Dragon Age: Last Flight (15 page)

“That’s when the demon made its offer?”

“Yes. The secret of blood magic in exchange for healing its mortal shell.”

“And you accepted?” She released Revas’s wing and circled the griffon to check on her tail feathers. The polishing cloth was gray with grit, so Isseya folded it over to a new, clean side.

“I did.” Calien seemed both repulsed and relieved by his own confession. “I took the demon’s offer of knowledge, and I healed her. Very slightly. Then I put a dagger through her heart. The Crows do not renege on their word. Not to demons, and not to clients.”

“And so you’re a blood mage.” Isseya glanced at him across the broad black expanse of Revas’s back. “That seems like a short course of study.”

Calien gave her a humorless chuckle. “It was. There was no teaching. It was like the demon drilled a hole in my skull and poured someone else’s memories in. I remembered parts of the Fade I’d never seen, knew the ways to spells I’d never heard of. The knowledge was all just
there
 … and though I never spoke of it until today, and tried to pretend I’d never touched it, the demon’s secrets never went away.”

Isseya finished grooming her griffon. She dropped the dirty wing cloth over an elbow and patted Revas’s shoulder, signaling the great beast to take her freedom for the night. With a hiss of acknowledgement, Revas strode away from the two Wardens and flung herself into the air, seeking out whatever scrawny prey she could catch in the moonlit Anderfels.

When the dusty winds of the griffon’s departure had died down, Isseya wiped the grit from her mouth and looked back at Calien. “How can you teach a thing you never really learned?”

“We’ll stumble through it,” the older mage said. “I do know the art, after all. I remember it more vividly than I do most of my own memories.” He paused, eyeing her. “Are you sure you still
want
this? It is maleficarum.”

“It’s a weapon,” Isseya said, meeting his gaze without blinking. “It’s a weapon, and we’re fighting a Blight. Of course I want it. Possession alone is a powerful tool … but if the tales are true, there is much more to blood magic than that.”

“They are,” Calien said. “There is.”

“What can you teach me?”

“Everything,” he said.

*   *   *

Morning came before Isseya was prepared to greet it. She had spent the entire night traveling through the mysteries of magic in blood, and when the new day dawned, her head was spinning with possibility as much as weariness.

Calien, too, was caught somewhere between exhilaration and exhaustion. He had carried the burden of his secret alone for almost twenty years. Sharing it seemed to have released a great worry from him, and Isseya’s excitement about exploring the possibilities of the art seemed to mitigate his own trepidation about the uses of blood magic. He remained far more cautious than she was, but he was plainly glad to find some purpose to the bargain he’d struck so long ago.

By the time the castle awoke, however, that purpose was still unclear. They stopped their experiments as soon as the first servants emerged into the courtyard’s gray dawn to draw water and gather wood for the morning meal.

Isseya wove a thread of healing magic to bind the cuts that the two mages had inflicted on themselves to fuel their spells. With all traces of their experiments concealed, she and Calien joined the other Wardens for breakfast.

“So today’s the day we break Hossberg’s siege, eh?” Felisse asked as Isseya lined up next to her to ladle porridge and raisins onto her plate.

Isseya raised an eyebrow at the redheaded archer. “Is that what Garahel’s been telling people?”

“Everyone who’ll listen,” Felisse said cheerfully, handing the ladle over to the elf. “He’s not much good at keeping secrets, your brother.”

“Nor at keeping expectations realistic.” Isseya dumped a glob of gummy oats onto her plate with little relish. “We won’t break the siege. At best, this will be the first step down a hard and bloody road to that end.”

Felisse shrugged. “It’s more than we had. Who’s leading the strike?”

“Garahel, of course. He’s so excited about it, he can lead the charge.” She said it flippantly, but in truth he
was
the best choice; that was why he’d been named Field-Commander last spring. He didn’t have a fixed position, as a Warden-Commander did; it was a temporary title, unique to these circumstances, that allowed him to control whoever was sent to his area.

He’d earned it. Her brother had proven his skills as a battle leader time and again in the years they’d been fighting the Blight. His griffon coupled extraordinary athleticism with an uncanny knack for spotting and exploiting weaknesses in darkspawn formations. Together they were one of the best teams the Wardens had.

And, after seven years, they were among the longest-serving veterans alive.

