Chapter One: Hired
This, she thought, watching a pair of drunken servants brawl half-heartedly over their house liveries (Hlaalu and Indoril, by the looks of it) this is what it's come to. Sitting in the scummiest dive Balmora had to offer, Trask curled her fingers around a misshapen mug and stared irritably into the bitter depths.
At the other end of the bar, a group of her fellow Dumner struck up a chorus of some Bard's leavings. No very talented minstrel. Any musician worth his trade had likely managed to sing himself off the island by now.
Trask listened to the ill-formed verses, and her mood darkened with every clumsy line.
"The Devil's dead, 'e's down in flame,"
Imperial scum'll get the same,
Don't need Divine to Intervene-
Here's to the Nerevarine!"
Nerevarine, eh? Already these fools had him up there on a level with Vivec, although Vivec wasn't quite so high-and-mighty anymore. Trask snorted, and chugged down the rest of her bitter draft. She'd drink to that, at least that was one favor the youth had done for her and her kind.
The kid- the boy, really. He'd survived against all the odds, including her, without ever knowing how.
Hope that luck holds, boy, she thought bitterly. You'd damn well better hope it does, because even your old man Klaus might not like a Nerevarine he can't control.
A voice, slurring through both intoxication and oversized incisors, snapped her out of her revery. The resident Khajiit, One-Eye, was holding court among a raucous company of pub-goers.
"...End the trade," he was saying, "Khajiit and filthy Argonian lizards, all go free."
"Damn Helseth," Trask murmured. Another upstart brat of a revolutionary, although mercifully less idealistic. She knew damned well, even if One-Eye did not, that morality had nothing whatsoever to do with Helseth's proclamation.
Power did.
And Power was a pull which Trask could understand far better than whatever arcane force had driven the enigmatic incarnate down his fated path.
Damned kid.
Damned king.
"Damned cat," she added out loud, for good measure. Then she raised her voice and said it again. "Damned cat!" Trask got to her feet, clumsily knocking over the bar stool. "Filthy feline. Go home and drink your sugar-milk, One-Eye."
A hush fell throughout the room. Someone cheered. Someone else called her an n'wah, and then sat back with their mazte to enjoy the show.
One-Eye's ears fluttered in her direction, and he swiveled around to look at her with an eye which attempted to blink away his intoxication. Survival instincts twitched, but not hard enough.
"Nnnn- Kahjit no have to listen to dark elves anymore," One-Eye proclaimed, narrow chest inflating like a blowfish.
A slow grin crawled across Trask's face. She walked towards him slowly, every step careful and deliberate, until One-Eye had backed away into the counter. Then he saw the knife, a wicked razor of a weapon angle forward like some bizarre claw. He got a much closer look then he wanted, right before the blade came to rest against his cheek. It moved there, tapping lightly, grazing the fur directly below his one good eye.
Other patrons were staring, now- she'd gone entirely too far. Still, no one interceded.
"Kahjiit," Trask said, very softly, "are filthy, uneducated swine who'd let their mewling kittens starve before they'd do an honest day's work." The knife traced sideways, and a few strands of hair fluttered to the floor. "Repeat after me. Say it."
"Swine," babbled the poor Khajiit, too used to cowering to change his habits now, especially with the knife threatening his single remaining eye. "Filthy."
"True, and true." Trask slipped her free hand into a pocket of her coat. Then she brought it out again, and clasped the trembling cat's shoulder in an act of pseudo-friendliness. One-Eye convulsed, his lips forming a soundless scream. Trask let go, shaking her hand a little to dislodge a small clump of fur, and slid her hand back into her pocket. No one noticed her dark fingers flexing their way back into the skin-colored glove.
The cat stumbled aside and toppled to the floor, eyes unfocused. He hiccuped gently. The barkeep seized on the opportunity to remove a mess before it happened.
"I think you've had enough, cat," he said, seizing One-Eye by the arm and dragging him towards the exit. If the crazy knife-woman wanted to get blood all over the place, let her do it outside. That way, he wouldn't have to spend half the night scrubbing the floorboards and answering dangerous questions from unfriendly guards.
But Trask had already lost interest. She released the summoned knife and turned her back on the barkeep and his exceptionally intoxicated patron, apparently interested in nothing except the next mug of greef.
Looking towards her abandoned stool, she caught the gaze of the person who'd taken up a place beside it. A Dunmer, dressed conservatively but still clothed too finely for this dump. Clean, too. Her eyes narrowed, feigning offense at his faint smile.
Trask tripped back to her stool and kicked it back into position before falling onto it, exaggerating every clumsy motion.
"You looking at something, silk-shirt?" she growled. The man held up his hands, smiling even wider. His brows drew up in center when he did that, the outer edges angling down towards his abnormally blunt ears.
"Peace," he said, raised hands offering reconciliation, "I was only admiring a bit of deft knife-work. You're quite talented."
Trask shrugged, and reclaimed her seat. Was that soap she smelled? Sload. Scented.
"I suppose," she acknowledged.
Damned straight. She'd fought alongside the Nerevarine, hadn't she? Never mind that the kid handled his sword as if it were a stick, and he some brat in a field fighting with imaginary foes. A mage, not a warrior, although the bards were telling different tales. Proper song-Heroes wielded proper swords, not magic. And they knew which end was which, too.
The stranger waved down the barkeep and ordered a drink of his own. Trying to fit in- and failing. One glance into the depths of his poorly-formed mug, one queasy thought of cleanliness passing perceptibly across his fastidious features, and he set the mazte aside.
"Former slaver, eh?" he asked, causally.
Trask shrugged again, and stole his drink. He didn't object.
"No secret. What's it to you?" she asked, a little more inclined to talk now that he'd bought her a drink. Kind of.
