They collected their pay from the astonished barkeep, who had plenty to say about how he'd never thought that they could pull it off, and looked at Solona many times when he was elaborately describing just exactly what he thought would happen to them in gruesome gory detail. It took all of her self-restraint to not freeze the man in a block of ice for his thinly veiled insults wrapped neatly in a blanket of bewilderment.
"If you have trouble again, we'll be around." Aedan pocketed the money, and then proceeded to get them a room for the night at discount for their services to the man. The room was a little on the cramped side, with only barely enough room to stand straight and a tiny window that was perhaps only as big as Solona's face, but it got them out of the weather. It was better than sleeping on the ground, if not by much. Aedan volunteered to sleep on the floor much to Solona's surprise. But after a night on the straw filled mattress wondering what sorts of animals had made their nest in it, Solona realized why he'd given it up so easily.
They spent a week like this, collecting jobs from the Chanter's board that usually had to do with silencing thugs, and even once they got a job from a city guard farther up in the ranks who seemed as frustrated with the lack of order as the two were bewildered by it. By the seventh night they had settled into something of a pattern, the barkeep that allowed them to stay in his place taking their skills of putting ruffians out of his tavern in exchange for lodging and meals. It was a good set up, over all.
One night Solona was up reading a book she had purchased with the coin she'd saved up over the week. It was a battered tome of healing that she'd found in a store called the Wonders of Thedas in the Market District. She used a few of the haggling skills that she'd learned from Aedan, but didn't dare try and influence the proprietor with spells, seeing as the man was also something of a mage himself. It worked fine on non-mages, since they never knew that they were being hoodwinked, but being a mercenary had naturally lead her to square off against fellow apostates, and she had discovered that they always knew when their wills were being manipulated.
After a while of reading she blew out the candle she'd used to light the room enough to see, Aedan's gentle snoring coming from the floor where he'd taken up permanent residence. They'd salvaged a decent looking mattress from another room for him to sleep on by now so he wasn't sleeping on the bare wood floor anymore. The man slept like the dead when he had a mind for it, going still as a board the moment he dropped off to sleep and not moving a single inch until morning. With a vague smile, Solona's gaze drifting out over the sea like it did every night before she turned in. Though she'd been looking at it through the window for the last week, she could never quite get enough of looking at it, especially when the moon reflected off the surface, shimmering through the forest of masts that always occupied the harbor.
Something caught her eye, and for a moment she though she'd been fooled by the gentle sway of the masts on the waves, and so looked again but more slowly. Sure enough she saw movement again and concentrated on it.
There were people out on the docks in a large group. The moonlight glittered off of armor, and it took a moment for her to realize that there was a severe height discrepancy between those in armor and those without. Were they… children? Elves? Her heart thudded in her chest hard, sudden realization dawning on her.
Immediately she prodded Aedan with her foot, trying to wake the man. He tried swatting at her lazily, determined to keep sleeping for as long as he could. Rolling her eyes, Solona shifted on the bed and grabbed his shoulder, shaking him hard. "Aedan! Wake up!"
That startled him to wakefulness, and Solona sat back to watch him flail around for a little bit, yelling out something that didn't quite make sense and made a gesture as if to stab the blank air in front of him. Keran, disturbed by the action woke up as well and barked a few times before realizing that nothing was actually wrong, then went back to dozing. When Aedan fully woke, he stared around the room, blinking like an owl until his gaze lit on Solona. "By the Maker woman, what is it? There had better be a fire, or someone had better be dying."
"Well, no one is dead yet, but I'm sure a fair number will be in a week." Unable to understand the cryptic response, Aedan simply stared at her until she continued her train of thought. "Look out the window, here." She pointed and waited for Aedan to get up.
He did so reluctantly, rubbing his tired face and running a hand through his sleep ruffled brown hair, leaning against the wall with his forearm as he looked out the window. At first he didn't see anything, but after following Solona's intently pointed finger, he finally saw what she did. "I don't… Oh by the Maker. Are those…?"
