Dust Town. Old memories of Orzammar's slum came unbidden to Vashti's mind as Fenris led them through the old mining tunnels under Kirkwall. But the comparison wasn't really accurate. Dust Town, at least, had been the ruins of old, abandoned buildings - they had the basic shape and form to serve as homes, arranged in a way that sketched out a community. These were... just tunnels. Dark tunnels, acrid with the smell of ash and urine, with small piles of detritus - and dark splashes of blood - the only indication that people had, until recently, lived here.
Elsewhere under the city, they might still. Aveline and her men had cleared a corridor almost to the docks, where the reports of undead emerging from the undercity were thickest. The tunnels here were empty of life, everyone either fled or killed. The dead rose up again, demons from Beyond puppeting their limbs. They encountered a few, here and there; never in sufficient numbers that the clumsy, lumbering monsters were a threat to them. Whatever organized them seemed to favor the night, and Vashti recalled that it had been so at Redcliffe as well.
Fenris and Ariane paused, ahead; Vashti and then Finn approached to see why. "Perhaps we are in the wrong place," Fenris said, not taking his eyes from the corridor ahead. "I had expected more resistance, more guards, if Merrill were nearby."
"Something is nearby," Finn said, his voice strained, and Vashti looked to him sharply. Of course he looked out of sorts; he always did, when they took him to places that might soil his robes. But the fine sheen of sweat on his brow and the darting of his eyes said that the problem was more profound than that. "The Veil... is in tatters here. Some of the demons may be coming across on their own, but I would suspect a mage is assisting, yes."
"Or the abomination," Fenris growled.
Finn nodded and swallowed. "It could be that as well."
"Then we keep -" Vashti began, silencing herself as the sound of metallic clanking echoed from down the corridor. Armor - different from the rag-clad undead they had fought so far. Fenris and Ariane slipped ahead, putting distance between themselves and the archer and mage. It became impossible to separate the sound of their two warriors from the approaching menace, but then a dim red glow appeared at the mouth of a cross-corridor. Vashti frowned - Some sort of magic? - but behind her, she heard Finn choke. "Maker's breath, what is-" he began.
The answer came as a revenant stalked out into the hall, an enormous red crystalline sword in one hand, a templar's shield in the other. It raised its blade and Fenris was jerked off his feet, pulled by the thing's dark magic onto the point of its blade.
Blue-white light flashed as the Tevinter elf countered with his own sort of magic, phasing his body so that he would be injured the less; Ariane charged and Finn steadied himself to support and heal them. The Warden loosed an arrow, then two, and saw them skitter and bounce off the dead templar's armor. Vashti frowned as the second hit, thinking to draw her dar'misu, when she saw the walking dead file out of the corridor after the revenant - more of the unfortunates from this place in their rags.
Those would be her targets, then. They might not have been formidable adversaries by themselves, but neither Fenris nor Ariane could afford a distraction. One grey goose-fletched arrow after another sped down the hallway, striking the shambling corpses in their legs, shoulders and necks. No hearts beat, nor lungs breathed, in those rotting chests, but long experience had taught that if the limbs or head were rendered useless, the demon within could use its puppet for little.
The last corpse out of the side passage did not stagger or shuffle into the corridor; it floated. Large, pale pointed ears and a rictus grin were visible even at range and in the gloom; berobed and carrying a three-headed staff, it had the look of a mage. Which meant, undead, an arcane horror, something almost as dangerous as the revenant.
"Got it," Vashti gritted, so that Finn would not waste his energies on one of his glyphs to neutralize it. A mage, alive or undead, was as easy to hit in battle as an armored warrior was difficult. The thing drifted to a halt, gesturing and conjuring a major spell which would surely be deadly. Vashti drew a careful bead on its throat -
Ariane screamed. The sound had death in it.
Without thought, she whirled to look. Reflexes tried to get the shot off anyway. The release was bad; her fingers caught the bowstring as it went, and she knew as she turned that the arrow would be wide of its mark.
In the space of a heartbeat, she saw:
- Ariane, her blades on the ground, both gauntlets gripping the blade of the red crystal sword driven into her belly.
- Ariane's vallaslin, suddenly so dark against skin that had gone ashen.
- Fenris, behind the revenant, swinging his greatsword down in a killing arc.
Then a great invisible hand lifted her, tightening in a crushing fist that bent her body back and away from that terrible scene. Her blood pounded in her ears as her throat was squeezed, and as the ceiling faded to utter darkness, she heard Morrigan's voice: Love is weakness. Love is death.
She said she'd got it but she didn't get it and Maker's breath the revenant was going down sword dropping no no no don't let it pull out - !
Ariane fell bonelessly to the floor, blood oozing from between her fingers where she clutched at her gut. Finn could heal that. Vashti twitched and choked in midair, strangling in the grip of the crushing prison. He could use a glyph to neutralize that.
He couldn't do both.
Things just beyond sight scuttled and scampered behind the thinning Veil, reaching for the dying elves, waiting for the vessels to be empty of essence so they could cross over and inhabit the bodies. He had never sensed their presence so clearly before, and it only made the horrible choice harder. He lost precious seconds until Fenris snarled, "Heal,mage!" at him, before launching himself down the corridor at the arcane horror.
Yes. Heal. The glyph was elaborate, might take too long anyway. Feeling strangely numb, he worked a fast healing spell to stabilize Ariane. Elsewhere, electricity crackled, and someone distant shouted, "No, you leave them alone!"
Wonderful. The maleficar coming to save her undead minions? Get Ariane up, she's the allan'isa, get her up, get her up...He rushed to the elven warrior's side, risking reaching across the Veil to the spirits. They were there, behind the crowd of demons eager to enter the mortal world. Three or four voices scratched the inside of his mind, shrieking reckless, tactless offers of power, safety, power. Finn ignored them, more out of habit than from any special virtue, and clasped a willing spirit to him. He poured his strongest healing into Ariane as spells boomed and fwooshed down the hall. Releasing the spirit, he found himself utterly spent. That was it, no more mana for Finn.
