Dragon Age: Last Flight (25 page)

Their descent from the mountain was a jolting, jouncing mess. Although the Wardens followed the most direct path available to them, the broad bases of their force cones smashed pines into kindling and dipped precipitously whenever the griffons flew over a cleft in the mountainside. Several times they had to slalom frantically to one side or another to keep the caravans upright. By the time the reached the gentler slopes of the foothills, Isseya’s entire skull ached from the clattering of her teeth. The whispers of demons circled around her thoughts, importuning her through the Veil:
Let us in, let us take the weight of these griffons from you. You need not possess them. Open them to us, and free yourself from their weight.

She shut them out, as she always had, but their voices could not be silenced completely—not while she was touching the Fade—and there was a long day ahead.

Once in the foothills, however, her mood improved considerably. Dawn was breaking through the eastern clouds, its rosy golden hues all the brighter for the contrast of the Blight’s storm behind it. Silvery mist drifted through the valleys ahead and wreathed the white peaks of the mountains behind them. The verdant greenery of the forests stretched beneath them, rolling out in a pastoral beauty lost to the rest of the Free Marches. Even with the tainted griffons’ rage simmering at the back of her mind, Isseya was soothed by the peace of the early morning.

It didn’t last long.

Past the hills, the land withered rapidly. Within the span of a few miles, the trees turned to dead standing sticks, while the grass and brambles around them thinned to scabby patches like tufts of hair on a Blight-manged bereskarn. Sullen gray clouds closed overhead, dimming the purity of the sun. The only animals they encountered were a cluster of tumor-raddled deer, who looked up with bloody mouths from the corpse of a cow they’d been devouring and hissed through hollow fangs at the passing Wardens.

The sight of the ruined deer spurred a surge of fury from the tainted griffons. Isseya, struggling to hold them back, bit her tongue until she tasted blood. It felt wrong in her mouth: thicker than it should have been, colder, a viscous poisoned jelly of corruption.

She spat.

It was blood, only blood. Isseya saw it go red into the wind. But the taste and the feel and the
wrongness
of it lingered, long after the deer had vanished behind them and the griffons’ anger had subsided back to dull embers. The demons chattered in her thoughts, frightened or gleeful, she couldn’t tell and didn’t care.

The darkspawn taint was growing stronger in her. She felt it with fatalistic sureness. It was widely rumored among the Grey Wardens that the corruption in their blood advanced more quickly during a Blight. No one knew for certain, because the taint affected them all differently and few dared to speak openly of what it did to them … but Isseya felt the truth of the rumor in her bones, and every spell of blood magic she worked on the tainted griffons seemed to accelerate its spread.

She tried, with limited success, to put the thought out of her mind. Kirkwall was coming rapidly into view, and they could not afford to be distracted.

As the griffons flew closer, Isseya could see fires burning in low black braziers around Kirkwall’s sweeping stone fortifications. They shone like a crown of red spinels in iron. Tiny mages shuffled around the walls, identifiable from this distance only by the tall outlines of their staffs and the occasional cascades of magically amplified flame that they rained down on the darkspawn from those black braziers.

Those roaring torrents of fire drove the darkspawn back, and incinerated those too foolish or unlucky to flee, but Isseya saw at a glance that they’d never break Kirkwall’s siege. They didn’t have the reach to push the darkspawn back more than a few hundred yards from the walls, and there must have been thousands of genlocks and hurlocks massed outside the city. No refugee shacks dotted the blackened earth around Kirkwall; if there had ever been any, they’d been burned to the ground long ago.

Still, the sight of the braziers heartened her. Garahel had said they might clear a path for her caravans to enter, and give them a chance to leave. Now she understood what he’d meant.

Calien had seen the same thing. “The darkspawn will surge forward when they see us. If we can pull them toward the walls quickly enough—”

“Those braziers will burn them to ashes in seconds,” Isseya finished. “But we’ll have to come in fast and straight. Garahel said the mages could control the fire plumes to some extent, but those sweeps don’t look accurate enough for me to feel safe that they’ll avoid us if we come in dodging.”

“Then don’t. You’re the one controlling them,” the older mage said.

“Yes, because it’s that easy.” Isseya snorted. “Just be ready to clear us a path.” She stood in her saddle, waving her flight forward. “Wardens! To Kirkwall! Riders, clear the way. Lisme, be ready to go in fast and straight. Fast and straight!”

