Dragon Age: Last Flight (24 page)

“Garahel.” The mage embraced her brother briefly and stepped back. He’d gotten even thinner in the few weeks since she’d last seen him. She could feel his bones through the wool and soft leather of his clothing. “What’s so urgent that it’s driven you out here?”

“What is it ever?” Garahel raked his fingers through his hair. The streaks of silver in it had grown considerably wider. “The Free Marches are in crisis. The Archdemon has succeeded in splintering the major cities by attacking each of them sporadically and pretending to be driven off by their armies. And it
is
pretending, Isseya, make no mistake of that. But their rulers refuse to believe it’s a ruse. They won’t release their armies, and so they’re all being whittled slowly down while they’re paralyzed in place. In a few months it won’t
matter
if they finally decide to unite under our command. There won’t be enough of them left to overcome the darkspawn.”

“What do you want me to do about it?” Isseya asked, although she had a strong sense that she already knew what his answer would be.

“We need you to evacuate the cities. Cumberland and Kirkwall are likely the best targets. They’ve already lost enough people that you should be able to house most of the remainder in Fortress Haine. Once their population has been moved to safety, their rulers may finally see reason. But it has to be now. Every day the Archdemon bleeds away their strength. We can’t afford to lose more.”

“I’m guessing you can’t afford to send many soldiers to help protect the refugee transports either, then,” Isseya said.

“I’m afraid not.” Garahel grimaced. “Each city’s army will do its best to cover you on the way in and the way out, but they can’t accompany you across the entirety of the Free Marches, and I don’t have any Grey Wardens to spare. For most of the run, you’ll have to rely on your own forces for escorts.”

Isseya could only stare at him. “That’s insane,” she managed eventually. “I have twenty-one Wardens, of whom six are too injured to fight. I have ten,
maybe
twelve griffons capable of pulling caravans, and only half of those are in any condition to face a battle. The rest will just get overexcited and injure themselves. And none of the refugees are capable of this type of mission. It’s impossible, Garahel. If you want me to evacuate the cities, fine, I’ll do it … but I need enough soldiers to make it something other than suicide.”

“We don’t have them,” her brother repeated. “But you do.”

“No, I don’t. Were you listening to anything I just told you?”

He didn’t answer immediately. Instead he reached into his cloak and pulled out a coarse cloth bag. It was dirty and bloodstained, obviously salvaged from some battle’s spoils.

Garahel opened it and took out a second pouch, this one of soft leather and embossed with a mage’s sigil in gold. The blue and gold braided silk of its drawstring told Isseya what was inside: lyrium dust. There must have been almost a whole pound in there, a fortune’s worth.

Next to the bag of lyrium dust, he put a carved glass bottle of viscous black fluid. The glass was etched into the shapes of gargoyle faces and grasping claws, fanciful decorations that did not begin to convey the true horror of the bottle’s contents—or its presence in the room.

Isseya shook her head, stepping back blindly until she stumbled into the wall behind her. She hardly felt the bruise of its impact. “No, no, no.”

“It’s the only way,” her brother said. She couldn’t believe the words she was hearing; from the look on his face, he couldn’t believe he was saying them. But they kept coming. “We don’t have a choice. We
must
evacuate those cities, and we must do it with a small, mobile force. You don’t have many griffons, and most of them are injured. But if you can do to them what you did with Shrike, they’ll fight like ten times their number, and their injuries won’t matter.

“There is no other way to save the Free Marches, Isseya. I couldn’t keep your secret, not if it meant all those thousands of people would die. The First Warden has given the order. Put the griffons of Fortress Haine through the Joining.”

19

5:20 E
XALTED

Isseya went to the roosts as soon as Garahel left.

Tears blurred in her eyes until it seemed that she looked at her once-familiar world through a pane of warped, melting glass. The lyrium dust and Archdemon’s blood dragged her down like a thousand pounds of steel chain. The churbling purrs and occasional snaps of griffons at rest filled her ears as she climbed into the tower that they’d claimed as their own, and Isseya didn’t know whether she wanted to glory in the sound or mourn its impending loss.

