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The night before the Listener’s return, Cicero dreamed about her. She was grinning up at him, her teeth bared like a skull's, as he straddled her, blade pressing against her neck. The Listener, his very own memento mori, the walking reminder of how close he’d come to death, how much closer she could have brought him.
The Dawnstar Sanctuary ran deep. Listen to the way the wind howled in the depth and it might sound just a little like laughter rising up from deep underground. Listen closer still, and you might hear the Night Mother whispering too, and she was whispering to him that night. Oh, he’d never truly hear her words, not while he was awake, but sometimes in his dreams, she finally spoke to her Cicero.
The Night Mother was there in that bed, lying beside her Listener. One sunken ribs and dessicated skin, the other fresh and ripe and pink-skinned. The shared bed had become a shared coffin, and they lay as mirror images of each other, just as they had in the Falkreath Sanctuary, that grotesque moment of betrayal that she ought to have been punished for rather than rewarded, and which he still bemoaned even now. What the Night Mother could have been thinking, he supposed he’d never truly know.
The Listener’s head was tilted back, as though that might help her to catch the Night Mother’s words. Even while she Listened, she watched him with eyes black as the Void.
There were noises in the silence. The wind in the depths of the Sanctuary. The beat of his heart. The scratching claws of the vermin that scurried through the walls. And rising up from the depths, the Wrath of Sithis, already coming for him.
Might as well be hung for a sheep as a lamb, he thought, and he killed her and jerked awoke, sweating and hard, to nothing but silence.
She returned that afternoon. Cicero should have know, the way the dream stuck with him, wouldn't leave him alone. It kept returning, creeping back slyly or suddenly coming to his mind in a rush when he was least expecting it.
The chatter of contracts fulfilled and yet to be fulfilled around the table at luncheon. The unchild watching him with her ancient eyes. He was all but oblivious to it all, to distracted even to wallow in his envy and resentment. He'd blink and he was back in that coffin, that bed, with the Listener’s legs sprawling open beneath him, her breasts flattened against her chest. Her eyes bleak and black and terrible.
His blade to her throat and her hand on his wrist. Willing him to do it.
What if. What if what if what if.
What if someone were to pray for her death? To perform the Black Sacrament? Someone loyal, someone faithful? Surely the Night Mother would grant such a boon? And of course he'd be more than willing to do the honours, since somebody would have to. Honest Cicero. Faithful Cicero. It was only what he deserved, after staying loyal for so long.
It wouldn't be so hard to do it. A skeleton? Well, he know where to get one of those. And he know how to do it properly. In the old days, it had to be one you killed yourself. A kill for a kill, as it were. Everything needed was easy to get your hands on if you know where to look. And Cicero knew where to look.
He went about his duties, caring for the Night Mother. The weekly recitation of the incantations and the oiling of her body and the seeking out of all the bugs that had made their home in her coffin. And all the time he worked, he talked to keep her company.
Foolish of him, perhaps. Letting himself chatter on, taking little notice of the turn his words might be making or of who might be listening. Or, rather, he thought with a stifled giggle, Listening.
He hadn’t meant to talk about her. And he hadn’t, not at first, but words had a way of circling back around, doubling back on themselves when you least expected it, and what, after all, was the one thing he and the Night Mother had in common? Save Sithis, it was her, and until one or the other of them was dead, it would always be her.
The Listener. Always at the edge of his mind. Always on the tip of his tongue. No wonder, then, that his talk should kept coming back to her, circling around and closing in like a pack of hungry wolves. And always, always on the edge of asking the Night Mother: why her?
He had to keep up the chatter because to let up, even for a moment, was to risk plunging into the chasm of silence that threatened to swallow everything up when he stopped, and even the pain of a raw and aching throat was better than that. Even in the moments when his words dried up, he hummed and whistled, chattered nonsense rhymes, anything to keep her entertained, to blot out, for a little while longer, the silence and the dream, until finally he was talking again, returning inevitably to the subject of the Listener and the memory of the dream, the weight of the dagger in his hand, and the way she’d lain cheek to cheek with Mother, with her eyes on him–
"I hope I’m not interrupting."
The Prodigal Listener, returned.
She was leaning against the doorway, watching him with an expression of intense fascination while the weight of words dried up and withered to ash on his lips.
He couldn't remember what he'd been saying just before she – yes – interrupted. The words, whatever they might have been, were out in the world. He wanted to catch them, snatch at them like they were butterflies. Stuff them back in his mouth and crunch them between his teeth. Too late now. Whatever she'd heard, however long she'd been waiting, it was too late. Maybe she’d heard all about the dream. Had he talked about that? Had he mentioned her by name? Would she recognise herself? Or had his careless chatter touched upon the matter of the Sacrament?
Only Sithis, and the Night Mother, and the Listener herself, knew how much she’d heard. And then, of course, there was the matter of how much she’d understood...
"Interrupting?" Cicero gave a careless tinkling laugh, entirely feigned. "Why, no! Not the slightest little bit. Cicero is delighted to see the Listener has returned." He paused, then added in a bitter undertone, "It feels like it's been such a very, very long time."
She smiled, entirely unabashed. "It has been a while."
"I commend you on your restraint. If Cicero had were the Listener, I wouldn't be able to keep away." He gave a weary smile, and let his head droop, his expression an exaggerated mummery of mock-sorrow. "Just to hear our beloved Mother's voice..."
"Speaking of which. May I?"
"Of course, of course," he muttered, stepping aside as she moved towards the coffin. "After all, Cicero is merely a servant to the whims of the Night Mother. And to the Listener too, naturally–" He broke off, his attention captured at the necklace she was wearing. A string of rubies followed the line of her throat. His mouth had gone suddenly dry. "My, what a pretty pretty necklace," he managed, his voice hoarse. "It suits you, Listener."
Unable to stop himself, he began to reach out his hand. She watched him, a mocking glint in her eye as he drew back his hand sharply, afraid to touch them.
"Shiny stones," he mumbled. "Shiny, glittery, blood-red stones. How pretty."
Beautiful.
Catching her expression, he cleared his throat. "I’ll let you be," he said. "Put in a good word for faithful Cicero, won’t you? I’m sure she’ll have plenty to say!" And then, in that sly undertone again, "It’s been so long since she last had the chance."
Which perhaps wasn't the wisest thing to say, but such was the prerogative of a jester: the freedom to say the things that wiser men wouldn’t have dared. To hide truth in plain sight and honesty in madness.
And besides it was true.
There was no doubt the Listener neglected her duties. Here one minute, gone the next, gallivanting off after some gaudy trinket or other.
Like that necklace. That pretty necklace. Lying across her throat. Her pretty perfect untouched throat.
By Sithis, what he wouldn’t give to put that right.
Even despite the way the Listener came and went, the increasing lengths of time between her visits, the Night Mother didn't always speak to her.
Cicero could always tell. Something in the eyes. A distant, distracted expression, as though her attention was turned inwards to the fissure that ran through her heart. He had one of those too, but the only thing that emerged from his was silence.
