Chapter 14

For those who require clarification, no, this is not based on the actual plotline of the game. This is a divergent plot based on the idea of Lucien and others behaving with a modicum of common sense.

Lucien LaChance sat alone in his chamber at Fort Farragut, trying to read. He was finding it difficult to concentrate, which was unusual. He'd managed to come by a rare text on the subject of garroting. Normally, it would have held his attention for some time. The trouble was that it kept recalling recent events to his mind.

Teinaava loved to read. It is one of the few things I passed on without deliberate training, Lucien thought. He set the book down and stared at the stone wall. The cavernous room was dim, lit only by a few candles. No windows and no skylights pierced this far into the fort. It was part of the reason he had chosen to live here. The furnishings were expensive, but simple and sparse. Even at his present rank, Lucien was not a man addicted to the comforts of the flesh.

It was a pity about the Cheydinhal Sanctuary. He was still rather angry at Mathieu Bellamont for forcing him to destroy years of his own hard work. But how could he have known the traitor was a member of the Black Hand? Bellamont had given nothing away. No one had guessed at the depth of his betrayal, not even Arquen, whose insight frequently seemed preternatural.

The Night Mother knew, Lucien thought, and experienced another brief moment of anger. He squelched it quickly. Sithis and his mouthpiece had eyes everywhere. She was right. We were fools not to realize it. To make matters worse, the other survivors of the Black Hand had been all too eager to believe Mathieu instead of Lucien. Some of them even seemed to enjoy his company. If I had not taken time to retrieve his diary myself... Had I not reached Ungolim in time...

He'd toyed with the idea of sending one of his underlings instead. In the end, he'd decided the matter was far too serious, and followed up his increasingly desperate investigation in person. No one would ever know what he had seen in that little room under the lighthouse. He'd made sure of that. It had only confirmed Lucien's own belief in the necessity of austere living. If you let yourself become self-indulgent, if you satisfied your own depravities at every whim, you would become careless. A fall would be inevitable.

Of course, Mathieu's fall was a long time in coming. I should have guessed. I should have known. I might not now be in the position of rebuilding an entire Sanctuary out of nothing. For that matter, he should have looked under the bed. It had been a long time ago, and he had been much less experienced, but that was no excuse. For that matter, I should have bothered to dispose of the body. I wonder if Mathieu would have gone quite so far, without his mother's head to talk to all these years?

There was no knowing. Lucien sighed and closed the book. He was still Speaker. That was something. And when Antoinetta Marie finally made her way back here, he would be able to start anew. He had one student left to him. That was some comfort. He would request another Shadowscale to parent, but it was unlikely his request would be granted. One never knows. At least now I have learned the folly of raising more than one at a time. It is an ill thing for an assassin to have any relationship closer than that with his Brothers and Sisters in Sithis. I kept them distant from myself, but I was less successful in keeping them distant from one another.

Something went clang, far off in the bowels of the underground fort. Lucien paused, listening. He had lived in Fort Farragut a long time. He knew that his Dark Guardians were sometimes prone to set off traps by accident. A faint hiss – hiss - ping followed, the sound of tiny darts hitting walls in a deadly crossfire. That is not one of the Guardians. They have learned to avoid the dart traps.

Silence followed. Lucien waited. He didn't really expect to hear anything else. Anyone who would come after him here would either be professional enough not to make a noise, however severe their wounds, or they would be dead within seconds of crossing the fort's outer threshold.

Lucien got up, placed the book reverently back on one of the oak bookshelves, and went to make sure the door was unlocked. Then he went to the table and poured himself a glass of wine. He sipped it as he stood and waited. After a few moments he heard another hiss, this one subtly different in tone. Whomever it is has killed the nearest of my Guardians. Perhaps all of them. That narrowed sharply the number of possible suspects. And he had shown Antoinetta Marie how to get in without setting off any of the traps. Hmm. Interesting.

Five minutes later, the door latch clicked. The door eased slowly open. Darkness yawned on the other side.

"You may as well come in," Lucien said. "I admit, I'm rather curious to see who might have made it this far."

Ocheeva stepped into the dim light of the candles. Several small darts were stuck in the right shoulder of her armor, and a jagged hole on the other side suggested the recent removal of an arrow. Very little blood was visible there. There was considerably more around the cut on her left side, where something small and sharp had not quite made it up under her ribs.

