Despite Sloan’s misgivings, things did actually return to something akin to normal – the “something akin” part being the constant muttering of a certain jester standing next to a certain box, of course – over the course of the next week. Life in the Brotherhood settled around the crate and its caretaker like water around a stone. The only real difference was the whispers.

 

They began three days after the Night Mother's arrival. They were quiet, at first, and Sloan thought them just a new level of background noise to go along with the new background guests. By the fifth day, however, they had grown insistent enough that she found herself pausing mid-stride, head cocked, waiting for a sentence that never arrived. The others noticed -- of course they did; this was a house of noticing -- but no one commented directly. Naza's questions grew fractionally sharper; Tusef's spars grew fractionally longer. Even Babette's smile took on an edge of curiosity she made no effort to conceal. Sloan said nothing. What was there to say? I hear things that aren't there was not a confession one made lightly in a place where weakness was measured in ounces and repaid in steel.

 

On the seventh night -- or what passed for night in the sunless depths of the Sanctuary -- she traced the sound to its source. The Night Mother’s sarcophagus had been removed from the crate and set standing in an alcove a short corridor away from the living quarters. Sloan stood before it for a long moment, listening to the silence that was not quite silence. The whisper was louder here; not in volume, but in presence -- it pressed against the inside of her skull like a hand against a door. The sarcophagus itself looked unremarkable -- dark wood banded with tarnished silver, carved with symbols she did not recognize. The lid was not sealed and, after a moment’s hesitation, she pulled it open.

 

The body within was preserved in a state that defied reason. Sloan had seen corpses before -- more than she cared to count, in more states of decay than she cared to remember -- but this was not a corpse. It was a woman, naked, her arms crossed over her chest in the attitude of interment, her skin pale but not waxy, her lips faintly tinted as if with the last residue of life. Her hair lay spread around her head in dark, undisturbed waves, and her eyes -- closed, serene -- seemed ready at any moment to open. Sloan studied her in the dim light. There was nothing threatening about the figure before her, yet something thrummed beneath the stillness, a current she could feel but not touch.

 

Beitild.

 

The name surfaced in her mind like a bubble rising through dark water. Not a voice, exactly -- there were no tones, no inflections, no sense of gender or distance – but it was unmistakably communication. It was a word placed directly into her consciousness accompanied by something that was not quite an image and not quite a feeling: a sense of location, of a specified place where this person could be found. She could not have described it in words if her life depended on it, but she knew it, with the same bone-deep certainty that she knew her own hands.

 

"Beitild.” The word hung in the air and she realized with a start she had spoken it without deciding to speak. Behind her, a bell chimed and Sloan turned.

 

Cicero stood in the doorway of the chamber, his motley catching the torchlight in ways that made him look less like a man and more like a broken rainbow given treacherous life. His expression cycled through several emotions in rapid succession: first delight, then horror, then a sort of ecstatic betrayal.

 

"You opened it!" His voice scaled upward into a register that should have been painful. "You opened Mother's box! Without ceremony! Without permission! Without…" He stopped, his eyes locking onto the sarcophagus, then onto Sloan's face, then back to the sarcophagus, as if trying to triangulate a crime. "Cicero did not say you could open it!"

 

"The latches weren't closed.”

 

"The latches!" Cicero pressed both hands to his cheeks, a gesture of such theatrical dismay that it bordered on parody. "The latches are not the point! The point is respect! The point is reverence! You do not simply open Mother's resting place as if it were...as if it were a pantry!"

 

"It's just a body," Sloan said, though even as she said it, she knew it wasn't.

 

Cicero's mouth opened; closed; opened again. No sound emerged. He looked, for the first time since she had met him, genuinely at a loss for words.

 

The moment broke as others arrived, drawn by Cicero's rising voice and the novelty of disruption in a place that thrived on silence. Naza came first, her footsteps unhurried, her eyes taking in the scene with the practiced efficiency of someone cataloguing evidence. Tusef followed, broad shoulders filling the doorway behind him. Babette slipped in at the edges, finding a shadow to settle into. Lexzal arrived last, his staff tapping a slow rhythm against the stone, and stopped at the threshold -- unwilling, perhaps, to come closer.

 

The chamber filled with overlapping voices: Cicero's escalating accusations, Naza's calm interjections, Tusef's gruff demands for an explanation. It was the kind of chaos that should have grated -- and it did, but distantly, as if filtered through water. Because beneath the noise, beneath the bickering and the posturing and the barely concealed suspicion, the whisper was still there. Fainter now, but present; a thread she could follow if she chose.

 

"Beitild," she said again.

