Lucien was following the man with a suspicious scroll that he received from the traitor. They were riding at full gallop across the Colovian Highlands, presumably towards Bruma. When they were passing by an unassuming cave, their horses were shot.

“What?!” Lucien landed in a crouch when Shadowmere threw him off and sped away, she didn’t appear to be seriously hurt. The other horse lay dead however, and its rider was fighting off the attackers. “Bandits?” Lucien wondered, trying to keep out of sight. Yet he too was attacked by another person. “Three attackers in total,” Lucien noted, parrying.

The fight was short, the attackers were skilled. The man with the scroll eliminated one of them – killed or severely wounded him, Lucien could not tell – but the second attacker got the better of the man, and joined his comrade against Lucien. Of the three attackers, two were wearing that particular dark leather armour, the third one wore a black robe – they had been sent by the Black Hand.

“Why attack the other man if they are after me?” Lucien wondered, twisting out of the way of their lunges. Things didn’t add up. The one wearing robe was casting spells too, and Lucien could not avoid those. He was weakened and felt physically sick but ignored it and lunged just as the mage was casting another spell… A bout of frost hit him right in the face but his sword was already piercing the mage’s chest and Lucien brought it home by sliding it up, all the way to the neck. He fell onto the mage as the frost paralysed his body. “Baronoff’s Bloody Icicle”, he thought. He always found the name of that spell quite pretentious, but had to admit that it was highly effective. The paralysis didn’t last long, but the frost made him sluggish for a while still, and the third assassin landed another hit, and another, before Lucien finally got him too.

He rolled on the ground, he could not stand up.

“Oh that is great,” he swore. “And it wasn’t even the main ambush, just a roadside attack… They are not taking any chances.”

He bandaged himself up as best he could and crawled over to each of the four men on the ground.

“Two men and two women,” he corrected himself, finally having had the chance to look at them properly. “Our armour and a Black Hand robe… She was a Silencer, I think… I’ve never met her… I wonder if she had only just been promoted…” He looked into her face – she was young, and he thought of Lena, just as young, and still only an Assassin, but more skilled and more resilient than this young Silencer that he just killed. “If we ever get through this alive,” he thought, “I want no other Silencer but Wolf.”

He finally got to the man from Anvil that he had been chasing. He went through his pockets looking for the scroll, found it and unrolled it – the scroll was empty.

“He was leading me into an ambush…” he shook his head. “But we got ambushed along the way… Fate really works in peculiar ways.”

Lucien killed the Brother that was still breathing and crawled into the cave from whence they came hoping that it would be clear of bandits and vermin. It was – he found several bodies inside. Stew was still simmering over the fire… The bandits never saw it coming.

“Well, you were successful against the bandits but you failed your contract nonetheless,” he thought of the dead Brothers and Sisters outside. Their corpses should dissuade any casual adventurers from entering. He would stay in that cave until his wounds recovered enough so he could stand. “You should take the time to heal your wounds before getting new ones, Speaker,” Lena’s words sounded in his head. Speaker. She still wouldn’t call him by his name. “Very well, Assassin, I’ll take the time,” he replied to her in his mind, then fell asleep.

…

Although the scroll that Lucien found was empty, he knew exactly where the ambush would be set up – at Applewatch. The Black Hand safehouse was the logical place for it, especially since Arquen was already spurring on others to unite against him.

“I must confront them there,” he thought. “It will distract them long enough to allow Wolf to enter the lighthouse and then bring her report to the Listener… Let us hope that I survive…”

The road to Bruma had two more ambushes for Lucien, but he dealt with both of them without much trouble. “They are running out of people,” he thought, looking over his attackers. “These aren’t of the same caliber as the ones I met before. These are just to keep the pressure up.”

When he was near Applewatch, he let Shadowmere go and approached the house on foot, watching the surroundings. He saw several people in black robes enter the house, and recognised Arquen among them. They were gathering there, it seemed, the Black Hand was finally uniting against him. His chances of survival were getting slimmer and slimmer with each new person arriving.

