Dragon Age: Last Flight (6 page)

“Is that true?” she whispered. “Are you grieving?”

Revas snorted again and turned her head to watch the others. But she took a step closer as she did, enfolding Isseya in the warm animalic smell of her feathers.

Garahel was scratching the neck of an odd-looking male griffon about forty feet away. The animal had the rangy look of a juvenile that hadn’t quite grown into its adult frame, and his color was very unusual. Large patches of white splashed across the fur on his belly and forequarters, while the rest of him was a brindled brownish-gray.

Most griffons were variations of gray. Solid whites and blacks existed but were uncommon, and parti-colored ones were even more rare. While fighting griffons were bred for speed, intelligence, and athleticism, rather than color, gray was the dominant type. The others were recessive, and seldom showed among the Wardens’ ranks.

Not that color was the only oddity about Garahel’s new friend. One of the griffon’s ears flopped forward instead of standing up in a swept-back point like it should have. There was a sharp kink in his tail, which bushed out in a great furry puff more like a fox’s tail than the long sleek lion’s tail that most griffons had.

In all, the young male was a very peculiar-looking griffon. And he was actually
purring
as Garahel scratched his neck. The griffon butted the top of his head against the elf’s chest, nearly bowling her brother over.

“That’s an odd bird,” Isseya called.

“Of course he is,” Garahel replied, wheezing for breath. He seemed delighted at having been knocked backward, though, and immediately resumed scratching the griffon’s neck even more vigorously. “He’s
mine
. The unlikeliest of heroes, that’s us.”

“Does he have a name?”

“Thunder, according to the chest plate. But I don’t think that fits, do you?” Garahel asked the griffon.

The big animal flattened his ears and hissed, sticking his tongue out. The elf nodded sagely at this response. “That’s what I thought. So we’ll need something else. Oddbird, maybe. Scruffy? No, too predictable. Scragglebeak? Hmm, no, sounds like a geriatric pirate in need of a shave. Ah! I know. Crookytail!”

“Crookytail,” Isseya repeated. “You want to name your war griffon
Crookytail.
”

“He likes it better. Don’t you?” Garahel cooed, scratching under the griffon’s chin.

Isseya bit her tongue. There were bigger concerns in the world than her brother giving an undignified name to his griffon. And really, if there was a single griffon in Thedas who was
going
to have a ludicrous name, it might as well be that one. Nobody could possibly take the poor beast seriously anyway.

Within a few minutes, the rest of the Wardens had chosen, or been chosen by, their griffons. They’d loaded their bags, saddled their new mounts, and adjusted the reins to fit their grasps. To Isseya’s surprise, it didn’t seem that anyone was left over, or had been stuck with a beast that they found less than ideal. Garahel had chosen the only odd one in the lot, and the others all seemed as taken with their new companions as she was.

“Under normal circumstances, we’d have you train together,” Warden-Commander Turab said when they’d all been paired. “Easy rides around Weisshaupt, some flyby target practice, drills with dives and landings. Nice gradual training. Months of it.

“But we don’t have months. There’s a Blight on, and we need the palace evacuated before the sun sets and the darkspawn surge. You’ve had some training, enough that I believe you can be ready to go into the field, but we don’t want you fighting. Your mission is to take one passenger each and flee. Do you understand? You don’t engage the darkspawn, you don’t hold ground. You take to the air,
high
, and you get your charges out of Antiva City as quickly as possible. Huble and Dendi will be with you, and I want you to follow their lead—but if you get separated, or they fall, head for Wycome. Any questions?”

Isseya shook her head along with the others. She might have had questions if she’d known where to begin asking them, but it was all too much, too fast. None of the others seemed eager to speak up either.

Turab looked them over deliberately, then jerked his head in a nod. “Fine. Back down to the audience chamber. The senior Wardens will meet you there.”

It was hard, climbing down from Revas’s saddle. Isseya had just met her new griffon, and she did not want to leave as they were beginning to form their first fragile bond. The fear she felt at the prospect of their mission warred with the exhilaration of finally becoming a true griffon rider, and she wondered if that was why the Warden-Commander had arranged things as he had. Nothing else could have distracted them so effectively from the likely doom they faced.

