Shrike, however, was curled in the darkness of his despondency. He did not lift his head as Isseya entered; instead he tucked it more deeply under his wing. His fur was matted with filth where he’d lain carelessly in his own waste.
It hurt Isseya’s heart to see a griffon so denuded of his pride. They were noble beasts, the masters of the sky, and normally they carried themselves with a dignity befitting the awe they inspired.
She knelt in the straw just outside his stall and laid out the tools she’d brought. Alongside Garahel’s box, she set a knife and a bottle of blood that she’d taken from a hurlock the previous day. The hurlock’s blood was blackish red, but not nearly as absolute in color or as viscous as the contents of the ancient bottles in Garahel’s box. Those held the blood of Toth, the Archdemon of the Third Blight, who had been slain at Hunter Fell almost two hundred years ago.
Shrike didn’t turn his head to look at the tools Isseya set before him. She poured a small pyramid of sparkling blue lyrium dust into the empty chalice, then poured the hurlock blood over it until all the dust had dissolved. Into the swirling mixture, she added a single drop of the ancient Archdemon’s blood. Cold black steam rose from the chalice, carrying with it the curdled, alien scent of darkspawn corrosion.
Isseya froze, breathing in that steam. The horror of her own Joining rose over her, paralyzing her where she knelt. Several of her fellow recruits had died during the ritual, choking on foam and fear and regurgitated blood, and she had nearly been among them. Feeling that wrongness slide into her body and melt into her bones … it had wrenched at the core of her sense of self, and in some ways she had never entirely recovered. She couldn’t. No one could. The Joining made them both more and less than what they’d been before, and its changes were irrevocable.
But she had survived. And she believed she’d found a way that Shrike could too.
Opening herself to the Fade, Isseya drew a strand of magic and channeled it carefully into the chalice. The murky liquid swirled more quickly in the cup, and on its whirling surface she began to see the reflections of nonexistent creatures stretched and distorted by the vortex.
She set the chalice aside, keeping the magic active in its heart, and approached Shrike with the knife in her hand.
The griffon didn’t look at her until she was close enough to touch him. Then, finally, he raised his head.
His lores were gray and sunken, the feathers dry and colorless over the soft leathery skin. A reddish-black stain crept along the inner surfaces of his beak, spilling out through the cracks that spider-webbed the mandibles. Blackish rheum clouded his eyes, as though a thin layer of oily pitch had been poured over each orb.
Only a day had passed since Shrike had swallowed that taste of darkspawn blood, but the corruption was overtaking him rapidly. He let Isseya take his paw without much interest. His ears remained limp and wilted, and his black-rheumed gaze lingered listlessly on the stable wall behind the elf.
“I’m doing this to help you,” Isseya told the dispirited griffon. She didn’t think he could understand, not really. As uncannily intelligent as the beasts could be, they were still beasts, and human speech was mostly beyond them.
She wanted to say it, though, even if the words were mainly for her own sake. “I can’t let you die for saving Danaro. I won’t let you.”
The griffon lowered his head back into the dirty straw. He barely flinched when she pricked one of his toes with the knife, drawing a bead of blood from its side. As the trickle of crimson spread across Shrike’s fur, Isseya drew power from that blood into her unfinished spell. She slid her consciousness along the channel of blood into Shrike’s living mind, just as Calien had showed her, and there she bent the griffon’s wild thoughts into the shape of her own.
Accept this, she willed, and Shrike opened his beak. His eyes were glassy and unseeing, but inside, his thoughts spun and flailed in sudden panic.
No, no, no, no, no filled Shrike’s skull in a terrified thunder. He fought against her intrusion with the desperation and futility of a dragonfly caught in a spider’s web. No!
Accept this, Isseya repeated, and gently but firmly forced the griffon’s mind wider.
She reached back to take the chalice and carefully tipped it into Shrike’s beak, willing the transfixed griffon to swallow several times as she emptied the mixture of spell-touched lyrium and blood down his throat. Shrike’s panic built until Isseya was afraid that he would break his mind against hers. She tightened her grip, venturing deeper into his emotions and memory until she reached the very core of the griffon’s identity.