Then suddenly he saw someone exit and leave, then another person exit and search the area around Applewatch. Were they having disagreements? Or were they waiting for someone? For him, perhaps? Why did they think he’d come there at all? And then it dawned on him – the man with the empty scroll was supposed to lead him there, but they got intercepted, as if the Black Hand wasn’t that united at all, as if his exile and the assassins were separate from this trap, from the traitor…

Lucien didn’t hurry to go in. He waited to see whether anyone else would arrive or leave, watching the sentry by the entrance. Then a middle aged man arrived and Lucien recognised Mathieu Bellamont. Was he the traitor? It was hard to believe… He was considered one of the most effective and loyal members of the Brotherhood… but stranger things were known to happen. With the arrival of Bellamont, the sentry also entered the house, it seemed the gathering was now complete. The one person missing was Lucien Lachance.

“They will kill me if I go in,” he reflected, wondering what to do. “How many of them are inside? Four, five, perhaps? I stand no chance.” Yet something had to be done, he had to keep them there to allow Lena the time to deliver evidence and then to give the Listener the time to investigate her find. Lucien tried to estimate how much time that would need to be. “If Bellamont is indeed the traitor and he rode here from Anvil,” he reasoned, “then Wolf should have delivered her evidence just about now. The Listener would then need to ride from Bravil to Anvil, search the place and ride back… Two days, all in all perhaps, if he hurries… I should give it another half a day and then go in.”

He settled down between the rocks with a clear view of the house and prepared to spend the last half a day of his life in quiet meditation.

…

The night was about to fall when Lucien decided he could not wait any longer. People have already been going out of the house, looking around, peering down the road. They were getting impatient, and may be were about to leave, and he could not allow that. He got up, straightened his back, wrapped his hand around the hilt of his sword, walked over to the house without hiding and knocked on the door.

There was no answer. The house was perfectly still. He opened the door and entered.

What happened next was so quick that no one really understood it until all was quiet again. As Lucien entered the house and took a few steps towards the middle of the room, he got attacked from several directions. He twisted and spun, his sword extended, blood spatter covered the walls and the floor as half a dozen people in black robes were doing their dance. All was quiet – everyone stifled their cries of pain, these were no novices. Then suddenly the fighting stopped. Two people were on the floor unable to get up, three others were still standing, swords at the ready, looking around as if they lost their quarry. Blood was dripping from their robes, much of it their own.

“Where is he?” One of them said in a hoarse voice. “He could not just vanish.”

“He could, as a matter of fact…” Another shook his head. “Vanish from view, at least. He should still be here somewhere. Mat, don’t you have a spell for that?”

The third person cast a spell and purple light briefly filled the room, settling on the shapes of five people and many rats.

“Rats?” A woman hissed. “Who cares about the rats in the basement! That is a stupid spell!”

They searched the room, but it had many corners where a person could hide, crates and furniture in the way.

“Is he dead, perhaps?” One of them wondered.

“He is not,” another shook his head. “And we need his body as proof.”

Then they heard the door rattle, and one of them spun around. “There he is!!! Tried to escape, did you?!”

The attack was savage. They slashed at every part of his body, no longer aiming for the heart, they were determined to make sure he didn’t vanish again. Then they hoisted his body by the neck which in itself would have killed him, had he not been already dead.

“And so it’s done!” Arquen was triumphant. “The traitor has been slain! And here is his body as proof!”

“Well, it’s a body… but did you really have to slice up his face like that?” Another assassin pulled the hood off the corpse to reveal a dark-haired head mutilated beyond recognition.

“She got carried away,” another one grinned. “There isn’t much left of his body either.” He peeled off a piece of the blood-soaked robe and a good chunk of skin and tissue came off with that as well. “Bah! Every organ is mincemeat now…”

“That’ll keep him from coming back from the dead,” Arquen laughed. “I like to be thorough. We should report to the Night Mother now.”

“I wonder why the Listener isn’t here,” one of them remarked, helping one of the wounded Brothers get up.

“The Bosmer is getting soft with years,” another scoffed. “It was time the Night Mother replaced him.”

Eventually they left, and the rats started crawling out of their holes attracted by the smell of fresh blood.