A/N: D'oh! I've just realized that the asterisks I was using to convey shifts in POV within a chapter aren't showing up in the live preview. I apologize for any inconvenience and will use "--" instead.

Chapter 24

"That way!" screamed the Dremora's voice again. Akhanad shook her head irritably at the inner noise. She now had no doubt which kynaz to track, which signature of daedric power to follow across this chill and crowded landscape, but the Master would keep trying to give more orders anyway. Akhanad dimly understood what the kynaz was trying to do, and she suspected it required nothing more than simple proximity to the target.

She had to go more slowly now. It was getting darker, and Akhanad was unaccustomed to complete darkness – particularly the cold blue darkness of this world, so very uncomfortable compared to the fervid half-light of Dagon's plane.

The Master would want her to kill the caitiff, for whatever reason a kynaz might have for that. The Kyn were ever killers of their own kind, and Akhanad neither knew nor cared what the individual motive might be. She did know that the link between herself and the loathed krynvelhat was tenuous here in Nirn. And to keep the tight control she held even now, to have even the dimmest possibility of threatening Akhanad into compliance, the mage would have to tire herself. Even an unsleeping daedra could tire, oh, yes.

The krynvelhat was paying close attention to the link now, keeping her on a tight leash. But that would change when she came near the weak one. The Master's attention would be divided, and she dared not dispatch her atronach to the Void lest she lose the link to her desired object. Things would be interesting then. Akhanad grinned to herself as she vaulted another small boulder, enjoying the features of her new face. And that was assuming the kynaz was even able to kill her again from so far away. Akhanad rather suspected she was not.

The krynvelhat would hurt her if she failed, of course. But the krynvelhat was going to hurt her again anyway. Akhanad saw nothing to lose in what she planned, and perhaps something to gain.

That Kheised had been strange. (She was unaware at this point that he had passed her some hundreds of yards to her right, taking a more direct route toward the goal than hers.) She had never seen an atronach with such a fine degree of control over his form, even his voice. And, like all creatures of a predatory inclination, she had found yielding to her curiosity generally served her better than otherwise.

--

"Here it is," said Tychicus Varen. He set Laure down gently as he broke stride, letting go when she was steady on her feet. She was very proud of how well she hid her disappointment, and then she looked up through the treeline and saw the hulking shadow of the keep against the starry sky. Laure swallowed. The water must be off to one side, hidden by the curve of the land; from here she could not even hear it.

She called up a pittance of magicka so that she could cast the one night vision spell she knew. Everything around her grew lighter, and colors flattened into shades of gray and blue. She stared up at the worn bricks of the structure in front of them. "It's an old fort," she said.

"Yes, this is Fort Ashen," said Tychicus Varen. "Nothing's lived inside it since before I came to Cyrodiil. Whatever is in there now probably isn't alive, either."

"What about the Dremora?" said Laure.

"They won't have gone inside," said Varen. "They didn't care for Sercen. They won't much care for a place of ancient human dead, either. Which means there won't be any undead left around the exterior." He turned and looked at her with a very familiar lack of affect. "If you want to stay here in the trees, you'll probably be safe. I don't know what will happen once I'm inside, and they won't spare me for your sake if things go wrong. Nor you for mine."

"I understand," said Laure. "I want to go with you."

Varen nodded, and his smile was there and gone in an instant. "I thought so. Then let us go, Sister Laure."

They stepped out of the trees together. Laure considered making herself invisible, but Tychicus Varen had not. In fact, he was drawing up a life detection spell of such magnitude that any magus inside the keep must surely sense it. Laure was almost used to that by this time.

He doesn't want to surprise them, she concluded after a moment's thought. Maybe that was better, considering what had happened last time. She wondered if the half-mad Imperial was still alive.

"We will go in by the main entrance," said Varen, confirming Laure's guess. She followed him around to the right, shivering in the night breeze as they walked beside the stone wall. In a city the stone would soak up the day's heat and give it back, but she felt no warmth from the walls beside her. Different kinds of moss grew in the chinks where the mortar had fallen out, dark green and pale green and gray.

She wouldn't need her night vision spell again, it seemed. Someone had a small fire going inside the walls as they came to the high arch that marked the entrance to the courtyard inside. There might have been a portcullis once, but if so it was long gone. The flames cast bizarre shadows on the high walls and stairs and the broken arches of brick.

The male Dremora stood to one side of the fire, the Imperial on the other. The light of the fire did strange things to Dremora armor, picking out red glows and shifting shadows on the black surface. The Imperial still wore the ill-fitting fur garments, and he still had deep shadows in the sockets of his eyes. There was a bow in his hands, an arrow nocked but not drawn. Laure almost missed the other Dremora. It took several seconds for her to resolve the shadow beside the caitiff into a slumped body reclining on the ground. Then the Sleeper raised her head, nudging herself up on one elbow, and the fire reflected from violet-threaded eyes as she stared toward them. They were closer than last time, and now Laure could make out the peculiar shape of her horns, curled like a ram's tight against her skull.

"Servant of the Aedra," she said. Her voice was very high for a Dremora's, but it still had that nerve-scraping duality, as if two people were speaking and only one was in this plane. "And a second time you have brought this Breton. Why?"

