#ssyzahi

J’henq could see their silhouettes at the top of the stairs, watching him with their tails twitching in eerie unison. The sunlight of Stros M’Kai halted in an abrupt line, beyond which lay dust and cobwebs and almost certainly painful groaning grasping eating death. He did not want to go. He was no adventurer and certainly no tomb robber.

Ssyzahi disagreed with J’henq, and Qsyzhai agreed with Ssyzahi, and together they were just So Sure that J’henq was the man for this job. They’d bathed him, clothed him, given him a stout leather jerkin and a fine pair of daggers and a new roll of picks. They told him there were jewels at the bottom of the tomb. They watched with enigmatic smiles when he had insisted that someone else, someone luckier, someone braver should be their thief. They offered him forty percent of the profit. He refused. They told him they were going to wear his pelt if he refused again. In that case, gentlemen, this one thinks daylight is burning, and we should make for the tomb.

They were picking on poor fallen J’henq, he mused, as he wiggled and squirmed through a hole the size of a watermelon. They’d been showing up all over Stros M’Kai, following him around, making their creepy presence known. He saw them in the tanner’s shop, slowly carving apart skins. He saw them in the blacksmith’s, testing the points of wavy krisses with their paws, and licking the bright red drops away. He saw them in the tavern, sipping on blood red wine. He saw them in his dreams, entwined into a monster with two heads, beckoning him with a curved finger and a sensuous, sussurating voice.

It had always been easier to crawl and creep than to fight for the lithe khajiit. He pressed himself into corners, covered himself with grave dust, and crept bootless on soundless footpads to evade the creaking long-dead guardians, who shuffled endlessly, mindlessly unaware that their eons of servitude were about to end in failure. He flicked open vaults and keyholes with the barest hint of pressure, hardly even disturbing the dust that had settled onto the doors. He leapt over pits, oiled and unhinged claws set to claim the unwary. He bitched to himself unceasingly about his terrible, terrible luck as he opened the carved, runed mausoleum at the heart of this awful place.

Inside, all was a-glitter with wealth. J’henq’s head swam as he rubbed at his dusty eyes, unable to comprehend the mountain of ancient gold and silver and polished gleaming gems the size of robin’s eggs. Praises to the gods above and below. Praises to the Princes. Praises to the Dark Lady. Praises to Sithis the Father. J’henq thrust a paw into the center of the pile.

He came away with only a curious box made of carved marble, unadorned and unremarkable. Its lid jostled about as he examined it for traps - but, finding nothing, the curious cat slid the box lid off. He dropped it, and the box. They shattered. He scrambled backwards on his paws, scrabbling for purchase on the dusty tiles, slamming into the walls of the mausoleum in his haste to escape.

Above, J’henq burst into the sunlight, sobbing and gibbering, bleeding from a dozen claw slashes and near-miss arrow wounds, running as fast as he could over the dunes toward Stros M’Kai. Behind him trailed the ghost, tatters and ruins and bones and lovely pallid flesh, whispering in an ancient tongue meant only for the dead or the mad.

J’henq was out of breath and his tail was a puffed mass of alarm. He crouched behind a convenient stack of sight-blocking crates, hands on his knees, birdlike chest fluttering as he gasped for air. His nostrils flared, and quickly became apparent why those crates had been stacked there in the first place. As his luck would dictate, he had chosen to elude his pursuers by standing ankle-deep in a public cesspool. A tanner’s boy was quietly scooping bucketfuls of waste, chuckling in his moonish way and shaking his head. J’henq made the sign of lewd disapproval, sucked a lungful of ammonia-tainted air, and kept running.

J’henq’s luck had run out two years ago. He’d been caught with a jar of skooma in the back of an unaware caravaneer’s wagon, hitching a wholly illicit ride out of Elsweyr into Cyrodiil, and had been promptly thrown into a dungeon - much to his shock and surprise, since he had never ever Ever been caught before, and had certainly never seen the inside of a cell. He didn’t know it at the time, but the fact that one morning his cell door had just mysteriously been left open was the last lucky break the khajiit who relied on luck would receive.

Since that day, every scheme had failed, every burglary had ended in disaster, every scam had been a double-cross, and every septim he’d laid paws on may as well have been poured into a sewer. He’d been reduced from a proud, wealthy and sought-after smuggler to a common thief of the streets, and it set his fur on edge to even think about. How could this have happened? What had become of J’henq the Golden, J’henq Clean-Paw?

He didn’t have time to bitch about his troubles at the moment, though, because the guard had caught up to him once again. Arrows plinked off the brick walls as he ran through the alleys, and not for the first time did he wish he’d ever bothered to learn swordplay. He wished it again and more fervently when the path before him suddenly became a three-walled deathtrap, with the only door in the dead end barred from the inside. Idly he wondered if the approaching guard would be taken in by the usual khajiit-pathetique act; khajiit has done nothing, khajiit is innocent of these crimes, do not harm lowly khajiit, masters. He doubted it.

They were yards away when the door he hammered on suddenly gave way, and two pairs of clawed hands pulled him inside. Darkness within. The heavy wooden bar fell, and for a while, the only sounds were J’henq’s panting and the banging of fists against the door from the outside. Slowly, the smuggler became aware of four hands on his shoulders and sides, guiding him forward into the gloom.

"Waits for this one," came one hissing voice, in its cold, neutral tone.

"Waits for the failed thief," came the other, a curiously exact copy of the first.

"This one stinks and we do not like it," they chorused. Their tails lashed at his hindquarters and his calves, and they held him in an iron grasp as a chill ran up and down his spine, urging him to bolt. Onward they went, J’henq’s heart hammering in his chest.