There was, she’d heard, a group of Tal-Vashoth operating out on the Wounded Coast. Well, that was nothing new; there were always Tal-Vashoth out on the Wounded Coast these days, defectors from the now-defunct Qunari presence turned to banditry and generalized savagery.
(She’d seen the look in their eyes when she was fighting them. It wasn’t blood lust. It was terror. No rules meant everything was permissible, after all.)
But what was different about this group was their organization. From the information she’d been given – and had paid very well for, call a spade what it is – this group didn’t act like a typical kicked anthill, like most Tal-Vashoth camps had. They were controlled. Militarily precise. They didn’t panic easily and they didn’t attack willy-nilly, either. Or at all. In fact, they seemed more like a well-oiled mercenary army than a rag-tag coterie of bandits and outlaws.
And that was interesting. Scary as Void, too, for what it could presage for Kirkwall, but mostly interesting. Hawke hadn’t had any particular reason to go check them out, or, Maker forbid, challenge them; she’d fought enough hordes of rampaging Qunari in her life already, hadn’t she? But she had kept her feelers out, the little network of friends and acquaintances and informants she’d spent her years in Kirkwall carefully cultivating; and had trusted that if anything major changed, she’d hear about it in time. She usually did.
The only reason any of it concerned her at all, at this precise moment, was the lingering suspicion that she’d forgotten something. Something, in this instance, having the value of where the Tal-Vashoth band made their headquarters. And that was… right around the corner, so to speak. The hills out here were honeycombed with old abandoned mines, dripping natural caverns, and half-collapsed ruins dating to the Imperium’s height and earlier. One might connect to another and another with very little transition, and it was damnably easy to get lost.
“That asshole better not drop me in the lap of the Tal-Vashoth,” Hawke muttered. She was hunting down a man as a personal favor to the workers at the Rose; apparently he was known for his cruelty with them and had finally snapped and beaten a young woman nearly to death. Hawke would have killed him with pleasure even before that, if she’d known; but now his expected lifespan measured in hours, not years. “Why do they always think I won’t find them if they go hide out in caves. I always find them in caves.”
“Bad guys don’t usually have a lot of imagination, Hawke,” Varric answered, chuckling, and Fenris gave a grunt of agreement.
“I don’t really like caves,” Merrill chirped cheerily, but showed no reluctance to enter the yawning black mouth in front of them. “They smell a bit strange. And there are always spiderwebs.”
“Not to mention spiders,” Hawke agreed, but she led the way forward all the same, Huan trotting happily at her heels.
