Dragon Age: Last Flight (31 page)

The Archdemon’s death had done nothing to slow the spread of the darkspawn taint in the elf’s body. The last of her hair had fallen out, and gray blotches of corruption patched her scalp. The whispers of madness that haunted her thoughts had changed, grown softer and more shapeless, like the murmurings of a distant dreamer rather than the urgent calls they’d been … but they were still there, filling her quiet hours.

Soon she would go to answer her Calling. That thought, which once had filled Isseya with such dread, now seemed only welcome: the opportunity to put down an impossibly heavy burden and come, at last, to rest.

Soon. Isseya held that thought as the torchbearers came forward and the red flames took her brother.
Soon.

*   *   *

A month later that promise of respite seemed more desirable, and more distant, than ever.

Isseya wanted nothing more than to give up her struggle and surrender her ghosts, but instead she found herself saddling Revas for Weisshaupt.

It was the griffons. Following the Blight’s end, they had been behaving erratically, and none of the Wardens knew why. The strangeness had begun with the birds originally stationed at Fortress Haine, it was said, and so the First Warden had ordered Isseya back to the Anderfels. Before she was released to her Calling, the elf would tell them what she could about the griffons’ troubles.

Isseya didn’t expect to have much insight to offer. Whatever the problem was, it had spread far beyond Fortress Haine’s beasts. Moreover, other than Revas, most of the griffons now regarded her with barely hidden suspicion, for the taint had progressed so far in her that she seemed almost as much darkspawn as Grey Warden to them.

But she went all the same, because orders were orders, and in truth she welcomed the chance to see the great glorious beasts one last time.

What she found in Weisshaupt, however, was a grim mockery of what the griffons had been.

The roosts were nearly empty. Some of that, she knew, was because of losses suffered during the merciless years of the war. And some was because the Grey Wardens were still scattered wide across Thedas, working to build new accords between nations in the fragile, emerging peace.

But even so, the number of vacant perches in Weisshaupt’s mountain roosts shocked her, and more shocking was the roostmaster’s news about why.

“They’re killing one another,” he told her. His name was Dunsaine; he was a small, stocky, brown man with pox-scarred cheeks and a knife-scarred smile, but an easy manner nonetheless. A hungry griffon’s beak had taken three fingers and part of the thumb off his left hand when, as a foolish young recruit, he’d tried to nurse it back to health by hand-feeding its meals. Despite that accident thirty years ago, his love for the winged creatures had never waned. Dunsaine had devoted his life to caring for Weisshaupt’s griffons, and Isseya had never seen such pain in the man as she saw now.

“What do you mean?” she asked. The elf wore her hood pulled down to her eyebrows and kept the lower half of her face wrapped in a blue-black scarf. She looked like a leper trying to hide her disfigurement, but the truth was worse, and she didn’t want her old friend to see it. Even at the end, Isseya held on to that much vanity.

“Come. I’ll show you.” He led her out and up the windswept stairs, their shadows silvered with winter frost. Crisp-grained snow crunched underfoot as they climbed to the high wall that overlooked the griffons’ feeding ground, a broad bare bowl of stone where the Wardens drove goats and sheep for the beasts to prey upon.

No goats or sheep were in there now, yet fresh blood made steaming crimson arcs across the pale gray stone. As Isseya squinted against the sun’s white glare, she saw two griffons wheeling across the feeding ground, one chasing the other in what she initially took for play and then—when another spatter of blood rained down from the sky—realized was anything but.

“Why are they fighting?” she asked.

Dunsaine shook his head. “I don’t know,” he answered helplessly. “Males do, sometimes, if there’s a female in heat around, but there hasn’t been one of those in the roosts for weeks. Sometimes mothers will fight if their young are close by, but we don’t have any of those about either. Food’s not scarce enough to make them quarrel for hunger, and they all know this is shared territory. No explanation I know fits. But fight they do, all of them, and it gets worse every day. At first they only fought each other, but in the last two weeks they’ve started turning on people. We’ve already had to put down nearly a dozen of the poor beasts for injury or viciousness.”

Apprehension traced a chill finger down Isseya’s spine. “May I examine one of them?”

“Surely. Which would you like?”

