Dragon Age: Last Flight (19 page)

If they sensed the Wardens waiting in the moat, however, they gave no sign. The ogres lumbered toward the cairns, raced by the eerie, whistling shrieks. They grabbed the pikes and staffs in huge callus-plated hands and needle-clawed gaunt ones, yanking the trapped weapons loose and holding them aloft with triumphant roars. The slower hurlocks and genlocks came upon them, snarling and grunting enviously, and tried to wrestle the smaller weapons away from the hissing shrieks. Around and around the ogres they danced, quarreling over their prizes.

And the earth exploded under their feet.

Dirt fountained twenty feet into the air, propelled by four staggered gouts of incandescent blue-green fire that burned brighter than the sun. More than two hundred yards away, where the Grey Wardens waited, the wave of pressure popped Isseya’s ears and kicked the breath from her lungs. Magical flame incinerated the nearest darkspawn instantly, lighting up the bones inside their flesh a split second before reducing their entire forms to ash. Rocks and white-hot metal fragments scythed upward and sideways from the blast, shredding other darkspawn into disintegrating puffs of wet blackness. Nothing solid was left of the ones that had been nearest the eruptions.

The skyburners’ violence was like nothing Isseya had ever seen. The wind that blew over the Grey Wardens was damp and heavy with the smell of sudden death, edged with the tingling acridness of burned lyrium.

“Go,” she told her company, and signaled to Revas to take flight.

In a rush of wings, the Grey Wardens launched.

Their task was to kill the confused and injured darkspawn, and they did it with brutal efficiency. Fireballs punched through the hurlocks’ staggered ranks; hurtling boulders knocked down the dying ogres. Ice storms and frost cones turned the genlocks’ black blood to ice and shattered the shrieks’ thin bones. The ruptured earth shook with the force of Lisme’s quakes and Isseya’s forcespells. Through it all, the archers’ shafts hissed down in lethal hail.

They had planned to drive the darkspawn into the river, but after the griffons’ second pass, there were no survivors left to drive. The dwarven skyburners had been far more devastating than anyone had expected, and their little ambush had been a perfect massacre.

The main battle looked far chancier, though, and Isseya had just turned to gather her Wardens back into an organized assault when she realized that Shrike was already attacking the main front on his own.

Danaro was hauling back on the reins with all his strength, standing in the saddle for more leverage, but a griffon in full fury was impossible to stop. And Shrike’s fury was beyond anything Isseya had ever seen.

The griffon dove toward a knot of heavily armored ogres. A pair of Grey Wardens, a human and a dwarf, stood surrounded in their midst. Both were drenched in blood, some of it darkspawn and much their own. Isseya had only a glimpse of them before the ogres’ bulk blotted the two Wardens from her view, but it was enough to tell her that the two were barely standing.

She wasn’t sure whether it was the Wardens’ desperate plight or the fact that the ogres were the biggest targets on the field that drew Shrike’s attention. Either way, the griffon plunged into a heedless full-on dive, slamming into the back of the biggest ogre’s neck with his fists balled. The ogre’s head snapped forward and sideways with a violent crack, and the huge creature toppled dead where it stood.

The other two ogres grabbed at the griffon. One seized hold of Shrike’s left wing and wrenched it violently. Isseya saw the griffon jerk downward in the ogre’s grip, then lost sight of Shrike and his rider as Revas turned away to make another pass over the battlefield.

She expected the griffon to be dead when Revas came back around, but to her astonishment, Shrike was still fighting—and, somehow, still flying. His injured wing flopped on each beat like a damaged kite, but by dint of magic or adrenaline or sheer ferocious will, Shrike stayed off the ground. Danaro clung to his back in terror, firing half-finished spells at the ogres whenever he had a steady moment to cast.

“What did you
do
to him?” Calien asked breathlessly behind Isseya.

“I don’t know,” the elf confessed. “I only wanted to spare him from the darkspawn taint. This … It wasn’t what I intended. I don’t know what it is.”

Turning away, Isseya raised her right arm and called out to the other Wardens: “My flight! Attack!”

