Chapter 18

Chapter 18

     She snatched the necklace up, but it was too late.  I drew both swords and leapt back, getting a firm foothold in the snow.  “This whole time-”  My throat choked up in fury.  “This whole time you’ve just been planning something, haven’t you?  Filthy corpse-desecrating Summerset Shadow,” I spat.

     Her face flushed up and she drew her daggers, facing me across a thin stretch of land.  “We never hurt anyone!  Just because we choose to rob from easier targets makes us beasts?”

     I grimly gripped the swords tighter, trying to sum up what I knew of her fighting ability.

     “You’re the animal, Kisvar!  You, and those Oblivion-blasted thieves you call friends!  You came to our hideout and you killed everyone.”  Tears formed in the corners of her eyes, and one escaped as she blinked and ran down her cheek.  “Everyone.  Some of them had never even killed an animal, let alone a person!”

     “You stole from our clients.  What did you expect?”  I lifted my ebony sword higher.

     “Not for the renowned Thieves’ Guild to sweep through our cave like a group of marauding bandits.”  Her voice was icy cold now.  “I was one of the lucky ones.  I was off on a job with two of my guild when you-”  Her throat bobbed.  “We regrouped, named a new leader, and started taking in new recruits.  You have no idea how long I’ve been waiting for this moment.”

     “What moment?” I asked warily. 

     “The moment where we catch you alone, of course.”

     Oh gods.  Two forms materialized from an outcropping of rock behind Aetra, and suddenly I heard snorts and the crunch of hooves behind me.  I turned around to see four horses galloping toward me.  I raised the swords, but two slid to a stop in front of me and the others blocked my retreat from the sides. 

     I was effectively and completely surrounded.  This was beginning to look very, very bad.  Trying to dodge anything in deep snow was like trying to dodge rain.  In other words, pretty much impossible.  Also, they had me surrounded and they had the advantage of numbers.  No, things were not looking good.

     I found myself resorting to my old standby of sarcasm.  “What, were you so scared of trying to kill me that you had to wait until you could bring friends to help?”  Something about this didn’t add up.  Aetra could have killed me in my sleep a hundred times.

     “Well, we don’t want to just kill you, see,” a man stated.  “We want to take down your entire guild from the inside out, destroy any influence you ever had, then massacre every single one of your members.”  A ripple of laughter ran through the group.

     Well Brynjolf, you were right about Aetra, I thought.  I seriously doubted now that I’d ever had a chance to apologize to him….  I wasn’t going down without a fight.  “Not if I massacre you first.”  I grinned at him.

     The smile slid off his face.  He shouted at his horse, spurring it forward at me.  I knew I had no chance of dodging it, so I braced myself. 

     For an instant, just one tiny instant, the horse’s face was so close I could see its breath crystalize in the freezing air, its eyes rolling in fear as its master urged it forward at my twin blades.  Then it slammed into me, impaling itself on my swords with a scream.  The force bowled me over backward and knocked every bit of breath from my body, but the horse crashed over onto its side, trapping the man beneath it. 

     Gasping and clutching my ribs, I pushed myself upright and called two firebolt spells to my hands.  My swords were still in the horse. 

     “I’ll kill you for that.”  The man drew his sword and jumped over his fallen horse, slashing at me.  I twisted to the side and he stumbled past me, but then another man jumped down from his horse and attacked me.  I parried his attack with my bracer, shot a firebolt at one woman, then turned to meet the attack I was sure was coming from behind. 

     It was, but I was too late.  I got a brief impression of a carved shield before the world went black.

     By the gods, it’s cold again, was my first thought when I came to.  I am really sick of being cold.  In fact, I think I’ll actually move to a province in the far south. 

     I sat up, rubbing the right side of my face.  I don’t know what it looked like, but it felt like a dragon had been breathing fire on it the entire time I had been out.  Feeling my jaw, I looked around.

