Chapter 14: In for the Kill

It was the first week of Frostfall, marking a whole year since I had joined the Dark Brotherhood, the elite band of assassins serving the Night Mother and delivering vengeance to the guilty. After pushing to go on contract for months on end, our Listener—Hecate, once known as Diana the Dragonborn—had finally given me permission to take lives in the name of the Dread Father, Sithis. I had dreamed of this day for far longer than that, ever since I had used my own mother's bones to enact the terrible ritual called the Black Sacrament.

When Garnag and I left Sanctuary, my heart had been full of joy at the idea of finally fulfilling my destiny as an assassin. Neither of us had our own horses; Garnag had spent the last decade in prison, leaving him with no possessions to speak of, and I hadn't yet earned any coin to buy one. Everything we owned was borrowed or a gift. The Dark Brotherhood was a generous family, for the most part, and neither of us wanted for supplies.

Cicero had been generous enough to loan Garnag his horse, a brown he called Hilarity. I had expected to wind up riding Nazir's gray gelding, Sirocco, but was shocked when Hecate had pushed the reins of her own horse into my hands. The black demon-steed called Shadowmere had been a fixture in Dark Brotherhood lore since before any of us had joined the order. It had been the horse I rode when I was first taken from Windhelm to become a member, riding pillion behind Hecate through a cold night a year past. I was honored beyond words.

Garnag had chosen to pack lightly. He carried a simple iron sword and a brace of daggers, as well as a small stock of potions provided by Babette, our alchemist and resident girl of mystery. They weren't as good as real healing—Hecate had once described them as "adrenaline in a bottle"—but they would keep you going if you were wounded and needed to stay active. He also insisted on bringing along a saddlebag with enough dried food for a week. The trip should be shorter than that, and I trusted the hunting and foraging skills I had gained since joining the Brotherhood, but Garnag was persistent about always "keeping the basics on hand."

My own kit was a little more specialized. I preferred blunt weapons to bladed ones, but I always kept a knife on me as a backup. Cicero had shown me dozens of uses for short blades that I would never have considered before becoming an assassin; knives were versatile tools. My own primary weapon was a flanged mace with a solid steel head that could crush steel plate when wielded at full force. It wasn't a subtle weapon, but I had never been a very subtle person. I also brought along fishing line, hooks, and a fire kit. After the hellish trip I had endured wandering the roads of Skyrim when I escaped Honorhall Orphanage, I was dead set on never again being caught in the wilderness without a way to catch food or make fire.

While Garnag preferred to wear normal clothes on mission, perhaps because of his skill as a mage, I insisted on getting to wear real armor on contract. Nazir had shown me the basics of light armor—how to use it to deflect incoming attacks, how to wear it comfortably, that sort of thing. Hecate still hadn't wanted to issue me a permanent suit of Dark Brotherhood armor, since she didn't yet know how tall I was going to wind up after finishing my growth spurt, but she had seen the use in protecting my vital organs while in dangerous situations. She had turned out a basic suit of reinforced leather armor in my size in almost less time than Nazir could make dinner. It fit like a dream and felt like it could stop a crossbow bolt at point-blank range.

The day I left for my first contract, everyone had gathered near the Black Door to say goodbye to me. Even Meena, who normally didn't care one whit about anyone but herself, had come to see me off. Hecate had hugged me close like a real mother and whispered, "Be safe, Aretino." Not the usual "Kill well and kill often" that was used as the standard greeting and departing phrase by the Dark Brotherhood. She had also said something else, something that I had never heard her say before—not even to Cicero.

"I love you."

My mind kept coming back to "Be safe," though. It warmed my heart to think about, even if it wasn't particularly practical advice for an assassin. Safety wasn't something we dealt with on a regular basis; my own life had been fraught with danger, even before joining the Brotherhood. My daily training with Cicero, Meena and Garnag—all of them skilled teachers—could easily turn lethal if one of us made a mistake. I could have gotten killed saving Babette from bandits, even if she still insisted that she didn't need any saving.

