Thief, The Thousand Thefts of Ahezzar, Part II

Contents

Chapter IX: Highrock

Chapter X: The Masquerade

Chapter XI: The Parting and The Coin, Tender is the Sea-Ghost

Chapter XII: A Friend to Rats, A Shadowmark

Chapter XIII: By Cremation, So Creation

Chapter XIV: Four Corners of the House of Hlaalu

Chapter IX: Highrock

What fate spelled o’er by fleeing Ge, such starlanes to Aetherial shores, reflect the course below. Quit they the maybe of our world and too the thief does quit his own, mortal mirrored in the make. The spokes of star and Aedric lanes, oh twilit pinions in the void, do clatter bout the man-as-hub, rim reaching endless round. Lo’ if wheel’s rim be infinite, is not the hub in kind? Indeed it does sit everywhere, In him, in you, in time.

Evermore grew out of the land ahead, or rather sat upon it like the crushed skull of a fallen colossus, supine and rotten. Its grey walls grown up with moss and lichen and pockmarked with siegeshot like dental caries. Groups of Breton carpenters and masons moved from hole to hole like a tongue flits to a toothache, uselessly and automatic. They stood about each hole, discussing recourse, lamenting dwindling materials, then moving on without filling the cavity. Overhead a cacophonous murder twirled like a blackfeathered cloud, and single crows sometimes dipped from the cloud as raindrops to perch on treebranch and rooftop. The crows were minded only by absent glances from the gatekeepers ahead, Breton guards with blue sashes who looked up from their work, siphoning a line of travelers through the gates, to scowl at the birds and mutter old curses. It was wearing these same scowls that the guards greeted the two travelers from Sentinel.

“What business do you have in Evermore’s walls, travelers?” rasped one of the frowndrawn guards.

“News of the Reachmen,” said the first messenger, “and an offer of help from King Fahara’jad of Hammerfell.” This was the second lie the thief had told. The second messenger produced, with orangehaired paw from out his robes, a rolled vellum scroll sealed with red wax and bearing the sigil of the all-beneficent and thrice-blessed King and presented it to the gatekeepers.

They had concocted the lie in Sentinel. To pose as messengers of the king, offering his help against the gathering Reachmen, bound to march for Evermore eventually, of which they learned from Undermarket brokers. It was a simple enough plan. They had stolen a well of palace ink and one of the palaces many royal seals. Chezan had then taught the thief the art of forgery, rapping him on the knuckles when he missed a flourish or a telling downstroke. The soreness of it still lingered in the thief’s bruised hands. They had then crafted a letter that seemed to hail from the desk of the King himself, sealed it accordingly, and set out to Evermore.

Lazar’s influence in the Covenant had spread over the years. In many ways the thief still struggled to think of him other than the fallen friend he knew, a simple noble boy and fellow vizier’s son, but Lazar had progressed leaps in his absence. Lazar’s father had also died, shortly before the boy’s return. Killed by a necromancer, Suturah, who slew all Fahara’jad’s viziers and raised them against him in an assassination attempt. The thief’s father had already taken his own life and, by one tragedy, was mercifully saved the horror of that blasphemous other.

It was Lazar who had persuaded the Ash’abah to camp near the city walls and when the exiles turned their unclean hands against the undead viziers he was hailed as a hero of the Covenant for his foresight. Rumor’s whispered about Sentinel’s Undermarket disputed this honor, claiming he had been in league with the Suturah from the start yet had turned against him when it seemed he had more to gain by saving the king. This was neither asked after nor proven.

The thief had wondered why Lazar would turn against a king he had only recently had a hand in instating. It was a question that had left him sleepless in the refuge more than once. A bid for more power, he supposed, perhaps Lazar had planned to betray the necromancer from the start, but to let his own father be killed, to let him suffer the dishonor of undeath, it was all very disturbing.

The thief had learned from Chezan that Lazar had holdings in the Dawnstar Caravan Company, holdings he had maintained since his youth, and he suspected that if he was to find any evidence to exonerate himself it would be found in their headquarters. Any evidence that told of the Knahaten infected blankets being shipped to Sentinel would be enough to incriminate Lazar and free the thief from the shackles of his slander.

They had spent their left-handed earnings on new robes and hearty horses and, well-supplied and with forged letter in hand, set off to Evermore, Dro’Baash and Chezan blessing their departure.

The journey had not been without difficulty. A sandstorm, less verbose than Tava’s last yet still as dangerous, had risen behind them during their journey and it had nipped at their heels and overtaken them with a windwhip fury before they had reached Bangkorai. They persisted through the sheering grit of it, past the desert sands and scrublands, to a land of green the likes of which the boy had never seen. Calm sun spangled brooks emptied into the Bjoulsae River, who’s course they followed, and the thief had stopped at each one, kissing their clear waters, enchanted by the potable abundance.

“Letter from the Redguard king, eh? Give it ‘ere, messenger,” snapped the gatekeeper. He took the roll of parchment, inspected its seal, and without cracking it motioned them to follow him into the city. The other gatekeeper dropped his shoulders and let out a sigh of annoyance at being made to sift through the ever growing line of travelers by himself. The thief and the Khajiit took their horses by the bridals and followed the guard into Evermore’s walls.

The city was not pocked and pitted like its walls, rather, large swaths of it seemed newly wrought and the city was enveloped in a din of percusive construction. These newly erected homes were unlike the sandstone and mudwork of Sentinel. They were framed with huge oak beams that were exposed on the outsides of homes, between the frames were walls of wattle and daub, a construction technique also used in the Alik’r that involved weaving pliable straight branches into a mat and building upon the mat with clay, mud, and dung. This was painted with thick coats of quicklime such that the house walls were bonefaced white, plexus and scapula of ancient kills. The roofs of the homes had been tiled with slabs of gray slate and all the mullioned windows were leadbeaded glass.

“Bad news does indeed travel fast,” the guard was saying, “we only learned of the gatherings ourselves some weeks back. Seems the lessons we taught the Black Drake those forty years ago his heirs forget.” He motioned around him to the new houses. “Finished rebuilding from that last siege we were. Now all the mortar and timber’s been used up and the outer walls still have need of it. Our only hope is to stop this wild host before they get to sieging us. Only invasion we’ve seen thus is these damnable crows. Ugly and loud portents they are, no doubt sent to taunt us.” He swatted at a crow perched on a fencepost and missed. It rose, cackling at him. “They run more abundant than St. Pelin’s blood, damnable birds!“

“We’ve come far and are tired,” said the first messenger, “if you could take the letter to your king in our stead–”

“Queen,” corrected the guard, “King Eamond is, well, dead… Long live Queen Arzhela! She haunts the chapel of St. Pelin most days, tending the forward scouts who make it back with news of the Reachmen. Aye, I suppose I don’t need you there to deliver the message. You can keep your horses in Pelin’s Watch stables and the Anchor’s Point’ll have the beds if you have the coin. Just don’t leave the city for a few days, the Queen will no doubt wish to pen a response.” With that the guard parted ways with the messengers and headed off to the chapel.

When he was gone Ten-Paw turned to the thief. “This one will put up the horses and find the Caravan’s offices. Get us a room, bottom floor, in the back if you can. This one will join you there later.”

The thief did as asked and later that night he and J’zar prepared themselves in the Anchor Point’s cheapest room, a greasy closet of a sublet with a view not of the gabled breton skyline now fading into dusk, but to a midden heap in the alley below. This squallor was very agreeable to Ten-Paw.

They had procured, with their aggregate-by-night, two suits of leather, burnished black with pitch, that had been modestly enchanted by a shiftfaced Altmer in the cistern undermarket. They donned these, took up their picks and stalked out the window drawing its shade as they went, a sputtering grease candle left lit within. Entering a lightless kind of night, as if it sat in the punchbowl of a giant crow’s eye, the thief remarked on the stillness, a pregnant rebuttal to the argument of day.

The Dragonstar Caravan Company held a small headquarters near the Bjoulsae and even by night silent skiffs plyd the river’s glass black.

The building sent out its final shipments at dusk. Thirty-five crates of cut Glenumbrian peat and Three barrels kindlepitch to a nearby distillery, five wagon loads of arms to the Covenant front in Cyrodiil, and a shipment of folderol that disguised thirteen smuggled Dwemer artifacts to a southern collector. The officiants and accountants ate a modest meal of dried meats, put out the candles, and trickled out of the offices by twilight’s fading.

One hour later the building had been picked clean, coffers had been emptied, and confusingly an out of date recordbook of no note had been stolen. Other homes and shops had been ransacked too.

At midnight the gatekeeper was tasked to find the messengers with a desperate and urgent response from the widowed queen. He checked at the Anchor’s point for them, then Pelin’s Watch stables, then with all the other gate keepers and was let known, too late, that they had quit the city earlier that night and now rode north.

The thief was marking Evermore’s map from memory as their horses walked a jagged gully, illumed as he was by waxing moonlight. Ten-Paw was farther along the road with his cloak drawn against the wind. He finished his last mark and returned the map to its case with a satisfied pat. As they came up out of the gully he looked behind him at the receding forests of the Western Reach and coaxed the horse to a run, its shoed hoofs sparking on the flintdanced ground. Ahead in the distance above the brambles and witch hazel, past jagged knives of basalt that lacerated Rivenspire’s soils, past needleless pine barrens, the city of Shornhelm slunk back from the breaking dawn. The thief thought he’d even heard it hiss.

They did not care to linger long within Shornhelm’s walls, before long the game they’d played in Evermore would send out its tendrils of searching justice, guards or bounty hunters would be dispatched on their tails. Besides, there was something unsettling in the air of this northern city. The tension of a thirst. Grudgingly, they had to stop to have J’zars horse reshod, so the thief took this opportunity for a little sport. Ten-Paw had taught him how to pinch pockets by daylight and he did just that in the early hours of the morning, cutting purses and lifting necklaces with well practiced contretemps. It was in this way that he’d lifted the letter.

An invitation, printed in gold filigreed lettering on red dyed paper, a masquerade ball to be thrown by house Tamrith that night. The thief read the letter under cover of a narrow sidestreet. He looked up from it and down at the filth washed up in Shornhelm’s gutters: beggars, drunkards, veterans and destitute workers scrounging for scrap in the fleeridden street. He looked back to the letter, the tilting scales of have and have not twisting his gut into a knot, and decided then that he would attend this party, if only to redistribute some wealth. Back at the farrier the thief announced his plan to Ten-Paw who smirked and chastised but in the end agreed that, stupid as it was, the party could prove lucrative.

Chapter X: The Masquerade

The mask. The mask. That numinous thing that hand alofts to hide the face yet frees, in kind, the soul. Yea, tender tells annonymous heart, it speaks its truth concealed. This mask confides and comforts. Amongst its like-hid friends their darkest fears revealed. But what of that second mask we wear, the facemade mask of wish-to-be? It does not drop at that critical need. It presumes itself reality . Pray you dont forget which face is real, for when you drop the facemade mask you part some real skin too. Or wait too long and find the mask instead does take to wearing you.

