Isseya accompanied each run down to the lowlands to bring back another caravan of refugees. As Field-Commander of Fortress Haine, the caravans were her responsibility. Besides, Revas was needed to pull them, and she herself was a necessary part of their protective escort. While the darkspawn were thickest around the cities, and Isseya restricted her runs to outlying towns and villages, there were always scouts and stragglers abroad, along with ghouls and blighted beasts. Rarely did they complete a run without a few skirmishes along the way.
The danger was terrifying and exhilarating, as it always was. What surprised her was that the slower work of rebuilding the fortress was exhilarating too.
It gave her great satisfaction to walk around the castle village and see new thatch on the roofs, freshly cut firewood drying in the sun, and fields of weeds and young pines giving way to neatly tilled rows. This late in the season, the farmers were limited in what they could grow, but they’d planted carrots and cabbages and low-bush beans. Chickens and smaller speckled fowl waddled around the houses, pecking at stray insects, while floppy-eared rabbits in their hutches ate kitchen scraps and grew fat.
Compared to the churning devastation around the cities of the Free Marches, it was an idyll. But a fragile one. Isseya allowed herself an hour a day to oversee the progress in the village, and then she went on to her real work.
Under the soaring walls of Fortress Haine, she and Ogosa were hollowing the mountain. A network of small natural caves opened onto an adjacent face of the mountain, and they were using that as a starting point to carve out the Retreat.
The dwarf had mapped out where she thought the weaker portions of the mountain could be dug away without threatening the castle’s foundations. Isseya, Calien, and a handful of other mages used carefully shaped forcespells to shatter the stone where Ogosa told them, cleared it out through the caves, and used a modified version of their mage-supported aravels to hoist the rubble away. The larger chunks were used for building walls and fence supports; the smaller pieces were collected as gravel and used to fill in the road through the expanding village. When the magically blasted tunnels were clear, Ogosa and her dwarves went in to refine them by hand and build in supports.
They worked swiftly, spurred by tale after tale detailing the allies’ losses. Every day that passed seemed to bring worse tidings.
All across the Free Marches, the Grey Wardens and their allies were being driven back by darkspawn. The Archdemon had appeared in the skies over Tantervale and Kirkwall and Starkhaven, raking the battered cities with black flame. Blight sickness ravaged the hinterlands, turning the few surviving hermits and holdouts to ghouls; there were rumors of cannibalism among them, and perhaps among the desperate peasantry as well.
At Fortress Haine, far removed from the front lines, there was little they could do but work—so work they did, through rain and fog, sleeping as seldom as they dared. Occasionally injured Grey Wardens and wounded griffons came to Fortress Haine to convalesce, and Isseya put them to work alongside the others, giving them all they could handle without setting back their recoveries.
Within two months, they’d excavated a series of caverns large enough to hold the fleeing population of a small city. They could not support that population, though, for one simple and insoluble reason.
“Water,” Ogosa said.
They were deep in the mountain, standing on a gravel-littered shelf of mage-blasted stone. Above them, narrow shafts let in sunlight and fresh air. Ogosa had instructed the Wardens to dig out basins around the ventilation shafts, then fill them with soil and compost so that the refugees might be able to grow plants in the sunlight, or mushrooms if the light proved too feeble for green growth. As yet, there was nothing in the basins, but Isseya could see the potential. And the problem.
“Where do we get enough water to support thousands of people?” the elf wondered aloud. The silver ribbons of snowmelt that ran down from the Vimmark Mountains’ peaks sufficed for their current small number, but if the population doubled, they’d drink the streams dry—and the Refuge was built to hold twenty times the people Isseya had now.
“In Weisshaupt we collect the rain,” Ogosa suggested.
Isseya shook her head. “It doesn’t rain that much in the mountains this time of year, and we can’t wait for next summer’s storms. Soon the rain will turn to snow, and then…” She trailed off, thoughtful.
“What?”
“Then it clings to the white peaks,” the elf finished. She snapped her fingers. “That’s the answer. We’ll mine the mountains for water.”
Ogosa took a step back and cocked her head at the taller woman, intrigued but skeptical. “It might work. Fly up to the snowpack, blast away chunks of ice like you’ve been blasting these caverns, carry them down on the platforms we use for gravel…”
“We could do that,” Isseya agreed, “but it would be slower than I want, and it wouldn’t be a permanent solution. If we came under attack, and I needed the griffons for defense, we’d lose our water supply. No, my intention is to store enough water to last us a century, if need be.”
“How do you propose to do that?”
