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 there.

“Change is inevitable,” Urvwen went on. “Indeed, change is sacred. But it is not to be unguided. I came here to guide; the An-Xileel—and the city council—the ‘Organism’ that they so thoroughly control—do not listen.”

“They have a guide—the Hist.”

“Yes. And their guide brings change, but not the sort that ought to be encouraged. But they do not listen to me. Truth be told, no one here listens to me, but I try. Every day I come here and try to have some effect.”

“What’s coming?” Mere-Glim persisted.

“Do you know of Arteum?” the old man asked.

“The island you Psijics come from,” Glim answered him.

“It was removed from the world once. Did you know that?”

“I did not.”

“Such things happen.” He nodded, more to himself, it seemed, than to Mere-Glim.

“Has something been removed from the world?” he asked.

“No,” Urvwen said, lowering his voice. “Something has been removed from another world. And it has come here.”

“What will it do?”

“I don’t know. But I think it will be very bad.”

“Why?”

“It’s too complicated to explain,” he sighed. “And even if you understood my explanation, it wouldn’t help. Mundus—the world—is a very delicate thing, you know. Only certain rules keep it from returning to the Is/Is Not.”

“I don’t understand.”

The Psijic waved his hands. “Those boats out there—to sail and not founder—the sails and the ropes that hoist them, control them—tension must be just so, they must adjust as the winds change, if a storm comes they may even have to be taken down …” He shook his head. “No, no—I feel the ropes of the world, and they have become too tight. They pull in the wrong directions. And that is never good. That is what happened in the days before the Dragonfires first burned—”

“Are you talking about Oblivion? I thought we can’t be invaded by Oblivion anymore. I thought Emperor Martin—”

“Yes, yes. But nothing is so simple. There are always loopholes, you see.”

“Even if there aren’t loops?”

Urvwen grinned at that but didn’t reply.

“So this—city,” Mere-Glim said. “It’s from Oblivion.”

The priest shook his head, so violently Mere-Glim thought it might come off.

“No, no, no—or yes. I can’t explain. I can’t—go away. Just go away.”

Mere-Glim’s head was already hurting from the conversation. He didn’t need to be told twice, although technically he had been.

He wandered off to find his cousins and procure a bottle of Theilul. Annaïg could wait a bit.

FOUR

Hecua’s single eye crawled its regard over Annaïg’s list of ingredients. Her wrinkled dark brow knotted in a little frown.

“Last try didn’t work, did it?”

Annaïg puffed her lips and lifted her shoulders. “It worked,” she said, “just not exactly the way I wanted it to.”

The Redguard shook her head. “You’ve the knack, there’s no doubt about that. But I’ve never heard of any formula that can make a person fly—not from anywhere. And this list—this just looks like a mess waiting to happen.”

“I’ve heard Lazarum of the Synod worked out a way to fly,” Annaïg said.

“Hmm. And maybe if there was a Synod conclave within four hundred miles of here, you might have a chance of learning that, after a few years paying their dues. But that’s a spell, not a synthesis. A badly put-together spell likely won’t work at all—alchemy gone wrong can be poison.”

“I know all of that,” Annaïg said. “I’m not afraid—nothing I’ve ever made turned out too bad.”

“It took me a week to give Mere-Glim his skin back.”

“He had his skin,” Annaïg pointed out. “It was just translucent, that’s all. It didn’t hurt him.”

Hecua buzzed her lips together in disdain. “Well, there’s no talking to the young, is there?” She held up the list and began picking through the bottles, boxes, and canisters on the shelves that made up the walls of the place.

While she did so, Annaïg wandered around the shelves, too, studying their contents. She knew she didn’t have everything she needed. It was like cooking; there was one more taste needed to pull everything together. She just didn’t have any idea what it was.

Hecua’s place was huge. It had once been the local Mages’ Guild hall, and there were still three or four doddering practitioners who were in and out of the rooms upstairs. Hecua honored their memberships, even though there was no such organization as the Mages’ Guild anymore. No one much cared; the An-Xileel didn’t care, and neither the College of Whispers nor the Synod—the two Imperially recognized institutions of magic—had representatives in Lilmoth, so they hadn’t anything to say about it either.

She opened bottles and sniffed the powders, distillations, and essences, but nothing spoke to her. Nothing, that is, until she lifted a small, fat bottle wrapped tightly in black paper. Touching it sent a faint tingle traveling up her arm, across her clavicle, and up into the back of her throat.

“What is it?” Hecua asked, and Annaïg realized her gasp must have been audible.

She held the container up.

The old woman came and peered down her nose at it.

“Oh, that,” she said. “I’m really not sure, to tell you the truth. It’s been there for ages.”

“I’ve never seen it before.”

“I pulled it from the back, while I was dusting.”

“And you don’t know what it is?”

She shrugged. “A fellow came in here years ago, a few months after the Oblivion crisis. He was sick with something and needed some things, but he didn’t have money to pay. But he had that. He claimed he’d taken it from a fortress in Oblivion itself. There was a lot of that back then; we had a big influx of daedra hearts and void salts and the like.”

“But he didn’t say what it was?”

She shook her head. “I felt sorry for him, that’s all. I imagine it’s not much of anything.”

“And you never opened it to find out?”

Hecua paused. “Well, no, you can see the paper is intact.”

“May I?”

“I don’t see why not.”

Annaïg broke the paper with her thumbnail, revealing the stopper beneath. It was tight, but a good twist brought it out.

The feeling in the back of her throat intensified and became a taste, a smell, bright as sunlight but cold, like eucalyptus or mint.

“That’s it,” she said, as she felt it all meld together.

“What? You know what it is?”

“No. But I want some.”

“Annaïg—”

“I’ll be careful, Aunt Hec. I’ll run some virtue tests on it.”

“Those tests aren’t well proven yet. They miss things.”

“I’ll be careful, I said.”

“Hmf,” the old woman replied dubiously.

The house, as usual, was empty, so she went to the small attic room where she had all of her alchemical gear and went to work. She did the virtue tests and found the primary virtue was restorative and the secondary was—more promisingly—one of alteration. The tertiary and quaternary virtues didn’t reveal themselves even so vaguely.