Balanced On the Knife Edge

Chapter 1

"Hurry up, you wench," Nusha hissed.

Nusha had been waiting in the cellar for almost an hour now, curled up between two crates like a viper around her eggs. The air was frosty and dank, poison to the Argonian's cold blood, and she dug her rake-like claws into her palm to stay alert.

Above her, an argument raged between husband and wife. The woman had been stomping around the place when Nusha arrived, banging drawers and cupboards as if it were the End of Times. Her husband, Nusha's mark, woke up soon after, and they had been arguing ever since. Screeching, throwing things, slamming doors.

It was enough to make anyone swear off romance for good.

Svaknal Asgariksen seemed like an easy target at first. If someone merely wanted him dead, they only needed wait until he drank himself into Oblivion, or for his debts to catch up with him.

But the client wanted the amulet that hung around his neck at all times, and Svaknal's time was quickly running out. As Nusha had been told, at any moment a horde of moneylenders, vicious Orcs, would be knocking at his door, hungry for blood and coin. The amulet had to be taken before that could happen.

Nusha had endured the mockery of her peers, waited patiently for years so she could prove them wrong. And now, thanks to this idiotic woman, she was going to fail her first mission.

The fighting upstairs reached a crescendo. Nusha tensed, daggers held in each hand, ready to move. The wife shouted something in a foreign tongue, and a loud BOOM followed.

Silence filled the house.

Nusha shuffled the daggers in her hand, waiting for a sign to ascend. All she could hear was the ragged breathing of the wife.

She wasn't to be harmed. That was part of the brief. And if the woman saw Nusha, she risked revealing her identity to a mundane. But at this rate, the moneylenders would get to Svaknal before Nusha could. There was no choice.

She slipped out from between the two crates and sprinted up the stairs.

At the last moment, the door opened, spilling wan light onto Nusha's face. A tall, elven silhouette appeared before her. There was no time to respond, and Nusha ran straight into the plum-skinned woman, bouncing backwards and tumbling down the stairs.

"By the Mad Queen!"

Nusha scrambled to her feet. Her daggers had been knocked out of her hands, and now she searched for them in the dark of the cellar. The Dunmer woman who had opened the door stood dumbfounded at the entrance to the cellar. She filled almost the entire door frame, dressed in a Nordic jerkin and trousers, a leather satchel slung over her shoulder. Her face seemed to rest by default on an imperious scowl, and her accent betrayed her status as an immigrant from Morrowind.

"What are you doing in my house? I'll call the guards!"

"I wouldn't do that," said Nusha, rescuing a dagger from a pile of old linen.

In reality, she was panicking. Once she got her daggers back, she would high tail it out of there. But she needed to get this Dark Elf off her back first.

"I was only here to kill your husband."

No point in lying, Nusha supposed. And this woman didn't seem particularly fond of her husband, either.

"Well, I've just killed him myself."

"What?"

Nusha spun round and snapped her teeth. This Dunmer wench had stolen her kill?!

"Yes. It seems all those years training Destruction magic were not wasted!"

She was proud of her achievement. So much so, that she seemed to temporarily forget that Nusha was a stranger hiding in her cellar. The Argonian took the opportunity to retrieve her second dagger from beneath a crate.