“And then what?” Valya’s irritation had drained away; in its place, a leaden certainty had settled over her. She knew where this story was going, and it wasn’t anything she wanted to hear again. Every mage in the Circle had heard the same tired cautionary tales about how untrained mages succumbed to demons and became abominations. That it had actually happened to Reimas’s father was sad, no doubt, but it didn’t make the lecture any more welcome.
But that wasn’t the story after all.
“Then someone did talk, and the templars came,” Reimas said. “We never found out who it was, or how they knew. It doesn’t matter anyway. My father wasn’t a strong man. There was never much courage in him. When he got word that the templars were coming, he filled his pockets with stones and he walked into the lake.” She was silent for a while. Her thumbs twisted around each other, the knuckles white with suppressed emotion.
Then she exhaled a long breath and laid her hands flat on the book’s cover, staring at the title framed between her fingers. “I was angry after that. For a while. I hated the templars. I hated how they questioned my mother with such cold arrogance, how they questioned us children about our own magical potential, as if we were trying to hide being plague carriers. For years I carried that anger, that hate. I grew up fighting anyone who’d face me, just to have somewhere for that anger to go.
“I can’t tell you when it began to change, or why. But one day I realized that if I really wanted to prevent others from ending the way my father did, my best chance would be to do so from within. I didn’t have the piety to join the clergy honestly. I didn’t care a fig about the Maker. But it’s the templars who are trusted with protecting mages. It’s templars who guard them, and keep them safe—if they’re doing the job right. And I meant to.”
“That’s why you left?” Valya asked quietly.
“That’s why I left.” Reimas looked at her, finally. The older woman’s eyes were bright and glassy. Maybe with tears, maybe not; Valya couldn’t be sure. The library’s weak gray light made it hard to tell. “Because the order had stopped being what it should.”
“Why are you telling me this? What do you want? Absolution for your order? For your father?”
Reimas smiled tightly. She touched her eyes with the corner of a sleeve, brushing away whatever might or might not have been there, and seemed to retreat back behind her usual walls of melancholy self-possession. “I won’t say no if you’re offering, but it wasn’t my intention to ask for that.”
“Then what?”
“The templar order has fallen far from what it should be. I believe it can be set back on the right path, but … not now, not by me.” Reimas pushed the book of homilies aside, clearing the table between them. “But the Grey Wardens still are the heroes of ages. We’re both here now, waiting to join. I asked you to sit with me so that I could tell you my story, and explain that you don’t need your anger, or your fear. We’re all here because we wanted refuge from the divisions of the world outside. We’re all looking for a cause that won’t fail us, and comrades we can trust. That’s what I wanted to say.”
“Good,” Valya said, standing. She pushed her chair back into its place by the table. “You’ve said it.”
“But did you hear it?” Reimas asked.
Valya didn’t answer. She went back to the chamber that held Garahel’s memorial, picked up the diary she’d been reading, and left the templar to her book of unread prayers.
10
5:19 EXALTED
“Ready?” Felisse called. The Grey Warden’s voice wavered on the wind as her tawny-bellied griffon seized a gust of rising air and circled away.
“Ready!” Isseya shouted back. She spat a lock of windblown hair from her mouth and signaled Revas to fall in line behind Felisse. Snow and flecks of burning ash stung her cheeks in incongruous harmony, driven by wintry gusts that caught cinders from the city’s bonfires and whirled them up erratically.
Below the flight of Wardens and griffons, the city of Hossberg stood ringed by walls and burning barricades. Outside the barricades, pushing against the reach of Hossberg’s catapults and ballistae like the waves of a malevolent sea, the darkspawn horde surged and receded.
Seven long years the siege had worn on. The Anders, led by Grey Wardens, had beaten the darkspawn back regularly over those years, sometimes forcing the horde back for months of illusory peace. But always the Blight returned in fresh waves of horror, pushing the Anders back behind the safety of their walls and weapons and blazing barricades of pitch-soaked wood.
