[closed] if you're here and I'm here then who's flying the plane

[katabasis]

WHO: Flint & Yseult
WHAT: Trust exercises
WHEN: Immediately pre-hasmal invasion
WHERE: Near Hasmal
NOTES: will include content warning in subject lines if applicable

It's almost guaranteed that their contact has utilized the flow of refugees across the border and toward Hasmal as a cover to pass into the South, though they aren't meant to meet them in that. Doubtless every breed of intelligencier currently peddles their trade there, for if an agent of one secret network might slip in that direction then why not agents of all?

Rather, after crossing the broad width of the Minanter on one of the point-nosed ferries (in the company of a pilot with a near supernatural skill for weaseling extra coin out of pocket, but who tactfully neglects to intervene in the debate his passengers are engaged in), they hire a pair of horses and turn west toward what is allegedly an all but forgotten trading post by the name of Drake's Landing which is said to boast such luxuries as a nearly empty inn and the cheapest drink in the political tri-corner.

At some point—perhaps after the fourth or fifth narrow bridge that they have to coax the horses across, for the landscape is threaded through with twisting offshoots of the Minanter—Flint remarks, "If we come this way again, it would be faster to row in."

Maybe that's how the Venatori beat them to the Landing. Or maybe the ferry pilot had a raven in the little cabin at the back of his boat who had carried word of a certain notable captain of Riftwatch swiftly North.

Regardless—

Comments

[hassaran]

"I should leave you to manage on your own for suggesting Rutyer's better practice than I am." She doesn't.

She also doesn't leave it. Once he's settled and had a moment, but before the acute pain of that rearrangement is likely to have faded back into duller persistent misery, she says: "Eventually, everyone breaks. It would be a mistake for us to leave the decision about what we would rather die than give them to that moment."

[katabasis]

He's the more insufferably relentless of the two, he might have suggested. But even Byerly Rutyer would have allowed him a few minutes of abject suffering before pressing after him with all the temerity of a finger on a bruise. So maybe not.

"Then by all means." Maker, he is exhausted. "Lead on."

[hassaran]

He can consider that an object lesson. Yseult folds her hands in her lap, fingers laced.

"Old information first, like our dead contacts in Perendale. Information about Riftwatch they could learn with a few weeks of decent surveillance. Names, numbers, organization, donors. Then agents and operations in areas we control. Kirkwall and Ferelden, southern Orlais, contacts in the March and the Chantry. People they'll struggle to get to. Then those in quiet places, working up to the higher value agents. They cannot have our contacts in Tevinter or the Anderfels, the location of the eluvians, or Research's project."

[katabasis]

He listens with his head cocked faintly to one side as his hand absently feels along the outer seam of his trousers. It's an unconscious examination—a quiet, unthinking assessment of how far pain travels and radiates and to what degree. The more viciously efficient thing to do would be to submit each knee to a thorough prodding to determine the extent of the damage there, but he can't bring himself to do it and it doesn't really matter besides. Without a healer, the difference between how they might be broken makes only a nominal difference.

(Sweat has sprung back onto his forehead as accessory to his move. Or because he has been sitting long enough while his joints swell that everything else has finally decided to go crooked along with them. Who fucking knows.)

"And you?" His eyes rove over to her; the angle of his temple reverses direction. "How long are we committed to keeping you a secret?"

[hassaran]

It is the natural next question. Not one she could raise herself without it seeming she had begun the conversation precisely to answer it. She is watching the hesitant press of fingers to knee, but looks up when Flint turns back, without any of the speed or subtlety that would suggest guilt over the observation.

"They will believe I know details that others do not about our networks and communications and those of our allies. And I do. If they know who I am, they'll likely insure I don't die until they have it all. How motivating you find that is not a question I can answer."

[katabasis]

His examination of her is similarly guiltless, something that is both patient and measuring coiled in the shape of it. What good would it do at this point to surrender her to Tagaris? It gains nothing but her very temporary security. It risks a great deal. It will not lift either of them out of this cellar unless it's to travel somewhere else. To be sucked deeper into the Imperium where some blood mage will be conveniently to hand in order to trivialize the work being done here in this moment.

"Nina, then," is something they've already agreed on. "Unless we find ourselves in a position where more time becomes a luxury."

If there estimation is even remotely correct, they're not far from Drake's Landing. Failing all else, it's not unbelievable to suspect that someone might come trailing after them.

[hassaran]

She observes Flint's measurement without offense for the calculations it suggests. Instead there is the sense of Yseult tracing along the paths of his mind beside him, watching as he follows a parallel route of logic she's already walked a half-step to the side (when she said they won't let me die she'd meant it as a warning). She knows him enough to know he will most likely think through the problem in a similar way, enough not to trust an answer that isn't preceded by that work. She knows, too, that a moment ago he could hardly move without her help.

His agreement is met with her own, a nod and then a tip of her head back against the wine rack. There is more that could be said, plans for the worst that might go without saying but probably shouldn't. But she can see the sweat and the pallor. The situation is escalating, but no so quickly (especially for her) that she needs to press him now. So she waits a minute or two to see if sleep begins to take him, and when it doesn't it's only a conversational tone without the keen edge of earlier when she asks, "Have you done this before? Been interrogated. Tortured."

