Wert cleared his voice. “You stood up to the overseer,” he said.

“I was angry,” Glim replied. “And I’m not used to being treated like that.”

“He’d never felt the pain before,” another of the skraws said. “I’ll bet he wouldn’t do it again.”

“Well?” Wert said.

“Well, what?”

“Would you stand up to him again?”

“I don’t know. If I had reason to. It’s only pain.”

“He might have killed you. Probably the only reason he didn’t is that there’s only one of you, and you’re so valuable. But that’ll change soon.”

“Why are you asking me this?” Glim snapped. “Why do you care?”

“You said it yourself,” Wert said. “Why should we have to take the vapors? I didn’t really understand you when you started talking that way. It’s hard to think like that. But you’ve been most of your life without overseers. Things occur to you that don’t to us.”

“It’s never occurred to you that your lives could be better?”

“No. But now you’ve brought it up, see? Now it’s hard to make the thought go away.”

“And you’ve spread it around.”

“Right.”

“So what do you want with me?”

“Let’s say we want free of the vapors—just that one thing. How do we go about that?”

Glim almost felt like laughing. Here was Annaïg’s resistance, such as it was.

“Well,” he said slowly, “I haven’t thought about it. I’m not sure I want to.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean this isn’t my sort of thing,” Glim replied. “I’m not interested in leading a revolution.”

“But that’s not right,” Wert blurted. “If it weren’t for you, we wouldn’t be in this situation.”

“Situation? You haven’t done anything yet, have you?”

“Situation,” Wert repeated, tapping his head.

“Look—” Glim began, but then stopped. He could use this, couldn’t he? If they thought he was leading them in some sort of insurrection, he could use them to get to Annaïg.

He saw they were all watching him expectantly.

“Look,” he said again, “without the sump, no one is born. Probably more than half of the food supply comes from here, and I’ll bet the Fringe Gyre needs water from here to produce the rest. And we control the sump.”

“But the overseers control us.”

“But they can’t—or won’t—do what we do. What if things started going wrong? Mysteriously? We don’t tell anyone that we’re behind it, and they punish us, but if things keep going wrong—if water doesn’t go where it’s supposed to, if the orchid shrimp die because we forget to scatter the nutrients, well, we’ll make a point. They can’t kill us all, because then who would see that new skraws are born? And then we let them know that all we ask for everything to go back to normal is something better than the vapors, something that doesn’t hurt you so much.”

He saw they were all just staring at him, dumbstruck.

“That’s crazy,” one of them finally said.

“No,” Wert breathed. “It’s genius. Glim, how do we start?”

“Quietly,” he said. “For now, the only thing I want you to do is make maps.”

“Maps?”

“Maps of any place we deliver to—food, nutrients, sediment—anything. I want to know where the siphons at the bottom of the Drop go and why. Do we have access to the ingenium through any of them?”

“I mean, what’s a map?” Wert asked.

Glim hissed out a long sigh, and then began to explain.

SEVEN

Attrebus screeched involuntarily and the Khajiit howled; the sensation was like falling—not down, but in all directions at once. The moons were gone, and in their place a ceiling of smoke and ash. Stifling heat surrounded them and the air stank of sulfur and hot iron. They stood on black lava, and lakes of fire stretched off before them.

“Stay together!” Sul shouted. He took a step, and again the unimaginable sensation, and now they were in utter darkness—but not silence, for all around them were chittering sounds and the staccato scurrying of hundreds of feet.

They were in an infinite palace of colored glass.

They were on an icy plane with a burning sky.

They were standing by a dark red river, and the smell of blood was nearly suffocating.

They were in the deepest forest Attrebus had ever seen.

He was braced for the next transition, but Sul was suddenly swearing.

“What?” Attrebus said. “Where are we? Is this still Oblivion?”

“Yes,” he said “We’ve been interrupted. He must have sniffed out my spoor and laid a trap.”

“What do you mean?”

“This is part of a trail I made to escape Oblivion,” he said. “It took me years to make it. It starts in Azura’s realm and ends in Morrowind. I used the sympathy of Dagon’s gate to enter his realm at the point my trail crossed it, so we really started in the middle. A few more turns and we would have been there. Now …”

He scratched the stubble on his chin and glanced at the leaves overhead.

“We’re lucky,” he murmured. “We have some time before dark. We might have a chance.”

“A chance against whom?” Attrebus asked

“The Hunter,” Sul answered. “The Father of the Manbeasts—Prince Hircine.”

In the distance Attrebus heard the sound of a horn, then another behind him.

“We’re being hunted by a daedra prince?”

“The Hungry Cat, we call him,” Lesspa said. She actually sounded excited. “I knew coming with you was the thing to do. There could be no worthier opponent than Prince Hircine.”

“That may be,” Attrebus said, “but I don’t intend to die here, no matter how honorable a death it might be.”

“He won’t necessarily kill us,” Sul said absently, turning slowly, looking out through the curiously clear forest and its enormous trees. “He didn’t kill me, the time he caught me. He just kept me here for a few years.”

“How did you escape?”

“That’s a very long story, and I didn’t do it without help.”

“Well, being held here won’t do either.”

“He’ll probably kill us,” Sul said. He pointed. “It’s that way—another door that will put us back on track. It’s in a more difficult place, which is why I prefer this one—but it will do.”

“And if it’s trapped, too?”

“Hircine always gives a chance,” Lesspa said. “That’s his way.”

“She’s right,” Sul agreed. “It’s not sport if the prey can’t escape.”

The horns sounded again, and a third joined them, in the direction Sul had just pointed.

“That’s bad,” Attrebus remarked.

“Those are Hircine’s drivers,” Sul said, “not the prince himself. We haven’t heard his horn—you’ll know it when you do, believe me. If we can get past the driver, we might have a chance.”

“We’ll get past him,” Lesspa said. “Mount behind me, Prince Attrebus. Sul, you ride S’enjara with Taaj.”

Attrebus climbed up behind Lesspa. There was no saddle, or anything to hold onto but her, so he reached around her waist.

The tigers began at an easy lope that was still far faster than Attrebus could have run. Lesspa had a lance in her left hand, and so did Taaj. The other two Khajiit had small but efficient-looking bows.

The horns sounded again, the loudest now being the one they were headed toward.

Because of the lack of understory, and because the huge trees were spaced so far apart, they caught glimpses of Hircine’s driver from a fair distance, but it wasn’t until the last thirty yards that Attrebus saw what they faced.

The driver himself might have been a massive albino Nord with long, sinewy arms. He was bare to the waist and covered in blue tattoos. His mount was the largest bear Attrebus had ever seen, and four only slightly smaller bears ran along with him.

“Bears,” Lesspa sighed. It sounded as if she were happy. She shouted a few orders in her native dialect.

The archers wheeled and began firing, but Sha’jal was suddenly moving so fast that Attrebus nearly fell off. Everything to the sides blurred; only their destination was clear, and getting larger with terrifying speed.