Chapter 3
Rather than retrace his steps up the road past Bravil, Ashleigh Prideaux chose to ride on the Lower Niben. It cost him a couple of his good potions, but he had several extras now. The gelding Pert did not seem at all leery of setting foot on the water's surface. But then, the hostler of the stable from which Prideaux had bought him had earnestly claimed he was used to magery.
It was a fine day on the water. Over the surface itself, there were few of the insects that haunted the banks. Prideaux had always enjoyed waterwalking. There was something indescribably fascinating about the way the horse's hooves hit the water with a slight ripple, as if it were a floor made of jelly. He could look down past the stirrup and watch the weeds wave in the current. The occasional toothy and very puzzled slaughterfish rolled a cold, fishy eye upward as they passed. Whenever the horse started to sink gently downward, he would cast the spell again, and watch as Pert's hooves rose back up above the surface.
Sometimes there were creatures on the bank. He saw an occasional deer, big-eyed and nervous at his passing, or the quick flash of a vanishing cottontail among the dark leaves. Mudcrabs went on about their business on the pebbly shore without paying him much heed. Once he even saw a wisp, an argent golden cloud as big as a man's head hovering a yard above the ground. It gave out a soft, euphonious chime, which he knew better than to fall for; but it was a pretty thing, and as long as he kept his distance, he could appreciate it without fear.
He passed vessels great and small with somewhat more frequency. There were fishermen, gaping at the stranger with the waterwalking horse, and once he passed a great galleon, half-grounded and in the process of being dragged off a sandbar by a team of horses. He crossed to the other side of the river to avoid it.
Prideaux kept to the edges of Niben Bay when he came there, aware of the shipping traffic. He was not the only mage to be using this method of transportation, apparently. He saw a couple of other robed figures walking on the water, though they kept their heads down and their hoods up. No one responded to his greetings.
He saw the Arcane University on its high, rocky isle from far off. It took much longer to figure out how to get there. At last a fisherman informed him that, while he might certainly try to make the climb if he wished, the best way was to take the bridge from the Imperial City's Arboretum. Oh, and his horse would have to stay at the Chestnut Handy Stables. There were no horses allowed in the City, and good riddance, too, for they would muck up the cobbles something awful. Where were the stables? Why, outside the Talos Plaza district, off to the West. Prideaux thanked the man wearily and started off in exactly the opposite direction from the one he wished to go. Pert snuffled as they moved from water to land, though in approval or disapproval Prideaux could not say.
There were many Legionnaires about. They were easily identifiable in their dull, serviceable plate, peering suspiciously from behind the nasals of their helmets. Prideaux supposed now was not the easiest of times to be an Imperial. Five years and more after the closing of the Gates, the Empire seemed stable, but he had heard it often expressed that this was just the calm before another storm. The Septim line had perished, and the Dragonfires would never be lit again. To one from a little stub of geography made up of contentious city-states, the loss of one line of rulers seemed an odd thing to cause such national anxiety. But then, High Rock had long had the saying:
Find a hill, become a king.
That long history of quarreling and commingling, human blood and elven mixed and shed, was very different from the Imperial one. The line of mortal Emperors had traced their ancestry from the Trials of St. Alessia and the burning blood from the heart of the dragon-god Akatosh. The now-impossible rite of the Lighting of the Dragonfires contained within it the statement that without an heir of the joined blood, Cyrodiil would fall under the Demon Lords of Misrule. There was no knowing who this meant, exactly, but the invasion of Mehrunes Dagon so lately thwarted suggested who at least one of those Demon Lords must be.
Prideaux was still dwelling on this sobering theme when he came to the stables at the foot of the hill that led to the great gates. The portals towered some two or three times his height, proportionate to the size of the stone wall that encircled the Imperial City. He left Pert with the cheerful Orc who ran the stables, cast his feather spell again, and shouldered his bags and satchel. Then he went up the steep hill to the open gateway. A guard eyed him from the shadow of the great doors, hand on his sword hilt.
"I beg your pardon," said Ashleigh Prideaux, when he had finished coughing. "How do I get to the Arcane University from here?"
"Go straight ahead to the statue of Talos, then turn right," said the guard. "You'll have to pass through the Temple District, and the Arboretum beyond that. There's a gate and a bridge to the University from there. It's the only entrance."
"Oh, my," said Prideaux faintly. That sounded like a very long walk on foot. "Is there anywhere I might lodge between here and there?"
