Dragon Age: Last Flight

by Liane Merciel

  The griffon’s eyes were much better than her rider’s. The first inkling Isseya had that Revas had spotted prey was when the griffon began beating her wings rapidly to increase speed. A few seconds later she folded her wings and went into a smooth, blindingly fast dive.

  A small party of genlocks scattered under the griffon’s shadow, much too late to escape. Revas balled her talons into fists and slammed into the rearmost pair of genlocks, snapping their necks and killing them instantly. Even before the genlocks’ dying hands stopped twitching toward the hilts of their fallen swords, the griffon was on the rest.

  Her instincts were good, and her training had been thorough; Revas never used her beak to rip at the genlocks. Darkspawn blood was horrifically poisonous to anything not immune to the taint, and although the Grey Wardens had been protected against it by the ritual of the Joining, that protection did not extend to their mounts. A griffon that took a bite out of a darkspawn was doomed to suffer an agonizing death.

  But Revas’s claws were fully available to her, and in less than a minute she had torn apart six of the seven genlocks they’d caught.

  The only survivor was the one that Isseya had pinned in a shimmering sphere of force. Her spell sheltered the genlock from Revas’s claws and, at the same time, held it paralyzed. Its nightmarish, yellow-stained eyes stared at her in total confusion from behind the spell’s opalescent walls.

  “Easy,” the elf crooned to Revas, dismounting with the griffon’s reins in hand. Gently, she pulled the great beast away from the imprisoned genlock. For a moment the griffon resisted, shrieking her frustration and hatred of the trapped darkspawn, but when Isseya didn’t release the reins, Revas subsided into sulky churblings and let the elf lead her away.

  When they had enough space that Isseya felt she could trust Revas not to lunge immediately at the darkspawn, she looked at Calien. “Can you take it?”

  “Yes.” The other mage stepped forward, holding a knife. He nicked a shallow cut along his palm, letting the blood drip onto the ground inches away from the trapped genlock’s feet. It was impossible to discern any emotion on the creature’s ugly, flattened face, but Isseya felt a pang of unease in her own gut. For all her bravado earlier, there was something unsettling about seeing maleficarum at work up close.

  But it had to be done. She steeled herself, unsure what to expect.

  The force field vanished like a pricked bubble. At once the genlock lunged forward. Revas tensed, wanting to meet it, but held herself in check at Isseya’s murmured command. The griffon’s front claws flexed angrily, tearing deep furrows in the rocky soil. A whine reverberated in her throat. But she stayed put.

  Calien snapped his hand up the instant that the darkspawn moved. The genlock froze, a quizzical snarl trapped on its lipless mouth. Then it closed its watery yellow eyes, shook its head like a dreamer awakening from unhappy sleep, and turned its back on them to lope away over the barren rocks.

  “It’s going back to the Deep Roads,” the human said. “If we follow it, we should find the entrance they’re using.”

  “Excellent.” Isseya climbed back into the saddle and offered a gloved hand to pull Calien up behind her. She signaled Revas to return to the air, and the griffon did so gladly. “Which way?”

  “North for now.”

  They soon overtook the lone genlock. It strode across the broken earth with a singleness of purpose that the darkspawn rarely showed of their own accord, but it could not outpace its aerial pursuers. Revas spun in lazy, drifting circles over the darkspawn; it was the only way the griffon could keep the slower creature in view.

  After they’d been trailing their quarry for some time, Calien stirred. “You’ll keep my secret?”

  “Of course I will,” Isseya said, watching the genlock. In all the years she’d been fighting the Blight, she had never seen anything like that: a darkspawn utterly in thrall to a Warden’s will. She glanced back at the other mage. “I want you to teach it to me.”

  11

  5:19 EXALTED

  “We’ve found the entrance to the Deep Roads that the darkspawn are using,” Isseya announced as Revas landed in the courtyard of Hossberg’s castle. “We followed one of the stragglers from tonight’s skirmish back to their hole. It isn’t too far from here, and it’s narrow enough that our mages should be able to collapse it easily.”