There she rewove the thoughts that she found, snipping strands of remembrance and feeling and layering others in their places. She weakened Shrike’s hatred of darkspawn and pushed the sense of loathing away from what he’d become since ingesting their taint. In place of those emotions, she braided together acceptance and forgetfulness, blurring the details of what he’d become and altering the griffon’s perspective so that it seemed less awful. She masked the sense of alien sickness in him, bending the griffon’s thoughts so that he would believe it was only a cold, a cough, some transient illness that accounted for him not feeling quite like himself.
It was intricate work, and exhausting, and far beyond anything Calien had showed her. But it held together, she thought. It held together reasonably well.
Slowly, she extricated herself, releasing Shrike’s mind into its altered paths. Her blurry vision cleared. She was kneeling in the stable straw, the empty chalice on its side next to her hand.
Shrike’s breathing had evened, and the gray pallor of his lores had warmed to a healthier hue. His eyes were mostly closed, but the sliver Isseya could see was bright amber, cleansed of its ebon shroud.
He looked like himself again. Whether he was himself, she couldn’t tell. The griffon had fallen into uneasy slumber immediately after she released the blood magic that bound him. But his chest rose and fell peacefully, and his wings were held close to his body, in the normal position of a sleeping griffon rather than the haphazard carelessness of Shrike’s depression. He coughed, once, as if clearing his throat from a cold, and then he relaxed completely. She thought that might mean her attempt at the Joining had succeeded. She hoped it did.
Quietly, Isseya picked up the fallen chalice, wiped its inner surface on the corner of her cloak, and placed it back into Garahel’s box alongside the pouch of lyrium. She took her empty vial of hurlock blood as well, and dropped it into a pocket. Finally she cleaned the flecks of crimson from the knife, and on cautious feet left the infirmary stable.
She went to Danaro first. The mage was reclined on his bed just as she’d left him. The same book of arcane histories rested on the small table at his side, probably open to the same unread page.
He looked up with unwilling hope in his eyes as she entered. “Did it work? Did you save him?”
“I don’t know,” Isseya replied, “but I think I did something.”
14
5:19 EXALTED
“They’re coming,” Lisme announced, squinting through the brass-cased spyglass held up to his left eye. “They’re approaching the skyburners now.”
The androgynous mage still bore fresh pink scars from the battle to close off the Deep Roads, but he’d incorporated them into the carnival of his costuming. Today he had dressed to identify himself as a man, with black hair that fell past his shoulders and an equally long mustache. Both hair and mustache cut away around the shiny pink flesh of his newly healed wounds, leaving a wide bare swath striped across the left side of his head.
“How many?” Isseya asked tensely. Her brother had assigned her a small company of griffon-mounted mages and archers. Every one of the Wardens under her command was a skilled veteran, but they were not a large force. Their role in this battle was meant to be secondary—crucial, but small. If the darkspawn had come in greater numbers than anticipated, their task might be impossible.
Their duty was to massacre all the darkspawn in the fork of
the Lattenfluss River, south of Hossberg. Most of the allied forces, under Garahel’s leadership, were grouped to the city’s northwest, where they faced the greatest might of the darkspawn horde.
The southern front was comparatively quiet … but its very emptiness was deceiving. That invitingly open space had lured a considerable portion of the darkspawn army into an attempt at a sneak attack from the rear, and now the Wardens meant to destroy their foes with guile and spellcraft rather than arrows and swords.
“Looks like … two hundred, maybe two hundred and fifty,” Lisme answered after a pause. He lowered his eyeglass and looked over his shoulder at Isseya. The wind caught his hair and skirled it out in a banner of black silk behind him. “Mostly hurlocks, a few shrieks. I see three ogres.”
“No sign of the Archdemon?” Isseya asked.
“None,” Lisme confirmed, to no one’s surprise. The Archdemon had not been seen in the Anderfels for weeks. The last reliable sighting had been reported over the ruins of Antiva City, six days earlier.