But they still had to go on and face that doom, so, reluctantly, she pulled herself off Revas, patted the griffon’s scarred neck in farewell, and followed the Warden-Commander back into the cool blue shade of the Royal Palace.

The halls were nearly deserted as the young Wardens made their way down. The climbing roses, wilting in the twilight after a long day in the sun, swayed gently in the sandalwood-scented breezes of the interior palace. Along with the flitting of the small yellow-breasted birds that darted amid their thorny branches, those wind-stirred flowers were the only movement Isseya saw. Guards and gardeners alike seemed to have abandoned the place.

“Word must have gotten out,” Garahel said. His usual easy smile was gone, and he kept his hands close to the pair of black-handled knives tucked into his belt. “If they’ve panicked…”

Isseya unlimbered the staff from her back. Magic thrummed through the rune-carved steel. She could feel the strange reverberations of the Fade in the metal, both real and not real. By her will, that amorphous energy could become fire, lightning, ice, or pure entropic ruin as it came leaping down the channel of her staff.

However reassuring the feel of that power was, the thought of turning it against people made her stomach twist. Isseya clutched the staff tightly as she walked alongside her brother down the eerily empty halls. “Do you think there will be fighting?”

“I hope not,” Garahel answered, “but if the people feel that their rulers have betrayed them…”

They did, and it had driven them to violence. Isseya saw the first victim as she came around a great bronze statue of a drake. The statue’s wide-flared wings hid the woman initially, but as the elf stepped around it, she could see the corpse all too well. Blood, bright as the statue’s ruby eyes, soaked the snowy white linen of the victim’s dress. The gold trim on her sleeves said that she had been nobility, if not royalty; their pristine cleanliness, unmarred by defensive wounds, said she had been taken unawares. She had fallen facedown. Isseya hoped it had been quick.

“There’ll be more,” Garahel said grimly, striding past the dead woman. An instant later Isseya heard it too: the clang of steel on steel, the hiss of magic being pulled from the Fade and hurled into reality.

It was coming from the audience chamber. The realization seemed to hit them all at once. As a group, they broke into a run.

The Anderfels man was faster than the rest of them; he overtook the elves to throw the chamber’s doors open.

A battle raged inside. Huble and Dendi had overturned one of the side tables and were using it as cover. The bodies of half a dozen guards, burned and frozen by Dendi’s spells and hacked to pieces by Huble’s sword, sprawled on the floor in front of them. Twice that number remained standing, though, and their furious demands for blood echoed from the walls.

King Elaudio lay among the dead. One of his own guards had struck him down: the curved sword of the Antivan Royal Guard stood upright in the dead ruler’s chest, its gold tassel soaked dark red.

The queen was still alive. Along with a handful of other terrified nobles, she cowered behind the throne. No one could reach them while the Grey Wardens stood, but even at a glance it was clear that Huble and Dendi were tiring.

“Give up the cowards!” one of the rebellious guards shouted. “Our fight is not with you! We only want the wretches who betrayed us.”

“You can’t have them,” Dendi snarled back. “Our orders are to take them. We don’t go back on orders.” A fan of ice sprayed from her staff, freezing two of the men where they stood. A third threw his arm up to block the supernatural cold, letting out a high-pitched shriek as frozen blood erupted from his veins in crimson icicles.

Some of the men had turned back as the door opened. Garahel leaped to meet them. He fought alongside the tattooed Anderfels man as if they’d been practicing together for months. The Ander drove them back with huge, sweeping swings of his bladed war club, while the elf darted in and out, stabbing at any vulnerable spot he could find in his off-balance opponents.

Behind them, Isseya pulled magic from the Fade as fast as she could, barely pausing to shape the spirit energy before she flung it as bolts of crackling violet energy at their enemies. Her hastily fashioned spells weren’t enough to kill them, but the guards stumbled under the barrage, and then the other Wardens finished them off.

She forgot her fear, her guilt, her reluctance to harm other people. In the immediacy of the moment, there was only a frantic desire to destroy all who opposed them.

And then it was over. Caught between the two groups of Grey Wardens, the remaining guards soon fell. The last pair tried to surrender, but Dendi cut them down mid-plea with another deadly sweep of ice.

