Briala let him go. When he was gone, she let out a slow breath and rolled the tension out of her shoulders.
“Well, I thought that went well. How about you, da’len?” Felassan asked behind her.
“He’s right.” Briala shrugged, watching the moon clear the rooftops. “I grew up serving Celene. However I was treated, it was more gently than if I’d been in the alienage. Maker’s breath, I live in the palace in Val Royeaux.”
“And it’s just been one giant holiday for you, hasn’t it?” Felassan’s hand came to rest on her shoulder. “Ah, wait, no, you spend all your time spying for the empress and urging her to help these elves in a hundred ways they will never notice.”
Briala nodded without answering. The words were true, but it didn’t tighten the knots in her stomach.
“Or … ah.” Felassan chuckled. The hand on her shoulder tightened, pulling her around. In the moonlight, his eyes were deeper spots of black. “You’re not sure which it is, are you? Are you really doing this to help save elven lives, or are you doing it to protect your empress?”
“The two are inseparable,” Briala said without hesitation. “I know that Gaspard would not be gentle with the elves, and I cannot put words in his ear.” She unslung her bow and stepped out from the trees, Felassan beside her. “This is the only way.”
Felassan grinned. “Well, good. Let’s stop moping and go kill a noble, then.”
Ahead of them, at the edge of the lawn, Thren waited. Briala looked at him, the elven crusader fighting for his dead friend, and asked, “Could the Dalish help these people?”
Felassan was silent for a long moment. “I doubt we’ll ever know,” he finally said.
“Why not?”
“Because,” Felassan said, “the Dalish will never see the point.”
“Are you ready?” Thren called over, forestalling any other question Briala might have asked.
“If you are.” Briala drew an arrow from her quiver. “Let us win justice for your people.”
Felassan crossed the road, his steps even and unhurried, and came to the stone wall of Lord Mainserai’s estate. It was twelve feet high, with foot-long iron spikes jutting out and down to deter would-be thieves, along with shards of broken glass set at the top of the wall.
Felassan laid a hand to the stone wall, closed his eyes, and let out a long breath.
A rumble started in Briala’s belly and worked its way to her ears, and they popped as the stones of Lord Mainserai’s wall shifted. The metal spikes shrieked, and loose rocks shot out from stonework with sharp cracks. The wall around Felassan sagged, as though it were a snow fort melting in the spring sun, and his hand glowed with pale green light.
Briala winced as one of the spikes, warped by the twisting of the rock wall beneath it, tore away and clanged to the ground. “I thought this would be quieter.”
“You thought wrenching metal and stone apart would be quieter? Really?” Felassan pulled his hand away. As dogs began barking all through the neighborhood, he added, “Shall we depart?”
Where he had cast his spell, the wall had sunk, until it formed a canyon just a few feet high. All around it, stone was stretched, the iron spikes jutting at irregular angles like some great monster’s teeth. Briala stepped gingerly over the gap, her bow raised.
Inside, the lawn was neatly trimmed, and hedges had been sculpted into the shape of dragons and griffons and other beasts. Past the lawn, the manor itself was elaborate and overwrought, its clean white columns lit magically to display bronze sculptures of Emperor Drakon fighting darkspawn. With Thren and Felassan behind her, Briala crept into the shadow of a majestic wyvern, and then darted across the lawn to take refuge beneath a griffon’s outstretched wings.
“Who’s there?” came a cry from near the house. Briala found the guard as he stepped out, looking at the wall in confusion. “What in the Maker’s name?”
Her arrow took him in the throat, and he died without giving cry. Then a second guard stepped out from behind a column, saw his comrade fall, and let out a full-throated shout.
Felassan flung out a hand, and a boulder the size of a wagon wheel tore itself from the earth and hurtled into the guard, smashing him against the stone column. He landed with his neck twisted unnaturally and didn’t move.
“Damn it.” Briala stepped out from the hedge. “They’ll be all over us in a minute.”