Wafted warp and weft across the floor as merry dancers whirled. The thief, in time, with mask of gold, did step into this world. The ball had commenced with garalous glee some hours ago, first by bright Breton trumpeting and now, by lute strummed and violin drawn, a waltz progressed. Noble hearts soared with glee and scandalized each other in secret, hidden behind blank faced masks. The thief, unaccustomed to the Breton waltz, twirled with the dances of his home and was met with stares of confusion and admiration. Noble ladies took his hand, coy at first, and slopstepped with drink, one by one until he had become a subject of whist and fantasy in their sitting room conversations.

“I hear he’s a noble lord of Hammerfell,” said one with blind certainty.

“No, a general in Cyrodiil,” argued another, “my husband served with him.”

“Hah, another bragart come-by-wealth, who’s ego is no doubt swaddled in that massive turban,” scoffed a masked Sayma. “He’d find a kindred soul in my husband, that I swear.” The noble ladies stared at the Redguard, scandalized.

The cartographer’s daughter had been goaded to attendance by her husband who now looked down on the sitting room from a balcony, engaged as he was in conversation with a man of House Montclair. Lazar was only half listening to the Montclair who had been prattling on about Breton lineage, the late prince Ranser and his half-brother Phylgeon, rightful rule, and a tiring cavaclade of accolades for his lord Wylon, punctuated with ironic anecdotes of humility. Lazar had lead the two of them ever more abroad in Covenant lands of late. No doubt, thought Sayma, to solidify more of the connections he was always obsessivly fostering. She wished to be home with her son, not wishing him to be raised soley by servants, but her husband had insited as he was often wont to do.

She glanced up at Lazar, caught his eye, and turned away thinking only of her son, that beautiful boy now walking and talking on his own, who even at this young age had a thoughtfulness about him so absent in other screaming broods. She stood and adjusted her mask, a bejeweled red half-face, and returned to the ballroom.

He had been staring at her a long while before she noticed, that stranger in the plain golden volto and red turban, and when she caught his eye he swished across the dancefloor towards her and offered his hand with a silent bow. She had a thought of denying the stranger’s ego, wiping clean the smirk she was sure he wore beneath the mask, so boorishly self-assured. But then, it wasn’t showing as she expected it to. He was avoiding her eyes, looking everywhere but at her, hand still outstretched. He began to withdraw it hand but she caught the hand and drew up close to him for the dance. Hand in hand they stepped and swayed through the masked crowd. There was an ungainly grace to him, a surefooted quality that masked an unsure heart, and Sayma struggled to plumb the self in his averted eyes.

“I’m unsettled in such parties,” she said to him as they swayed to the music, “all these masks and falsely tailored realities. Guilt and vice and horrid thought that dwells in secret, shown now with annonymous pride. It’s all very hypocritical. Your name would put me at ease.”

“Ah, but if I had a name to give,” the stranger lamented. His voice was doleful and unfamiliar. “Though, I swear my nature I will not hide from you.” His face and its adorning mask was now past hers, chin over shoulder, and he whispered sideways through it, “I am a dangerous thief, my lady. Comuppance as a man.” He relesed her hand, clutching her waist with the other and motioned to the menagerie of paintings that adorned the hall. “What worth is art in this age of indifference? What worth has one pearl to the lady who wears a hundred? We’ll see how they feel when they’ve lost it all. They’ll see me, the swindler, the liar, the thief, and therein see themselves, and therewith withdraw. This is not an evening’s entertainment, rather it’s their indecent exposure. Does this disturb you?”

It did not. Sayma almost felt a kindred spirit in those words. One who saw as she.

Their eyes met at last, her green against his blue, and Sayma let out a gasp of distant recognition. “Your eyes! They look just like– No. You can’t be– Ahezzar!”

“Just so I am not,” he said, “nor have I ever been any man but this.”

“But you– your eyes! I know those eyes, I see them in- I see them in-” She was cut off by a shrill shreik from across the hall.

“Thief! Thief! Oh gods, My jewels!” exclaimed one of the noble women.

“No!” gasped another, “my family ring! It was first era!”

More shreiks rose as a wave of understanding swept the hall. Gasping ladies were checking for necklaces and rings, yelling in kind when none could be found, and men were turning out their empty pockets desperatly. Sayma spun back to face the stranger who had released her at the first yell but he was gone, melted into versicolored silks. In the chaos she thought she saw a flash of the red turban but it was quickly lost in the blur of the scrambling crowd.

“Some Party,” Lazar later declared with flippancy as a guard had him turn out his pockets at the door. “These Bretons could do with a modicum of Redguard honor. No thief would be able to cause such a stir in Samaruik palace, his hands would be rent before he pilfered his first jewel.”

“Ah, to be a rug washer in Samaruik,” quipped Sayma. It was old humor, poking fun at the bloody history of the palace, humor which now seemed lost on the annoyed Lazar.

“Rohlbert Montclair says some of the ladies described him wearing a golden mask and red turban. Did you see any who fit that description, my dear?”

“Indeed I did not,” Sayma lied, “rest assured, dearest Lazar, the fortune you spent on me leaves intact.” The two turned out of the estate in silence quitting the last dregs of that broken ball.

The thief and Ten-Paw had already regrouped outside Shornhelm’s gates and were riding north to thes coast and the furthest limits of Breton influence.

“A fair haul, Vethiit?” the Khajiit asked, “This one heard much commotion rise from within the walls. You’re late too this one must add.”

“Wouldn’t know,” said the thief “I gave the jewels to a gutterling. Told him to change them for gold with a fence and distribute it to those who have need of it. Told him if he didn’t the gold-face man would know and would cut his throat as he slept. I think he’ll listen.”

“Incorigible Vethiit, stupid Vethiit!” laughed Ten-Paw, “This one is ashamed of you!”

They kicked their horses to a gallop as they rounded the road to Northpoint and Ten-Paw yelled to him as he pulled ahead in the night. “Yet, somehow, he also bristles with pride!”

Chapter XI: The Parting and the Coin, Tender is the Sea-Ghost

“A gift must be returned in kind.”

-Code of the Baandari

House of The Thief, Lover Setting. Retrograde Tricky Plane(t), Tu’whacca. Prograde Tall Plane(t), Ruptga. Lord roused on eastern horizon.

He prayed to the God of The Many Unknown Ways of Water, to the God of Nothing Goes Wrong, the God of Minor Spirits That Sometimes Spite Us, to Tava and even the far east’s Lord of The Middle Air, Lastly he prayed to the God of Make Way, The Hoon Ding. Old habits were like that.

He was standing abreast Ten-Paw on the Northpoint quay, staring out at the bruise-blue Sea of Ghosts, a body of water that dwarfed any he had ever known, swallowed them in its frigid churning gullet even, with plenty room to spare. They had sold their horses outside town to a ploughmer and now readied themselves for sojourns of a naval bent. They were parting ways and he was silent.

“Hermorah dan jer fea maor. Zara to’ jer huna naba,” his Khajiit friend was saying. It was an invocation to Hermaeus Mora, who Khajiit believed was made the tides in the beginning place, and a prayer to Khenarthi, the catname of Tava.

“Revenge takes you far and away, Vethiit,” said Ten-Paw with a smile. He was referring to Morrowind.

They hadn’t gleaned much from the Caravan ledger stolen in Evermore. Everything seemed to be ciphered into an unrecognizable script, an accountant’s code used to protect trade secrets and mask dubious shipments from prying customs inquisition. The only decipherable thing of note was just inside the book cover on a handscrawled nameplate where, in daedric leaning penmanship, was scrawled, ‘Hlaalu Ren.’

Under it with the flourish of an eager hand someone else had written:

‘This book is now under the care of Acct. Algeon Redfellow in light of that old snake Hlaaluís escape to Mournhold, Pelin drown the grayskin embezzler! All books shall be reconsidered in his wake in chronological order. This note being a placeholder of intent.’

If Ren had been accountant and shipment master of the Caravan those five years ago he was the thief’s best chance at uncovering the shipment that had destroyed the young Ahezzar af-Anselm. He made up his mind to search out the Hlaalu in Morrowind and, one way or another, convince him to translate the ledger. He would have to take a ship along the north coast to Skyrim, travel down to Riften, and from there make his way through Stonefalls and Deeshan to the Mourning Hold. Just a jaunty traipse through hostile Ebonheart lands, to the very capital no less, under the watching eye of a walking, talking, actively smiting god to shake down one of her children for information. What could go wrong?

“This one is sorry you won’t come to Elsweyr. Many more warm days in Rimmen than Riften, yes? Ten-Paw was saying as the thief checked his possibles.

He was clad in the pitch-leather under his travel robes and his head was wrapped in a simple turban. The Yokudan dagger hung at his hip. He had used what was left of his earnings to buy a rucksack from a Northpoint mage and it now held the ledger and map case, his journal, a set of picks, and a forged letter proclaiming him a banner-neutral surgeon. Ten-Paw now added to this list a simple brass coin. The thief turned the coin over in his hand.

“This coin holds no value in the markets of man, Vethiit, but this one thinks It’ll have some worth to you. The Baandari know it well, as do the Renrija Krin. That is an In-Kind-Coin, the symbol of my debt left unpaid. Show that coin to any Baandari or Renrija in Elsweyr and they’ll help you find this one. J’zar would still be declawed in that tower… He would have eaten his whole tail before the sootelf by now if you hadn’t had the misfortune of being thrown in there too. Khajiit knows when to thank a god.”

“You skooma addled sugarshit,” the thief said, tears welling in his eyes, “your brain’s gone soft with sugar. It was you who saved me! The debt is mine.”

“Very well,” Ten-Paw laughed, “But seeing as Vethiit don’t use In-Kind-Coin, I must take your word as binding verbal contract. Khajiit gladly holds you to it as the Daedra might. He will not forget.”

“Good. Embrace me you stupid cat, you’re my only friend.”

“Keep yourself out of Jail, Vethiit. This one will await you in Elsweyr when your venging streaks do quiet. Steal only what is superfluous. Ahzirr Durrarriss.”

“Yes, we give freely to the people, I won’t soon forget it. I won’t forget anything you’ve taught me, J’zar. Fusozay Var Var.”

“Var Var Var. Your Ta’agra grates these delicate ears, Vethiit. Leave before he misses you in earnest. Trrrangai, Rrraga No Shirrra.”

Ten-Paw’s purring attempts at Yoku touched the thief and he was struck with grief at leaving his closest friend. He turned and looked at the ship, tar and timber tall as the dock buildings creakspeaking in the breeze. He wiped a tear and looked back but J’zar was already walking away, one orange paw aloft in farewell as he went. He suspected the cat was weeping too.

A Breton boatswain was loosing the moorings of his belayed dinghy and now motioned the thief aboard. They shoved off the quay with their oars and rowed out to the waiting ‘Bonnie Lass of Where’, A neutral merchant vessel, Skyrim bound by way of Winterhold, supplied a week and set to sail.

