– – – –

2. Divide

– – – –

Merrill stumbles, muffling a yelp as her bare foot slips on some unnameable grime coating the tunnel floor. The flame at the end of her staff dips and almost singes Isabela's scarf.

"Careful, Kitten," she gasps.

Ahead, the light of Aveline's lantern halts. "Can you keep up?"

"We cannot stop here." Fenris pushes away from Isabela and braces himself on the rough-hewn wall. His markings glimmer unevenly. She's almost certain he has a cracked bone or two in his leg, but he refuses to slow down. Even getting him to lean on her took effort.

"Yes, I'm all right, I'm sorry! Let's go." Supporting herself on her staff, Merrill hurries on.

The clank of Aveline's armour and the resumed scuff of their steps echo in the quiet. The corridors blur all sense of time. It is some blighted hour of the night at which all respectable folk should be abed and all self-esteeming rogues well into their valuables.

Fenris limps after Merrill with wayward steps. Isabela draws her one remaining dagger – the curved red steel blade Zevran gave Hawke in parting – to guard the rear. If the minstrels ever sing of the Champion of Kirkwall's escape from the city, she hopes they skip the part about the muck and dark and exhaustion, the sting of unhealed injuries and the dread of running into chokedamp in the corridors.

"How much farther is it?" Aveline's question carries back to her.

"We should be under the harbour," comes Anders's worn reply. All three of their mages stagger with exertion. Hawke's fractured arm is cradled in a crude sling, with Anders too spent to tend either to it or to Fenris's leg. Aveline left her shattered shield in the Gallows courtyard. Her plate mail seems the most of what holds her together. Isabela hears, now and then, the wet hitch of her breathing. Varric escaped the worst harm, but his quiver rattles with only a couple of bolts. They're all caked in blood, singed and chilled by ambient magic, and grimly focused on one purpose: get through Anders's handy escape tunnel before the templars come.

"And when we reach Darktown?" Fenris snaps.

"Kirkwall won't be a prime place for any of us right now," Varric cuts in. "I'm sure the Knight-Captain is a right gentleman, but he won't be able to hold back the templars from our tail."

As the others voice agreement, Isabela nods to herself. She has a ship in the harbour, a stash in a place as secure as a cunning mind can find in Kirkwall, and every intention of sailing by sunrise, if they aren't lost in these sodding tunnels or gutted by templars by then.

"We knew that when we stood with the mages." Hawke's good-humoured tones have become low and grave. It is that voice he wields when he needs you to believe his words are the sacred truth of Andraste herself. Trust me, it says. "We can lie low in Darktown for a bit, and then make for Tantervale over the mountains."

"I need to get word..." Aveline begins.

The ceiling sags with a sigh of rubble and dust. Isabela moves as Fenris does, their reaching arms colliding to sweep them both to the floor. She covers her head and his best as she can as chunks of rock cascade from the cracked ceiling. Fenris bites back a hoarse noise, then goes into a ragged coughing fit at the smothering dust.

Little by little, the rumbling dies off. Spitting and hawking, Isabela clambers onto her knees. "Varric? Hawke!"

A draft of air touches her face, damp and chill. The lyrium in Fenris's skin glows and dulls and glows again – the only light she can see. The corridor is filled with shattered masonry, a jagged shaft of darkness looming up from the point of collapse.

"Merrill?"

The others walked a good few paces ahead of them. Merrill, only a couple.

"I don't see her," Fenris says low. He heard the despairing note in her voice. The near-dark corridor sways in her vision.

"No," she grits out. "No, no – Maker's balls, we made it through scores of templars and crazy walking statues and – don't you dare, not now..."

"Isabela." She wants to wallop him for the way his voice softens on her name.

"Don't. Just don't."

"No. Look." He nudges her shoulder.

The floor before them shivers as if with a tiny aftershock, the layer of pebbles clattering. In a whirl of dusty shadows, Merrill's thin form spins up from the ground. Blood dribbles gently from her closed left fist. "Oh, good, it worked! That was a bit close."

"Kitten!" Isabela scrambles to her feet, a wave of unabashed relief washing away her stunned anguish. Too much, but she doesn't care right now.

"She's lucky to still have her own skin." Fenris stands, too, laboriously.