Once the griffons had passed through the Joining, all the little noises of their lives would vanish. Their huffs of contentment, nighttime crooning, and preening prideful beak-clacks would disappear; the only sounds they’d make would be snarls of anger and hate, and racking coughs as they tried uselessly to expel the contamination from their blood. There would be no more whistles, no more purrs.

The Blight takes too much from us.

But it was impossible to refuse. How could she? This was the very purpose of their lives. Every time they went out to the field, the griffons and their riders willingly courted death. They fought the darkspawn with all their hearts, and risked oblivion freely, so that others might survive the horrors of the Blight. The Grey Wardens had already made the same sacrifice that she was asking of the griffons. Was this really so different?

Yes
.

Intelligent as they were, the griffons were animals. They couldn’t speak, they couldn’t understand her explanations, and they could not possibly comprehend the repercussions of what she was about to do to them. The notion that they would have consented was a comforting illusion—but there was no truth to it, and Isseya would not lie to herself about that.

It didn’t matter. She’d force them through the ritual anyway. If it meant the Free Marches’ survival, and the Grey Wardens’ chances of ending the Blight, then ten griffons from Fortress Haine were a very small price to pay.

The roosting tower was quiet and airy. Lord de la Haine had never finished the construction of this tower; it remained unfurnished and largely open to the sky, so the Wardens had given it over to the griffons. Despite its openness, the beasts’ leonine smell was strong in the tower, along with the odors of the ointments and poultices used to treat the wounded animals. It mingled with a whiff of blood and old meat from their meals, and, more pungent, the catlike rankness of the urine that the males sprayed along the highest point of the stone wall. Left unattended, griffons were messy creatures.

She wondered if they would still be after she was done.

The magic came to her easily. Isseya had almost hoped it would fail—that the gift of magic would be gone from her, somehow, and lift this terrible choice from her conscience—but the Fade was waiting when she reached for it, and ethereal power filled her grasp. She spun a web of blood and lyrium and darkspawn corruption, and she tried not to look into the griffons’ eyes as she dropped it over each of their minds, one by one.

None of them resisted until it was too late. They knew and trusted her, and although every griffon reacted with the shock and revulsion that Shrike had, they only did so after she’d already trapped them in skeins of blood magic. And as she had before, Isseya ignored their struggles, finishing her spells with implacable precision. Inwardly, she quailed at her own work and wept and raged along with the griffons … but no trace of grief or anger marred her spells.

Finally it was over. Her head ached, her legs ached, and her heart ached worst of all. Standing unsteadily, the elf leaned a hand against a rough stone wall and waited for her vision to clear enough for her to leave the tower.

She’d used only a fraction of the lyrium and Archdemon’s blood that Garahel had provided, but she didn’t want to think about what that might mean. Better to assume that the First Warden had simply chosen to err on the side of overgenerosity, not knowing how much Isseya actually needed.

Ten of the griffons had undergone the modified ritual. She hadn’t put Revas through it—that would have been a betrayal too far—and she had passed over Lisme’s Hunter as well.

As Isseya finally turned to climb down the tower stairs, though, she realized that the androgynous mage was standing there, observing her from the shadows. She had no idea how long Lisme had been watching.

“You’ve Joined the griffons,” the taller mage said. She had shed the male guise she’d worn when Isseya saw her last. Today she was dressed and made up as a woman, her eyes so thickly lined in kohl that she seemed to be wearing a bandit’s mask.

“Yes,” Isseya said.

“Yet you passed over Hunter. Why?”

“For the same reason I passed over Revas,” the elf said. “What the griffons go through is not like our Joining. It affects them differently, and much worse. You were at Hossberg; you saw Shrike.”

Lisme inclined her head slowly. She wore no wig today; instead she had painted her bare scalp with curlicues of metallic copper, dark in the shadows and brilliant in the sun. “I did.”

“Then you already know why I wouldn’t do it to Hunter.”

“No. I understand why you would make this choice for your own griffon. But why exempt mine?”

