The Lost Cause of Silus Vesuius
The idea had seemed sound, but once it was in his mouth, Silus Vesuius found mead spiced with juniper berries less pleasant than he had imagined. Perhaps the Northerners considered it a luxury; perhaps they looked past it to the comeliness of the brewer-woman; but the juniper served rather to numb Silus's tongue to the flavor than to enhance it in any part. It was no spice; it was a dash of dull asceticism.
Silus had taken a few tries at asceticism, and never found he liked it.
Fortunate, then, that he was to honor the Mythic Dawn as a museum proprietor.
A few more patrons had come in since his last go. He splayed his fingers again and waggled them in the manner arranged. No immediate response, but he had learned on these trips not to expect one.
This time, after the requisite pause, his man approached.
A rheumy old man, the Breton seemed, so decrepit he could never stand a trek even of five miles, never mind from Winterhold where his prize had originally lain, but it had to be a façade, or else a catastrophic run of bad luck, even if he was only a fence. No man who dealt in stolen goods could afford slow joints.
But the prize was sound. When he opened the bundle, there it was: the fourth Commentaries. Mankar Camoran's own son had held this book; some said penned it. It had exchanged hands beneath the very Imperial City - and to whom it had been passed, who could say? Silus's own ancestors, of Solitude infamy? The doomed outposts of Black Marsh, or the conquerors of the Crystal Tower, or the very assassins of Uriel Septim – who could say? The book was rich with muteness.
His hand brushed the cover and opened. It was written, as he had suspected, in the fourth-century hand – Dagon had had little use for scribes, but infinite use for a single one; in his vainer moments, Silus thought of himself as carrying on that torch – and the initial paragraphs were just right, they really did spell NOONDAY SUN. Alas that no tombstone on Green Emperor Way was ever liable to come into his collection, or he would be able to demonstrate the meaning on the step of his own Dawnstar homestead.
The pub's door sawed open once again, this time allowing a pair of men through, the first with a cold lamp-box that he jounced about.
"Walk always in the light," proclaimed the second, as he kicked a table
Vigilants. As casually as he could with his suddenly sweaty palms, he closed the book and laid his hands over the cover (how much would it damage the leather, he wondered.) When they had passed, he removed a hand and with it transferred the large coin-purse he had brought from the bottom of his pack to the table, then bundled the sacred writings into it as quickly as would probably not provoke suspicion.
He was sure their eyes had given him more than a passing glance.
For an hour or so, he nursed his tongue-numbing mead and spoke to his seller of politics and the weather (Silus, for his part, didn't care how close Ulfric Stormcloak was to the High King nearly as much as he half-vomited at how close the Jarl of Dawnstar clung to his hem.) The seller had as much heart in it as Silus did, but with eight hundred drakes in his lap, the man was inclined to be patient.
The Vigilants did not approach. In the time it took Silus to swallow down the last of his mead, they had fallen soundly into actual carousing.
He left without a further word, gladdened, and turned the corner toward Helgen's north gate.
It was then that something blunt struck him hard in the back, knocking his wind away, a bottle tipped over his face leaving it numb, and the last thing he knew, to his relief, was that his satchel was at the side facing the sky.
By the quality of the lamplight when he awoke, he must be below ground. Those beams were awfully perpendicular and close to one another for a mine; a building, perhaps?
He was on one of three cots. One was a bit ill-used by mud and weather, but his was only dusty.
Then he noticed the corner behind him, where a man stood, ten years his senior but powerfully built, in easy reach of a quarterstaff broad as Silus's forearm and longer than his captor was tall.
He felt at the place between his shoulderblades. That fit.
Three cots. That meant three Vigilants.
"Worry not," said the man, placidly. "Your book is unharmed, as is the rest of your belongings. How was your journey here?"
"Pleasant weather, very keen starlight," he gabbled. What do you want with me, he longed to ask, but even the scribe of the Mythic Dawn would never have shown his belly like that.
The Vigilant seemed to read it in his face regardless.
"Silus Vesuius. There is a matter to our mutual advantage. I would discuss it."
