closed || nothing sacred, all things wild

[exsecutus]

WHO: Nikos, Caspar, Nell, Carla, Max, Kitty, Marisol, and the letters of Ilias Fabria
WHAT: the assassination of Grand Cleric Agathe of Cumberland
WHEN: mid Cloudreach
WHERE: Kirkwall, Antiva, and the long and lonely road to Val Royeaux
NOTES: part of the mod plot

Comments

[galvanising]

Behind all this, Nell sighs. Doing magic without a staff is harder--harder to generate power, harder to control it once you do--but something she's been practicing since the rebellion began. Even so, it's no neat Knight-Enchanter spell but a blast of pure force that whips out of her raised hands, lifting the two unsuspecting toll-collectors up into the air and slamming them back into the ground with a heavy thump and muddy squelch that don't quite cover the sounds of bones cracking.

"Make sure to stab them or something so it doesn't look like magic," she says as she strides ahead toward the dock.

[exsecutus]

Nikos doesn't startle easily. Then again, Nikos doesn't often witness two men picked up and slammed to the ground by invisible force. Startled isn't the word for the look on his face as Nell pushes past them, but it's his version of it. He lets that look slide over to Caspar then, for half a second. Years of cooperation and learning each other's tells puts plain what he's thinking: okay, then.

The warier of the two toll-booth keepers lays, perfectly still, with his limbs splayed at weird angles. The one who had greeted them is making a noise like a wounded animal--ragged, desperate--and his eyes are very white in his muddy face. This, at least, doesn't disturb Nikos.

He yanks the tabard off over his head and draws his knife as he moves toward the closer and clearly dead one. Three quick strikes, in the back. The push of his knife into meat is easy. It's a good sharp blade. He wipes the flat of it on the man's roughspun shirt, and grabs hold of one of his dead weighted arms, to arrange him into something more natural. As natural as a surprise stabbing could ever be.

There's four boats tied up at the dock, looking like children's toys if one has in mind the larger frigates and merchant galleons that typically put in at Kirkwall. One of them has a little stick of a main mast, without sail. The other three are flat-bottomed, poled along before a crude sail would be erected once the river widens. Only one of these shows signs of life. Too shallow for any kind of a cavernous below-decks beyond its smuggler's bolt holes, the boat boasts instead a central structure almost like a cottage--two floors, one sloughed on top of the other, and a flat roof of wood and tarpaulin. There's even a chimney, which has a thin line of blacker smoke streaming out of it.

Just before the docks, there's a few small daub-and-wattle outerbuildings, no more than sheds, which could serve as a space to duck behind and change out of blood-spattered Chantry robes. Or anywhere, really, so long as it's done quickly. From back in the woods, the shouting has doubled, and is joined by other sounds that carry on the wind through the mossy trees--a bell of some kind, more voices, alarm. The toll-booth keeper drags one of his arms out to his side. His fingers squeeze at the mud of the road, and he makes that noise again, high and horrible, adding to the chaos that is swelling in the moment.