Wind blew like a whetted blade adeck the Bonnie Where, and lifted briny phantoms who danced the waters ‘bout her bow with kelpen knots of hair. Below the churning brack, as blackwrought as the void, roiled and riled and tumbled there, with Bonnie Where astride. The fading dark, and breaking light did naught to brighten those phantasmic depths and the thief-as-surgeon was lost in likeblack thought as the anchor was aweighed. By Mizzen, Fore and Mainmast rose, first Main, Topgallant and Royal sails. Then the flying, the inner, the outer Jib with Trying Sail in tow. She trundled left, the Bonnie Where, and the surgeon had no thought free of subservience to the sea below. It was in his every fiber and as the ship port tacked and its point of sail was turned, in irons, beam reach, to running, he felt his spirit lurch forth with the ship and Tava’s sounding horn did blow. Breton, Nord and Niben men all rigging rose and hauled at lines and thus old Bonnie Where ruddered creaking to her plotted lanes.

The captain was Nibenese, Voraius Stird, an imperial merchant marine who had carved his fortune shipping Bug Musk from Blacklight to Wayrest, and even now kept his business afloat despite the crumbled infrastructure of the Empire. He had hardly set foot on any land in twenty years. Stird was a hard knot of saltscrub and a shrewd tasker and he now made his way down from the tiller where the first-mate had relieved him. Stird welcomed the surgeon with a hand’s broadside volley to his back and nearly struck the landlegged man to the deckings.

“Ain’t got yer sea legs yet, surgeon?”

“First time on any ship at all,” he replied with a voice that hardly bulwarked blooming sickness below.

“Normally wouldn’t take on a man who doesn’t know the sea and her wiles,” the Captain said, “but a surgeon’s rarer than a Nereid’s husband these days. Divvied up to the squabbling thirds of war I reckon, while we at sea takes what we can. I mean no ill when I say I dare hope we’ve no need of ye at all.”

“Just so, I hope it more,” said the surgeon and he spoke truer than was known.

Their journey went unfettered by the happenstance of sea. The Lover, her modesty ever intact, had left for a western liaison, setting below the horizon. In her absence the Lord had properly established his spangled visage in the heights of the heavens. Even he was to be supplanted soon for already the Mage was raising its staff up from starless eastern waters. The surgeon noted this and went back to retching off the deck for the third time that week. The swelling frigid waves of the Sea of Ghosts had only made the salted pike of supper less agreeable than it habitually was. He sweated in the northern air, which grew a colder antipode to his sea fever with each passing day. And who, pray tell, does cure the physician, especially he who falsely practices? He looked up from the keel which he had battered with his sick, into the highwatered night and saw there the flashings of sheetlightning and a rudely shaped and massive thunderhead, its approach of anvil crown briefly lit by cracking bolts. At this sight he peeled himself off the railings and retreated off the deck and away the coming storm.

They had passed Highrock’s northern bay, continued off the shoals of Kurog’s Wrothgar, and on to the waters of Skyrim. Solitude was long passed as they skirted the coasts of The Pale, over Pilgrim’s Trench, on their final push towards Winterhold. All had been easy and fair but ever roughening seas presaged the coming storm and even the Bonnie Where seemed to tense its planks against it.

The surgeon had spent most of his time in the cabin he was afforded for his work, a luxury the standard crew did envy, and he spent that time annotating and studying maps, writing in his journal and looking over the ledger, none of it very medical. He briefly supped with the crew and saw them for surgeonly ‘advice’ which mostly constituted the reciting of maxims and telling the men to, ‘buck up and face the unavoidable minor pangs of life.’ Aside these lesser interactions he mercifully had not been called on to ply his trade and so, as the storm overtook the Bonnie Where outside, the surgeon was surprised by the clamorous rhythm of a knock at his door. He threw it wide to find the third-mate, frayed and harried.

“You’re needed at once, surgeon! Something dire. Cap’n’s been stricken!” shouted the exasperated mate, a boy of only sixteen. He was met again with the door as the Redguard surgeon shut it in his face, muttering,

“A moment– A moment please.”

The mate pushed the door open again to find the surgeon, raising a quaking glass of brandy with an unsteady hand, uncharacteristic for a man of his trade. The Redguard downed the glass, circled himself to Satakal, and was feverishly praying to as many gods as could leave his lips.

“Ye’ve gotta hurry, Surgeon!” the mate was shouting and he took the leafshake surgeon by his shirtsleeve. The surgeon grabbed his rucksack and timidly obliged after the mate into the hall.

The ship was heaving back and forth and their footing was undermined by the pitch, throwing them against one wall and the other as they went. The surgeon’s mind was racing, last desperate plans to keep his cover intact flitted into view and fell flat. Stird’s life balanced on one side and his freedom was on the other, the divide between them a razor not even Mehrunes could love. He lost the brandy before he’d even cleared the hall.

They pushed their way above deck into the driving rain of the nowcome storm and the mate took the surgeon by his arm and with his other hand held fast a grapnel of rope that ran its length. Slowly the mate lead him across the lurching deck towards the captain’s quarters. The surgeon was rummaging in his rucksack with his free hand. It was a last ditch bout of cunning but all that he could do. He produced the leather roll of picks from out the pack and let them slip from his grasp as the ship yawed again. The roll hit the decking, unfurled as it slid, and sent the picks careening off the rocking ship in a small clatter of iron.

“Oh gods, my scalpels!” shouted the surgeon as they spilled into the dark waters below “I can do naught without them!” He feinted to throw himself after them but the third-mate held him fast as expected. “They’re lost, surgeon. Come on!”

At last they entered the captain’s quarters and the mate pushed the door shut against the storm. Lanterns overhead swayed with the ship and cast a frenzied movement against the subdued forms below. The whole of the crew had silently gathered around the captain who had been laid out flat on his desk. Stird was clutching his abdomen with both hands and groaning in agony, writhing under the hands of the first mate and the galley cook who held him there, his massive form reduced to a squirming child by the pain. They all now looked expectantly at the surgeon who was prodded to the fore by the mate. He was dripping, sopping with the storm which masked new sweat, and was stammering apologies.

“My scalpels- gone, I– nothing to be done. Can’t work without them, you see. Tragic. Spilled over the side and– yes, nothing to be done. Poor man. Can’t–”

The surgeon was wiping his brow, like unto Stird’s, knotted and exasperated with sweat.

“It’ll be fine, surgeon,” comforted the boatswain, bringing forth a salt-cracked bag, “we keep an operating kit ‘ere on the ship. Not as fancy as yer lost own, I reckon, but enough to do the job. ‘ere, there’s scalpel and gauze a plenty, salves against infection, bandage and all. Surely ye’ve a spell or two as well.”

This happy coincidence turned the surgeon a paler tint and set him quaking anew. He circled himself innumerably, muttering to deeply western gods, called for more brandy and was denied, and hesitantly plumbed the source of Stird’s pain with unsteadily probing finger tips.

The crew gathered round, a mockery of medical theater, and watched on as the surgeon set to work, he as unlearned as the rest. He incanted spells he didn’t know, worked the scalpels, cut and clotted, braced himself against the swaying Bonnie Where, prayed and slit and the crew looked on, bookdumb but presumably learning something from his flourishes. A class without a teacher.

Before the hour was out the surgeon had finished his work and indeed, he had relieved the captain’s suffering and all suffering thereafter.

Stird lay dead.

Subsequent inquiry within Stird’s cabin unsheathed the thief from within the surgeon guise and so began long deliberation of what was to be done with the wretch. Of his guilt, all were certain, they had all witnessed the murder with rapt attention. All that remained was that they, his sentencing committee, come to agree on suitable punishment for his negligence.

“Gut ‘im as he did the Cap’n,” shouted one of the group, “Make ‘im bleed in kind!”

“Death’s too light a sentence,” said another, “I say we fix ‘im ‘bov the bow an let the gulls carry ‘im off by bits n’ bits!”

“Keel haul the fake an’ let them sea-ghosts sort ‘im.”

“Saber off them delicate fingers of which ‘e’s so fond. Feed ‘em to ‘im slow.”

“Bury ‘im live at sea with the Cap, I say! Let ‘im look on ‘is work as ‘e swallows the brack!”

“Gents!” the first-mate broke the squabble with a raised hand, “we’re merchant men of honor, not lawless dogs of the sea! Indeed, this man’s crimes do warrant punishment severe but lest we make ourselves baser beasts, like unto ‘im, I say we leave it to the law ashore. We keep ‘im till Winterhold… Let ‘im see ‘ow ‘e likes the Chill.”

A murmur rose, some still dissenting for blood, but the Nords of the crew, in hushed words, were repeating the first-mate’s sentiment.

“The Chill. The Chill. The Chill.”

All good Nord boys and girls were raised to fear The Chill, a prison cut from glacial ice that haunted unknown reaches far past the frontiers of Winterhold. It’s gelid howling tunnels were manned, they were taught, not by mortal guards but by servile atronachs, great lumbering shards of living ice possessed of neither clemency nor pity. What death did not claim of the prisoners there, of which there was very little, gangrene picked over, freezing to useless rot the choicest remainder of limbs. The Cyrod and Breton men were silent as the Nord’s chant rose and the words themselves hung there, bereft of warmth.

“The Chill. The Chill. The Chill.”

They had the thief now by the scruff of his robes and they hauled him out the cabin and off towards the brig belowdecks. Out into the storm they pushed like a lynchmad mob, thief at the fore, and they prodded him on into the tempest’s wail. Hail mixed with rain around them and clattered and bounced across the deckplane, springing left and right to the pitch of the Bonnie Where. It was chaos in the storm, some gripped the grapnel and railings and caught their slipping bothers as the whole mob staggered crosswise the lurch. The thief lost his footing on the beads of hail and was kicked flat from behind then hoisted back to stand. The augerous chant still rose from the chaos, and lightning strobed on the selfmade magisters’ justice drunk eyes,

“The Chill. The Chill. The Chill.” The Bretons and Cyrods and all the young deckhands now joined, “The Chill. The Chill. The Chill.” The words could’ve froze a pyre.

Just then, from far to the west, a Yoku god did presumably hear the thief’s desperate pleas for help and stood from his throne. He was the God of That Was The Last Thing We Expected To Happen and he boarded the Bonnie Where with a crack.

The bolt had tumbled down from the heavens faster than a striking serpent, every scale of it abloom with fire. It struck the main mast at the top and ploughed it through, splitting it with what sounded like the thunder of every Thu’um ever spake. The twainrent mast crashed down on the deck in a splintering V. By miracle or mundane luck both sides of the V crashed around the thief, scattering the crew and crushing those too slow to miss it. It continued down through the railings, through the decking, cleaving down through part of the hull and the wedge of deck upon which the thief stood crashed down into the cargo hold below.

