Post #2423667 in The City of Chains, a roleplay on RPG

The mansion in which Gaius Leviticus was staying with his retinue was a large one, and it was clear from the well-maintained stonework that he had the funds required to maintain an estate used only infrequently. By the time they reached it, all in Hightown was dark and quiet, but Amalia did not take this to mean they could simply walk in the front door. There were bound to be guards posted, and even though those were to die as well, it would be better if they could conduct as much of this as possible without alerting the entire household. It was also true that she wanted their method of entry to be inscrutable—she did not desire that the fear they spread here be only fear of insufficiently-locked doors or open windows. The basra needed to understand that nothing and nobody was safe if they antagonized the Qunari, and few had antagonized them so egregiously as the Magister within.

Amalia and Ithilian, having scaled the outer wall surrounding the estate with little trouble, now had their backs pressed to it, the natural shadow falling over their bodies and making them inscrutable, blended into the stone and the dark. “Do you see the lit window?” Amalia asked, referring to one on the third floor of the mansion. It was one of only a few illuminated glass panes, but the direction of her gaze would make it obvious to which she referred. “The room we want is to the right. The lit one is the study—I expect Leviticus is in there now, but the desk faces the outside, so it’s better to enter from the door behind.” It went without saying that they would have to be careful in their ascent, to avoid drawing his attention.

Studying the edifice itself, she decided that the best approach would be to simply climb the outside, which they should be able to do without earning themselves any notice. The first story or so was smooth stone, with no handholds to speak of and no windows on this side, which meant that her best bet would be to ascend by jumping to catch a second-floor windowsill. “If you can boost me, I can climb and then let you use the chain." It wasn't exactly inflected as a question, but she did pause for input regardless.

"Sounds easy enough," Ithilian said, at the moment not enjoying the shape of the longbow slung over his shoulders. It was too useful a tool to pass up on, certainly, but made squeezing down low or into tight places rather awkward. Ithilian was a trained hunter and naturally moved both swiftly and quietly, but he hadn't yet learned how to move throughout urban environments like he could in the forest or the wilderness. It was unnatural and took some time getting used to. The last few years had helped him, certainly, but Amalia was still far beyond him in matters of stealth.

They'd seen a few patrols on the way in, but they were scattered and mostly easy to predict. When they were clear, Ithilian moved forward, looking around often to check for signs of guards, before he arrived under the windowsill, turning to offer Amalia her boost up.

Amalia did not waste time. From a stand, she lunged into a moderate run, placing her foot in Ithilian’s laced hands and springing, aided by the extra force he provided. This, she remembered, was why Ben-Hassrath so often worked in teams. She caught the ledge of a second-story window with her fingertips, bracing her feet against the unyielding stone and leveraging herself up with an easy, trained grace. She was perched on the sill shortly thereafter, and conveniently, there was a decorative ridge of stone between the second and third floors, which she could use for the barest of workable handholds on her way up. She might have had to use her chain as a grappling hook, otherwise, and that was unfavorable for the noise it would produce.

Once she was atop the sill she wanted, Amalia tested the window, finding it unlocked. That didn’t sit well with her, and she grimaced. This had all been a little too simple—the small number of guards out front, the regularity of the patrols… either this Leviticus was so lax with his security that he should have died long before she killed him, or else something suspicious was going on. The trouble was, she had no way of knowing. On any other day, she might have simply assumed that a careless servant had left the window unlatched, perhaps because the room was seldom used anyway. Today, though… she felt even less like taking chances than she usually would.

Still, there was little else for it but to go in, and she drew a single-edged knife, placing the dull edge between her teeth and biting down firm enough to hold, but not so much so that she risked cutting her mouth rather than letting it go. There was a way to be sensible about such things, and if Amalia could choose only one positive attribute to have for the rest of her life, she would choose sense. The ‘rest of her life’ would be longer, that way. Pushing the window open slowly, so as not to cause it to squeak, she stepped cautiously into the darkness of the room, listening carefully for anything that might betray a presence in the inky dark. She heard nothing, though a faint sense of unease pervaded, and she unlooped the chain from her waist with perhaps more haste than was strictly necessary and eased it down, hand-over-hand so as to prevent any unnecessary clanking. She had to lean halfway out the window to get the right length, but she knew how to brace her feet to make this possible. With a terse beckoning gesture from the fingers of her left hand, she bid him climb—as quickly and quietly as possible.