Still, my heart needed all the warming it could get—given how cold the rest of me was after spending two days in a duck blind on a gods-forsaken island in the middle of the Sea of Ghosts.

It had taken us two days of hard riding along the old coast road to travel from Dawnstar to Winterhold, where the fabled College of Mages lurked on a spire of rock connected to the mainland by a perilous-looking bridge. It was my first visit to the city of wizards, which was far less imposing than I had expected. The college itself was awe-inspiring, a mighty fortress illuminated by magical light that made it seem half-real from a distance. The city of Winterhold on the other hand was a ramshackle collection of huts, half-finished houses, and a few ratty-looking taverns.

Garnag was able to tell me that the city was actually once far grander, but that a terrible earthquake had leveled most of it years ago. The bridge to the college had suffered serious damage during the quake, and parts of it had fallen into the sea along with the city of Winterhold. Apparently, some Nords blamed the mages for the earthquake, since the college had suffered so little damage compared to the city.

"Did they have something to do with it?" I asked, looking up at the huge fortress.

"Who knows?" Garnag rumbled. "But in my experience, it's never worthwhile to credit malice where stupidity is just as likely a cause. So if they did, it was probably an accident." He spat noisily into the sea. "People are always looking to blame mages for their problems too. I suppose it helps you deal with tragedy if you can put a face to it, be angry instead of sad. That kind of thing can wind up hurting a lot of people if it's misdirected, though."

I understood what Garnag was getting at. For a long time Grelod the Kind, headmistress of Honorhall Orphanage, had been the face in my mind when I thought of the world's ills. Even after Hecate had killed the old crone, she was still the first thing I thought of when someone talked about evil. Rolff Stone-Fist had become my personal boogeyman after I slit his throat as part of my initiation ritual to join the Brotherhood. Lately, he was haunting my nightmares less and less, for which I could only be thankful. But I still comprehended the need to put a human face on your misery.

"Where did you learn magic?" I asked, and immediately felt sheepish. "Sorry, Garnag. I know we're not supposed to ask each other about life before the Brotherhood."

"No worries, kid," he rumbled. Whenever other people called me "kid," I felt resentful about it. For some reason, it didn't feel as condescending coming from Garnag. "I was trained in the College of Whispers back in Cyrodiil. They were one of the groups that took up training mages for the Empire after the old Mage's Guild dissolved. I wasn't even fully trained when the Brotherhood recruited me." He laughed as though recalling good memories. "Being a court mage wouldn't have suited me anyway."

We stabled our horses in Winterhold, paying from our small petty cash fund to put them up. I paid a few septims extra for discretion, leaving the stablehand with the idea that my master was a powerful visiting mage who would turn him into an ash pile if anything happened to the horses while we were gone. Shadowmere snorted menacingly right on cue, making the poor man blanch with fear and leaving me to worry how well the horse understood me.

We acquired a small rowboat from a fisherman and rowed out into the Sea of Ghosts, following Nazir's map into the fading twilight. I understood how the sea got its name as night fell and cold fog billowed up from the surface of the water. The dim light from our hooded lantern made the swirling mists look as though they had awful, tormented faces in them. A quick dip of my finger into the water off the side of the rowboat let me know that it was cold enough I would probably freeze to death in under a minute if I fell out. Fortunately, we were able to find the island with little trouble.

The island that my target—Sullian Crito, a corrupt diplomat turned slaver—had picked for his dead drop with his pirate allies was a scrubby little plot of land maybe two hundred feet across. It rose a dozen feet out of the water, rife with rocky outcroppings, growths of thick brush and nettles, and a thriving pod of horkers living in a reef on the western edge of the tear-shaped islet.

"What a lovely little chunk of rock," I commented as we dragged the rowboat ashore and flipped it over. My breath steamed in the air as we covered the boat in handfuls of sand, rock, and seaweed. It would make it harder to recover the boat for a quick getaway, but camouflage was a necessity for the mission. We needed the island to seem undisturbed until Crito showed up to collect the gemstones he was receiving as payment from the slavers. If anything looked out of place, we might wind up with Crito never showing—or worse, his pirate allies raiding the island to look for us.

