Chapter Text
Not for the first time, it occurs to Lucanis that agreeing to this in the first place had been slightly absurd.
He works alone. Fifteen-odd years in the field, with rare exceptions, he has always worked alone—and even then, Illario hardly counts. Alone means fewer variables to account for, fewer fracture points in a plan. It means when things go sideways, he only has himself to worry about getting out. And it means, if they do, he knows exactly where to place the blame.
It’s easier. Even when it’s harder—it’s easier.
“Clear out here,” Harding’s voice murmurs in his ear, slightly distorted by the faint ripple of the spell. “Last person out was almost ten minutes ago. Pretty sure it’s just you and the night watch, now.”
“Unless there’re dawdlers,” Bellara says, a lingering note of worry. “There’s always a few, right? Should we have patched into the timecard system? I should have patched into the timecard system. If you give me ten minutes—”
“It’s fine, Bell.”
“Quiet on the link,” Lucanis says. Again. Patiently, he thinks, considering it’s the fourth time.
“Please.” Rook’s voice is softer but doubled—the low lilt direct in one ear just a half-beat delayed from the murmur a few feet away that reaches the other. She looks at him across the dim room, unconvincingly solemn. “He looks so cranky, you guys.”
Lucanis resists the impulse to react—or thinks he does, but her lips curl in to press against a smile, so maybe not as successfully as he’d hoped. Cranky.
It was also much quieter, working alone.
“How can you tell?” Harding mutters.
“Quiet,” says Rook, not quite suppressing the laugh. She winks at him and shifts to peer down the hallway. It stretches beyond her, low lit by security lights running in strips along the floor.
“We can avoid stragglers,” Lucanis decides. “Are we set?”
“Ready here,” says Neve.
Harding’s not long after. “Still good.”
“There’s a guy here who keeps glaring at me,” Rook whispers. “Fine otherwise, though.”
An hour, and this should be over, assuming they aren’t all under arrest. “Okay,” Lucanis says, shifting towards the door. “Bellara?”
“On it!” she chirps in his ear. There’s a long pause, silent except for the soft rustle of Rook shifting position. Then the red light on the security pad switches green; the lock gives a faint click as it disengages, handle turning smoothly beneath his hand.
He doesn’t need to look over his shoulder to know Rook’s come up behind him.
“Ready?” she murmurs.
As they’re going to be. “Ready.”
It should be a quick, clean job. Get in, get what he needs, get out, move on. But then, Lucanis is supposed to be in Treviso, not riding a crowded Minrathous rail line towards the inner city. On several fronts, things are off-plan.
He holds the overhead strap with one hand, using the other to slide his phone from the pocket where it’s silently pulsing.
[i’ll talk to them in the morning] reads the message. The lengthy delay in Illario’s reply can only mean he’s working or on a date. Eight months ago, the idea of Illario at the offices so late on a Friday evening would have been laughable. A lot had changed in eight months, though. Illario’s work habits were least among them. It really could go either way, these days.
[still an idiot fyi] arrives almost immediately after, open bait Lucanis briefly considers, then dismisses.
[oh now too busy to talk], several minutes later.
He sighs. If this is the sort of mood he’s in, Illario will only keep going, and the inevitable constant pulsing of the messages will be distracting. [I’m working.] he sends back. Beneath his feet, the steady thrum of the train is starting to slow.
[working requires an assignment], comes the response, but no others follow. Lucanis slips the phone into an inside pocket just as the doors slide open with a chime and the tide of bodies start to carry him along: out, onto the platform, up to a street considerably wider and better-maintained than the one near Docktown he left behind when he boarded.
In Treviso, on an evening as lovely as this one, there would be music in the air and gondolas lazy on the canals. The trolleys would be in service, but near empty. Fai come il vino—why huddle together just to hurry along? Enjoy the journey, amico.
Minrathous is many things, but it’s certainly not Treviso.
Night’s settled during the ride, streetlights glowing down the avenue. He isn’t quite out of place, even against the vibrant silks and opulence of a Spire District platform—but in his dark clothes, with his chin slightly lowered, he won’t rate much notice either. He can see it in the way most eyes that land on him do so only very briefly before sliding on. Estate staff, probably. No one that anyone out to enjoy the Minrathous nightlife will be likely to pay much attention to—and they don’t. Almost all of the people who ascend to the street alongside him filter off to the east where many of the better nightclubs are located, the more exclusive restaurants and lounges. And to the north, gleaming above the rooftops surrounding it: the Argent Spite and the Archon’s Palace hovering far above it, haloed in light. Even at a distance, the magic necessary to keep it aloft itches his eyes.