The riders raised their right fists, acknowledging that they’d heard her orders, and dove. Even as the darkspawn became aware of their peril and turned to face the Grey Wardens with bows and slings, the Wardens hurled blasts of fire and bone-cracking ice at them, cutting an evanescent path through the gathered horde. Their archers pinned down the stragglers with deadly accuracy.

Doing her best to block out the demons’ persistent howling, Isseya tightened her grip on the possessed griffons’ minds and sent them racing down the narrow channel that her companions had cleared. The path was ephemeral, as an oar-streak sliced through a churning black sea, and so tight that the primaries of the griffons’ great gray wings brushed against the bodies of charred and frozen genlocks on either side. But the beasts flew straight and true, one chasing the other, beak-to-tail until they and their clumsy caravans had reached the shelter of Kirkwall’s fire-girded walls.

Hunter did not.

Lisme had been struggling with her griffon as soon as the darkspawn came into view, as all the tainted beasts’ riders had, but her course brought her closer to their ranks than the others’ did. The mages and archers ahead of them stayed as high as they could, trying to evade their enemies’ weapons, and dipped lower only to hurl volleys of magic or arrows along the caravans’ path. That greater distance, Isseya saw at a glance, was the only fragile reason the other Wardens’ griffons kept any semblance of sanity through the mists of rage.

Hunter, tethered to the caravan and limited to the height of Lisme’s wavering force cone, was being pushed much closer to the gibbering hurlocks and frenzied genlocks. They shrieked challenges at the Grey Warden and her steed, waving their weapons just beyond the delicate border of death that their companions had laid down—and Hunter could not refuse their call.

Screaming in fury, the griffon launched himself into a mass of darkspawn, while Lisme stood in her saddle and hauled uselessly on his reins. The chain of vehicles behind them dipped as the mage’s concentration faltered, then collapsed into the darkspawn with a thunderous crash. Twenty or more shrieks and hurlocks vanished into the wooden wreckage, but Hunter went down too, dragged out of the air by his harness. The darkspawn swarmed in, and Isseya lost sight of them in the chaos.

“There’s nothing you can do,” Calien said sharply behind her. “We need to get to the city.”

Isseya nodded. Her jaw was clenched tightly against the guilt that bubbled in her throat like caustic bile. There
was
nothing she could do, but there had been before, in the tower roost—and she’d done it, and doomed her friend.

Mutely, she sent Revas forward.

The black griffon flattened her ears and lunged through the air, steadfastly fixing her gaze on the dwindling speck of the caravan before them. It was already almost under the city walls, and the darkspawn were closing swiftly to either side, but Revas ignored the oncoming horde as she had ignored Hunter’s enraged cries and Lisme’s panicked ones. Hurlocks screamed challenges at the side. Calien swept them with a deadly fan of ice, freezing them so rapidly that their skulls cracked from their expanding brains and black icicles erupted from their eyes, but he could not silence the ranks behind them. Genlocks hammered fists against their crude shields and howled incoherent obscenities from behind the corpses of their frozen comrades.

It was enormously difficult for the griffon to set aside her raptor nature and forgo the opportunity to engage her hated enemies, Isseya knew, but Revas did it. The darkspawn horde closed behind them, but they had made it to Kirkwall, and the tongues of fire from its walls kept the frustrated hurlocks at bay.

And despite all else that had happened and was happening, Isseya felt a surge of pride at her griffon’s will and independence. The elf was too exhausted, magically and emotionally, to have guided Revas herself. In that moment, she had needed her griffon to think on her own, and Revas had done so beautifully. Even with Hunter’s shrieks echoing in her ears and the Fade’s malign spirits pulling at her concentration, she could muster gratitude for that.

She stepped out of the saddle. The other caravan leaders were doing the same, watching the darkspawn warily through the hissing whips of flame that drove them away from the walls. The Wardens who had escorted them through the horde were out of sight; they’d flown over Kirkwall’s defenses and landed in the castle, where they would gather the civilians to be let out through a small secondary gate and loaded into the caravans. Isseya wondered how they’d decide who would stay behind, since Lisme’s chain of vessels had been destroyed on the way in. As Field-Commander of Fortress Haine, it was probably her duty to make that decision, but she was far too weary to face that choice now.