The city would have fallen long ago if not for the Grey Wardens. Although the months of respite were sometimes sufficient for Hossberg’s farmers to scratch a sparse harvest from the hard lands surrounding the city, and for its hunters to trail the few thin, frightened deer that survived in its forests, they would have fallen far short of being able to sustain the city on their own. Hossberg survived only because the Wardens and their griffons were able to bring supplies from less-harried lands and drop them from the air.
Isseya was assigned to one such transport now. Calien, the mage from Antiva City, sat behind her in Revas’s passenger saddle; Amadis was with Garahel somewhere on the other side of the walled city. The four of them had lost innumerable friends and comrades over the past years, but by luck or skill, they themselves had survived.
Today they were working together to draw the darkspawn over to the east side of the barricades, so that the real transport could drop its supplies over Hossberg’s western fortifications.
The decoy side of the operation was always, deliberately, more dangerous than the true drop. As a rule, the darkspawn had little sophistication and no real grasp of tactics; while Isseya had seen two emissaries that demonstrated glimmers of higher intelligence during her years fighting the Blight, and had heard reports of a few others, the Wardens always sought out and destroyed such darkspawn as soon as they learned of their existence.
Without such gifted leaders to guide them, and absent the Archdemon’s direct supervision, the other darkspawn were little more than rabid brutes. Baiting them in the wrong direction was easy: all it took were a few low passes, a fireball or two, and a hail of arrows to draw their attention.
Surviving that baiting, however, could be a challenge.
If they flew too high, the darkspawn lost interest and gave up. If they flew too low, the ogres would be able to knock them from the sky with boulders. The genlocks and hurlocks might be able to bring down their griffons with a lucky shot from their wicked black bows. Even if none of the darkspawn landed a blow, flying so close to the bonfires was dangerous on its own; the smoke and light could dizzy the griffons, and the eddies of hot air that rose from the fires could interfere with their wingbeats, causing them to lose control and have to make a forced landing—and a team that came to ground outside allied lines was as good as dead.
But if they could hold steady, they had a fair chance to destroy a sizable swath of the horde and bring some relief to Hossberg’s beleaguered defenders. And that was worth the gamble.
Ahead of them, Felisse’s griffon folded its dusky wings and dove toward the jagged tide of darkspawn. They surged toward it like iron filings drawn toward a lodestone. Some of the genlocks and hurlocks waved their crude swords in the air, gibbering and hopping as if they could somehow leap the forty feet that separated them from Felisse and her mount.
Thirty feet over their heads, the griffon flattened its descent and swept over them, pulling them along the burning barricades and then away from the fortifications. Felisse’s rider, a Grey Warden named Jorak, sent white-fletched arrows sleeting through their ranks, inciting the screeching hurlocks to new heights of fury. Some of the dead-eyed monsters tore their own falling comrades apart in frustration, but most chased after the Wardens.
“In we go,” Isseya said to Calien, signaling Revas to follow Felisse’s course. From the corner of her eye she saw the mage nod, and then they were descending and her focus was on the darkspawn alone.
/> As Revas reached the lowest point in her dive, skimming over the horde so closely that Isseya could smell the cold rankness of their corruption, Calien began firing spirit bolts into the howling masses. They were packed close enough for the mage to devastate with greater spells, if he’d wanted, but a fireball or tempest storm would have scattered them, and they wanted to keep the horde all but climbing on top of one another.
Ahead of them, a third griffon team angled downward, anticipating the course that Felisse and Isseya were about to cross. As that griffon swept over the darkspawn, its passenger upended a heavy sack over the hurlocks’ shrieking heads. A clattering cascade of bottles fell out, glittering in the dusky firelight like pearls of poisoned hail.
Milky liquid roiled inside each of those bottles, and as the glass shattered amid the darkspawn horde, that liquid vaporized instantly into a thick, opaque fog. The alchemical mist dizzied and sickened the darkspawn. Even the great horned ogres bellowed painfully when the fog seized them. As the hurlocks and genlocks stumbled into one another, wailing and moaning in nausea, the Grey Wardens released their spells and arrows.
