Amalia was quite used to doing this sort of work alone, or with Ithilian only. It was fortunate that they'd found assistance now, because there were many more materials to go through than usual, and much of it was simply beyond the realms of her expertise. She was no mage, and had studied relatively little of the so-called Fade and its occupants.
Still, she supposed she'd been useful, as far as translation went. Qunlat was not an easy language to learn, though she was surprised by the number of people here who had even a loose command of it. As she worked on the last stack of pages, the others rifled through what she'd already rendered in the trade tongue. There had to be something in here that would give them some idea of what Marcus's plans were. She could not abide the thought that there wasn't—that all of the sacrifice and effort of the raid had been for naught after all.
She frowned, narrowing her eyes at the page below her. "I have seen this word too many times," she said, her brows knitting. "Iina. I have translated it as 'jar,' because that is the strict meaning of the word, but in context I think it would be better if it were vessel. Qunlat lacks a term that general for storage." Which meant that iina would have been the closest thing, if Marcus were searching for a way to convey 'vessel' or 'receptacle.'
Such was the price of keeping one's notes in a language less likely to be understood by spies. Few even in the Imperium knew much of it.
Lia was not among the individuals with knowledge of Qunlat, but that hardly stopped her from trying. At the very least she could look for specific words that Amalia pointed out to her, finding repetitions of them in other documents and passing them along to help expedite the search. She was tenacious in her efforts to contribute; Lia took many things more lightly than others, but she approached this with the utmost seriousness.
"What's the significance of that, you think?" she asked, looking up from her cross-legged position on the floor, setting down the paper she was glancing over.
"Nothing good," Ithilian grumbled, leaning against the wall near the closest window. The pieces of him that were lost didn't stop him from helping with this, in a way similar to how Lia was working, though over the years he had acquired a partial knowledge of the language they were working with. He and Amalia had spent countless hours together, after all. "Might be something he was searching for. An artifact of some kind. He spent plenty of time tomb raiding."
Rilien's face remained impassive as he scanned over several more of the translated pages. “Some of these definitely pertain to blood magic as well. I am not certain if that is connected or not—he appears to have had a wide range of active projects."
“It's almost like even he wasn't sure what he was doing—the notes are scattered." Cyrus could read Qunlat, or at least enough of it to decipher the original pages. It probably didn't hurt that he'd occupied a similar position to Marcus's in Tevinter, either. Rather than sitting, he stood, several pages in his hands, and leaned back against one of the inset bookshelves. His hair was disheveled, evidence that he'd run his fingers through it many times over the course of the day. “Like he was searching for something; or trying to collect anything that might be relevant on some subject. Vessel. Vessel..." He shook his head, shuffling through a few more sheets of parchment.
"So he might have been looking for some... vessel sort of object, and he thought he was going to find it in elven ruins?" Leon looked quite wan these days, but the malady seemed to be mostly physical, whatever it was. "Does he say anything about what the vessel was for? It seems really unlikely he was after anything of purely historical or financial interest."
Amalia grimaced, barely containing the frustrated noise that threatened to escape her. Something about the trajectory of the discussion was wrong. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she knew it was there anyway. Marcus wasn't the kind of person who—
She clicked her tongue against her teeth. "Power," she said flatly. "Marcus cares about nothing but power. Obtaining it, asserting it, having more of it than anyone else. It's just the kind of person he is." She knew that. Knew it with a certainty she only rarely felt about anything else.
"So this vessel thing could somehow give him more power..." Lia said, mostly to herself. "Maybe Vesryn or Harellan would know more about what he might be after? If it's something the ancient elves buried somewhere?" She obviously hadn't heard of such a thing herself, and it didn't take more than a look at the others to know that no one immediately knew of what Marcus sought.
"It doesn't make sense," Ithilian said, his voice carrying that same frustrated note. "Assuming Marcus does find what he's after, won't it just go to Corypheus? He's serving Corypheus, his Venatori followers serve him... and why is he serving him to begin with? As his general, Marcus can't rise any higher without—"
"Overthrowing him," Lia finished. "Could he be planning to do that? Overthrow Corypheus?"
Something about this line of thought must have struck Cyrus the right way, because all at once he was moving, crossing to the main table where the documents were piled and rifling through them. Translated, untranslated; it didn't seem to matter. He pulled them almost at random from other piles, creating a much smaller one and then spreading the parchments over the bare space on the table.
“Vessel, vessel... blood magic. Elven ruins, Corypheus—trying to overthrow Corypheus. What's the only way you topple someone like that? Someone with more power than you?"
“From behind." Rilien folded his hands into his sleeves.