     A very familiar sight met my eyes.  This was an underground jail cell, one identical to the hundreds I had seen as an adventurer.  The only difference was that I was locked inside the cell instead of being outside trying to break in to loot something.  The cot I was sitting on rested against the far wall from the door, which was a heavy iron one with bars. 

     By all rights I ought to be pathetically pressing my face against the bars and screaming to be let out right now, like most of the prisoners I had seen before, but I felt strangely calm.  The Summerset Shadows had taken my Thieves’ Guild armor, gloves, and belt pockets, leaving me in my leather undershirt and pants.  I had two lockpicks hidden in the pants, but just looking at the door from here I didn’t think I would be able to pick the lock.  Well, maybe I could, but if they hadn’t also barred the door from the outside or something then they didn’t deserve to be called thieves.

     They had not, however, left me without any weapons.  Well, no physical ones anyway.  That was the beauty of being a mage.  No one could truly take all your weapons away without force feeding you a lot of Magicka poisons. 

     I stood up.  My face still felt strange, but I wasn’t lightheaded.  Cautiously peering out of the door, I saw a fire flickering in a pit in the center of kind of a wide corridor.  Cells lined the wall on the other side, and I guessed that this half of the room looked the same.  There were a few tables with varying foods on them in the middle of the room, with two people sitting at one.  They were far more interested in their mead than keeping an eye on the cells, so I used this opportunity to examine the door. 

     Like I had guessed, the door was indeed barred from the other side.  To top that off there were no bars on the lower half of the door, so I couldn’t just slide something through and lift it up.  The lock would be hard to reach from in here, but not impossible.  If someone left the bar off, I might be able to get out. 

     Actually, my Unrelenting Force Shout might have been strong enough to break down the door, if I used all three Words.  Since I kind of couldn’t use it anymore, that didn’t help at all beyond making me depressed.

     I went back to the bed and sat down again.  Even if I did get out, I had no idea which way led out of the cave.  For all I knew I could just be choosing the direction that led deeper into whatever ruin I had been taken to.

     I mentally brought up my map of Skyrim, thinking of all the locations that were fairly close to Dawnstar.  No matter how long I had been out, surely I couldn’t have been taken very far away from the Howling Cave.  I thought of all the locations I knew of around that general area, but none of the ones I could recall had a hallway like this one. 

     This was starting to look really, really bad.  I shook my head in disbelief, smiling sarcastically at my hands, which were folded in my lap.  I’m in the middle of the biggest fight of my life, and I somehow managed to get myself kidnapped.  But no, I hadn’t gotten myself kidnapped.

     I had been repressing thoughts of Aetra because furious hatred didn’t really help my thought processes, but now that I had pretty much decided I was screwed I allowed all the anger to rush back in. 

     If I ever saw Brynjolf again, I owed him Skyrim’s greatest apology.  Oh, and I owed Delvin Skyrim’s greatest punch in the face. 

     Actually, this was entirely my own fault.  I had failed to see what Aetra really was, but by the gods!  She had pulled off the lonely thief act like she had really lived the life.  I couldn’t really believe it even now.  All the times we had talked up until the end where the stress started getting to her, I had never suspected anything like this.  Troll tracks? I thought to myself with scorn.  Of all excuses to be fooled by…. 

     Great, now I’m just hopeless.  At that moment I am ashamed to admit I was more afraid for Gormlaith than myself.  Horses were hardy, strong, fairly intelligent by animal standards, and they didn’t scare easily.  If the Summerset Shadows hadn’t killed her, they probably kept her.  She was a valuable war horse, and if they didn’t ride her themselves they would probably sell her.

     The thought of someone besides me riding Gormlaith made me want to impale something with the Daedric sword I didn’t have right now.

     I straightened up at the loud grating of metal on metal.  The door swung open, revealing three Summerset Shadows silhouetted by the firelight outside.  “Get up,” one growled roughly.  I eyed the handcuffs he held doubtfully, torn between the fear of being helpless and the wiser course of biding my time before I attempted an escape.