"I think you should get to name it," Garnag joked. "You're about to kill its former owner, after all."

"I'm no good with names," I complained. "Babette and Hecate always seem to be able to come up with that sort of thing on the fly. They know a bunch of ancient languages and stuff, and I don't know any of that." I looked around the desolate piece of land and shook my head. "Couldn't think of anything to call this piece of crap island if I wanted to." Garnag smiled his tusky grin at me.

"Shiteholme," he said. I looked at him, confused. "I know a few old pre-Empire languages too. That's from the old Nord tongue. Means 'crap island.'"

We looked at each other a moment before bursting out laughing, holding our stomachs and trying to keep from making too much noise. I wiped tears from my eyes and finally nodded.

"Shiteholme, it is," I managed to cough out. "Now let's look around and find someplace to put up our blind."

"Ahh, Fortress Shite," Garnag mused sagely. That sent me into another gale of ill-kept laughter. If all of the old members of the Brotherhood were as funny as Garnag, it was no wonder that Cicero had become such an amusing fellow.

Our first night on Shiteholme wasn't so bad. We worked to quickly set up a camouflaged tent, and the exertion kept us warm until we could crawl into our bedrolls and collapse into an exhausted sleep. By the time we woke up, it was sleeting heavily, and we had to go out into the freezing rain to renew the basic camouflage from the previous night and reinforce it. I grateful to have Garnag along; the island was lonely and miserable, and the effort to set up a camp would have been much more with just me doing it.

As part of that work we set up a couple of square yards of oilcloth on stakes, creating an overhang to keep the rain off us while we watched the shore. There was only one place on the island that was useful as a spot for boats to come ashore, which helped our surveillance significantly. The "duck blind"—we called it that from an old hunter's term for a concealed sniping position—was right outside the entrance to the tent, surrounded on all sides by uprooted bramble bushes and scrub brush.

Garnag and I both worked for hours to build our little camp spot, taking frequent breaks to warm our hands over the small fire we had built in a sunken pit inside the blind. We couldn't let it get too big lest the smoke or glare give us away. More than that, it had to be kept small so that it didn't dry out the camouflage enough to set it on fire or build up enough heat under the oilcloth to set it smoldering. It took most of a morning and by the time we were done, we were both soaked, frozen, and stiff. Still, I couldn't deny the quality of the work; from further away than a dozen paces, you couldn't tell that our camp was anything but a particularly thick bramble patch.

We had discussed searching the island to see if we could find Crito's dead drop before the merchant arrived, but dismissed it. Between the risk of being spotted by a passing ship and the sheer effort involved—even searching a small island thoroughly was a task of days at minimum—we decided it was simply easier to wait for Crito to arrive. Garnag said there was no point doing extra work when you could make your target do it for you. I thought it was good advice, especially given the miserable weather.

Once everything was situated, we dove into the tent and stripped out of our wet clothes. Since I was technically the one on mission and Garnag was just there as backup, I volunteered to leave the tent to hang them up over the fire. It made me think of when I had stolen clothes from the miners at Shor's Stone, which brought a wistful smile to my face. It amazed me how something that had been such a trial at the time could turn amusing in retrospect.

When I got back inside, the tent was surprisingly warm. Garnag was sitting on a bedroll in his loincloth, cupping his hands in front of him and concentrating intently. It shocked me a little to see a tiny ball of flame hovering over his cupped palms, rolling back and forth like a sphere of liquid fire.

"Close the door, kid," Garnag growled. "You're letting the heat out." I hurried to seal the tent flap and skirted around the edge of the tent. I was afraid that bumping into Garnag might cause the fire to jump out of his hands or something, and I didn't fancy catching the tent on fire because I had been clumsy.

"I didn't know you could do that," I commented when I had gotten to the safety of my own bedroll.