"She was to be here," said Varen. He shrugged one shoulder in his brown robe. "I saw it."

Nobody was asking as if she'd come by choice, she noticed. Maybe she hadn't. I wouldn't be here if he hadn't carried me. And he can see the future, at least a little. But he'd said earlier that his vision would fail near the Sleeper. I wonder how much he has already seen.

"You haven't taken a life to strengthen yourself this time," said Tychicus Varen.

"A token of my intent," said Sodrinye. She shook her head slowly. "In this tongue one would say a token of good faith."

"There is no good faith among the Kyn," said Varen without rancor.

"There are those against whom we are not at war," rumbled the big caitiff. One gauntlet rested on his mace, but he had not drawn the weapon. He was looking carefully around him as if he expected an ambush.

"You are powerful," said Sodrinye. "But tonight it is not you who cause me alarm. What you fear or intend may be beside the point before the dark is gone again."

Tychicus Varen nodded once. "This I've also seen."

"Then why are you here?" said Sodrinye, and sat upright with a sudden jerk. Laure twitched.

"I don't know," said Varen. "I trust that I will."

"The time for speech is at an end," said the Sleeper, and balled up her doubled fists and hit her own caitiff in the back of the right knee. The joint obligingly buckled, and he fell to one knee with an oath just in time for an arrow to zip past where his head had been a moment before. Laure dove for the accommodating shadow of a pillar and found herself next to the Imperial. She looked around wildly for another place, but he wasn't looking at her. He was just letting go of his bowstring, aiming up into the darkness. The vibrating twang of the weapon was loud beside her ear.

--

"Tell you what," said Menien Goneld, glancing briefly sideways at the little priestess. She was surprisingly plump for someone who must have spent a great deal of time outdoors, reminding him with a pang of someone he had known in a life on the other side of flames and shadows. "I'm not saying we're on the same side, mind you." He squinted up into the dark as he nocked another arrow. There was no movement now. Whoever had skylined himself an instant ago had taken cover rather than risk another shot at the Dremora. Not such a sloppy thing to do on a cloudy night, but he was blotting out the stars.

"We certainly are not," said the priestess.

"Right. But you leave me alone and I'll leave you alone. Sodrinye might or might not want to hurt you sometime, but I'm pretty sure it's not now."

"That isn't exactly reassuring," said the Breton. If her voice quavered slightly, she recovered her timbre very quickly. "I'm casting night eye now. Please refrain from shooting me."

"I shot your friend because he paralyzed me," said Goneld. "And tied me up and left me. I wouldn't expect you to understand."

"Good," said the priestess. "Because I don't." She stared up and around, squinting at something Goneld could not see. "That wasn't the action of a sane man. You seem reasonably sane at the moment."

"At the moment I'm not reliving two years in a cage in Hell," said Goneld. "When I can't move the memories get hard to ignore. Now don't talk for a second. I have to listen."

Somewhat to his surprise, she obeyed. He heard the loud tramp of Ebel-Merodach's boots off to the right somewhere, probably carrying Sodrinye into the shadow under the stairs where she would be invisible. Assuming whoever shot at us can't cast spells and isn't a Khajiit. But that wasn't a Khajiiti silhouette I shot at. Wasn't a skeleton, either, and no zombie could have shot that arrow. There's somebody alive after us.

--

Marcus Barnabas cursed himself silently as he crept along the narrow walkway that lined the courtyard wall halfway up. It had been no joke getting up the wall from the outside while the others were inside talking, and then somehow he'd missed. It looked as if the spellcaster had deliberately knocked the other Dremora down and saved him, and that was not typical demon behavior.

He could see the dying fire down below – he was careful not to look directly at it, lest the afterimages blind him to his shadowy surroundings - but its light revealed nothing. Everyone had scattered to cover. Lybiad was somewhere in here as well, supposedly circling toward the stairwell to his left; Tracks-Too-Well was waiting out in the forest, ostensibly on watch but more likely reluctant to come near the two Dremora.

He heard voices briefly, the Imperial and the girl, but they were behind a pillar and out of sight below his ledge. The Imperial had been very quick to return fire, reflexes Marcus did not care for at all – ordinary bandits didn't do that kind of shooting.

Stalking in the dark was an exciting game in training, a tense and ugly one in reality. Darkness had only just fallen, and who knew what would happen if -

Marcus heard a drawn-out hiss, like someone had thrown water onto the fire below, but the glow of the low flame was uninterrupted. Then there was a red light in the main doorway, and a creature flung itself inside and crouched swaying beside the fire. The thing had a woman's body and a woman's face, but it was black as coal from head to toe. A red glow limned it and cast a dim light around it on the ground. A flame atronach? Here?

"Kyn!" hissed the atronach. "I know you are here. Come out!"

There was no answer. Barnabas thought about his silver arrows, but they would do very little damage to an elemental creature. For that he would have to get close enough to use his sword, and there was no reason to do that just yet. The atronach was circling the fire slowly, head cocked as if listening. It doesn't act like it's friendly to the demons. Let's wait and see what happens.