"My Dark Guardians do not use knives," Lucien said.

"No, Speaker," Ocheeva said quietly. She reached back to pull the door closed, then leaned back against the wall, hands at her sides. "That was Marie."

Lucien did a rapid recalculation. Then he said, "So she lost her wits entirely at last. What happened?"

"Vicente Valtieri was burnt to ashes," Ocheeva said. Her voice went on in slow litany, pausing every so often to breathe. "Gogron gro-Bolmog and M'raaj-Dar were poisoned. The new sister she took by surprise, and stabbed to death. I do not know what she did with Telaendril's body, but I know that she is dead. I found her as she cut Teinaava's throat in his sleep. All of them are dead, Speaker. Everyone. There is no reason for you to pretend you did not know."

"You seem to have lost considerable blood, child," Lucien said. "For that I make allowances. But do not talk nonsense."

Ocheeva laughed ironically, then fell abruptly silent, in the manner of a person who has just been forcibly reminded that some of her ribs are broken. "Should this one believe that you would train a student who would disobey you? You, who have been my master from the shell?" She paused to breathe, shaking her head. "No, Speaker of mine. This one knows you too well. You would not be deceived by Antoinetta Marie."

"Still the child of your upbringing," Lucien said. He smiled a small, cold smile. "More than Antoinetta was, it appears. We did discover that Mathieu Bellamont was the traitor in our midst – not that I need explain myself to you. I suppose you've earned it, having won your way into this chamber alone. I could not withdraw the command. Particularly when I gave Marie orders not to speak to anyone."

"This one is deeply disappointed that you did not choose me, Speaker," Ocheeva said.

"I was inclined to believe you might attempt to spare Teinaava," Lucien said. "You were always so reluctant to hurt him, when you were small. Will you now tell me that I was wrong?"

"Teinaava." Ocheeva breathed the name as if it were a curse. Her next words arrived in a breathless hiss. "Yesss. I might have understood about the others. I did not care particularly for the new Sister. And M'raaj-Dar is not an easy man to live with. But that you would take from me my only brother, your only son... That I will not forgive, Speaker."

Lucien held himself very still. For all that he was not a social man, he understood a great deal about words and their use. There were semantic mistakes common to the recently bereaved, but Ocheeva would not be the one to make them. "M'raaj-Dar is not?" he said.

Then he heard the tramping footsteps in the hallway. The footsteps of someone very large, wearing very heavy armor. Someone who has chosen to go silently until this moment. Someone who has been listening at the door all this time.

He was not entirely surprised to see Gogron gro-Bolmog open the door and duck inside. His helmet was too tall to pass under the lintel otherwise. The others filed in behind him, fanning out to either side of the door. Telaendril was not present. No doubt she was still on assignment, as usual. M'raaj-Dar paused beside the door long enough to heal Ocheeva's wound.

"You are not so easy to live with yourself," he said.

The injury was shallower than it looked, Lucien realized now. It would not have deceived him in full light. But I thought she had received it from Marie, whose cuts are never shallow. It was not the light which deceived me. It was my own belief.

"It must have taken some contortion, to make such a mark yourself," he said. He never doubted for an instant that she could have done it. I trained her myself.

Ocheeva shook her head as she straightened. "No, Speaker," she spat. "In fact, that was Teinaava." The other Argonian stood beside her. He was very still, as always, but the tip of his tail twitched ever so slightly. Lucien had seen him so only a very few times in his life, and only when he was very, very angry.

"Marie was not a bad choice," Vicente Valtieri said. "I don't believe any of us suspected her. I myself thought it was Ocheeva, at first."

"What?" said Ocheeva.

"Antoinetta failed only because of a very particular concatenation of circumstances," Valtieri went on, paying no attention. "Of course, she was entirely mad in her devotion to the Night Mother and the god. Except for young Vilindriel, whom she barely knew, she did not try to kill anyone quickly. She was fond of us, you see. It is too late to ask her, of course, but I believe she meant to give everyone the opportunity to make peace with the god."