“Any will do.” She paused, reconsidering. “No, wait. If they’re
all
fighting … let me see one who was never at Fortress Haine. Please.”

“This way.” He led her back through the covered roosts and along a straw-flecked hall to the south-facing cove where the convalescent roosts held Weisshaupt’s sick, wounded, and elderly steeds. Hatchlings were kept here too, whenever the Grey Wardens had any, but presently those nests held only old stains and cobwebs.

“Tusk is our oldest griffon,” Dunsaine said, stopping outside a small wooden door. Through the cutout window at eye level, Isseya saw a roost much like all the others: a sheltered interior portion with a water bucket, a shallow nest of straw and stiff, raw goat hides, and a wide shelf of sun-washed stone that opened to the mountainside.

A very old griffon was sprawled on that stone, his wings spread wide to bask in the sun. All the fur on his paws and the whiskery tuft at the end of his tail had gone snowy with age, as had the feathers around his beak and down the back of his head. Tusk’s wings were patchy, his tail threadbare. He seemed to be deaf, or nearly so; he did not react when Isseya opened the door, and let out a hoarse trill of surprise when she reached out cautiously to touch his flank. His eyes glowed with the dull haze of cataracts, so thick that she doubted the poor creature could fly safely, or at all, anymore.

He wasn’t just old, but sick. Crusts of dried blood rimed his nostrils and the corners of his beak. His pulse was dangerously rapid, yet his breath was a slow, rattling wheeze. Every other exhalation came out as a weak sneeze.

Most distressing, he’d shorn off the fur and feathers on the insides of all four limbs, and had licked them into suppurating hot spots. The raw, swollen flesh had an ugly wet shine to its surfaces, and as Isseya came closer, she saw inky purplish stains spreading under the old griffon’s skin.

It looked like her own flesh. It looked like darkspawn corruption. But that was impossible.

“Tusk?” she murmured, but if the elderly griffon heard her, he made no response.

Shielding the movement from Dunsaine behind her, Isseya pricked a drop of blood from her own finger and another from Tusk’s paw. It was hard to believe that this decrepit old thing could share anything like the rage she’d seen from the two griffons battling over the empty feeding grounds … but whether he did or not, her spells would soon show her the truth.

She grasped the Fade, and she traveled along the currents of blood and magic until she slid into Tusk’s mind.

Raw red hatred greeted her. The ancient griffon’s mind was a sea of bloody rage, and although Tusk was too old and feeble for that hatred to be expressed in action, the intensity of emotion seething in his thoughts left no doubt that he would have killed them all if he could. All the Wardens, all the other griffons, and finally himself. He felt an alien sickness pulsing through his muscles, wrapping around his bones—and he sensed its echoes in the Wardens, in the other griffons, in everything he wanted to destroy. Loathing consumed him.

Isseya recoiled from the shock of it. She
knew
that she’d never touched Tusk’s mind before, had never put him through the Joining or forced him to swallow Archdemon’s blood. Yet the anger in him was more caustic than anything she had ever felt in Shrike or in the others she’d altered. And, as much as she had hoped to deny it, the hatred and the taint in Tusk was linked to the magic she’d spun over the others.

It wasn’t the same, but it wasn’t wholly different, either. The shadows and contours of her original work were there, barely discernible under the red veil of fury that clouded Tusk’s mind. It had changed, grown into something different and newly warped, as a bereskarn differed from the hurlock that might have spawned it … but she could not doubt its origins.

How could this happen?
Yes, she’d bent the other griffons’ minds to think of their Joining as a disease, and yes, they had coughed and sneezed up blood … but it
wasn’t
a disease, what she’d done. That had only been a trick to make them accept the transformation.

Hadn’t it?

You barely know anything about blood magic.
Calien had hardly begun teaching her the most basic aspects of the art before she’d leaped to Joining the griffons. And who was to say that her teacher knew much more himself? Who was to say that she hadn’t accidentally fashioned a real disease while thinking she was just imitating its forms?

Blood magic was a profoundly forbidden art, and the few who practiced it did so through a fog of ignorance. She’d
thought
she was serving the greater good by violating that stricture … but wasn’t that what fools always thought in children’s stories? It was, in some awful way, entirely predictable that her fumbling would end in unexpected disaster.

