"And if it's trapped, too?"

"Hircine always gives a chance," Lesspa said. "That's his way."

"She's right," Sul agreed. "It's not sport if the prey can't escape."

The horns sounded again, and a third joined them, in the direction Sul had just pointed.

"That's bad," Attrebus remarked.

"Those are Hircine's drivers," Sul said, "not the prince himself. We haven't heard his horn-you'll know it when you do, believe me. If we can get past the driver, we might have a chance."

"We'll get past him," Lesspa said. "Mount behind me, Prince Attrebus. Sul, you ride S'enjara with Taaj."

Attrebus climbed up behind Lesspa. There was no saddle, or anything to hold onto but her, so he reached around her waist.

The tigers began at an easy lope that was still far faster than Attrebus could have run. Lesspa had a lance in her left hand, and so did Taaj. The other two Khajiit had small but efficient-looking bows.

The horns sounded again, the loudest now being the one they were headed toward.

Because of the lack of understory, and because the huge trees were spaced so far apart, they caught glimpses of Hircine's driver from a fair distance, but it wasn't until the last thirty yards that Attrebus saw what they faced.

The driver himself might have been a massive albino Nord with long, sinewy arms. He was bare to the waist and covered in blue tattoos. His mount was the largest bear Attrebus had ever seen, and four only slightly smaller bears ran along with him.

"Bears," Lesspa sighed. It sounded as if she were happy. She shouted a few orders in her native dialect.

The archers wheeled and began firing, but Sha'jal was suddenly moving so fast that Attrebus nearly fell off. Everything to the sides blurred; only their destination was clear, and getting larger with terrifying speed.

Sha'jal bellowed out a deafening roar and bounded up on one of the bears, using it as a step to kick himself even higher, and all of the weight went out of Attrebus as they soared straight at the driver. He brought up a spear with a leaf-shaped blade bigger than some short swords, but not quick enough to hit the huge cat. Lesspa's lance went true into the driver's chest, but the resulting impact spun them half around, and Attrebus finally lost his grip. He hit the ground on his shoulder, felt pain jar through his skeleton, but all he could think of were the bears all around him, so he scrambled back up despite the pain.

A good thing, too, because one was coming right for him. He drew Flashing, made a wild stroke, and staggered aside as the bear lunged for his throat. Flashing bounced off the beast's skull, leaving a cut that appeared to only make it madder. Then it reared up over him, giving him the opportunity to thrust his blade into its belly. It bawled and threw its weight on him, wrenching his weapon from his hand. He threw up his arms to protect his head and tried to roll aside.

He was only partly successful; the beast came down on his lower body, claws ripping into his byrnie. He kicked at the crushing weight, but it was only the bear rolling off to lick at its wounded belly that freed him. Heaving for breath, he took Flashing back up and chopped though its neck.

A flash like lightning lit the trees; he turned and saw another of the bears topple, smoking, as Sul leapt over it and toward the heart of the fray. The white giant was gone, and in its place something between a man and a bear was fighting the Sench-tigers. It hurled two away, but even as it did, Sha'jal leapt on the driver's back and closed his viselike jaws behind his neck. The other Khajiit were finishing off the mount. The other bears lay in brown heaps.

The were-bear bawled and tried to shake free. Sul strode up almost casually and cut him from crotch to sternum.

The tigers plunged into the were-beasts' steaming entrails. They were quick about it, and before Attrebus had taken another twenty breaths, they were mounted again, riding hard as the other horns drew nearer. By the sound of it, one of the drivers was behind them and the other was coming from their left flank.

"Hold on!" Lesspa yelled. He was just wondering why when they were suddenly moving downhill in what amounted to a controlled fall. They burst into open sunlight and bounded over a stream as they left the forest behind and plunged downslope to a grassy savanna. A red sun was just touching the horizon, painting bloody the river that meandered across the flatland. Of course, this was Oblivion, so it might be blood. Off to what he presumed was the south, he saw a herd of some large beasts, but before he could figure out what they were, they were on the plain and he couldn't make them out anymore. They were in the same general direction as one of the drivers who was approaching and blowing, so he hoped that whatever they were, they might slow him down.

