The night before, Cyrros had found Sidony in the throng of partygoers as they filed out of the manor. He had pulled her away into the night, away from curious ears, and made an offer: In exchange for telling her what he could learn about the Mortalitasi assassin, she would help him secure their first lead on the killer.
Cyrros had a patron who had been the mistress of one of the recently slain nobles. Evidence of their affair—a journal—had fallen into the hands of the victim’s servant, who was threatening to expose the scandal unless the patron paid him an unconscionable amount of gold.
They had spent the morning combing the docks by the river, searching the places Cyrros had heard the upstart servant liked to visit, without any luck. It was an unusually warm day for the season, and the sun hung high overhead as they sat on a low wall to rest.
“I … appreciate you helping me stop this assassin.” Sidony sighed. “But I am having trouble understanding how cleaning up these foolish messes for your noble pets is a valuable use of my time.”
“I told you,” Cyrros smiled reassuringly, “my patron has information to trade, if we find the journal for her.”
“I understand that part. But what could she possibly know that would be of any use to us?”
“So far, every victim’s family has insisted that their deaths were accidental. Despite their questionable nature. I haven’t been able to piece together whether they’re saying this to avoid shame, or because someone is coercing them. Either way, none of them would dare risk putting themselves out of favor with the Mortalitasi by claiming one of them is responsible.
“My patron promised me that once she gets the journal, she’ll tell us what she knows about the circumstances around her lover’s fall. She doesn’t believe the official story. She doesn’t think it was an accident, or by her lover’s own hand. I think she knows something that’ll give us a better lead than just waiting for another party and using the nobles as bait.”
Sidony looked out over the river. Her patience for the royal families’ frivolities and squabbles was growing thin, so much so that using one of them as bait was starting to sound rather enticing.
“Who is this woman, your patron? How do you know we can trust her?”
Cyrros smiled again, the one that seemed to appear when he wanted her to stop asking questions.
“That’s not part of our deal, mage. Just as I won’t tell my patron the secrets you’re after, I won’t betray her trust by exposing her.”
“Stop calling me ‘mage,’” Sidony snapped. “Would you like me to call you ‘frustratingly shifty elf’?”
“I guarantee you, I’ve been called worse things.” Cyrros laughed.
“I know that this is all part of what you do,” Sidony continued. “But the people I usually work with have the decency to not withhold knowledge from me. This blind confidence you expect is not something that is ever asked of me. I am not enjoying it.”
“Ah, there he is,” Cyrros said as he looked away and gestured to a young man walking past the market stalls across the plaza. His messy black hair stuck out of the hood of his coat, completely out of place in the warm weather.
Sidony scowled as Cyrros deflected her concerns.
“Perfect,” he said as he stood and brushed off his pants and extended his hand to her. “I was going to suggest using your special brand of magic, but that face you’re making will put the fear of the Maker into the poor boy. Let’s go.”
* * *
They kept their distance as they followed him up the avenue.
Artists and various entertainers were still hard at work, preparing and adorning the dozens of statues for the season. Their quarry weaved in and out of buzzing crowds.
“What are we waiting for?” Sidony asked. “He’s right there.”
“Too many people around,” Cyrros replied. “I want him in a quieter place. Don’t want to risk anyone else getting involved. The journal we’re after might get snatched up in the wrong hands. Again.”
Silence settled between them as they walked. Sidony clasped her hands together and felt a foreign presence against her palm. She looked down and saw the angry red stone in the ring Antonia gave her the night before still blazing on her finger. In the chaos after Reinhardt had dismissed everyone from the party, she hadn’t been able to find her.
“I have to ask,” Cyrros began. “How do you know Lady Antonia?”
Sidony looked at him and sighed.
He put his hands up in defense. “Can’t help it. Part of the job and all.”
“I don’t know her,” she replied.
“Interesting.”
The upstart servant they were tailing was no longer staring straight ahead. He looked in several directions before slipping into a side street.
“This way,” Cyrros said as he pulled her into the alley closest to them. “We’ll come out the other side and catch him off guard. He’ll notice us if we follow him down directly.”
They picked up their pace as they made their way through the deserted passageway.
“Do you often wear jewelry belonging to complete strangers?” Cyrros asked as he pointed to her hand. “Strangers who just so happen to be very prominent and influential necromancers?”
“And how are you so well acquainted with Antonia?”
“I don’t know her personally, just the bits and pieces I’ve picked up through my work. She’s very popular in many circles, very well liked.”
Cyrros thought for a moment. “She seemed like a lively woman, when she pointed me your way last night. She was very concerned about you.”
Sidony rolled her eyes. “She is … a friend of someone I knew. A long time ago. That is our only connection.”
“Your only connection … other than the fact that you’re both highly skilled death mages?”
Sidony shook her head. “I was supposed to be one of them. A Mortalitasi. Antonia’s friend, Henrik, he … took me in when I was a child. Taught me necromancy—death magic. The customs and history of Nevarra. Little else.”