This time their Mother spoke. He’d already heard her handing out the contracts, but even if he hadn’t, it would only have taken a single glance at her to know that. She looked half-drunk on it, her eyes heavy-lidded, her skin flushed on the intimacy of the Night Mother whispering in her heart, and he’d never felt his envy quite as keenly at that moment, or hated her quite so much.
He’d known when he wasn’t wanted. He’d made himself scarce. He’d known to let her be, and he might have expected her to do him the same courtesy, but no no no, she just couldn't leave him alone. He was sharpening his knives, sparks flaring in the darkened room because he liked to see them dance, liked to hear the knife squealing on the whetstone, even if he didn’t often have a reason to keep them sharpened these days.
A contract for the unchild. Another for one of the new recruits. The plum for the Listener. But nothing for Cicero.
"I'll be leaving soon," she said. As if he didn’t already know.
"She spoke to you?" he said, pretending surprise. "Oh, but of course she did. She's always speaking to you. Quite the chatterbox these days, aren’t you, Mother? Plenty to say to some amongst us." He trilled out a musical sigh. "But never a word to say to Cicero. And no contracts for Cicero either. My blades have grown so dreadfully dull."
"Cicero can stop pretending," she said, coming into the room. He narrowed his eyes as she picked up one of the knives and made a cursory examination of the blade. "This one looks sharp enough to me. Sharp enough for my purposes."
"Does the Listener want something?"
"Assistance with a contract. If you’re willing. And if you can be spared from your duties as Keeper, naturally."
"I... might be able to step away. For a little while," he said cautiously. "But what sort of assistance might you need, Listener? How could faithful Cicero possibly help?"
Her lips quirked and she held up a finger. "Ah!" she said, then reached into her pack, fumbling around, before drawing out a jester’s hat, very much akin to his. Cicero watched with paired horror and fascination as she drew the hat down over her hair and spread her hands in a ta-da gesture which struck him as horribly incongruous. "The target, I’m told, has something of a weakness for clowns."
"Oh!" he said, brightening up. "They terrify him?"
"Not that sort of weakness."
He made an obscene gesture. "You mean he wants to handle their juggling balls?"
"I mean that he thinks they’re funny," she snapped. "Dear gods, it’s like pulling teeth."
Which was a little harsh. It was hardly Cicero’s fault that the Nords usually had a limited sense of humour.
There was no particular reason why Cicero should have hated travelling with her so much. Indeed there was every reason why he should have found every moment on the hunt a blessing, the rare chance to wet his whetted blade, to send souls winging their merry way to Sithis again. And it wasn’t just the contact: they'd killed plenty of others along the way, while the Listener was practising the art of being a jester. Her juggling and capering skilles were, alas, sorely lacking in Cicero’s practised opinion.
In fact, there was no doubt about it – she was very bad at being a clown. But what she was good at was being a very bad clown, and it took many hours of arguing and countless dropped juggling balls, before they settled on a routine with the Listener as the put-upon straight-woman apprentice to his vastly superior talent.
She even let him have the final kill.
While the target was too busy laughing, wiping tears from his eyes, clapping the Listener on the back, and declaring that he couldn’t believe his luck to have run into them, Cicero cleared his throat and the target turned towards him, still grinning…
Right up to the moment Cicero stabbed him. And stabbed him again. And then stabbed him some more. There had been quite a lot of stabbing. Rather more than the occasion necessitated perhaps.
They’d already killed plenty: numerous assorted bandits, a thief who’d made the mistake of jumping out of a bush and trying to rob them, a couple of necromancers, a mage who’d tried to challenge the Listener to a duel, and one Thalmor patrol complete with the Stormcloak prisoner they’d been escorting, who’d been collateral damage when the Listener had Frenzied them into butchering each other. They’d shared a jug of ale while they watched the proceedings and lay bets on how it would turn.
Admittedly, they’d probably have killed the prisoner anyway. Cicero’s dubious loyalty to his homeland was about as moth-eaten and ragged as his motley, but in theory he was still a loyal citizen of the Empire. More or less. Assuming it didn’t clash with his loyalty to Sithis.
They’d killed plenty, but he’d forgotten the thrill of fulfilling a contact and sending an owed soul to Sithis. Glorious. The sweetest wine he’d ever tasted. He’d capered in celebration a little afterwards, while the Listener dealt with the corpse in preparation for the completion of the contract. The bonus addition that the client had very particularly requested: that the skull she kept on her desk as a memento mori be secretly and silently replaced with the skull of her murdered lover who'd made the mistake of attempting to blackmail her over their love affair, so that every time she gazed upon it her mind might be filled with sweet memories of their times together without her father knowing.
They holed up in an abandoned house deep in the Morthal swamps for a couple of days while the Listener tended to the skull with the application of various alchemical potions to colour the bone so that it looked older, and the swap could be made without anyone suspecting.
The work was slow and painstaking and all the while Cicero was aware of his duties and how he’d have to return to Dawnstar soon, and yet again he’d be denied the chance to wield his blades. He ought to have been grateful to her for offering the chance, and the irony was that they worked so well together, as terrible as she was at being a clown, she was wonderfully good at being a terrible clown.
"Don’t you think it’s the loveliest thing?" she said with a sigh.
"Mmm? You mean the skull, Listener?"
She was perched on the windowsill, silhouetted against the light filtering weakly in through the grimy windowpanes. The skull, newly aged, sat perched on her fingers, empty eye-sockets to dreamy wistful eyes.
"Well, yes, but not just the skull. Them. She was happy to have him killed, but she couldn’t bear to let go of him, not completely. All that coin, and just for this, to have a piece of her lover close to her for as long as she chooses. Oh, to be so loved." She sighed, and unfolded herself off the windowsill and tossed the skull to him. "But then, I always was a romantic."
I’d keep your skull, Cicero thought suddenly. Keep it and stroke it and whisper all his secrets into its black empty eye sockets as though they were direct windows onto the Void.
It wasn’t until she cast a glance at him that he realised he’d said it out loud. Whoops.
It wasn’t just the two of them. Not always. From time to time another Imperial walked with them, the spirit of one who’d died long ago.
Cicero was a child of Cyrodiil. He knew the stories, They all knew the stories, the dire warnings about what could be. He’d heard the echoes in the corridors of the Sanctuary at Cheydinhal, regret and bitterness and grief and forgiveness. Hatred, too. That most of all.
He knew who that spirit had been and what he meant. Lucien Lachance, loyal to the Brotherhood to his last breath, even when they turned on him. And he doubted that there was a single member of the Brotherhood who understood that fate better than Cicero himself.
What would Lachance have done, he wondered, if he’d returned to the world as flesh and blood? If he’d had the chance to avenge the wrongs done to him by his brothers and sisters?
The dog who’d stuck him was dead. So too the bitch Astrid. He was mostly indifferent to the unchild and the Redguard – and by ‘indifferent’ he meant he’d quite happily have butchered them both if that wouldn’t have broken the Tenets; he just wouldn’t have gone out of his way to do it.