  “You’re thinking we’ll be able to cut off the darkspawn’s reinforcements?” Garahel asked. He had already been back for some time; his golden hair was dark from fresh bathing and he’d changed out of his flight armor into a soft robe suitable for sleeping. Amadis, Isseya noted, had also bathed and changed. Even as she watched, the human woman circled an arm around Garahel’s waist. The two of them had gotten shameless about flaunting their relationship.

  Who was she to lecture them about discretion, though? They were breaking no laws, and etiquette seemed an absurdity in the face of the Blight.

  “Exactly,” Isseya said. She unbuckled Revas’s harness and began smoothing out the furrows that the straps had left in the griffon’s sleek black fur. Calien, who had just dismounted, stepped quietly out of her way.

  “When do you want to hit them?” said Amadis.

  “As soon as we can. Tomorrow, maybe the day after.” Isseya hauled off the saddles, one after the other, and stacked them to the side for one of the castle servants to check and clean. “The entrance isn’t fortified. Darkspawn don’t really think like that. We shouldn’t have more to deal with than, at most, a few wanderers straggling up from the Deep Roads.”

  “So you hope,” Amadis said. She touched the hilt of a dagger that a second earlier Isseya hadn’t seen tucked into the belt of her robe. An instant after her hand left it, the weapon vanished again.

  “How do you do that?” Isseya asked, although she knew full well the woman wasn’t going to tell her. Not after seven years, not ever. She shook her head in bemusement. “Anyway, yes. So I hope. But if it proves to be too much for us to handle, we’ll just abort the flight and try again another day. It’s not their nature to fortify or try to hold the position. They don’t keep a visible presence there. We never even found the place until tonight.”

  “It’s good work that you did,” Garahel said. He disengaged Amadis’s arm from his waist and took her hand, pulling her back across the firelit courtyard to their quarters. “We’ll do a flyover tomorrow. If it isn’t too heavily guarded, we can try collapsing it then. If it is, we’ll come back. How many mages do you expect we’ll need to bring down the entrance?”

  Isseya shrugged, glancing at Calien with a questioning lift of her eyebrows. “Three? Maybe four? It’s not a large opening, and it doesn’t look too structurally sound. It’s just a gap in the earth—this isn’t one of the old dwarven gates. Really, one mage could do it, given enough time. My concern is that we might not have enough time. If there are any darkspawn nearby, they’re likely to come out angry upon realizing that we’re there. So … to make it quick and easy, I’d say no fewer than three.”

  “I agree,” Calien said. He’d pulled his hood up, hiding his face, and the words came as a whisper from their depths.

  Amadis and Garahel exchanged looks. “Tomorrow, then,” the elf said. “Three mages. You two and Eracas, I suppose, if I can pry him loose from Felisse.”

  “We’ll meet you here in the morning,” Isseya agreed. Her brother nodded, and then he and Amadis went back into the castle together.

  It was very late, and they were the last ones in the courtyard. Even the castle servants had retired for the night after taking Isseya’s saddles for cleaning. Other than the guards marching their endless rounds on the torch-ringed walls, keeping vigil against any incursion by the darkspawn, there was no one in sight.

  Calien had been subdued since casting his spell of possession over the genlock, and Isseya expected that he would retreat to his quarters as soon as they returned, but to her surprise he lingered long after the others had gone. She still had to feed Revas and groom the griffon’
s wing feathers, but nothing held the blood mage to stay with her.

  “Aren’t you going to sleep?” she asked.

  He shook his head minutely. His voice was almost inaudible, even from a few feet away. “Why do you want to learn blood magic?”

  “Because it seems useful,” the elf replied, brushing an oiled cloth lightly over her griffon’s stiff flight feathers. “And against the Blight, I will use any tool that works. Why did you?”

  “Because I was an apostate,” Calien said in the same soft voice. She couldn’t see his eyes, but she had a feeling that the mage was looking somewhere far into the distance. He seemed to be talking less to her than to the ghosts of his past. “I was an apostate, and I wanted to live.”

  “And you did, so I’d say it worked. Who taught you? Was it one of the Crows?”