“Then I suppose he’s the one I’d better cajole into letting me go,” Felisse said. Balancing her tray lightly on one hand, she wove through the crowd of bleary-eyed soldiers and Grey Wardens to Garahel’s table. Isseya grabbed a mug of bitter steaming tea and followed her.

Calien was already sitting with her brother and Amadis. The three of them, and two other Grey Wardens, were huddled around a loosely sketched map. A saltcellar fashioned from carved antler stood in its center, with a dozen soggy raisins dotted in a vaguely triangular shape on its left side.

“Battle map?” Isseya inquired, gesturing at the saltcellar with her mug.

“Indeed.” Garahel moved his arm back so that she could have a better view. “Does it seem accurate?”

“As much as a map made of breakfast can be.” She put down her porridge bowl and tried the tea. It was, somehow, worse than she’d expected: not just bitter, but so astringent that it curdled her tongue.

It woke her up, though, and that was the point. After a full night without sleep, she’d welcome
anything
that could keep her awake a while longer. Isseya took another sip of the acrid brew and made a face. “Is it really necessary to plot out a map for this attack? I told you yesterday the darkspawn don’t guard it. We shouldn’t encounter much resistance.”

“We shouldn’t,” Garahel agreed, “but we might. Best to be prepared.”

“Not if it means leaving Hossberg unguarded. Who knows when the darkspawn will try to hit us again? If you take all our griffons out of the city, even the darkspawn will have to recognize the opportunity.”

“I wasn’t proposing to take them all,” her brother said mildly. “I think four should do it. Four griffons with eight riders is a large sortie, but not large enough to give your purpose away. Set off in different directions, regroup near the Deep Roads entrance, bring it down, come back to Hossberg. I’ll send four mages, two archers to give you air cover, two warriors for ground protection. Does that sound reasonable?”

“Quite.”

“Good. Calien, you’re with Isseya. Felisse, take Danaro, Jorak, Lisme, and … oh … let’s say Tunk and Munk.”

The redheaded archer recoiled. “The dwarves? They always get sick when we take them up. Last time I was cleaning vomit out of Traveler’s wings for
days
. His harness still has stains.”

“That’s true,” Garahel said with the same easy equanimity, “but nothing gets past those two in a fight. Those brothers alone could hold Hossberg’s gates for days. Besides, they know the Deep Roads better than any of us do. They might be able to see things on the ground that the rest of us would miss. I don’t ask you to fly them often, Felisse. Do me the favor this once.”

The archer threw her hands up in exasperation. “
Fine
. I’ll go find Danaro. Hopefully we can get the dwarves out of here before they finish breakfast. The less that’s in their bellies, the less I’ll have to clean up.”

“Very sensible,” Garahel said. He pushed Isseya’s untouched porridge bowl back toward her. “You, on the other hand, should probably eat some food. Did you get any sleep at all last night?”

“Not much,” the elf admitted, taking the bowl. Her appetite was nonexistent, but she made herself eat the cold globby oats anyway. “But I’ll be all right.”

“You’d better. Finish that, and then get out to the courtyard. I want you to use all the daylight we’ve got. Nightfall might bring a fresh wave of darkspawn to the fight.”

“Yes, sir, Field-Commander, sir.” Isseya lifted her porridge-flecked spoon in a sardonic salute, earning a snort of amusement from Amadis. “You won’t be coming with us?”

“I can’t.” Garahel made a face. “I’m Field-Commander, remember? I don’t get to run off and fight darkspawn every time I want to. I’ll be at the fore when we actually break this siege … but for a sortie, well, you’re in charge.”

“I’ll try not to disappoint.”

“You won’t.” The smile stayed on her brother’s face, but his eyes took on a faintly sad cast. “I know you, Isseya. You
can’t
.”

12

5:19 E
XALTED

The entrance to the Deep Roads was an irregular cleft in the hills, ugly as an axe wound. Some long-ago tremor in the earth had broken the rift open, and although it had probably lain unnoticed for decades, if not centuries, the Blight had broken that stillness and drawn darkspawn up through its depths like a moon-pulled tide.

By day, however, the hills were quiet. The Anderfels had always been a hard land, but under the Blight, even the toughest of its inhabitants were suffering. Parched plants and dead brown grass crackled dully in the breeze. Not a single sparrow sat in the branches of the bent, leafless trees. The unnatural storms of the Blight cast a pall over the morning, although it seemed that enough weak light spilled through to keep the darkspawn down.