He turns west.
Ahriman Hall is pre-Ash Age, though he isn’t sure by how much, all stone and marble and gilding. Probably a private estate, once, before the Last Blight, and converted in the reconstruction like most of the city. Now it’s lit, within and without—a distinctly shimmering, opalescent quality to the light that can’t be mistaken. Magelight, every bit of it, spilling from the windows and casting long shadows onto the street. It must be unbelievably expensive, lighting so large a building with only magic, which is almost certainly the point. He wonders if they’d debased themselves enough to have had it wired at all.
No matter for tonight, though. The guards on either side of the steps ascending to the main entrance are watching, but not him. Their heads don’t move as Lucanis nears, or as a long town car pulls up at the curb—though, at this, a man in a suit not so unlike his own crosses the sidewalk to open the rear door. Lucanis holds to let him pass and cuts behind, on to the far corner.
It’s habit, more than anything else, really, the quick inventory he takes of the passengers stepping out from the car: two men, dark suits, the red sash of high rank on one, what might have been a fourragère around the shoulder of the other, though Lucanis is too far to be sure. Two women, a scarlet floor-length gown on one, the other mostly obscured at the far side of the group, a flash of emerald green. For the briefest moment the five of them move in parallel, half a block apart, and then Lucanis clears the corner of the building and they, presumably, ascend the stairs to join the party.
The alley around the back is much darker than the sides facing the streets. There's a light over a rear door, glowing yellow-cast, dim but steady. Electric. Debased themselves after all. He checks the time: 8:07.
At 8:12, the door swings out, shouldered open. Markus’ hands are occupied, one cupping the end of the cigarette between his lips, the other clicking a lighter that casts the bottom half of his face in amber as it flickers on. He looks up just as the end catches, glowing red, and blinks, momentarily frozen. The cigarette dangles precariously.
“You’re late,” Lucanis points out.
Markus snaps the lighter closed and drops it into one one of the pockets of his apron, reaching to steady the cigarette as he takes a long drag. “By two minutes.”
“Two minutes late.” But Lucanis quirks a smile, shifting out of his lean against the brick wall opposite.
The elf slides a brick left near the door over with his toe until it sits just inside the doorframe, then assumes his own lean a few paces down the alley. His expression remains unperturbed. “You should see the shit they’ve got us making for this. Five flavors of quenelles. Who wants to eat five bites of meat mousse and call it a course?”
“Magisters, I guess.” Lucanis takes the plain white keycard Markus holds out as he passes, palming a few folded notes in its place.
“Fucking Magisters,” Markus mutters in agreement, tucking the money away without looking at it. And then, to Lucanis’ back as he steps into the service hallway, “We're turning over to the night staff at ten.”
Lucanis raises a hand in acknowledgment and keeps going without turning back. His luck isn’t much to bet on lately, but with any at all, by ten he’ll be long gone.
A line of coats hangs from hooks on the wall outside the kitchens; he leaves his mixed in near the end. No one inside looks up to see him as he passes the round windows high on the swinging doors, too caught up in the noisy bustle of the line. Down the hall, around the corner, into the back stairway, and up—two steps at a time up the first flight and then more slowly for the one after, adjusting the buttons of his suit jacket as he goes.
The banquet’s crowded. Lucanis stays to the side of the wide hall outside the ballroom, offers the few stragglers still making their way in the deferential sort of nod that tends to erase him from their memory the moment he leaves their sight. At the far end, large double doors open out to a balcony which runs along the whole back of the building. A handful of guests linger there as well, little clusters of conversation that bleed into each other as he passes. Weather. Upcoming elections. A cruise. Nothing that warrants slowing, and no one who pays him much attention as he settles alongside one of the arched glass doors leading in to the ballroom, or as they pass him not longer after, heading in. It’s predictable enough about Minrathous, or this part of it, anyway—hold a door open, and people waste no time assuming you’d been put there specifically to do it for them.
The music from inside fades, gives way to applause and then the rise and fall of a speech he can only half-hear through the glass: commendable service, our fine officers, the gratitude of the Magisterium. Not what he’s come for.
His inner breast pocket pulses, and Lucanis checks his watch. 8:36. He still has some time to kill, even if Illario’s running commentary isn’t how he’d prefer to kill it.
Except the message is from Teia: [Lucanis, what are you doing?]
He hesitates a moment before tapping out an answer. [Waiting in line for a movie.]
[No, you are not.] she replies, almost instantly.
It figures—at each others' throats over almost everything else these days, but when it came to Lucanis, Teia and Illario can get along just fine.