The Listener was different.
She should have been punished for what she’d done. She’d broken the first Tenet, by disrespecting the Night Mother, and so damned what if she’d done it on the orders of a superior, and to disobey would have been to break another Tenet? Most egregious of all, she’d stolen the one thing he’d wanted, to be the Listener, to hear the voice of the Night Mother whispering in her chest.
And the worst of all was that she seemed to think he should have been grateful to her for letting him assist with the contract, when all it had really been was a brief taste of freedom, a reminder of the strictures of the life to which he’d inevitably have to return.
Rather than being grateful to her, he only hated her all the more.
Cicero spent an awful lot of their time travelling together pondering on the nature of the Tenets, and to what degree they could be stretched without being broken, and to his likelihood of surviving the Wrath of Sithis should he happen to break one. And whether those chances might be slimmer if the broken Tenet happened to involve the death of the Listener?
All entirely hypothetical, of course.
What counted as breaking a Tenet? ‘Never kill a Dark Brother or Sister.’ Well, that was simple enough on the face of it, but what did it really mean in practice? Did it refer only to murdering outright, or would it include less direct methods, such as failing to intervene to rescue them? Or… well, again, hypothetically, if a poisoned object, an apple, say, were to be left on their plate, and they happened to be foolish enough to eat it, would that count as breaking the Fifth Tenet, or was it their own fault for being so careless vis a vis suspicious pieces of fruit?
A puzzling conundrum indeed, and one he was given the opportunity to test all too soon.
As they were both children of Cyrodiil, it might simply have been curiosity that drew them to the Shrine of Mehrunes Dagon, although Cicero’d had doubts since he’d realised the dagger she habitually carried was a daedric artifact, Mehrunes’ Razor itself. In fact it seemed that her primary purpose was to butcher the daedra there in order to harvest their hearts rather than pay the prices an alchemist might charge.
Frugal of her. In many ways, she was the veritable image of a good Imperial woman. Had Cicero been anything like a good Imperial man, he might even have approved.
His chance was a single moment. So brief it would have been easy to miss it. So brief it would be easy to pretend that moment had never happened, that he’d never had the chance to do anything different.
A miss-step on her behalf, a failure to act on his. Nothing, really.
She slipped on a patch of ice and stumbled, while a Dremora Lord towered over her, bringing up its sword, readying itself to bring the gleaming blade of gleaming slick-shining jagged black ebony down on her. And when Cicero ought to have been dancing in, stabbing stabbing slashing slashing, instead he stepped back, melting into the shadows, mugging an expression of terror, practising his look of regret.
An instant. The blink of an eye. And it wasn’t as if he could have done anything anyway. His wound still troubled him, particularly when it was cold, and right now it was freezing. He’d been weak ever since the stinking dog had sliced him up. He could hardly be blamed.
And nor would he be, since the Listener wasn’t as easy to kill as all that.
Inside of dying, as ought to have been inevitable, she rolled to her feet and up underneath the Dremora Lord’s arm.
Ah. Oh dear.
A blink of an eye and the Dremora had crumpled, and Cicero was left blinking and guilty, quite clearly on the verge of slinking out. She stared at him, her expression impassive.
Cicero laughed nervously and capered in the hopes that it might lighten the mood, although strangely enough it didn’t seem to.
"Oh Listener, Cicero is impressed! You did better than I could ever have imagined, oh yes, oh yes, and here I was certain that Dremora would have cut you in half." He gave another half-laugh and gritted his teeth. "Quite certain, oh yes indeed. And yet… here you are. Alive against all the odds. Again."
"A wise man might know better than to bet against me," she agreed, her tone friendly enough.
So friendly did she sound that Cicero almost allowed himself to relax a fraction, and then she’d slipped behind him and yanked his head back, her breath steaming in the air. She had the Razor to his throat, her cool cheek pressed against his, her hand in his hair.
"If I didn't know better," she murmured, her voice soft and deceptively sweet, "I'd have sworn you were willingly going to let that Dremora kill me."
Cicero gasped in horror. "Me? Gentle, innocent Cicero? Allow the Listener to be harmed? Oh, no no no no! Such a thing has never once crossed poor Cicero's mind. For shame, Listener, to suggest such a thing! For shame!"
She snorted and caressed his hair fondly. "Liar." Then she released him and shoved him away.
He really ought to have have seen it coming. Instead of warning him off, the Listener’s stubbornness in refusing to die acted more as a goad to his professionalism. He’d been good at killing once, before the Black Hand had chosen in their wisdom to appoint him as Keeper. He always had relished a challenge, and there were few challenges more enticing than the Listener and how very difficult to kill she was, and how a professional might go about arranging her death should the matter come up.
Not that he was planning on killing her now. Far from it. But there was many a slip ‘twixt cup and lip,
Call it… a thought experiment. A rhetorical argument.
And anyway, she wasn’t talking to him now. The business with the daedra seemed to have annoyed her a bit and none of his ceaseless attempts to engage her, to sing to her, to entertain her with jokes and merriment and capering, could draw her out of her sullen silence.
He’d needed something to occupy his mind, so he’d resorted to a droll little word game – A for Aconite, B for Beheading, C for Choking, D for Defenestration, etcetera – to keep them entertained. For some reason, she didn’t seem the slightest bit entertained. Nor, for that matter, was he.
Although she’d got rid of the rest of the outfit, she’d kept the jester’s hat, wearing it on her head at a jaunty angle that he found infuriating. Every step she took, the bells jingled. Every time she turned her head, the bells jingled. Every time she breathed, the bells jingled. Every. Single. Movement.
E for Evisceration. F for Flaying. G for Gutting. Hmm, unless that was too close to ‘evisceration’. Oh, wait, Garotting. Of course. G for Garotting. Perfect.
Tinkle tinkle.
He gritted his teeth. Garotting really would be perfect.
She wasn’t even moving. Rather, she was standing utterly motionless and letting the breeze gently make the bells jingle. Except there wasn’t a breeze that he could feel, and his bells weren’t jingling. He knew she had magicka, knew she had a Telekinesis spell. But even for him the assumption that she’d be using her magicka purely to make her bells jingle to annoy him did seem a little paranoid.
There was something obscene about it. Something offensive about those tinkling little bells. So delicate, chiming with every step. It was a mark of honour to wear the motley, even if Cicero didn’t much hold with honour during the normal course of things. And true, she might be fully dressed, but to wear the hat of a jester without the rest of the garb, well, it was almost like she was naked. Offensive. Obscene.
He tried to picture her naked and wearing only the hat. Found that didn’t much help.
H for–
Tinkle tinkle.
H for Hanging. I for… I for… By Sithis, he wished he hadn’t tried to picture her naked.
Ooh, I for Intestinal Parasites! There were some very nasty ones that could be picked up from certain merchants in Black Marsh for an eye-watering price. And indeed eye-watering was the entirely appropriate reaction when you found out just what it was those intestinal parasites–
Tinkle tinkle.