Ithilian noticed the window being unlocked as well, though he had spent most of Amalia's climb watching for the seemingly nonexistant guards. Even most shemlen were not this unwary, and they should have been trying harder, if they knew the situation. To say that the Qunari had no love for the Tevinter Imperium was a slight understatement, and if this magister was demanded dead by the Qun, surely he would be aware of that. And surely he would expect them to try, upon coming to a city currently housing a good deal of their military forces. And while he would have liked to believe the easy entrance was due to Amalia's skill and planning, Ithilian tried to remain a realistic elf.

Taking the offered chain, Ithilian did not put his feet against the wall to brace himself, but rather simply pulled himself up with his upper body strength, one arm length at a time. Scaling the building by walking up it would have been most awkward, and he didn't feel comfortable in his ability to do it as silently as Amalia had. The chain was little different from a vine up to a tree branch, though, and he scaled it efficiently and effectively. By the time he reached the top and climbed through the window, however, he heard a voice. "Patrol's coming again," he said quietly, urging her to reel in the chain before it was seen. He remained crouched down inside the window, looking about carefully as she had no doubt already done, but there was no threat in here as of yet.

She didn’t need to be told twice, and Amalia wound up the chain as fast as silence would allow, hooking it back onto her belt and calmly removing the dagger from her mouth. Huntress she was not, at least not in the conventional sense. But she had been assassinating people for a very long time, indeed, and perhaps a bit perversely, the familiar motions of a task like this were helping her keep her nerves in check. She was not an optimist by a long shot, and she knew that this was going to go badly eventually, but for now it was enough that she had some time remaining to her before that happened. Creeping across the floor of this unknown room, she used the dim light that filtered in through the (now once again shut) window, testing each of her steps before placing the full weight of her person onto each subsequent tread, in case there was something on the floor that she wouldn’t expect.

Thankfully, there was not, and they made it to the other end of the room without incident. Staring hard at the light coming from beneath the door, she determined that no feet were passing by, but she pressed her ear to the wood anyway, stilling her breathing for several moments. No steps, receding or otherwise, but it may not stay that way. Turning the knob fully before she pushed, Amalia cracked the door open, and, upon discovering that the hallway was, in fact, completely bereft of life, she moved it wider, inclining her head leftwards and motioning for Ithilian to close the door behind him and keep a watch.

The room immediately next to the one they had entered was as occupied as it had been last night—she could make out the flicker of candle-light from underneath it, as well as something faintly bluish and most likely magical. Her reconnaissance had informed her that this was Leviticus’s private study—the target was just beyond this door. That he was awake was irritating, but not insurmountable, as far as obstacles went. The same ear-to-the-door trick revealed a loud shuffling of parchment, followed by a muffled curse in a masculine tone. If he’d just dropped something, he was probably standing… and stooping to retrieve it. It was take this advantage now, or risk standing out here for too long to wait for another. “Ithilian,” she hissed, reversing her grip on the dagger and placing her palm on the door. This one gave without the need to turn a handle at all—it had been faintly cracked, and swung inward at the insistence of her hand. Ithilian had moved to the other side of the door, his bow in hand an arrow half pulled back already. He assumed Amalia would move in close, and targets were often silenced quicker with an arrow to the throat or head than they were by sprinting across a room to end them with a blade.

Amalia was tense as a coiled spring, ready to leap, but the motion was uncomfortably stilled halfway across the room, as soon as her harried mind caught up with her trained body and she recognized just who she was looking at. He sat casually on the chair that went with the desk, one ankle crossed over the opposite knee, the spilled stack of parchments unattended on the floor to his left. Pitch-dark hair fell to his shoulders, kept back from the patrician lines of his alabaster-pale face. There was a glint of amusement in the likewise-black eyes, and indeed, it was reflected in his half-coy, half-arrogant smile, a close-lipped expression that she knew well enough to revile. His robes were deep crimson, and from the look on his face, he was mocking her with the choice and knew that she knew it.

“Well, well. And here I’d thought you’d died. Imagine my surprise when my men found that empty hole in the earth. You’ll have to tell me how you did that sometime, Ben-Hassrath.” He sounded… delighted, even, though there was an undertone of malicious amusement to it. The smile grew, just fractionally. “Ah, but I forget my manners… it’s Amalia now, isn’t it? I’m so pleased.”

Amalia, still frozen, swallowed thickly. She’d run so many possible scenarios for this moment through her head over the past decade, but half of them were moot because she couldn’t kill him, and the other half because she couldn’t seem to make herself move. The fingers closed over her knife felt numb, because she knew it was a useless thing, here. Just like her armor was a useless thing. Just like the paint she hid her face behind was a useless thing. He knew everything there was to know about her, every way she could be hurt, and she’d somehow managed to forget that, to focus so hard on erecting her petty defenses, her disguises, and think herself safe.