Sidony frowned as she remembered her days cooped up in the Necropolis, hungry to learn more about magic in the world outside, longing to see the rest of Thedas. And Henrik, telling her to put those thoughts from her mind, that Nevarra City itself was dangerous enough, let alone anywhere else.
“Henrik and Antonia always expected me to join them, eventually. But…”
“But?” Cyrros asked.
Sidony’s patience spilled away like a tipped-over glass. “But obviously I didn’t.”
Cyrros opened his mouth, but before he could speak, Sidony hissed, “Because I’m here with you. Being pestered by annoying questions instead of catching a Mortalitasi assassin that keeps slipping through my fingers!”
Cyrros clamped his mouth shut and smiled. They fell into silence again, and soon they reached the other side of the alley.
“Wait.” Cyrros barred her way with his arm and looked around the corner, in the direction of the alleyway where their target had disappeared.
“It’s quiet enough here,” he said, surveying the near-empty street. “If he comes this way, pull him in.”
Time stretched as they waited for the servant to appear from the mouth of the other alley.
“So, Henrik. What happened to him—”
“Stop it,” Sidony barked.
“Stop what?”
“I’m not one of the eager little rumormongers you like to trade with. Is my past relevant to finding this assassin? Will it help you win the silly games you’re playing with the nobility? Stop asking me…”
The rest of her words fell away. Her eyes were drawn over Cyrros’s shoulder, to another grossly exaggerated statue some thirty paces away. Some Pentaghast duke or another. Both its arms, raised in supplication, cast the street around it into shade, obscuring a motionless figure that radiated the same magic, the same cold impression of death that she had felt the night before.
Before she could will her feet to walk in its direction, she felt hands cl
amp on her shoulders and spin her around.
“There!” Cyrros hissed in her ear.
It was him, the servant they’d been chasing, walking away from them on the other side of the street.
Sidony wrenched herself from Cyrros’s grip and bolted toward him. The servant had just enough time to realize a determined-looking woman was racing in his direction before Sidony thrust her hand forward. A purplish-white flash of magic narrowly missed his back as he started to run.
As she darted after him, she could faintly hear Cyrros shouting and the pounding of his footsteps behind her. If he wanted her to stop, then he was about to be disappointed. She would not let another piece of this puzzle elude her.
Before she could let another curse fly from her hand, the servant turned a sharp corner, into a narrow alley between two storefronts.
She heard a shout—Cyrros’s voice—close behind her. She looked over her shoulder, and he gestured for her to follow the servant before he slipped into a narrow passage a dozen paces behind.
She raced into the alley. The servant was nearing the other side.
Gathering as much strength as she could, she stopped and focused on his retreating form. Just as Cyrros appeared in the opening at the opposite end of the alley, she sliced her left arm in an arc in front of her.
The servant screamed as the curse knocked him forward and out of the alley. His hands flew to his head, batting away imagined monsters from the horror spell Sidony had inflicted on him.
Cyrros caught him just as he began to collapse and dragged the screaming man back into the alley, and Sidony ran forward to meet him. The servant’s face looked like Henrik’s had when she saw his corpse: pulled wide in a look of terror.
“Stop his screaming,” Cyrros ordered as he struggled to restrain their quarry. She pulled on her magic, attempting to wipe the spell from the man’s mind. She tried again, and again, gritting her teeth against the energy draining from her body. But the more she tried, the louder he screamed, and the more she saw Henrik’s face.
“Mage! Stop him!”
“I can’t,” Sidony growled, “it’s not working.”
The servant thrashed and forced his way out of Cyrros’s arms. The man charged at Sidony, his shrieking face inches from hers, teeth gnashing and eyes wild. Suddenly, he was yanked backward by his hair, and his screams turned to gasps. Blood poured from his side, from the spot where the knife in Cyrros’s hand was buried.
Cyrros released him, and the servant fell to the ground. Now that she could see him calm and up close, she realized he couldn’t have seen more than twenty years. And now his death was another she had failed to prevent.
“What—” Sidony panted. “Why did you do that?”
“I told you to make him stop,” Cyrros said, pulling a handkerchief from his pocket and wiping at his hands. “If he’d kept it up, who knows what attention we would’ve drawn … especially after you decided to throw a few fistfuls of magic out in the open.”
“I was—” Sidony stuttered. “I was about to—”
She waved her hand over the dead man covered in his own blood.
“This wasn’t part of what you asked of me,” she said forcefully. “Why did you do that?”
He said nothing as she watched him pull his knife from the corpse and clean it. She said nothing as he rummaged inside the servant’s coat until he found the journal they were looking for. And silence stretched between them as he pushed her out of the alley, back into the sunny main street.
* * *
“Wait here,” Cyrros said as they stood outside the front door of an elegant apartment.
“No,” Sidony said, snatching the journal from Cyrros’s hand.
“I need to hear what this woman knows.” She crushed the book to her chest. “I need to hear it from her. Not you.”
Cyrros shook his head.
“You can’t. She doesn’t know you, she isn’t expecting you…” He reached for the book.
She stepped back, out of his grasp. Clutching the journal with one hand, she held the other forward, open and palm up.