Revas was already plunging forward as the words left her lips. Unlike Shrike, Revas and the other griffons in their flight kept to their trained tactics. They skimmed low over the fighting, twisting rapidly from side to side in an effort to evade the darkspawn’s spells and black-shafted arrows while their riders hurled their own volleys into the fray.

Seeing a small group of Ruby Drake mercenaries being picked off by genlock assassins, Isseya sent Revas that way. Valiantly as the men and women were fighting under their crimson dragon pennon, the genlocks had the advantage. A rare magic ran through their veins, enabling the stocky darkspawn to flit in and out of shadows as stealthily as the best Antivan Crows. They vanished whenever the Ruby Drakes turned to face them, then slipped around to flank their enemies and bring them down with quick merciless stabs.

Magic could even the odds, though. As Revas swept past the genlocks and mercenaries, Isseya sent a tightly controlled blast of supernatural cold sleeting across the edge of their fight. Calien hurled a second frigid cone in an intersecting path, overlapping Isseya’s at the point of origin but fanning outward to catch targets she couldn’t reach.

Their dual burst caught most of the assassins—and, unavoidably, a few of the Ruby Drakes—and froze them in thin, cracking shells of glassy moisture. Some of the injured died immediately inside their cocoons of pink-stained ice. Others, pinned helplessly for a few crucial seconds, could only struggle and snarl in their frozen bonds as the remaining Ruby Drakes cut them down.

All around the battlefield, other griffon riders were doing the same, swooping into small conflicts amid the bigger conflagration and aiding their allies with whatever tactics were necessary to help them prevail. Smoke and cinders spiraled up from the dozens of spell-driven fires on the field, stinging their eyes and choking their nostrils, but they ignored the pain and fought on. They threw down covering arrows to enable land-bound Wardens to retreat, drove back hurlocks and genlocks with barrages of fire and stone to let their allies regroup, and distracted ogres and spell-flinging emissaries with flashy aerial feints so that warriors on the ground could exploit their confusion.

A hurlock emissary, dressed in tattered, too-large robes like a mockery of a true mage, clipped one of the griffons with a streak of ebon-edged flame. The griffon flapped and spun wildly, struggling to regain control, but an ogre’s boulder knocked it from the sky before it could recover. The two Wardens mounted on the griffon went down with it, crushed under their steed’s weight even before the darkspawn swarmed over the mortally injured beast and tore it apart with their claws and saw-bladed swords. A fine mist of blood clouded the air above their savagery.

It happened too quickly for Isseya to react, and there was little she could have done to stop it in any event. She was in danger herself: a group of genlocks with crossbows was shooting at Revas, and though the fireballs that she and Calien hurled back at the archers incinerated some of their quarrels in passing, the onslaught was too risky for the griffon to withstand.

A bolt creased Isseya’s forearm; a second later two others plinked off the armored foreguard of her saddle. Hunching lower to take what cover she could, the elf shouted at Revas to retreat, and then used her firespells to buy them time.

Scratched and quarrel-stung, the black griffon climbed into the air. The genlocks’ bolts chased her, but their weapons didn’t have the range or accuracy to pose a serious threat once Revas was a few hundred feet up.

They circled above the battlefield, too high to do much but watch for the moment. To Isseya’s astonishment, Shrike was still fighting on the ground. He was so soaked in blood that she didn’t recognize him immediately. Danaro was nowhere to be seen. Either he had fled his griffon’s madness or, more likely, he had died.

She wondered if Shrike would have noticed either way. The griffon was completely lost in the frenzy of his fighting. He kicked an ogre back into a crowd of hurlocks, hitting the horned brute with such force that it was knocked off its feet, then leaped onto the ogre and ripped at it with all four claws while savaging its throat with his beak.

The heedless aggression of his attack left him vulnerable to the hurlocks. As they got back to their feet, the smaller darkspawn mobbed him, stabbing and slashing.

Yet, somehow, Shrike managed to evade many of their blows. It was as if he knew before the darkspawn did where they were going to strike, and could dodge or deflect their swings before they landed. Not always—there were too many, and Shrike wasn’t about to give up his prey to avoid them—but it began to explain how he’d stayed in the fight as long as he had.