"Pretty much every trained mage can make fire," he replied. Garnag's eyes seemed glassy with fatigue and concentration. "It takes a lot of finesse to just make a small one, though. It's easier to just cut loose and turn the air into flames, but that's less useful than you would think. Unless you're specialized in destruction magic, a sword does a hell of a lot more damage to a man than burning off his eyebrows and a layer of skin." He sighed and let the flames go out; it began to get colder in the tent almost immediately.

"Why'd you stop?" I asked, crawling into my bedroll to stay warm in the absence of our magical space heater.

"Magic takes energy," Garnag said, beginning to bundle up himself. "Making a small flame doesn't take less energy than setting a man on fire—it just takes more control. Since I'm not specialized in destruction magics, I'm not as familiar with the ways to cut corners with the spell or to improve its efficiency, so it burns through my magicka fast."

"Magicka? What's that?"

"Some call it the 'life blood of Nirn' or other fancy talk, but it's just the word that means a person's magical energy," Garnag explained. "Everyone's got some but mages train to let their bodies hold more of it, and to recover it faster once it's all gone. Most folks think a wizard can just point his hands at someone and shoot fire, but there's a lot more to it than that. Magic's an expendable resource—like money or blood. Spend it too fast, or at the wrong time, and you wind up with none at the moment you need it most."

"Do you think I could be a mage?" I asked, more out of curiosity than any real desire.

"Probably not," Garnag said quickly. I looked at him with a hurt expression on my face and he laughed. "No offense or anything, kid. It's just that most people can't learn magic. They don't have the right drive, or enough patience, or a whole slew of things." He scratched his stubbly chin for a moment before continuing. "My old teachers back at the College of Whispers said that maybe one in a hundred humans have the right kind of mentality to be a mage, and that less one in ten of those actually wound up getting the training. It varies from race to race too; lots more Altmer have the talent for magic than Imperials, and a lot less Khajiit and Nords."

"Well, obviously some Nords can learn magic," I noted. "Just look at the College of Winterhold."

"I said less, not none," he retorted. "Places with an established mage guild or school wind up with a lot less of their potential wizards falling through the cracks too." He paused briefly before rooting through one of the packs to grab some bread. He broke it in half and passed some to me. "I wouldn't doubt that you could probably learn a spell or two—most folks can manage that if they're stubborn enough—but knowing a couple of spells doesn't make you a mage, any more than owning a knife makes you an assassin."

"What does make a person a mage then?" I asked.

"Why the interest?" he asked between mouthfuls of bread and cheese.

"I'm just curious," I said with a shrug. "All this stuff interests me. Magic, stories, songs… It's all really interesting stuff, but no one in the Brotherhood likes answering questions. Babette always acts like I'm dumb for not knowing all this stuff already, Hecate doesn't seem like she knows much more about any of it than I do, and Nazir says that asking questions is a bad habit for an assassin."

"Well, Nazir has a point," Garnag chuckled around a mouthful of food. "Too much curiosity can be lethal for an assassin—but so can too much ignorance. I don't mind questions, though. I went a decade without any conversation deeper than my monthly appointment with an Imperial torturer." He laughed mirthlessly, an old and deep pain in the sound. "And after the first year, he didn't even ask me questions anymore."

We ate in silence for a few minutes, listening to the slow, cold drizzle spattering against the tent. Finally, I looked up and spoke again.

"Thanks, Garnag," I said with all the sincerity I could muster. "I really appreciate it."

"No worries, kid," he rumbled as he curled deeper into his sleeping bag. "But in exchange, you're taking first watch. Wake me up in four hours."

The next two days were freezing and rainy. Garnag and I alternated on keeping watches while the other slept, but we also spent a lot of time keeping watch together. My body was cold most of the time, but my mind felt like it was on fire. For the first time in my life, I was with someone who didn't mind answering questions and could actually answer some of them. Garnag didn't always know the things I was interested in, but he knew enough of them to keep me finding new things to ask about.

Even with the good company, the weather dragged on our spirits and was physically demanding. Garnag had gotten in better shape than he was in when he escaped prison, but there was only so much improvement that you could see in a month. More than that, he was just old. Sometimes I could hear his raspy breathing turn wet or harsh, which would be followed by a bout of heavy coughing. Garnag always denied that he was in any discomfort, though, which didn't really ease my mind about it.