But she had to be sure. Stepping cautiously away from Tusk, Isseya wiped her hands clean of any trace of blood and returned to Dunsaine in the hall. “Was this griffon ever at Starkhaven, or Ayesleigh?
Any
of our battles?”

The roostmaster shook his head. “No, Ser. Tusk never fought in any of those battles, not one. His sight started going before the Blight began, and he wasn’t safe to fly. He hadn’t left Weisshaupt since before Andoral awoke. It’s a wonder he’s carried on this long.”

Isseya nodded unhappily. “Has he had any contact with the other griffons?”

“Only a little, when they first got back. We used to feed Tusk together with some of the convalescents. But he couldn’t see well enough to keep from offending them, so they’d get testy with him, and he doesn’t need to be starting fights at his age. Their sneezing worried me too. I know the First Warden’s always said it’s nothing, but as old as Tusk is, I didn’t want to take chances. Anyway, we’ve kept him separated for years.”

“How many years?”

Dunsaine’s brow wrinkled as he thought it over. “Since before Starkhaven—5:21, maybe early in 5:22. That’s when I last had him in with any of the others.”

Two years. Maybe three.
Isseya’s thoughts were a bleak whirl. If Dunsaine’s recollection was accurate, and Tusk had fallen into this condition after limited exposure and years of undetected incubation … then if his condition
was
a disease, or worked like one, it’d had a long time to spread.

“Thank you,” the elf said.

“Can you help him? Do you know what’s wrong?” Dunsaine searched her muffled face for hope, and found none.

Isseya shook her head. “I must do more research. Consult with colleagues. There’s nothing I can do for him now.”

“Then what do—What do we do?”

“What you must,” she answered, staring helplessly at the white-muzzled old griffon. “What is merciful.”

*   *   *

Three months later, Isseya heard, the First Warden formally gave the order: any griffon showing signs of “irredeemable viciousness” was to be put down. Those who were coughing or sneezing up blood, and had served in the Blight, were also to be killed.

Isseya was in Antiva by then, but the news struck her like a dagger to the heart. The Grey Wardens had already been quietly killing the griffons they couldn’t control; the only reason to make the order public was to put outside nations on notice that they were doing so. That meant the rage plague was not isolated to Weisshaupt, and that others had been suffering from outbreaks of the same disease and had gone to the First Warden for help.

No such help would be forthcoming. The Grey Wardens had no solution better than death. That was the real message in the First Warden’s order.

And it was her fault. Isseya still didn’t understand exactly how or why, but she knew that it was so. The scarlet sickness that was overcoming the griffons was tied to the ritual she’d imposed on some of the fighting birds during the Blight … but she didn’t fully understand what it was doing to them, or how it was spreading, and she had no inkling of how to effect a cure. If it were a real disease, then their bloody spume might be the means of transmission. But it
wasn’t
a real disease. Was it? How
could
it be, when she’d made it?

Her quest for answers had begun in Weisshaupt. The Grey Wardens had the finest collection of griffon lore to be found anywhere in Thedas, and one of the best libraries on magic. But, as she had expected, Dunsaine and the other Wardens had already combed it for answers and found none, and Isseya’s own search was no more fruitful.

After coming up empty-handed in Weisshaupt, Isseya traveled to the Free Marches. She’d lied to Dunsaine, at least in part: she knew of no other blood mages that had survived the Blight except for herself and Calien. The few who had come forward to the Grey Wardens had died in the fighting, many of them almost purposefully, as if they meant their deaths to redeem the sins of maleficarum. But she believed there had to be books somewhere, secret diaries, coded scrolls—
something
that might offer answers, or at minimum a direction she could follow to find them.

If such writings existed, however, Isseya could not locate them in Starkhaven. Nor in Kirkwall, nor Tantervale or Ostwick or Ansburg. She found nothing in the blood-soaked mud of Cumberland or the sea-lapped ashes of Wycome.

She tried the Tevinter Imperium next. It was one of the worst-kept secrets in Thedas that the Tevinter magisters tolerated, even welcomed, blood mages in their midst. Some rumors went so far as to claim they were
all
blood mages, every last one, and that was why the Tevinter Imperium, alone among the world’s major nations, openly practiced the institution of slavery: to feed its magisters’ cruel appetite for blood.