Sloan rode with growing irritation. The she-devil had started to move faster. Not abnormally fast, but fast enough that it was clear something had changed. Sloan could only think of one thing that might be.

 

"She must know we’re following."

 

Aithne blinked and glanced over. "What's that?"

 

Sloan laughed. "Sorry, I didn't realize I said that out loud. I was just thinking the she-devil must know we’re following because she’s moving faster than before."

 

"I don’t understand how she could know that. Or how you know how fast she is going.”

 

“She could know that because I think we’re dealing with some form of Daedra, so maybe she has some sort of way to tell. As for me…I don't either. I can just… see the lines that bind people together. Somehow. I first noticed it in Dawnstar a couple weeks ago and it has become stronger every day since then. It's how I found you in Mor Khazgur."

 

Aithne was quiet for a long moment. Sloan expected her to let the subject drop the way she had let every subject drop for the past three days -- with a nod, a silence, a return to the private space she had been in since they started. But instead she said, very quietly, "I've been meaning to tell you what happened. I just didn't know how."

 

Sloan did not push. She kept her eyes forward, her pace steady, and let Aithne find the words on her own.
 

"Merks betrayed me."

 

The name landed like a blade. Sloan had liked him -- the nervous young mage who had accompanied her to the Thalmor Embassy, who had admitted he was left at the College at age five, who had flushed when she told him he looked good in something other than robes. She had not thought of him as someone capable of betrayal.

 

"He got his memories back from…” Aithne motioned vaguely, ”…our first time. Here."

 

Sloan nodded. “How?”

 

“From a cursed dragonpriest mask that I gave him."

 

Sloan turned to look at her. "You gave him?"

 

"The one from Labyrinthian. I didn't know what it was -- I thought it was just an artifact, something valuable, a gift for a...for someone who had helped me." Her voice carried a weight that had been pressing on it for days. "It showed him the first timeline. But not the way it happened. It showed him a version where I betrayed him. Killed him. He believed every bit of it." She paused, steadying herself. "He held me captive for eleven days just gloating about his ‘revenge.’ He wouldn't listen to anything I said -- the mask had him too deep. I was just the monster in his memory."

 

Sloan felt her hands tighten on the reins. "How did you get out?"

 

"I managed to break free with magic. The blast killed him. Well, the big rock that was thrown by the blast killed him." She said it without triumph, without apology. The words hung in the cold air between them before she continued. "I would have been rescued soon after even if I hadn’t escaped -- Nyatt and Chyehye showed up.” A deep breath. “And so did Urag." Aithne's voice dropped. "He’s the librarian at the College. We were married. Not in this life, in the last one. He doesn’t know me very well in this one. But he was there anyway and when I saw him standing there, I didn't think, I just reacted. I ran past Nyatt. Past Chyehye. Straight into his arms."

 

She let out a breath that fogged and vanished. "He felt like home. That was all I knew in that moment -- he felt like home and I had been a prisoner for eleven days and I needed to be somewhere safe. I wasn't thinking about what it looked like. I wasn't thinking about the two people who had married me in this life, who had trusted me, who were standing right there watching me choose someone else." Aithne’s voice broke into a sob on the last word and then there was a long pause during which Sloan tried with growing desperation to think of something to say. Aithne took a ragged breath and continued on instead.

 

"They're not speaking to me. Not really. They're being civil. But they told me they don’t want me sharing the bed with them anymore and I could feel their bitterness. And I can't blame them! I chose someone else. So when you showed up at Mor Khazgur asking me to leave, I was ready. I just didn't know how to tell you why."

 

Soan frowned. “It is possible they aren’t mad at you. I assume Merks raped you?”

 

Aithne winced as she nodded and Sloan silently cursed herself for being so blunt. She was supposed to be good at conversations! Somewhere, she felt Mishi sneering at her.

 

“Well, perhaps they didn’t want to share the same bed because they were afraid you might still be…struggling with that.”

 

“Good point. They think I’m weak on top of everything else.”

 

“No, that’s not what I m…”

 

“Orcs do have a tendency to overestimate what other races can do.” Aithne’s tone had turned as bleak as the winter air. “They are surprised when someone can’t handle as much as an orc.”

 

“I don’t think…”

 

“I was too afraid to delve deeper into their minds and now I’m glad I didn’t – I don’t think I could have handled hearing their scorn.”

 

Sloan bit her tongue to stop from saying anything else – everything she said just seemed to make things worse. She cast her eyes about for something to use as a distraction, and it was only because of that that she noticed the tracks.

 

“Wait.” She stopped her horse and swung down as Aithne turned.

 

“What?”

 

“Tracks leading off the road.”

 

Three days of wind and a dusting of overnight snow had softened their edges, blurred them into the landscape. If she had not been looking, she would have ridden past without a second glance. She knelt and brushed aside the loose powder to feel the shape beneath. The groove was wide, the spacing consistent, and there were tell-tale holes from the studs on the wheels.

 

"Military gauge," she said. "These weren't made by merchant carts."

 

Aithne looked down from her horse. “My military knowledge is of the sea, so I’ll have to take your word for it.”