"More our element, grassland," Lesspa told him.

It was only then that he noticed that M'qar was riderless.

"Where's J'lasha?" he asked Lesspa.

"On Khenarthi's path," she replied.

"I'm sorry."

"He died well. There's no sorrow in that."

A herd of antelopes with twisting horns scattered at their approach.

Lesspa slowed Sha'jal to a walk and dismounted. Taaj and Sul followed her lead.

"The other drivers are still coming," Attrebus pointed out.

"The Sench are sprinters, not distance runners," Lesspa replied. "They need to get their wind back if we're to run again."

They were parallel to the river now, which had dug itself a respectable ditch here, at least a hundred feet deep. It made Attrebus nervous to have a sheer drop on one side and riders coming from every other direction. He told Sul so.

"A tributary comes in up ahead," Sul told him. "It makes a gentler slope going in, and we can get down into the canyon there. The door we're looking for is up the canyon another mile or so."

"You really think we'll make it?"

"Hircine himself won't show up until after it's dark. He hunts with a pack of werewolves. Until then all we have to do is avoid the drivers."

"Ground is shaking," Lesspa observed.

Attrebus felt it, too. At first he wondered if it wasn't some characteristic of Hircine's plane; he'd heard that Oblivion realms were often unstable. But then he saw the cloud of dust off to the south and understood the truth; what he felt was the thunder of thousands of hooves.

"We probably want to avoid that, too," he pointed out.

"The driver," Sul growled.

"To mount!" Lesspa called, then sang out in Khajiit.

Once again the tigers dug in and flew along the edge of the precipice. He could see the stampede now, but could only tell that the herd was brown.

"Up ahead!" Sul shouted. "You see, there? That's where we go down."

Attrebus could see it, all right, and could see that they were never going to make it, not at the speed that herd was moving. In less than a minute they were close enough for him to see they were some sort of wild cattle, albeit cattle that probably stood six feet high at the shoulders and had horn-spans almost that wide.

Impossibly, the tigers increased their speed, and the tributary grew nearer, but now he could hear the beasts snorting and bellowing, closer and closer, a wall falling on him ...

And suddenly he saw the tiger Sul was riding make a peculiar leap that took it over the edge of the cliff.

Then Sha'jal was in the air, too.

The fall opened below him as if in a dream. Everything seemed to be moving quite slowly. They were nearly parallel to the cliff, and Sha'jal was lashing out at something-a tree, growing up from below them. He caught it and then all of the blood rushed from his head as they swung down and in toward the cliff face.

When his senses returned, he was fetched up hard against some sort of recess in the rock wall; he could see the trunk of the tree rising from somewhere lower, but even as he watched, it was smashed from view by the rain of cattle that began pouring down a few yards in front of them. He looked right and left, and incredibly, all of the Khajiit and Sul were there, pressed against the back of the shallow rock shelter. Flakes of shale rained on their heads, and he could only hope that the weight of the wild cattle didn't break it.

They kept coming, bleating, eyes rolling, legs flailing.

Lesspa started laughing, and the other Khajiit quickly joined her. After a moment, Attrebus found himself chuckling, too, not even certain why.

And, finally-as the last of the light was fading-the beasts stopped falling.

"Quickly, now," Sul said. "I think we can work our way down on this side. We don't have much time."

Sul proved right-their hideaway was part of a larger erosional gully, probably an earlier channel of the tributary. They were able to step and slide their way down it.

The river was choked with dead and dying cattle, and the water stank of their blood, urine, and feces.

They continued downstream, crossing the tributary a few moments later. Attrebus could barely see now, but the Khajiit and Sul seemed to be having little trouble, and the strand along the river was sandy and relatively flat. And then a new, silvery light shone as a moon rose into the sky.

Above, two horns blared, quite near.

Upstream, another answered in a voice so incredibly deep and primal that Attrebus suddenly felt like a rabbit in the open, surrounded by wolves. It chased all thought from him, and before he knew it he was dashing forward in mindless terror.