 

The room went silent; everyone turned to look at her. Even Cicero stopped mid-gesture, his hands suspended in the air like a puppet whose strings had frozen.

 

"Who?" Naza asked, her voice deceptively light.

 

Sloan shrugged. "I don't know. It just...came to me."

 

Cicero's eyes went wide -- wider than should have been physically possible. A sound escaped him, half gasp, half laugh, entirely unhinged.

 

"You heard her! You heard Mother speak! You are the Listener! The void has chosen you!"

 

"I'm not anything," Sloan said, but the words felt hollow even to her own ears.

 

The others exchanged glances; a silent conversation passed between them, rapid and subtle. Naza's expression had gone carefully neutral; Tusef's jaw worked as if he wanted to speak but had decided against it; Babette's smile had sharpened into something watchful and speculative. Only Lexzal met her eyes, and in his gaze she read something she had not expected: not belief, but the suspension of disbelief. A willingness to wait and see.

 

Cicero, meanwhile, had dropped to his knees in a posture of such extravagant devotion that it circled back around to being unsettling. "The Listener," he repeated, pressing his forehead to the stone floor. "At last. At last!"

 

Sloan looked into the open sarcophagus, at the still face of the woman within, at the hands crossed in eternal patience over a chest that did not rise or fall.

 

"I don't know what I heard," she said, and this time it came out quieter than she intended. "I don't know what any of this means."

 

A footstep, measured and deliberate, from the corridor behind Cicero. The jester's head snapped up, his theatrical devotion shifting into something watchful as Kira stepped into the chamber. She moved past Cicero without looking at him, past Naza, past Tusef, past all of them -- her eyes fixed on Sloan with an intensity that made the hairs on Sloan's arms prickle. She stopped in front of the sarcophagus and her expression flickered through something too quick to read before settling into a smile.

 

"It means you have been chosen to tell us who the Night Mother has agreed to slay after she heard some soul cry out to her." Kira's voice was light, almost conversational -- the tone of someone discussing the weather, or the quality of the wine at dinner. "Why don't you come with me, and we'll see if it is what it seems."

 

Sloan kept her face still. She had learned to keep her face still through many things -- through pain, through fear, through the slow realization that someone trusted was about to put a blade in her back. She kept it still now, even as her stomach dropped and her pulse quickened and a voice that sounded very much like Mishi's sneered sloppy in the back of her mind.

 

She recognized that tone. Loose, casual, almost warm -- the same tone Kira had used in the Vixen's office, just before she drove a hidden dagger at Sloan's chest. The same tone she had used while Mallin's body cooled against the wall behind her.

 

"Of course," Sloan said, and her voice came out steady. "Lead the way."

---

Kira’s office was smaller than the one at the Vixen but looked remarkably similar. It was intimate, the way a confessional is intimate, the way a trap is intimate before it springs. A desk of dark carved wood dominated the center, its surface cluttered with papers and a single oil lamp that cast a pool of amber light across the space. Bookshelves lined the walls, stuffed with volumes and scrolls and the odd trinket -- a glass jar of dried nightshade, a dagger with a chipped blade, a child's wooden doll with one eye painted shut.

 

And there, leaning against the far wall with her arms crossed and her tail tracing lazy arcs through the air, was Gilna.

 

Sloan's heart stuttered -- once, a single hard beat against her ribs – but she forced her face to remain still. She had not seen the Khajiit since Solitude, since the alley and the daggers and the message delivered with that sharp-toothed smile. She had assumed Gilna had reported back to Kira and moved on to other work, other cities, other targets. She had not assumed she would find her here, waiting in the Matron's private office as if she had never left.

 

Gilna's ears flicked forward. Her amber eyes tracked Sloan's entry with the lazy attention of a predator who had already decided whether to pounce.

 

Sloan held her gaze, nodded once, and said, "Hello, Gilna."

 

The tail stopped mid-swing and Gilna's head tilted -- a slow, deliberate motion, like a bird considering a worm that had just spoken in tongues. Her eyes narrowed, and when she spoke, her voice carried that particular Khajiit cadence she had always used when she was circling something interesting.

 

"You know my name. No one has spoken it.” The khajiit pushed off the wall with a single fluid motion and took a step closer, then another, her head still tilted, her ears swiveling forward. "I am certain of this. So tell me, little two-legs -- how do you know my name?"

 

Sloan met her eyes and winked. "'Knowing is what we do, right?'"

