Dragon Age: Last Flight (16 page)

Lisme’s eyes went white, like a night sky electrified by a flash of lightning. The hillside rumbled underfoot, and fissures snaked out from the visible crevice with alarming speed. Isseya caught a glimpse of sunlight reflecting off wide darkspawn eyes and hurled her own forcespell at it, angling its impact to hit the reverberations of the other mage’s earthquake. The fissures widened and expanded rapidly, and the ground dropped underfoot with a sickening lurch. Dust billowed into the air, coarse and gritty.

Isseya stumbled back, sneezing helplessly and trying to wipe the stinging grit from her eyes. Through the haze, she glimpsed a flare of sickly reddish light from the hill’s interior, like a cough in the hot throat of a volcano. It arose from somewhere in the tunnels below, and it did not come from any of their spells.

“They’ve got emissar—” she began to call through the dust, but before she could finish the words, fire and rock erupted through the hillside. Fragments of heated stone blasted across the group of Wardens, drawing a chorus of curses and cries.

Even before the blinding fountain of rock and smoke fell from the air, the ground dropped out from under their feet. Lisme’s guess had been accurate: the fissure that ran to the Deep Roads had been larger than any of them had realized, and the hill was not collapsing over it, but
into
it.

And the darkspawn were there, waiting.

Isseya lost her footing and tumbled hard to the ground. A shock of pain shot up from her tailbone; she thought it was broken. The earth bucked and jolted under her like an unruly stallion. From its ruptured depths, hands emerged.

They were monstrous hands, innumerable and greedy, their nails shattered from clawing through the dirt. Some had three fingers, some six or seven. Some were soft and pale as rain-drowned worms, while others were covered in coarse scaly calluses. Black blood, whitened with a powdery coating of grit, seeped from cuts and abrasions on their skin. The blood was the only thing they shared.

The blood, and the cold clammy hunger.

The hands tore at her flesh, pulling her into the earth, and as they dragged Isseya down, their own faces began to rise through the spell-torn soil like those of swimmers emerging from some nightmarish sea. Hurlocks and genlocks and gaunt-faced shrieks, their pointed ears plastered flat against vein-webbed skulls, came up with dirt between their teeth and hatred in their eyes. They bit and ripped at whatever they could reach, and as Isseya tried desperately to flounder away across the tumbling, treacherous ground, she saw that the other Grey Wardens were faring no better.

Some were doing far worse. Jorak, the archer, lay motionless amid the flailing hands of his assailants. The dirt and scattered stones to his left told the tale: they’d been sprayed with scarlet arcs of blood from a torn artery in his neck.

Twenty feet from the dead archer, Felisse fought to kick away more hands that grabbed at her thighs and ankles. Her arrows fanned uselessly over the ground, just out of reach. A hurlock’s arm, buried past the shoulder, bashed blindly at the ground near the woman’s head with a large stone. It had already caved in the partly submerged head of a genlock, which it had apparently mistaken for the Warden’s, but the darkspawn had clearly realized its mistake and was viciously hammering the bloodied rock over and over into the earth, moving ever closer to striking Felisse.

Blast after blast of incandescent fire marked where Lisme fought. The androgynous mage was hurling incendiary spells point-blank into the darkspawn, immolating herself together with them. The salt-caked netting of her wig was alight with green-edged tongues of flame; most of the cloudy glass beads woven into it had burst. Her flesh was seared raw, red, and black, and the fish scales on her cheeks and brow had crisped white and flaked away. It hardly seemed possible that she was still alive, and she wouldn’t be for long.

Isseya couldn’t see the others, and she didn’t want to look. Taking inspiration from Lisme, she reached for the Fade and channeled its energy into a blast of pure force, aimed directly at the darkspawn grabbing her through the dirt.

The impact threw up a cloud of grit and blood and shattered stone. Isseya, who had closed her eyes in anticipation of the blast, let out an involuntary shriek as a shard of rock cut across her forehead. Warm blood ran down her skin and over her eyelids.

But the spell had knocked the darkspawn away from her, at least temporarily, and she wasn’t about to waste the chance. Wiping a sleeve hurriedly across her brow, Isseya kicked herself upright and scrambled down the hill, skidding on loose dirt and tripping over the clutching hands of more half-buried darkspawn. Blood stung her eyes mercilessly, but she dashed away the pink-stained tears and kept running.