–did.
J for–
"J for Jarrin Root," the Listener said, without turning around. The bells jingled softly. She’d stopped, and was gazing up at a leaden sky, the clouds about as heavy as Cicero’s heart, with a rueful expression.
He glared at her. "I thought the Listener wasn’t playing," he said resentfully, and she cast an enigmatic look at him over her shoulder.
"The Listener is always playing," she said, her tone and expression grave.
He grunted. "K for Keel-hauling," he muttered under his breath.
Tinkle tinkle.
She’d lifted her head and was staring hard at the sky again. "I do believe it’s going to rain," she said. "And I don’t particularly fancy getting caught in a thunderstorm. I saw a cave back there which might provide some shelter while we eat. I hope it’s not inhabited."
"I hope it is," Cicero said under his breath. He was in the mood to kill something.
The cave had been inhabited – by hagravens, which made a pleasant change – but wasn’t by the time they were done. The Listener build up the fire while Cicero got the food together, his mind still on the game, having lost track of what letter they’d got up to. The last word he remembered was the one she’d provided: Jarrin Root, the deadly poison which she’d used, so the story had it, to kill the emperor’s double.
So he already had poison on his mind, mainly because he was trying very hard to distract himself from the Listener, who by now was setting his teeth on edge with everything she did, and yet he couldn’t look away. She was digging through her pack for something or other, the rubies of the necklace about her throat glittering as they caught the firelight, and as she bent over her back, the neckline of her shirt fell forwards, and behind her the shadow of the jester’s hat bent and capered across the rock.
Cicero took a deep gulp of his wine, and even as he swallowed it struck him that it tasted more sour than usual, an unusually acrid note amongst the vinegar and sediment, and then – tinkle tinkle – he took another swallow, and already his thoughts were growing fuzzy, the world softening at the edges.
He blinked slowly, his eyelids seeming to inch slow as snails down over his eyeballs, with about as much haste as the sun to set, and then he realised belatedly that for the first time in hours, the tinkling had stopped.
The Listener had gone still, watching him. She asked him, her voice very distant, whether anything was the matter, and there was a stillness to her voice that told him that something very much was the matter.
His hand clenched around the cup, his tongue swollen and fat in his mouth. Trying desperately to identify the poison, from taste, from sensations, from his knowledge of the stores she habitually kept in her pack. Jarrin Root was his first thought, but no, if it had been, he’d have been dead already. "You–" The cup dropped from his nerveless hand, spilling what was left of the wine across the ground. So at least she wouldn’t be able to force the rest past his lips.
She stood up, dusting off her hands. Approached as Cicero gently, slowly, toppled over, his body immobile. He could only stare as she squatted down, bending her head to the side so her face was on a level with his. "You know, you were right, Cicero. The Night Mother does talk a lot. And you wouldn't believe some of the things she tells me. It shocked me, truly, the darkness that can lie in the hearts of men."
"The Tenets…" he managed to grate out.
"The Tenets won't be broken. Well..." She made a face, and in the moments before darkness claimed him, he heard the last of her words drifting towards him as if along a long black tunnel. "Not really. Perhaps it might be necessary to bend them a little. But you and I, Cicero, have a couple of matters we need to work out..."
When he came to, he was still alive, which was certainly more than he'd been expecting. A more cynical man, and one who’d seen the torture chambers the Listener ran in the Dawnstar Sanctuary, might have suspected it wasn’t a good sign. But he was unquestionably alive, and even less unquestionably uncomfortable, sitting on the cold stone and metal floor of a cell of rusting iron, a few yards long and barely wide enough for him to stretch his legs out straight.
The ground was strewn with mouldering straw and his arms, another less than positive sign, he had to admit, were manacled behind his back. The scent of iron tainted the air. The chain fastening the manacles had been looped through the bars, and it scraped against the metal as he tested the range of his motion by rising into a crouch.
Methodically, he took stock. His backside had gone numb, His knives gone, and he’d been stripped out of his jester’s outfit so that he was left shivering in the cool dank cave air. The lingering effects of whatever she’d drugged him with pressed at the inside of his eyeballs, an ever-present ache.
He pulled at the chain again, tugging his right hand forwards as far as he could, while his left was pulled back against the bars. He studied the manacle. Given time, and a lock pick, he might be able to pick his way free. Which would have been fine, except that he didn’t have a lock pick on him, and he suspected time would prove to be in short supply too–
Tinkle tinkle.
He went still.
Then twisting around, he craned his head so he could search the shadows of the cave. He didn’t have to wait for long.
She came, stepping lightly over the rock, picking her way over the hagraven clutter and stalagmites, dressed in braies and her loose undershirt, with the godsdamn jester's hat still firmly in place on her head. Her expression was grim. The jingling of the bells was as the screams of souls in the Void.
And, oh, fiddlesticks, here they were again, Cicero waiting helplessly while she came for him. Relentless and ruthless and terrifying.
"Listener," he said and chuckled nervously, the chains rattling. "It seems I'm a little tied up at the moment."
She entered the cage and squatted down before him, her hands resting on his knees. "You don't like me much, do you, Cicero?"
His eyes opened wide. "Not like you? Where could you have got that idea from? Why, you spared poor, poor Cicero's life. Kind Listener, gracious Listener–"
"So that matter with the dremora? You didn't feel the need to intervene?"
"And miss the spectacle of the Listener herself despatching them? It was a work of art, a thing of beauty, the knife and the stabbing and the–"
He stopped. She was staring at him. Not angry, but hard. Eyes dark as daedric-treated ebony. The blade was in her hand, Mehrunes' Razor itself, a weapon capable of wiping out a life with the merest scratch, as simply as pinching out a candle.
"No," he said, keeping his eye on the dagger. "No, Cicero is not altogether fond of the Listener, you’re right. But it's nothing personal. I'd never make it personal.."
"That is a pity. I always did like the personal touch."
He licked his lips. "What are you going to do with me?" A wheedling tone entered his voice. "You... you wouldn't leave wretched Cicero here to starve, would you?"
She didn't answer. Instead, she rose to her feet and heaved the cage door closed, the rusting hinges screaming like damned souls in torment. She snapped the key in the lock then tossed it away through the bars.
Now suddenly less certain, Cicero stared at her. "You're locking us both in?"
She ignored him. The Razor followed the key, although that at least she directed away with a Telekinesis spell, purely, he suspected, to remind him that she could. Then she took up a flask and took a swig, what appeared to be water spilling over her lips and soaking into her undershirt.
Cicero couldn’t help but stare, twisting his hands in the manacles in the vain hope that he might be able to slip them. Then she was kneeling down again, and bringing the flask to his mouth. It occurred to him briefly that his lips were sitting exactly where hers had been a moment ago, then he was forced to swallow or be choked as water flooded his mouth.