“Well, don’t blame me. I got mine.”
“We need to go, now!” She took off toward the house at a sprint.
She darted across the lawn, past a beautiful marble fountain where bronze nymphs cavorted, and up the staircase where the two dead guards lay. As she reached the top of the stairs, four guards rushed around the corner with swords and shields ready.
“For the elves!” came Thren’s cry from behind Briala, and a moment later a stone whipped past her and caught the lead guard on his breastplate, knocking him back onto his heels.
They were armed and armored, and they outnumbered Briala’s group four to three. Added to that, Briala knew that the longer they fought, the more attention they would draw.
It would have to be quick.
She ran forward, firing on the run as she did. Her arrows, one after the other, split the air and glanced off iron breastplates. Fired from a half-draw on the run, they lacked the penetrating power necessary to punch through armor, but the guards stumbled and flinched, and Briala’s true arrow was already drawing back as the guards fumbled with their shields. It took the lead guard in the leg, punching through armor, and he cried out and dropped to one knee.
The next guard saw an archer with no arrow in her bow and lunged in for the easy kill. She sidestepped and slid a dagger out of its sheath and up into his face in one smooth motion. He collapsed, shrieking, but Briala was already moving.
“Oh, you poor fools,” Felassan said from behind her, and Briala flinched as lightning played off the body of the guard coming at Briala from the other side. He cried out and shuddered, paralyzed in the coils of magic, and then fell, his breastplate smoking. “Always going after the one closest to you and forgetting about the one in the back who can light you on fire.”
Briala dropped her bow, drew a second dagger, and turned to the guard she’d hobbled first. He grimaced and swung at her, and she stepped back, then lunged in and finished him quickly, her silverite daggers slashing across his throat. She turned toward the last guard, only to see that it had been handled. Thren was cutting the man’s throat with what looked like a rusty butcher’s knife, favoring a small cut on his side. He saw her look and nodded once, face grim.
Felassan came up the stairs, his staff crackling with curls of green energy. “Go,” he said. “As your people drew the city guards elsewhere, I will draw Mainserai’s men out here.” Without pausing, he leveled his staff at the guard Briala had blinded and finished him with a spear of emerald light.
Briala retrieved her bow and slung it over her shoulder. She doubted there would be much time for shooting in the close confines of the manor. She nodded to Felassan, then quietly pulled open the great bronze door and crept inside with her blades raised.
The lamps had been dimmed for the evening, and Briala squinted in the shadows. Her armor, soft drakeskin fitted specially for her slender frame, let her move as softly as if she’d been wearing a robe, and Thren moved with the quiet caution born in the slums.
She had been in enough noble houses to know the general layout, and moved confidently to the stairs. Thren trailed behind her. At the top of the stairs, shadowed hallways glittered as art on the walls caught the moonlight.
Ahead of Briala, a door opened with a tiny squeak of old metal, and a robed servant stepped out into the hall. She turned and saw them, and her mouth made a tiny soundless “Oh.”
For a long moment, nobody moved. Briala looked at the woman—an elf, at least sixty years old, in a tattered robe that would leave her too cold in the winter. The knuckles on her fingers were swollen into knots, and her graying hair had come free fro
m the bun she’d stuck it into, hanging around the papery skin of her face.
Wordlessly, the woman pointed to a room a few doors down. Then she gave Briala a tiny nod and backed into the room she’d come out of. The door closed softly, and Briala heard a lock click into place.
“And she serves him,” Thren whispered, and shook his head. Briala moved toward the door, the soft leather soles of her boots making no noise on the carpeted floor.
Quietly, Thren pulled the door open.
The room inside must have seemed impressive to Thren, Briala guessed, by his shocked stare. To Briala, it spoke of someone with enough money to afford luxury, but no taste in how to spend it. Fereldan furs hung next to Tevinter statues and sculptures from the Anderfels. A jeweled dagger was half-sheathed carelessly on a nightstand, and a painting that looked in the dim moonlight like an original Caliastri was hung on a wall that would see its colors leached by sunlight within a few years.
