Balanced On the Knife Edge

Chapter 9

At first, Nusha had plotted, trying to figure out a way to escape. But nobody escapes from the Imperial Prison.

Her cell lacked a window, and the open slit in the opposite cell only provided strong light for a few hours per day. She took to sleeping, drifting in and out of consciousness on the rough straw mattress, only waking to eat the stale bread given to her and to pace around the room.

It reminded her of her meditation in Black Marsh, when she had sat by the Hist tree for twenty days and twenty nights. But this time, she did not change, and she received no visions or insights. She was trapped here, plain and simple.

There were only two guards outside her cell. Clearly, they trusted the structure of the place to keep her under lock. Nusha worried for Karme, worried what they might do to the poor Dunmer girl who had the unfortunate chance to be captured by the amulet's spell. Doubtlessly they would be torturing her, trying to extract the truth out of somebody who could not give it. They would not believe the Pale Pass story; the Empire had too many enemies for something like this to happen by mere chance.

Occasionally, Nusha would sit still by one of the walls, her ear pressed against it, listening for the sound of Karme's cries, or perhaps the rattle of the Akaviri soldiers. But the prison was sealed off—perhaps Karme was being kept inside the palace itself—and Nusha only heard the flicker of torches and muttered conversation of guards.

Every few hours the guards switched over. Perhaps due to the strain put on them by the skeletons, Nusha was occasionally left alone during this time, only for half-an-hour or so. She had no faith in her abilities to escape, and indeed, they must have felt safe leaving her in the knowledge that none could make it out within that time.

One day, perhaps a week into her incarceration, something strange happened. While the guards were gone, the wall opposite Nusha began to shift. She scurried into the corner, watching warily as it slid aside, revealing a passage lit with pale blue lights.

Standing at the entrance to the passage was a face she never thought she would see again, an Argonian man with milky-white eyes and a smattering of battle scars.

"Meeran?"

She rubbed her eyes. She must be hallucinating. There was no way that he was here.

"You're not dreaming, Nusha. I'm here to rescue you."

At the sound of Meeran's voice, Nusha's stomach twirled into knots. It sounded just as it had almost ten years ago, when she had first met him.

Nusha was an orphan, a wretch who simply showed up in a clutch of eggs in Black Marsh. The local nannies—old Argonians of varying gender who took care of hatchlings—looked after her, but gave her no preferential treatment. Meeran was the one who changed her life, chose her as a Shadowscale. As a representative of the Dark Brotherhood, he visited Black Marsh every year to pick out a fresh bunch of recruits, from those Argonians born under the sign of the Shadow.

Nusha didn't understand how, but she'd seen that moment. When she first licked the Hist that changed her form, she had fallen into a deep sleep, and watched Meeran's journey through Black Marsh through his eyes. The dream confirmed what she had always suspected: she was a runt, rejected by her peers from birth, and Meeran was the only one who had seen something in her, a potential for a greater destiny.

Meeran had chosen her, and the urge to prove the other preceptors wrong, alongside the prophecy, was what lead to Nusha's reawakening and return to the Priory. But ever since that day Meeran had been a murky presence in her mind, neither friend nor foe, saviour nor destroyer. She had wondered if he even existed at all, having only met him once at a tender age, and yet here he was, standing in the Imperial Prison, here to rectify the course of her ill-fated life once more.