"Tell me something, Cicero," she said, her tone incongruously conversational. "Did you ever go to bouts at the arena? Not for business, I mean, but purely for pleasure." There was something very deliberate, he noted, about the way she said the word ‘pleasure’.
"From time to time," he said warily once he'd swallowed. "Did you?"
"Once or twice. But if we’re being honest with each other, it was always a little too impersonal for my tastes. I preferred smaller games. Private games." She recapped the flask and slipped it back through the bars. "The sort of games where two well-matched people would be locked in a cage. Very much like this one, in fact. Sometimes with weapons. Sometimes not."
"Well-matched," he repeated and gave another nervous chuckle. "I'm... shackled to the bars, Listener. If you're expecting Cicero to put up a fight I'm quite helpless. I've seen you fight. And stab. And cut. And eviscerate. You'll be able to butcher me without a moment's hesitation. Even unarmed."
"I'm not planning to kill you."
"You're not?"
She shook her head. "I'm going to give you the chance to kill me."
"And why would you want to do that?"
"Because frustration is a dangerous thing, and something we cannot afford, especially now, when we need to be united. We cannot afford disharmony amongst ourselves. I know you're angry. I know you're bitter." Her eyes didn't quite soften. She probably wasn't capable of that. She leaned forward and gripped his wrist, the chains rattling as she pulled his hand towards her and leaned in at the same time so that she could place his hand over her heart. It was horribly awkward and horribly intimate, made all the worse by the deceptive sweetness of her voice. By Sithis, he hated her. "If I could, I'd hand over this burden to you in a heartbeat."
"Generous of you, Listener," he muttered in an undertone. "Offering something you'll never be in a position to give."
Carefully, quickly, he thought it through. The knife and the key were both well out of his reach. The key to the manacles too, no doubt, assuming that there was a key to the manacles. He had no lock pick, and nothing with which he might be able to approximate a lock pick, if he had a particular talent for that sort of thing, which he didn’t. She could retrieve them all through Telekinesis if she needed he. He on the other hand...
So if in the extremely unlikely event that he did manage to kill her despite being shackled, he'll be all but trapped in the cage, with nothing to drink except what was left in the flask which she'd so generously left within his reach, and that wouldn’t last long. Even odds which would get him first: thirst or the Wrath of Sithis.
Cicero might have been mad, but he wasn’t an idiot.
No dice, Listener, sweet.
"You’re suggesting Cicero would break the Tenets?" he said, packing every scrap of affront into his voice that he could manage. "I am shocked at you, Listener! Shocked!"
"I’m afraid you misunderstand me, Cicero. You won't have the choice."
She gave him no warning. A twist of her hand, and a creeping sensation crawling up his spinal column, and dragging his skin with it. His jaw clenched tight, and then his system was flushed with a tide of anger the likes of which he'd never felt before.
Not just anger, but rage. Pure, stark, cold-burning fury. It struck him like a hand set against his chest and slamming him back against the iron. He didn’t just see red: he tasted it, breathed it. His lips peeled back and his fingers hooked into claws, and he cast about for something on which to focus that uncontrollable fury, and the only thing he could see was her.
The Listener. Her face set and determined, apparently unarmed and apparently vulnerable. Even Cicero, as mad as he was, would have recognised that as a lie in a more lucid moment, but this was nothing like a lucid moment.
Aggrieved, he opened his mouth to speak, to tell her exactly what he thought of her, but he was beyond speech. The fury had drowned out the part of his brain that dealt with rational thought, inasmuch as any part of his brain had ever dealt with rational thought.
"A Frenzy spell," she started to say, but the words were barely out of her mouth before he snapped and went for her, feet scrabbling on the stone, teeth bared. The chain yanked taut.
To her credit, the Listener barely flinched, and darted backwards, but there was nowhere to go. He hauled on the chain, all but foaming at the mouth as he pressed her back against the bars, his teeth snapping an inch away from her exposed throat. He threw his left shoulder forwards, attempting to block off a retreat she seemed in no danger of making.
She was breathless. Some of her hair had come loose from her braid, hanging around her face in wispy strands.
He might not have been able to rip her throat out, but what he could do was catch the fragile chain of her necklace between his teeth and drag it to the side, so that it was pulled tight against her throat, hard enough to bite into the skin like a garotte. His shoulder pressed against her chest, her breasts pushing against his arm.
He hauled, heard her hiss of something that was both pain and excitement. The chain scraped unpleasantly against his teeth, the manacles cutting into his wrists. His jaw ached. He shifted his teeth, pulled harder, and then the chain snapped and he lost his balance, going to one knee.
Cicero spat out the necklace.
He howled in thwarted rage and threw himself with renewed vigour against the Listener, biting at her thighs through her braies as he swept her legs out from under her. She cried out as she tumbled over, and Cicero made another snapping lurch for her throat, but was thwarted by the chains yet again.
So instead, he scrambled, twisting his body around, throwing one arm forwards, the other back, to allow the other enough freedom of moment that he could wrap it around her lower legs and haul her along the ground towards him.
And as he did so, he heard a sound horribly familiar to he who was laughter incarnate, and she was laughing, she was laughing. Her head thrown back and her eyes glowing with delight.
She bared her teeth at him, then drew a foot back and kicked him hard in the jaw. He snarled, snapping like a terrier at the meat of her calf, but he couldn’t get purchase. So instead he crawled up and over her and pinned her down as much as he could when he was half-suspended above her body. He snapped his teeth, aiming for her throat. Yet again, he couldn’t reach.
Well, if he couldn't bite her throat, he'd bite what was in reach instead. Her shoulder. The meat of her upper arm. He got little more than a mouthful of cotton for his troubles. His mouth parted, breath heaving, he mouthed at her chest, searching for something he would sink his teeth into until he reached her breast.
He froze, mouth still open, jaws aching.
The bells jingled very softly. The swell of her breast, falling and rising with every breath. She wasn’t laughing any more.
Very slowly, almost gently, he opened his mouth a little wider and closed his teeth on the side of her breast, biting down. Not quite hard enough to bite. Not yet.
The rage had ebbed a little, replaced with something else.
Cautiously, he bit down a little harder, and this time it was hard enough to hurt. Her nipple brushed against his cheek, hard as a pebble. She made a sound in the back of her throat, a bitten-back cry, and pushed her fingers into his hair, gripping it tight like she meant to wrench him away. Instead, she twined his hair around her fingers and used to to yank him closer, the burn in his scalp almost a match with the ache in his shoulders and jaw.
He relaxed his teeth, and bent his knee, letting that take some of the strain while he sucked her nipple into his mouth, soaking the cotton with his saliva. Still awkward, still painful, but marginally less so. And now that the pain had eased a little, the existence of another source of discomfort and another ache entirely gradually began to dawn on him.
His cock was hard as Skyforged steel, uncomfortably trapped between his thigh and the leg of his pants, and his position meant that he was able to rub his cock against the knee she’d bent as he caught her nipple between his teeth, distantly aware of the Listener pressing her hips up towards him. She shifted her knee slightly to the right, catching his cock dead on, and a shiver of pleasure tore through him, sending him into another, rather less magically influenced frenzy.