The tiny gate in front of them was opening. Exhausted, frightened men and women emerged, blinking against the hot wash of light from the fire spells. Many cradled babies in their arms or pulled small children along by the hands. They brought almost nothing else. Isseya had told the Champion of Kirkwall that the Wardens didn’t have room for material goods on these runs. There would be food and clothes at Fortress Haine.

“Get in,” one of the other Grey Wardens told the refugees, guiding them to one of the three caravans as each conveyance filled. The Marchers obeyed, their faces taut with barely contained panic. Some of the children cried.

Isseya ignored them. The strain of holding her spells took all she had; the elf could spare no pity for her charges. She waited until the last of the aravels was almost loaded and the shapes of their flying escorts were visible overhead through the veiling flails of fire from the walls. When she saw the griffons circle in the sky, she knew the Grey Wardens were ready to lead them out from Kirkwall.

“Ready the skyburners,” she told the Wardens around her, climbing back into Revas’s saddle. “Mages, raise your caravans.”

At a signal from the airborne Wardens, the defenders’ fiery curtain parted and died. The darkspawn rushed forward, only to be driven back by bursts of concussive force and elemental ice. Buoyed by their mages’ spells, the caravans lifted into the air, then leaped across the gibbering darkspawn as their griffons—two possessed, one free-willed—surged in their traces.

Again they chased the vanishing path laid down by their escort. But this time, as the darkspawn closed behind them, Isseya signaled for the last caravan to hurl lyrium runes in its wake.

The dwarven explosives were too imprecise, and threw too much debris into the air, to be safe for use during their entry. Their griffons couldn’t fly through the choking clouds of dust and smoke that the explosions sent up.

On the way out, however, that was not a concern. And so the Grey Wardens scattered devastation across the darkspawn as they left, sowing azure bursts of death and confusion to cover their retreat. The wreckage of Lisme’s crashed aravels vanished into one such explosion, and Isseya was both glad and sorry to see it go.

“It worked,” Calien said a few minutes later as they crossed back into the quieter reaches of the Blight. He sounded dazed. “It
worked.
We can do this.”

“Maybe,” Isseya said. They were far enough from Kirkwall that she judged it safe to release her possession of the tainted griffons. She relaxed her hold slowly, watching for the first sign that the fierce beasts might turn back to the darkspawn … but they didn’t. Her guess had been on the mark: the griffons had less interest once the horde was out of sight behind them, and the arduous journey had subdued their ire under a heavy mantle of exhaustion.

Gratefully, she released her connection to the Fade. The demons’ voices finally went silent in her thoughts. Isseya sank back in her saddle, only then becoming aware that her robes were soaked through with cold sweat. She’d been so absorbed in her magic and in ensuring the caravans escaped Kirkwall intact that she hadn’t even noticed.

“Maybe?” Calien prompted.

Isseya rubbed her temples. It did nothing to ease the pounding ache behind her eyes, but she tried anyway. “If I have to possess them to keep them from self-immolating, we can’t do this. If we have to break the other griffons’ minds to make them tolerate the Joined ones … No. I can’t. It’s too much, Calien. I can’t do it.”

The blood mage was quiet for a time. Then, softly, he offered: “I can.”

And all Isseya could think, hearing the words through the rush of wind and the dulling numbness of her weariness, was:
That was what the demons said, too.

20

9:42 D
RAGON

“Are you reading about darkspawn again?” Valya paused on her way out of the library, having spotted Sekah sitting cross-legged on the floor with his back against one of the shelves. An enormous gilt-edged book was laid open across the boy’s lap, and from twenty paces away she could see the fearsome visages of shrieks and hurlocks painted across the parchment.

“Of course,” Sekah replied, blinking innocently as he raised his head. “That’s what we’re here for, isn’t it?”

“Not at this hour. It’s past midnight.” Valya raised her staff pointedly. The glow from its blue agate, and the radiance of Sekah’s own moonstone-tipped staff, were the only lights in the library. Night had fallen hours ago, and the other Hossberg mages had retired after dinner. They were the only ones left in the dark, hushed halls. The Wardens allowed them few candles after dusk; beeswax was costly, and the mages were expected to provide their own illumination.