"Tiber Septim Hotel," said the guard. "Straight up the street, Citizen." He had already resumed scanning the other travelers who passed through the gate. Prideaux shrugged and went. The statue of the dragon was impossible to miss, with its neat circle of stone blocks and the red and gold flowers at its base. He had heard that the City had been almost entirely destroyed by attacking daedra. One could hardly tell this at a glance. For the most part, the stone buildings still stood. Even most of the paving stones were regular again, and the thin strips of earth between sidewalk and buildings showed no burn marks. Here in the shadow of buildings and walls, mushrooms were more common than flowers. The blooms around the statue must be someone's special charge, Prideaux supposed.
He paused beside the statue to look around. He could see the door to which the guard had alluded. It seemed a long way off, down a street that curved slightly. Apparently it was true that the districts of the Imperial City were arranged in slices around the Palace and White Gold Tower. He could see the tower itself in the distance, unbelievably high above the more mundane structures below, and unmistakably Ayleid with its domed base and the clawed battlements around the flat roof.
More importantly, it was quite clear that he could not possibly walk to the University today. He turned to look glumly up at the wooden sign of the Tiber Septim Hotel. The paint was fresh, including a small amount of gold leaf; the very script of the letters seemed to whisper, expensive. Ashleigh grimaced. His gold supply was meager. He stopped a passing Imperial who had a pleasant face.
"I beg your pardon, Sir," said Ashleigh. "Are there any other lodgings near here?"
"Not really," said the man. He scratched his bald head. "There's the Bloated Float down by the Waterfront – it's cheap - and in the Elven Gardens District there's Luther Broad's and one other place."
"I see. Which way is the Waterfront?"
"South and East," said the man, and moved on.
Ashleigh sighed, then coughed. It seemed he was in for a walk no matter what, and he already felt the beginnings of a fever. That happened from time to time. Riding and walking all day would not help it. Well, if he couldn't save his feet, he might as well save his purse. He cast his feather spell once more and turned toward the South to look for another gate. At least it didn't look like rain.
The Waterfront was represented by yet another curving street, this one walled on only one side and fronted on the other by Niben Bay. The Bloated Float was identifiable by a wooden sign set out on the sidewalk and a permanent set of stairs built onto the side of it, the better to allow customers access. Ashleigh, now flushed and definitely feverish, trudged down these and through what seemed to him an unusually heavy wooden door.
The tavern deck was snug, with a high ceiling to balance the small floor space and a bar on one wall. No one sat at the tables. The bar was occupied only by a slumped person in a brown cloak that hid body and features, though the shoulders evidently were bony and narrow. The right one seemed distinctly higher than the left, though he could not tell if this was because of posture or deformity. She was speaking to no one in particular in a high, strident voice. He couldn't quite place the accent.
"- burned Ald'ruhn. Ald'ruhn! Why not Suran? 'Tis a pesthole full of false Incarnates and slave hunters and naked dancing s'wits, none of them male, by the way, which strikes me as more than slightly unfair. Why not Hla Oad? Well, all right, Hla Oad is too wet to burn. But did it really have to be Ald'ruhn? I hear Percius Mercius died going back for that Nord smith. Ha! I believe that little rat Aengoth survived, by all the arms of Sotha Sil who perished - "
A dark-haired Altmer met Ashleigh at the base of the stairs. He was dressed in the embroidered linen garments of the better class of tavern-keeper, had a distinguished middle-aged countenance, and was presently looking somewhat harassed.
"How do you do, good Sir? Let me help you with those." Ashleigh allowed him to remove the saddlebags. He immediately set them down on the nearby bar, looking surprised at the weight.
"Very well, thank you," Ashleigh said. "Do you have a room for rent?"
"Certainly, and I'll let you have it all night for free if you'll solve one little problem for me," said the Altmer. "You're a mage, aren't you? I can tell."
Ashleigh silently damned the native High Elven ability to sense magicka. "What exactly is it that you want done?"
"It's that madmer over there." The bartender waved a hand at the figure at the bar, who was still talking at length to nobody. The long harangue did not seem justified by the nearly full bottle of cyrodilic brandy and the half-empty glass in front of her. "She's scared off all my other patrons. I've lost the price of the room many times over in custom since she got here. If you can get her out of here or shut her up, I'll be more than grateful."
"Has she been here all day?" Ashleigh asked hopefully. Perhaps this was her fourth or fifth bottle of brandy, and he would hardly have to do more than nudge her off the stool. She must have spilled some. There was a stain on the wood floor around the base of the bar stool, and he thought he glimpsed a trickle of dark fluid down one of its wooden legs.