Isseya, flying at the head of their small formation, signaled Revas to land and the others to follow her lead. The black griffon descended in a tight, controlled spiral, alighting on a hill near the gap in the earth. A moment later the others touched down around her.

Dismounting, Isseya walked over to the rift. The earth around it was dry and brittle; pebbles crumbled loose under her feet and tumbled into its depths. The cold, foreign smell of darkspawn corruption wafted up from the chasm.

The crevice’s interior surfaces were oddly stained, like a long-used teacup that had never been washed. Their discoloration made it difficult to gauge how far the rift ran or what twists and turns it might take during its descent. Isseya summoned a flicker of magical light to the head of her staff and extended it over the crack, hoping to illumine a little more … but there was virtually nothing to be seen. The black stains on the stone defeated her eyes.

It didn’t look difficult to collapse, at any rate, and that was the important thing. She motioned for the other mages—Calien, Danaro, and strange, beautiful, unsmiling Lisme—to join her.

While the mages gathered around the crevice, and Jorak and Felisse checked over their bows, the dwarven brothers Tunk and Munk noisily washed out their mouths with a shared canteen of ale and spit into an abandoned rabbit hole. Isseya had expected the dwarves to take more of an interest in their attempted demolition, but the brothers seemed entirely preoccupied with their ale-rinsing. Judging by the vigorousness of their gargling and the sour expression on Felisse’s face, it seemed that archer’s gloomy predictions had come true, and the dwarves had indeed dropped their breakfasts somewhere over Hossberg. Isseya could only hope they’d cleared the city first.

“How do you want to break it?” Lisme asked as she and the others came to the bottom of the broken hill.

The tallest of the three mages, Lisme was an intentionally unsettling presence. She used wigs and paints and other cosmetic tricks to give herself exaggerated, inhuman looks. Some days she appeared male; others, female. Isseya had worked and fought alongside her for years and still wasn’t sure which, if either, was the truth. The mage seemed to change genders as easily as she changed her clothes, and with the same air of artificial performance. To her, being a man or woman seemed to be a matter of theater, not identity. She had heard that Lisme had been subjected to considerable persecution before and during her time in the Circle of Magi, and that her bizarre guises since joining the Grey Wardens were colored by those earlier attempts to control her identity. Having survived erasure, she made herself indelible.

Today Lisme was dressed as a woman, and her hair was a tangled mass of old sea nets, the ropes stiff with salt and bleached white by the sun. Her eyes were a pale, washed-out bluish-green, the same shade as the cloudy glass beads she’d strung into the netting. Somehow she’d procured dozens of opalescent fish scales and had glued them to her cheeks and eyebrows, masking her pale skin under the guise of some fey, dreamlike creature.

There was nothing dreamlike about the intensity in her eyes, though. Lisme
hated
darkspawn. Her hatred burned with a heat that Isseya had rarely seen in any man or woman, even after seven years of fighting against the Blight. She hated darkspawn the way Revas hated them: with the all-consuming, unthinking ferocity of a raptor’s soul.

“Earthquakes would be the easiest way, don’t you think?” Isseya said. “Shake the hill down on top of it.”

“Or into it, if the hole is bigger than it looks from here.” Lisme leaned over and peered intently into the hole. The opalescent bead-scales on her cheeks shimmered like tears in the Fade.

Suddenly she recoiled. “Never mind. No time for doubts. Collapse it
now.
They’re here.”

“What do you—” Isseya began, before the slap of hurlock footsteps and the echoes of their guttural grumblings reached her. The darkspawn were coming, and they were coming fast. The way that sound bounced off subterranean walls made it hard to tell, but she guessed there might be anywhere from thirty to a hundred hurlocks and genlocks in the swarm, and the whispery ear-shrilling flitters of shrieks suggested that those infernal assassins were among them too. She recoiled instinctively.

“Bring it down,” she said.

The scale-wearing mage nodded and raised her staff. She was the only one among them who could command the primal forces of earth to tear themselves apart in a controlled quake, but the others had their own methods of destruction. Isseya began pulling power through her own staff, shaping the raw energy of the Fade into telekinetic waves that would amplify whatever damage Lisme’s quake wrought under the surface. Around her, she felt the prickly spiritual tension that indicated the others were crafting complementary magic.