“Because you’re my friend,” Isseya answered, “and I thought you’d want Hunter to stay as he is. The transformation will kill him. Even if he survives this run to the Marcher cities—and he might not—the darkspawn taint moves much faster in griffons than it does in us.”

“Will it make him stronger?”

“Yes. Temporarily. But yes.”

The copper scrollwork on Lisme’s clean-shaved head glinted as she moved into the light, crossing the tower to study the last griffon Isseya had altered. The griffon was an older female, her wings scarred and bent from many battles, her muzzle white with age. She’d been sent to Fortress Haine because time and injury had made it impossible for her to continue on the battlefield.

Isseya’s spell had removed those pains from her, though, and as the griffon recovered from the disorienting effects of the blood magic, she moved like a youngling again. She was not as she had been in her own youth. Like Shrike, and all the others who had undergone the modified Joining, her movements were hectic and jerky, too fast sometimes and, at other times, seized by strange stuttering delays. She shook her head and coughed, then pawed at her beak, trying to rid herself of the discomfiting taint that she’d been spellbound to believe was just a cold.

But the griffon was strong again. Despite her white fur and cough, that much was clear. She was strong, and she was losing control.

Lisme’s mouth hardened as she looked upon the struggling beast. “Do we need this strength?”

Isseya couldn’t lie. “Yes. Even with it, we may fail. Without it, we have no chance.”

The woman nodded, her painted curlicues glimmering. “Then do it to Hunter. Whatever you need, we will give. We’re Grey Wardens, both of us, and I won’t let my sentimentality be the reason that this mission fails.”

*   *   *

They left Fortress Haine under the misty gray moonlight. Dawn was the merest suggestion of sapphire on the eastern horizon, daylight at least two hours away.

Isseya wanted to reach and leave Kirkwall under the sun’s full brightness, and that meant a departure in the dark. While the Blight’s perpetual storm clouds provided some shelter for the sun-fearing darkspawn, they were still weaker and more timid by daylight than they were at night, and she meant to exploit every advantage she could.

They had few others. Even with the griffons bolstered by blood magic and rage, Isseya didn’t like their odds. The Grey Wardens would have to fight to get into the besieged city, then fight their way back out again, this time burdened by the unwieldy caravans full of civilians. Not only did they have to keep their passengers safe, but they couldn’t afford much damage to the aravels—not if they wanted to use the vessels again.

Isseya had arranged the aravels into four sets of three, each pulled by a griffon and escorted by two more. Revas and Hunter were in harness; Isseya was gambling that the gray griffon’s bond with Lisme would allow the mage to control her steed even through the fog of tension and anger created by the Joining’s magic.

The other two she controlled herself. Unbonded to any particular rider, and unwilling to accept any ordinary rein, the blood-raged griffons would have been completely wild if left to their own devices. They snarled and bristled in their harnesses, snapping at anyone who came near. Already, the griffons’ persistent coughing had irritated their sensitive nasal linings so that each snort was accompanied by a fine mist of crimson—the first sign of many that their bodies were self-destructing under the irresolvable tension of the taint.

Reason had no hold on the creatures, so instead Isseya possessed them.

It pained her to steal even this last sliver of independence from them, but there was no alternative. She wrapped her mind around the two griffons, trying to ignore the red-tinged chaos of their thoughts. A muted sense of rage seeped through, prickling at her like a brush of poison ivy across her soul, but she fought to stay focused on the task ahead.
People need us.

Calien sat behind her, maintaining the forcespell that held their own line of floating vehicles aloft. Guiding Revas while possessing two of the other griffons was all that Isseya could handle; she needed a second mage to manage the caravan. She trusted Calien—and she knew that if disaster struck them outside Kirkwall, the blood mage would be able to seize control of the altered griffons and get them back to Fortress Haine.

“Ready?” Isseya asked.

The terseness of her tone brought a raised eyebrow from Calien, but he knew what she was doing, and after a beat he simply nodded. “Yes.”

“Revas,
lift!
” At the same moment she called the command, Isseya urged the possessed griffons skyward. Lisme’s Hunter rose with them, and in a wavering line, the griffons departed Fortress Haine.