"Yes, but that's all she's bought," said the bartender indignantly. "She came tramping in here, said she was dying, and asked for brandy, and she's hardly drunk a drop of the stuff. Just goes right on talking the worst horrors – well, listen."
Ashleigh listened.
"- Even have hands, their arms just hang without bones, and they come at you with that face full of tentacles waving and poison coming off them like smoke. And if you let 'em touch you, they'll suck the life right out of your body. And the ash vampires! Half of them have a tentacle where their eyes ought to be and the others have a gaping hope there instead. And when you get near them they look right at you."
"I see what you mean," he said. He handed the man a few of his meager supply of septims. "Bring me a glass of mead and I'll see what I can do. If you could possibly mull it I'd be ever so grateful." His throat was beginning to hurt on top of everything else.
"Yes, of course, I've got irons in the fire for just such an occasion," said the Altmer graciously. "Thank you so much."
"Don't mention it," murmured Ashleigh, and dragged the saddlebags down to the stool beside the Altmer. "I beg your pardon, Madam. Is this seat taken?"
"Nay, stranger," said the mer, barely glancing at him from under her hood. "You look like you could use it." He caught an instant's glimpse of a gaunt and hollow Altmeri face, typically sallow. The iris of the eye that he saw was so dark that it looked black. Then she turned back to take a tiny sip of her brandy with a hand inside an awkward gauntlet. It was an obvious antique of Dwemer make. The thing looked ready to fall apart, but a thin sheen of magicka covered the surface.
"The corprus stalkers were the worst," she said, as if he had asked a question. She was leaning hard on the bar, as if she really were drunk. "The poor bastards didn't know what was happening to them, or where they were, or much of anything except that they were hurting and mad. Kill you in a second if they could, aye, but with all those horrible growths all over they couldn't hardly walk, let alone run after you."
"But wasn't that cured when Dagoth Ur perished?" Ashleigh interjected, his fervid brain conjuring a vague memory of what he'd heard of events in Vvardenfell. The bartender slid a glass of hot mead across the bar. Ashleigh took a grateful sip before adding, "That's the corprus you mean, is it not?"
"Oh, aye. It's all over with." Another quick glimpse of that bottomless black eye, narrowed to a slit as if she could not quite focus on his face. "All of it. No more temple. No more three blessings, Sera, no more City of Light, City of Magic, no more Almsivi intervention. Still plenty of cliff racers, worse luck. Sotha Sil murdered, and Almalexia put down for everyone's good but hers, and gods know what became of Lord Vivec. Ha! Gods!" She turned to Ashleigh so fiercely that her hood fell back, disclosing a tight braid of pale hair and a truly astonishing set of puckered scars that crisscrossed her face in a neat pattern, like embroidery. He was startled to see that she had no right eye. The socket was shriveled up, the lid stretched across the empty hole. She still leaned hard on her right arm as she gestured with the brandy glass, sloshing expensive liquor.
"Gods," she repeated. "Let me tell you something, Sir Breton, there's nought that has ever worn flesh that is better than faithless. Better to put your trust in daedra, little as they can be trusted, than in anything born of woman or mer. Even Vivec failed us, Vivec! Who looked up from the womb and saw the end of all things, and laughed. Perhaps he has gone to his Annunciation at last. Perhaps Mephala has him."
Prideaux opened his mouth to respond to this as the woman paused to sip her brandy with a trembling hand. Then he realized that her cape had slid back over her left shoulder, partly because it was lower than the right one. She wore a plain leather tunic over her hose. There was quite a large tear in it, almost from armpit to waist, and her side looked as if it had been gnawed by a demon. Ashleigh's horrified and fascinated eyes traced the trickle of blood down from the gory wound to the barstool, thence to the floor. And he'd thought it was spilled liquor...
"Madam, you are wounded," he said.
"Nay, sir, I am killed," she said calmly. "They saw to that, same as I saw to a good number of themin the Old Manor District. They're a bit better at their work on this continent, I grant them that."
"You could be healed," Ashleigh said.
"'Tis no good. There's poison in it," said the mer.
"It must be a very slow one, then," said Ashleigh. "Since you've been here for quite some time now."
"I am not so very easy to poison," said the Altmer. "Though it hurts me something fierce, I acknowledge. I had thought to have been and gone some time before this. There is nothing for me here."
"I see," said Ashleigh Prideaux, as if this suicidal admission were entirely natural as a subject for conversation. "If you would pardon me for just one moment."
"But of course, Sir Breton," said the Altmer politely, and turned back to the bar. She set down her brandy glass and looked thoughtfully at her hands as Ashleigh reached down for his potion satchel.