His strength and quickness, too, had increased to supernatural levels. He could pull a hind leg away from a hurlock’s sword without looking, and then—still without looking, far faster than Isseya could follow the motion—whip that same leg back with enough force, despite the awkward angle, to rip the hurlock’s stomach open and spill its guts across the ground.

Calien had seen it too. “How is he
doing
that?”

Isseya could only shake her head. Her throat was painfully dry from shouting through the smoke. “I don’t know. I’ve heard that some of the oldest Wardens can do something like it. Late in their service, when they’re on the brink of the Calling, some of them have such a kinship to the darkspawn that they can hear echoes of their thoughts. It never lasts long, though. It always means the end is near.”

“It does seem that Shrike’s is, yes.” Calien paused, and although he was sitting behind Isseya and she could not see his face, she’d been fighting alongside the blood mage long enough to know when he was struggling with something he wasn’t sure he wanted to ask.

“Spit it out,” she muttered.

“What you’ve done—”

“It wasn’t what I wanted,” the elf said curtly. All she had intended was for Shrike to survive. Not for him to become some winged avatar of destruction.

“But it
is
what others will want.” He pointed down to where Shrike was finally beginning to falter. The griffon’s gray wings were soaked with red and black; the few primary feathers that remained on each one left dripping trails of blood whenever he moved. Frost burns and gaping cuts marred his flanks. A broken arrow stuck out from his neck, another from his right forelimb.

And yet his struggle had barely slowed, and the ring of dead around him was heaped five high on every side.

At the front, brass horns were blowing to signal the allies’ victory. They’d won. The darkspawn ranks were breaking, dissipating into chaos as, somewhere, the faraway Archdemon lost interest in the field and gave up control of its defeated minions. Hurlocks and shrieks scattered mindlessly, fleeing over the corpses of their comrades. The ogres, too big and slow to escape, fought on, bent on bringing as many others into the void as they could.

A cheer went up from the Wardens and their allies, who rushed at their defeated enemies with renewed determination. Soon their victory was a rout, and the darkspawn were being driven into the Lattenfluss, where they floundered and drowned or were shot down by archers.

Isseya didn’t share their jubilation. She looked down at Shrike, who had finally fallen. They’d won this battle … but the war raged on. As long as the Archdemon lived, none of their victories could be sure to last. Hossberg was free today, but in a week or a month or a year, it might fall to the darkspawn again.

Calien was right. Isseya knew it as surely as she flinched from admitting it. Many
would
want the griffons to become even deadlier than they were. The griffon riders wouldn’t—not the ones who saw their beasts as friends and trusted partners—but those who viewed the animals as mere machines of war, to be expended strategically and with no more emotion than skyburners or catapults, those people wouldn’t care about the cost.

“It was my spell,” she said aloud, both to Calien and to herself. They were high above the battle, and though the wind carried the scent of blood and smoke from below, it was fainter up here. Stronger was the leonine musk of Revas’s fur. “Mine, and mine alone. No one else has the secret. And I’ll never do it again.”

15

9:41 D
RAGON

“Have you ever known a blood mage?” Valya asked. She didn’t intend for the question to sound timorous, but it came out that way anyhow. Even after she’d spent months learning to accept the presence of the templars in Weisshaupt, the habits she’d learned in Hossberg remained.

Despite her occasional hesitations, however, she had genuinely come to like Reimas. Under her melancholy exterior, the woman had a core of humility and profound kindness. If all the templars in Hossberg had been like that, Valya often thought, her formative years in the Circle wouldn’t have been stunted by such fear.

She felt no such connection with the other templars. They mostly kept to themselves, anyway. Knight-Lieutenant Diguier had died a few weeks earlier while attempting the Joining, and since then Valya had seen even less of the remaining templars.

But Reimas continued to meet her for morning tea and walks around the parts of Weisshaupt that they were permitted to visit, and gradually, to Valya’s quiet surprise, the two had become something like friends.

Close enough, at least, that she felt comfortable asking the other woman about some of the things that had been troubling her.

Reimas didn’t answer immediately. She watched a little brown bird hopping along the rough stone of the low courtyard wall, looking for insects under one of the fortress’s small, stunted apple trees. Black speckles dotted the bird’s wings and the sides of its neck, and its belly was a creamy white.