The Ander bled freely from wicked-looking but shallow cuts across his chest and arms. Garahel had taken a light scratch along his brow and a glancing hit from a morningstar that was already beginning to blossom into a bruise on his ribs. None of their injuries looked serious enough to warrant magical intervention, and the Wardens were otherwise unscathed.

“Get them out of here,” Dendi ordered, gesturing to the huddled knot of surviving nobles. “Now.”

“What about the king?” Kaiya asked nervously. The bald girl looked nearly as sick as Isseya felt, now that the urgency of combat had ended and they had a chance to look upon the carnage they had created.

“Darkspawn killed him,” Dendi replied curtly. “We can’t have the world knowing that his own people turned against him at the last, and anyway it’s true. If the Blight weren’t about to swallow Antiva City, none of this would have happened. The darkspawn
are
the cause of King Elaudio’s death, if not the most direct one.”

“That’s not true, though,” the queen said suddenly, standing. A bit of color had returned to her pale cheeks. “It’s not true at all.”

“It’s the truth your people need to hear to keep their morale. You can argue with me about it later, if we’re lucky enough to have that luxury,” Dendi said. She ushered the nobles forward briskly, handing them off one by one to the young griffon riders. Huble gave their names as each crossed the room, but Isseya couldn’t begin to keep up with the flurry of titles and hallowed houses’ names.

Her charge was a compact, athletic-looking woman of some thirty years. The woman’s sleek black hair had been cropped short in a manner more befitting a common soldier than a highborn lady. Amadis was her given name; Isseya didn’t catch her family’s.

She
did
notice, however, that Amadis helped herself to the dead guards’ weaponry as soon as she emerged from cover. After choosing a gold-tasseled saber and three curved daggers, the human woman thrust the smaller blades into her belt, arranging them with an ease that suggested this wasn’t the first time she’d had steel in her hands.

Garahel’s passenger was named Calien. He was an older man, tall, dressed in red-and-gold mage’s robes. A feathered hood shadowed his face; Isseya’s only impression of him was a sharply pointed chin and pale, thin lips framed by dark brown hair. He carried a staff wrought to resemble a dead, lightning-struck branch with a copper serpent twined around it. The workmanship was exquisite, and everything about the staff’s design spoke of power, but Isseya hadn’t seen him do anything during the fight.

She wondered about that, but only for a little while. Perhaps he just hadn’t felt threatened, even with the king dying in front of him.

Kaiya and Taiya took the last two nobles. The Anderfels man didn’t have a ward, since the king’s death left them one short. Of the two who remained, one was a dumpy matron in a tight white wimple. She wore a gold pendant depicting the Maker’s blazing sun within a circle, and that pendant never left her hands. The other was her daughter, Isseya thought; she was younger and slimmer, but their round-cheeked faces were very much alike.

“There,” Dendi said when the last noble had been introduced and paired to a Warden. “Go. Wycome is our goal, don’t forget that. If we fall behind, don’t wait. Your duty is to get these people safe. That is your
only
duty. We gave you the griffons to save them. Now do it.”

5

5:12 E
XALTED

The bells of Antiva City were ringing. Long and loud they pealed, thunder caught in bronze. Their clamor was deafening.

As Isseya climbed back up the stairs to the wall where the griffons waited, she could see the city glowing under her feet. Radiant orange reflected in the windows of the Chantry cathedral; the streets looked like rivers of ruddy gold.

It wasn’t the sunset. Antiva City was burning. Smoke hung heavy in the air, thick enough to choke. The shouts of men rang from the city walls, dwarfed by the bells that called out the same message in their dolorous toll:
To arms, to arms, we are under attack
.

The darkspawn had come.

Warden-Commander Turab had been wrong: Antiva City hadn’t been able to hold its attackers off for days. Already the darkspawn were pouring through the gates. Isseya saw the huge horned heads of ogres moving among houses, and the quick flicker of shrieks around the brutes’ feet. People were screaming, fleeing, dying everywhere.

“They’re not your concern,” Dendi said sharply as she came up the stairs behind Isseya. “Get on your griffon.
Move
.”