"Yes," Lucien said musingly. "It does sound like something Antoinetta Marie would do. Strange, that I did not think of it." He did notice the smaller vampire creeping along the edge of the wall, trying to get behind him. She was entirely chameleoned against the stone, but the movement was quite visible to an eye as experienced as Lucien's.

"You've become what you consider a perfect assassin," Vicente Valtieri said, showing his fangs in something that might charitably be called a smile. "In the process, you've destroyed any capacity you might have possessed for emotional attachment. You've effectively handicapped your ability to predict the reactions of others."

"It seems rather arrogant of you to make such a judgment," Lucien LaChance said. "But humility has not been one of your strong points, Vicente."

Gogron gro-Bolmog chuckled behind his visor. Valtieri appeared to ignore him.

"True, certainly," Vicente said. "But I've been watching you a long time, Lucien."

"I am your Speaker," Lucien said. His own voice was flat in his ears, taut with anger. "If you kill me, you will be expelled from the Brotherhood."

"Yes," Teinaava said, speaking for the first time. "But we will not be alone. We will defeat the harbinger of the god's wrath, and regain the Night Mother's favor. All things are permitted to the strongest. You have said so yourself so very many times."

"And even if we are not accepted again," Ocheeva said, "It will be worth the price."

"I'm not sure you realize just what the price is," Lucien said.

"Tsk, man," Vicente Valtieri said, shaking his head. He drew his sword from its harness in a leisurely manner. The blade was nicked and scratched, dull in the dim light. "How long has it been since you actually had to fight for your life? Alone, without others of the Black Hand to defend you?"

"Not long enough for your purpose, I think," Lucien said. "And I suspect your wait has been even longer."

"Ours has not," Teinaava said, and moved.

---

A lot of things happened very quickly then. Dree saw M'raaj-Dar cast a fireball as big as his body at Lucien LaChance. It glared blue to Dree's altered vision, the same color as the blur of motion that was Lucien. He avoided the ball of flame easily, and it impacted harmlessly against the wall. The next instant he was invisible. That was no obstacle to Dree, who could still divine the pale outline of his body with her hunter's sight. She threw the spare knife she'd taken from Marie's body. As she'd expected, Lucien caught it and threw it back. Dree probably could not have moved in time, but Ocheeva was already between her and the Speaker. His invisibility snapped off the instant he threw the knife. He'd judged the distance perfectly, knowing the weapon would turn over in midair – so when it hit a target considerably nearer than he intended, it hit handle-first.

Ocheeva was driven back a step as the pommel smacked into her chest. LaChance could not pursue the advantage, however, because then Teinaava was upon him.

Dree was not sure any eye could follow what happened then. M'raaj-Dar stood back, a pale aureole glowing around his hands, but couldn't find a target. Gogron simply stood in the doorway with his axe in hand, the way Ocheeva had told him: You are too slow for what will happen here, and too dangerous to us if you go berserk. And you are still weak from blood loss. M'raaj-Dar cannot heal that. This latter point might also be true of Teinaava, but Gogron hadn't argued.

Dree shook her head, concentrating on the here and now. Ocheeva was part of the melee now, but Dree could not see what was happening. The two Shadowscale and the Speaker moved too fast for eyes to follow. Vicente Valtieri hefted his sword in one hand as he moved in slowly, watching. I wonder if even he can tell what's going on, Dree thought.

The question answered itself a moment later. Valtieri seemed to twitch sideways, moving barely a step to one side, but suddenly the claymore was bloody. Something hit the floor a few feet away with a wet thunk, and Dree's sensitive nostrils picked up the scent of human blood. The blur of movement resolved into two Argonians and one Breton. Lucien Lachance's hood had fallen back, exposing his disheveled hair. His left arm was gone. He still held a knife in the right. The old sword must have been sharper than it looked, because the cut had not yet begun to bleed. Lucien stepped quickly back, raising his knife arm, and blue light shot up from around his ankles. The wound might have healed. The pause was what killed him. Ocheeva and Teinaava darted in as one.

Everyone was suddenly still. Dree watched as Lucien LaChance stood swaying, staring down at the two wounds in his belly. They were perfectly straight and neatly in parallel, one above the other.

"You'll regret this," he said.

"I think not," said Vicente Valtieri, and cut off his head.