It was a relief, but also a disappointment, to know that the Archdemon would not be part of the fighting today. If it had been, they might have had a chance at ending the Blight—but they would also have had a much greater chance of being destroyed. After seven long years of grinding siege, Hossberg’s garrison was in no state to take on a foe of such power.
Lisme put his eye back to the spyglass, watching the approaching darkspawn. Isseya could barely make them out as a line of moving darkness stitched across the horizon. The shining flow of the Lattenfluss River, which had sunk so low under the Blight’s drought that it vanished beneath its banks for twenty or thirty yards at a time, stuttered behind the advance of the horde’s jagged line.
Ahead of them, halfway to where the Wardens and their griffons lurked in ambush, the skyburners waited.
Adapted from traps that the dwarves had devised to fight darkspawn in the Deep Roads, the skyburners consisted of large, buried clay vessels filled with scraps of ruined armor, sharp rocks, and other shrapnel. At the core of each one was a handful of specially prepared stones, each one inscribed with a rune in lyrium, which the dwarves had assured her brother would explode when properly triggered. While admittedly imprecise, and sometimes prone to failure, the lyrium runes were promised to be devastating against the darkspawn.
The memorial cairns had been decorated with the weapons of the fallen, as was traditional in Orlais and some parts of the Tevinter Imperium. Few of Thedas’s civilized nations buried their dead—there was too great a risk that demons or malign spirits would occupy their bones—so instead they burned the corpses and used their weapons as memorial.
In the Anderfels, however, life was harder, and weapons were too precious to be given up for the dead. If the darkspawn knew anything about human customs, they might have gotten suspicious about the presence of valuable halberds and pikes on those rocky cairns.
But Garahel didn’t think that the darkspawn were conscious of such niceties, and he also didn’t think they would pass up the chance to loot good weapons from their victims. Hurlocks and genlocks had no talent for smithing; they had to rely on what their subservient ghouls could craft, and ghouls were not known for their finesse at the forge. So, he had calculated, the darkspawn would very probably fly into a frenzy as they fought over the weapons left on those four cairns, and certainly they wouldn’t leave such prizes behind.
And when the darkspawn took those pikes and halberds and iron-capped staffs, they’d die. Trip wires laced around the butts of those weapons connected to the hidden skyburners. After a short delay, while the lyrium runes activated—and, hopefully, more darkspawn walked into the traps—the skyburners would live up to their name.
Isseya was rather looking forward to watching them. She’d always liked pyrotechnics, and these dwarf-made explosives promised to be excellent ones. The Wardens had never used them before; they had received these only a few months earlier, as part of Garahel’s unending efforts to win more allies to their cause. The dwarves hadn’t been willing to spare many of their warriors, but they had sent two sisters from the Miner Caste and several wagonloads of materials to the Wardens.
“Almost here,” Lisme murmured. “Get ready.”
Isseya nodded and retreated back to where the others waited. A little while later, Lisme followed, crouched low to the ground and still tracking the darkspawn with the spyglass.
Their company of Grey Wardens numbered just twenty-three, with a dozen griffons among them. They were hiding in a natural ravine that Hossberg’s miners had widened into a waterless moat. Years ago the Lattenfluss River had kept the moat flooded, but as the Blight wore on, the river’s levels had dropped so low that the moat’s bottom had been reduced to sticky mud. That was, unfortunately, just enough moisture to sustain the gnats that plagued the Grey Wardens as they waited.
Waving a cloud of gnats away, Isseya climbed into Revas’s saddle. Calien was already seated in the passenger saddle, and the rest of the company was mounted as well. All their steeds bore two riders, except for Danaro’s Shrike, who had become so irritable after his Joining that he would tolerate no one but his master.
Shrike crouched some distance away from the other griffons, brooding and moody. He’d recovered swiftly from Isseya’s ritual, but he seemed to harbor some anger over the experience. The griffon had been testy ever since emerging from his depression, and the other griffons treated him with the same hostility. He’d gotten into two fights with other griffons that came near to causing lethal injury, and he’d ripped a nasty wound into the arm of a stableboy who’d lingered too long after bringing him a goat for dinner. Only Danaro could approach his griffon without getting a hiss and a hate-filled glare, or worse.
