Chapter 11

If there was any sound of struggle from the stairwell, it was too quiet for Ebel-Merodach to hear. His conflict with the bandits was disappointingly brief – none of them had real armor, and there were none of the lizard-men who might have resisted the poison enchantment of his mace. It wasn't long before he stood alone and surrounded by the bodies. Then and only then did he pause to look around him.

The chamber in which he stood was a great rectangle, with the filigree cages at either end and a ceiling towering far above. It was harshly and unbendingly symmetrical, utterly devoid of the organic circularity of Dremora construction. Blue light filtered down from glowing crystals that hung in cages from the distant ceiling. Nothing moved. The only scent to reach his nostrils was of old stone and dust. This building is a corpse. And not a corpse in the sense one might find it in Oblivion – food, decoration and alchemy storehouse – but a frozen, gutless hulk. Good for nothing. He had a horrifying feeling that the building itself had always been like this, born dead and preserved thus. It had no thirst for the blood spilt on the stones of its floor.

Merodach shook himself silently, reproving this overly sentimental train of thought, and went to see what had happened to Sodrinye. He was almost to the base of the stairs when the dark kynaz stepped carefully off the bottom step.

The caitiff stared at her for a moment. She stood unsupported, with her back completely straight. The violet threads in her black eyes glowed brightly in the dim as she looked up at him. For the first time he had ever seen, she held her head up.

"What have you done?" said Merodach.

"I have consumed a life," said Sodrinye. "While it lasts, I will have strength." He couldn't hear her sigh, but he saw her shoulders rise and fall. "A little. Go and drink, caitiff. You are thirsty."

Merodach was not a stupid kynaz, so he was not totally surprised when the weight of debt overrode his will and he found himself saying, "You go first."

Sodrinye shook her head. "While this lasts, blood is no good to me. I will need it badly afterwards."

"Then clothe yourself, and spare me the sight of you," said Ebel-Merodach, with as much scorn as he could muster. He went to drag the female krynvelhat within Sodrinye's reach before he turned back to the others. He kept his mace in his hand as he drank. The great room seemed to be all there was to the ruin, but one never knew. A very busy few moments later, Merodach heard soft footsteps on the stairs. He dropped the corpse with which he had been occupied, licking the blood from his lips. The dead human's skull made a hollow noise as it hit the floor.

"It is Menien Goneld," said Sodrinye. She now knelt in the dead mage's gray robe and moccasins, and for reasons of her own had laid her old garment over the corpse of the mortal. Merodach would have assumed the gesture to be a derisive one if she had been any other kynaz.

The gray robe fit her well. Most human races were small compared to the Kyn, but Sodrinye was thin for a kynaz.

Merodach stood up and waited. He still deeply loathed the taste of mortal blood, the blue ruin around him, and this frigid, glaring, half-dead plane, but all of those things were easier to face on a full stomach. At the moment he was inclined to be philosophical. A moment later, Menien Goneld appeared between the two cages. Merodach watched as he assessed the room, tracing each place where an enemy might hide in a way that had taken Merodach his entire first incarnation to learn. But mortals are only allowed one. No wonder they learn quickly. The Imperial was moving a little slowly, apparently fatigued, but there was no sight or smell of blood on him.

"See? Only six of them," said Goneld. "I knew you wouldn't have any trouble, demon. What happened to that poor bastard on the stairs? He looks like he saw it coming."

"The Sleeper drained his life," said Merodach. Beside him, Sodrinye got to her feet. She did it with more assurance than customarily, but still very abruptly. Menien Goneld watched. There was a look on his face which the caitiff was unable to interpret.

"And here I've been thinking the caitiff was a monster," Goneld said. "He's nothing to what you are, is he."

"No," said Sodrinye. Her face held no expression whatsoever. "To him also I am a monster, Menien Goneld. Have I not told you he would kill me, if he were ruled by his own will?"

"Yes," said Menien Goneld. "You did."

