bay Imperials named Oliis, he felt the cloud-rippled sky gently pressing on him, on the trees, on the ancient ballast-stone paving. He wondered, which is to say that he gave his mind its way, let it slip away from speech into the obscure nimbus of pure thinking.
    Words hammered thought into shape, put it in cages, bound it in chains. Jel—the tongue of his ancestors—was the closest speech to real thought, but even Annaïg—who knew as much Jel as anyone not of the root—her throat couldn’t make all the right sounds, couldn’t shade the meanings enough for him to really converse with her.
    He was four people, really. Mere-Glim the Argonian, when he spoke the language of the Empire, which cut his thoughts into human shapes. When he spoke to his mother or siblings he wasWuthilul the Saxhleel. When he spoke with a Saxhleel from the deep forest, or even with a member of the An-Xileel, he was a Lukiul, “assimilated,” because his family had been living under Imperial ways for so long.
    When he spoke with Annaïg he was something else, not between the two, but something very different from either. Glim.
    But even their shared language was far from true thought.
    True thought was close to the root.
    The Hist were many, and they were one. Their roots burrowed deep beneath the black soil and soft white stone of Black Marsh, connecting them all, and thus connecting all Saxhleel, all Argonians. The Hist gave his people life, form, purpose. It was the Hist who had seen through the shadows to the Oblivion crisis, who called all of the people back to the marsh, defeated the forces of Mehrunes Dagon, drove the Empire into the sea, and laid waste to their ancient enemies in Morrowind.
    The Hist were of one mind, but just as he was four beings, the mind of the Hist could sometimes escape itself. It had happened before. It had happened in Lilmoth.
    If the city tree had separated itself, and the An-Xileel with it, what did that mean?
    And why was he going to do what Annaïg had asked him to do rather than trying to discover what was happening to the tree whose sap had molded him?
    But he was, wasn’t he?
    He stopped and stared into the bulbous stone eyes of Xhon-Mehl the Fisher, once Ascendant Organ Lord of Lilmoth. Now all that was visible of him was his lower snout up to his head. The rest of him was sunken, like most of ancient Lilmoth, into the soft, shifting soil the city had been built on. If one could swim through mud and earth, there were many Lilmoths to discover beneath one’s webbed feet.
    An image arose behind his eyes; the great stepped pyramid ofIxtaxh-thtithil-meht. Only the topmost chamber still jutted above the silt, but the An-Xileel had excavated it, room by room, pumping it out and laying magicks to keep the water from returning. As if they wanted to go back, not forward. As if