Lord Mainserai lay alone in a voluminous canopied bed, snoring softly. The lord evidently preferred to sleep in the nude.
Thren stared at the man who had killed his friend. “For crimes against Lemet and the elven people,” he began, and then broke off as Briala, who had never stopped walking in the first place, leaned over and slit Mainserai’s throat. “What did you … I wanted him to know!”
Briala wiped her blade on the sheets and glanced at the body. “I believe he just figured it out. Let’s go.”
Thren glared at her. “This was not your fight.”
“That’s why you needed me here,” Briala said, and sighed at his puzzled look. “I know what you’re feeling. I killed the noblewoman who killed my parents.”
That got Thren’s attention. “I thought you were just some noble’s spy.”
“No.” Briala peeked out of the bedroom, checking the halls. She heard no sign of inside guards, but it was best to be sure. “I am the empress’s spy.” And because it was not quite a lie, and because Thren needed to hear it, she added, “Empress Celene could not arrest Lord Mainserai without incurring the anger of the other nobles, but she wished to see justice done.”
She crept out into the hallway, Thren behind her. Both still had their daggers out.
“So she sends you to kill those who anger her?” Thren asked. He had the good sense to keep his voice down now that they were out of the bedroom.
“Yes.” Briala spent more time watching and listening than she did killing, but in the twenty years Celene had ruled Orlais, Briala had gotten her hands bloody often enough.
“Like the noblewoman who killed your parents?”
“No.” She paused at a thump from around a corner, then relaxed when she saw that it was just a cat making its nightly rounds. “That was for me. And that is why you needed me here. When I went after the noblewoman, my need for vengeance very nearly got me killed.”
They moved quietly back down the stairs to the front parlor. “Then I suppose I am glad you were here,” Thren said behind her.
“As am I.” Briala smiled.
She had done it.
Briala hadn’t allowed herself to think it before, when she’d ridden into town with Felassan and seen the poor elves who fancied themselves rebels. They’d built a barricade that any chevalier would vault over and wore badly tanned leather armor that an axe or halberd would cut through like it was satin. In their naiveté, they had been talking about Halamshiral belonging to the elves again. It was heartbreaking to see them so proud over so little, unaware of how much trouble they had caused, or how close they had all come to death at the hands of the imperial army.
That army would have crushed them in hours.
If Celene had seen them in that moment, she would have withdrawn her permission in an instant, and Briala would have been hard-pressed to argue.
Briala wondered what Gaspard was trying to make of the elven situation. He was too opportunistic to pass it up, and too crude to come up with something truly clever. With luck, he’d be speaking of it as a dire situation that needed a firm hand, so that when the situation inexplicably vanished, he’d look even more the fool.
Through the still-open bronze doors ahead, the yard was quiet. Briala wondered if Felassan had dealt with all of Mainserai’s guards, but it seemed bright outside. Perhaps he’d lit something on fire?
Briala came outside, and blinking past the glare of torches, she saw a dozen armored men on horseback ringed around her.
“In the name of Empress Celene,” Ser Michel’s voice rang out, “you are under arrest for the murder of Lord Mainserai.”
For a moment, she thought she had misheard, but when her eyes adjusted to the brightness, she saw the tabards of the men around her, the golden lion on a field of purple.
She saw Ser Michel’s face, grim and resolute, and at her stare, he only nodded.
She had failed, after all.
Felassan was nowhere to be seen, though great hunks of stone had been torn from the formerly pristine lawn, and some of the marble columns were scorched, near crumpled bodies that marked more of Mainserai’s guards.
“I surrender.” Swallowing the bile that rose up in her throat, Briala dropped her daggers and held her hands up, showing her empty palms. The silverite blades struck the ground with a sound like glass breaking, though of course the blades themselves were fine. Several of the chevaliers glanced down at the sound, surprised that an elf would have such fine weapons. They would of course recognize the distinct sound, since all of them were nobles. Well, except for Michel, some dark and laughing part of her mind noted.
