The Infernal City Read Online Free PDF

something were pulling them back to that ancient Lilmoth …
    He stopped, realizing he was still walking without knowing exactly where he was going, but then he knew. The undertow of his thoughts had brought him here.
    To the tree. Or part of it. The city tree was said to be three hundred years old, and its roots and tendrils pushed and wound through most of lower Lilmoth, and here was a root the size of his thigh, twisting its way out of a stone wall. Everything else around him had become waterish, blurred, but as he laid his webbed hand on the rough surface, the colors sharpened and focused.
    He stood there, no longer seeing the crumbling, rotted Imperial warehouses, but instead a city of monstrous stone ziggurats and statues pushing up to the sky, a place of glory and madness. He felt it tremor around him, smelled anise and burning cinnamon, and heard chanting in antique tongues. His heart thumped oddly as he watched the two moons heave themselves through the low mist of smoke and fog that rolled through the streets, and the waters surged beneath them, around them, beyond the sky.
    His thoughts melted together.
    He wasn’t sure how long it was before his mind complicated itself again, but his hand was still on the root. He lifted it and backed away, and after a few long breaths he began walking, and in the thick night around him, the massive structures softened, thinned, and went mostly away, until he was once again in the Lilmoth where his body was born.
    Mostly away. But he felt it now, the call the An-Xileel felt, and he realized that a part of him had already known it.
    He knew something else, too. The tree had cut him off from the vision before it had run its course.
    That was troubling.
    Gulls swarmed the streets like rats near the waterfront, most of them too greedy or stupid to even move out of his way as he picked his way through fish offal, shattered crabs, jellyfish, and seaweed. Barnacles went halfway up the buildings here. This part of town had sunk so low that when a double tide came, it flooded deep. The docks themselves floated, attached to a massive long stone quay whose foundations were as ancient as time and whose upper layer of limestone had been added last year. He made his way up the central ramp to the top of it. Here was a city in itself; since the An-Xileel forbade all but licensed foreigners in the city, the markets had all crowded themselves here. Here, a fishmonger held a flounder up by the tail, selling from a single crate of silver-skinned harvest. There, a long line of sheds with the Colovian Traders banner hawked trinkets of silver and brass, cooking pots, cutlery, wine, cloth. He had worked here, for a while. A group of his matriline cousins had set up a business selling Theilul, a liquor made of distilled sugarcane. They’d originally sold the cane, but since their fields were twenty miles from town, they’d found it easier to transport a few cases of bottles than many wagonloads of cane—and far more profitable.
    He knew where to find Urvwen; right in the thick of it all, where the great stone cross that was the waterfront joined.
    The Psijic wasn’t yelling, as usual. He was just sitting there, looking through the crowd and past the colorful masts of the ships to the south, toward where the bay came to the sea. His bone-colored skin seemed paler than usual, but when the silvery eyes found Mere-Glim approaching, they were full of life.
    “You want to know, don’t you?” he said.
    For a moment Mere-Glim had trouble responding, the experience with the tree had been so powerful. But he let words shape his thoughts again.
    “My cousin said he saw something out at sea.”
    “Yes, he did. It’s nearly here.”
    “What is nearly here?”
    The old priest shrugged. “Do you know anything about my order?”
    “Not much.”
    “Few do. We don’t teach our beliefs to outsiders. We counsel, we help.”
    “Help with what?”
    “Change.”
    Mere-Glim blinked, trying to find his answer