He rutted against her, half-biting, half-sucking her breast, before wriggling down in a desperate attempt to grip the hem of her shirt between his teeth and drag it upwards. That had been the plan at least, but he abandoned it half-way through to scrape his teeth over her skin and bite at the flesh of her stomach and her hipbone instead, and then paused to watch in enthralled fascination at the way the flesh slowly turned pink as the blood returned.
She spread her legs and wrapped them around his waist, lifting her backside up to meet him. Rubbing violently against her, and with her in turn grinding back against him, he could have sworn he could feel the heat of her cunt through the layers of their clothes. His cock ached, the sensation of friction and the abrasion of his underclothing very nearly painful in its intensity.
Half-feral, he dropped his head back down, growling in the back of his throat in frustration and fury as he tried to push her shirt out of the way, until she finally took pity on him and pulled it over her head. Her small breasts were already marked with the pink rings of his bite marks, circling around her dark nipples, contrasting sweetly with the pallor of her skin.
The marks made by the necklace earlier looked for all the world like he'd garotted her, and it was, he thought, blinded by magic and pleasure and the urge to hurt, to kill, to come, quite possibly the most beautiful thing he'd ever seen.
A sudden sharp stab of pleasure roiled through him, coiling with shiver sweetness up along his spine. A perfect storm: feral urgency clashed with slow, honey-sweet pleasure, and Cicero was let helpless and quivering caught between the two. He sank his teeth into the flesh around her breast, heard her faint moan as he flicked his tongue over and around the nipple, before tightening his jaw and biting down harder, sucking with as much force as he can and rutting between her legs with equal violence as though he were already inside her.
The noises she was making were soft and liquid, not just her throaty moans but the sound of the wetness between her legs. Even, if he listened carefully, the wetness in her veins. He set to biting her with a frenzy, concentrating on her breasts, until not a square inch of that pale skin was left untouched, wanting to mark every inch of her body in the only way currently available to him.
She twined her legs tighter and pulled him harder against him. Gripped his hair and yanked on it until his scalp burned, her hips jerking up towards his, her movements losing their rhythm and taking on a newfound urgency. There was pain in the sounds she was making, but more pleasure.
She clenched her fingers in his hair, arching her back, pushing her breasts up towards him as her cries built to a crescendo, and suddenly he reared up, the chains scraping against the bars in a way that set his teeth on edge, to watch her as she came, her eyes black, and her head thrown back, her chest flushed her lips parted and shining wet and red with saliva.
She laughed, breathless with pleasure and joy as she came, a pleasure that came so easily for her, and he wanted to scream with frustration because his own release was tormenting him: agonisingly and yet beyond his reach. It felt like a blockage inside him, like the potentially devastating build-up of stream in the damaged mechanism of a Dwemer ruin, and by Sithis at the moment of her peak she’d looked exactly as she had in his dream in the moment before he’d slit her throat.
His hands curled around the chains as he watched her as she came down, her eyes hooding, her lips curling into a blade-like contented smile. The fingers clenched in his hair eased, and the pain in his scalp with them. Cicero swallowed, giggled nervously, pressed his cock a little harder against her. Wondered if he dared suggest she might remove the manacles.
Before he could speak, her eyes flicked towards him. Her smile widened. Then she drew up her foot and kicked him hard in the chest again, rolling backwards and rising to her feet. When he went for her again, she danced back into the far end of the cell, just out of reach.
"The Listener is very cruel," he managed, unable to tear his gaze away from her breasts, shining with his saliva, swollen and flushed and marked by his teeth.
"Sometimes," she said, and he was only somewhat mollified to hear that she was very nearly as breathless as he was, "it’s necessary to be cruel to be kind."
A truism, certainly, but an extremely irritating one which made him wish he could bite her all over again. Instead, with his heart slamming against his ribs so hard it might have been about to burst (and it wasn’t the only thing), he settled back on his haunches, panting like a dog seeking refuge from the heat.
"Do you know what I think the Dark Brotherhood truly are, Cicero?" As she spoke, she pushed her thumbs beneath the waistband of her pants. "They're a necessary part of the Empire. As vital to its smooth running as the Legions or the Elder Council."
She slipped her pants down over her slender hips. Nothing underneath. Her red hair had been all but loosed from the braid, hanging down around her shoulders. A few strands had stuck to the saliva he'd left on her skin.
"They’re the blade to cut out cankers. The white-hot brand for cauterising a wound." She advanced a few steps, moving close enough that she could reach out a hand and caress his cheek. He could have twisted his head around to bite her hand. Instead he sat motionless, every muscle tensed so hard he quivered. His cock was rigid, the outline clearly defined against his pants, so hard it ached. So hard he wasn’t sure he’d be able to come, or that his erection would ever subside. Her voice softened. "Or the moment of catharsis to bring peace to the mind of a troubled man."
"Listener…"
"Some problems can only be solved through violence. And the Brotherhood is only what it ever was: a tool to be wielded by those who know how."
She thrust her hand out sideways in a gesture that at first he failed to understand. Then he heard a scraping sound and turned his head and saw the Razor sending up sparks as it was dragged along the ground by an unseen hand at the behest of her magicka. It stood upright, quivering with about as much urgency as his cock, before springing through the air to her hand, bringing with it the mineral tang of Oblivion.
For a moment, Cicero went very, very still. Then, before she could set the tip of the dagger against his throat, he leaned forwards and nuzzled at her thigh. For the first time, she seemed to have been taken aback. She froze, then as he pushed his face forwards, working it between her legs, they opened, allowing him somewhat limited access. Her arm rested on the back of his neck, the tip of the Razor pressing against the very top of his spine. Perhaps an implicit threat, perhaps only convenience. Either way, Cicero ignored it, and pushed his tongue into her cunt to taste her. She rocked her hips gently against him, then pushed him away with a show of reluctance.
"Another time, perhaps."
Cicero eyed her, thinking that there’d never be another time: the moment he was free he'd kill her for this, and face whatever the Wrath of Sithis had to offer. But then her blade was sliding around his throat, scraping against his skin as it followed the line of his collarbone, and down his chest. Cicero listened and stared as she dropped into a squat, hating himself for being unable to shut his ears to the slick sound of her wet cunt or look away from the flash of red.
The tip of the blade traced the length of his cock, from balls to base to shaft to head, and that last, she gently circled it, pressing the tip a little deeper, enough to dimple the fabric, enough to make him swallow, his mouth suddenly as dry as the Alik’r desert. She eased a finger beneath the waistband of his braies, and cut through the ties, and then she paused a moment as if to relish the moment, and Cicero stared at her, breathing hard, his gaze roaming from her cunt to her breasts, and to the blade in her hand, the way the handle had moulded to her grip as though it had been made for her.