Celene had given them to her on the night she had come back to her in Val Royeaux. It had been the first night they made love.
“Traitor!” Thren yelled, and she couldn’t deny the insult.
He raised his knife with a wordless yell, and a dozen crossbow bolts tore through him. He was dead before he hit the ground.
Ser Michel dismounted and came forward with shackles ready.
“Ser Michel,” she said. “We do keep running into each other in odd places.”
He said nothing. His face was grim and set, and after a moment, she realized what he feared.
“No,” she said quietly. “I would not spend it so fruitlessly.” Even if he did hold to his word, the two of them versus eleven chevaliers would be a short and one-sided battle.
He still said nothing, but he nodded once, and the muscles of his neck relaxed slightly. It surprised her. It was unlikely that any of his fellow chevaliers would believe whatever claims she made there in front of the home where she had just murdered a noble, so if he was worried, it was because he would actually have held himself to his promise. He was a more honorable noble than most actual nobles.
Michel turned her around, firmly but not roughly, and shackled her arms behind her. She let him escort her through the late Lord Mainserai’s yard. The other chevaliers formed up around her, wordless. Briala was not sure whether they had been given orders to treat her gently or if the obviously fine armor told them that she was working for a noble and should not be casually beaten. She very much doubted the code of honor about treatment of prisoners would apply to elven assassins.
Her mind spun new fancies with every step. They had come here and demanded surrender. This hadn’t been about stopping the elves, then—if it were, the chevaliers would simply have killed them. It was about Briala. That explained the light treatment.
Could they be with Gaspard, countering Celene’s plan? Unlikely. Ser Michel would never have turned traitor, and while Melcendre had lured him out with blackmail once, he was still too ashamed to allow such a ruse to work twice. They had come from Celene. Had Gaspard done something to force the empress’s hand? Had the Divine made a new demand? What had changed Celene’s mind?
Then, as she came past the torches, Briala saw the night sky, glowing a sooty red.
She smelled the smoke of Halamshiral’s slums burning.
After that, Briala stopped thinking.
* * *
By t
he time morning came, most of the work was done.
Empress Celene rode with her forces on her shining white mare, resplendent in royal plate that glittered even in the weak, smoky light of dawn. She ought to be tired, she knew. But even though she was up late this day instead of early, the dawn worked its magic upon her mind, keeping her moving.
The elves had heard the crash of armor as the army approached and had tried to form a spear wall, using sticks with knives and wooden shields made from tavern tables. The Orlesian army, marching four abreast in the narrow and winding streets of Halamshiral’s slums, had cut them down without even pausing. When they reached an open square, the horsemen had swept out and around in clean flanking waves, butchering the elves as they tried to flee and terrorizing any who thought to gather themselves for a counterattack.
After that, Celene’s greatest concern was troops losing discipline and turning the night’s work into a celebration. The elves lived in these slums, Celene knew, and with nowhere to turn, they would be vicious if given the chance. She rode along, protected but present, and snapped orders to the men when they seemed inclined to rush into a building for easy looting.
They marched through the elven slums with military precision, and when they rode back out, the section claimed by the rebels was burning behind them.
The lords and ladies of Halamshiral were assembled in the upper market square outside the gates that separated the nobles from the peasants, waiting in silence as Celene and her forces returned. The nobles stood in front, with their bodyguards. The merchants and tradesmen and servants stood off to the side, holding buckets. It was a wise precaution. The heat behind Celene was a blistering curtain that tried to steal the air from her lungs, and sparks and embers drifted freely over the stone walls that kept the nobles safe.
Those stone walls, Celene thought, likely dated back to when the elves first built Halamshiral. She wondered if they ever imagined that one day, those walls would protect human nobility from the elves who burned on the other side.
Dragon Age: The Masked Empire Page 12