A round of applause goes up inside, longer, abruptly much louder as one of the doors to his right opens. Two people pass through the margin of his vision and then on to stand against the balustrade: a man and a woman. He can only see the vague shape of them, but can hear them clearly enough. She’s wearing the high, thin kind of heels that go click, click, click with every step.
“—of starting to seem like you’re just antagonizing her on purpose, now,” the man’s saying as they go.
“Why would I bother?” his date asks. His accent has the precise Tevene rhythm Lucanis would expect in a Magisterial ballroom, but something in the way she turns her vowels reminds him of his own neighborhood. “I annoy her just by being in the room, no effort required.”
The man sighs, heavy. “That’s not true.”
“Yes, it is,” she laughs. “Don’t let the General convince you otherwise.”
“‘The General’ is going to notice if you aren't back by the next speech. Don’t push your luck.”
"I would never.”
“You’re ridiculous,” the man mutters, and turns back the way he came, leaving her alone and pulling the door closed again behind him.
Lucanis takes a brief glance up after he’s gone. She doesn’t seem to be in any hurry to follow, turned away to look out over the city. The knee-length pencil dress seems on the simple side for this sort of thing, not that he’s much of an expert. The absurd heels. An elf. Unusual for this sort of crowd, but it’s a modern Tevinter these days, as they like to over-insist.
His phone pulses in his hand. [Are you really going to make me ask again?]
Lucanis swallows the sigh. [I’m at a party.] he tries this time. Which, to be fair, is true. Technically.
A rustle of movement along the balcony, too small to allow himself another look up. No new footsteps, though. Just the woman shifting, almost certainly. Inside, the music begins again.
[You should have stuck with the movie.]
The urge to snap a shot of the ballroom through the window over his shoulder just to make a point rises, then falls. He can imagine the face she’d probably make seeing it, and almost wants to laugh—but she’d have him tracked to the floor by midnight, knowing her. It isn’t worth it.
“I don’t suppose you brought a light?” the woman asks suddenly. Lucanis looks up.
She hasn’t turned all the way—just a half-twist to look at him over her shoulder. Unfamiliar. Dark eyes, dark hair, straight brows that quirk up with the question.
“I don’t smoke,” he says, blandly apologetic.
She does turn then, all the way around to rest her elbows behind her on the stone and hold his gaze. An odd little smile tugs at her mouth. “Not what I asked,” she says.
He blinks at her, briefly and unexpectedly thrown. “Sorry.”
Something in the way she tips her head to the side and looks at him raises a quick flare of warning in the back of his mind, but then she shrugs carelessly and straightens up. “Oh, well. Thanks anyway.”
He reaches without looking for the gilded handle of the door, pulling it open as she approaches, but she passes without looking at him again. Click, click, click go the heels.
His phone pulses. Lucanis steps forward just enough to peer around the corner after her as she works her way through the arrangement of tables and out of sight. Emerald green dress, he notes belatedly.
It doesn’t sit… completely right, all of that. He can’t quite put his finger on it. Under other circumstances, it might be enough for him to consider backing off and trying another time, but that isn’t an option. It’s doubtful she’ll waste much further thought on a doorman without a lighter, anyway.
[Can we talk?] Teia’s message reads. At the top of the screen, the time: 8:50, precisely. In the shadows at the end of the balcony, another door cracks open. He switches his phone off and gets to work.
Lucanis waits halfway up the service stairway until the indistinct drone of the next speech wraps up and the music stops sounding like an elevator and starts to sound like it was meant for dancing. The level above still looks more like an old estate than a government building; the mezzanine hallways surrounding the main stair are dark and mostly quiet, except for the faint sounds of the orchestra drifting from beyond the closed ballroom doors below. No guards circling—that’s the important part. On a night like this, they’re always much more concerned with keeping people who don’t belong out than worrying about the invited ones staying put. Not concerned enough, obviously, but it will at least make the next part a little easier.
Two doors on the right before he finds the one he wants, as promised, though he glances at the nameplate and hesitates briefly, anyway. He doesn’t actually know what will happen, using the card on a warding crystal other than the one it’s tuned for. In Antiva, nothing good; he can’t imagine Tevinter being much more forgiving. It’s risky, not knowing. Not how he works. Not how he used to work, anyway.
He swipes the card. There’s an odd, soft click as the door unlocks, a more familiar shiver of static that briefly raises the hairs on the back of his neck as the ward falls. He turns the knob, crosses the threshold, and shuts the door behind him in silence before the impulse for caution can grow strong enough to have him second guessing.
