Somehow the market seemed populated by ghosts.
Brynjolf stood and hawked his bottles of Daedra Heart Elixir without any great degree of enthusiasm, his mind constantly drifting into the past. The elixir actually was selling rather well - Herluin had come up with a recipe that involved steeping a variety of herbs in good Nordic mead; dill and mint for digestive upsets, wormwood for parasites, willowbark for pain and a few crushed crimson rose petals to give it a good colour. The end result was deep red, pleasantly aromatic, and a lot of the buyers came back for more. Oh, it wasn't what it said on the bottles, but it wasn't going to actively do any harm, might even do a bit of good in a few cases, and the mead would make people feel better anyway. Sales were way up on what they used to be. Brynjolf had never asked Philbert what he put in his Falmer Ear Elixir and his Dragon's Blood Elixir, and all the other bottles of rubbish that had been sold from the stall over the years, they had all been pretty colours, smelled and tasted foul, and been universally useless. It had taken Herluin to point out that the best scams are the ones where the mark actually wants to come back for more.
So many of us came from this market, one way or another. I was a skinny, knock-kneed boy with red hair who tried to slit the purse of a well dressed merchant and got caught - and then the man I had thought was a merchant hauled me round the corner by one ear and proceeded to give me the thrashing of my young life. Then when I'd finished howling in the gutter, he offered to teach me how to do it so that I wouldn't get caught the next time. That was my first introduction to Gallus, over thirty years ago, when he was the youngest Guildmaster that the Thieves Guild had ever had. None of us then could possibly have seen how things would go on from there.
The market ebbed and flowed around him. One man with worry lines on his face came to talk to him quietly and he frowned as he listened to the story - Sapphire had clearly been trying an unauthorised shakedown of her own, and he was going to have to give the girl a serious talking to. Again. Sapphire just didn't seem to get the message sometimes. He reassured the man, a Redguard who worked at the stables outside the city gates, and watched him walk away with a spring in his step that had not been there when he came. The sun glinting on the man's black hair gave it a fleeting illusion of gold and his mind slipped to Mena again.
She was such a professional. Down to her fingertips. I saw her stalk in here like a dark mountain cat and already everyone in the market was in her sights, I saw her mind assess, discard, consider. The guards had already told me that she had spotted the shakedown at the gate where most travellers just accepted it. And when I approached her and offered her the little job to plant that ring on Brand-Shei she accepted with a nod - and then pulled it off with a finesse that Vex would have had trouble matching. She reminded me so much of someone else that day and even now I can't think who. But I remembered Gallus saying that the Redguard made the greatest thieves in the world, that the Shadow on their skins was a gift from the Lady, and the Lady didn't stint them on her other gifts either.
He shook his head and hastily turned his attention to the Priestess of Kynareth who had just appeared for her own consignment of bottles, the woman had been buying the new recipe by the crate and they were barely keeping supply up with demand. Brynjolf assisted her to load the new bottles onto the little cart she was dragging behind her. He assumed it was being used for the hospice near the city wall, and a few old men and women were at least having their final days made a little more pleasant by it.
Gallus never did make me more than a half-decent cutpurse, despite all his tuition. But he told me that I was one of the best cracksmen the Guild had ever had, that my touch on a lock was as light as cobweb and he'd yet to see me break a pick...oh, it was an exaggeration, but not by much. Old Marvess taught me the knife throwing, and Karliah made me an archer. Karliah. Damn the bloody woman, why on earth did she go and do what she did? Did she know she would destroy us all? Did she care?
Trying not to think about Mena and Mercer wasn't working, it seemed his thoughts were being drawn back in that direction whatever he did. They'd been gone for two weeks, surely some word would have to come back soon. He stacked the last of the returned empty bottles into a crate and passed the crate to Rune who had come to collect the day's takings. Then he locked up the stall and wandered down to the canal, leaning over and watching the water swirl sluggishly under the steps.
Twenty five years ago. Twenty five years, and I stood on these steps and listened to Mercer tell me about this job that Gallus had planned up near Windhelm. He'd been so cagey about the details apparently, only telling Mercer that they could double their take for the year on this one job alone. Mercer was already cynical then for all that he was so young, but he and Karliah and Gallus had been an unbeatable team for so long now that the cynicism was never taken very seriously by the rest of us, it was just seen as part of him. He was no older than I was, and we'd joined the Guild within a sevenday of each other, but within the first year he'd already been seen as a rising star, where I was a middle ranker, no better than average at anything other than lockpicking. They were talking about him even then as a Guildmaster in the making. And when he left to join Gallus and Karliah up at Snow Veil Sanctum, none of us could have possibly forseen what would come of it.
He tossed a pebble into the water, watching the ripples spread.
Ripples. The ripples from that day became tidal waves that nearly tore us apart. Vex came and found me to tell me that Mercer had returned alone badly hurt. How old was she then? Ten? Eleven? Not a guild member then, just a snotty nosed street kid with an uncanny ability for knowing what was going on around Riften. Gallus had had an eye on her for ages, waiting for her to get old enough to recruit. I couldn't believe it, we'd never known the Gallus/Mercer/Karliah team to have a failure. And the news was worse than I could have possibly imagined. They'd indeed met outside the ruins, and from the shadows, Karliah shot Gallus in the back. He dropped like a stone, dead before his body hit the snow. Mercer had had time to turn and throw a dagger at her - and miss - and then the second arrow took him in the shoulder. He had managed to crawl into the bushes before passing out, the murdering bitch had poisoned the arrow with the Divines only knew what. He said the last he saw with blurring vision was Karliah dragging Gallus's body up to the hole at the top of the ruin and dumping it in, then he saw nothing but blackness. She must have assumed that whatever she had put on that arrow would finish Mercer off since she didn't look for him to cut his throat and make sure - either that or she was interrupted and had to make a run for it. But Mercer was stronger than the bitch though and he came round hours later with his blood staining the snow and somehow managed to crawl as far as the road to beg help from a carter taking supplies to Windhelm.
Another pebble followed the first.
But it wasn't just Karliah who tore us apart. We did that to ourselves. When the news spread of Gallus's death, the factions formed and the infighting started. The Ratway became a bloodbath. By the time we came to our senses, she was long gone and unfindable. But she was always the best - there was nobody in the Guild who had ever been able to track Karliah - Gallus was the only one with a hope of it - and Gallus was dead. The only other one who might have been able to do it was that Redguard woman that they worked with sometimes from the Dark Brotherhood, she came closer to understanding them than anyone because their interests had collided so often. But when we tried to contact her through the Brotherhood they told us she'd returned to Hammerfell and they had no way of getting word to her. We were on our own. Mercer somehow held us together in the aftermath of the Ratway wars, those of us who were left. But the luck had gone with Gallus, over and over the little jobs that should have been our bread and butter turned foul on us. People started leaving. It's like those twenty-five years were just a slow dying, with none of us prepared to admit the guild was moribund. And then suddenly, this year, we get this plain-faced young woman from Hammerfell as a new recruit and the luck turns. No reason, no logic, just that it does.
There were running feet along the canal bank below him. He walked down the steps and was shocked to see that the runner was Delvin. This made no sense. Delvin rarely left the Guild in daylight hours other than on a job. Delvin never ran.
"Bryn, you've got to come quick."
"What's happened?"
The words were a horrific echo of a twenty five year old nightmare.
"It's Mercer. He's back. And he's badly hurt. And he's alone."