 

Sloan sat back on her heels and looked at the line of tracks disappearing into the ridge. "They left something here. Something they didn't want to take all the way to wherever they're going."

 

“You’re assuming this is the she-devil’s work. We don’t know that for sure."

 

The word landed oddly -- the shape of it in Sloan's ears pulled at a memory that felt distant but had only been a handful of months ago.

 

She-devil.

 

Delphine had used that exact phrase in the hidden room beneath the Sleeping Giant. A single she-devil routed an entire company of Stormcloaks. She had theorized it was a Keṣ Tshaâki, the Imperial special forces. Sloan had filed the information away and moved on.

 

The word Naasektenti had done its work (mostly thanks to Cicero’s creepy response), sending her mind toward Daedra and succubi and things that wore skin as a disguise. She had not put the two pieces together until Aithne handed her the missing link. She wasn't searching for an otherworldly being -- she was searching for an Imperial agent, possibly a khajiit, if Delphine's speculation was correct. One that had destroyed an entire company of troops at Korvanjund and, if the rumors were to believed, nearly single-handedly won the siege of Whiterun.

 

"I’ll bet you dinner at the next city we come to it is," she said, standing. "Let's see what they left behind."

---

The wagons sat in a natural bowl at the far end -- twelve of them, parked in neat rows, their cargo beds covered with oiled canvas lashed down with military precision. No guards. No horses. Just the carts, waiting, their presence in this empty stretch of mountain wrong in a way that prickled at the back of Sloan's neck.

 

Aithne dismounted first and approached the nearest wagon with a careful, measured step, her hand extended toward the canvas as if she expected it to bite. She pulled the corner back and peered underneath. Sloan came up beside her. Beneath the canvas sat a metal cylinder -- sealed, bolted, its surface covered in frost that looked too deliberate to be natural. Aithne reached out and touched it, then pulled her hand back as if burned.

 

"It's cold. Colder than the air around it." She knelt and began examining the seal with a mage's care -- her lips moving in patterns Sloan could not hear, her hands tracing the edges of the lid with the precision of someone who expected catastrophe if she did this wrong.

 

While Aithne worked, Sloan looked at the other wagons. Eleven more, each one identical. Each holding something that required a metal cylinder lined with Dwemer alloy to stay cold. One had a dark stain at the base of a seam, no larger than a thumbnail, where the metal had not sealed cleanly. She moved to it and studied the ground beneath it. The frost there was darker, wetter. And while she watched, a single drop of clear liquid squeezed out from a joined portion of the container and grew in increments until it trembled from its own weight before letting go and falling to the cold ground below. She watched another form in its place, a slow and patient rhythm: one drop, a long pause, another drop.

 

"Aithne,"

 

Aithne was at her side in moments. She studied the droplet without touching it, then sat back on her heels.

 

“I wish I had proper tools with me. We’ll just have to improvise. Do we have any scrap leather?”

 

“Yes, I’ll get it.” Sloan went to her horse and cut a hunk of leather from the leather pouch she used to hold berries and brought it back to Aithne, who took it with a nod and set it on the ground where the drips had fallen. There was a small sizzling sound but Aithne did not move it, just watched as the next drop formed.

 

When it fell to the leather, the reaction was immediate but contained -- a sharp sizzle, a wisp of pale vapor, and the leather began to darken from the point of contact outward, spreading in a slow stain that did not stop until the reagent was consumed. In seconds, the entire strip had turned a deep ashen grey at the very centers of the stain, then begun to flake apart at the edges where the dark and the light met.

 

Aithne stared at it for a moment, then looked at Sloan.

 

"It's a liquefied form of an alchemical compound based on deathbells. I can't tell you everything -- there are dozens of different formulations just off the top of my head -- but these containers are keeping it cold. Which means they don’t want it to warm up. I’m guessing at a warm temperature, it will turn into a gas that we don't want to be anywhere near."

 

The words landed like a stone dropped into deep water. Sloan looked at the rows of wagons again and tried to do impossible calculations as a slow realization spread through her mind.

 

"They were testing it."

 

Aithne blinked. “What? Who?”

 

“At Korvanjund. There were reports of this she-devil there. A squad of Imperials routed an entire company of Stormcloaks." She stood and looked over the wagons again. “I bet that was their field test for this stuff.”

 

“That is sickening! She probably stashed these here so she could move fast, and she'll come back for them when she needs them. We don't know where she's going or what she's planning, but whatever it is, these wagons are meant to meet her there." Aithne paused, and when she spoke again, her voice was barely above a whisper. "She's not just killing people, Sloan. She's planning to erase them.”
 

“Windhelm. It has to be. The Imperials have taken this war to a new level of atrocity.”

 

They stood among the wagons in the shadow of the mountain, surrounded by enough death to depopulate a city. The wind moved through the ravine, carrying the cold down from the peaks, causing the horses to stamp and blow. Sloan felt the Night Mother’s pull as her target moved swiftly to the east, no longer by her cargo of death. She shook her head and turned toward the horses. "We need to make sure she never gets a chance to use them."

 

Aithne nodded. "Then let's not waste time."

 

 

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