He scrambled topside up the inclined wedge as the hold was spilled in with midnight water. Some crew yet lived and they were shouting all. Lamps were smashed and torches darked by wet and the only light left was heaven’s strobe.

The whole of the boat, yawed severe by the mastmade breach, had trundled hard to port, such that its portedge railings kissed the waves and its starboard railings leaned truer to their name, deckboards towards the stormhid stars. If there was any spirit left in the beams and planks of the Bonnie Where they surely now said final prayers. Darkness masked the sundering of the ship, each crack of lightning flashing staccato vignettes of further terror.

The thief had his hand caught and wrapped in the roping which ran the starboard rail. He was hanging now over the impossibly angled deckplane which had bucked off most of the crew and slid them into the swelling dark below. A few loose men struggled in the tangle of rigging that was brought down by the sundered mast, their former captive of secondary thought to survival.

The dinghy was just over the rail from him. It had come loose off one of the two cranes that hoisted it along the starboard side and now dangled against the hull like a laughably oversized windchime. The thief hauled himself into its plumb hull and braced himself inside, feet on the transom and grasping the gunwale, so that he looked like a chapel statue perched in its alcove. He took his dagger and cut loose the fastenings on the prow, sending niche and statue both crashing into the waves below.

Yet more clamor accompanied the Bonnie Where’s journey to the depths, a discordant litany played out in howling wind, clattering hail and creaking then splitting wood. Sundered thus fully and on her side she was pulled beneath the roiling waves and with a final sputter the hymn to her destruction ceased.

Solemn mute, she dove four fathoms more into the black, though none could see her go, and came to rest amongst other failed attempts to tame the sea, skeleton hulls of Man’s dashed pride, those broken tenants who shared her bed. Therein she took on a new name, fitting of her station. Never more The Bonnie Lass of Where, ever after The Bonnie Lass of Pilgrim’s Trench.

Though free the wreck the thief had much left to endure of the storm. Rain and seaspray mixed around such that he felt as much under the water as on top it. The little dinghy was erected vertical by the swells, cutting down them into flumes of icy water then lifting anew. He wasn’t far off the coast of Skyrim, enough to see it on a clear day, but in that tempestuous night he may as well have been half way to Atmora. He unfastened the oars from the dinghy hull and did his best to row with the energy of the swells. He rowed and rowed with all his might, limbs numbing with cold, palms tearing bloody and stinging with salt, up, down, up again, and the only direction he did not care to try was below.

There was a splashing aside him, one of the desperate crew struggling to remain above the waves, and in a sudden pang of guilt driven mercy the thief hauled the sopping wretch into the dinghy. His muscles were afire with the rowing and he needed the respite of secondary arms. It was the young third-mate, laying there now gasping for air. There was no time for coddling, this was no rescue. He flashed the dagger at the sputtering boy’s throat and commanded him before he’d even caught his lost wind.

“Row damn you! Row to live!”

Row they did. They frenzy pulled against the oars.

The mate was sure of death by wave or dagger, and which was kinder in the end? He thought of his Niben Home. Of his mother and his summer loves. He thought of the girl he wished to marry, who’s family’s favor he sought to curry on the Bonnie Where. He thought he’d have returned, captain of that ship one day, to sweep fair Ysabel Cnisia far and away. With a crew of his own and a young bride ashore, that is how the mate wanted to die. Not like this, never like this. He rowed. He rowed against the fear, a fear that Daedra envied not being the cause, a fear that mortals only summon up in direst straits. He rowed until his limbs rebelled numb against him, until his vision blurred, until he collapsed over the oar and could summon nothing more within. And still his mind screamed, row!

The mate awoke shivering to the calls of gulls. He still lay in the hull of the dinghy but now stared up into a clear blue sky, a breeched birth of the sea. Gone was the storm and the swell of the waves, the terror of the night before. He pushed himself up to sitting with considerable effort and peered about in confusion, squinting against the day.

The boat had been hauled ashore on a beach that glimmered with rime mixed sand under Magnus’ noontime throne. The sun did little to warm him in the bitting Skyrim wind. Little would have save the furnacelike heat of Ysabel’s naked skin., how he missed it. He rubbed his scalp with a raw bloodbrown hand and thanked each divine in kind. Shoreline reeds were all froze up about him, wreathed in crystal, like an alchemist’s glass piping planted in the sand. Where the waves gently lapped around the boat already ice was building up, trying to fuse the little dinghy to the sand as if the ocean hadn’t had its fill with the Bonnie Where. It was a miracle the boy hadn’t succumbed to frostbite or the creeping death-by-sleep that cold and wet so fondly call a brother.

He pulled at a leather lace that hung out the top of his shirt and produced from the end of it the tiny bag that was his possibles at sea. Inside were his scant treasures, a little oil paint cameo of Ysabel that now ran in parts from his near drowning (he kissed this), a small flint and steel he used to light the boats greaselamps, the neatly folded paper that was his contract with Stird (now too wet to save and useless anyhow), and other such little objects that boys do take to sea.

His teeth all aclatter, the mate freed some reeds from their icy sheaths and set into them with the flint and steel until he’d roused a small fire. He broke off a few bits of the dinghy’s gunwale and loosed the thwarts and soon had got the fire going big enough. He turned the dinghy on its side to shelter against the wind, propped it up by one of the oars which lay broken not far off and stripped down to naked out of his damp cloths which were freezing into stiff sheets. He got as close to the fire as he could and hung his cloths about him to dry.

There was only one thing out of place in the whole scene, one missing element the mate had little care to wonder after. The thief, his frenzied rescuer and captor from the night before, was nowhere to be seen. Indeed if the mate had wondered after the thief, if he had concerned himself with anything but his immediate survival, he may have noticed the staggering tracks that lead south from the beached craft.

Indeed the thief had pitied the boy and left him living. He hadn’t expected or wanted any blood on his hands save what he expected to exact of Lazar. Stird was a tragic necessity, and the thought of taking the poor man’s life sat heavy in his mind. He had tried to save the captain, he hadn’t set out to kill him when he made the first scalples cut, but by negligence the deed was done and it was something he would carry ever more. One more ghost set to that sea, one more ghost to haunt his mind. He swore, as he walked south towards Riften, that he would never again take an innocent life. While he was at it, he also swore never again to pretend himself any profession which he could not himself apply in practice, for good measure he also swore to never again sail the northern seas. These vows he would keep to his dying day.

Chapter XII: A Friend to Rats, A Shadowmark

“Riften, you city of timeworn driftwood, half afloat on pylons and gangways that spill and collapse into broad Lake Honrich, your tumbledown piers criss-crossed with laundry lines and cargo netting give the appearance of a city held together by twine alone. Riften, rat-home, you are the coarse heart of Skyrim’s mild autumnal holdings. Riften, ne’er before have I seen a place of such schism between have and have-not; how I’d like to tip your ancient scales.”

-Thief’s Journal, Riften

Cold. He was so very cold. It was strange to him how close to burning the sensation of this cold was. How the burn of rime mirrored that of the sands he had once called home. Skyrim seemed antithesis to the Alik’r, yet tantamount to it and somehow crueler. There was more to it than burning, it felt as though the cold was in him, as if it had bed down in his bones, as if he would have to carry it forever in his heart. His heart, it was beating slower. His blood ached in its veins, coming to grueling crawl. Then numb. Yes, now numb. First the tips of the toes and fingers but spreading. Slowly. Slowly. Just walk. His eyes ached too. He thought of what they might look like when he was later found frozen to death. Would they be mistaken for marbles? Would they be prised from his head for rude games amongst Nord children? Threaded, like unto glass beads, and given as gifts amongst hags?

Yes death was coming. Death was the only topography he saw. He deserved it, deserved it for what he had done to Stird, deserved it for leaving that third-mate who he guessed was surely dead by now, deserved it for being unable to save so many lives in Sentinel, unable to save his father.

No. No, he couldn’t die, not yet. He couldn’t die before seeing justice done. His honor was not salvagable, but Sayma’s was. He could show her the truth of her husband, save her and her son. Her son, Lazar’s son, It should have been his own. Yes, he could not die, not yet. Oh, but it would be so easy. It would be so easy to just lie down, lie down and forget it all, lie down and let it drift away, all of it, honor, justice, Sayma, Lazar, Ten-Paw.

“Stupid Vethiit. Incorrigible Vethiit,” he could almost hear him in the howling wind, “This one is ashamed of you. So low. So troubled. Poor poor Vethiit the kitten. Weighed so low already? This one thought you a man. This one thought he taught you the krin. We grin at death, Vethiit. We grin at the hardship we endure. We exact our revenge on this world. Revenge. With a smile.”

A smile cracked on the thief’s lips, “gods damn you, cat,” he said to no one, “let’s hear you say the same if you were shaved.”

He kedged himself forward, casting a failing spirit ahead, dragging a limp body behind. It was day but his sight grew dim, a candle extinguishing in the void. A candle sputtering, its light there ahead of him. Dimming. Dimming. Dimming…

Brightening… Brightening? How had any light not been wrestled from the air by this cold? Yet there it was, a light, glowing against the glaucous crust of Nirn, orange against creeping black. A light. A little flickering light… He collapsed into the snow.

There was yelling now, distant, snowmuffled. It came to him as if in a dream. It was wordless to him, stripped of meaning, separated by a wall of ice, separated by a glacier. All was dark.

In his dream Anselm clasped his shoulders, he was so proud of his son. His face contorted in pain. Lazar pushed his head forth out of Anselm’s mouth, he was grinning and confident. Orange hair sprouted out of Lazar’s cheeks and his features waxed feline. “Wake up Vethiit,” said Ten-Paw.

He awoke but not to Ten-Paw. It was a bedraggled Nord who stood over him, his long gray beard slicked and yellow with oil. He was stooped over the thief with eyes rolled back in sagging lids and his hair hung long, It was tied and interwoven with dried herbs and twigs. The thief tried to sit up but was unable and at this movement the Nord’s eyes rolled forward again. They where a striking steel-gray and seemed to peer great distances, even inside.

“Had you marked for dead, Redguard,” said the old Nord, “sure as Shor made man. Course, can’t fault a man for trying to unclench old Orkey’s grasp. That Old Knocker sure did have his claws in you all right but I’ve picked up more than one spell to warm the blood after all these years out in the frost.”

“Where–” began the thief but the Nord cut him off.

“Don’t trouble yourself to talk. You danced with death today and that’s a tiring two-step. You’re in my care now. Fjorki is the name, Fjorki Light-Turner. First of the Light-Turners. I built the lighthouse in which I lay you down, placed each stone and raised each beam. Yes, this is the lighthouse of Winterhold, first of its kind outside Solitude. My beauty and my life, my ramparts against the shadows.”

They were in a circular room bounded by stone steps that jutted from the fieldstone walls, cochlear and rising to the roof, what lithic welkwork man does make. From the ceiling hung assortments of drying herbs, frost mirriam and milkthistle, Strings of juniper and snowberry, braids of knotted garlic. Some of the herbs hung in long ropes that stretched down to the floor. Fjorki motioned through the hanging herbs, which made a desiccate and invert forest of the room.