Cyrus nodded several times, tracing his fingers down a page and then moving to another one. He seemed to be reading, but very quickly. “I don't think the vessel is a physical object. I think it's—I think Marcus is the vessel. It's a type of magic. Apostasy, something you only hear about in rumors of wilds-witches and... ancient elves."
"What is the purpose of this magic?" Amalia asked. "What is Marcus to be a vessel for?"
Cyrus frowned. “Corypheus." He let that settle for a moment, then explained. “Specifically two parts of Corypheus: his power and his consciousness. The consciousness part is the easier one: the ancient elves knew how to do it—bind a mind to either a physical object or another mind. That's the Saraya case." He pressed his lips together, shuffling through several more pages. “Unsurprisingly, Marcus is interested in blocking that. Methods of resisting the binding. The other part is power, which isn't in anything I've ever read. But if Corypheus can do it, Marcus obviously isn't going to mind."
“So Corypheus intends to share a mind and a body with Marcus, who is disinclined to accept the arrangement?" Rilien seemed to find something off about the statement, but Cyrus was already shaking his head.
“If Saraya and Ves are cohabitating, what Corypheus wants to do is evict a tenant and move in himself. No sharing involved."
"Do the notes contain any indication of how close he is to achieving this?" Leon's tone betrayed ambivalence; he obviously wasn't sure whether success on Marcus's part would be a good or bad thing for the Inquisition overall.
Amalia knew very well that success on Marcus's part was never good for anyone but Marcus. This Corypheus was indeed powerful, but any cunning in strategy seemed to be the work of his immediate underlings. Perhaps that power structure would collapse if Marcus tried to use it. His aims were certainly more occluded than wanton destruction in the name of continental rule. But she did not believe that was any reason for hope.
Much better that they kill him, and thwart both plans at the same time.
“I can't say with certainty." Cyrus grimaced, aware that this wasn't reassuring news. “These notes definitely don't have all the parts in place, but on the other hand, they may not be the latest version of his plan, and even if they were six months ago, they certainly aren't now, if he's as clever as he seems." He set the parchments back down on the table. “I can say that even here... he's fairly close. The missing pieces are important, and I wouldn't know where to find them, but I'd know where to start, which means he probably does, too."
“Then it seems our priority in this matter should once again be locating him. I will divert more agents to this purpose." Rilien apparently shared Amalia's intuition that the best thing to do was kill him as soon as possible.
Perhaps it was time that Amalia went back on the hunt, as well.
Still, she supposed she'd been useful, as far as translation went. Qunlat was not an easy language to learn, though she was surprised by the number of people here who had even a loose command of it. As she worked on the last stack of pages, the others rifled through what she'd already rendered in the trade tongue. There had to be something in here that would give them some idea of what Marcus's plans were. She could not abide the thought that there wasn't—that all of the sacrifice and effort of the raid had been for naught after all.
She frowned, narrowing her eyes at the page below her. "I have seen this word too many times," she said, her brows knitting. "Iina. I have translated it as 'jar,' because that is the strict meaning of the word, but in context I think it would be better if it were vessel. Qunlat lacks a term that general for storage." Which meant that iina would have been the closest thing, if Marcus were searching for a way to convey 'vessel' or 'receptacle.'
Such was the price of keeping one's notes in a language less likely to be understood by spies. Few even in the Imperium knew much of it.
Lia was not among the individuals with knowledge of Qunlat, but that hardly stopped her from trying. At the very least she could look for specific words that Amalia pointed out to her, finding repetitions of them in other documents and passing them along to help expedite the search. She was tenacious in her efforts to contribute; Lia took many things more lightly than others, but she approached this with the utmost seriousness.
"What's the significance of that, you think?" she asked, looking up from her cross-legged position on the floor, setting down the paper she was glancing over.
"Nothing good," Ithilian grumbled, leaning against the wall near the closest window. The pieces of him that were lost didn't stop him from helping with this, in a way similar to how Lia was working, though over the years he had acquired a partial knowledge of the language they were working with. He and Amalia had spent countless hours together, after all. "Might be something he was searching for. An artifact of some kind. He spent plenty of time tomb raiding."
Rilien's face remained impassive as he scanned over several more of the translated pages. “Some of these definitely pertain to blood magic as well. I am not certain if that is connected or not—he appears to have had a wide range of active projects."
“It's almost like even he wasn't sure what he was doing—the notes are scattered." Cyrus could read Qunlat, or at least enough of it to decipher the original pages. It probably didn't hurt that he'd occupied a similar position to Marcus's in Tevinter, either. Rather than sitting, he stood, several pages in his hands, and leaned back against one of the inset bookshelves. His hair was disheveled, evidence that he'd run his fingers through it many times over the course of the day. “Like he was searching for something; or trying to collect anything that might be relevant on some subject. Vessel. Vessel..." He shook his head, shuffling through a few more sheets of parchment.
