The Infernal City by Greg Keyes Read Free Book Online Page B

she sagged there, gasping, tears of pain seeping from her eyes.
    “Are you okay?” Glim asked.
    She felt her leg. Her hand came away sticky.
    “I think it bit me,” she said.
    “No,” he said, squatting to examine her. “If it had, you wouldn’t have a leg. You must have scraped against the reef.”
    “Reef?” She brushed her eyes and looked around.
    They weren’t on land—at least, not the mainland. Instead they rested on a tiny island hardly more than a few inches above the water. Indeed, at high tide it would certainly be below water.
    “She’s too big to follow us in here,” he said. “Looks like the captain wasn’t kidding about sea-drakes.”
    “I guess not.”
    “Well, from here on out we only have sharks to worry about.”
    “Yes, well at least I’m bleeding,” Annaïg managed to quip.
    “Yah. So maybe the next half mile won’t be boring.”
    But if there were sharks around, they didn’t fancy the taste of Breton blood, because they made it to the shore without incident. If shore it could be called—it was actually a nearly impenetrable wall of mangroves, crouched in the water like thousands of giant spiders with their legs interlocked. Annaïg was pleased with the image until she remembered that it was from an Argonian folktale, one which claimed that’s exactly what mangroves had once been, before they earned the wrath of the Hist in some ancient altercation and were transformed.
    Somehow Glim found them a way through the mess, and finally to the sinking remnants of a raised road.
    “How far do you think we are from Lilmoth?” she asked.
    “Ten miles, maybe,” Glim replied. “But I’m not sure we’re well-advised to go back there.”
    “My father’s there, Glim. And your family, too.”
    “I don’t think there’s anything we can do for them.”
    “What’s happening? Do you know?”
    “I think the city tree has gone rogue, just as it did in ancient times. A lot of people say this one grew from a single fragment of the root that survived the elder’s killing, more than three hundred years ago.”
    “Rogue? How?”
    “It doesn’t talk to us anymore. Only to the An-Xileel and the Wild Ones. But I think it must be talking to this thing coming from the sea.”
    “That doesn’t make any sense.”
    “Only because we don’t know everything.”
    “So you think we should just abandon the town?”
    He did his imitation of a human shrug.
    “You know I can’t,” she said.
    “I know you want to be a hero like those people in your books. Like Attrebus Mede and Martin Septim. But look at us—we aren’t armed, even if we knew how to fight, which we don’t. We can’t handle this, Nn.”
    “We can warn people.”
    “How? If the predictions are true, the flying island will reach Lilmoth before we do, by hours.”
    She hung her head and nodded. “You’re right.”
    “I am.”
    She held the image of her father for a moment. “But we don’t know what’s going to happen. We still might be able to help.”
    “Nn—”
    “Wait a minute,” she said. “Wait. It’s coming from the south, right?”
    “Oh, no.”
    “We have to find high ground. We have to be able see where it is.”
    “No, really, we don’t.” She gave him the look, and he sighed. “I just rescued you. How determined are you to die, anyway?”
    “You know better than that.”
    “Fine. I think I know a place.”

    The place was an upthrust of rock that towered more than a hundred feet above the jungle floor. It seemed unclimbable, but that proved not to be a problem when Glim led her to a cave opening in the base of the soft limestone. It led steadily upward, and in some places stairs had been carved. Faded paintings that resembled coiled snakes, blooming flowers, and more often than not nothing recognizable at all decorated the climb, and an occasional side gallery held often bizarre stone carvings of half-tree, half-Argonian figures.
    “You’ve been here before, I take it?” she asked.
    “Yes,”