"It's traditional," Grief said, "for a condemned man to have a last meal. The Imperials insist on it. Did you know that, cat?" Zahn swallowed hard, looking for his voice. Food was the last thing on his mind.
"Yes," he said. Grief laughed.
"You would, wouldn't you? Guess you've seen plenty of criminals drop."
Zahn said nothing, flexing his claws and trying to test the ropes around his wrists. -Claws, now, there was a joke. They were only dulled little stubs, because: "Civilized Khajiit do not scratch." He swore that if he ever got out of this alive he'd grow them out longer and sharper than those of the fabled Senche-raht.
"Now, now," Grief smirked, and lightly kicked at the captive's dusty hind-feet. "I'm trying to be friendly, here. Don't you know that the longer you keep me interested, the longer you live? -And I am interested. You're a very unique case, young Zahn."
N'wah.
Zahn glanced around. Several of the dunmer's lackies lounged about nearby, sitting on crates or leaned up against the stone walls. Some watched with stony indifference, others smirked and snickered at the Khajiit's predicament.
Grief simply sat on a barrel beside the bound captive, sharpening his knife and chatting amiably. He paused for a second and tested the blade, then shook his head and went back to sharpening. Zahn's heart made up for several missed beats.
Zahn redoubled his surreptitious efforts to break free. Probably wasted effort, but so long as he could play the fool, keep himself thinking that there might be some way out of this, then he could at least prevent himself from having a complete break-down and losing whatever dignity he had left.
Shrik, shrik, went the knife, every time Grief ran the whetstone along its edge. Zahn couldn't make himself look anywhere else.
"Must have been an interesting life, eh?"
"...No."
Shrik, Shrik.
No, it hadn't been, and he'd been trying for an improvement (the kind he could survive, not this kind), and that was one of a hundred perfectly good reasons why he did not want to die right now.
The dunmer paused for a second, held the stone aside and pointed the blade's tip directly at Zahn's neck.
"Used to have a cat working for me, you know. While back. Tawny runt, sweet little thing by the name of Issih. Good girl." He smiled his pleasant, grandfatherly smile. "She could bring in the big boys like nothing else."
"What... what happened to her?" Zahn didn't quite understand what Grief was alluding to. A khajiit, work for slavers? It didn't make sense. Grief shrugged, and went back to sharpening his knife. Slow and steady, always in the same direction.
"Well," he said, "girls, now, girls can be a bit silly sometimes. Went and got all sentimental over some mark, started jabbering on about how they were soulmates, or something. Tried to elope with the boy." The blade flashed silver as the slaver angled it to the light, letting his eyes linger appreciatively on the edge. "Couldn't have that, now could I? But you- you seem like a sharp lad. Bit inexperienced, maybe, but well-educated. Not some slip of a soft-hearted girl."
The pieces began to fall into place.
"She... she betrayed other Khajiit? To you?"
"And did a fine job of it," Grief cheerfully affirmed, winking at him. "So what do you say, my fine young lad? A slit throat, or a fine job here with us. Your choice."
"I-" Zahn began, then bit back the bile in his throat and took a second to think. Shout defiance and die a martyre's death? Nope, not this Khajiit, not today. He'd say anything they wanted, and first chance he had he'd make a break for it, straight into the arms of the law, and let Helseth's reform deal with these demons.
"Of course," Grief continued, eyes twinkling merrily, "we have to be sure of you. There's a little something we need you to do, just to make sure you've got the necessary... well... that you've got what's necessary."
The necessary lack of a heart?
"Aye, Meril!" Grief shouted. One of the lounging elves shifted position and stood up straight.
"Yessir?" he asked.
"Go to the pits and fetch the most miserable excuse of a feline you can find."
"Yessir," the elf confirmed, grinning, and went vaulting over the wooden fencing down to where the slaves were kept. A few tense moments later and he came back again, dragging along with him one of the most pathetic things Zahn had ever seen.
The Khajiit kept her eyes on the floor. Long, ragged hair covered most of her face, but he could tell that she couldn't have been more than twelve. Barely a woman, by Khajiit standards, and not a woman at all by Zahn's. Just a kid. Every rib showed out in sharp relief under a too-thin coat of dust-brown fur, and her arms and legs seemed reduced to tendons and joints. She could barely even stand on her own.
Bad feeling about this, Zahn tensed, looking from the malnourished child to his captor. Bad, bad, bad feeling about this. Grief smiled and gestured to the emaciated creature like she was a freak on exhibit.
"Slaves get like this sometimes," he said, conversationally. "Just- refuse to keep living. Not much good to me, as you might imagine. Who'd want to buy that?" The Slaver stood and walked to where Zahn sat, tied to a stake. The Khajiit tried to look up, but couldn't crane his neck far enough to see past the elf's belt-buckle.