"So he might have been looking for some... vessel sort of object, and he thought he was going to find it in elven ruins?" Leon looked quite wan these days, but the malady seemed to be mostly physical, whatever it was. "Does he say anything about what the vessel was for? It seems really unlikely he was after anything of purely historical or financial interest."
Amalia grimaced, barely containing the frustrated noise that threatened to escape her. Something about the trajectory of the discussion was wrong. She couldn't put her finger on it, but she knew it was there anyway. Marcus wasn't the kind of person who—
She clicked her tongue against her teeth. "Power," she said flatly. "Marcus cares about nothing but power. Obtaining it, asserting it, having more of it than anyone else. It's just the kind of person he is." She knew that. Knew it with a certainty she only rarely felt about anything else.
"So this vessel thing could somehow give him more power..." Lia said, mostly to herself. "Maybe Vesryn or Harellan would know more about what he might be after? If it's something the ancient elves buried somewhere?" She obviously hadn't heard of such a thing herself, and it didn't take more than a look at the others to know that no one immediately knew of what Marcus sought.
"It doesn't make sense," Ithilian said, his voice carrying that same frustrated note. "Assuming Marcus does find what he's after, won't it just go to Corypheus? He's serving Corypheus, his Venatori followers serve him... and why is he serving him to begin with? As his general, Marcus can't rise any higher without—"
"Overthrowing him," Lia finished. "Could he be planning to do that? Overthrow Corypheus?"
Something about this line of thought must have struck Cyrus the right way, because all at once he was moving, crossing to the main table where the documents were piled and rifling through them. Translated, untranslated; it didn't seem to matter. He pulled them almost at random from other piles, creating a much smaller one and then spreading the parchments over the bare space on the table.
“Vessel, vessel... blood magic. Elven ruins, Corypheus—trying to overthrow Corypheus. What's the only way you topple someone like that? Someone with more power than you?"
“From behind." Rilien folded his hands into his sleeves.
Cyrus nodded several times, tracing his fingers down a page and then moving to another one. He seemed to be reading, but very quickly. “I don't think the vessel is a physical object. I think it's—I think Marcus is the vessel. It's a type of magic. Apostasy, something you only hear about in rumors of wilds-witches and... ancient elves."
"What is the purpose of this magic?" Amalia asked. "What is Marcus to be a vessel for?"
Cyrus frowned. “Corypheus." He let that settle for a moment, then explained. “Specifically two parts of Corypheus: his power and his consciousness. The consciousness part is the easier one: the ancient elves knew how to do it—bind a mind to either a physical object or another mind. That's the Saraya case." He pressed his lips together, shuffling through several more pages. “Unsurprisingly, Marcus is interested in blocking that. Methods of resisting the binding. The other part is power, which isn't in anything I've ever read. But if Corypheus can do it, Marcus obviously isn't going to mind."
“So Corypheus intends to share a mind and a body with Marcus, who is disinclined to accept the arrangement?" Rilien seemed to find something off about the statement, but Cyrus was already shaking his head.
“If Saraya and Ves are cohabitating, what Corypheus wants to do is evict a tenant and move in himself. No sharing involved."
"Do the notes contain any indication of how close he is to achieving this?" Leon's tone betrayed ambivalence; he obviously wasn't sure whether success on Marcus's part would be a good or bad thing for the Inquisition overall.
Amalia knew very well that success on Marcus's part was never good for anyone but Marcus. This Corypheus was indeed powerful, but any cunning in strategy seemed to be the work of his immediate underlings. Perhaps that power structure would collapse if Marcus tried to use it. His aims were certainly more occluded than wanton destruction in the name of continental rule. But she did not believe that was any reason for hope.
Much better that they kill him, and thwart both plans at the same time.
“I can't say with certainty." Cyrus grimaced, aware that this wasn't reassuring news. “These notes definitely don't have all the parts in place, but on the other hand, they may not be the latest version of his plan, and even if they were six months ago, they certainly aren't now, if he's as clever as he seems." He set the parchments back down on the table. “I can say that even here... he's fairly close. The missing pieces are important, and I wouldn't know where to find them, but I'd know where to start, which means he probably does, too."
“Then it seems our priority in this matter should once again be locating him. I will divert more agents to this purpose." Rilien apparently shared Amalia's intuition that the best thing to do was kill him as soon as possible.
Perhaps it was time that Amalia went back on the hunt, as well.