"She has her life."

"Is that you, Isabela? Thank Mythal you're all right! Where are the others?" Merrill grasps her arm with her good hand. "I had no choice, I promise. I can barely light a flame, and that spell takes a lot out of you."

"It's all right." Isabela rests her chin on Merrill's dirt-laced hair. "Are you hurt?"

"Just bruises." She swallows. "There was this sort of pocket under the rocks, and I..."

"Shh, it's over." The sooner Merrill leaves the moment – and Isabela's imagination can draw it up vividly enough – the better.

"There's – a draft." Fenris's words contract on a gasp of effort. "From up there."

Anders knew the route from the Gallows cellars to Darktown, but his secret tunnel is by no means the only passage snaking beneath Kirkwall. Isabela tries to summon every tidbit she's picked up about the network of corridors, mostly piecemeal knowledge from fellow smugglers and others who need to come and go unseen.

It would help if she had any more of an idea where they are than "under the harbour".

With a spark of magic, Merrill strikes a tawny flame upon her staff again. She holds it aloft into the hole in the ceiling. "Do you think there could be another tunnel?"

"I don't fancy turning back to fight more templars," Fenris says.

"I'll try to..." As Merrill sets her foot on a hunk of stone to try and climb the wreckage, Isabela snaps her hand up in a stilling motion. There was a sound.

A voice. A hope, crawling bloody and breathless through the jumble of rock.

Trying to peer through the top proves in vain. At Isabela's gesture, Merrill brings the flame over. The liquid light plays over the nooks and crevices of the heap.

"– vaini?"

"Varric?" The rocks are not stable, but Isabela scoots her foot into a cranny the allows her to hitch herself up along them, anyway. "Are you there?"

"Yeah, keep it in your lack of pants." She has to cant her head to hear. Somewhere is a gap big enough for sound and air to travel. "I've got Hawke, Aveline and Blondie here, though he's glowing blue and mumbling something about..."

She hears a shuffle of movement, then Hawke's voice. "Isabela? Are Merrill and Fenris there?"

"Yes."

"Tell her not to do a twitch of magic. The Fade's just about pouring down our throats here. Must be Meredith's merry fireworks show of crazy at the Gallows. It echoed."

" 'Echoed'?"

Merrill pokes her head up beside Isabela's shoulder. "Hawke? Yes, um. I know. I feel like I've got deepwood ants scurrying through my veins. There's spirits thick all around us."

"Demons," Fenris says tersely. "Yet you used blood magic."

Isabela squeezes her eyes shut as Hawke and Merrill babble hasty mage business at each other. They passed an intersection not too long ago. They have to double back and try to find a parallel passage. The ceiling may or may not hold, the templars may or may not be hot on their heels, and Fenris may or may not be able to walk on his untreated leg for much longer.

And every member of their ragtag band that likes shouldering absurd amounts of responsibility is on the wrong side of that cave-in.

"Isabela," Merrill whispers, "Varric wants you. He says we shouldn't stay here. Something about the tunnel maybe collapsing." They can barely see each other, but Isabela is certain all blood has fled Merrill's harried face. She presses her hands against the cold stone and leans up again.

"Any gems of insight?" She puts as much of a grin in her voice as she can.

"Don't get buried under there." He's doing the same. That comforts her a little. "And take care of Daisy, will you?"

"Both of them." Ah, Isabela, weren't you through with selfless promises of succour?

"If you must. Listen. If we can't meet up in Darktown, there's a charming – or so I hear – city called Bastion on the Antivan border..." Ridiculously she wishes she could touch him, listening and committing to memory the handful of names he can give her, a lifeline in the dark. Too soon, it is time to go.

"Stay alive, Varric." If she closes her eyes, she can see him smirk. "I still need to woo Bianca out of your grasp."

"Not in this lifetime, Rivaini," he chuckles, "but I'm in no rush to see about the next, either."

With that and a scuff of stones, a faint jangle of armour and the palest, fleetest flutter of blue through the narrow gap in the pile, they are gone. Slowly, Isabela turns to Fenris and Merrill. She's dressed her hand with a strip of her tunic. He stands, without support, lyrium markings gleaming.

"We're getting out of here," Isabela tells them. "All of us."