Silus managed a thin, nervous laugh at that. "No one ever says that and means it. In fact I don't imagine anyone says it without shutting someone up in a basement first."
The big man laughed wryly. "I bested you in combat before that. And will again, you may rely. I have the measure of you. By the creed of the Mythic Dawn, I have no need to speak of mutual advantage. It's obey me as your better or defy me direct to Paradise… and Paradise has closed for some time. Fortunate that you don't really believe that nonsense!"
He slapped Silus's arm, in what might almost have been camaraderie. It probably was not supposed to hurt much.
"But I'd advise you not to try leaving before I make my proposal."
No braggadocio in him. Only the stark truth: he was better. And, for whatever reason, he wanted him alive.
Silus winced. "What do you want with me, Vigilant?"
The man stared a moment and then spat on the floor. "Never call me by that name again."
Silus's mind worked furiously.
"Then…then you, too, are a servant of the princes of Oblivion? An ally."
The man laughed again, a marked element of surprise in it this time. "No! No, but better that than a Vigilant. Deserters without the decency to leave camp, that's what they are. If they did even their own sworn duty it would be too much trouble to their settled routine – march about looking important between every drink-house and brothel in Tamriel… never mind fighting this war…"
Suddenly, they had turned to idle tavern-talk. Silus embraced it. "You think it'll come to that, with the Eastmarch?"
"What? Ah. Last I heard, the Jarl was on his way to treat with High King Torygg. I can only hope that he turns more toward the Empire in the end – and the Empire toward him – but I don't think so, not when the elves are stirring the pot."
"Are they?"
"If I know it's to their advantage to have their finger in the pie, that's where their finger is," said the man. "I might fall under Ulfric's banner in the end myself – if all other possibilities are exhausted; you'd do as well to try splitting a drake into two sides – but infinitely better that than a Vigilant. Half the daedric shrines in the province can be found on maps in general stores – I suppose you'd know at least one for yourself, wouldn't you?"
He did. He had never got around to going to Dagon's shrine, but he certainly knew where it was. The squirm he felt about the subject was really immaterial. There were such logistical difficulties in procuring a sacrifice, and it would imperil his work at the museum.
The man smiled genially, with rather too much perception in his eyes for Silus's liking. He then took a mouthful of jerky from a pouch at his side, and offered Silus the butt end. Elk, spiced with sage. Not too bad.
"No, Silus Vesuius, whatever the Camorans would say about it, there truly is such a thing as mutual advantage."
He swallowed and a lump of gristle bulged down his throat. "How do you know my name?"
The man shrugged. "I was living in Dawnstar not long ago. You're trying to set up a museum, always conducting your business in the tavern, telling people where you're going in plain earshot, and it's worrying the local clergy. Hard not to."
He did have the look of a miner about him. They always came and went; Silus was unsurprised to have no special memory of this man, but it was hard to imagine not noticing being trailed by a man so large.
"I simply learned you were headed to Helgen and waited by the tavern window," the man went on.
"Oh."
"But the priest I spoke with believed there was hope you might sour on the enterprise, because of the way you spoke of the Argonian base camps in Oblivion. You spoke of them with awe, he said, and sympathy when you thought how they must have discovered the Sigil Stones taken from them. But I think I know why that is better than he."
If he did, he would have the better of Silus as well. He certainly didn't know what had moved him so in that account.
The big man ticked off points on his fingers. "You like the sky very well the way it is. You're no ascetic. You love to have earthly possessions. You don't seem to have any particular affinity for blood sacrifice – out of curiosity, have you actually bound yourself to Lord Dagon?"
"Of course," said Silus defiantly.
"You lie," he said, quiet as a candle-flame. "Good."
Some dim defiance reared up in Silus; he staggered up from his cot. "You want me to forsake my ancestors. What mutual advantage is that?"
The man stood, unmoving and unperturbed. "Oh, that concerns your advantage strictly. No business of mine. I only ask that, daedric worship or no, you proceed with the museum. I can only think of one reason you would, Vesuius: the same reason you so sympathized with the Argonians. If your ancestors had kept their reputation and their wealth, rather than die in ignominy, you never would have bothered about them. What you love, in short, is a lost cause. And that is well."