Her eyes shifted to his, and she held his gaze as she eased his braies down. Her eyes were full of a challenge he couldn’t quite read, although he couldn’t help but notice that her throat was within the reach of his teeth now. Her throat in reach, yes, but she wasn’t exactly unarmed any more, inasmuch as she ever had been, and such was the question: which of them was quicker? Could he manage to rip her throat out before she cut him with the Razor? It mightn't take more than a slash to kill him, but her position was an awkward, making a killing blow tricky. Still, even if the blow wasn't fatal, maybe he'd get the time to heal it and maybe he wouldn't, and maybe he'd be able to use the dagger to pick the locks between him and freedom and maybe he wouldn't, and damn sure that'd irk Dagon no end if nothing else, and the Princes were no friends to Sithis, but...
His cock sprang out, and her hand curled around the base, and then there was no more space for thought.
His hips jerked involuntarily, thrusting his cock into her hand. Her thumb stroking along its length, almost tenderly. And then she was turning away, and dropping on hands and knees, and he was rising up behind her, pulling one hand forward and dragging the other back so that he could grip her hips and shift her backwards against him and press the head of his cock to her cunt.
It seemed easy; simple in a way that few things seemed these days, in an entirely abstinent life that for far too long had revolved around nothing but the Night Mother–
The renewed Frenzy spell slammed into him without warning, startling in its savagery. One last little twist of the knife. The rattle of the chains, the manacles biting into his wrists. He was entering her slowly, wanting to take his time over the moment, and instead it was sudden and violence, Cicero ramming inside her with a force that made her cry out with a fierce wild joy.
What he was thinking about was her throat, now out of reach. Her breasts. Also out of reach. She'd fallen forwards on her hands and knees, and she was placed far enough away that he couldn't even reach bite her neck or her spine. He could do nothing except gnash his teeth and dig the fingers and nails of the one hand that could reach into her hip as he fucked her with as force as he could manage, her cunt hot and tight around him.
She slammed her hips back to meet his, matching him thrust for thrust, violence for violence, the Razor scraping against the stone as if to underscore her moans as she reached down between her spread legs. She squeezed the base of his shaft, then further down to cup and tug hard at his balls, before rubbing at herself, her cries rising in pitch.
And then she was rising onto her knees, arching her body back against his back, the sudden shift of the angles around his cock very neatly enough to make him lose control – what little control he had, anyway. Her back against his chest, her hair against his lips. His mouth opened in instinct, but when it closed, it closed on nothing but her hair.
With the hand holding the dagger, she reached back around his neck, her nails scratching welts at his nape. Her other hand was between her legs, pushing herself against his shaft, so that it rubbed against her clit with every stoke.
How close the dagger was to his throat. And how close his teeth to hers. She’d tilted her head to the side, leaving her throat bared. Virtually an invitation.
He kissed her neck, nipped her earlobe hard with an incisor, before dropping his mouth to her shoulder, the hollow of her throat.
He was going to kill her, he decided. Right at the moment he came, at the very height of his orgasm, and perhaps even hers if they were lucky enough to time it right, and if he was luckier still might even would distract her from the business of stabbing him.
Make it something really special. Something he'd remember until the end of his days. Which thanks to her would probably be extremely short. Sweet, though, no doubt, and filled with pleasant memories. And it'd be worth it, oh by the Void it would be so worth it.
With every thrust, the slap of skin on skin. The mantra repeating in his head: He hates her he hates her he hates–
"By Sithis," he managed to bite out.
She pressed back against him, and he felt the exquisite moment she came for a second time, clenching hard around his cock, and dropping her head back against his chest, and it was too much. He came, growling into her throat, metal scraping against metal, with the Void opening up inside his head, like a lacuna flaring open inside his skull.
He was so lost in it, he didn’t notice her reaching back, the snick of the manacle on his right wrist falling open. Or of his freed arm wrapping around her chest.
It’d... been a while. So long he couldn't quite remember just how long it had been. Certainly since before he became Keeper. Before Cheydinhal perhaps? Before the fall of the Bruma Sanctuary, even?
He'd forgotten. The flood of stark pleasure, so intense it shared significant overlap with pain. The overwhelming loss of control over the body, the shuddering spasms. And the way awareness seeped back afterwards, like regaining consciousness after fainting from extreme pain.
The focusing in on minor details first. The flesh between his teeth, still intact more or less. The sensation of her cunt clenching around his cock in time with the beat of her heart, echoed in the pulse he can all but taste through the skin of her throat. His freed hand over hers, holding the blade of Mehrunes’ Razor to her throat. Her head was tilted back, her eyes regarding him with amusement and indulgence, and with a question in them.
Well?
With the opening up of that lacuna, something seemed to have shifted. What was Sithis but a ravening vacuum? The hatred seemed to have gone, leaving only peace and howling emptiness behind.
He could almost understand why the Night Mother might have chosen her. There was something in the bleak black terrible depths of her eyes that told him she was as terrible as he is, as devoted, as given over to the Void. But unlike him, she was as sane as the blade of a sharpened knife, as the blade of the Razor.
They balanced each other out.
He couldn’t kill her. Any more than she could have killed him.
Unnerved, he giggled into her throat.
The moment passed, he dropped his hand down, pulling the chain through the bars. Rolling his aching shoulders, he watched the Listener, his mouth dry, as she touched a finger to the other manacle and it sprang open. There was a smear of blood on her neck, and it made him think of rubies on her skin.
And what man wouldn’t want to adorn his lover with jewels?
Cicero hesitated. "Could Cicero ask the Listener a favour?"
"Well, you can certainly ask. It depends what the favour is."
"If… anything were to happen to the Listener, do you think… might you allow Cicero to have your skull as a keepsake?"
She stared at him for a moment, then smiled.
After the… incident in the cave she’d sat cross-legged before him and rubbed a healing salve into the welts the manacles had left on his wrists, but when he offered to do her in turn, she’d smiled, and said that she preferred to keep her bruises as mementoes for the time being. Which had meant that he’d spent much of their onwards journey thinking about the bruises and bite marks under her clothes.
Pleasanter, in some ways, than daydreaming about all the ways he might go about murdering a woman he was bound never to kill, but no less distracting.
On their way north, they ran into an unfortunate group of bandits who made the mistake of trying to rob them on the road, and it was like stretching out old cramped muscles. Perfect timing in other ways too, since there was nothing like terrified screaming to clear the air of any potential awkwardness.
Honestly, those bandits couldn’t have turned up at a better time, although no doubt the bandits would have claimed otherwise.
It was getting late and it was starting to snow, and after they’d tracked down the rest of the bandits to their ramshackle den, and dealt with them, they took the chance to rest. There was a brazier and a bed, mostly clean except for the bandit leader’s corpse still sprawled across it, his face contorted by death into an expression of disapproval.
He was wearing Nordic carved armour, and after all the effort of dragging the corpses out into the snow, they’d shared a weary glance over the body. The bandit had the bulky muscular frame of a Nord who’d drunk his milk as a boy, so the corpse was heavy and the armour was heavier, and neither one of them was in the mood.
