The Infernal City (17 page)

“I need you.”

“That’s nice to hear,” Annaïg replied. “But this is my time for cataloging. Remember?”

“Yes, well that was before we were put in charge if Lord Ghol’s victuals,” she snapped.

Annaïg shrugged. “If you think you can talk Qijne into releasing me from this duty, I won’t argue.”

“You’re only saying that because you know I wouldn’t dare.”

“That’s true,” Annaïg replied. “On the other hand, Lord Ghol is bored, yes? We need something new, and that’s likely to come from these things.”

“Yes, well, Oorol was using the ingredients you identified, and it didn’t help him.”

“That’s because he didn’t understand them,” she said. “Any more than you do.”

Slyr stiffened, and for a moment Annaïg thought she had gone too far, but then the other woman relaxed. “You’re right. That’s why I need you. How often are you going to make me repeat it?”

“I’m in this, too.”

“She won’t kill you,” Slyr replied. “She needs you.”

“She’s insane,” Annaïg said. “You can’t use logic to predict Qijne.”

Slyr chuckled bitterly. “You’ve a big mouth,” she said. “You may be right, but she’s not entirely unpredictable—if she hears you said anything like that—”

“She won’t,” Annaïg said simply.

Slyr stepped back. “Really, you looked beaten and ready for the sump last night. Now you’re full of sliwv. What happened last night? Did you cozy up to someone? Pafrex, maybe?”

“Pafrex? The bumpy fellow with quills?”

“Or maybe you’ve trained your hob … unconventionally?”

“Okay, that’s disgusting,” Annaïg said.

“Disgust,” Luc chimed in. “Disgust is what?”

Annaïg felt a sudden flush. The hob was holding out a bottle of something black toward her.

“Just put that down, Luc,” she said. “Forget that and fetch me that snake over there,” she said.

“Luc!” the hob replied, bounding across the huge table to retrieve the viper she indicated.

Slyr was frowning down at her. Annaïg couldn’t tell if it had anything to do with the bottle.

“Look,” Annaïg said, “I am helping you. I’ve an idea.”

“And what is that?” Slyr demanded.

Annaïg lifted the serpent carefully, behind the head, even though it was as stiff as a rod. Most of the animals came like this—not dead, but sort of paralyzed, frozen even though they weren’t cold. Their hearts didn’t beat and they didn’t age. They had to be released from that state by a rod Qijne carried. Still, with something this deadly, it was hard for her to trust a spell she didn’t understand.

“The Argonians call this a moon-adder,” Annaïg explained. “When it bites, it injects venom that—in most beings—is almost instantly fatal. Argonians, however, can survive it, and in fact sometimes seek the venom out.”

“Why would they do that?”

“It provides them daril, which means something like ‘seeing everything in ecstasy.’”

“Ah. It is a drug, then. We have many of those, but they are not so much in fashion. Besides, we don’t want to
poison
Ghol.”

“No, no. I’m sure that would be bad. The venom is just a starting point. From what Glim told me, daril unfolds in stages, no stage like the last, and it confuses the senses. You see sounds, hear tastes, smell sights.”

“Again, we have such drugs.”

“The venom is transformed by a certain agent in Argonian blood—”

“If this is another attempt to find out where your friend is, I can only reiterate that not even Qijne knows where he is—or even has the ability to discover it.”

“I know,” Annaïg said, swallowing the sudden lump in her throat. “I don’t actually need Argonian blood. I’m just explaining. It comes down to this: I think I can make a metagastrologic.”

“This is a nonsense word.”

“No. It’s something I’ve read about, something the Ayleids—ancient people from my world—once used in their banquets.”

“A drug.”

“Yes, but the only sense that they affect is taste—nothing else. No general hallucination, no loss of clarity. Look, the essential flavors are sweet, sour, salty, and hot, right?”

“Of course. And with the lower lords like Ghol you can add dead, quick, and ethereat, at the same level.”

“Really? How interesting.” She wanted to know more about that, but didn’t want her idea to lose momentum. “Anyway,” she pushed on, “a good dish will still balance those essentials, yes?”

“Yes. Or contrast them.”

“So with a metagastrologic, the first taste of the dish will have a certain balance of flavors, but as it lingers on the tongue, they begin to change. Salty is confused for sweet, ah—ethereat for hot, and so forth. And it will keep happening, different each time.”

Slyr just looked at her for a long moment.

“You can do this?” she finally asked.

“Yes.”

“Such a dish would have to be carefully thought out, so that no matter what inversion of flavors occurred, most would be pleasurable.”

“It would require a chef of some skill,” Annaïg agreed.

“Well,” Slyr sighed, “it will not be boring, at least. I will go work on a foundation.”

Annaïg tried not to watch her depart, but she finally stole a glance to make sure she was gone. Then she closed her eyes and thanked the gods, carefully opened the bottle, and smelled its contents.

“That’s not it either, Luc,” she said. “Keep trying. But—um, I’ll ask you to see them, okay? I don’t want you interrupting my chain of thought. Just keep them in your cabinet.”

“Luc do,” the hob said, and started toward the wall.

“First go and find the chef and tell her we need this snake quickened.”

“Luc do.” He bounded off.

A few moments later he came back following Qijne’s hob, which had the baton. Annaïg placed the viper on the table, put the sharp edge of a cleaver on its neck, and touched it with the baton.

When it twitched to life, it jerked back and nearly slipped free, but its head caught and she put all her weight on the cleaver so the edge bit, then followed the skull back to the neck, slicing cleanly through. The body fell away, twitching, which gave the hobs something to hoot about.