The sound of a griffon’s wingbeats made her look up.

The griffons were coming to their riders’ rescue. Shrike, Danaro’s black-banded gray griffon, dove across the hillside. Isseya hadn’t seen Danaro since the collapse, for the mage had fallen early in the attack and been obscured by the thrashing of the half-buried darkspawn around him, but Shrike had spotted him instantly from the air. The griffon landed, screaming, and tore at the darkspawn around his fallen rider, ripping the emerging hurlocks and genlocks apart with claws and beak as fast as they dug themselves out of the ground.

Felisse’s tawny-bellied Traveler flashed overhead, his wings blazing copper and silver in the sunlight. He turned into a swoop and landed near the archer, kicking up a storm of dust. Traveler tore off the rock-wielding hurlock’s arm with a contemptuous rake of one fore claw, grabbed Felisse about the waist in another, and beat his wings wildly to lift off—only to find that he couldn’t. The churning earth was too treacherous for the griffon to get the footing he needed to launch.

The ground lurched and dropped again. Isseya fell to her knees, suddenly four feet below where she’d been standing a second earlier. Under her feet, the dirt ran like water down an incline that hadn’t been there a heartbeat ago. Stones and debris hopped along the tumult. Revas, unable to reach the elf, circled the collapsing hill and screamed her frustration.

The portion of the hill where Traveler was struggling had collapsed like a crushed melon. A gaping hole yawned in its center, and the rest of the hillside was rapidly sliding into its maw, taking the griffon along with it. Traveler scrabbled along the sliding earth and flailed his wings frantically, but he could get no traction, and the darkspawn that wriggled through the broken ground like monstrous earthworms were tearing him apart as he fought. Their claws sank into the griffon’s bright fur, staining the rich gold red.

Shrike was faring slightly better. He’d grabbed Danaro’s limp form in his front claws and was half running, half skidding down the hill as he tried to gain the momentum he needed to lift into flight. The griffon had few injuries of his own, but the blood of darkspawn soaked the fur around his beak in a black beard. The raptor’s amber eyes met Isseya’s from across the hill, and in them she saw a flash of recognition and an acceptance that, despite her years of close work with them, she would never have believed the griffons capable of.

The darkspawn taint would kill Shrike. That was why the Grey Wardens trained their griffons never to bite in combat, and sometimes went so far as to put armored muzzles over their beaks before sending them out to battle. The corruption in darkspawn blood, if ingested, would warp, madden, and eventually kill whatever had swallowed it.

There was no known cure, no way to stave off its deadly effects. She knew it, and Shrike knew it too. The resignation in the griffon’s eyes told her that much.

Resignation, but not regret. Shrike caught the wind in his wings and was gone, peeling off toward Hossberg with Danaro in his grip.

Isseya hesitated, wondering if she might be able to break Traveler free with a forcespell.… But no, in the chaos and struggle, she couldn’t see well enough to gauge the angle she needed to hit. The griffon was moving too fast, too frenetically, and she couldn’t see Felisse at all. From the tension in Traveler’s forequarters she knew that the archer was somewhere in her griffon’s grip, but it was impossible to know where she was in the fray or whether she was even alive. Overhead, Revas’s shrieks were deafening.

She gave up. Kicking one last genlock’s scrabbling hand away, she fled their disaster. As soon as she was clear, Revas swooped down to let her clamber into the saddle. Despite her overwhelming loathing of the darkspawn, the black griffon made no effort to engage them; she hissed in impotent fury and lofted herself back into the air.

From the sky, Isseya could see the scene far more clearly. Despite her despair on the ground, it seemed they’d succeeded after all. The hill’s collapse was slowing; the pit’s appetite was slackening. And few of the darkspawn who’d clawed at them so viciously through the ground had been able to pull themselves free. Mostly they were dying where they lay, trapped in the earth’s merciless vise.

The Wardens had left a tremendous dent in the Anderfels’ landscape, but they’d won. The way to the Deep Roads was sealed.

It should have felt like a victory. Later, perhaps, it might. But as Isseya looked down to the bloodied remains of Traveler, who had already been torn apart into a scattering of fur and glorious, ruined feathers, it was hard to rise above the leaden emptiness in her chest.

