Dragon Age: Last Flight (28 page)

She didn’t blame them. There wasn’t much left in her of the elf she had once been.

But there is enough,
she thought,
to see them through this.
To do her part in bringing the Archdemon down. One more battle, and she could bid farewell to this endless march of grief and sacrifice. One more, and she could leave the crushing burden of heroism to others.

“They’ll be controlled,” she said.

*   *   *

Night had fallen over their camp while Garahel laid out his plans.

By the time he finished, the sun was long gone, and Isseya walked back to her own tent under the mantle of darkness. Around her, campfires glowed ruddy in the blue-black gloom, islands of light and warmth in a sea of solitude. The noises of restless horses and snoring soldiers and the occasional sighs and moans of people taking solace in one another drifted past her, as familiar as the nocturnal songs of crickets had been in another life.

Her own tent was quiet. Revas did not like to sleep amid crowds and always sought out her own roosts away from their camps, and there was no one else Isseya would have invited to stay with her. Especially with the corrosion creeping through her blood, it was safer and more comfortable to lie alone.

Tonight, however, she found herself restless. Almost without realizing it, she walked past her tent, moving aimlessly through the forest of canvas and stakes and ebbing campfires until she came to a familiar sight: Calien’s tent, patched together from vibrant swatches of green and gold because he said the colors helped keep the Blight out of his dreams. The cloth had faded over the years, and the night leached much of its remaining brightness, but nevertheless it stood out among the other drab domes.

Isseya paused.
If there’s no light,
she told herself,
I’ll just go on
.

But there was. The golden glow of firelight limned the tent flap, soft but distinctly visible.

Pushing back her hood, Isseya approached and knocked at the door. Her knuckles made scarcely any sound as they dimpled the cloth, but Calien answered: “Come.”

“I didn’t mean to disturb you,” Isseya said, lowering her head to enter.

“You aren’t,” Calien said. He was rumpled and unshaven, and dark circles ringed his eyes, but he managed a weary smile and tossed a horsehide pillow over to Isseya. The elf laid it on the floor and sat awkwardly next to the single oil lamp that illumined the tent’s cramped confines.

An open book rested near the mage’s knee. Isseya gestured at it. “Up late reading?”

“Couldn’t sleep. You’d think that by now I’d have learned the importance of resting before a battle … but somehow the thought of flying out to challenge an Archdemon makes it hard to close my eyes.” Calien gave her a self-deprecating shrug. “I thought a little pious reading might settle my nerves. Or bore me to sleep, either way.”

“It’s a holy book? That doesn’t seem like you. I thought we’d agreed years ago that you were well past the point of prayers.”

“We did. But not everyone knows that.”

“Oh, it’s a gift?” Isseya looked at the book with renewed curiosity. “Who would give
you
a book of prayers? Must not know you very well.”

“No, not really.” Calien closed the book and tucked it behind his bedroll, out of view.

Isseya caught a note of subdued hurt in his voice. She lifted a hand in apology. “I didn’t mean—”

“I know. Truly, it doesn’t matter. I take no offense. And you’re right, she doesn’t know me very well.”

“Who gave you the book?” Isseya asked.

“The mother of one of my victims,” he answered. Seeing her surprise, Calien smiled wryly and leaned back on the blanket-piled bulk of his traveling chest. “She doesn’t know that. She doesn’t even know he was assassinated; she thinks he happened to be struck by a windblown tile that fell from a damaged roof, and that I was just a compassionate stranger who chanced to help her through a time of grief.”

“Why did you?”

“Because she wore the same perfume as my mother.” Calien picked up the little book again and gazed down at its cover. The title was inscribed in gilt, and it gleamed in the lamplight; Isseya caught the flash of its fire-washed silver, although she could not make out the words. “I remember almost nothing of her. Not her face, not her name. She left when I was very young. All that stays with me is the scent she wore … and I don’t even know what it is. Something sweet, like lemon blossoms, but that’s not exactly right.

“For years I wondered if I had only imagined it, but then I caught it again when I was stalking the target. I would have paid no mind to his mother otherwise. She was an Orlesian noblewoman, mistress to a powerful man and mother of his child, whereas my mother was no one of note, certainly neither powerful nor wealthy. But they wore the same perfume, somehow, and the noblewoman was about the right age, and something about that made me desperately stupid.