She expressed the venom into a glass vial and set to work.

Hours passed, and so absorbed was she in the task that she hadn’t realized Qijne was watching her.

“Chef?”

“What’s your hob doing going through the cabinets? Everything up there is known to me already.”

“But not to me,” Annaïg answered. “And if I’m to be a proper cook to Lord Ghol, I need to be familiar with all of it.”

Qijne’s expression didn’t change, but her glaze flickered down to Annaïg’s work in progress.

“Not really doing anything you’re supposed to do,” she observed.

“This is for the meal,” she said. “An additive.”

“Explain.”

Annaïg went back over the general properties of the metagastrologic.

The chef tilted her head slowly left, then right. “You’re cooking, in other words. When you’re supposed to be cataloging.”

“I am, Chef.”

“Which is not what I told you to do.”

“No, Chef. But Slyr is worried—”

“Slyr? Slyr put you up to this?”

“No, Chef. It was my idea. We failed last night. I didn’t want us to fail again.”

“No, no of course not,” Qijne said vaguely. Her eyes lost focus. “Carry on. Only know that if it does not please him, I will kill Slyr and cut off one of your feet, right?”

“Right, Chef.”

“That’s not a joke, if you think I’m joking.”

“I don’t think you’re joking, Chef,” Annaïg said.

After the meal went up, Slyr wandered off, her face pinched with fear. Annaïg slipped off, too, and had a look at her locket, but got nothing but darkness. She went back to the dormitory to wait for her meal.

A bit later Slyr rushed into the room.

“Come on,” she said. “Come with me.”

She followed the chef through the winding corridors and great pantries of the kitchen and into what appeared to be a wine cellar—there were thousands of bottles of something, anyway, racked all around her.

“Through here.” Slyr was indicating a sort of hole in the wall just barely wide enough to slip through.

It led into a small chamber illuminated by faint light. Once in it, she could see the light came from the sky—the chamber was at the bottom of a high, narrow shaft.

Slyr handed her a bottle and a basket of something that smelled really good.

“He wasn’t bored,” she said. “In fact, he sent one of his servants to commend me.” She looked up shyly. “Us.”

“That’s good news.”

“News worth celebrating,” Slyr said. “Try the wine.”

It was dry and delicious, with a fragrance she couldn’t quite place but that reminded her of anise. The basket was filled with pastry rolls stuffed with a sort of buttery meat.

“What is it?” she asked, holding up the roll she was eating.

“Orchid shrimp. They live in the sump.”

“It’s delicious.”

“It was supposed to go to the Prixon Palace servants for their night ration. I snatched a few.”

“Thank you,” Annaïg said.

“Yes, yes,” Slyr said. “Eat. Drink.”

“What about Qijne?”

“She may be—ah, as you said. But when we succeed, so does she. Lord Ghol was on the verge of becoming the patron of another kitchen. When kitchens lose patrons, people start wondering whether the master chef ought to be replaced. We did well, so she’ll look the other way a bit if we take very discreet privileges.”

“What sort of privileges?”

“Well … this is about it. Having a little of the good stuff and not being watched too closely at night.”

Annaïg felt her face burn a bit. “Ah, Slyr—”

“Don’t flatter yourself,” the chef replied. “I just thought you would enjoy being here, where you can see the sky. And no noisy, smelly dormitory. I love being here, alone—I don’t think anyone else knows about it. I just don’t dare come here often.”

“Well, then,” Annaïg said, “I
am
flattered, then.”

Slyr became a little sloppy after the first bottle of wine.

“I have heard something about your friend,” she confided.

Annaïg nearly choked on her drink. “Really?” she gasped. “About Glim? He’s okay?”

“He’s in the sump.”

It jagged through her like lightning.

“What?” she whispered.

But Slyr smiled.

“No, not like that,” she assured her. “He’s not dead. He’s working in the sump. The guy who brought the shrimp mentioned him. He can breathe underwater, did you know that? All of the sump tenders are talking about him.”

“Of course he can breathe underwater,” she replied. “He’s an Argonian.”

“Another of your nonsense words? There are more like him?’

She remembered the slaughter at Lilmoth. “I hope so,” she said.

“Oh,” Slyr said. “They’re down there.”

“Don’t you ever—” But she stopped herself. She couldn’t trust anyone here with thoughts of somehow stopping Umbriel.

But Slyr was waiting for her to finish.

“Have you ever been above?” she asked instead.

“To the palaces? No. But it is my dream to.” She looked up and her forehead wrinkled. “What are those?” she asked.

Annaïg followed her regard up to the small patch of night sky.

“Stars,” she said. “Haven’t you ever seen stars before?”

“No. What are they?”

“Depends on who you ask or what books you read. Some say they are tiny holes in Mundus, the world, and the light we see is Aetherius beyond. Others believe they are fragments of Magnus, who made the world.”

“They’re beautiful.”

“Yes.”

And so they ate, and drank, and talked, and for the first time in many, many days Annaïg felt like a real person again.

When Slyr finally curled up to sleep with her blanket, she opened her locket again.

There wasn’t anything there, which meant Coo wasn’t with Attrebus. She waited, hoping he would answer, but after an hour or so she fell asleep, and her dreams were troubled.

To Colin, the corpses looked like broken dolls flung down by a child in a tantrum. He couldn’t imagine any of them ever having been alive, breathing, talking, feeling. He couldn’t find any empathy even for the worst of the lot—those burnt to char—and he knew he ought to. He should at least feel sick or repelled, filled with the fear of such a thing happening to him, but he just couldn’t find anything like that in him.