Chapter 2 - Awakenings
Lucien looked about himself. It was pitch black, and the air smelled stale and stuffy.
Casting his custom nighteye/detect life spell, he took another look around. He seemed to be in some kind of storeroom, about the size of the training room, back at the Cheydinhal sanctuary, but there was no life within one hundred feet of him. There were chairs, statues and urns. Ancient looking books with heavy covers that looked to be made of metal. Weapons lined one wall, some of them exquisitely made, others obviously only ceremonial. A magnificent set of armour displayed on a statue stood in one corner. Nothing radiated magicka.
A museum, perhaps?Lucien pondered. His gaze fell upon what seemed to be an enormous box, the size of a small hut placed on a dais at one end of the room. Moving beside it, he found a door. With various sayings about curiosity running through his mind, he reached out and pulled on the door handle. The door was stiff, like it hadn't been used in years, and as it opened it gave off a faint rotting smell. Lucien looked behind the door.
At another door. Becoming slightly irritated, he jerked the next door open, to be met by yet another door. This door was just about at head height. With a sigh, his hand paused on the third handle, considering. His silencer seemed to hold him in too high a regard to play this kind of trick on him, so he believed her when she said she didn't know where the scroll would take him. It had been a last resort, really. But he knew the Black Hand would not have given him a chance to explain.
xox
'Speaker, wait!' his silencer called to him as he turned his back upon the body on Ungolim, and the statue of his unholy matron. Slowly he turned.
'Take this,' she said, holding out a roll of parchment. 'I found it in the Imperial Palace basement when I stole the Elder Scroll.'
Lucien took the scroll; the stiff, yellowed parchment looked a hundred years old or more.
'It's a teleportation scroll,' she explained. 'I'm not sure where it goes, but it's to somewhere far away.' Teleportation magick had been next to impossible to obtain after Hannibal Traven had severely restricted it's use, but whatever this was, it was clear that it hadn't been written by anyone from the mages guild.
The words of power were written in the Aylied language, but it was an archaic Dunmer script. He skimmed through the length of it – an unusually long incantation, but he could read it all.
'As a last resort,' she said. He nodded, placing a gloved hand behind her head, drawing her closer. He kissed her brow, then turned without a whisper and disappeared from her life forever.
xox
Lucien turned the handle. The stench of death hit him like a wall, so strong it took all his self control not to gag. Placing a fine black sleeve over his nose and mouth, he took a look in the box with ever-so-slightly watering eyes.
A beautiful granite sarcophagus occupied the space inside the box. Inside was a corpse adorned in a magnificent set of armour, magicka rolling off it in waves like heat off the gold road in Sun's Height. It seemed to be made of mithril or silver, yet Lucien knew this was a metal he had never seen before. Inscriptions ran over it like veins in a leaf, curling and intertwining, carved so fine and intricately that it baffled the eye. The corpse's head wore a mask of the same substance, the features serene yet strong.
Looking over the figure in the sarcophagus, Lucien caught sight of a chain attached to something black clasped tight in a gauntleted fist. Prying open the fingers of the corpse, Lucien tugged on the object, ripping it from its previous owner's grasp.
Lucien dangled the object from its chain between two fingers. It was a little flat figurine, an amulet, made out of some ebony-like substance, depicting a woman wielding two blades; one above her head and one behind her. Along one of the blades was written a word in a script he didn't recognise.
Pocketing the amulet, he continued his inspection of what he had come to realise was a tomb. The walls, the ceilings, even the floors were covered in paintings and engravings, all of which seemed to depict people in various states of undress performing numerous tasks. He recognised a figure dressed in resplendent armour – the occupant of this tomb. He seemed to be ruling over most of the others; a king, perhaps?
Moving on, he headed towards an open doorway. It lead into a hallway, walls adorned with rotting tapestries. Through this he went into another chamber, slightly smaller than the first, but completely filled with stone statues. Each one human height, though slightly shorter than Lucien, standing shoulder to shoulder. Each one different, and each carved to be astonishingly life like.
If Lucien had been the sort to feel uneasy, he would have done now, with a small army of carven sentinels guarding their king's final resting place. As it was, he didn't break his smooth gate, and kept walking into the adjoining antechamber.
This was clearly a library, or had once been. There were shelves stacked with books from floor to ceiling, and the musty smell of old parchment was overwhelming, such that Lucien was tempted to carry on walking. One particular book caught his eye, however. It had the same cryptic script on the cover that he had seen everywhere else in the tomb, but it had daedric runes depicted above it.
Pulling the tome off the shelf, he carefully dusted it off. 'Daedric Translation Manual'. Smiling a little to himself, as daedric was a language with which even elementary practitioners of the arcane must master, and in which Lucien himself was fluent.
Lucien shifted one of the finely carved wooden chairs out of the library into the hall, to escape the mustiness. Settling down, he started to flick through the manual.
After about an hour, cross referencing with other tomes and the inscriptions on the wall when necessary, he had determined that this tomb had belonged to someone called Nefernis, who had been a great warrior king at some point in this country's history. What country that was, Lucien was unsure, and Nefernis was not a name he was familiar with. What he did find curious was that Nefernis was always referred to along with 'his shadow', and always behind the figure in the resplendent armour was an identical copy, only coloured all in black.
One final thing he had the patience to glean from the text was the word inscribed on the amulet. Holding it in his palm, he read the writing: Kushiel.
'Kushiel,' he murmured. Everything went black. It took an alarmed moment to realise that his nighteye spell had worn off. He was about to renew it, when he glanced up, and saw two luminous green eyes staring back at him. Quickly casting the spell, he saw a life sized version of the amulet he held, and she was swinging one of those blades at his head.
Swiftly ducking under the blow, he swept to his feet, drawing his blades. Mehrunes Razor in his left hand; a delightful little surprise at the end of one of his last contracts, The Ebony Blade in his right; that was a gift from his dear silencer, a memento from the murders that he had recruited her for. Lucien smiled a little as he held his beloved weapons; he had revelled in his duties for the Black Hand, but he sorely missed the thrill of combat, as combat was so rare for a speaker.
The woman he faced recovered from her miss as though she had planned it, with a practiced grace Lucien had only seen in Dunmer who had trained for centuries. And himself, of course. But he realised this would be no easy fight.