It was the evening of our second day on Shiteholme, cold rain slowly drizzling from the sky, when we saw the ship.

About a mile out from the northern shore of the island, a single-masted longship loomed up out of the perpetual fog that hung like a pall on the Sea of Ghosts. Its sail was furled and the oars were out, paddling it slowly through the cold water. I thought I could just barely make out a distant drumbeat keeping time for the rowers, a low and steady thrum like a heartbeat.

"It's time," Garnag said, pulling his sword.

"No, wait," I replied, putting my hand on Garnag's arm. To his credit, he immediately relaxed his posture and lowered the blade.

"What's up?" he asked. I was almost shocked into silence. Garnag was easily the oldest member of the Dark Brotherhood as far as I knew, and he was deferring to me about something. He wasn't treating me like a child, but like an assassin—like his partner. I quickly recovered my poise and pointed out at the ship.

"That's not a merchant vessel," I said. Divines knew I had seen enough ships in port at Windhelm to know what they looked like. "Any trader would have two or three sails, plus rowboats or dinghies to let the crew go ashore at smaller ports." I peered out through the fog, feeling a sick sense of certainty building in my gut. "That's a raider."

"A pirate ship?" Garnag asked. "Good thing we built Fortress Shiteholme after all, eh?"

"What in Sithis' name are they doing here?" I cursed between gritted teeth. "There shouldn't be any reason for them to show up at all."

"Maybe they're just passing through," Garnag suggested.

"No," I shook my head. "Look at the way they're tacking the ship. They're coming into shallow water to weigh anchor." I did a rough mental calculation for the size of the ship and the number of oars I could see. "Probably twenty or thirty crew aboard."

"I'd cut that number to less than ten," Garnag offered. "I may not know ships, but we know that Crito is working with slavers, right?" I nodded. "Well, slavers never pass up the opportunity to squeeze a little extra labor out of their cargo. My bet is that the people pulling those oars have chains on their legs too."

As we watched, the longship pulled as far up onto the beach as possible, which still left three-quarters of the vessel in the water. Men scrambled on deck to throw lines off the ship and a heavy anchor on a chain dropped from the stern of the vessel. A pair of rough-looking men wearing grungy leathers jumped off the bow of the ship into the soft sand of Shiteholme, cursing at the cold water that splashed around their ankles. They looked like Nords, though, so it was too much to hope that they would get frostbite or something. I always wondered how the hell Nords could endure the cold so well, even the ones who had been raised out of Skyrim.

By the time full night had fallen, a double handful of pirates had come down onto the beach. It looked like Garnag had been close enough in his count from the way the last one off the ship closed and locked the hatch to the interior before descending the rope ladder to the beach. They set up a bonfire, collecting scrub and driftwood from along the beach; Garnag and I nervously waited to see if they would come as far afield as our duck blind or the covered rowboat, but they never did.

"Remind me to find out which of Nazir's informants gave him the information about this contract," Garnag whispered viciously, "so I can personally kick him in his balls." I could only nod in agreement.

The pirates had barely finished setting up their rough camp when a low horn note blew from the darkness off shore. One of the pirates, a bulky man with slightly better-looking armor and cruel scar running down his bald head from crown to chin, took a hunting horn off his belt and blew two notes in response. The bright light from the bonfire illuminated the pirates well enough—and incidentally made it harder for them to see Garnag and me—but from our vantage point it also threw enough light off the shore to dimly illuminate the shape of a large dinghy rowing toward Shiteholme.

As the smaller boat pulled up onto the shoreline, I could see four men in it. The man in the stern was a heavily bundled Imperial who looked like he was sucking a lemon. Nazir's dossier had been thorough enough to let me recognize him as Sullian Crito, my target. Apparently, instead of traveling with a single bodyguard, he had three. Two of them worked the oars while the third stayed in the bow of the boat, holding a heavy-looking crossbow with a quarrel locked and loaded. The heavy cloaks and greatcoats they wore couldn't hide the shape of their armor, which I guessed to be studded leather or something similar. No one would risk wearing heavy armor on a boat—no one sane, anyway.