He then turned his back and knelt (his great body coiled like a lion; Silus could entertain no notion of taking him by surprise). Momentarily, he re-emerged, pivoted, and held before him a thin, broad wax-paper envelope.
"For I have another small addition to your exhibit," he said.
It was with the tenderest care that his vast hands unfolded the envelope. It bore no seal, and it soon became clear that the reason for this was that the paper within might have been jostled to pieces by any sudden snap.
One piece of parchment. Very old, with a burn direct through the center. But the remains – surely it was a more complex conjuration chart than any Winterhold possessed. His head did not swim with the intricacies of it, and that was odd, but perhaps it was down to the burn spoiling the pattern.
"What is it?" he said, not able to keep a note of wonder out of his voice for the sheer age of the thing.
The man chuckled again. "Never trust to commentaries, Dawnman, without the original to guide you. Of course that would have been very logistically difficult, the sole copy having the capacity to drive a man mad had it not been under the careful possession of Mankar Camoran, but –"
Torn between wild desire and dread of destroying the precious page, Silus had no choice but to sink into his cot. "The Mysterium Xarxes. A page from the very Mysterium Xarxes."
"The only page that survives," said the man.
Silus couldn't tear his eyes away. "How—"
"The honest way, I fear," said the big man, smiling grimly. "As a man with a cause nearly as thoroughly lost as your own, so deep as to look to the thoroughly lost cause for hope.
"My name is Acilius Bolar. The last Blade alive who saw the siege of Cloud Ruler Temple. And had I thought to save myself or my comrades above the Mysterium Xarxes, I would be dead as the rest."
Silus looked wildly around at the cots. "This—this is a Blades safehouse?"
"Penetrated, years ago," said Bolar curtly. (Silus realized the stain on that cot might not, after all, be mud.) "Survived that, too. But they don't expect us to revisit compromised boltholes. Long as I'm on the move shortly, I'll be all right."
"Well – well – well, what do you care for the Mysterium Xarxes! Didn't you Blades destroy it to begin with!"
"Most of it crumbled in accidents of the road," he said, wincing at the memory. "A bit less than half, I had to leave pinned in the rubble of the Temple in the end. But the essence of it, Dagon's will and Camoran's false Paradise – that was destroyed by Martin Septim. Destroyed by him after he pored over it many and many an hour till he walked weary and gasped like a drowned man in his sleep, for he knew the stakes as well as the toll, ever taking the worst of the duties upon himself. By Martin Septim, conqueror of Oblivion, whose tomb withstood the lie to the contrary for three hundred desperate days – that is what I cared for it then, and what I care for it still. Preserve it, Vesuius. Preserve it for whatever reason you choose; you shall do it better than I."
And in that moment they were kindred spirits. Silus liked it not one bit, but they were. The ache to possess a thing desecrated, the desperate need that the past not be forgotten… gods' blood, even the way a Blade spoke of Martin Septim was at one with the feeling he'd had hours before at most, contemplating ink that might have been laid down by the pen of Raven Camoran.
Foolish pursuers of a lost cause.
"If – if you think I'll be extolling the Septim bastard in my ancestors' museum…"
"Better to leave it to implication," Bolar agreed.
And what, after all, was the alternative? This last fragment was all that was left. The man valued it chiefly for being ruined and had a bad habit of disasters on the road. Go to the Thalmor for an easy bounty? But Bolar was right: that would endanger this precious page more surely than anything that had yet befallen it.
"Oh, very well," he said. He fell silent a moment as he warmed to the notion. "No, no, it is very well. Perhaps the greatest treasure my museum could hold, short of Dagon's Razor – which could, incidentally, split a drake in two faces, if I had it. Yes, I'll take this. I'll risk the Vigilants. You— carry on risking what you're risking."
"Rather less, now." Bolar grasped his right hand in both of his, like a brother-in-arms, and Silus did not, oddly, recoil. "Come. I'd best show you the way up."