 

It had been one of old Gilna’s favorite sayings, and Sloan had to fight to keep from grinning at the effect of it. Gilna's face went through a transformation Sloan had never seen on it before -- not surprise, exactly, but something adjacent to it, something that flickered across her features and was gone before it could settle. Her ears flattened, then rose and her nostrils flared once, as if testing the air for lies.

 

And then she smiled -- that same sharp-toothed, feral smile Sloan remembered from a thousand lessons and a hundred deadly games -- and said, "So true."

 

The silence that followed was not hostile; it was studying, the way a scholar studies a text that refuses to sit still under the erratic flicker of candle. Gilna held her position, her tail resuming its lazy swing, and Sloan let herself breathe.

 

Kira had settled behind her desk during their exchange -- Sloan had tracked the movement peripherally, the rustle of fabric, the creak of leather, the soft click of a drawer opening and closing – and now folded her hands on the papers before her and regarded both of them with the patient expression of a woman who had all the time in the world and was not afraid to use it.

 

"Gilna has been watching you since Solitude," Kira said.

 

Sloan felt something cold settle in her stomach. She kept her face neutral, kept her breathing even, but the words landed like stones in still water -- for weeks, apparently, the Khajiit had been tracking her movements through the Sanctuary and her assignments, observing her training, her meals, her sleep, her conversations, and Sloan had not known. She had felt no eyes on her, no prickle at the back of her neck, no shadow that lingered a breath too long. It was a humbling reminder that she was not as far along as she sometimes liked to believe and she needed to adjust her expectations of herself to match reality before she took a step too far.

 

"A difficult task it was," Gilna added, her voice carrying that same melodic amusement Sloan remembered. "It is like you can see in the dark. Most people I can follow from across a city and never break stride. You…" she flicked an ear, "…you turned around three times before you ever left a room. You checked windows and doors before you entered them. You never took the same path twice, even to the privy."

 

Sloan said nothing. There was nothing to say; the cat was right and admitting it out loud would only give her more ammunition.

 

"I lost you twice," Gilna continued, settling back against the wall with a theatrical sigh. "Twice in the first week. I have not lost a mark in…" she paused, counting on her fingers, "…well, longer than you have been alive, I think. But you? You vanished. Once in the kitchens, once near the armory. I had to pick up your trail from Lexzal's observations both times."

 

Sloan filed that away as well: Lexzal was reporting on her movements too. Of course he was -- everyone in this place reported to Kira, sooner or later. She had allies, not friends.

 

Kira cleared her throat -- a small sound, barely audible, but it cut through the room like a blade. Gilna fell silent immediately, her ears swiveling toward the Matron with an attentiveness that spoke of long habit.

 

"The matter at hand," Kira said, and her voice had shifted -- still light, still conversational, but with an edge beneath it that Sloan recognized from the warehouse, from the Vixen, from every encounter she had ever had with this woman. "You claim the Night Mother spoke to you. You claim she gave you a name."

 

"I claim nothing but that I heard a voice say Beitild. Whether that was the Night Mother or my own imagination, I cannot say.”

 

"Yes." Kira's eyes were very flat, very cold, very watching. "That is the name you spoke. The question, of course, is whether it means anything. I will reach out to my contacts and our agents in the field.” Kira tapped a finger once against the desk -- a measured, deliberate motion. “If there is a contract for someone named Beitild -- if someone has performed the Black Sacrament and called out to the Night Mother with that name on their lips -- then we will know. And we will know if the name you gave matches the name we find. Until then, you will do nothing. You will speak nothing. You will not mention this name or any other names that might somehow pop into your head. You will train. You will eat. You will sleep. And you will wait."

 

Sloan met her eyes. "And if the mark is real?"

 

Kira's smile was beautiful and cold and did not touch her eyes. "Then we will have a very different conversation."

 

The dismissal was implicit. Sloan inclined her head and turned toward the door, but pause with a hand on the frame.

 

"Gilna."

 

The Khajiit's ears perked. "Hm?"

 

"You were right. In Solitude." Sloan did not turn around. "Curiosity can be dangerous. But survival? Survival is a matter of knowing who to trust. And I have always trusted you."

 

She stepped through the door before Gilna could respond -- before she could see whatever expression flickered across that feline face -- and let the door swing shut behind her.

 

The corridor was empty, the torches guttering in their sconces, the shadows long and familiar. Sloan stood in the silence and let herself breathe, let herself feel the tremor that had been running beneath her skin since Kira's voice had gone soft. The Night Mother was silent, but Sloan could feel her waiting -- watching, the way Gilna had watched, the way Kira was watching, the way the whole Sanctuary seemed to be watching -- wondering what she would do next.

 

Which was fair – she was wondering the same thing.

 

 

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