“Rest. Night comes soon and I must set to my tasks. Turn the light, Fjorki! Drive back the shadows, Fjorki! Damn birds! You hear them? They come in threes. Well, twos now…” To the thief he sounded more than a little mad.

The lighthouse keeper left him to rest and he drifted back to fitful sleep.

In his dream a parliament of crows gathered to sit in judgment of one of their fellows. Their verdict dire, they set into the accused crow and with black beaks pulled him asunder.

The thief set out again the following day, recouped, this time with dry robes and castory furs and with Fjorki’s prolixitous chanting to protect him from the cold. The old Nord asked nothing of him, only that he mind the southern dark and those that sing in it, a confusing request by an old buffoon.

He headed south from the lighthouse, crossing rimerode hills and silent snowy passes, tracing a southern ricochet across his maps of Skyrim, inn to inn, pursehearth to pursehearth. He walked with alcine herds of beasts and wondered at the velvet tangles of their crowns. He walked glacial trickles that bled to streams and thus to rivers. Slowly the land warmed. Spruce and fir grew sparse, supplanted by an ossuary of fireleafed femurs of birch. This was Skyrim’s temperate south, The Rift.

Riften was on the far shore of Lake Honrich from him, a racked farrago of local wood, crowded in with jutting piers and strung with drying laundry and fisher’s line. Mooring posts and rotten pilings of longsunk docks protruded from the lake, silent wetfooted sentries upon which, at the watermark, stuck stubborn henbeaked barnacles and swaying tufts of pubic algae. The city looked, even at a distance, as if it might collapse at any minute, remembered only as flotsam ever after.

The thief parted a few coins to a waiting ferryman who eyed his foreign skin with mistrust yet would suffer it for the cost of an ale. They slid across the fogskimmed lake by way of a rope bearded with algae which the ferryman pulled forth from the water and hauled at till it was taught. He drew them thus across the lake and proximity to Riften did it no favors. It was the kind of homely sleeping lover who in the morning light affronts a now sober bedmate to silent leave.

Mudfaced urchins went unshod and scumsoled cross the docks tossing clods of dirt at merchant’s backs and, screaming with excitement at their small victories, running for darker quarters. The thief disembarked the skiff to a grunt from the ferryman and Riften embraced him in its dilapidated bosom.

He had not planned to stay in this city, just long enough to pinch ample coin to carry on to Morrowind, but as he made his rounds of dubious endeavor he came across a sight that gave him cause to pause. A crowd had gathered in the street, a perfect clutch of distracted marks, and the thief pushed his way into the gathering throng, loosing a few purses as he went.

In the heart of the seething crowd were two men, both Nords, and one had the better of the other. The elder Nord, of noble looking stock, was beating the younger with an argent cane. The younger nord, a barefoot guttersnipe, took his beating well but found no respite from the inner ring of the crowd who pushed him back whenever he did try to quit his beating.

After a good long while of this a third man pushed through the crowd, a servant to the older Nord returned to his master, with a squat stump of log and placed it in the ring. The elder Nord had the snipe by his wrist, too beaten now to resist, and with his other hand unhooked an axe from his belt and held it aloft.

“See ye all what fate befalls any wretch who tries to pick the pocket of Jargur Silver-Blood! Let all the scum of Riften know no Silver-Blood of Markarth will be made a dupe! We are ancient blood, fit for kings, and will yet thrive a thousand winters more!”

The thief, pangs of his northern musings of broken honor still fresh, stepped forward into the ring and silence fell about the confused medley of the crowd.

“Surely this wretch has suffered enough for his crimes, noble lord,” he calmly said, “to part his fingers would be… Indulgent, don’t you think?”

“Indulgent? Indulgent?!” raged the Nord, “indulgent would be to sever his neck and send a steaming shit down the bastard’s gullet! Who are you, you daggerpricked Redguard, to chastise me?! Me?!”

“I’ll gladly pay coin for his dishonor, my lord,” the thief responded coolly.

“You’ll pay in blood if you try me further, sandeater!” There was a pause.

“Then,” the thief chided, “my good lord Silver-Piss, it seems we are at odds.”

No sooner had those words vibrated the crowd’s outermost eardrums and the thief was below him. The Nord tried to stagger back to get a good arc with his axe but before he could the thief flung Silver-Blood’s gaudy robes and tails overhead, blinding him and revealing naught but pale hairy legs and privates breezed aflap. The thief swept his leg and, with a firm push, the tangle of Nord and cloth fell face-first to the ground, bare ass in prayer to morning Magnus. Oh, if the sun could blush.

There was shock at first in the crowd but silence gave way to laughter as the thief booted the nord between the buttocks with an apt Frandarism.

“A thrust is elegant, and a cut is powerful, but sometimes the right action is, well-”

During the excitement of the turning tide one of the onlookers had put a searching hand south for his flask. He found it there but not his purse besides and he called out, “My purse! My purse! There’s a thief in this crowd!”

Another Nord hence found himself lacking too and the rabble roused further.

Bedlam turned to bedlam greater as neighbors accosted one another and broke into a fistfledged brawl. The thief grabbed the snipe from off the ground and hauled him after, shouldering through a weak-point in the welter. They ran together, thief and thief, crosswise the market and away. Soon the attention of the town guards had been called and some broke up the tangle of punchdrunk Nords while one intrepid guard took off after the fleeing pair towards the docks.

The snipe was coming back to better form and though one eye had been closed by the beating, he now took the lead, guiding the thief to a lower level of the docks, a maze of twisting gangways and footplanks. Skirred they cross the lowdock’s holy mess, jumping obstacles and ducking struts but the guard nipped ever at their heels. It wasn’t until the snipe led the thief around a breakneck angle of planks, holding him by a fistfull of shirt so he wouldn’t tumble off, that they heard a splash behind of the corner took too fast. They slowed to a trot and the snipe lead them down into a brickwork culvert, run with civic filth.

“Yer a fox more’n Shor ain’t’che m’lord?” asked the snipe when they had gotten far enough inside. He regarded him with one good eye and wiped a trickle of blood from his nose.

“Suppose it, maybe,” the thief responded catching his breath. He knew of Shor in a cursory way, the Nordname for Sep, distant in metaphor to the serpent’s hunger. He casually traced the scar on his chest. Their footstep’s scumsplash echoed off the culvert’s walls and their voices were dolefull doubled.

“Folks call me Kidd,” said the snipe, “and I’m obliged to ye for stepping in. Not many would raise a fist more’n a finger ‘round here. Got a name so’s I can thank ye earnest?”

“Not any worth remembering,” said the thief.

“An’ so yer nameless if ye wish it,” laughed Kidd, “but I reckon ye’ll be known to me’n the lads. Ratfirend by nature, Ratfriend by name. Ye know where we’re off to, Ratfriend?”

“Not versed so,” said the thief, “I’m new and passing quick.”

“The Ratway,” said Kidd with a child’s sort of reverence, “my board n’ birthright. Home to all the middenmen and gutterkin of Riften. Foysts an’ fences, louts an’ launderers, pinching princes an’ beggar kings. If any a man finds himself without a drake to bite for supper, he ends up here, an’ thems not wanting to make the morning drop, ye understand me, Ratfriend?”

“Aye,” said the thief with a rebuttal of his own land’s cant “Two Feet to Tava, the gallows bound. Men like me.”

“Right at that, Ratfriend. See? I knew we’d be fast friends.”

They carried on down the culvert as droplets from above tapped an echoing dirge. Eventually they turned left and came to a sluice gate upon which Kidd knocked, “Three times for friends, once for not-followed, thrice more spells luck.”

The metal gate shivered up at the last, opening to a merry, if fetid, subterrane.

The Ratway was as squalid as the culvert’s smell presaged. It stunk of refuse, sick, and roasting meats. Beggars and drunks crowded round counters to spend the loose coin they’d eked and barmaidens, if you could call them something so innocent or young, obliged. It was dark and rancid but not cold. Hearths burned there, floos being built up long ago to join with those of the chimneys of surface houses so their smoke was masked the attention above. Fences sat in appraisal of newly brought wares, petty magistrates in their judgdoms, passing opinions like royal decrees. Lusteyed men side-eyed those ladies and boys of the oldest profession and sometimes, when they had the coin and the courage, they approached and were led, trembling handed in excitement, to rooms of iller repute.

Elder thief followed younger to a bar table, whereat he parted a few coins for a pair of racked and ragged flagons. They sat and dank, quicksilver in conversation which was roused in time by Kidd’s exuberance, until both thieves nursed heads aswim and jocular.

The thief couldn’t help liking Kidd. He was joyful in spite of his wretched station and took great pride in being a lesser subject of the Pact. There was no bloated misplaced honor in him but there was a brash self-honesty the thief admired. They talked for a long while, comparing exploits, Kidd laughing heartily through with his one good eye rested ever on the thief. The only measurable difference between the men was that danger and misfortune seemed to find the thief unwilling while Kidd would seek it out, to self-destructive ends.

“Temperance is even more necessary outside the law than within,” the thief chided as Ten-Paw once had to him after the snipe had loosed a tale taller than Hrothgar. Kidd only laughed.

“Temperance is for thems got something to loose, Ratfriend.”

They carried on back and forth into the late hours, the thief eventually coaxed into showing Kidd his night’s handiwork, Maps of Sentinel, Evermore, and Shornhelm all codified to criminal schematic, symbols of a wordless cant.

“Brilliant, I sees it clear! Coded marks to conceal yer intentions from the law. A paper key to all the riches of a city! Can ye teach me? Ye know, to read em proper?”

“Aye I could,” said the thief “But I’ve business south that needs attending and quick.”

Kidd persisted and, with judgment clouded lonesome, the thief eventually ceded a day to him. That day became two, which in turn became a week and another. He had thought better of it but had known only scant friendship since Sentinel, the presence of an eager pupil being analgesic to his sins. It felt good to be wanted, to be needed, to have something to give. Every night the two stalked into Riften’s slumbering streets and set to task, burgling and marking, marking and burgling until no house was spared their fingerwork and was prompted dire notice and a curfew from the guard.

“Bout time ye met the other lads,” said Kidd midway through that second week as Rain’s Hand brought tubers to bear, dull roots and leaden rain. The Shadow, itself hazarding a form more like to a fisher’s hook than the praying shade mortals describe, had already reared and The Mage was setting eastwise soon.

“You mean there’s folks out there can stand you?” joked the thief prompting Kidd to laugh as he always did, that fullbodied humor shaking through him.

“Sure, Ratfriend, Sure. More’n one in this town ain’t out for my blood yet. Sees what I can do ‘bout that. Come on, they’re yonder in the warrens now.”

Kidd led the thief through the Ratway and into her warrens, grubby sublets and bunks shared by the degenerate scampering lice of Riften’s nethers. The thief had been boarding in the warrens himself the past few weeks but hadn’t the mind to know any but Kidd.

