Read Online The Infernal City by Greg Keyes - Free Book Online

lose, she bent double, retching. It spent her, and she lay trembling, unable to watch more.
    “So,” she heard Glim say after a moment. “So this is what the tree wanted.”
    She heard the pain in her friend’s voice, and despite how she felt, dragged herself back to the edge and opened her eyes.
    Again her first impression failed her. She imagined she was seeing an Argonian army, standing shoulder-to-shoulder, ready to slay this foul enemy as they had the forces of Dagon in times past.
    But then she got it.
    “They’re just standing there. They aren’t fighting.”
    Glim nodded. “Yes.”
    The air was thick with fliers and threads.
    “I don’t understand,” Annaïg wailed. “Why does the tree want your people to die?”
    “Not all of us,” Glim whispered. “Just the Lukiul. The assimilated. The tainted. The An-Xileel, the Wild Ones—they’ve gone away. They’ll come back, after this is over, and every Imperial taint will be scoured.”
    “It’s mad,” she said. “We have to do something.”
    “What? In three hours every living thing in Lilmoth will be dead. Worse than dead.”
    “Look, we’re here. We’re the only ones who have any chance of doing anything. We have to try!”
    Glim watched the slaughter below for another few breaths, and in that moment she feared he was going to fling himself down to join his people.
    But then he let out the long, undulating hiss that signified resignation.
    “Okay,” he repeated in Tamrielic. “Let’s see what we can do.”

    They left the edge and walked back into the crack. The holes that the fliers had come through were high, and the climb looked difficult, but the split in the island continued back, gradually sloping down. Daylight was soon behind them, and while the ghost of it followed them for a while, eventually they were in near complete darkness. She wished she’d foreseen this—one of her earliest concoctions had been to help her see at night. But without any proper materials or equipment, there wasn’t any way to make one now.
    The going was easy enough, though—the walls remained about twice her shoulder-width apart, so it was easy enough to keep a hand on each rough surface. The floor was a little uneven, but after a few stumbles her feet grew cautious enough.
    She could hear Glim breathing, but after they left the ledge, he hadn’t said anything, which was just as well, because not only would it be foolish to make any more noise than necessary, she didn’t feel like talking, either.
    She reckoned they had gone a few hundred yards when she saw light once again, at first just a veneer on the stone, but soon enough to see where they were stepping again. A good thing, too, because the path led them to another cliff.
    This one opened in the belly of the mountain, a vast, dome-shaped cavity open at the bottom so they could once more see the destruction of Lilmoth. They were already over the old Imperial quarter, where her house was.
    “Taig,” she whispered.
    “I’m sure he left,” Glim hissed. “The tree couldn’t affect him.”
    She just shook her head and turned her sight away, and through tear-gleamed eyes she saw masses of the threads shooting down—so many it looked almost like rain. She followed their course and saw them, thousands of them, in every nook and cranny of the stone. She couldn’t make out much; they, too,seemed vaguely insectile, but she saw the thin, stone-colored tubes the threads issued from, because the rest of whatever-they-were were concealed in circular masses of what appeared to be the same material. They looked a lot like spider egg sacs, but larger, much larger.
    “Here,” Glim murmured.
    She had almost forgotten him. She turned to follow his pointing knuckles and saw steps hewn into the stone, leading up.
    There wasn’t any other way to go except back, and so Annaïg started up, filled with a sudden, panicked determination. She had to
do
something, didn’t she? If she could get up there, cut those things