There had been no question of putting a second rider on Shrike. Isseya only hoped it wouldn’t hurt them today.
In the distance to the north she could hear the thunder of war drums and the brassy cry of trumpets signaling the advance. The battle of Hossberg was about to begin.
The darkspawn heard it too. A few turned back indecisively, apparently unsure whether to try fording the Lattenfluss to join the battle. More broke into a run, charging for the cairns’ weaponry.
The ogres shoved their way forward first, bowling over smaller darkspawn as they rushed for prizes they were too large to use. Pincer-mouthed shrieks flitted and flickered around the ogres’ feet, trying to outpace their huge companions.
When they reached the cairns, the darkspawn stopped, raising their heads and snuffling at the air. The wind did not favor them, but Isseya tensed anyway. The abilities of darkspawn could be unpredictable, and sometimes they could feel Grey Wardens through the same Joining-induced kinship that enabled the Wardens to sense them.
If they sensed the Wardens waiting in the moat, however, they gave no sign. The ogres lumbered toward the cairns, raced by the eerie, whistling shrieks. They grabbed the pikes and staffs in huge callus-plated hands and needle-clawed gaunt ones, yanking the trapped weapons loose and holding them aloft with triumphant roars. The slower hurlocks and genlocks came upon them, snarling and grunting enviously, and tried to wrestle the smaller weapons away from the hissing shrieks. Around and around the ogres they danced, quarreling over their prizes.
And the earth exploded under their feet.
Dirt fountained twenty feet into the air, propelled by four staggered gouts of incandescent blue-green fire that burned brighter than the sun. More than two hundred yards away, where the Grey Wardens waited, the wave of pressure popped Isseya’s ears and kicked the breath from her lungs. Magical flame incinerated the nearest darkspawn instantly, lighting up the bones inside their flesh a split second before reducing their entire forms to ash. Rocks and white-hot metal fragments scythed upward and sideways from the blast, shredding other darkspawn into disintegrating puffs of wet blackness. Nothing solid was left of the ones that had been nearest the eruptions.
The skyburners’ violence was like nothing Isseya had ever seen. The wind that blew
over the Grey Wardens was damp and heavy with the smell of sudden death, edged with the tingling acridness of burned lyrium.
“Go,” she told her company, and signaled to Revas to take flight.
In a rush of wings, the Grey Wardens launched.
Their task was to kill the confused and injured darkspawn, and they did it with brutal efficiency. Fireballs punched through the hurlocks’ staggered ranks; hurtling boulders knocked down the dying ogres. Ice storms and frost cones turned the genlocks’ black blood to ice and shattered the shrieks’ thin bones. The ruptured earth shook with the force of Lisme’s quakes and Isseya’s forcespells. Through it all, the archers’ shafts hissed down in lethal hail.
They had planned to drive the darkspawn into the river, but after the griffons’ second pass, there were no survivors left to drive. The dwarven skyburners had been far more devastating than anyone had expected, and their little ambush had been a perfect massacre.
The main battle looked far chancier, though, and Isseya had just turned to gather her Wardens back into an organized assault when she realized that Shrike was already attacking the main front on his own.
Danaro was hauling back on the reins with all his strength, standing in the saddle for more leverage, but a griffon in full fury was impossible to stop. And Shrike’s fury was beyond anything Isseya had ever seen.
The griffon dove toward a knot of heavily armored ogres. A pair of Grey Wardens, a human and a dwarf, stood surrounded in their midst. Both were drenched in blood, some of it darkspawn and much their own. Isseya had only a glimpse of them before the ogres’ bulk blotted the two Wardens from her view, but it was enough to tell her that the two were barely standing.
She wasn’t sure whether it was the Wardens’ desperate plight or the fact that the ogres were the biggest targets on the field that drew Shrike’s attention. Either way, the griffon plunged into a heedless full-on dive, slamming into the back of the biggest ogre’s neck with his fists balled. The ogre’s head snapped forward and sideways with a violent crack, and the huge creature toppled dead where it stood.
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