The fear crawling from her belly up past her lungs and coldly into her throat was telling her a different story.

Her lack of response earned a chuckle, of false good nature, and the man’s chill black eyes swept to Ithilian. “And what’s this? Making friends, are we, dear one? I do hope he’s better than the last; we both know how well that turned out for you. Welcome, ser elf, to the humble abode of my master, Gaius Leviticus. I am Marcus Alesius. I’m curious: did our little Amalia tell you just what you were getting yourself into?”

Ithilian had pulled up and drawn the arrow fully back, aimed directly for the man's forehead, and it was only Amalia's inability to move that had stopped him from loosing. She didn't seem to have been hit with any kind of spell, so he had to assume she was merely petrified at seeing this particular man in front of them. That he assumed that only a spell of some kind would stop her from moving him spoke to how swift she was, and decisive as well. He become so used to the certainty in her motions that when it was suddenly and clearly stolen away, it was rather unnerving.

There was so much here that he was on the edge of knowing, and there was that danger again, that hesitance to involve himself with this knowledge, for fear of what consequences it would bring. Their lives had always been unspoken between each other, and indeed he still had not told her hardly anything of his past, even after returning from Ferelden. She knew he had lost a great deal, but that was always enough. No more needed to be said. They worked well together, and there was an unspoken desire to prevent anything from getting in the way of that. It was as though working together had brought forth a desire, in both of them, to try being a new person.

Ithilian did not lower his weapon, even though he knew he was not allowed to kill this magister. He felt as though he was mere moments from learning things Amalia had never wished him to know, and for any of it to come from this shem and not her own lips was wrong. If she'd wished for him to know of this friend she had, she would have told him. If she'd wished to truly tell him "what he was getting himself into", she would have already done so. The man he'd seen in the Fade when the demon had tried to reach her flashed in his memory. In fact, apart from the difference in attire, he had looked remarkably similar to this man, but he allowed himself to draw no conclusions.

"She does nothing without reason," he said evenly. "I believe in her." It was the least he could do, after all his errors. Had she not been one of the ones to make him believe in himself? "Amalia?" They needed to do something. They could not kill this man, and he was more than capable of making this entire plan fall apart in a matter of moments. But she was the lead here, not him.

Amalia was actually shaking faintly, and it was clear from the thousand-yard stare she had that she wasn’t in the room with them, at least not mentally. The fingers of her freehand clenched and unclenched, almost rhythmically, like the way her blood pounded in her ears. How long had it been since she was so thoroughly in the grip of memory? She could feel the shackles she’d never quite managed to unlock pulling at her, biting into her wrists with a familiar kind of pain. All pain was familiar.

Ithilian’s words seemed only to add to Marcus’s enjoyment of the situation, and his smile split into a grin. “Believe in her? That’s rich. Even she doesn’t believe in her, am I right, kadan?” The word hit her like a smack in the face, and though she’d heard everything else, and registered something fighting the fear, it was only this which brought her back to the present. He mocked her, with a studied deliberateness that had only ever belonged to him, using freely the one word she never could, so casually, like it meant nothing. Like everything she fought against, every nightmare that drew her awake in a cold sweat, every doubt and uncomfortable prick of memory could be so easily swept aside.

And that just made her angry. Seeming to regain some of herself, Amalia adjusted her grip on the knife. Glancing over her shoulder, she nodded faintly, as if to confirm that she had heard, that she was back. “You know you are,” she replied, still blunt to a fault, even when it was her own weakness she exposed. “But that doesn’t matter. I have other people to believe in, now. And you will not stop me from doing this.” Marcus looked nonplussed, though perhaps not entirely surprised.

“Stop you? Why in Thedas would I want to stop you? I made you, kadan, and now you are going to serve me a very nice purpose indeed. I know your people too well—I knew the Ariqun would send you, and I knew you would come tonight. I even lessened the guard for you and left the most likely window unlocked. Leviticus has the remainder of his guard with him at my suggestion. Everything is perfectly in place—all you have to do is kill him.” Marcus shrugged, chuckling at the look of obvious suspicion that crossed her face. “His death will make me a powerful man, and you know how much I do love that. Besides, you don’t have a choice. You’ll want to hurry, though—I do believe he’s about to sacrifice about twenty slaves to summon enough servitors to kill you.” Amalia’s eyes went wide, and she turned immediately to flee the room.

“You’ll see me again, kadan. I look forward to it. And oh—you’ll want the ballroom!”

Snippet #2423667

located in Kirkwall, a part of The City of Chains, one of the many universes on RPG.

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