They came to a table of rough kids, none older than the thief when he suffered his defame, throwing down runecarved hen bones in a Nordic game of chance.

“Oy you lot! Here’s ol Ratfriend I’s tellin ya ‘bout. Ye know, the one with them gobsmackin’ maps I’m always on ‘bout. Realer’n Alduin’s scaly prick, as I told ye, thank ye very much.”

One of the group stood, a dirty blond with sallow cheeks and crustcornered eyes. He shook the thief’s hand earnestly and marveled at him as if meeting some bardsong hero for the first time.

“Real’s right! And the skin on ‘im! Er, never met a Redguard, pardon nameless lord, no offense. Is it true you once stole a vampire’s fangs right out ‘is ‘ead while ‘e slept?”

“True.” laughed the thief, playing along with Kidds apparent exaggerations. Kidd scratched at his head, stricken with parasites of embarrassment.

“Even the part where ye stole Emeric’s bedsheets when ‘e got up t’ fill ‘is chamberpot?”

“Aye, though I can’t now remember why I needed them,” said the thief with a sidelong glance at the blushing Kidd.

“What about,” said another of the lads, “the time ye broke into the daggerfall bank and made yer escape by air thanks to a harpy ye’d wooed?”

“Neither a borrower nor a lender be,” laughed the thief, “though that harpy’s still be after me for a nestmate.”

The boys were sold, they hooted and stamped, cleared off the hen bones and made with ale and mead such as they could afford. Clockwise they were: Toadpike, the blond, Sigvar, a hair-lipped barrow boy, and Trout, a stocky lad with a wide beaming grin that showed a single blue incisor made of Stalhrim.

“You show ‘im yet, Kidd?” asked Toadpike when they were well and drunk.

“Been meaning to,” responded Kidd. The thief looked at him in befuddlement which prompted the snipe to stammer out a response. “The boys n’ me, well, we wanted to show ye something, Ratfriend. We’re real proud of it, see? One’f yer lessons put to practice. A real advancement for foystkind, all by yer hand n’ head.”

The lads lead him topside into the evening streets, spilled out of the culverts halfdrunk and swaying. They had their heads on enough to be quiet but their stealth was impaired by drink. They lead the thief down an alley to an unassuming corner and directed his eye south at one of the cornerstones.

There, smaller than a reikling’s balled fist, was a hasty etching, a diamond bounded rectangle hatch crossed in a crude henscratch. The thief knew it, knew it intimate. It was his mark for ‘Strongbox’, lifted right from the maps and applied lithic, visible to any with the eyes to look for it.

“See,” whispered Trout, “Kidd’s been after us ‘bout these maps ye’ve made. Says we’re at a turning point in the advancement of burglary.”

“Marks made only by us, for us, to tell our intentions or warn others off danger. Right under them guard’s noses at that! A cant spoken on the very ‘ouses n shops themselves, yeah?”

“Shadowmarks,” said Sigvar with self-satisfaction. They had obviously debated the name for a while.

The thief was silent. An inner conflict roiled within him. He was partly impressed by their ingenuity, a little proud they thought his concepts revolutionary. But he was mostly angry. Angry that Kidd had gone behind his back on this, angry to have his work vandalized into posterns and foundations so any could see it, angry by the fear it would come back to him. The maps were a two-fold defense against understanding. The first line of this defense was in not showing the maps to anyone, much less carving them on stone. He let them know all this when they’d returned to the Ratway, laying into them with admonishment.

“But Ratfriend, I– We– You know, we thought– For the betterment of us all… For the advancement of The Guild…”

“The… Guild?”

“Sure, you know– We all thought you must be a member, thief great as you. The Thieves Guild, Ratfriend, thems that run this whole thing.”

The thief knew of the Guild from Ten-Paw, they often worked tandem with the Krin, but he hadn’t the cause to consider it often. A loose shadowy conglomerate of gentleman rogues and low-life extortioners, an elaborate system of fronts and covers. The capitol behind fences and launderers, the orders behind some of the greatest heists in Tamriel.

“See, we’re in the Guild, Ratfriend. We thought you was too! Just lowly footpads but there’s advancement when ye have cause to earn it. We thought, ye know, with yer maps we could all climb the ladder. We’d give ye all the credit, of course!”

The thief was quietly brooding.

“Look,” said Toadpike “My brother’s a journeyman and ‘e says there’s a new position open at the top. Our chapter, see, its run by a sort of, whats the word, a triumpharate.”

“A triumvirate?” asked the thief, “Like a group of three?”

“Yeah, thas it! A triumvirate. There’s always three, see? Well, ‘cept one of em betrayed the others, made off with our chapter’s greatest treasure, the Skeleton Key. They say ‘e ran north an we jus’ learned where to, some lighthouse… Changed ‘is name an’ all. Can’t commune with the lady without it, the key I mean. See, them three built this… This.. I don’t know rightly what to call it, but I know it ‘fects our luck fer boon or bane. Never seen it meself.

“We’s thinking if we show yer marks to the bosses and we catch this traitor… Well, one of us is sure to be in with them three. Then, Ratfriend, then we’re all gold. No more scrounging for sup, no more hungry nights in the warrens”

“They ain’t enacting blood-price for him neither. We can take the key back by force if it comes to that… And ‘e’s an old feller. Some daft codger named Fjorki.”

“Right. Ye could come with us, Ratfriend. We’d ‘ave need of a man skilled such as ye. Ye could take the top an’ we’d be yer loyal men. Loyal to ye ‘til the end. We’ll never get a chance like this again! It’d be a great service to Nocturnal.

'Damn birds! You hear them? They come in threes. Well, twos now…’ Fjorki’s words rang in his head, ‘Mind the southern dark and the birds that sing in it.’ He thought of his troubling dream that night in the lighthouse and the parliament of crows. No, they weren’t crows in that dream where they? They were nightingales, little peaceful singers in the dusk, turned to ruder forms of violent Corvus in their verdict.

Knock three times spells luck, Noc. Tur. Nal.

They were Daedra worshipers, his new friends. Skittering little homiletics to a demon Prince. Nocturnal, less a ruler and more a patron, still vile to the thief who had no cause to traffic with Daedra. Some Yoku superstitions held fast in his heart. Furthermore, his ‘Shadowmarks’ would soon be everywhere, a horker’s share of unwanted attention. He prayed to the God of Where Have All My Friends Gone and made to depart.

“Please Ratfriend! Don’t go! I still have so much to learn from ye!” cried Kidd after him, “all we gotta do is take care of this Fjorki and we’re set forever! We can rule this town from below, together!”

The thief turned back, a tear welling in his eye. “I won’t kill Fjorki, Kidd… I can’t. He saved my life. But I won’t kill you to protect him either..”

He quit Riften that night, never looking back.

Chapter XIII: By Cremation, So Creation

“We watch as the world is destroyed and, through the unseaming of that cloth, catch sight of the threads and indeed how it was first stitched. Travels in the star-wounded east brings these thoughts to mind. Godspoke pilgrims crawl on scabby knees along ashen roads to the saint-shrines of the changed mer, dragging their blue bodies until palms and soles are bloody in penance. They go in hair-shirts and kresh, prostrating themselves before a living triune, prone in faith and fear. Their sorrows are mirrored in the venomous land, who’s sulfurous effusions and molten discharges spill from the crust-cracked ground as if the land was sick. As the Dunmer weep so too does the land in magmatic lamentations.”

-Thief’s Journal, Davon’s Watch

The smell entered his nose before he saw it, Morrowind. Sulfur, foul eggs, and the smell of wet cinders, like a burnt out house after a week of heavy rain, tinged with an earthy fungal sweetness. He had crossed the Velothi range from Riften, unhindered by anything but guilt. He thought of Kidd, the boy had only wanted to make him proud, and of Fjorki, he should have sent some warning to repay his kindness. He thought of a parallel Ahezzar who lived out his days as a crime lord in Riften, of a peaceful Ahezzar who never had cause to leave Sentinel at all and would, on this day, be at a desk tracing mindspace cartographies of the lands he now walked in flesh. He thought of the Ahezzar he was living, the cruelest of them all.

He was already beleaguered by the land. He came down out of the Velothis to a land who’s cartography was so alien that no map could reckon it with any justice. Fine ash covered every knowable surface and danced in every crevice. It rose with his footsteps until he was made cinerious total, looking so like an abominable gray soul who’s vessel is buried unconsecrated, damned to solemn wander the Mundus eternal. In wetter places giant fungal growths sprung up, emperor parasols spreading their umbrellic crowns to drown out the sun. Ash mixed with spores underneath and the damp alchemy of it grew dark and clumped to his boots. On the mushroom’s stems grew strange polyps that stared at the passing thief like an audience of unblinking eyes. He had to stop regularly to jettison black gobs of ashen mucus that collected in his nose. Congestive, garrote and everywhere ashes swept the land south of star-wound, what powders them dusts the maybe gray. He walked on.

In the ashfields there was no game, not as he knew it, yet the land did teem with foreign life. Far above came the haunting cries of redbacked racers. Crosswise the fields giant Shalks, glossy black scarabs, scurried excitedly clicking into their burrows and gas-beasts drifted and bobbed through the air, impossible gas bladders with languid tentacles that grazed the ground and felt after forage.

He crossed great swaths of black sand and scoria, fragmented ejecta of dawn age cataclysm. He saw sweepings of mineral fibers, fine and tangled glass like the hair of some great fell beast of a more primeval Nirn who’s name was fear or some concept older. Amidst the abrasive plains great fumaroles gashed deeper black the crust, and from them billowed vaporous sulfur which in turn painted the scorial maws with acid yellow condensate. Sometimes this precipitate caught fire by a loose lightning strike and when it burned by day the sulfur liquefied and took new hues as it dripped, sanguine in trickles and pools, bloodstreaking the shocks of mineral yellow. By night the selfsame sulfur burned in glowing blue rivers, pale fire, mancerworks of Magicka like them his people so little trusted. Brimstone, how that land did bleed and burn. Abraded inside and out, he walked on.

He traveled in the shadow of a great volcano, the Tormented Spire as his map named it, yet the thief felt it caused more torment than it suffered. It belched a great column of ash day and night which fell as silent choking snow and drifted yet more greyness around the bleached and racer cleaned skeletons of guar and alit that pierced its accumulation. Sometimes the volcano threw out great flaming rocks and other times dribbles of magma crept down its slacklipped jowls like some sedated patient of profound derangement who can only drool most days yet is still monitored for periodic fits of violence. The scalding rivers of it, that madman’s glowing spittle and jissom, preformed perverse assaults on the land around, a liquid geology of copulation that multiplied the land with creeping fire which slowed and darkened into corpulent fleshfolds of rock.

It was a land of sublime terror, punctuated at times by processions of native faithful he did witness snaking in the distance, ecstatics who walked and crawled in all manor of penance garb, cilice mail with inward facing tines to break the skin, rough kreshsack that chafed and made raw the cesious penitents’ corpus. Inflictions circumscribing an anatomy of devotion entire.

