Free Lord of Souls: An Elder Scrolls Novel by Greg Keyes

on, but the only other passage of interest to him was one in which she began to question whether the Emperor had authorizedor was aware of their trip, and she had determined to ask Hierem about it.
    He read the final few sentences with a little chill:
    At lunch today Hierem repeated his assertions, but I still have my doubts. I have a meeting with the Emperor tomorrow. I will ask him myself.
    I hope I shall feel better. My stomach is unsettled, and there is pain in my joints. Perhaps the soup did not suit me.
    Colin thumbed back through earlier parts of the book, but it was dark now. He settled against a chimney, watching Arese’s unlit window. Neither moon was in the sky, but there were no clouds, and the stars were glorious. He rested there, letting the fall of night ease into him; first the swifts, then the fluttering of bats, the lonely imprecation of a barn owl. Tree frogs chirped and insects whirred. A dog barked somewhere in the Market District and was answered nearby, which set off a chorus of canine comment from all quarters of the city. A couple argued not far away about what the proper price of the cockles for dinner might have been, and the strains from a lute drifted along in the breeze.
    Arese would be with her sister now. He had a few more hours to wait, a little more time to decide what to do, whether to show Arese the journal or not. Was she really an agent of the Emperor?
    He’d been assigned to find Prince Attrebus. The prince had gone, against his father’s wishes and in secret, to find and fight the menace of the flying city. He hadn’t gotten far; Colin had found his entire bodyguard slaughtered—and it seemed, at first, the prince, too. Attrebus, it turned out, was a careful creation of his father and his ministers. All of the battles and duels he had won were set up that way, and the bards and authors who sang and wrote of him were heavily subsidized by the court. The princehimself hadn’t known this; few outside his guard had. Whenever the prince decided to go off on some sort of adventure, his right-hand man Gulan always reported it to the office of the Prime Minister, and it had been handled.
    But not this time—or at least not the way it usually was. This time the prince had been ambushed. That was what had led Colin to investigate Arese; he knew Gulan had gone to her, as usual. He discovered that she had set up the attack on the prince herself, and later followed her to a house where—as he listened—she killed the crime boss who had facilitated it, along with all of his guard and household. He still didn’t know if she had summoned something or
transformed
into the nightmare that had turned the house into an abattoir.
    And yet, Arese had admitted this to him. She had offered an explanation for it.
    Most traps are simple.
    He sighed, ran his hand through his hair, felt the breeze on his face.
    He heard a faint noise that seemed somehow out of place and opened his eyes.
    Fifteen yards away he saw the shadowed figure of a man, dressed in the black quilted jerkin so many of the Dark Brotherhood affected these days. The fellow was in profile, kneeling on the roof of the building across the alley. As Colin watched, he slipped like a spider down a rope too dark and thin to make out from his vantage point. He settled, still like a spider, on the casement of Arese’s window. After a moment Colin saw the window reflect starlight as it swung open, and then, a few heartbeats later, shut again.
    The breeze picked up. It felt cool, and Colin realized he was sweating.
    Someone wanted Arese dead.
    He hesitated long enough to feel ashamed, trying to sort outwhat the smart thing to do was. If she died, he could step out of this whole thing.
    But then he would never know what was going on, and maybe he would have to watch the Empire collapse knowing he might have done something.
    But it was more than that. There had been something about her, brittleness, vulnerability …
    He recognized her, he