Almost a dozen pirates and three bodyguards instead of one. This just kept getting better and better.

"Mission's blown," Garnag said sourly. "We better just lay low until they finish up and get out of here."

"No!" I said loudly enough that I was worried my voice might carry to our enemies. I calmed down and started again. "No, I will not give up my first contract because of a little setback."

"Kid, I admire your guts," he replied, shaking his head, "but there's a difference between a 'little setback' and what we've got here. That being a complete clusterfuck."

"We can do this," I insisted. I scanned the two forces and noted the way they kept their distance from one another. They kept their hands near their weapons, even as the pirate captain and Crito walked out to meet one another. The bodyguard with the crossbow kept it pointed at the ground instead of the pirates, but his finger never left the trigger. I smiled broadly in the darkness and chuckled to myself.

"What's so funny?" he asked.

"Why do all the work," I whispered, "when we can make our enemies do it for us?"

It had taken me almost ten minutes to creep through the underbrush on the edge of the island, skirting the waterline, until I reached the pirate ship. The pirate captain and the merchant were still deep in conversation, Crito's hands moving animatedly as he occasionally raised his voice. As near as I could tell from the parts of the discussion I could pick up, the pirates had shown up to "renegotiate" their arrangement with Crito, who had brought along extra security to make sure that their new distribution plan didn't involve cutting out the middle man.

That's the problem with dealing with thieves and cutthroats—you could never be sure they wouldn't jump ship at the first sight of a better deal. The paranoia in the air worked to our advantage in this case, though.

As I settled my back up against the hull of the pirate ship I drew my mace, keeping the head low and behind me to avoid the chance of it reflecting back any firelight. I drew my cloak tight around my shoulders and pulled up the cowl of my hood. While I didn't yet own a suit of the distinctive black-and-red armor of the Dark Brotherhood, I still owned several outfits with the colors and had changed into one of them earlier. The hood and cowl covered everything of my face but my eyes—and had the distinct advantage of keeping my face warm in the frigid autumn air.

"We have an arrangement, Onming," Crito was snarling when I was finally in position. "A man of my position doesn't deal well with subordinates trying to change their fee midway through a bargain."

"I am no one's subordinate, Imperial dog!" Onming snarled. The bodyguard with the crossbow twitched briefly in his direction at the shout, and his own men stirred in anticipation of violence. I smiled beneath my cowl; this was going to be easier than I thought. "Given the market demand for our product-" he began.

"By the Eight!" Crito cried. "Did you take a correspondence course in economics since the last time I saw you, Onming?" The pirate captain scowled fiercely at the merchant's sarcasm. "Can we just stick to business as usual here?"

It could be trouble if Crito was half as good at talking as he seemed. He might even be able to turn the situation around and talk the pirates into a better mood. I certainly couldn't allow that to happen. I lowered my cowl so that my mouth was free and proceeded to shout at the top of my lungs, hoping Garnag was in position.

"Look out!" I screamed, trying to deepen my voice. At the same moment, Garnag whispered the words of a powerful charm that confused the minds of its targets. I could see the crossbowman's eyes flash briefly as the magic took hold of his mind, but if I hadn't been staring directly at him, I never would have noticed. With a scream of rage, the bodyguard brought his crossbow up and sank a bolt directly into Onming's eye. The steel tip punched out the back of his skull in a bloody mess, and the pirate captain dropped dead into the sand with a stupid look of surprise on his face.

As the crossbowman tried to reload, a look of furious anger on his face, Onming's crew drew their weapons and surged forward. The first pirate to reach their captain's killer sank a one-handed axe into the man's collarbone with enough force that I could hear bones snapping from my hiding spot. The crossbowman screamed but had enough life left in him to kick the pirate away; the axe remained stuck in his chest as the pirate went staggering away, losing his grip on the weapon.

