The first flood of refugees from the chokedamp in the Lowerdark hit Anders' clinic when he was deep in a nightmare of darkspawn. Compared to seeing himself as one of a monstrous horde all casting about for the song of a master, being wakened by pounding and shouting at the clinic doors was a blessing. He shook himself awake, hand already on his staff, adrenaline pulsing through him with the certainty that he was under attack from the darkspawn in his dream.
For all of two seconds, then the real world proved to be less pleasant than a dream of darkspawn by virtue of being real.
"Anders! Anders! Open up!" The shouts continued, the pounding grew louder, and Anders stumbled his way to unbar the door, barefoot and pulling on his trousers on the way. Sleeping naked because of the heat had been a fine idea right up until the point when someone expected him to be awake and useful.
As soon as the door was unbarred, people shoved it open, pushing past Anders carrying others who could barely get their feet under themselves, or worse, the still figures of the most vulnerable – children and the elderly.
Everyone spoke at once, some shouting, some weeping, none calm. The victims who were conscious retched and moaned, their reddened eyes streaming fluid too thick to be tears.
It was as though Anders had woken from one nightmare directly into a new nightmare.
All he could do was start sorting through the chaos, helping those who could be helped and alleviating the pain of those who were too far gone for anything else. The worst was always when he had to tell a mother or father that their child had passed beyond the Veil, and it happened more than he wanted, as the children were the ones most gravely stricken.
The word that emerged from the cacophony of stories and cries was chokedamp.
The problem was that Anders knew chokedamp, and this was not its result. Whole wards in Darktown died quietly of chokedamp. Sometimes it boiled up out of vents into Lowtown, taking entire slums down as stealthily as a thief in the night.
What it did not do was this. These survivors presented symptoms of some insidious poisoning. All he could do for their streaming eyes was wash them with water and clean cloths. He used up his entire supply of embrium for breathing, and elfroot for the retching and vomiting, and still needed more.
He sent out runners to call in the herbalists and non-magical healers who assisted him with any degree of regularity and sent another runner to Elegant to beg her help, promising, against his better judgment, that he would owe her a favor in return for her dipping into her supply of herbs and curatives.
Too few of those who had made it to his clinic survived. The ones who did filled every cot and space he had for patients. There was even a retching woman in his bed.
He spared himself a moment to wryly consider that she was the first woman to grace his bed in years. When she leaned over the edge and vomited on his coat, he could not help but think that yes, that was perfectly emblematic of his love life since Justice.
It took time to get things settled down, although Elegant's delivery came remarkably swiftly, with a note in her exquisite calligraphy warning him that he would owe her a "substantial" favor. Right. Of course. He would pay back her favor when she or one of her circle of friends contracted something unsavory and he healed it free of charge and more importantly, free of gossip. If Elegant wanted to cheat on her husband, he would at least spare the cuckolded man any diseases.
While he waited for her deliveries, he did his best to make his patients comfortable, and he started gathering stories. The survivors were from a Middledark ward situated just above a Lowerdark ward where all agreed there were no survivors.
That was not so unusual. A bad chokedamp outbreak could kill a whole ward with no warning.
The tales of green glowing fog, and a few frightened whispers that something had moved in the gas, were more than unusual.
The story from a frightened man named Georg who had left his decimated ward for business – he did not say what kind and Anders did not ask – and returned to see it flooded with radiant fog raised the mage's hackles the most.
"They was taking them," he confided after pulling Anders outside the clinic and out of earshot of the sobbing, puking, and coughing patients. "I saw it. They was taller than a Qunari with great black cloaks. They was dragging bodies down past the Lowerdark. Mark my words, when the poison clears, there ain't going to be a body to be found. They's all gone. All dead or worse."
• • •
"I have to go to Lowerdark," Anders told Annalisa, the most skilled of his assistants. He winced at the mess that had been made of his usual coat – was that vomit in the pauldrons? – and dug into the chest where he kept his few personal possessions, pulling out a robe he had never really expected to wear again, but for sentimental reasons had never been able to bring himself to sell or give away.
He shook out the robe and ignored her hissed intake of breath. Void, he had already been walking around bare-chested and barefoot, treating all the patients with a Tevinter Chantry amulet hanging out in the open on his chest, why not just complete the picture with the Tevinter mage robe?
So he would be associated with the heresy of the Black Divine and hunted down and executed. As though he wasn't already at risk of being hunted down and executed for being an apostate. Let alone the fact that he was an abomination. Try convincing a templar that, Oh no, Messere Templar, I'm not the bad kind of abomination, I'm the good kind. Funny how the word abomination precluded little niceties like explaining the difference between Fade spirits and demons.
At least the Tevinters didn't lock their mages away from their families and drive them mad with templar abuses. No matter what Fenris had to say about Tevinter, Anders could not help but think that they had at least a few things right. Less the whole rampant blood magic thing, but Kirkwall was no paragon of magely purity in that respect either, was it?
There was no privacy to be had anywhere in the clinic, not even in his usually private room, so he just turned his back on her and dropped trou. If Annalisa was looking at his bare backside, so be it.
"There might be more survivors down there," he explained as he pulled the robe over his head and settled the feathered pauldrons on his shoulders, deftly wrapping his bare arms in the cords that would keep the pauldrons from slipping and also channel the robe's magic to protect his arms almost as well as armor.
At least that was the idea, although he had a few werewolf scars from Blackmarsh to prove that it didn't always work perfectly.
He tucked the Tevinter Chantry amulet under the center strap on his chest, although that cat was pretty well out of the bag for anyone had seen him working on the sick and injured tonight. These were people who owed him, though, and they trusted the mage who healed them for just a bartered meal far more than they trusted the templars or Chantry.
"Annalisa, can you help…." he gestured to the laces at the back of his robe. Between the bare skin from just above his nipples to his shoulders and the virtual corseting of the torso, the Tevinter robe was… well, striking was one way to put it.
He had rather wondered at the Hero of Ferelden's choice to give him the robe as a gift. Admittedly the enchantments were useful for a Gray Warden, but he was certain he could have chosen a different set of robes to give to Anders. Too bad the man had been too busy pining over his Antivan assassin to want to start a fling with an errant apostate.
Lastly he settled the crossed belts over his hips and adjusted the pouches until he could load his meager supply of lyrium and healing potions into them. He hated that he kept the potions back from his patients, but Hawke paid for them, not Anders, and Hawke had made him swear that he would use them only for himself.
"You can't heal your patients if you're dead," the man had argued when Anders had tried to refuse the potions and the promise. "And I won't forgive you if you get yourself dead because some Darktown rogue doesn't want to let his broken arm heal the old-fashioned way."
That was hardly fair. Anders would never waste a potion just for a broken arm, but sometimes he had patients whose pain made him almost hate Hawke for eliciting that promise, knowing as he did that Justice would not let the mage be forsworn.
Annalisa tried to protest as Anders cleaned sawdust and less savory things off his feet before pulling on his boots. "Anders, we need you here."
"You don't need me here. Everyone who could be helped has been helped. Those who could not…." Were for their families to take to the pyres.
"If anyone else comes in while I am away, you know what to do. Embrium if they cannot breathe, elfroot for the nausea and vomiting."
He gestured toward the woman in his bed. "And give her another dose of the elfroot if you would. My coat is never going to be the same."
He looked mournfully down at his beloved coat. It had endured darkspawn, giant spiders, countless bandits, slavers, and generally unsavory sorts, and might just have been done in by one Lowerdark-dweller's vomit.
"There is no justice," he muttered, only to feel a twist of disagreement from a corner of his mind that was both himself and not himself. "Just us," he amended for his rider's sake.