So I've got a funny story for you. Guard stops a Coterie ambush from killing a fellow guard. Guard Captain drums her out of the corps for it.
No, the punch line is that she ended up in the Alienage, living with a wide-eyed blood mage trying to put a cursed mirror together like a jigsaw puzzle. Go ahead, you can laugh now. But I still say it's better than bunking in Gamlen Amell's house, where he'll try to cop a feel and call it rent.
I've been a soldier and I've been a guard. Beating on things with a sword is what I know, and I'm not bad at figuring things out - too good, you might say, considering where it's gotten me. So to make ends meet, I hung out a shingle - the Number 1 Lowtown Detective Agency. Mostly, I track down losers who owe gambling debts, husbands or wives out running around, business partners skimming from the top - small, petty stuff. Even the murder or two we looked into were pedestrian - a crime of passion, a robbery gone wrong. Nobody in Lowtown had the resources to go big, I thought, except maybe Hawke. But Hawke's the exception.
Was I wrong.
I can usually spot an elf at twenty paces, but this one got in the door before I realized he wasn't a human. Almost as tall as me, almost as broad, in a long dark coat with a turned-up collar to play down the neck, and a two-handed sword strapped across his back. "Aveline Vallen?" he asked, big green eyes looking everywhere in the room except at me.
I rocked back in my chair. I don't go for elves in general, but I could see where exceptions could be made. (In theory, anyway. In practice... well, that's another story.) I couldn't place his accent, but that voice - low, smoky, a touch of gravel - that was something I noticed. "That's me," I said, cool.
A pitter-patter of bare feet skittered behind me, sliding a bit when she tried to corner the hallway too fast. Again. "And I'm Merrill," my partner said. "Welcome to the Number One Lowtown oh! you have vallaslin!"
I blinked. She was right - there were two little pale marks running down his chin. That's my partner all over - she notices things. Not always useful things, like a sparrow in the Viscount's keep, but sometimes she finds gold. Now I just have to find a way to keep her from blurting out whatever she sees to whoever's in the area.
He looked her over for a moment, then smiled. "Not exactly," he said, and I swear that voice dropped another half-octave. "I didn't expect to see a Dalish elf here."
"Oh, it's a long story," Merrill waved it off. I could hear the nerves in her voice; looked like he could, too, but figured a different reason.
"Maybe you could tell me about it sometime," he offered, with a smouldering look that even got through my partner's usual obliviousness and kindled a fire in her cheeks. "Once my sister is safe."
"What's the story?" I rapped. I didn't like the approach he was taking to enlisting our services.
He looked at me, all injured innocence. I wasn't buying it. "My sister's been... in the company of a smuggler. Hayder," he supplied the name. "I don't think he means to do well by her."
"And?" I asked, unimpressed. "Did he break both her legs so she can't walk away?"
"If I had seen her recently, maybe I would know," he shot back. "There are many ways a human man can make it difficult for an elven woman to leave him."
I grimaced. That wasn't exactly a lie, even if I think the old 'helpless elven maiden' thing gets played when a girl makes a mistake she wishes she hadn't. "So is that meat cleaver you're carrying for show? You look like a capable sort."
He just sighed and turned those puppy eyes on my partner. "You explain to her," he said.
"Aveline, he won't be listened to. And if an elvhen man attacks a human in this city..." She let it trail off.
If the guard were run right, it shouldn't bloody matter, I wanted to say. But I had good cause myself to know that wasn't the case.
"Have a seat," I said, pointing to the rickety chair on the other side of my desk that was also the dinner table, "and tell us about this sister."
Fenris, the client, led us to where Hayder's ship was berthed. It was a smuggler's special - one of those warehouses that opens right onto the water. You pay your bribes to the harbormaster, you pull inside, and nobody sees what you offload. Yet another fine public service of Kirkwall that the Guard ought to be taking a closer look at. Jeven won't, though, not in an Age.
"I'm here to see Hayder," Fenris growled at the watchman at the door. I didn't expect that to work - and when it did, I got suspicious. It didn't quite add with the 'poor oppressed elf can't confront the big bad human' story (and the entirely satisfactory retainer) that got us here. But it wasn't impossible, and in fact I could already hear a man ranting about some 'little bitch,' so we followed him in, me in my old Ferelden officer's togs and Merrill...