“I finished the job, of course. The Antivan Crows do not fail to fulfill their contracts, even when the target is a child whose only crime is complicating questions of succession. But when it was done, I lingered in the city longer than I had to, and I arranged to offer the grieving mother some comfort through her tears. Afterward we struck up a correspondence. Over the years we became close. She’ll never know the truth, of course. She only knows that I’ve been fighting with the Wardens since Antiva fell.”

“And for that she gave you a book of prayers?”

Calien inclined his head. “She sent it from Orlais. One of the Grey Wardens brought it a few days ago. Her hope was that the Maker might hear her prayers, watch over me, and guide me safely through the Blight.”

Isseya wanted to scoff at the sentiment, but something in the mage’s expression held her back. Yes, there was something cloying about the notion that the Maker would guard any of them against the coming danger, and something awful about a killer offering solace to a bereaved mother after murdering her son … but there was something terribly
human
about it too.

She couldn’t begrudge Calien for straining to find a connection to the faceless ghost of his mother, nor could she fault the woman in Orlais for finding a false son to assuage her loss. Neither really had what they wanted, but they had accepted a different sort of love in its stead—and if it was imperfect, it was still more than she had.

“She’s still alive, then?” the elf said.

“Yes. The Blight poses no threat to her yet, or anyway, no more threat than pushing a surge of bandits and penniless refugees into the city.” Calien exhaled a long soundless sigh. “Maker willing, it never will.”

“It won’t,” Isseya said. She pushed the bristly brown pillow to the side as she retreated to the door. “Thank you.”

“For what?”

“Reminding me why tomorrow matters,” the elf said, and slipped back into the night.

22

5:24 E
XALTED

The Grey Wardens assembled at dawn. They were a glorious sight, even to Isseya’s jaded eyes: a streaming procession of fifty griffon riders in burnished plate and gray-blue surcoats, their aerial lances tipped with fluttering pennons of snowy white silk. Dawn’s light gleamed off their breastplates and pauldrons, defiantly brilliant in its rosy glow, despite the storm clouds’ attempt to mute it. The griffons, sensing their riders’ excitement, pranced and snorted in their harnesses. Even the beasts who had been through the Joining seemed more eager and less angry than usual. Their coughs had subsided into hisses of anticipation; not a few of them licked the blood-froth from their own beaks as if imagining it was their foes’.

Garahel rode at their head, resplendent in a rich blue cloak and carrying a round shield with the Grey Wardens’ heraldic griffon worked in shining platinum. He was more lightly armored than most of the other Wardens, eschewing their heavy plate for a simple helm, vambraces, and breastplate over hardened leathers. Crookytail waved his bushy, white-tipped tail at the gathered soldiers, as jaunty as if they were trotting off to a parade. The odd-looking griffon had endured the endless battles of the Blight without any apparent diminishment of his spirit; the floppy tip of his bent left ear jounced with every high-footed step he took toward the battle.

Isseya kept to the back. Her cowl was pulled low, and she’d wrapped scarves tightly around her patchy scalp and pallid face. The wind of their flight might blow back her hood, but no one would see the taint’s marks on her.

Revas was irritable under her saddle, hackling and flattening her ears at anyone who got too near. Many of the griffons seemed equally agitated, and Isseya wondered how much of their riders’ tension was being communicated down the reins to their steeds. For all the stoicism on the Grey Wardens’ faces, she knew many of them had to be feeling some fear.

The tainted griffons, however, did not. In their thoughts was only boiling rage and the burning desire to vent that rage upon their enemies. Isseya held them in an iron grip of possession to prevent them from acting on that anger. She controlled eight of them, and Calien held four more. Two other blood mages possessed another half dozen griffons between them. She had not told them the details of the Joining—that was a sin Isseya had no intention of forcing others to share—but she had enlisted their aid to control the tainted creatures.

Together with the rest of the Grey Wardens, they took to the cloud-purpled sky.

