Pain woke him. In his wrists, at first, although as he crawled towards consciousness a hundred other hurts - small and large - made themselves known to him. Instinctively he reached for healing magic to ease them and found his access to the fade blocked. Part of the pain in his wrists explained itself in an all-too-familiar way - anti magic bracers encircling them, locked together in front of him. The rest of the pain became obvious as he lifted his head to examine them - the bracers were rubbing against bandages.
Someone had been bleeding him.
White hot anger flooded him as he remembered the last time someone had done that to him - at the Circle a month after his fifteenth birthday - the Templars holding him still as he thrashed to get away from the knife. But he wasn't at the circle. He blinked, trying to clear the fog in his brain through natural means - not easy when he was used to being able to dismiss pain with a thought - but finally managed to clear his sight enough to take in his surroundings.
It didn't look good.
He was sitting, naked but for his smalls, in a cage which was suspended from the roof. Another two cages hung near him. The air was cloying with herbs and potions and bitingly cold - it was obvious to him that this was some kind of mage's laboratory. There were shelves packed with the kind of ingredients he had in his own workroom at the keep - along with many others he wasn't as familiar with, although he ventured a guess Nathaniel would know their purposes. A large bench sat on a raised platform at the end of the room, covered with vials and ingredients.
It was eerily silent. He couldn't feel the familiar presence of Pounce and he felt a sudden stab of grief - hoping the animal had managed to avoid the spells that had captured him.
He shifted himself upright, setting the cage to swinging wildly. The noise from the chain that held the cage was deafening in the silence and Anders guessed it wouldn't be long before whomever had captured them would come knocking. He was desperately worried about Francesca - if the mage had bled Anders there was no telling what he would do to the warrior. Blood magic used live sacrifices in too many of its spells for Anders to hope she was somehow unharmed.
He was almost afraid to check, but once the cage was settled and he was certain no one was coming to investigate the noise, he reached up into his hair and felt carefully for the picks he always kept there. Years of escape attempts had taught him magic was definitely not always an option and he breathed a sigh of relief to feel the familiar hardness in its usual place. He left them in place for now, however, despite the shivers that wracked his body in the cold and the ball of nauseous worry that sat in his stomach. He needed to find out who his captor was - and what they had done with Francesca.
An hour or so later Anders heard a door opening and turned to see a figure struggling up the stairs into the room, dragging a body - he could only hope it was a living one - behind him. At the top of the stairs the figure let the body drop and Anders was relieved to see Francesca move - the body was definitely her - and groan in protest. As he straightened, Anders could see that the figure was a mage, although he was so ancient and wizened Anders could have been forgiven for thinking he was a ghoul. The robes he wore were tattered and bloodstained, the staff on his back held in place with frayed rope rather than a proper sling. He was every schoolchild's vision of a malificar - a Templar's dream.
Francesca was dressed slightly more than he - undershirt and trousers rather than just smalls. He supposed the mage was more thorough about removing any source of enchantment from a fellow magic user - but he could see shallow wounds on her wrists, presumably similar to the ones that adorned his own.
"So, you're awake," the mage said once he was upright. Anders didn't dignify his words with a response, simply stared. "Surprising. I would have expected a few more hours, at least." The mage left Francesca crumpled at the top of the short flight of stairs and moved towards the corner of the room, opening a chest there and rummaging through it. "I imagine you're cold," he continued. "It does tend to get rather chilly up here in the winter. Forgive me for not dressing you in your robes again - they have a few too many enchantments in them for my liking. And it's difficult for an old man to dress an unconscious person - especially someone so big. Here." He pulled out a set of robes, only slightly better off than the ones he was wearing, and brought them to the cage. Anders took them silently. The mage casually cut his hand with a knife and cast a spell that Anders was unfamiliar with, before unlocking the anti-magic bracers around his wrists so he could dress. It was difficult with the cage swinging so much, but he managed, despite the crushing feeling of the blood magic - preventing him from casting. Once he was finished the mage muttered a word and Anders found his hands back in front of him, despite his intention not to cooperate with the man if he tried to replace the bracers. The man snapped them back into place, his wrinkled face expressionless.
The whole procedure had something of the routine about it and Anders shuddered to think that the man was used to this kind of work.
"Who are you?" he asked.
The mage returned to Francesca and began laboriously dragging her the rest of the way to the cages. Anders winced - the wooden floorboards were undoubtably full of splinters - he hoped her trousers were thick enough to stop them from lodging in her skin.