Jorak, Felisse, and the archer who’d thrown that sack of bottles shot their entire quivers as quickly as they could, hammering the darkspawn with a punishing storm of arrows. An ogre fell to the ground, studded with arrows like a ham stuck with cloves, and crushed two genlocks under its body as it fell. Their limbs twitched and spasmed under the ogre’s carcass like the legs of dying spiders.
Next to the fallen ogre, a hurlock emissary had opened its mouth to attempt a spell when one of the Wardens’ arrows caught it through the bottom of its jaw, punching through its deformed tongue and pinning it to the hurlock’s chest. The emissary screamed around the shaft, a horrible whistling sound, until two more arrows silenced its cry.
Other darkspawn, shrouded by darkness and fog, died around them. Some who weren’t killed immediately fell wounded under their comrades’ boots and were trampled into pulp.
Isseya closed her ears to their hissing cries. Darkspawn sounded the same in victory or death. It was all a cacophony of tortured growls and gurgles, malevolent to the end.
Behind her, Calien had opened himself completely to the Fade. A whirling aura of energy surrounded the mage, so powerful that its glow was visible to the ordinary eye. It might have frightened even the darkspawn, if they’d been in any condition to recognize the threat.
But they weren’t. They could do nothing but reel in the fog and weep over their injuries as the third Warden mage slammed fireballs into the fringes of their mass, scorching the malformed creatures and herding them closer together. Electricity gathered around Calien, causing the hairs on the mage’s head to rise into the air. Sparks danced around the strands, whipped into brilliance by the strength of his connection to the Fade.
Isseya loosed Revas’s reins. The griffon would have to guide herself through the storm that was about to come. Tapping her hands against her steed’s neck to signal her concession of control, the elf reached for the Fade herself and began shaping her own spell.
The winter air cooled even further around her. The soft snowflakes of the Anderfels crystallized in the air, becoming suddenly so brittle that they rattled off the backs of her riding gloves with tiny bell-like tinkles. Circular winds began to spin around them, buffeting Revas from side to side. The griffon was accustomed to this, and adjusted as best as she could, but Isseya knew the most dangerous part was about to come.
She released her spell into the darkspawn almost directly underneath them. A howling blizzard tore through the darkspawn ranks. Just as the first wave of supernatural cold ripped across them, freezing the injured hurlocks’ blood into shaggy black ice and bursting the genlocks’ joints like sap-filled trees, Calien drove his own spell down into the wintry storm.
Lightning pinwheeled through the darkspawn, scything them in coruscating white arcs that ran horizontal to the ground. Isseya caught a fleeting glimpse of a dozen hurlocks paralyzed by the lightning, their arrow-raddled bodies arched upward unnaturally in the flurrying snow. When the shock released them, they fell dead to the ground.
Then Revas was past them, conquering the turbulence of her riders’ spells, climbing up and up through the air to leave the battlefield behind. Isseya let herself breathe again, and flexed some life back into her frozen fingers. Calien closed his connection to the Fade; the swirling aura around him vanished.
It had been a perfect run. They hadn’t lost a single rider; she didn’t think anyone had even been seriously hurt. Their attack had torn a significant chunk out of the darkspawn army, and somewhere on the other side of the city, King Toraden’s soldiers were collecting another drop of salt, dried meat, and barley for distribution to Hossberg’s grateful populace.
Their victory was total. And it didn’t matter one bit.
Within weeks, if not days, every darkspawn they’d killed that night would be replaced by two more. The Archdemon’s army was endless. The Wardens’ gather-and-destroy tactic had been perfected over countless runs and was still luring darkspawn to their deaths by the dozens, because the darkspawn didn’t learn anything from their prior failures and didn’t need to. They had an inexhaustible supply of soldiers.
The Blight would go on until the Archdemon fell. Everyone knew that. As long as it lived, the darkspawn would keep coming.