"We should have done him first," she said mournfully, and then there’d been some dickering over how best to move him which had ended with them tumbling onto the bed and fucking, while the dead bandit glared disapprovingly at them all the while.
After that they ate a meagre meal of bread and eider cheese, washed down with the bandits’ ale – no poison this time – and sat on the bed, eyeing up the bandit, and taking it in turns to announce that they were definitely going to shift the heavy bastard, any minute now, before not bothering to move. Outside the other corpses were already shrouded by snow, the world outside muffled by heavy snow. Why, they might be the only two people left in Skyrim alive. Perhaps it might be better not to move the bandit – if they were the last two people left alive, they might be glad of the company someday.
And since they seemed to have reached some kind of accord, Cicero took the chance to ask the question that had been on his mind for a while now. "Did you want Cicero to try to kill you, Listener?"
"In a manner of speaking. To be clear, I'm glad you didn't. What I wanted was for you to act."
"But I didn't act."
"A wise man man once told me that doing nothing is sometimes the wisest choice."
"Cicero has never been particularly wise," he observed sourly, rubbing his wrists.
She smiled. "And that goes against everything I've ever learned about jesters. You must have been wise once, or else you’d never have been chosen as Keeper."
It almost felt like a dream. He tried to remember that time before he had been Keeper, a time when his knife had felt like a part of his arm, a part of him. A time when every contract had felt like a blessing from the Night Mother herself. When he’d had a place, a home, a family. He couldn’t quite manage it. "I’ve changed," he said sadly.
"I’m not so sure about that. You saw things more clearly than any of us. Because you were right, Cicero. About Astrid, about the travesty the Dark Brotherhood had become." She paused. "Perhaps I may be mistaken, but I pray that I am not, because I have plans..."
"I don’t suppose the Listener would see fit to share those plans with Cicero?"
An idle question. Polite curiosity, really. He wasn’t really expecting her to share them, but she glanced at him thoughtfully for a few moments before nodding.
"She would indeed. And so she ought, since they involve your charge." She lay down on the bed, pillowing the back of her head on her hand. "I went to Bravil once as a child, you know. I saw the statue of the Lucky Old Lady and what it meant to the people of that wretched city. The way they took it to their hearts. Cicero..." Her voice softened, and she lay her hand very gently on his. "The time has come to find our dread Mother a new crypt."
"A crypt? For Mother? You mean... No more Cicero oiling Mother's flesh, no more caring for her bones?"
"Eventually. Of course, it’ll take time to make the necessary arrangements, finding a suitable site, and ensuring it's appropriately consecrated. Part of your duties, I understand, along with greasing the right palms, taking care of the intransigent in whatever way you deem appropriate... I'll leave the details to you."
"Cicero will do his very best," he managed. "The location..."
"Again it’s your decision, but I thought perhaps in a city? I dislike these out of the way locations. The Dark Brotherhood ought to be in the heart of things, one with the people, as we once were in Cyrodiil." She gave a thin smile. "If I may make a suggestion, where better than Solitude, with a monument to guard the spot? A statue, perhaps, to commemorate the sad passing of the emperor."
"Most fitting."
"Yes, I thought so. I rather like the touch of irony. And everyone has a piece of the Void in their hearts." She rolled towards him, eyes gleaming with delight. "Imagine it, Cicero. All those Legion soldiers, no strangers to death and bloodshed themselves. Each time they stop to remember their dead emperor, they commune with the Night Mother and those fragments of the Void grow a little louder. They hear Sithis's voice speak a little louder and remember our Dread Father on the battlefield. And we grow stronger."
"You truly are an inspiration, Listener," he said, quietly marvelling.
"You'll do it, then?"
"It would be the culmination of my duties as Keeper. I never..." His voice cracked. He was even slightly misty-eyed. "I could never have dreamed this day would come. Even though it means... once the Night Mother is in her crypt, consecrated, hidden away, there'll be no need of a Keeper." Emptiness loomed ahead of him, and who knew what dreams might be waiting in that emptiness.
"No need of a Keeper," she agreed. "You're right. But what the Brotherhood does need, if we are to grow, is a Speaker."
"A... Speaker? You want Cicero to become a Speaker? Surely the Listener is jesting."
"I can't be expected to do everything, and the Black Hand must be restored if we are to regain the Brotherhood's hold over Skyrim. The others..." She made a faint sound of disgust. "Well, they're loyal enough in their own way, to me as they were to Astrid, but not to Sithis or the Night Mother. You're not like them. You remember, and value, the old ways in a way that the others do not." This she said very carefully. Cicero regarded her quizzically, and she shrugged. "It may be that there will come a time when something will need to be done about that, but for the moment we must rebuild, and it’s becoming very clear that I cannot do everything alone."
"Yes, but still... Cicero?"
She kissed his cheek. "Do think on it, won't you, but there's no particular rush. There's some time yet for you to make your decision, and these things must be done right if they are to be done at all. We'll head for Dawnstar in the morning. I realise I've been remiss in taking you away from your duties for to long."
"Thank you, Listener. You’re right, I really ought to be getting back to Mother..."
He trailed off, overwhelmed by the enormity of trying to imagine it: a time when he would no longer the Keeper, when he wouldn’t be tied to her corpse. He’d almost begun to think that time would never come, that he’d be the Keeper until his bones had withered and the skin had shrivelled, as he waited for a Listener who’d never come. Which wasn’t to say he’d be entirely free: A Speaker in the Black Hand would have their own responsibilities, but they’d be important ones, crucial ones, ones which involved his blade in his hand, perhaps even the appointing and directing his own Silencer.
He could follow in the footsteps of Lucien Lachance, might even – he caught his breath at the thrilling thought – have the chance to direct a Purification ritual as that great man had so very long ago. The unchild and the Redguard and all the others who didn’t truly comprehend the wonders of their Dread Lord, and whom he’d never for one moment believed he might get the chance to kill.
No one would ever have remembered the name of Cicero the Keeper, but perhaps one day to come the name of Cicero the Speaker might be whispered in the passages of Sanctuaries all across Tamriel. And wasn’t that what every fool longed for? To be remembered?
It was a gift. A gift from the Night Mother herself. A reward for all his patient loyal service.
He’d have got up and capered if he hadn’t been exhausted to the bone. Instead he just giggled wildly and clapped his hands, close to weeping for joy.
"Oh, Listener! I shall compose a song in your honour! ‘the fair dread maid, dee dee blood flow, something something Cicero’. Forgive me, Listener, it’s a work in progress…"
"There was one last matter," she broke in, raising her voice only slightly. "A minor thing, and I leave the matter entirely up to your discretion. It relates to the statue of the emperor and what form it might take. An irony that it might be amusing to incorporate into the statue for posterity. I thought it rather apt..."
"Go on."
Smiling, she leaned closer, her eyes glittering as she brought her mouth to his ear. "I'm told," she whispered, "that he used to have a fool."