Just a BioWare Fan

An Offer from the Arishok

I needed to make sure Bethany knew about Mother before we did anything else. Gamlen had promised to send word but he’d hardly proven the most reliable of family members. Once I’d helped my sister to her feet she embraced me, gingerly to avoid being impaled on my pouldrons. Before I could decide how to ask delicately if she knew our mother was dead, however, Bethany proved she did.

“Did mother suffer, sister, or was it at least brief?” As always, she wore that earnest expression that made me want to tell her everything was going to be all right. It had never worked on Carver, who used to nail her braids to her bed when she was sleeping, but the rest of us had coddled her utterly. No wonder she had become so comfortable in the Gallows where no outside concerns intruded unless a mage sought them out.

As I hadn’t been there when Mother had been beheaded and sewn onto that monstrous, piecemeal body, I couldn’t really answer her question. I did the best I could. “She lingered a bit but she didn’t seem to be in pain,” I said. Bethany nodded mournfully but more pressing matters interrupted our talk.

Certain Doom and a Reprieve

The looters discouraged or dead, we returned to following bands of Qunari across Lowtown. For every ten we killed two more hauled another well-dressed human off toward Hightown. Satisfying as it was to finally let loose on them, we’d have to make our way up as well and find out what they had planned.

As we followed the warren of alleys, circling around closed gates and collapsed buildings that still smoldered and spit flame, we found ourselves outside Gamlen’s apartment. Instead of guards or armed thugs fighting for their lives we found three men wearing impressive blue and silver armor in battle with the Qunari. They fought well but were hopelessly outnumbered.

We threw ourselves into the fray and, between the seven of us, we made short work of the remaining troops. In the quiet that followed, the sounds of struggle much subdued after the swath we’d cut across Lowtown, one of the men bowed and introduced himself in a ridiculously formal Orlesian accent as Rochard, a Grey Warden.

Not long after Sebastian described the new tack some Chantry members were taking I received yet another summons from Viscount Dumar. The note arrived just before I returned, with ‘Bela and Fenris in tow, from another jaunt up the Wounded Coast. Fenris and I remained friendly in a stilted way that left much unsaid. He remained my strongest fighter, though, and I wasn’t about to let personal matters interfere with business.

That’s what I told myself, anyway. In truth, I couldn’t stay away from him. The lazy evenings drinking wine and talking, just the two of us, had ended but I invited him on jobs regularly and he still joined the group at The Hanged Man. The others seemed as determined as Fenris and I were to avoid our being alone. That eased the worst of the awkwardness most nights.

Some undertone to Dumar’s message that evening urged me to respond quickly. Instead of playing Wicked Grace with my Mabari as we’d intended we headed right back out the door and up the nearby steps to the keep. Seneschal Bran ushered us into the Viscount’s office immediately. His normal, snooty disdain carried overtones of anxiety, ratcheting up my concern another notch.

It's a Trick: Get an Axe

In telling of the Qunari earlier I find myself to have been disingenuous, another of Varric’s influences. I did, in fact, have rather more to do with them than ogling their half-nude forms on occasion. The sorts of encounters we had with their race were typical examples of life in Kirkwall for us.

While still gathering the coin to buy into Bartrand’s Deep Roads expedition we’d killed off some bandits that attacked us on one of the many paths that wound up from the city into the surrounding hills. A weasel of a dwarf named Jevaris Tintop, whom we thought we had been rescuing, promptly asked us to assume the job for which he’d hired the men that now lay dead around his feet. He promised us a share of his profits if we would kill the Tal-Vashoth, as Qunari that left the religion were called, to show his good faith to the leader of the still-faithful.

The rebels had camped north, up the Wounded Coast. Apparently Jevaris would get some secret formula for an explosive in return for their elimination, something powerful that would be in demand among the Coterie factions that controlled the caverns and passages, collectively known as the undercity, that riddled the hill on which Kirkwall was built. I needed the sovereigns so we did as he asked and then accompanied him to the Qunari compound to claim his reward.