“Unless they can’t get here,” Isseya murmured aloud.
“What was that?” Calien asked.
Isseya turned in her saddle, just enough to see the older mage over her shoulder. Having lost its static charge, Calien’s hair had fallen back to its normal state of disarray. In the unsteady light of Hossberg’s distant fires, it seemed black, not its true dark brown. His gray eyes were equally obscured, showing only occasional gleams from the deep shadows of his sockets.
“The darkspawn,” she told him. “We did well today, but it doesn’t matter. We can kill them by the thousands, but it won’t change anything. There are always more. There will always be more until the Archdemon falls.”
“And?”
“What if we could cut off those reinforcements? What if we sealed off whatever part of the Deep Roads they’re using to travel to Hossberg? Then killing the darkspawn around the city might make a difference. Then we might be able to break this siege.”
Calien shook his head doubtfully. “How would you do it? The Deep Roads have countless openings. Not only the old dwarven gates, but cracks and rifts from earthquakes and erosion, and probably some from the darkspawn’s own diggings, too. No one knows where the darkspawn are coming from, and even if you could find the way they’re using, blocking that one would just shift them over to others.”
“How do you know?” Isseya countered. “Everyone says that, and then no one tries. They give up before the attempt’s even made. I think we ought to try, at least. All we have to do is follow one of these darkspawn back underground.”
“How do you propose to do that? No tracker alive would take the assignment. Even if they could somehow distinguish one hurlock amid the mass, and that one hurlock just happened to go back to the Deep Roads—which, I’ll remind you, they might do during the brightest hours of the summer sun, but they hardly ever do during winter—your tracker would be caught and torn to pieces as soon as he got on the trail.”
“I wasn’t proposing to use a tracker,” Isseya said. “I was going to use you.”
“Me? That’s funny.” The corners of Calien’s mouth twitched upward in an utterly humorless facsimile of a smile. “What makes you think I’ll be of any help?”
“You’re a blood mage.” Unconsciously, Isseya let her voice drop as she said it. They were high in the air, and the winter winds swept the sound of her words away, but Calien still saw the shape of them. They were beyond the reach of Hossberg’s fires, and the moonlight was scant and weak through the Blight’s perpetual storm clouds, but even in the near-darkness, Isseya saw the color drain from his face in response.
It was a dangerous accusa
tion. Blood magic—maleficarum—had been forbidden across Thedas since ancient times. Its practice was punishable by death, and not always a quick one.
But Isseya had been fighting alongside Calien for years. She’d saved his life innumerable times, and he had saved hers equally. The crucible of the Blight had forged a profound trust between them, and she knew that he knew that if she’d wanted to reveal his secret, she could have done so many times before.
“How did you know?” he asked so quietly that she barely caught the words across the wind.
“I’m a mage too, Calien. I can see when you’re casting spells without touching the Fade.” He’d only done it a few times in her presence, always in desperate straits and only when he’d already been wounded by darkspawn, so the bloodletting needed to fuel his magic would not be obvious … but she’d noticed. There was something different about that magic. Isseya paused. “Can you do it? Can you … get inside one of them, somehow, and follow it back to the Deep Roads?”
He was slow to answer, but at length his head dipped in a nod. “I can. When do you want to do it?”
“Now. Tonight. While no one can see us doing it. We’ll tell them that we saw one of the injured stragglers from tonight’s battle acting erratically, and we followed it into the Deep Roads.”
“We’ll need a darkspawn.”
“We can get one.” Isseya took up Revas’s reins again. Leaning down to her griffon’s tufted ear, she shifted her weight forward to signal her wish for speed and said: “Hunt.”
With an eager hiss, the griffon angled to the north and slid a little lower, passing in and out of the bottom layer of the clouds like a needle darting through cloth. Her head tilted down as she scanned the Blight-withered lands below for the erratic movements that would signal darkspawn.
Dragon Age: Last Flight Page 10