"Yet now he is in honor bound to defend me from you," Sodrinye said. "And you have sworn to do him no harm. Even if you succeeded in taking my life without taking his, which in justice to him I will say is very unlikely, you would have done him immeasurable harm. If I am lost in the void, he will never be able to discharge his debt. It will be a thorn in his flesh for all eternity. Even if he, too, perishes in Nirn and is lost, if any shred of him remains, it will continue to torment him."

Merodach considered this with no small amount of grim glee. Perhaps I have underrated her capacity for guile. "You are fairly caught, Menien Goneld," said Ebel-Merodach. "As I was."

Menien Goneld stared at the Sleeper for a moment. Then he laughed, a brief and bitter sound. "So long as I stay as honest as you think I am."

"Even so," said Sodrinye the Sleeper. She looked at Ebel-Merodach for a moment, one flitting glance, and then turned her face toward the stairwell again. "We have no need of anything else belonging to these dead. Take what you wish."

"Are you planning to just keep the bodies here? They'll rot, you know," Goneld said. "And they might not stay down. Strange things happen on Ayleid ground."

"On what?" said Merodach. The adjective was obviously not a Cyrodilic word, though Goneld continued to speak that tongue.

"This is an Ayleid place," said Goneld, waving his hand aimlessly at the room. "Heartland High Elves. They died out a long time ago, supposedly. Left a lot of things behind."

"Elves," spat Merodach. "Aedryn khajadi." Filthy aedra worshippers. But it made sense. The death of merish virtue would explain the awful atmosphere of this place, a locale abandoned by the spirit of the aedra but unfilled by any daedric presence.

"You'll be changing your tune the first time you run into a lich," said Menien Goneld. "Do I have to repeat my question?"

"Ebel-Merodach, do you yet thirst?" said Sodrinye.

"No," said Merodach.

"Then I will burn them up when you have finished, Menien Goneld," said Sodrinye.

"Fine," said Goneld. He stalked in to search the corpses, avoiding the blood still leaking from a couple of throats. Mortal blood pressure was much lower than Dremora, but even that petered out fairly quickly from the vessels in the neck. Merodach watched him narrowly. The physical weakness of their first short time in Nirn appeared to have left him. No. He was inside a cage for too long. He has recovered command of himself, not strength in his body. Which means he is now collected enough to lie to us. Merodach considered that. Probably. Humility was not one of his outstanding traits, but he was very aware of his inadequacy in the area of reading human emotion. And while he saw some small parallel between fighting men – or why else had he laughed, the time Goneld spat on him from inside a cage? - the divide between mortal and immortal was great. Humans became much more difficult when it was necessary to view them as something other than prey and entertainment.

But that has been our error all along, thought Ebel-Merodach, watching Goneld pick out thin bits of metal that had the look of tools more than weapons. The quick darker Human had apparently been carrying several. If we had not underestimated their strength, Lord Dagon's plans for this place might have succeeded. And if we had fully understood the debt the Blood of Akatosh felt to this plane and its people. But that was another emotional question. Perhaps it was not debt at all, but some other mortal emotion which Ebel-Merodach would never be able to understand.

"I'm finished," said Menien Goneld, who now had several more weapons than previously. He'd collected some food for himself as well, or at least that was what Merodach assumed it was. He preferred not to look at it too closely.

"Stand back," said Sodrinye the Sleeper. Goneld moved out of the way with some alacrity. Merodach stationed himself behind Sodrinye's shoulder. He had no reason to doubt her aim, but he had no idea exactly how large a fireball she was likely to prod -

WHOMPH.

A couple of seconds later, the ringing cleared from Ebel-Merodach's ears. He opened his eyes. A mushroom cloud of smoke was ascending slowly toward the ceiling. The bodies were gone, and a blackened circle on the floor was all that was left. There was hardly even a smell of burning flesh; they had been too quickly consumed. The table where Sodrinye had sat was gone as well. Menien Goneld, who had not chosen his station as carefully as Merodach, was picking himself up from the floor.

"Next time we'll just bury them, all right?" said Goneld.

"Why?" said Ebel-Merodach. "They were already dead."