"Slavers." She nodded grimly, standing from her bed and walked the length of their small living space, grabbing her clothes and began putting them on over her night wear. "That would explain why we've not seen hide nor hair of any guards patrolling the docks this whole week except for the drunk ones."
Aedan sighed, rubbing his eyes with the palms of his hands and then stared at Solona as she continued to dress, putting on her cloak last and grabbing her staff. "You're going to make me go out there and save them, aren't you?"
The mage narrowed her eyes. "Do you really need to ask? Need I remind you that Slavery is illegal in Ferelden? Somebody will probably pay for putting them out of business." When Aedan didn't move she turned to fully face him, placing her free hand on her hip. "Are you really going to sit and watch as slavers take a band of children or elves off to Tevinter, where they'll be tortured and used as blood slaves?"
He sighed. "No, I wouldn't wish that fate on them. But I think we're biting off more than we can chew. Drunk thugs is one thing, a scattering of apostates we've proven being able to handle… But these slavers are well armed, and there are a lot of them."
"So I'll pull out all the stops." She replied quickly, straightening to bring herself to her full height as she did so. "Explosions, lightning, the whole thing. I'm not going to sit by and watch them get away Aedan, I won't. I couldn't live with the knowledge that I didn't even try to help those poor people escape when I very well could have."
For a moment there was silence between the two, a clash of wills, and then Aedan's better nature won out and he gave, stooping to gather up his armor. "Fine. But if this starts going pear-shaped, then I have every right to drag you away from the fight. Trying to save them is one thing. Dying to do it is a different story."
"Fine." Though secretly she was thinking that he'd have a hell of a time trying to drag her away from a fight unless she was utterly exhausted or unconscious. Nervousness began to stir within her and she left through the door, heading downstairs quietly. Keran followed her out at the behest of his master, following her to the docks. Probably as much to keep her from doing anything stupid as to protect her if she sprung before Aedan got there.
She ran along the docks as quietly as she could manage and took shelter in the shadows of crates, boxes and mounds of nets the closer she got so as to avoid being spotted. Keran followed close in her wake, that Mabari intelligence keeping him from bolting out into the unknown until the attack had really started.
The slavers walked for a long while, leading her out from the main port where common fishermen made berth to the nicer docks where it smelled less of fish and more like the market. Big ships were here, the kind that transported large goods, spices from other lands, or in the case of the Tevinters, live cargo.
They stopped in front of a large ship that was fairly unremarkable. It was certainly no overly decorated Orlesian ship, but it was impressive for the size of its hold. Obviously they wanted to take a lot of slaves with them when they went, or else they already had them. Keran perked up and wagged his tail, the clank of metal on metal alerting Solona to Aedan's presence as he came up behind them and hid in the shadow of a stack of crates.
"What're we up against?" He asked in a soft voice, looking over the crates as he did so to get a brief glance at the slavers.
"Five armed slavers, two mages. The slaves are all elves, probably from the Alienage." She was holding onto her staff tightly, her anger easily visible. Solona wasn't exactly trying to hide it, either.
"They're probably blood mages…" Aedan swore quietly, his mind going over possible strategies. "And the trained kind, not the sort that we have, like those apostates who accidentally learned how to do it."
"I can take out at least one of them." Solona offered quickly, hoping that she sounded more confident than she felt. Blood mages were powerful, legendarily so. The Chantry often spoke of the evilness that blood magic represented, how it was demon given, and even those within the Circle had a powerful revulsion to it. She would certainly never try doing it. At the very least, having to cut open your palms all the time seemed like a bad way to go. "If I've got the jump on them, then I might be able to put the whole group to sleep, the elves included. Between you and Keran, you need to strike them down if you can as soon as possible."
"Got it. I'll run out there like a heathen the moment that they drop and start cutting off heads." A grimace came to his face, and as silently as he could, he slipped his arm into his shield and withdrew his sword. "Ready as I'll ever be."