"You can call me Avernus, although truly my name is unimportant," the mage huffed. "Considering your predicament I would have thought your first question would have been more self-centred."
"Call me an optimist," Anders said. "If I know it's going to be bad news I like to delay it a bit. Part of the fun."
The mage parted his lips in what was probably meant to be a smile, but it simply added to the overall impression of him as something half-dead. He reached the cage next to Anders and swung the door open. Anders confessed to himself that he was morbidly curious about how the skinny man was going to maneuver Francesca's muscular bulk into the cage, but the mystery was solved when he went to the wall and operated a winch, lowering the cage to the floor so he could roll the unconscious woman into it.
Anders itched to be able to use his healing sense on his fellow warden - she was obviously not well. He could only hope her injuries were in the same categories as his own and nothing more severe.
"Any chance you'd let us know what your plans for us are?" Anders said finally.
"I should have assumed they wouldn't tell you," the mage said. "Considering. But truly you're better off not knowing."
"You're a blood mage, I take it?"
"Indeed," he replied. "A warden first, however. As are you I imagine."
"I've always preferred to think of myself as Anders first, but being a warden is certainly up there, yes."
The mage closed and locked Francesca's cage and winched it back up into position. Anders could get a better look at her, now and he was worried at what he could see. She was pale - far paler than she should be. The blood mage must have taken more from her than from him. "You were going to tell me what your plans for us were."
Avernus looked confused. "Was I?"
Great, Anders thought. He's going senile into the bargain. "Yes," he said.
The old man shrugged. "You will be assisting me in my research," he said.
Anders grimaced. "I'm assuming this 'assistance' involves regular bloodletting and eventual death?" he said.
Avernus cocked an eyebrow at him. "Well, that rather depends on how well the research goes. Although I haven't had live subjects for some time, so I wouldn't be too optimistic."
Best to get out of here as soon as possible, then. Anders thought. The whole situation was increasingly surreal. Avernus seemed totally disconnected emotionally, he spoke conversationally, as though Anders were a colleague or a student rather than someone who was about to be bled dry and possibly chopped up into bits. He sucked at a lip in sudden fear. "What exactly are you researching?" he asked after a moment.
Avernus turned from the cages to his workbench, littered with vials and potions and, Anders swallowed to see it, two full glass flasks of bright red blood. He wondered if it was his or Francesca's. He felt even more nauseous. "Commander Dryden wanted me to find a way to make the joining less fatal," Avernus said.
Anders frowned. "Commander Dryden..?" he said, but Avernus was still talking.
"I was more ambitious than that. The wardens have been so shortsighted, for so many years. Why do they look upon the taint as a curse when instead it can be a blessing?"
"Ah, possibly because of the whole early death thing..." Anders said, although he had the impression Avernus wasn't listening to him, having drifted off into his own world, "...but you seem to have found a way around that.. Did you say you were a warden under Commander Dryden? The woman who led the rebellion...?"
Avernus looked up and blinked at Anders. "Didn't your Commander tell you anything about this place?" he said. "I would have assumed he told you about repairing the veil at least."
"Uh.. well. Our Commander is no longer the same man, you see."
"Indeed? So what are you doing here then? I assumed he'd sent you. Although I wondered why he sent two when I specifically asked for one at a time. And a mage as well - he should know I have little use for mages..."
"Wait.. you asked Commander Cousland to send wardens to you? He knows what you're doing here?"
Avernus nodded as he began mixing ingredients in a mortar and pestle. Anders sat back against the bars of the cage, his mind racing. Aedan Cousland was knowingly sending wardens to be used in experiments that would likely kill them - by a blood mage no less.
A blood mage who was over two hundred years old. And almost certainly insane - given Anders current definition of the word, which included being able to speak about using human beings in experiments as though it was perfectly natural. It didn't make sense. Aedan wouldn't give a damn about how many warden recruits died in the joining - he'd barely blinked when Mhairi keeled over.
"Why?" Anders said finally, once the news had sunk in. Avernus paused in his work, looking up at Anders critically.
"You strike me as a fairly intelligent lad," he said finally. "Why don't you work it out for yourself?" Anders opened his mouth to reply but Avernus waved a hand and he was suddenly unable to make a sound. "Enough questions for now," Avernus said. "I need to work."
And that, it appeared, was that.