He also watched trailing funereal processions to and from Orenthis and further Necrom, kedged east or south by chanting priests, bearing newdead bodies or silently returning to homes empty of their parted kin or still bearing them in the urns that all mer fill in turn.

Silhouetted before the spewing cone of the volcano the processions of urn burials seemed all the more reverent. As new matter was born of fire so the old and sick was returned, Ashes to ashes, home hearth to the hearth of the Provisional House. The thief felt as though he stood on the edge of eternity’s cremation, delivered under the similitude of a dream, One more soul to stoke the pyre of pilgrim’s progress. He walked on.

He came across many of these pilgrims in his progress, themselves vignettes of triune faith, though what of it was hallucination he could not rightly reckon.

So follows the course of his fevered progress in the lands of the Velothi:

He first came across two netchimen with their long hooks who went to wrangle the gas-beasts. They debated as they walked. The first netchiman argued that the only law was love for the triune gods. “All else is permissible,” he claimed. The second netchiman struck him for his impertinence saying the only law was Love for the triune gods. “Do what you Will, void of desire,” he responded and, as the thief passed them, said, “Love is under his will only, which is to say ALMSIVI, which is to say us all. Paint or dance if you will, but only if you paint not for the painting and dance not for the audience. Whatever floats your netch.”

The thief carried on down the road. He next came upon two pilgrims, they were Muthsers Sex and Murder and they twined in union by its banks. When Muthsera Sex had finished, Muthsera Murder slew him and said to the thief in her defense as he passed, “He took me without lust so I slew him without vengeance, we learn to Love”

A ways further on the road he happened on three plunderers outside the brass doors of a Dwemer derelict. One plunderer looked mournfully back at the ruins and said to the others, “they never understood Love.” The second plunderer lay, mortal struck by a construct within. The third recited a common verse of Vehk’s poetry, last-rites to ease her suffering. The poem was the shape of an urn:

‘The fire is mine: let it consume thee,

And make a secret door

At the altar of Padhome

In the House of Boet-hi-Ah

Where we become safe

And looked after.’

As the thief passed, one of them explained to him it was from the sermons, “we yell across the gulf in our hearts, the closer they become the less we must yell until, at last, silence. We are become one in the hearthglow of the Provisional House. What you fail to notice is that we are one under ALMSIVI all the living while.”

The thief left the plunderers and walked on. After a while he spied two Dunmer locked in heated debate at the roadside. They were Muthsers Happenstance and Kismet. Happenstance argued by anecdote, of a mother who was preparing a dinner of kwama egg and thought, “It would be nice to have a bouquet of kanet today.” All the while her son was in the garden picking hakle-lo to season the dinner he happened to also pick a bouquet of kanet out of whim. The mother had never had flowers on the dinner table before, and the son had never brought flowers. Kismet responded that it was the close relationship of the mother and the son which led them to independently have the idea which they couldn’t not have had otherwise, a case of synchronicity which Vivec says disproves coincidence. “Indeed,” said Muthsera Kismet, “it is an illusion of your perception.” Muthsera Happenstance retorted, “you conflate fate with expectation,” and they argued on. They asked the thief intervene when he passed (which he declined) and carried on long after his going, back and forth in this nature, and he thought to himself of Ten-Paw, “When this one contradicts himself he is telling the truth.”

Further down the road the thief passed a troupe of the Red Wives of Dagon who worshiped and wept for the month’s destruction they endured. One of a pair of pilgrims engaged them on the road in solicitation. His companion chastised him, commanding him to unfold himself in Nerevar’s example rather than folding his lusts to milk. The later slew the former when he would not relent, saying to the thief as he passed, “to follow another’s path is dangerous. He wished to be dominated but not to learn.”

Later, as the ash began to dapple green with tenacious scrub, the thief came across two Dres who drove two Telvanni slaves along, yoked together at the neck. The Dres mistook the thief for a foreign client and they told him how the slaves were the daughters of brothers and fairly priced. The slaves, during this unsought bargaining, broke loose their yoke and forced the Dres masters into submission. Slaves then yoked slavers and took up their robes and carried on as them, driving them down the road in like kind. As they departed the thief one slave® said, “All truth is a necessary lie.”

The thief continued down the road to Davon’s Watch. He passed, on his way, through Kragenmoor and saw a house that did catch fire and threaten to burn alive the family within. As this was happening a Guar herder was behind his hut defecating in a bucket as was his wont and means. Springing to action he extinguished the fire with the foul water of his own making and said to himself, “ha! Truly DAGON has no power in the land of ALMSIVI, his own elements rebel against destruction!” He then stared at his hands for hours, searching for scripture, wondering if he was born to be a hero or made one by virtue of his filth.

As the thief made his way out of Kragenmore he came across two pilgrims who were old friends reuniting. They embraced at Kragenmoor’s gates but as they did one friend took up his knife and drove it into the other’s back. The one who stabbed then revealed his true face, which he had carefully hid under the face of the former’s friend. He was a debt collector who had gone unpayed too long. When the deed was done the debt collector knelt at the side of the mer he stabbed and wept bitterly, overcome with grief, for when you conceal yourself in the skin of another it wears you in turn. The thief passed them by and the debt collector wailed for the loss of his closest friend.

A ways down the road the thief passed a group of loud shouters who showered their drunken abuse on passers by. A penitent of St. Rilms crawled passed them but as they sang their hymns of abuse on the penitent he only seemed to grow more self assured. Unhappy at not being able to shake the penitent’s faith the loud shouters also got onto hands and knees and followed him in kind. The coming forth and the driving away brings all things around.

The thief came next upon a stylite, an ascetic who lived his life sitting on top of an emperor parasol. The ascetic called eureka down to the thief from his mushroom, “The scarab rolls its dungball through the void, this is why the stars, Ayem’s stars, do turn. How do those selfsame stars look from Aetherius? Why, they are black, flecks of soot in a sea of light. And what of the Magnus tear? SITHSIT still travels in a phosphorescent mirror of the sky! We of the Velothi know that forgotten enemies wait ever in the wings, our houses must remain unified under ALMSIVI! The Thrice-Sealed House withstands the Storm. Understand, outlander, that the drowned lamp is the reflection of Ayem’s stars in Seht’s waters as described by Vehk’s poetry. It is the light of remembrance pale by the dark volume of every memory that hides it. The drowned lamp may be your fate or mine.” Confused by the ascetics words, the thief walked on.

Close now to Davon’s Watch the thief entered a great slough. In the stinking mire of it he was encumbered and each troubling step magnified his guilt and sunk him further in muck. Just as he thought his end was near a troupe of graceful pilgrims happened by. They were Muthsers Valor, Daring, Justice, Courtesy, Pride, Generosity, and Humility. Muthsera Valor pleaded to his kinsmen, “we must help this outlander!” But Muthsera Pride argued that an outlander wasn’t their concern. Muthsera Daring, taking any chance to dance riskily, had already hopped from tuft to tuft of the many corkbulbs that grew up from the mire. He alit on a bulb close to the thief and asked why he should help him.

“Help me or don’t” said the sinking thief, thinking back on the netchimen, “Whatever floats your netch.”

“Haha!” said Muthsera Daring, “I shall save you without thought of repayment, my grace under ALMSIVI is assured!”

He extended a hand to the thief and hauled him over to his bulb. They slowly made their way out from the slough by way of hopping bulbwise and finally lay panting both at its edge. Muthsera Justice put an evil eye on the thief then.

“What business do you have in the lands of the Velothi, outlander?” he asked suspiciously.

“Only to submit to this land and let it shape me to be a better man by suffering.” lied the thief thinking of the men and the Red Wives of Dagon. Muthsera Justice seemed satisfied and the thief was unsure he had actually lied.

Muthsera Pride piped up again, “What makes you think this land wants to shape you, foreign-skin? This land is for the Dunmer.”

“The gulf in our hearts is great, Pilgrim,” said the thief thinking of the plunderers, “let’s use less words.” The thief then sat silent as the penitent to St. Rilms until Muthsera Pride conceded to him.

Next Muthsera Courtesy bowed to him in welcome and Muthsera Generosity gave him his guarhide shoes and let him drink of a beetle shell canteen. When the thief tried to not accept the shoes Muthsera Humility quieted him with an opened left hand.

“Forge a keen faith in the crucible of this world, outlander. ALMSIVI in every hour,” and with that the strange graceful pilgrims sent the thief on his way to Davon’s Watch.

By the time the thief had reached the gates of Davon’s Watch he felt the full effect of traveling in those inscrutable lands. He thought to himself as he entered the city, “Did I just learn something? If I did I don’t rightly know what… Then again, I do believe I’m walking like a different person. What waking allegory is this land?”

“Wealth beyond measure,” the guard said to him as he passed the gates.

“Wealth beyond measure,” he thought as he robbed the city blind.

Chapter XIV: Four Corners of the House of Hlaalu

“In the great wind of progress, tradition cannot stand.”

-Grasping Fortune

House of The Shadow, Mage Setting. Retrograde Suspicious Plane(t), Julianos. Steed rears mane above eastern horizon.

Viscous faced Hlaalu Ren sat at his lectern and swept the inkthatched plains of a ledger book with eye and pen by the abject light of a bug-lamp on the office wall, itself dimming in waning subservience. He prodded the bug to brighter light with a frown and called up the stairs with a bullfrog croak to his clerk, Latch.

“Latch! Latch! You miserable wretch, where are those deeds?”

“Begging your Pardon Muthsera Ren, I was- It was just-” The new clerk came trundling down the stairs with an armful of court documents.

“Spare me your stammering, Latch! Such meager displays that you have any worth to me at all! You assured me, did you not, that you knew how to both read and write?” said Ren with a scoff

“I do, Muthsera. It’s only, well, its only my first week, Muthsera and your work is all obfuscated in code I cant rightly reckon.”

“And why shouldn’t it be?” demanded Ren “Why these days everyone is out to bleed a most humble worker like myself dry. Why they’d bite my last Drake and, with a smile, charge me a handling fee.”

“Right you are, Muthsera. Most humble.” aped Latch.

“Don’t talk back, Latch. Where are the papers? Yes good, right there on the desk. No not that, that’s the Nevarus account, you halfwit. Good gods, what do I have to do for a proper Dunmer clerk?

Just then the door opened and knocked a hanging bell on its lintel to life. A small Dunmer girl walked in, no older than fourteen or fifteen, and Ren looked her up and down with onerous salacity. Latch had retreated upstairs to once again attempt to decipher one of Ren’s requests for another meticulously coded document he didn’t understand.

“Ah, lovely Nilia, threefold blessings. What brings you to my humblest establishment? No, don’t tell me,” he lifted her chin to get a good look at her, “your grandfather. Yes, old Gals Hlaalu sends his sinless granddaughter yet again in his stead.”

