"Like Carrion Men"
I'm pretty sure the little choppy sections aren't working so well as an editorial choice. Apologies.
4.
She killed Bhelen's thugs, when they were stupid enough to attack her. She killed her cousin in the Proving, and better men and women with him. She killed carta members, dusters too stubborn or too stupid to know when they were outmatched, or too desperate to care.
When Harrowmont said he needed someone to find Branka - mad Branka, Branka the Paragon, Branka the tinkerer, Branka the absolutely Stone-blind crazy - in the lost Ortan Thaig, she nearly told him to shove it up his hidebound arse.
Duty, soldier.
But she didn't.
She left Alistair behind.
"You can't," he said, when she told him he had to stay in Orzammar. "Aud, you can't."
"No," she said, and caught his arm. He practically vibrated with tension under his mail. She was almost surprised he didn't rattle. "I can't risk both of Ferelden's last two Wardens in the Deep Roads. If something happens to me, you're it. I've been in the Deep Roads before. So has Oghren. The only reason I'm taking Morrigan and Lelianna is because we'll need a mage, and neither Oghren or I are worth shit with a bow and we might need that, too. The fewer we are, the better our chances of finding Branka without bringing a horde down on our heads."
And you're Maric's son.
She didn't say it. It would only have hurt him.
Oghren the Sot had the sense of humour of a dirty-minded schoolboy and smelled like a dead pig after a three-week bender, all grease and rot and booze.
But he could fight like a demon, and in the Deep Roads, you didn't ask for more.
Aud missed Alistair at her flank, shield-heavy, jingling in his mail. Solid, methodical, there. But he had no rock-sense, and mere human eyes weren't enough, in the dark tunnels where even the lichen-light along the stone failed to nothing and darkspawn hurled themselves from the cracks. It was all she could do in the worst of it to watch Lelianna's back - Morrigan being a witch and a shapechanger and more than capable, look to your own back, Warden, of taking care of herself.
She missed him anyway.
They were four weeks in the dark.
Lelianna and Morrigan ran short of insults and bickering within two days. Afterwards they spoke only of pleasant things - insofar as Morrigan could ever be pleasant - or of necessities. The dark closed in, beyond the passages nearest Orzammar, the ones the Legion of the Dead had to travel on their long, dismal watch. To the humans, the comforting solidity of the stone would feel like the trap it was.
Aud felt it. In warm still air reeking of sulphur and carrion and the ancient/fresh geology of metamorphic rock and cooling stone. The taint burned in her blood. Her nightmares overran with slaughter and the archdemon screaming. At times she thought she could hear it when awake, grinding inside her skull like boulders. She tried to recapture the fierceness that had fueled her as a warrior, all the years she'd marched with the killing expeditions to the thaigs, or the rage that had sustained her when her exile began, but it wouldn't come, and she grew more hollow with every passing hour.
It seemed impossible that Oghren, wafting unmentionable fumes from the ancestors-be-damned brewery that was his pack, farting, snorting and picking his nose with broken-nailed filthy fingers, should stay oblivious. It seemed impossible that anyone should stay oblivious. But he did.
It almost made her like him.
First day they come and catch everyone. Second day they beat us, and eat some for meat.
Hespith's flat, ruined voice made Aud's teeth itch. She could smell the taint in the other dwarf's flesh, bruised, ravaged, polluted. It made her blood itch.
Now she does feast, as she's become the beast.
Morrigan killed her, after. Hollow as she'd become, Aud had enough of herself left to consider it a mercy.
Not least because the broodmother was the Stone's own bastard to kill, and they could not permit Hespith to become a second.
"You're frightening the bard," Morrigan said, in a strange voice.
Aud studied the branch of the tunnel in front of them. Behind her, cradled in an outcrop of the wall, Oghren snored, and Lelianna lay slumped on her pack in the silent sleep of the truly exhausted. She rubbed the pommels of her swords in thought. They were close to Branka. She could practically smell it, even over the stink of her own filth after almost three weeks with no water but the foul-tasting streams that trickled from the rock.
When she found the Paragon, Branka was going to die, Oghren or no Oghren. Branka had sacrificed her people on the altar of her obsession, and you didn't do that.
You might stab your equals in the back. You might scheme for advantage and betray your superiors in rank, or arrange for members of a rival house to die in humiliating circumstances. But you kept faith with those who looked to you, by the Stone's black heart and the entrails of all the ancestors. You didn't spend your people's lives for no better end than your own blighted pride.
And if you did, they deserved to be avenged.
Aud found she could get angry, after all.
"Warden." A dangerous note. "I will not permit you to ignore me."
"I'm frightening Lelianna." The left-hand tunnel, perhaps. Drag marks on the floor, and scratches on the walls where something metal had abraded the rock. "I heard you. And?"
"For all the -" Morrigan grabbed her wrist with one strong, callused hand. Aud found herself pinned by the witch's dark glare. "Oghren does not know you as I have come to," Morrigan said, cold and quiet. "My... friend. He has not noticed, or perhaps the disgusting little man merely does not care. But you are frightening the bard because Lelianna has seen, as I have seen, how hard you drive yourself and how distant you've become. You dwarves can talk all you like of the Stone, but you are not made of it. And you did not look as though you thought you were, before we set out on our little excursion down here." As a biting afterthought: "And such a delightful trip it's been, too. Remind me to thank you for it properly, once we're back on the surface."
"I had not realised," Aud said, carefully - you had to be careful with Morrigan, especially when she was admitting to something as un-witchly as worry, which was, by the ancestors, what this conversation seemed to be about. And if Morrigan's worried, what kind of shape am I in? - "that you troubled yourself much with Lelianna's feelings."
"And I had not realised," Morrigan said, softly, vicious, "that you troubled yourself so little with them. Or do you think I did not see how you look at her? Or, for that matter, how she looks at you? She trusts you, Warden. If you break yourself down here, it will ruin her."
"You think I'll break?"
"Aud." Morrigan's twisted smile held, for a wonder, something almost like compassion. "Everyone breaks."