[katabasis]

A warning, a promise; the gradations of the thing hardly matter. What's true is simple—that they are most likely to leave here together, either under their own power or at the hands of some rescue, or they won't leave at all. They will slip away, spirited off into the dark toward some unknown place inside the Imperium where the value of them in combination will quickly become inconsequential.

He thinks of that black pit down which they'd thrown Valeriantus and feels some vague stirring of resentment for the idea of it.

"Not in this fashion, no," is what he eventually answers when Yseult finds her way back to asking. You? he is meant to ask then, an easy deflection disguised as conversation.

"I was once held and tried in a Seheron outpost. The workings of that and this are remarkably similar."

[hassaran]

Yseult, who has read reports of that episode (and was about to say as much), tips her head as if puzzled. "In what respect?"

[katabasis]

A turn of the hand; a low rasp of metal.

"Both rely on the idea that you will feel some"—what? He searches for the word—"Obligation to return yourself to an earlier state. One in which you're the only person in control of defining who or what you are rather than some monster on a gallows or a prisoner at their mercy. That eventually, you will use whatever justification you can in an attempt to exert control. Which they will then happily use to hang you."

Or lever information free with. Or, or, or.

[hassaran]

It sounds good, so it takes Yseult a few minutes to work out what part of that comparison it is that niggles at her, the wrong note hidden in seeming harmony. "The trial cannot have relied on that; they were going to hang you no matter what you said or didn't say.

"But you are right about this. If they were more crude, or in more of a hurry, they would just flog us until we talked or died. But these two are more subtle than that. Our food comes in irregular intervals, the lantern filled with a different amount of oil each time, the banging on the door at random times. Disorientation to speed the sense of helplessness."

[katabasis]

"Executing someone isn't the point of a trial anymore than making us miserable is the point of this," is a mild check. "Both are concerned with the effect produced. The person at the center is only as important in as much as they can be leveraged."

Tagaris, making a point to remind him why he is there with Riftwatch to begin with. It's the illusion of a foothold in the same way the invitation to speak there in that square had been.

(If all goes according to the the Magister's intentions, they'll no doubt be stripped of what they know and eventually killed in this place too.)

[hassaran]

"My point," speaking of torture, time to argue, "Is that your experience being held for a day and paraded to the gallows is not as relevant to this as you suggested. What mattered there was the effect produced in the crowd, not in you. That was the focus of any manipulation. You were a prop. This is the opposite."

[katabasis]

Mildly, in the loose way someone might deal out cards very late at night (or in the way that someone who is tired of a great many things, but particularly matters of semantics might say)—

"It's more relevant than you're insisting. What reason is there for putting us together if not to shine a light on the current discrepancy between us? I'm here so you can see this," with a gesture to his knees. "And so I can it when they heal you. But by all means. If you can think of some alternative purpose, I'd be very interested to hear it."

[hassaran]

"Of course that's why. And we would both know that anyway because we're not stupid." Sharper, quicker--if he's going to play her part of irritating placidity, she will fill the space vacated. "I wasn't asking about your familiarity with the philosophical theory of torture."

[katabasis]

The look he tips in her direction is all shaded by the lamplight—flat, because no illumination finds what might otherwise ordinarily appear to be some low spark of irritation. So. Patiently:

"What you asked is how I thought the two things were similar. Listen or don't."

[hassaran]

"My mistake," is in no way an apology, "I assumed you had brought it up because it was useful." Keeping them in the same room does have its benefits for the Venatori, even if they're not the ones expected.

She doesn't really believe that's going to be the last word, but is done regardless. She sets her head back, rearranges shoulders against the rack and, in just a few minutes more, has dozed off with remarkable ease.

[katabasis]

His reply is brief—an exasperated huff of air that is half frustration and half disbelief expressed as humor. For fuck's sake in no words at all.

She sets her head back. Beside her, Flint makes to cross his arms and then decides his shoulders would prefer otherwise. So he sits and he waits and he doesn't fall asleep at all much less with her ease thanks to the thrumming of various and the stiffness which has begun to settle in. In the quiet, he entertains the idea of drawing a bend into his legs but subsequently abandons that too. Thinks instead about Hasmal; about the Minanter; about what he and Mssr Holden had briefly discussed while they'd sat in that field above Val Chevin; about the bizarre truth that if he is comparing this storeroom to that forsaken outpost in Seheron then at least the company he'd found himself alongside there had understood certain fundamental commonalities between them.

Somewhere, Charles Vane must be very fucking pleased with himself (though Flint doubts his perception of the man figures at all into Charles' self image—or even that Charles entertains the past time of self-evaluation. It seems largely out of keeping with his habits).

When next the door opens, it's to permit a guard to refill the flickering lantern. Presumably some invisible rotation of duties has reset and begun again.

[hassaran]

Yseult's eyes open as footsteps arrive outside the door and she watches the guard until his work is complete. Then she shuts her eyes again and goes back to sleep, untormented by thoughts of Flint's opinion of her.