The girl was silent and her red eyes looked on every object in the Hlaalu office except at the Hlaalu who owned them. She had auburn hair and a shy disposition and she undertook her chore with the solemnity that only the love of a child affords, for she deeply cared for her grandfather. Ren opened the lectern and produced a small bag of coins, duly marked them in his ledger, and placed them in the girl’s hand with a pat. His aqueous face melted from the cloying smile he wore upon her entering to a sterner scowl.

“Thank you muthsera,” said the girl with downturn reds, “he’ll be very grateful to you.”

“And so he should,” said Ren, his face rippling mawkish again, “Now, Nili, tell your grandfather I’ll be expecting a return on my investment very soon. Very soon.”

“I will,” she said and she turned to leave.

“ALMSIVI in every hour,” said Ren as the ringing bell heralded her escape from his gaze. For all his religiosity, the only god Ren truly served was money.

“Latch! Latch, you lazy s’wit, get down here with those accounts!”

The clerk again trundled down the stairs, musshaired and nervous with a new jumble of velum scrolls. He presented them, and was let known with a hard smack from Ren that they were not what he had called for.

“Suppose I’ll have to teach this s’wit the codes if he’s to be anything but an eternal grub in my ash yam,” the old Hlaalu muttered to himself.

Hlaalu Ren had come from meager stock. He had not been a Hlaalu in birth. In fact he hadn’t belonged to any house or known family, being left on an orphanage’s steps as a swaddled babe. He had spent his young life as an object of charity and low expectations and it bred in him a great resentment. He was so very blessed to have anything at all, the mistresses of foundlings had always been so keen on reminding him. A great humbleness had taken hold of his heart there, as well as a great pride in being so humble. He let it be known at any occasion he could just how humble he was.

Ayem would come to the orphanage once a year. Almalexia, Mother Morrowind herself. How very blessed the children were to be graced with the presence of a walking god. They adhered to strict discipline in her presence and stricter cleanliness, being scrubbed down by the nurses vigorously before every visit to the point of bloodlet and rash. Very blessed. Ayem came to the orphanage to pick future Ordinators who would be her hands, to be taken and trained and given honored positions and housenames, but she never picked Ren. Every time he would be made to stand before his bunk and every time she would pass the boy by, so crooked was his back and longlanked his limbs even at that young age. Oh, but how thankful he should be for all he was given. Yes, how blessed a life did the young Hlaalu Ren enjoy.

He had learned a mundane mancy in those years, the art of numbers and the magics they could conjure into logbook and ledger. Why, even as a young man, now old enough to be quit of the orphanage but too young for morals, he had found that this particular school of magic could make coin disappear where it was abundant and reappear where it was lacking. Discrepancies could be accounted for with shuffling and legalese could cloud a mer’s judgment as profoundly as a conjured illusion.

As a man, Ren had left Morrowind and the bitter memories it held for him and set out west. He found gainful employ in the Dragonstar Caravan Company out of Evermore, Dragonstar, Elinhir, and Belkarth. Years of studious (and most humble) service to the company had left him with a considerable assemblage of what coins fall through cracks and he made a name for himself pioneering a system of coded symbols to obfuscate further his shiftings and shufflings of nets and losses. He carried on this way for many years more, climbing the ladder of position and power, ever humbler and humbler, to the station of head accountant. It was in this position that he met Lazar.

A young boy, eighteen he was, that son of a Vizier, not even a beardmade man, yet Lazar brimmed with ideas that outpaced his age. Ren hated him, of course, his lavish upbringing, his prideful stare, but between them was money to be made. He was a forward thinker, progressive, there was that. For all the nurses’ teachings, the endless recitations of the Seven Graces of Vivec and the Homilies of Blessed Almalexia, Ren had never found a god he loved as he did the god of glimmering gold.

Lazar’s request was simple. Only that a shipment of blankets be picked up by hardy, yet dispensable, merchants in Dune and transported north and across the Alik’r to the coastal city of Sentinel. In return, the Dragonstar Caravan Company would be given monopoly of trade in Covenant lands, under the auspices of a new Forbear king, and with that monopoly Ren would have in his hands all the lutestring tethers of trade in Northwestern Tamriel.

Ren carried out his end of the bargain with the deft hands of a puppeteer and while all the world shuddered and fled at the spreading Knahaten Flu he made to carry it, not himself of course, a plague rat or piper of plague rats who’s paid for his work.

The curse of avarice, however, is that it is insatiable, a Seplike hunger for more. There is a reason Sep is the god of Crazy Merchants, in them he finds apostles of profoundest faith. Ren wanted more and it was his first undoing.

It was his brightest student who had betrayed him in Evermore, some years after the Flu affair, which was recorded in his encompassing codes but well hidden enough to elude scrutiny. The most grievous mistake Ren made was in thinking that everyone thought as he did. Honor simply did not agree with his rational. A young clerk named Algeon Redfellow, an equine and timid Breton, had uncovered his embezzling and, in a display that to this day confounded Ren, jeopardized his standing and wellbeing to expose the ruse. Perhaps this was why he was so cruel to Latch, a projection of an anger unpayed at upstart clerks. He had fled Evermore that very night for his old home of Morrowind.

He had been calling himself a Hlaalu for many years in the west but now, returned to Mournhold, he made it official. He took the hand of Tolmera Hlaalu, an aunt of young Nil, receiving a dowry and a position in the Hlaalu vaults which was her father’s charge as Key Treasurer. He was an ichthyic lover and a sea-tempered and cruel husband to Tolmera. Most repugnantly of all, his ever liquid eye alit on her young niece who was, even by Dunmer standards, well below any age of reasonable consent. Ladies spoke ill of him in sitting rooms, his subordinates feared him, his superiors despised his cloying words and obsequious smile but none could do a thing about Hlaalu Ren. He was ingrained.

Old Gals Hlaalu, the treasurer, had keen problems of his own. He lay in drink and gambled in bents so destructive to hearth and kin that Dagon swelled with pride. These flaws were only worsened by Ren who encouraged the behavior, further indebting the man to himself with personal loans. Quietly, from his position as undersecretary to the treasurer, Ren cooked Gals’ books, “losing” great sums of money for clients. Before long the mer would crack utterly and Ren would ascend another rung of the ladder, his apotheosis, to mantle the concept of wealth itself.

“Come on Latch, you insufferable man, try to keep up”

“Aye Muthsera,” said Latch scuffling up beside him, “here is the bill of sale you asked me to draft.” They now walked through the stacked verandas and terraces of the Mourning Hold, glittering with the spirituality that permeated every crevice of this most holy of Dunmer cities, Almalexia.

“It seems you’re not utterly devoid of use after all, Latch,” said Ren looking over the document which was drafted in the daedric script of Dunmer habit and footnoted in Ren’s own codes, for his understanding only.

“I live to serve, Muthsera,” said Latch with the obsequity that Ren so often used himself. The lad was even picking up on his mannerisms, how quaint.

“We’ll make a Dunmer of you yet, now pick up the pace! I have a meeting with Gals that will prove very, ah… Beneficial to me.”

Hlaalu Ren and Gals sat in the latter’s office at the treasury vaults, a bottle of flin between them. Gals, old even by merish standards, was on his third glass which he lifted to his lips with an unsteady hand. He was quaking through, utterly terrified of Ren, who earlier that week had threatened to expose his failings to the house council. Coin under his charge was missing left and right, but he had not gambled it away himself, at least he didn’t think he had, he was so often drunk of late. Especially with a recent tragic death hanging heavy on his mind. His poor daughter, Tolmera Hlaalu, found dead on the street the week before, the victim of a random act of violence in which there were no suspects.

No, he was sure, when he gambled it was his own fortune he spent, it had almost ruined him alone. His luck was sure to change for the better, was it not? One cannot lose forever, one must play to win. However, so much official coin unaccounted for as well. He was having to borrow more and more money from Ren to cover up his failings. As weeks had gone on he fell deeper and deeper into a depression. He could hardly look at his darling Nili for the shame. Her inheritance, squandered so selfishly and he, with honor that balanced over a precipice that was sure to dash his reputation, and her’s by proxy, on the rocks of shameful ruin below.

His granddaughter, she was all he had left. He stared at Ren across the table, deliquescent, flowing, sniveling, solvent Ren. The cruel Dunmer cracked a smile of pity and Gals drowned himself in more flin.

Ren’s plan had worked marvelously. A domination to make the fire stone blush. At first he had been friendly with the old man, his father in law, but as time went on motives changed. Yes, he must have her, Nili, she consumed his mind.

Gals would never permit him, no, but Ren had taken precautions. In secret he had altered the treasurer’s last will and testament to name him Nilia’s sole guardian in the case of his death. He did not wish to kill the old man, he had another plan to try first. ‘If it comes to that,’ thought Ren, ‘If it comes to that.’

“As you know,” Ren began, “my dearest and most trusted father-in-law. Your debts have grown too heavy for me to bear in good conscience.” He poured the man another glass of flin. “My meager income surely cannot support two men and their habits, you understand, and as you are unfit to return my generous investment, which I must remind you is the only thing keeping you out of prison right now, I’ll require some other compensation for my generosity.”

Gals looked at him in silence, one red eye trailing off, charting its own drunken course free the will of the man that authored it.

“Latch!” Cried Ren and the studious clerk entered with a bow.

“Good good. Latch, present my offer to the good treasurer. There, yes, that’s fine… Now, get out of here! Go on! Out!” The clerk hurried out of the room.

There, in the hall, stood Nilia Hlaalu, who had been spying on the meeting. The clerk bowed low to her and, noticing the tears that welled in her eyes at seeing her grandfather so, he bent down low and whispered in her ear.

“Go,” he said, “you must not be here when this meeting concludes.” She Ran.

“NO!” Came a cry from the room “Hlaalu Ren you merciless fetcher! You can’t– this– this is– extortion- depravity! You fiend! I will never let you take her!”

Ren had made his way around the table and now fanned moist fingers in a talon grip on Gal’s shoulder. “The choice is clear, father-in-law. You sign over your estates and your position to me and you give me Nili’s hand in marriage. Your only alternative is prison, dishonor, your family’s, no Nilia’s ruin, and eventually, for we both know a man old as you would not thrive in the debtor’s cell, death.”

Outside a preacher yelled from his soapbox in a voice that cascaded down the streets and alleyways of Mournhold. His assembled crowd listened on in ecstasy and tore at their hair and clawed their backs. He zealous yelled his words and brought a tactile fervor to the crowd. It rang clear through the house of Hlaalu:

Be concerned for your judgment, it is always at hand.

I know your kind.

Wickedness sweet in your mouth- you hide it under your tongue- you spare it.

You spare it when you keep your mouth tight with it inside you.

Oh secret sinner, can you not see six eyes upon you?

Relinquish those thoughts if you are strong of it,

for six eyes see you hiding your sin like a child does a stolen sweet.

Four deceiving winds whisper flattery about your ears.

In such winds does not the sin smell sweet?

I say again, Is it not easy fo