They flew high over the Blight-scarred ground, letting the storm veil the diseased earth from their view. The darkspawn had been driven far back into Antiva, almost to the coast where the fallen city lay, and for an hour or more, Isseya saw nothing but the bleak marks of their passage. The shells of fire-gutted farmhouses and ruined walls flitted by underneath, tombstones to nameless towns. Rivers crisscrossed the dead earth, some slow and shrunken and gray between wide banks, others whipped to white fury over a tumult of jagged stones.

Then, abruptly, the darkspawn were there, crawling over the corpse of Ayesleigh like spiked black maggots. From this height, Isseya could not make them out clearly, except for the sweeping horns of the ogres lumbering over the others. Even they were only larger shapes, indistinct amid the faceless mass.

That was enough for her to target, though. At the head of the griffons’ flight, Garahel’s arm went up, holding a streamer of vivid crimson silk to the wind. Upon seeing his signal, the riders dove, splitting into two lines as they hurtled toward the darkspawn.

Just above bow range, the flight leveled off, and the passengers on each griffon began emptying the satchels Garahel had distributed to them before they’d left camp. Dozens of elongated, weighted clay balls fell through the air, tumbling down onto the darkspawn like lumpy gray hail. Upon hitting the city’s cobbled streets, they exploded, erupting in a variety of toxic clouds, caustic fogs, and geysers of ruptured earth thrown up by dwarven skyburners. Empty shops and houses collapsed in a thunder of cracking beams and tumbling tiles.

Impressive as the fusillade was, it wasn’t an attack the Grey Wardens could sustain for long. Garahel had mentioned the cost of their artillery when he’d discussed their strategy with Isseya—only once, and in passing, but the number had stayed with her. They might have been raining rubies encased in gold on the darkspawn for the price of those bombs.

Rubies wouldn’t have been so devastating, though. The angry, agonized cries of darkspawn followed the Grey Wardens as they wheeled their griffons back up through the clouds. And for all its infernal cleverness, the Archdemon that controlled them had no understanding of the politics or commerce of Thedas. Neither the draconic darkspawn nor its minions had any way of knowing that the Wardens couldn’t afford to repeat the barrage ten or twenty or a thousand times. And they lacked any way of meeting the griffons in the air … except for sending out the Archdemon.

Garahel’s gamble was that they would. As far as the darkspawn knew, it was their only hope of stopping the Grey Wardens’ barrage.

The red flag went up again, and the Wardens dove for a second pass, dodging around the smoke and grit blown up by their first sweep. Again the earth erupted into poisoned flames behind them, and again the shrieks of dying darkspawn filled the air. Foul green vapors poured from the windows of the few houses that hadn’t tumbled into wreckage.

But this time the timbre of those screams changed in the Wardens’ wake, shifting from terror to triumph, and Isseya knew even before she turned in her saddle that the Archdemon had come to answer their challenge.

It rose through the inferno over Ayesleigh like a nightmare made flesh. The miasmic fog from their bombs rolled off its ragged black scales, eddying through the rifts in its armor and trailing after it like a venomous cloak.

Three times Isseya had seen the Archdemon since the fall of Antiva City, and each time it seemed to her that the creature had become larger and more terrible. Perhaps something in the course of the Blight gave it strength, or perhaps it was a trick of her taint-sickened imagination … but the sight of the Archdemon, frightening even in the beginning, now sent a shock of icy paralysis through her soul.

Many of the other Grey Wardens were similarly affected. Bereft of their riders’ guidance, and momentarily freed from the stunned mages’ control, their griffons balked and swerved in confusion, stalling for precious seconds instead of fleeing back toward their ambush as they’d planned. Only a few, led by Crookytail’s namesake white-plumed tail, broke away to where their hidden allies waited. The others lingered in confusion—only for a second, but it was a second too long.

Faster than Isseya would have believed possible, the Archdemon was upon them. It knocked Revas to the side with a buffet of wind from its wings and swept past her, fixated on a cluster of tightly grouped Wardens ahead. The black griffon fought to regain her balance, screaming angrily.

Past them, the Archdemon’s enormous bony jaw swung open, backlighting the corrupted dragon’s horns and the fringe of broken bone around its chin with the infernal glow that filled its throat. Then Revas’s tumble broke Isseya’s view. When they came back up an instant later, there was nothing to be seen but fire, whirling violet around a core of absolute dead black, soundless and roaring all at once.