  “No,” Calien said unhappily. He leaned heavily on his staff, turning it slowly so that the crystal in its head gleamed in the castle’s torchlight. “It was a demon.”

  Five years ago, that admission would have shocked and terrified Isseya. Now she merely nodded. The horrors of the Blight had caused her teachers’ old warnings to pale into insignificance. The first time she’d heard the screams of a woman dragged off to become a broodmother, she would have struck a thousand bargains with demons to end that suffering.… And although Isseya had learned to harden herself against such impulses over the years, they had never entirely left her. “How did you find it?”

  “Through one of our contracts. An apostate blood mage had fled to Antiva. The templars could not or would not try to strike at her there, so they asked the Crows to do what should have been their duty.

  “We found her in Treviso, posing as a flower seller. It should have been an easy kill, but it … wasn’t.” Calien was quiet for a moment. Then he sighed, moved to sit on the low wall of a nearby courtyard well, and pushed down his hood. His face was drawn and tired, the lines of exhaustion around his mouth made starker by the shadowy firelight. “When we caught her, we realized why the templar had been so quick to hire us. It wasn’t because he was afraid of crossing the Antivan Crows. It was because he was afraid of crossing her.”

  “She was an abomination?” Isseya asked. She had seen what became of mages who succumbed to demonic possession. They turned into creatures of nightmare: their bodies melted and took on surreal forms, more like the imaginings of uneasy dreams than anything in the natural world. Their minds vanished, either subjugated by the possessing demon or—she thought, although it was impossible to know for certain—destroyed outright.

  It happened more often than usual during the Blight, as desperate mages reached for more power than they could control and opened themselves unwisely to the Fade. Mages who hadn’t learned to control their gifts were at greatest risk; untrained talents trying blindly to save themselves, or their families, from the darkspawn were the most common source of abominations along the borders of the Blight.

  Skilled mages could fall victim too, though, under the strain and sleeplessness of the fight. Sometimes they even chose to give themselves up voluntarily. It was not unheard-of for Warden mages, trapped behind enemy lines with no hope of reinforcement or rescue, to invite demons into their bodies so that they could perish in one last frenzied strike against their foes. A powerful abomination could bring down scores of darkspawn before it died.

  Isseya herself had decided long ago that she would become an abomination before she let the darkspawn carry her off to become a broodmother. Better to die in horror than live it.

  “She was,” Calien said. “Subtler than most. There was nothing visibly untoward about her outer appearance, at least not that we could see. No doubt those who knew the mage before the demon took her would have felt differently.

  “But we had no idea. Our first inkling that she was anything but ordinary came when she brushed off our poisoned daggers like gnats. Then she attacked … and within moments, she and I were the only survivors of our ambush.”

  Isseya walked around Revas, picking up the griffon’s other wing and brushing its flight feathers with the oiled cloth as well. As she cleaned, she examined the wing for damage. Griffons’ courage and tenacity often prevented them from showing any signs of pain or weakness to their handlers, but something as small as a broken primary could spell disaster in the field. “Why did the demon promise you magic? Why not just kill you?”

  Calien’s lips quirked in a lopsided smile. “The Crows do deserve some of their reputation. She killed most of us, to be sure, but we took our price in blood. By the end of the fight she was nearly dead herself, whereas I had been able to keep myself mostly whole. I could have finished her easily. I knew it, and the demon holding her knew it.”

  “That’s when the demon made its offer?”

  “Yes. The secret of blood magic in exchange for healing its mortal shell.”

  “And you accepted?” She released Revas’s wing and circled the griffon to check on her tail feathers. The polishing cloth was gray with grit, so Isseya folded it over to a new, clean side.

  “I did.” Calien seemed both repulsed and relieved by his own confession. “I took the demon’s offer of knowledge, and I healed her. Very slightly. Then I put a dagger through her heart. The Crows do not renege on their word. Not to demons, and not to clients.”

  “And so you’re a blood mage.” Isseya glanced at him across the broad black expanse of Revas’s back. “That seems like a short course of study.”

