legbamel wrote...
Yes, the Qunari are responsible for their own actions but they're zealots whose most holy relic has been stolen. And the woman who had it last spends four years lying to her friends about it...the same friends who find swatches of cloth, finger bones, bottles of booze, and belt buckles all over the Free Marches and return them to their rightful owners. Hawke regularly deals with merchants and shady characters that could well have been able to give them a lead.
Being zealots does not excuse their behavior, nor should it. They were able to refrain from stabbing people for four years, why couldn't they refrain a while longer?
Isabela had been looking for the relic the whole time, and Hawke knew about it. She wasn't hiding that fact from Hawke at all. At the beginning of act 2, they have this little exchange:
I've been following a lead. I'm so close, I can taste it!
Isn't that what you said last time?
Oh! You mean when I went digging for that stash?
Yes, that turned out to contain several badly written poems and an old boot.
It could've contained the relic!
I don't deny she lied to her friends about the nature of the relic, but she was hardly secretive about searching for it, or the results of her searches. At the time it didn't seem like it was hurting anything - the Qunari were simply keeping to themselves. They were searching for the tome on their own and, more importantly, they weren't stabbing lots of people while doing it.
And it isn't true that the Qunari aren't doing anything. That was the whole point of the poison gas escapade: they were attempting to draw her out in tempting her with something they presumed she would steal because it was (relatively) common knowledge that the recipe was powerful, sought-after, and thus valuable. They weren't just sitting there hoping the stupid book would magically appear on their doorstep with a little "sorry" note on it.
I think you misunderstood when I say 'not doing anything'. I did not intend to imply that the Qunari were idle those four years. When I said 'not doing anything', what I meant was 'not invading Kirkwall and killing lots of people'. The Qunari went for four years without invading Kirkwall while looking for the tome. There was no real evidence to indicate that they were about to start stabbing when they did.
IIRC, the Arishok asks you for the tome before he signals the attack. When you tell him it's gone, that's when he goes on his tirade and decides to subdue the chaos. And the fact that he knows enough to ask you about it means that he's definitely got his own spy network on it, though how Qunari have all of this knowledge of the goings-on in Kirkwall I still don't understand. One would think the horns would be noticed listening to Petrice's bile in the Chantry, for instance.
But even if you know about the tome (e.g. never got Isabela), it doesn't matter, because he *still* attacks the city. The reason he attacks the city isn't because he wants the tome back, it's because he can't stand it anymore. Otherwise, he would have demanded the book from everyone, rather than just kill the Viscount and complain about the people before he killed them.
It isn't like the tome was squirreled away in some ancient tomb that was untouched by man for four years. Somebody had the thing. It had to get from the shipwreck into Walleyed Sam's possession somehow, and both Isabela and the Qunari were looking for it. There were rumors that had kept Isabela busy looking for it for at least three years. It's entirely possible that she (or they) had other 'near misses' with the tome before as well. The only thing special about the one we saw in gameplay was that it ended up being near the time the straw broke the camel's back.
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