“Do you want to see for yourself what that boy saw before you cut open his ribs?” she warned.
He dropped his hand and sighed.
“Come on,” he said, opening the door for her.
“After you,” Sidony replied.
* * *
The apartment was dark, despite it being the middle of the afternoon. The expected noise from servants and visitors in an extravagant place like this was absent.
No one appeared to greet them as they moved through the entryway.
“Are you sure this is where we were supposed to bring the journal?” Sidony asked.
“Yes,” Cyrros said. “She told me to bring it here once I found it. She could be out for the afternoon, but the entire household wouldn’t go with her. Something’s wrong.”
Sidony felt the prickle of magic ripple down her arm in response.
When they crossed into the room, the magic flared when she saw the body, all shriveled limbs and colorless skin.
Cyrros’s face fell into a concerned frown.
“Well … damn,” he said, smoothing a hand through his hair.
“What do you mean, “damn”?” Sidony said, more frantically than she would have liked.
Cyrros smirked. “Are you all right, mage? With your skill set, I didn’t think seeing something like this would unnerve you.”
“Don’t tell me this is who we are depending on?”
“And if it is?” Cyrros asked before disappearing back into the front hall.
Sidony glared at the corpse, at this new proof of her failure. Another witness silenced. One more step behind the killer.
“I am growing tired of this assassin beating me at every turn,” she said through gritted teeth when Cyrros returned to the parlor.
“They haven’t beat us yet,” Cyrros said. “This is your chance, mage.”
“What are you talking about?” Sidony sneered.
“No one’s here! No one to shoo us away, no one to tip off the Mortalitasi to come and take the body … We need death magic.”
Sidony peered at the body, brow furrowed. “If I do what you’re suggesting … it won’t be pretty.”
“It’s death magic. I wouldn’t expect it to be.”
She shot him a glare.
“Can’t you just … wake it up long enough to tell us what it saw?” Cyrros offered.
“That’s not how it works. Getting a corpse to speak is a rare gift, even among the Mortalitasi.”
“There has to be something you can try.”
Sidony regarded him for a moment. The Mortalitasi’s methods weren’t supposed to be known to anyone outside the order, and Maker only knew if she could even get this to work, but this could be their only opportunity to study one of the victims uninterrupted.
“I can call on a spirit from the Fade to possess the corpse. I’ve heard stories of spirits latching on to the final moments of the dead.” She paused, thinking back to the old rituals Henrik used to make her observe.
“There are certain tools the Mortalitasi use to attract a spirit to a corpse, tools that I do not have. And if I do not use the proper methods to invite a spirit into the body, it will be … unpredictable. We can hope it’s agreeable, but this thing will be just as likely to attack you as answer your questions.”
“I don’t think we have a choice right now,” Cyrros reminded her.
Sidony let out a breath and closed her eyes. She focused her magic, using it to reach into the Fade—the realm beyond where spirits, demons, and departed souls reside. She searched for a spirit willing to occupy Cyrros’s patron, if only for a brief moment; willing to confess her memories to them.
Cyrros shouted as the fingers on the corpse’s gloved hand started to flex. Sidony centered herself and pulled the spirit harder toward the dead. She was a breath away from fully waking it, when she noticed the embroidery on the glove as it lifted in the air: a quill.
&
nbsp; Pain exploded in the back of her skull, and everything went dark.
* * *
“My wife, Cyrros? My wife?”
The anxious voice lanced through the haze that was slowly lifting from Sidony’s head. She willed her eyes to open, but they wouldn’t.
“Yes, your wife, Nicolas, and I’m sorry,” came Cyrros’s voice, and the rustle of clothing as one man shoved the other. “But if you don’t take your hands off me, you’ll be joining her.”
“Now you’re threatening me?” Reinhardt laughed. “How stupid could I have been—”
“Pretty damn stupid if you think I was the one who did this.”
“What would you have me believe?” Reinhardt roared. “I hired you to kill my rivals and take the Mortalitasi down with them, and now I find my wife slain by the assassin I employed—and one of the damn death mages herself!”
Sidony started at the confession and forced her eyes open. The room was unfamiliar, full of well-appointed furniture … But she recognized the same polished floor—red as a drakestone—as that of the room where they had discovered the body of Cyrros’s patron. Reinhardt’s wife.
She struggled to sit up and discovered her hands were bound behind her.
“Why would he have me raise your wife if he killed her?” Her voice sounded weaker than she would have liked.
The two men turned to Sidony in surprise. Reinhardt quickly recovered, and he rushed forward, an accusing finger outstretched toward her.
“Because he was using you, you disgusting witch! His job was to upend the Nevarran line of succession and blame it on people like you!”
Reinhardt rounded on Cyrros.
“And because he’s a killer. That’s all he knows how to do. Give him a list of targets, and he won’t stop there. He can’t control himself.”
Sidony looked to Cyrros. He didn’t deny it, but from the look on his face, he was struggling with something unspoken.
Dragon Age: Tevinter Nights Page 23
