'And how was it a "conspiracy" in the first place?' added Phane. 'When I think of conspiracy, I think of the intrigues of Daggerfall, not a smelting town in Skyrim.'
Drelis nodded and smiled, allowing that it certainly sounded ridiculous on the surface. 'It was the public murder of the woman in the market that got Khargol on the trail,' he explained. 'She had been from Cyrodil, but Khargol managed to do some digging and found the room she had been staying at in the Silver-Blood Inn. Her diary revealed that she was more interested in the city's prison than shopping for jewellery.'
'What's so special about its prison?' asked Phane, impatiently.
'Perhaps it's not the prison itself, but whom it contained,' Drelis suggested. 'Markarth's silver mines are owned, largely, by the Silver-Blood family. Instead of sitting out a term or sentence in a cell, prisoners are put to work mining silver ore to pay their way out of incarceration. The murderer in the market had been a miner, not a prisoner, and had never been connected with the forsworn before now.
'After more poking around, Khargol ran afoul of a mercenary by the name of Dryston who attempted to intimidate him away from his investigations. Of course, Khargol's heavy fists made short work of the sellsword, and Dryston revealed that he had been sent by a man named Nepos "the Nose".
'Investigating the Silver-Blood family, Khargol found out from Thngvor Silver-Blood that Ulfric Stormcloak, the rebel who had killed high king Torygg, had saved Markarth from the forsworn using his Voice! This must have been very intriguing, but unfortunately that was all Khargol discovered, the specific shout or shouts that Ulfric used were not revealed.
'Khargol visited Understone Keep, the seat of power in Markarth. There he met an orc smith by the name of Moth gro-Bagol who taught Khargol smithing techniques he had learned in the Imperial Legion. Khargol put the theory to good use and fashioned some armour from dwemer metal he had found on his travels. He must have looked a strange sight, wandering about in dwarven-style armour.'
'What about this Nepos character?' Lalaine insisted.
'Well, Khargol might have been an orc, but he was not one to rush blindly into complex situations. He approached the jarl and asked about forsworn in the city. Jarl Igmund dismissed his questions, claiming that there were no forsworn within sight of the city walls, let alone within them. He asked Khargol to route camps of forsworn in the Reach instead, but it was not enough to dissuade our orc hero.
'He visited Nepos and, after a brief parley that revealed Nepos to be forsworn himself, killed him. The Silver-Bloods had the forsworn "king", a man named Madanach, in the prison's mines and had been using the forsworn as their puppets with the leverage provided to them. Things had, however, taken a turn for the worse; now the Madanach was distributing his orders through Nepos, a powerful man in the city.'
'So it really was a conspiracy,' agreed Lalaine.
'Indeed,' said Drelis. ' But that is the end of Khargol's activities in Markarth for the moment. With Nepos dead, it was safer to disappear that night than stay longer to root out more forsworn agents. Again, I cannot say why Khargol appeared in Markarth in the first place, but he disappeared just as quickly.'
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