Then the water itself seemed to slap at them. Glim was going even faster now, weaving and rolling, not giving her any chance to breathe at all. Again, a vortex seemed to jerk at them, and as they spun she caught a glimpse of an immense dark shape against the moonlight glowing down through the water—something like a crocodile, but with paddles instead of legs.

And much, much bigger.

Glim dove deeper, and her lungs began to scream again, but just as suddenly, he turned back up and in an instant they broke free of the sea’s grasp, hurling into the air, where the black gas in her chest found its way out and one sweet sip of the good stuff got in before they struck once more down through the silvery surface. Agony ripped along her leg, and then Glim was doing his crazy dance again, and something scraped at her arm and she screamed bubbles into the water as her fingers began to lose their grip.

But then they stopped, and Glim was hauling her up out of the water. He sat her down on something hard, and she sagged there, gasping, tears of pain seeping from her eyes.

“Are you okay?” Glim asked.

She felt her leg. Her hand came away sticky.

“I think it bit me,” she said.

“No,” he said, squatting to examine her. “If it had, you wouldn’t have a leg. You must have scraped against the reef.”

“Reef?” She brushed her eyes and looked around.

They weren’t on land—at least, not the mainland. Instead they rested on a tiny island hardly more than a few inches above the water. Indeed, at high tide it would certainly be below water.

“She’s too big to follow us in here,” he said. “Looks like the captain wasn’t kidding about sea-drakes.”

“I guess not.”

“Well, from here on out we only have sharks to worry about.”

“Yes, well at least I’m bleeding,” Annaïg managed to quip.

“Yah. So maybe the next half mile won’t be boring.”

But if there were sharks around, they didn’t fancy the taste of Breton blood, because they made it to the shore without incident. If shore it could be called—it was actually a nearly impenetrable wall of mangroves, crouched in the water like thousands of giant spiders with their legs interlocked. Annaïg was pleased with the image until she remembered that it was from an Argonian folktale, one which claimed that’s exactly what mangroves had once been, before they earned the wrath of the Hist in some ancient altercation and were transformed.

Somehow Glim found them a way through the mess, and finally to the sinking remnants of a raised road.

“How far do you think we are from Lilmoth?” she asked.

“Ten miles, maybe,” Glim replied. “But I’m not sure we’re well-advised to go back there.”

“My father’s there, Glim. And your family, too.”

“I don’t think there’s anything we can do for them.”

“What’s happening? Do you know?”

“I think the city tree has gone rogue, just as it did in ancient times. A lot of people say this one grew from a single fragment of the root that survived the elder’s killing, more than three hundred years ago.”

“Rogue? How?”

“It doesn’t talk to us anymore. Only to the An-Xileel and the Wild Ones. But I think it must be talking to this thing coming from the sea.”

“That doesn’t make any sense.”

“Only because we don’t know everything.”

“So you think we should just abandon the town?”

He did his imitation of a human shrug.

“You know I can’t,” she said.

“I know you want to be a hero like those people in your books. Like Attrebus Mede and Martin Septim. But look at us—we aren’t armed, even if we knew how to fight, which we don’t. We can’t handle this, Nn.”

“We can warn people.”

“How? If the predictions are true, the flying island will reach Lilmoth before we do, by hours.”

She hung her head and nodded. “You’re right.”

“I am.”

She held the image of her father for a moment. “But we don’t know what’s going to happen. We still might be able to help.”

“Nn—”

“Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait. It’s coming from the south, right?”

“Oh, no.”

“We have to find high ground. We have to be able see where it is.”

“No, really, we don’t.” She gave him the look, and he sighed. “I just rescued you. How determined are you to die, anyway?”

“You know better than that.”

“Fine. I think I know a place.”

The place was an upthrust of rock that towered more than a hundred feet above the jungle floor. It seemed unclimbable, but that proved not to be a problem when Glim led her to a cave opening in the base of the soft limestone. It led steadily upward, and in some places stairs had been carved. Faded paintings that resembled coiled snakes, blooming flowers, and more often than not nothing recognizable at all decorated the climb, and an occasional side gallery held often bizarre stone carvings of half-tree, half-Argonian figures.

“You’ve been here before, I take it?” she asked.

“Yes,” he replied, and made no other comment, even when she began hinting that one ought to be forthcoming.

Rose was blooming in the east by the time they scaled the last of the stairs and stood on the moss and low ferns on the flat summit of the tabletop. It was quiet, dreamlike, and everything suddenly seemed turned around and impossible. What was she doing here, chasing this fantasy? Nothing was happening, nothing ever happened …

“Xhuth!” Glim breathed, just as the bright line of the sun lit the bay on fire.

Her first impression was of a vast jellyfish, its massive dark body trailing hundreds of impossibly slender, glowing tentacles. But then she saw the solidity of it, the mountain ripped from its base and turned over. The mass of it, the terrifying size.

She had been picturing a perfect cone, but this had crevasses and crags, crude, sharp, unweathered angles, as if it had just been torn from the ground the day before. The top seemed mostly as flat as the summit they stood upon, but there were shapes there, towers and arches—and most strangely, a long, drooping fringe depending from the upper edge like an immense lace collar, but twisted about by the wind and then frozen in its disheveled state. It was still south of them and a bit west, but its movement was clear enough.

She watched it, frozen, unable to find a response.

Something faint broke the silence, a sort of susurrus, a buzzing. She fumbled in the pockets of her dress, found the vial marked with an ear, and took a draft.

The hum sharpened into not one voice, but many. Vague, gibbering cries, unholy shrieks of agony and fear, babbling in languages she did not know. It sent scorpions down her back.

“What …?” She strained at the jungle floor below the island, where the sounds seemed to be coming from, but couldn’t make anything out through morning haze, distance, and thick vegetation.

She turned her attention back to the island, to the glowing strands it trailed. They might have been spider silk spun from lightning, some flashing briefly brighter than others. She realized they weren’t trailing, but dropping down from the center of the base, vanishing into the treetops, flashing white and then withdrawn into the island’s belly. As some came up, others descended, creating her original impression of a constant train of them.

Amidst the bright strands, something darker moved.

Swarms of something—they might have been hornets or bees, but given the distance, that would make them huge—emerged from the stone walls and hurtled toward the jungle below. But at some invisible line a few hundred feet below the island, they suddenly dissolved into streamers of black smoke, then vanished into the treetops. Unlike the threads, they did not reappear.

“Glim—” she whispered.

She turned and saw him going back down the steps. Only his head was visible.