Nothing inside the darkened anteroom. No alarm, no flare of a glyph, no sound but a clock quietly ticking somewhere to his left. No guarantee something he can’t see or hear hasn’t sparked into life, either, but it’s as much reassurance as he’s going to get. She still won’t tell him how they do it, but Neve’s people never miss. He owes her a coffee.
Lucanis ignores the small workspace near the far wall and the filing cabinets behind it; an assistant’s, almost certainly. Unlikely to have what he needs. The desk in the room beyond is much larger, gleaming wood reflecting the beams from the Archon’s Palace filtering through the large windows behind it. Two chairs face it, distinctly uncomfortable looking compared to the high-backed leather on the far side. And right in the center, closed: a laptop.
It wants a password, unsurprisingly, but the bright voice on the other end of Neve’s line that he still only knows as ‘Bell’ has assured him that it won't matter. He’d found himself more confused every time she’d tried to explain it—something to do with the frequencies of the sending chip and mimicking the current into the Fade—but that sort of thing’s never been Lucanis’ strong suit. As long as it works. He slots the little silver disc in and waits.
Illario would be fascinated. He’s been insisting for years that they’d been falling behind on the magitech; twenty minutes on the phone with Neve’s friend and it was hard not to agree. The damage Illario could do with this kind of bypass code alone…
The log-in screen blinks away abruptly, replaced by a photo of what looks like one of the volcanic-sand beaches along the Venefecation Sea and, overtop that, the most chaotic tangle of folders and files he’d ever seen.
Well, he’s in, at least, even if ‘in’ looks like it belongs to a confused 80 year old. And—a quick check of his watch, reading 9:22 in the dim light—with some time to spare. Maybe his luck’s holding out, after all.
The folder named “Important” is mostly itinerary notes; “Overlook” is something to do with luxury townhouse development plans along the cliffs to the north of the city. Finally, in a folder called “Mol. closed session 266.4,” he gets somewhere.
The file called “RC_1424_5” is so redacted as to be almost completely unintelligible, which would be enough to catch his eye regardless—but what’s left is enough. It’s the header that cues the hot wave of adrenaline, the familiar blanket of internal stillness that settles over him just after.
██████ Appendix A.2: ██████ (Alt.In.)
Site Desig.: ██████ [94811.4/883642.9]
If he didn’t know better, he’d brush right by that string of numbers as meaningless, which is almost assuredly the point in the way they’re formatted. Unfortunately for the author, he does know better. Coordinates—ones Lucanis thinks he could recite in his sleep. Backwards, probably. Just off the coast of Arlathan Forest, 35 kilometers west of Antivan waters. He might as well get them tattooed somewhere. They’ll never leave him anyway.
There’s a similar file under session 238.2, a month older. Also redacted to incoherency, also the same site. Another, a month before that. And before that. It’s too much to sort through in the time he has. Lucanis backs up three file levels and punches in the key-combination Bell walked him through to start her little disk doing… whatever it is that it does to replicate it all over to the network it’s enchanted to.
It’s… a lot. It’ll need a few minutes. She did warn him that larger transfers would, more than once. He waits. Four minutes. Five. This might have been a mistake. Eight. Nearly there, but it’s longer than he’d planned for. He should have taken the ones he knew for sure and left it at that. Twel—
A glow appears beneath the gap of the office door.
The transfer’s done. Lucanis pops the disk, pockets it, eases the laptop closed, and silently crosses the room to the wall alongside the hinges of the door.
It’s yellow-hued, the light. Steady, but moving. Maybe a flashlight.
He plays it out. Windows, clearly not designed to open. One exit. A knife strapped to his forearm that he can have in hand easily, but using it will create a lot more problems than it would solve. Staying behind the door if it opens, slipping out in the gap when they step in… it isn’t a great option, but it’s the best he has to work with. In the next room, he can hear faint movement across the carpeted floor. The dry rustling of papers. …humming?
A drawer opens, closes. The light shifts. It’s definitely humming, low fragments of a song he can’t place, more papers moving. 9:47. 9:49. They’re just staying out there. Of course they are. So much for luck.
The way the light’s angled, they’re on the same half of the room that he is, just on the other side of the wall. Whoever it is, they don’t belong here any more than he does, or they’d have activated one of the lights. They have to be here for something, not fishing, or there would be a lot more rummaging.
And they have fewer time constraints than he does. Clearly.
Lucanis switches to the opposite side of the doorframe with one long, soundless step. The humming continues. A hand to the knob, pressure inwards towards the latch as he turns to keep it from clicking as it releases. The door cracks open in silence. Lucanis widens the gap just enough to see.