Regret was a luxury she couldn’t afford. The fighting wasn’t over, not yet. Calien had escaped to a safe patch of ground, where he was using his spells to drive a halting mob of bruised limping darkspawn back from Lisme’s painfully slow retreat.

Somehow the mage had summoned the strength not only to survive her repeated blasts of near-suicidal flame, but to stagger away from the battlefield. Her left foot dragged uselessly behind her, leaving a scuff in the dirt with every step, and her charred robes fell apart in crumbling flakes of ash that left a sooty trail behind her. She looked more like a demon-possessed corpse than any living being.

But living she was, and when her griffon saw her, he let out an earsplitting peal of delight. He was a scarred, white-muzzled beast named Hunter, and he was one of the fastest griffons in their flight after Garahel’s Crookytail. Age had begun to slow him a little, but none of that was in evidence as he folded his wings and dove toward his mistress.

Lisme stumbled and fell before Hunter could reach her. Calien threw one final fireball to finish off the last of the darkspawn and hurried forward, a spark of healing magic glittering in the crystal head of his staff. It flowed into the androgynous mage as a trickle of pale blue energy, closing some of the oozing burns that pocked her body, and easing the ragged roughness of her breath. She stayed hunched a moment longer, trying to gather her strength, while her griffon landed nearby. Hunter stalked over with a suspicious glare at Calien, using one great wing to push the mage aside from his wounded rider. Isseya, worried, signaled Revas to circle lower.

“The dwarves,” Lisme croaked, hoisting her injured left leg up awkwardly and dragging herself into Hunter’s saddle. “The dwarves are still out there.”

“I’ll stay with them,” Isseya said. She glanced down to where Tunk and Munk stood. The dwarves looked ready to meet any possible danger, although no darkspawn remained to threaten them. Their supposed protectors had never bloodied their axes. “Can you fly?”

“Yes,” Lisme said. She wrapped Hunter’s reins loosely around a wrist, using the saddle’s armored front guard to steady herself. Closing her eyes, she drew a shaky, painful breath, then exhaled and nodded. The last of the unexploded beads broke loose from the blackened strands of her wig and tumbled to the ground. “I can fly. If we don’t have to do any fighting.”

“Good. Go back to Hossberg. Tell Garahel we need another pair of riders to collect the dwarves, and a survey team to scout the area and confirm that we’ve closed off the entrance. But … we’ve done it. We’ve cut off their reinforcements. Now is the time to break the siege.”

Lisme managed a weary, faltering smile. “I’ll tell him,” she said, and signaled Hunter to fly.

13

5:19 E
XALTED

“Is there anything you can do to help him?” Danaro asked. His voice was quiet, stripped of hope. Unconsciously, as he spoke, he twisted a corner of the coarse field blanket that covered his injured legs. The fabric was dirty and frayed from similar fidgeting over the past day and night.

In a day or two, he’d be well enough to leave Hossberg’s infirmary. Already the healers had tended to most of his wounds; they kept him under observation only to see whether the poison in one of his legs might worsen. The mage didn’t seem concerned about that possibility, though. It was Shrike that worried him.

“I don’t want my griffon to die for saving me,” he said. “There must be
something
. He can’t become … can’t become a ghoul.”

“He won’t,” Isseya promised. Her heart ached in sympathy for Danaro. All riders feared that their griffons might fall in fighting, as Traveler had.… But as awful as that death had been, at least it had been relatively quick. The slow suffering of ghouldom was infinitely worse.

“I’ve heard tales of wildflowers in Ferelden.…” Danaro began, but he trailed off and shook his head disconsolately without finishing the thought. “Children’s stories. I’m such a desperate fool, I’m looking for hope in
children’s stories
. Even if such magic existed, by now? Seven years into the Blight? Every such flower would have been plucked down to the roots and used ages ago. I might as well wish for a fairy godmother to fly in through the window and save him with a twinkle of her wand.”

“There might be one thing we could try,” Isseya said. She hesitated, looking doubtfully down at Danaro from where she stood beside his bed. “If you’re willing to take a risk.”

“The Joining?” Danaro suppressed a flinch as he said the words. He rubbed the side of his nose with a broad thumb, worrying at the mole there. “You know that’s been tried. It doesn’t work in griffons. The attempts were such a disaster that it hasn’t even been
thought of
in fifty years. Even if the experiments had ever had any success … surely it wouldn’t work in a griffon already dying of the taint.”