Grief walked around behind him, back where Zahn couldn't see any part of him at all, and a second later the ropes at his wrists fell away. Then he felt something cold pressed into his hands, and he gripped the thing reflexively even though his fingers were nearly too numb to feel it.
He brought it around, held it up in front of his eyes, and saw that he was holding the knife.
"Why?" he asked, holding the thing as warily as he would have held a serpent. Grief stood in front of him again, hand outstretched and pointing at the bound and gagged creature who still lay helpless on the floor.
Zahn scrambled to his feet and backed away, knife held out in front of him. Straight out, as far as he could keep it from himself without dropping it.
"A-as if!" his back bumped into the wall, and Grief began to laugh.
"My, my- you are unique, cat. Quite unique." He moved to stand over the emaciated slave, stirring the form with his foot. Blank yellow eyes looked up at him, then closed when the girl tried to curl into a tighter ball. "Now, what about this one?" the Slaver asked. "Is she as unique as you? If your positions were reversed, would she act like an honorable little lady, and refrain from slitting your throat?"
Zahn swallowed. "I hope so," he said, honestly. He watched Grief kneel, gently run a caressing hand over the slave's mangy fur. The slaver's fingers slid under the girl's chin, forced her head up and towards Zahn.
"Look at her, cat. Just look. How long do you think she'll live? A few days, maybe a week?" he let her head fall back to the stone with an audible smack. "Whereas you- you've got decades in you. One life for the other, it's not even an equal trade." That gentle, cajoling, reasonable voice still filtered out through a pleasant smile. Devils looked like that when they talked, all level-headed logic and twisted half-truths.
Zahn shook his head stubbornly. "I don't think it works like that."
Grief stared. at him impassively, his lips crooked in the corruption of an honest smile.
"Why not?" he asked, gently. Zahn looked down at the knife in his hand, then up at the Dunmer's unruffled countenance. He couldn't connect this situation to the slaver's relaxed stance and self-assured rationality. "Bec- because you can't measure life. It isn't like coin."
Zahn darted forward. Rushing past Grief and falling to his knees beside the young Khajiit, he hurriedly cut the cords around her wrist. They fell away easily, but the girl didn't move. Didn't stir, didn't look at him. What was this? None of the elves had moved, and no one yelled or swore or made move to stop him. Behind him, he heard Grief sigh.
"Such emotional creatures." There was real regret in the elf's voice. Zahn felt a hand fall to his shoulder, and was momentarily taken aback by what felt like a sympathetic gesture. He doubted that conception, doubted it very much. But no amount of well-placed misgiving could have prepared him for what happened next.
With no further warning, something closed around his neck. Something heavy in a way which transcended physical properties, a cold, metallic presence that pressed against his mind as well as his skin. Within the space of a breath, his entire world darkened to gray.
"I'd of given you the right to choose, boy," Grief's voice resounded through his skull, no longer confined to a single dimension. Inside him, not filtering in through his senses but pushing against them from the other side. "Only, you chose wrong."
Zahn gasped, and doubled over. He'd been drunk, once, very drunk. A dare, and a barrel of Cook's best, and an unhealthy dose of natural curiosity... the morning's regret had been nothing compared to Saxtus's displeasure, but it was the hangover that he remembered most. Zahn commonly disappointed Saxtus. But that peculiar pain had been very, very new, and not the sort of experience which he ever intended to repeat.
Take the discomfort. Multiply it by ten. And add a plentiful measure of sheer, unadulterated, intelligently willful malice...
Zahn couldn't think. Something was thinking, and using up a lot of space in his brain to do it, but it wasn't him.
The knife lay on the ground beside him where it had fallen. Zahn couldn't remember dropping it, but now he needed to pick it up, needed to, in a way which he couldn't remember needing anything before. At least, not anything attainable, not anything so close to his hand. His hand shuddered, each finger twitching spasmodically.
Distantly, he heard the laughter. The cavern was alive with it.
No.
A distant but insistent voice cried out, shouting to be heard over the noise of the crowd- such a crowd, all in his head. And they all wanted the same thing. Only one of the voices, the voice that was hidden, wanted something different.
"Go outside," cook used to tell him, all bustle and exasperated resignation, "silly kitten, don't give Ahnatti this look. Go outside." And all the while that night's dinner would be writhing pitifully in her hand, squeaking abjectly and fighting for all it was worth. A broken neck, that was how Ahnatti did it. Sometimes a severed one.
The blade scraped off the ground, coming upwards one tiny fraction at a time.
No, no, no, no!
The crowd in Zahn's mind converged on the single voice, drowned it. Suffocated it. He couldn't breathe. The world went dark before his eyes and he fell into some undefined space. He kept falling until his forehead hit stone, and the knife fell from an outstretched palm.
The stone- was wet. So was the knife. And his hand.
Warm, and wet.
TBC