     After a few tense seconds I chose the wiser course of action, allowing my hands to be secured behind me.  Still, a cold sweat broke on my forehead as I heard the click and felt the cold metal as the locks clicked shut.

     Two of the Summerset Shadows flanked me while the one who had spoken led the way.  I paid very careful attention as we walked, trying to memorize the twists and turns.  We seemed to be headed further into the caves, so at least now I knew to run the opposite way if I got the chance.  

     Occasionally dark, hooded figures pushed past us, and I caught sight of several more sitting at tables or performing other tasks such as cooking or smithing.  The more I saw, the farther my heart sunk.  There had to be at least two score thieves in here, at least twice the numbers of their original group.  And these were just the ones who were in the hideout right now.  There were bound to be more out on jobs.  Where had they gotten so many recruits?  Either the new Summerset Shadows had no actual thieving talent and were just glorified mercenaries or they had been working really, really hard at recruiting for the past year.

     I was brought to a forceful halt at a desk where a man was writing something on a bit of paper.  He looked up as we stopped and I looked into the face of-

     Someone I had never, ever seen before in my life.

     “Ah, Kisvar.  So kind of you to join us once again,” he said pleasantly.

     When I say pleasant, I mean it fell on the ears in a way kind of similar to the feel of a door opening on greased hinges.  It felt overly polite, like he was forcing himself to remain calm and overdoing it as a consequence.  “You could have just sent me an invitation,” I said dryly, deciding to resort to sarcasm once more.  “The couriers are very efficient.”

     The Altmer set his paper down on the desk.  “Do you have any idea what you did?”

     I almost made some sort of snide comment about the time I stole a sweetroll, but since I knew that wasn’t what he meant and that being overly sarcastic might cause me bodily harm, I changed my mind.  “I destroyed a threat to my Guild,” I said truthfully.

     He let his pen fall to the desk with a thud.  “Is that how you see it?”

     “You were targeting our clients and hurting our business.  Yes, that is how I see it.” 

     “Targeting your clients?” he laughed in disbelief.  “We targeted the dead.  You targeted the living.”

     “But you targeted the possessions of a dead relative of our living client,” I pointed out. 

     “So we did.”  His voice cracked a little.  “And apparently you thought that the appropriate reaction was to simply attack our retreat without warning and murder every single living being you could find there.”

     His eyes now had a cold, hard gleam in them, and I was beginning to regret not sounding more apologetic about murdering his whole guild.  “Would you rather we had contacted the Dark Brotherhood?”

     That had been the wrong thing to say.  The Elf stood up coming around the desk and moving toward me until he was practically spitting in my face.  “If you had, I wouldn’t have been surprised.  I wouldn’t expect any more of you and your group of cowards.  Those thieves had families, friends.  Look around you.  Every person you see here has lost someone because of you.” 

     I unobtrusively chafed the sides of my wrists against the cuffs.  “What do you want from me?”

     “Now we get to it.”  The Elf moved back around the desk and sat down.  “I want to know where the entrance to your guild is.  I want to know how many members you have.  I want to know the jobs you have planned, I want to know who your contacts are, and I want to every little detail of the way your guild works so I can rip it apart from the foundations.”

     “Then I’m afraid you’ll have to look somewhere else.  I’m not feeling very talkative at the moment.”  The games were over.  Either I was going to tell him what he wanted to know willingly or I wasn’t, and obviously I wasn’t, so there was no use in pandering words.  I didn’t doubt my refusal would have unpleasant consequences, but maybe I could escape before things escalated too far.

     Far from looking surprised, he actually looked quite pleased as he leaned back in the chair and smiled at me, showing the pearly whites of his teeth.  “Take him away.  We’ll start tomorrow.”

So here's chapter 18!  I'm really sorry it took me so long to get this up.  I was having a severe case of I-don't-feel-like-writing-because-I'm-busy-watching-Youtube-videos-itis.