"Then lets hope this works." Solona started gathering her power, seeing in her mind as everyone on the dock dropped to the ground limply with the sleep spell she was conjuring, then made it so, releasing the energy in a burst. The effect was immediate, the elves as a whole dropping where they stood, unconscious the moment they hit the ground. Two of the armed slavers hit the dock as well, one simply seemed to freeze up, sleeping on his feet and making for an odd sight indeed. The other two guards instantly went on alert, and one of the mages stumbled, fell, and then finally succumbed to the spell.
Aedan and Keran rushed from their position as soon as they saw the elves go down, the Mabari tearing off into the night and jumped the first standing guard he came across, the one that had fallen asleep standing. The man woke on impact, but it was too late. The dog had knocked him clean off his feet and over the side of the dock, his heavy armor dragging him to the bottom of the harbor with only bubbles left to mark where he'd gone down.
The two guards left still awake rushed forward to meet the threat head-on, screaming some sort of battle cry in Arcanum that probably meant something very insulting. Aedan met their charge, stopping short of colliding head-on with one and his sword passed a hair's breadth in front of his face, missing him by the barest sliver of a margin. His shield went out, catching the man in the shoulder and nearly knocking him off balance with the force of it. He went to stab cleanly through the man's head only to have the warrior twist at the last minuet and meet the oncoming blow with a shield of his own. The second awake slaver rushed Aedan from the side, sweeping a great two-handed sword in a broad arc that if struck would probably have cleaved Aedan clean in half. Keran interrupted the deathblow, his powerful jaws locking around the man's ankle and pulling with all his might, tripping the man up.
The sword caught Aedan in the shoulder and caused enough of a distraction that the first slaver found an opportunity to rush him, knocking away Aedan's shield and aiming for a kill. He nearly got it too, if Aedan's sword didn't strike down and nearly shattered the slaver's blade. He got a pommel to the face for the effort, the slaver's jaw cracking unhealthily when Aedan backhanded him.
The mage seemed to be stunned by the sudden attack, but wasn't out of the count for long. He started summoning some sort of spell, speaking rapidly in Arcanum as he did so and making all sorts of hand gestures, the energy he was gathering making a visible ball between his outstretched hands. Solona rushed from her hiding place and sent out a burst of magic, frost blooming over the skin of the mage, freezing him mid-cast. The other slavers that she had put to sleep were waking, along with the first mage who was rising quickly. Unwilling to face two of the blood mages at once, she quickly sent out a spell of horror, and was rewarded with watching the stunned mage fall back on the ground and start writhing, screaming in terror from whatever nightmares she'd conjured into his head.
Keran had managed to grab a hold of the warrior's arm that he'd downed and pulled hard enough to wrench his arm, the man crying out in pain when his shoulder was dislocated. The warrior kicked the dog out of the way, Keran retreating briefly with a yelp before returning to the offensive, harassing the warrior as he tried to rise, biting and scratching and keeping him down for the count.
Solona saw what the dog was doing and sought out the man's life energy, drew upon it with the power of her mana and felt his strength flood into her. The man gave a startled cry, then collapsed dead on the docks. It was not a second later when Solona felt something odd, a warp of power, and then she was burning. There was no fire, but she felt her blood rush and heat, practically boiling in her own veins. She tried to scream out, but her throat was closed off, her body totally out of her own control as the blood mage that she'd frozen took his revenge, delighting in watching the mage woman suffer silently under the influence of magic.
The two slavers still asleep had fully risen now, the one closest to the screaming blood mage pausing for a second to help. He changed his mind however when Aedan drew his blade across the neck of the slaver that he'd been fighting, very nearly decapitating the man when he did so and blood sprayed all over as the body went down. Keran launched an attack, the two armed slavers nearly tripping over the still asleep elves as they rushed to kill the warrior that had downed another of their fellows.