Rifling through the filing cabinet, a small flashlight between her teeth and a file folder open on the surface behind her: the woman in the green dress. The clicky-heels are set neatly on the desktop beside a small notebook left open. A few dark strands of hair have spilled loose from the slicked-back bob, falling over her face; there’s a pencil behind her ear.
Lucanis is, briefly, paralyzed. She’s here as a guest. Her absence will be missed eventually, although apparently not yet. She came with at least one officer, knows at least one general—but given the crowd downstairs, almost all of them must.
It’s 9:54. His coat is mixed in with the evening shift. They’ll be out by 10:10. He needs to go.
He eases the knife strapped to his forearm free and lets it drop down grip-first into his palm, then rotates it until it the blade’s held loose between his thumb and forefinger. If he opens the door a tiny bit more, he’ll have a decent angle on a large painted vase along the far wall. She’ll turn, if it shatters. Anyone would. Go look closer? Bolt? Either will work. It isn’t ideal, but he’s out of time. It’ll have to do. Lucanis cracks the door a bit further—
A cheer goes up from the ballroom below, so sudden and loud even through the floor that the woman's head snaps up, starts to whip towards the door to the hallway, but doesn’t make it all the way. Instead, she freezes, flashlight in her teeth, eyes locked on his.
Neither of them move as the cheering slowly dies down.
In the relative quiet that follows, she opens her mouth just enough for the flashlight to drop into her palm. Her lips spread into a slow, satisfied looking smile. “Thought so,” whispers the woman.
She clicks the light off and tucks the slim cylinder down the V of her neckline. The pencil follows. She’s still watching him.
“You gonna come out of there?”
No. He is absolutely not.
She opens her mouth to say something, but another cheer goes up, as loud as before. The woman flicks her eyes at the door, lips pressing briefly thin, then back. “That’s my cue,” she murmurs, closing up the folder. It disappears into the open file drawer. She bumps it quietly closed with her hip. “How do you wanna do this? Mutual destruction? Your word, my word?”
“You’re a guest,” Lucanis says, quietly. He’s shifted his angle so she ought to see more his ear, less his face, not that it matters all that much at this point. “I doubt my word would stack up very well.”
She laughs softly and plucks the little notebook from the table, tapping the back against the fingertips of the opposite hand. Where that’s supposed to disappear to, he doesn't even want to guess. “You might be surprised. Tell you what… I didn’t see a thing. You?”
She can’t be serious. He knows how this needs to go, at this point. How it would already have gone, if it were Illario or probably almost anyone else in his place. Maybe Illario was right about him after all. “You have no idea what I was here for.”
“Nope! But believe me, in that office? It would be… almost impossible for me to care.”
“Your date might care.” It’s 9:58.
“My… ew.” The woman tucks back the hair that had fallen forward, hooks a finger into the heel of each shoe. “Look—I gotta go. If you decide to use the knife you've got there, avoid the face, okay? So I look nice in the crime scene photos. Otherwise, you have yourself a lovely night.”
And then she turns her back on him and pads over on stocking feet to the hallway door.
She might, he thinks, suddenly, be a little crazy.
“Oh, and pass on the little spoon things,” the woman whispers, easing the hallway door open and glancing out. She puts on one heel, then the other. “They taste like bacon pudding. It’s… really weird.”
And then she’s gone.
That was—
10:01. He’s out of time. He’ll figure out how much damage control this is going to need later.
There’s a flash of emerald out of the corner of his eye as he hurries along the hallway to the service stair. The woman’s opted for the wide main staircase, strolling down casually with a hand on the railing. What the fu—
No time. Lucanis backtracks: down a level, through the supply room lined with shelves full of linens and plates that he came up through. Music filters from the ballroom, jazzier than before, a more chaotic tumble of voices. The hall on the other side, the doorway to the balcony at the far end. It isn’t empty anymore, but the small clusters of people are all drinking and the far end is still very dark. No one looks as he steps out, or when he quietly starts weaving his way through. Around the corner, down the wide hallway on the other side, a straight-backed, quick stride meant to look purposeful. He looks in to the ballroom as he passes the wide arched doors—
There’s the woman again, right at the edge of the dance floor, talking with a couple whose backs are to him, a champagne flute in her hand and her eyes on the entrance. She sees him, folds one arm across her front in a way that very subtly tips the glass in his direction, and turns a broad, bright smile on the couple. She—
—No. Out.
The evening shift is gathering their things and filtering through the back door as Lucanis hits the ground floor and melds into the crowd. Markus catches his eye over someone’s shoulder as Lucanis grabs his coat, scowling, raising his hand to tap a pointed finger several times against his bare wrist.
Yeah, he knows, he knows. He’s late.