Behind him, the other two men drew long swords; one of them grabbed the screaming Crito and pushed him behind them. That was good training for a bodyguard. The pirates outnumbered the bodyguards, but without their captain they were a disorganized rabble. They came forward in a surging wave, screaming and hacking wildly with their motley assortment of knifes, short swords, and boarding axes. The bodyguards paced backward calmly once Crito was out of the way, giving ground easily while weaving a defensive pattern with their longer blades.

The crossbowman, still screaming from a combination of pain and magically-induced anger, finished reloading his weapon and shot the man he had pushed away in the kneecap. The pirate shouted before toppling over, only to have the man who crippled him jump onto his chest and begin smashing him in the face with the butt of the crossbow. In seconds only a bloody mess remained of the man's face, and the crossbowman didn't look like he was going to let up before erasing the man's head completely. Another pirate neatly split his skull with an axe, mercifully putting an end to his anger.

The pirates were warily circling the remaining bodyguards after losing three of their number in the initial charge. Only two of them were dead, but the third was laying on the sand bleeding from a broad gut wound and moaning softly. Crito was cowering in his dinghy, clearly hoping that no one would turn their attention to him; his occasional frantic glances at the oars made it clear he was considering abandoning his own men if he could manage to row the boat on his own.

One of the bodyguards stumbled slightly, probably from a quick telekinetic shove from Garnag, and the pirates facing him surged forward in anticipation. Their enthusiasm turned out to be misplaced when the man recovered quickly enough to stab one of them through the chest. The unintentional lunge opened his flank to another pirate, who got in a lucky stab to the bodyguard's neck. With his artery spraying blood onto his cloak, the critically wounded man spun and neatly beheaded his killer before dropping into the sand.

After the exchange was over, the lone remaining bodyguard was facing the three pirates who were still capable of fighting. The bodyguard was breathing heavily from exertion while his foes were still fairly fresh, having taken the ruthless tack of allowing their comrades to wear him down with their deaths.

That was the moment Garnag chose to step from concealment, blasting fire into the air from both hands and yelling at the top of his lungs.

Two of the pirates turned and ran away screaming. The bodyguard took the opportunity to hamstring one of them and deliver a quick coup de grace before resuming his defensive posture against his single remaining foe. The pirate who managed to escape the bodyguard ran directly back toward the ship, as though he believed he could pilot a single-masted longboat by himself.

His path took him right past my hiding place.

Never one to look a gift horse in the mouth, I crushed his thigh with my mace, sending him flying end over end before landing hard enough in the surf to knock the breath out of him. He never got a chance for another one before my next blow broke his neck. I looked back toward the bonfire when I finished; in the time it had taken me to end the pirate, his comrade and the bodyguard had locked steel and were exchanging rapid strikes and counterstrikes. It all looked very swordsman-like.

Rather than bother letting them duke it out fairly, Garnag hit the bodyguard with some sort of magic that locked his joints up for a split-second, long enough for the lone remaining pirate to disembowel him. The dying man groaned once before collapsing. The pirate didn't have long to celebrate his victory; a pair of Garnag's throwing knives caught him in the chest, sending him to his knees. I stalked out of the shadows and put my mace through the back of his skull, ending the battle with a wet thump.

Garnag and I nodded to each other with satisfaction and turned to see Crito desperately trying to figure out how to work the oars of his rowboat. Garnag ended his efforts by casually stepping onto one of the oars and snapping it under his weight. Crito screamed like a woman and scrambled to the end of the boat away from him, drawing a dagger from under his cloak. I stepped up and casually backhanded the knife out of his hand and into the sea. He was so obviously inept with weapons that it was like fighting a child.

I reminded myself of who this man was and the things he had done, then took the lead. Garnag was my backup after all; this was my contract.

"What do you want?" Crito sobbed, cradling his bruised hand. "I have money! Lots of money!"

"Where are the gemstones, merchant?" I rasped in my best threatening voice.

"Oh, Divines," he wept. "Spare me, please!" I leaned in and grabbed the collar of his cloak, using the leverage from the side of rowboat to tilt him back over the frigid waters of the Sea of Ghosts.