Something caught him from behind, and he swung violently, trying to break the grip before realizing it was Sul ...

"Easy," he said. "Snap out of it."

"That's Hircine," Attrebus said. "It's over."

"Not yet," Sul said. "Not yet."

The horn sounded again, and now he heard wolves baying.

"Keep together," Sul warned them. "When we get there, we'll have to be quick."

Dark figures watched them from both rims of the canyon, and strange bestial sounds drifted down, but apparently the other drivers were content just to keep them bottled in and let their master have the kill.

They rushed on, breathless, limping. Sul shouted something, but Attrebus couldn't make it out because of the wolves. He glanced behind him, and in the moonlight saw an enormous silhouette shaped like a man, but with the branching horns of a stag.

"He's here!"

"So are we!" Sul shouted. "Ahead there, you see, where the canyon narrows. It's just through there."

It was all running then, following Sul. The howls grew closer, so near that he could already feel the teeth in his back. The canyon narrowed until it was only about twenty feet wide.

"Another fifty yards!" Sul shouted.

"That's too far," Lesspa said. She stopped and shouted something in Khajiit. They all turned to face the hunt.

"We'll catch up after we've killed him," she said.

"Lesspa-"

But Sul grabbed his arm and yanked him along.

"Don't spit on their sacrifice," he said. "The only way to make it worthwhile is to survive."

Behind them he heard Lesspa's warrior shriek, and a wolf howled in pain.

He tried to concentrate on keeping his feet working beneath him and off the fire in his chest. He was terrified, but he wanted to stand with Lesspa, to stop running.

And yet he knew he couldn't.

The walls of the canyon narrowed further, until they were only about ten feet apart. The shingle vanished, and they were running in swiftly moving water. And something was splashing behind them.

Then he took a step, and nothing was under it-the river dropped away into empty space. He didn't see any bottom.

EIGHT.

Annaig passed a bit of what had once been a soul along a wire drawn through a glass globe full of greenish vapor. As she watched, droplets formed on the wire and then quickly condensed into beadlike crystals. She waited for them to set properly, then carefully unsealed the two hemispheres of the globe and slid the wire out, so the tiny formations tinged and settled in the hollow glass and shone little tiny opals.

"There's that down," she murmured. "Forty-eight more courses to go."

Lord Irrel's tastes tended toward the inane. No meal of less than thirty courses ever pleased him, and fifty or more was safest.

Almost everything he ate was the product of some process involving stolen souls. She'd been squeamish about that at first, but like a butcher getting used to blood, she had become less focused on what it was and more on what to do with it. At times she still wondered if she was destroying the last bit of a person, the final part of them that made them them. Toel assured her that wasn't how it worked, that the energy that came to the kitchens came from the ingenium, which had already processed it to purity.

In the end she felt sure she would have been more bothered by dismembering human corpses, even though there was nothing there to feel or know what was happening.

A soft clearing of the throat behind her caused her to turn. A young woman with red skin and horns stood there, looking a little worried. Annaig did not know her, but she was dressed as a pantry worker.

"Pardon me, Chef," the woman said. "Do not think I presume, and I'm certain what your answer will be, but a skraw is here with a delivery, and he says he will only give it to you."

"A skraw?"

"That's what they call them that work in the sump."

Annaig's spirit lifted in a sudden rush. Mere-Glim worked in the sump, or at least so Slyr had said.

"Well," she said, trying to keep her composure, "I suppose I have a moment. Take me to this fellow."

She followed the woman through the pantries and beyond, to the receiving dock, where she had never been. It wasn't particularly imposing, merely a room with various tunnels leading away. There were also two large square holes in the walls that didn't seem to go anywhere until she realized they were shafts going up and down. In fact, as she watched, a large crate came into one of them from above. Several workers sitting on the top of it got down and began unfastening the latches on the front.

She did not see Mere-Glim. Instead, there was a dirty-looking fellow in a sort of loincloth holding a large bucket.

"This is him, Chef."

"Very good-you may go," Annaig told her.

She bowed and hurried off.

"Well," Annaig asked. "What's this?"