"I'd imagine you're out of work." To put it mildly, yes. "...And I happen to have some work that needs doing..." he stopped, looking sideways at her, waiting for a reaction. She didn't give him one, just stared stonily at the counter-top.
"Well." the elf said, when the pause became awkward. He cleared his throat. "Some of your, um... former colleagues... aren't taking the news so well. Smugglers, you understand. Illegal. Illegal means bounties."
"Forget it." Trask took another swig of Mazte. "Bounty-hunting's a short-term career, and it pays dung."
"Ten-thousand gold," the elf contradicted her. Trask froze. Then she sat the mug back down on the table, very, very gently.
"Who?"
The elf looked sideways at her and hesitated.
"Calls himself Grief," he answered, after a second's thought. "...you know him?"
Trask grinned, slow, and wide, and evil.
"Twenty-thousand," she said, "And you'd better be good for it."
"Fifteen."
"Done."
Zahn watched the flickering torches, and tried to think about more than his misery. His discomfort began somewhere in his wet hind-feet and ended in the lump on his skull, with all manner of bruises and scrapes filling the space in between.
They'd taken his clothes straight away (no need wasting fine linen in this muddy pit, and his had been very fine indeed) and Zahn had instantly become, as far as the slavers were concerned, completely indistinguishable from the other captives. Elves often had a hard time telling Khajit apart. Since their favorite form of address seemed to be "Hey, you!" Zahn supposed that they didn't really need to.
Except that, in his case, they wanted to.
"A Khajit wearing fancy clothes and wandering around alone-"
"-The aristo-cat, Grief wants to see him."
"Which one is 'e?"
Zahn tried to mill with the rest, looking as forlornly disinterested and un-aristocratic as possible. It nearly worked. Nearly.
But- "Hey, you!" said one of the thugs. Zahn looked up directly into a pair of bright red eyes.
"Um... me?" And they had him.
Trask cupped the light-spell between her palms, and knelt down to examine the stone overhang. Dark, murky water of indeterminate depths, fed by a waterfall and following its own current to hell only knew where.
Dangerous, easy to get drawn under and trapped in an airless tunnel, if one couldn't fight the current. Easy to go too far, and miscalculate the time needed for a return journey.
A body could get swept away and lost forever, drowned and devoured by carrion-feeders who would remember the feast of flesh for the rest of their savage, sightless lives.
Trask smiled. Devious bastard.
Which devious bastard, now, that was a question worth asking.
Don't underestimate me, silk-shirt.
If this were a trap, it had better be a good one.
She let the light-spell go, and her wry grin was lost in an absolute dark.
"You talk... oddly, for a Khajiit. Which is to say, you sound normal. Why?"
Zahn stood ill-at-ease, trying not to look into the elf's amiable, dull-red eyes. One was glazed over in blindness. The Dunmer's face was a veritable butcher-shop job of scarred lacerations. A few teeth were missing, and every finger of his visible hand seemed to have been broken at some point in his obviously long life.
On the whole, Zahn thought, he looked entirely too convincingly villainous to be for real.
Only the elf's voice remained intact. It was clearly enunciated and perversely polite, with an edge which assured the Khajiit that this man was quite real, quite definitely a villain, and entirely capable of proving that in a variety of unpleasant ways.
"I spend a lot of time with elves and humans," Zahn responded truthfully, prompted by a guard's rough push.
"Oh?" the scarred Dunmer toyed with an amulet hanging around his neck. It looked like a fang.
Possibly a Khajiit fang. "picked up the accent, have you?"
Zahn swallowed, watching those dark, crooked fingers play with the grisly token.
"Well... yes."
The elf caught his stare, and smiled pleasantly.
"Like my necklace?" he lifted it, let it dangle on a length of leather cord. "you don't need to worry, my dear aristocat. I only do this to cats who bite. You won't bite, will you?"
Zahn shook his head.
"There, then. I'm sure we'll get along fine."
He dropped the necklace and picked up a crumpled fold of cloth, holding it out tantalizingly like a boy teasing a dog with a treat. "Want some sugar, my friend?"
Zahn could catch the scent even from where he stood, the sickly-sweet odor known to drive so many of his species to distraction. It affected him, too, a shiver that went to his bones. Khajiit were born addicts, inheriting the need from their dependent mothers. Saxtus had told him that.
Zahn bared his teeth in a nervous smile, and shook his head at the offer.
"No... thank you." Red eyes stared at him.
"No? No. My. You are an aristocat, aren't you? You don't care for the sugar?" Zahn's stomach turned decidedly queasy at the look in the elf's eye.
"No," Zahn said. The elf arched an eyebrow, prompting the Khajiit to continue.
"Um... it's... it makes people really stupid. Like drunk, except worse." For a moment longer, the elf merely stared. Then he smiled, a wry twist of closed lips, and turned to address the elves on either side of Zahn.
"Hear that, boys? Might want to lay off it for a while." Zahn's ears flattened in consternation.
Oh.
But then the elf kept talking, and he soon forgot all about his little indisgression.
"Fine clothes, fine speech. No sugar." Grief still smiled but he'd replaced the aura of genuine friendliness with an aura of genuine menace. "I want you to tell me who you are, and who might pay to have you back."
Meeting those mismatched eyes, Zahn encountered a very clear and entirely bilaterally symmetric intonation.
"I am perfectly capable," that look said, "of feeding you your own guts and adding both of your dainty white fangs to my little collection," This elf was very serious. And this elf, at least, would have no trouble picking him out from a crowd.
So Zahn told him why he talked like an Imperial.
Five seconds later, he was very much wishing that he had not.
"Ransom?" asked one of the guards, looking at his boss. The scarred visage remained impassive for a moment longer, then the Dunmer shook his head.
"No," he said, "too risky. Better just kill him."
TBC