"The stones!" I shouted. I was starting to really enjoy being menacing, especially considering how deserving my target was.

"On the ship!" he screeched. "They're on the ship! Who are you people? How do you know about the stones?" Garnag leaned forward and dropped a folded piece of parchment onto Crito's lap. I let go of his collar, and he leaned forward to look at the paper. Inside was a black ink handprint. The merchant's eyes widened as he saw the symbol.

"We know," Garnag whispered as I raised my mace over my head with both hands. Crito's terrified eyes flickered up at me just in time for the steel head to bury itself in his face.

It was perfect.

After we boarded the ship to search for the gemstones, I took the captain's key and went below decks. Garnag rumbled something about it not being our problem, but I reminded him that it was my contract and he gave no more argument. The hold was divided into three compartments: forward and aft storage rooms, and a central oar gallery. In the gallery was the most abject display of human misery I had laid eyes on since Honorhall.

My initial assumption of twenty or thirty crewmen had been off significantly. There were two rowers at each oar, forty men and women in total. They were chained together and to the rough bench on which they sat, wearing little more than rags and showing obvious signs of beating and starvation. As the hatch to their reeking chamber opened, the ones who were awake scrambled to wake up their dozing compatriots as they grabbed for the oars. This scene must have been played out many times before.

This time, their gaunt faces grew confused as Garnag and I stepped into the hold, our faces still hooded and cowled from our slaughter. I stopped halfway down the stairs, looking around in pity and disgust. For a moment, I wished I could resurrect Sullian Crito just so I could kill him again.

"Your captors are dead," I said loudly to the sea of unwashed faces below me. "I recommend that you spend a couple of days resting and regaining your strength, then plot a course for Winterhold. If you work together, it's less than a day away at good sail—less if you don't mind getting back at the oars for a few hours."

I pulled the keys to their chains out of my pocket and tossed them down the stairs.

"Unlock your chains and wait ten minutes," I continued. "By then we'll be gone." I started to turn, but then paused and looked back at the human cargo. "But we'll be watching. If any of you have dreams of seizing control here, drown them deep and work with your fellows to return to civilization. What happened to your captors could just as easily become your fate if you decide to be like them."

With that, I walked back up the stairs and closed the hatch door behind me. Naturally, we had already secured the jewels—Garnag had insisted that we get our pay before anything else. Still, asking for ten minutes before they poked their heads out of the cabin might buy us five to make good our departure.

"Bravo," said Garnag sarcastically. "Quite the performance." My face burned with embarrassment under my concealing cowl.

"Let's just get out of here," I growled.

It took us another three days to get back to Sanctuary from Shiteholme. I had insisted that we stay behind and make sure that the ex-slaves made good on my suggestion to take the ship back to Winterhold. Once they arrived at the small city, Garnag and myself watching from our rowboat a good distance off, we had turned and come into the fisherman's dock a few hours later to avoid suspicion. I knew that the Stormcloaks hated slavers as much as the Imperials did, so the prisoners would be dealt with fairly by the local authorities.

Once we took our horses from the stables—which were barely attended thanks to the excitement of a ship full of former slaves coasting into port—we took the scenic route home. It was cold out, but the rains had finally stopped, so a couple of nights of camping out along well-traveled roads was a welcome change from hiding in brush and gullies.

I had no nightmares. Not about Sullian Crito, and not about Rolff Stone-Fist.

When we reached Sanctuary and stabled our horses in the concealed stables nearby, Garnag patted my shoulder.

"Good job, kid," he said simply before turning and walking toward the Black Door.

As we walked through the Black Door together, greeted by our family like conquering heroes, I thought I could see new faces among the small gathered crowd. I no longer feared the change that the future would bring. Whatever happened, I was strong enough to face it. More than that, I welcomed whatever tomorrow might bring.

I thought of Hecate's last words to me before I left a week ago. I knew she didn't love me in the same way I loved her, but I could wait. I had taken my first steps on the road to being a man. She would see me in time, and my feelings for her would always bring me home safely from a contract. I had someone to live for—someone I had to grow up for.

…to be continued…