The Infernal City.

An Elder Scrolls Novel.

Greg Keys.

For my daughter, Dorothy Nellah Joyce Keyes.

Welcome, Nellah.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS.

I would first like to thank everyone involved in The Elder Scrolls for such rich material to work with. Specifically, thanks to Kurt Kuhlmann, Bruce Nesmith, Pete Hines, and Todd Howard for their input and guidance. I would be remiss to neglect mentioning the Imperial Library website, which was also an invaluable resource in writing this book.

As always, thanks to my agent, Richard Curtis. Thanks to my friend Annaig Houesnard for being a good sport about me lifting her name.

Thanks also to my editor, Tricia Narwani, editorial assistant Mike Braff, and copy editor Peter Weissman, production manager Erin Bekowies, production editor Shona McCarthy, marketing manager Ali T. Kokmen, publicist David Moench, and, of course, the publisher, Scott Shannon. For the wonderful cover, thanks go out to illustrator Paul Youll and designer Dreu Pennington-McNeil.

PROLOGUE.

When Iffech felt the sea shudder, he knew. The wind had already fallen like a dead thing from the sky, gasping as it succumbed upon the iron swells, breathing its last to his mariner's ears. The sky always knew first; the sea was slow-dreadful slow-to come around.

The sea shook again-or, rather, seemed to drag beneath their keel. Up in the crow's nest Keem screamed as he was tossed out like a kitten. Iffech watched him twist and almost impossibly catch the rigging with those Cathay Raht claws of his.

"Stendarr!" Grayne swore, in her South Niben twang. "What was that? A tsunami?" Her feeble human gaze searched out through the dusk.

"No," Iffech murmured. "I was off the Summerset Isles when the sea tried to swallow them, and I felt one of those pass under us. And another, when I was younger, off the coast of Morrowind. In deep water you don't feel much. This is deep water."

"Then what?" She brushed her silver and gray bangs off her useless eyes.

Iffech twitched his shoulders in imitation of a human shrug and ran his claws through the patchy fur of his forearm. The still air smelled sweet, like rotting fruit.

"See anything, Keem?" he called up.

"My own death, nearly," the Ne Quin-alian cat shouted back, his voice rasping hollow, as if the ship was in a box. He lithely hauled his sleek body back into the nest. "Nothing on the sea," he continued after a moment.

"Under it, then," Grayne said nervously.

Iffech shook his head. "The wind," he said.

And then he saw it, in the south, a sudden blackness, a crackle of green lightning, and then a form like a tall thunderhead billowed into being.

"Hold on!" he shouted.

And now came a clap like thunder but forty times louder, and a new fist of wind that snapped the mainmast, taking poor Keem to the death he had nearly seen. Then all was still again, except for the roaring in his damaged ears.

"By the gods, what can it be?" he barely heard Grayne ask.

"The sea doesn't care," Iffech said, watching the dark mass move toward them. He looked around his ship. All of the masts were broken, and it appeared that half the crew was already gone.

"What?"

"Not many Khajiit take to the sea," he said. "They'll bear it for trade, to move skooma around, but few there are who love her. But I've adored her since I could mewl. And I love her because she doesn't care what the gods or daedra think. She's another world, with her own rules."

"What are you going on about?"

"I'm not sure," he admitted. "I feel it, I don't think it. But don't you think-doesn't it feel like ..." He didn't finish. He didn't need to.

Grayne stared out toward the thing.

"I see it, now," she said.

"Yes."

"I saw an Oblivion gate open once," she said. "When my father worked in Leyawiin. I saw things-it feels a little like that. But Martin's sacrifice-they say it can't happen again. And it doesn't look like a gate."

It wasn't shaped like a thunderhead, Iffech realized. More like a fat cone, point down.

Another wind was starting up, and on it something unbelievably foul.

"It doesn't matter what it is," he said. "Not to us."

And a few instants later it didn't.

Sul's throat hurt, so he knew he had been screaming. He was soaked with sweat, his chest ached, and his limbs were trembling. He opened his eyes and forced his head up so he could see where he was.

A man stood in the doorway with a drawn sword. His eyes were very wide and blue beneath a shock of curly, barley-colored hair. Swearing, Sul reached for his own weapon where it hung on the bedpost.

"Just hold on there," the fellow said, backing up. "It's just you've been hollering so, I was worried something was happening to you."

The dreamlight was still fading, but his mind was starting to turn. If the fellow had wanted him dead, he probably would be.

"Where am I?" he asked, taking a grip on his longsword, despite his reasoning.

"In the Lank Fellow Inn," the man replied. And then, after a pause, "In Chorrol."

Chorrol. Right.

"Are you okay?"

"I'm fine," Sul said. "Nothing to concern you."

"Ah, yes." The man looked uncomfortable, "Do you, umm, scream like that every-"

"I won't be here tonight," Sul cut him off. "I'm moving on."

"I didn't mean to offend."

"You didn't," Sul replied.