The pain was absolutely excruciating, and there was nothing she could do to stop it. She was trying to block out the mage's control, trying to assert her will and disrupt the spell with any mana she could still direct, but nothing was working. The mage was going to kill her. She was absolutely sure of it. She could feel his will smothering her, could practically feel his fingers wedging into her brain and wrestling control from her with an iron grip.
Then suddenly it stopped. Solona dropped to the ground, gasping for breath and shaking, barely able to believe that she was in control of her own limbs again. She looked up, expecting to see Aedan having stabbed the mage through the head or something, but instead saw that he was engaged in the last two armed slavers still standing, he and Keran working in tandem to thrown them off their balance as best they could. The mage she had set a nightmare upon had stopped screaming; slowly regaining his senses as he rose to his feet and attempted to join the battle once more. Weakly, Solona tapped into the mage's life force; drawing what energy she could and was satisfied to watch him drop to the ground again, this time dead.
The mage's death gurgle was a satisfying sound. The elf had waited a long time to take out her pent-up rage out on somebody, and who better than some mage that appeared to be too dumb to notice when a little elf woman came up and stabbed him straight in the gut? She flicked the blade she'd picked up, having taken it from the corpse of the shield bearing one that had been killed and turned her attention to the fight. She would have been far more comfortable with a smaller sword, but this would do for now.
The elf took a running start and ran straight at the slaver who was fighting fiercely with the dark-haired man who wasn't wearing Tevinter livery. She supposed that made him her ally, for now. The poor bastard didn't even see her coming, concentrated as he was on trying to keep from being decapitated and avoiding the flailing sword of his fellow slaver as the man tried to ward off the dog viciously attacking his ankles. Her sword sliced through a chink in his armor, sinking up to the hilt. The man appeared to have been startled by a sudden sword in the ribs, looked at her with a bewildered gaze, then was knocked to the ground by being pummeled in the chest by the not-slaver human. The two locked gazes for a second, elf and warrior, then went about attacking the last remaining slaver, the elf woman scooping up the sword of her latest kill and moving around behind the final target.
From her place at the edge of the dock Solona watched with a bit of wonder as the three easily overcame the last slaver, the red-headed elf woman stabbing the man in the back while Aedan shoved him further on her blade and Keran dragged him down to the dock. He was dead in a second, and the elves that had been under her spell were waking up to the carnage. Some simply fled the scene, but others remained behind apparently paralyzed by the sight of so much death.
"What are you waiting for?" The elf that had joined the fight asked, looking at her fellow kin. "By Andraste's ass, get out of here! Or let the Void have you!" That got the others going, and as one they started running for the city.
The battle on the dock had woken up others who had been sleeping, and apparently alerted those who were on the boat. Arcanum chatter rose from the slave vessel, and soon enough heads appeared over the railing. "Time to go." The elf picked up a second sword and ran away from the dock at full speed as arrows started to rain down on the docks.
Keran ran ahead of Aedan who paused to help Solona to her feet and then proceeded to drag her by the hand out of reach of the arrows in a mad flight from the harbor. Alarm bells sounded throughout the bay and everywhere lights flared to life in windows. By the time the guard got there, the perpetrators were long gone.
A/N: Oh look, we're doing something good without promise of payment! They do appear to still have souls. This chapter was fun to write. It was initially a lot longer, but in the end I decided to split it in half, so, to be continued! Next chapter we have a new character, and even more exciting things start to happen. Can you handle the suspense?
In onther news, I only just now found out that you can reply to reviews given to your stories. I feel like I've been duped. Curse you fanfiction and your complex replying system! Curse you! Also, I haven't been putting up disclaimers for my story. If this bothers you, I'm sorry. However, since the site is called fanfiction and I am obviously not David Gaider or anybody else on the production staff of DA, I figured that a warning was unnecessary. If anybody was hoping that I was a member of the production staff, I'm sorry to disappoint you.