  Calien gave her a humorless chuckle. “It was. There was no teaching. It was like the demon drilled a hole in my skull and poured someone else’s memories in. I remembered parts of the Fade I’d never seen, knew the ways to spells I’d never heard of. The knowledge was all just there … and though I never spoke of it until today, and tried to pretend I’d never touched it, the demon’s secrets never went away.”

  Isseya finished grooming her griffon. She dropped the dirty wing cloth over an elbow and patted Revas’s shoulder, signaling the great beast to take her freedom for the night. With a hiss of acknowledgement, Revas strode away from the two Wardens and flung herself into the air, seeking out whatever scrawny prey she could catch in the moonlit Anderfels.

  When the dusty winds of the griffon’s departure had died down, Isseya wiped the grit from her mouth and looked back at Calien. “How can you teach a thing you never really learned?”

  “We’ll stumble through it,” the older mage said. “I do know the art, after all. I remember it more vividly than I do most of my own memories.” He paused, eyeing her. “Are you sure you still want this? It is maleficarum.”

  “It’s a weapon,” Isseya said, meeting his gaze without blinking. “It’s a weapon, and we’re fighting a Blight. Of course I want it. Possession alone is a powerful tool … but if the tales are true, there is much more to blood magic than that.”

  “They are,” Calien said. “There is.”

  “What can you teach me?”

  “Everything,” he said.

  * * *

  Morning came before Isseya was prepared to greet it. She had spent the entire night traveling through the mysteries of magic in blood, and when the new day dawned, her head was spinning with possibility as much as weariness.

  Calien, too, was caught somewhere between exhilaration and exhaustion. He had carried the burden of his secret alone for almost twenty years. Sharing it seemed to have released a great worry from him, and Isseya’s excitement about exploring the possibilities of the art seemed to mitigate his own trepidation about the uses of blood magic. He remained far more cautious than she was, but he was plainly glad to find some purpose to the bargain he’d struck so long ago.

  By the time the castle awoke, however, that purpose was still unclear. They stopped their experiments as soon as the first servants emerged into the courtyard’s gray dawn to draw water and gather wood for the morning meal.

  Isseya wove a thread of healing magic to bind the cuts that the two mages had inflicted on themselves to fuel their spells. With a
ll traces of their experiments concealed, she and Calien joined the other Wardens for breakfast.

  “So today’s the day we break Hossberg’s siege, eh?” Felisse asked as Isseya lined up next to her to ladle porridge and raisins onto her plate.

  Isseya raised an eyebrow at the redheaded archer. “Is that what Garahel’s been telling people?”

  “Everyone who’ll listen,” Felisse said cheerfully, handing the ladle over to the elf. “He’s not much good at keeping secrets, your brother.”

  “Nor at keeping expectations realistic.” Isseya dumped a glob of gummy oats onto her plate with little relish. “We won’t break the siege. At best, this will be the first step down a hard and bloody road to that end.”

  Felisse shrugged. “It’s more than we had. Who’s leading the strike?”

  “Garahel, of course. He’s so excited about it, he can lead the charge.” She said it flippantly, but in truth he was the best choice; that was why he’d been named Field-Commander last spring. He didn’t have a fixed position, as a Warden-Commander did; it was a temporary title, unique to these circumstances, that allowed him to control whoever was sent to his area.

  He’d earned it. Her brother had proven his skills as a battle leader time and again in the years they’d been fighting the Blight. His griffon coupled extraordinary athleticism with an uncanny knack for spotting and exploiting weaknesses in darkspawn formations. Together they were one of the best teams the Wardens had.

  And, after seven years, they were among the longest-serving veterans alive.

  “Then I suppose he’s the one I’d better cajole into letting me go,” Felisse said. Balancing her tray lightly on one hand, she wove through the crowd of bleary-eyed soldiers and Grey Wardens to Garahel’s table. Isseya grabbed a mug of bitter steaming tea and followed her.

  Calien was already sitting with her brother and Amadis. The three of them, and two other Grey Wardens, were huddled around a loosely sketched map. A saltcellar fashioned from carved antler stood in its center, with a dozen soggy raisins dotted in a vaguely triangular shape on its left side.