"The breakfast is out, down there."

"Thank you. Please leave me."

The man closed the door. Sul sat there for a moment rubbing the lines in his forehead. "Azura," he murmured. He always knew the prince's touch, even when it was light. This had not been light.

He closed his eyes and tried to feel the sea jump beneath him, to hear the old Khajiit captain's words, see again through his eyes. That thing, appearing in the sky-everything about it stank of Oblivion. After spending twenty years there, he ought to know the smell.

"Vuhon," he sighed. "It must be you, Vuhon, I think. Why else would the prince send me such a vision? What else would matter to me?"

No one answered, of course.

He remembered a little more, after the Khajiit had died. He had seen Ilzheven as he last saw her, pale and lifeless, and the smoking shatterlands that had once been Morrowind. Those were always there in his dreams, whether Azura meddled with them or not. But there had been another face, a young man, Colovian probably, with a slight bend in his nose. He seemed familiar, as if they had met somewhere.

"That's all I get?" Sul asked. "I don't even know which ocean to look in." The question was directed at Azura, but he knew it was rhetorical. He also knew he was lucky to get even that. He dragged his wiry gray body out of bed and went over to the washbasin to splash water in his face and blink red eyes at himself in the mirror. He started to turn away when he noticed, behind him in the reflection, a couple of books propped in an otherwise empty shelf. He turned, walked over, and lifted the first.

TALES OF SOUTHERN WATERS, it announced.

He nodded his head and opened the second.

THE MOST CURRENT AND HIGH ADVENTURES OF PRINCE ATTREBUS, this one read.

And there, on the frontispiece, was an engraving of a young man's face with a slightly crooked nose.

For the first time in years Sul uttered a hoarse laugh. "Well, there you go," he said. "I'm sorry I doubted you, my Prince."

An hour later, armed and armored, he rode south and east, toward madness, retribution, and death. And though he had long ago forgotten what happiness was, he imagined it must have been a bit like what he felt now.

ONE.

A pale young woman with long ebon curls, and a male with muddy green scales and chocolate spines, crouched on the high rafters of a rotting villa in Lilmoth, known by some as the Festering Jewel of Black Marsh.

"You're finally going to kill me," the reptile told the woman. His tone was thoughtful, his saurian features composed in the faint light bleeding down through the cracked slate roof.

"Not so much kill you as get you killed," she answered, pushing the tight rings of her hair off her face and pressing her slightly aquiline nose and gray-green gaze toward the vast open space beneath them.

"It works out the same," the other hissed.

"Come on, Glim," Annaig said, tossing herself into her father's huge leather chair and clasping her hands behind her neck. "We can't pass this up."

"Oh, I think it can be safely said that we can," Mere-Glim replied. He lounged on a low weavecane couch, one arm draped so as to suspend over a cypress end table whose surface was supported by the figure of a crouching Khajiit warrior. The Argonian was all silhouette, because behind him the white curtains that draped the massive bay windows of the study were soaked in sunlight.

"Here are some things we could do instead." He ticked one glossy black claw on the table.

"Stay here in your father's villa and drink his wine." A second claw came down. "Take some of your father's wine down to the docks and drink it there." The third. "Drink some here and some down at the docks ..."

"Glim, how long has it been since we had an adventure?"

His lazy lizard gaze traveled over her face.

"If by adventure you mean some tiring or dangerous exercise, not that long. Not long enough anyway." He wiggled the fingers of both hands as if trying to shake something sticky off them, a peculiarly Lilmothian expression of agitation. The membranes between his digits shone translucent green. "Have you been reading again?"

He made it sound like an accusation, as if "reading" was another way of referring to, say, infanticide.

"A bit," she admitted. "What else am I to do? It's so boring here. Nothing ever happens."

"Not for lack of your trying," Mere-Glim replied. "We very nearly got arrested during your last little adventure."

"Yes, and didn't you feel alive?" she said.

"I don't need to 'feel' alive," the Argonian replied. "I am alive. Which state I would prefer to retain."

"You know what I mean."

"Hff. That's a bold assertion," he sniffed.

"I'm a bold girl." She sat forward. "Come on, Glim. He's a were-crocodile. I'm certain of it. And we can get the proof."

"First of all," Mere-Glim said, "there's no such thing as a were-crocodile. Second, if there were, why on earth would we care to prove it?"

"Because ... well, because people would want to know. We'd be famous. And he's dangerous. People around there are always disappearing."

"In Pusbottom? Of course they are. It's one of the dodgiest parts of town."

"Look," she said. "They've found people bitten in half. What else could do that?"

"A regular crocodile. Lots of things, really. With some effort, I might be able to do it, too." He fidgeted again. "Look, if you're so sure about this, get your father to talk Underwarden Ethten into sending some guards down there."

"Well, what if I'm wrong? Father would look stupid. That's what I'm saying, Glim. I need to know for sure. I must find some sort of proof. I've been following him-"