Now, my partner's... on the odd side. She's Dalish, which means she's got no idea what a city's really like. She's been trying to learn, in between afternoons of black magic and demonology, but she's got some bad sources. Like Varric Tethras.
Don't get me wrong. I wish him every bit of success, mostly because it'll mean good news for Hawke, and I still owe that family. But he writes these books, and then Merrill reads them, and she comes on a job with this weird grey hat with a little brim she keeps tugging down so she can't see. It reminds me a little of those damn hurlocks with their crossbows, back north of Lothering. So I can only see half of one eye when she nods at me as we cross the threshold. She's got no idea when we're being set up for a double-cross, but she can tell when I lock my jaw and knows that means trouble's coming. She'd kill at Wicked Grace if she could remember the scoring.
Things happened quickly after that. A big ugly Marcher who was apparently Hayder saw us coming and didn't like our looks. He didn't say much before setting his men on us, but I thought I heard something about a 'knife-eared traitor' in there, and I doubted he meant Merrill. I filed that away for later, because things were getting a busy right now. Hayder unlimbered a sword as long as Merrill and shouted something about killing us.
...and then he was crying for his mother, sword falling, forgotten, to the floor. For all that my partner's a cheerful, pleasant sort, she's got this knack for pulling people's nightmares out of the back of their brains and putting them front and center. And then there's the lightning striking from the sky, leaving the room smelling like roasted pig as men fry. It seems less honest than a sword-blow, but I can't argue with the results.
We didn't have to get into the blood magic, thank the Maker. I've seen her do that once, and once was enough.
The client went right for Hayder - glowing. At first I thought it was a new spell of Merrill's, but a quick glance confirmed she was still conjuring lightning. Fenris was doing that all on his own, lit up with an eldritch pattern of lines that showed right through his long coat.
I've had clients with trouble written all over them before, but never literally.
I couldn't stay to watch the light show - too many smugglers to kill. If they can make it out of Merrill's killbox, I have to put them down before they can get to her. It's not my favorite part of the job, but it's the part that makes it pay. Not everyone can stare deadly trouble in the eye and then gut it.
It was over pretty fast - it usually is, when we're out of sight somewhere Merrill can really unload. "Stone him!" I barked.
She hesitated. Of course she did - he was the client. She trusts me, but she's got her own brain and it asks a lot of questions. Too many questions, sometimes, like now. I hefted my shield, not sure what was coming next.
Not much, as it happened. She got her petrification spell off and it - didn't work. "That's quite odd," I heard her pronounce, because that one just about always works. There was a golem once - another story. Certainly, it should have worked on some elven fellow, even if he did glow blue. But instead the stones reached up, then slipped and slithered back down again, following those blue-white markings down to the ground. And I noticed - he wasn't the least bit singed, despite having run straight into a lightning storm to kill Hayder.
"Is there a reason you're trying to... what are you trying to do?" he asked.
"Get the whole story," I said.
"Aveline, we should look for his sister. That is why we're here," Merrill felt compelled to remind me.
I didn't take my eyes off him, but asked her, "You don't have any, I don't know, unanswered questions after all that?"
"They knew his sister; they knew him. He brought us here, so they got upset. We had a fight. Am I missing something again?"
When she put it that way... But my gut insisted there was more to the story than we'd gotten. "And the blue-glowing thing?"
"You brought an apostate," he noted dryly, "who threw around lightning, and you're asking me about that? We should search the premises and go, before someone comes to see what all the thunder and screaming was about."
"To loot the bodies, probably." Because it's not like anybody in Kirkwall would put their own arses on the line to help out. I put up my sword. "Fine. We'll search."
No woman. And the client seemed relatively unconcerned about that. Score another one for my gut. "You think your sister is inside that book?" I asked, as he leafed through some sort of log.
"I think Hayder's ship's log is my best bet at finding out where she is, now that Hayder's dead," he replied, unperturbed.
"I think some people are coming," Merrill reported from the door.
Fenris slipped the logbook under his arm. "Thank you for your assistance, ladies. I believe that concludes our business."
"Why do I have the feeling," I asked, my eyes narrowing, "that you expected this to end in slaughter?"
"I couldn't say." Wryly amused, damn his eyes. Which probably meant he could say exactly. He raised his voice slightly and called, "You still owe me a story," toward the door and Merrill, then he suddenly flashed blue, jumped up several crates and disappeared out a second-story window.
"Aveline," Merrill called again. "We should really go. I think it might be the guard."
I cursed, and we ran for it.