Ariane, shaking and panting, reached for her blades, fumbled them; healing magic might have knitted her wounds, but the shock lingered. He couldn't help that, not now. He pulled a bottle of lyrium loose, worried at the stopper and tried to see how the battle went.
His saw Fenris first, halfway down the hall and evidently paralyzed. His eyes went wide as he glanced farther ahead, expecting to see the arcane horror sending magical death toward them - but the arcane horror was no longer a threat. The charred remains were wreathed in thorny, living vines that still tugged and pulled at the blackened limbs. At the center of those vines stood a be-vallaslin'ed mage - Merrill, it had to be. Her staff was lifted as she finished an incantation, and Finn flinched -
- Vashti fell to the floor, coughing and gasping. A dispell, Finn realized. But... why?
Merrill's ironwood staff dropped to the floor, landing amidst the vines. She looked past him, back down the hall; perhaps foolishly, he looked over his shoulder. Nothing. The red lyrium sword festered like a gangrenous wound in the Veil, but it lay between them; that wasn't what drew her attention, either. "I'd like to tell you how to stop Hawke, if that's all right," she said quietly, still not looking at any of them.
If this was a trap, it was a really peculiar one. "We think we know how to stop Hawke, thank you," Finn answered, as Ariane and Vashti tried to pick themselves up off the floor.
"Oh." The Dalish mage swallowed, glanced at the Warden and then quickly away, and added, "I also know where she is."
"Lies."Fenris, moving again, free of the spell.
"Wait!" Finn cried. "She helped us! She might really know -" But Fenris was not waiting. Finn called up the patterns of a paralysis glyph, shaped them in his mind, and threw them out -
No mana. No glyph.
Merrill flinched but did not run as the greatsword came swinging around. Finn perceived motion to his left just before the grating shriek of metal-on-metal resounded along the stone corridor. Vashti stood, braced into the block, her two curved daggers crossed where she caught the Tevinter elf's sword. "Oh," Finn breathed again, smiling. "Good."
"My kill,"the Warden snarled. Fenris stared down at her for a moment, then stepped back, shouldering his weapon.
"Wait, wait, wait, no!"Finn reached out with both arms, shaking his hands. "She said she knows where Hawke is."
Vashti turned toward her erstwhile clan-sister, blades glinting in the shadows. "I don't care."
"You should."
Finn blinked in surprise. Ariane's voice was hard and clipped, and it stopped the Warden cold. "How can you say that?" Vashti demanded, anger and hurt in her voice. "You saw what she did!"
"Did you miss the part where we nearly died here?" Ariane shot back. "Do you really think it's a good idea to go blindly wandering around down here, maybe encountering more of these things, and maybe not being so lucky next time?"
"I..." Finn wasn't sure he'd ever seen Vashti uncertain before. She looked from Ariane back to Merrill, who stood trembling with her head bowed. This would be a good time, he thought, to knock back that lyrium potion, before anything else went wrong. He carefully slid the empty flask to the side of the hall, out of the way.
Fenris made a slicing gesture with his hand. "She cannot be trusted."
At that, Merrill looked up. "I did just save you, you know. And I'll just point out that I'm the mage not possessed by a spirit."
"Yet you serve this abomination."
Merrill twisted her fingers. "I thought I could... keep her from doing worse things. I can't. It's a very powerful, very evil spirit that has Hawke. They have to be stopped, and I can help. If we're still alive afterward..." She took a breath and turned to Vashti, very somber. "I won't try to stop you. From..." She waved vaguely at her dar'missu.
"Guard Captain Aveline and Master Tethras agreed that she was... not a stereotypical maleficar," Finn put in. "It seems wise to accept whatever help we can get."
Vashti rounded on him. "She destroyed our clan!"
"It was an accident!" Merrill cried out. "Mahariel, I swear - Marethari was possessed and we had... we had to kill her, but the clan thought I just murdered her and they, they wouldn't stop, they were trying to kill me and I just -"
Vashti whirled, one arm raised. The pommel of her dagger took Merrill in the temple, and the mage collapsed to the ground. "Then you should have died!"
He brought Vera down, flat, parallel to the ground, between the two exiled Sabrae. He was shaking, partly from anger, partly from fear, and just a little bit from the intoxicating rush of power the lyrium imparted. "You stop that."
Vashti regarded him with slitted eyes. "You -"
"No, you!" Finn interrupted, suddenly not in the mood for dramatic accusations. "I understand entirely too well about coming home and finding out your trusted elder turned to blood magic and killed everyone, all right?" His voice sounded frayed and frantic, even to his own ears. Voices at the edge of perception whispered that he could put her in her place, teach her not to strike an unarmed, unresisting mage, just reach inside and make her drop those weapons... He shook his head to clear it. "Just... just stop that."
Ariane stepped past him to put a hand on Vashti's shoulder. "You will have justice. Count on it. But after this evil is defeated."
The Warden didn't move for a long, tense moment, then nodded sharply at Ariane. "As you say, it will be." Without another word, she strode off to the lesser undead, to make sure of them with her blades and then reclaim her arrows. Fenris grunted and went to help.
"Thank you," Merrill said from the floor.
"No, thank you." Finn offered her a hand up. "Vashti would be a walking corpse if you hadn't intervened."
"I couldn't let them... It was an accident -"
"Not talking about that right now," Ariane interrupted briskly. "Talking about stopping the abomination. How were you going to suggest that we go about doing it?"
"Well, there was this seal we found, in three parts..."