38. Casing the Joint
"Someone's going to have to go in there and take a look," Sherry said.
"I'll go," Zevran answered, eager for an opportunity for action.
"You can't," was Peep's immediate response. "Ain't no way for a elf to go around in there and be safe. You'll be arrested and put into the New Alienage before you get six feet inside the walls."
"New Alienage?" Sherry repeated, staring at him blankly.
"Place the elfs are taken to soon's they land," Peep told her. "They's slaves is what they is, no doubt 'bout that."
"He has slaves?"
"Ain't only him, neither, Ma'am. He sellin' them, too." Peep looked down at the city over the walls. "Even if he sneaks in by way of the roofs, the other thiefs will notice him and turn him in. They don't like the elfs no more than no one else does."
"I'll do it, then. Are the roofs overly populated with thieves?" At Peep's noncommittal shrug, she nodded understanding and slipped away.
"What's got 'er all riled up?" Peep asked the other two.
"The whole world's in danger," Wynne answered. "Darkspawn, Archdemons, tyrants, betrayers, wars. I guess that's enough to upset anyone."
"Not Sherry," Peep told her. His piercing eyes, as deeply brown as his rich skin, gazed at her solidly. "She done been through more wars than the rest of us ever will. Back before the religious apocalypse, she says, they was wars all the time. The USA was constantly all over the world killin' people with their airplanes and their bombs. Why she don't like to use the old stuff. She think it's too much power for any people to be having. She told me, 'When you got to be face to face with the people yer killin', it makes it harder'. I ain't sure if she's right, but I do know that it ain't war got her all worked up like dat."
"Loghain's got Alistair," Zevran told the other man.
"Alistair? Who's Alistair?"
"A Gray Warden, one of only three on the planet that we know of," Wynne answered. "Only the Gray Wardens can kill the Archdemon and end the Blight."
"And her lover," Zevran interjected.
"Zevran!" Wynne admonished him sharply. "That's no one's business but theirs!"
"Lover?" Peep said, his voice dripping with surprise like a tree after a summer thundershower. "Well, I'll be. I ain't never knowed her to get person with no one. I didn't think I'd never live to see the day." When he turned back to watch the town again through the binoculars, his face was pensive and contemplative.
"Well, how long have you known her?" Zevran asked.
"Some seventy-five years or so," Peep told him.
Zevran laughed. "You're all of what, twenty-five?"
"I were forty when I met her, and she shared her secret with me. Far as I know, I'm the only one what she has shared it with, too. Me, and my wife and my boy. We ain't like her, though. We stay outta the public, mostly. Come into town for some things we can't make ourselfs. We watch the world change, but we don't be no part of it." He passed the binoculars to Zevran. "She gone over the wall, can't see her no more."
"What is her secret?" Wynne asked.
"Can't tell nobody, or it ain't no secret no more. It ain't no secret what she gots a secret, it only a secret what the secret is. If she lettin' you come to the cabin with her, though, she trusts you more than she ever trusted anybody but me and mine since I knowed her. That don't mean, though, that I'm tellin' you her secret. It ain't mine to reveal. I'm gonna get myself some grub. You want some?"
"Grubs? What are you going to do with grubs?" Wynne asked, curious.
He chuckled. "That's an old-fashioned way of sayin' 'food', Ma'am. Do ya want some food while we wait?"
When the other two nodded, he went and got some from the saddlebags of the massive Shire stallion he rode. The speckled gray beast stood some 20 hands [6.6 feet or 2.05 meters] tall, a size that everyone else seemed to find remarkably intimidating. Surprisingly, though, despite carrying a man who probably weighed as much as the other three combined, he seemed to have endless endurance coupled with a generally placid personality—a rarity in a stallion of any breed.
When he returned with the food, they ate in silence, all of their minds on the woman below.
For her part, Sherry was carefully making her way along the roof of a building that had sprung up near the intimidating fortress that she knew Alistair would be held in. A military prison that had been old even in her childhood, it still stood stark and cold against the deepening evening. Once it had been surrounded by a chain link fence, but now it was wrapped in a stone wall. Sentries paced along the length of it, others napping in the towers that jutted out of it like huddled vultures.
The security was tight. Either they were expected, or there was something more going on than just Alistair's trial. She suspected the possibility that there were local Warlords there for the trial, meaning that Loghain was intending to attempt a takeover of the entire area. It would be quite the coup, if he could manage to unite them. The main reason the area stayed safe was because there was no unity of purpose, and the most brutal of the Warlords tended to fight amongst themselves constantly.
Recognizing that she would be unable to kill as she went, or she would alert them to the presence of danger, Sherry slowly made her way across the wall toward the area closest to the water. There, she shimmied around the end of the wall, where they hadn't bothered to build it out into the water. She sneered at such shoddy work, and managed to make her way to the side of the building.
Slowly, she eased herself to the first set of lowest windows, easing through the ancient panes where glass no longer stood, only carelessly opened shutters, not even barred like most of the windows. To her surprise and delight, she found that she was in the Warder's office. She checked the charts and found the crude writing that showed where Alistair was.
Now, she thought, to get him out... A simple enough task—with an army and an Abrams Battle Tank. As it was, she had to decide whether to go find him herself, or go back and get the others. There was, however, the larger task of getting them into the city and then into the militarized zone outside of the prison.
A moment later, voices outside the room stole the decision from her. She dived back out the window and landed panting as quietly as she could just outside it. She froze as the door opened, fearful that the rocks beneath her feet would crunch together if she tried to move.