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

stealing, forging, stuff.

[exsecutus]

There are four parts of the plan, and they go like this:

Marisol's part is simple. Get to Fabria. Get in his quarters, his office, anywhere that correspondence might be found. Kostos had told Nikos to look into Fabria, though not in so many words, and Nikos is loyal. It is especially fortuitous when his loyalty might be used for dual purpose.

The grandmother's letters. A cache might contain a word on the movements of Grand Cleric Agathe. A well-connected woman will have made this her business to know. If the letters can't be found, the handwriting might at least be imitated by their clever rifter, the tone copied. After all, how hard can it be, Nikos had reasoned to Marisol and a glass of her Antivan red, to be Ilias Fabria?

The design is up to Marisol. It will no doubt be flamboyant.

And later, in Kirkwall, Nikos brings the code to Carla to copy. Their rifter is not his type. He can deal with her, if she will be as good as she says. And as the plan has started to come together, each piece a fit, he might be found to be less sour in turns. This will work. It has to work.

The code is not an easy one. Caspar had given the cipher to Nikos just last night, delivered straight from the Spider's Sons in Antiva. Rolled into a thin scroll, secreted inside a thin tube like a single strand of pasta or a very long stick. They'd worked out the letters together, with Nikos writing and Caspar dictating, and now their product is here for Carla to look through: twenty pages of letters, to be written in the hand of six Antivan merchants and merchant princes.

"It is chaos," Nikos promises, when he makes the delivery to Carla in the tavern. And he looks tired--darker circles smudged beneath his eyes--but happy, or at least as happy as he ever looks. Caspar might even be with him, getting wine at the bar, or else tucked into a booth somewhere else at the tavern.


[OR anything else connected to the forging part of this can go here!]

failure to frame

[exsecutus]

In Antiva City, Kitty has been given the use of a little apartment over a fishmonger's shop: two rooms, one for sleeping and one for entertaining and receiving, furnished sparsely, with a well-made sofa and a sturdy double bed outfitted with a good mattress. The wardrobe has no personal effects. If this is a home, it is inhabited by ghosts who wear no clothes, eat no food, and have left no living trace of themselves to be glimpsed by the curious.

Outside, there is the street, cobbled in the Antivan fashion, and the paper lanterns strung from building to building, making a kind of fanciful canopy to walk beneath. And on the corner, there is a little tavern, decently close--and the water, two blocks one way, and three blocks the other, the homes and apartments and villas of some certain merchant princes. Marisol will have told all about them: their names, their gossip, their wives, lovers, children, debts, their embarrassing childhood nicknames, a full accounting from a woman of equal social standing who has known princes all her life. Supporters of Benedetta, all.

Kitty was sent early, to find the right time. And the letters were sent with her, a cache secreted in the false back of a book of Antivan history from the Storm Age, each letter written in the particular code and hands that Carla gave to them. Grand Cleric Agathe is named all over their lines, while the blessed Benedetta is heaped with praise, named as hope, hailed preemptively in tell-tale places as the Divine. Plans, coordinates, locations, dates.

And all of this is being held, right now, by a fucking monkey.

Crouched on the writing desk beneath the open window, the monkey cocks his head at Kitty. He is adorable, all bright eyed and close-cut fur, clad only in a little purple vest. The open window is behind him, streaming in the evening smells of the street and the sea breeze and freedom, above all else. The monkey makes a noise of curious inquiry and peels off the first page from the letters and holds the page out to Kitty, his leathery little hands clutching creases into the careful code.


[OR anything connected to the botched frame job can go here!]

assassination

[exsecutus]

The slender neck of Grand Cleric Agathe is a wet ruin. Blood soaks into her gossamer veil, and into the dirt of the road. There is blood on her lips too, and her hands are clutched around her necklace, holding to the symbol of Andraste like a child with a talisman.

There were four escorts that had come with her. Three are dead; one is dying, her hat fallen from her head. She coughs, and it echoes around the copse of trees. Nikos, wiping his knife against the inside of his robe, shoots her a glare.

The road to Val Royeaux is dangerous. Everyone knows that. And Agathe had come prepared. Her guards are over the hills, and the camp, all of the Chantry brothers and sisters that traveled from Nevarra with her, or else joined up along the way--and the camp of pilgrims, the devout that wished to see the election of the Divine. The cookfires make a blue-gray haze over the hills, hanging like a shroud. It had been easy to join the train, especially for a group wearing the robes of the Chantry.

Nikos hates robes. He looks stupid in robes. Caspar, of course, looks amazing, and others look fine. He wipes his knife again on the backside of the tabard, the part that will lay flat against the plain gray robe and hide the crimson stains of Agathe's blood.

The dying Chantry sister coughs again. The towels that she was carrying have tumbled onto the ground and are thick with her blood. The little pool is cloudy with blood too, half surrounded by the screens that the sisters were hanging to conceal the Grand Cleric's bath.

"Someone shut her up," Nikos says, tightly. "Before they hear."

They have to move, and move quickly. Escape is the next objective, now that the Grand Cleric lies dead.