“We’ll build a cistern into the Retreat. Like the basins you’ve been building for emergency crops, but a hundred thousand times the size. Then we’ll tunnel up to the snowpack and hit it with fire and forcespells, shattering the ice into an avalanche that we can funnel directly down to the lake. That should give us enough water to support the Retreat’s full population for years.”
“It’s a good plan,” Ogosa said, “except for one thing.”
“What?”
“I want to build the tunnels first,” the dwarf said. “It’ll be easier to clear the debris if we don’t have to scoop it out from the bottom of a giant lakebed. Other than that … it’s insanity, but that’s nothing new. Let’s do it.”
* * *
Three weeks later Isseya found herself standing on a vast slab of snow-dusted blue ice. The mouth of their tunnel was a speck of blackness a hundred yards away, seemingly much too small and distant to contain the avalanche she was about to send down its throat. Small green flags fluttered on thin poles scattered around the snowfield, indicating the path that Ogosa wanted her to drive the broken ice along.
A sturdy rope encircled her waist and wrapped around her shoulders in a harness. The other end was tethered to Revas, so that the black griffon could lift her rider out of danger if Isseya miscalculated and sent herself careening down the mountainside along with her avalanche. The griffon was perched on a spine of bare rock about fifty feet above the elf, where she’d hopefully be out of the way of the mage’s blasts.
No one else was on the mountain. Calien and Lisme were down in the Retreat, waiting to turn the ice into water with firespells, but Isseya had refused the other mages’ offers of help on the frozen slope. If Ogosa’s calculations were correct, the impact of her spells alone should be sufficient to cleave the edge of the ice cap in the way that they wanted. Only a relatively small fragment of the Vimmarks’ frosty crown needed to be chiseled away to supply the Retreat with fresh water. Sending too much ice down the tunnel would run the risk of flooding the caverns they’d worked so hard to build.
She hoped the dwarf’s measurements were accurate. They’d find out soon enough.
The wind whipped ice crystals across Isseya’s face, making her wince. She spat out a thread of ash-blond hair and raised her staff to the high bright sun, squinting down the slope to the tiny, waiting entrance of their tunnel.
Opening herself to the power of the Fade, she pulled a skein of raw force through her staff. It stretched in response to her will, lengthening and narrowing like molten glass at the end of a blower’s pipe. When it had attained the fineness she needed, Isseya angled and fired her force lance at the farthest of the green-flagged poles Ogosa had set.
The flagpole shattered into splinters. With a deafening thundercrack, the ice beneath it split, fissuring into pieces that smashed one another smaller as they tumbled t
oward the waiting tunnel. Much of the smashed ice fell through the hole immediately, its crashes echoing from the depths of the hollowed mountain, but several larger pieces blocked the hole a moment later.
That, too, was as Ogosa had predicted. Isseya struck the blockage with a second force lance, breaking the chunks into smaller fragments that rumbled down and out of sight behind a diamondlike spray of pulverized snow. When the last of the glittering pieces was gone, she raised her sights to the next green flag and loosed a second force lance at the snow under its base.
The pole exploded, and the flag went whirling away like a leaf caught in a snowstorm. When the last of the icy rubble was gone, Isseya struck the next flag, and the next.
Almost two-thirds of the slope had been chiseled ten feet lower than its original level before the elf felt the ice groan and shift suddenly, causing her to stumble forward. Between the reverberations of her forcespells and the loss of its supporting ice, the remainder of the shelf had been weakened enough that it was collapsing under its own weight.
Even as the thought flashed through Isseya’s mind, the ice split again and slid under her feet. She lost her footing completely and fell hard onto her stomach, sliding downward toward the tunnel mouth. Her breath fled in a rush. Spinning chunks of ice and the blinding white spray of grainy snow filled her vision; the sun was a flash of dazzling gold that winked in and out of view. Ice pummeled her limbs and the top of her head. Desperately, she clung to her staff with both hands.
And then sudden pressure closed around her torso like the grip of a giant’s fist, and she was being hauled up into the air, revolving helplessly at the end of a dangling rope.
Revas had saved her. She laughed away the remains of her panic, seized by adrenaline-dizzied delight. Snow and ice fell from the elf’s garments in sparkling cascades as her griffon lifted her higher. Far below, the broken ice shelf drained down into rattling darkness. Taking careful aim through the wind and her own constant spinning at the end of the rope, Isseya hit the larger boulders with a few more forcespells, breaking them into smaller pieces and hurrying them along.
It was done. The Retreat had water. The elf relaxed into the harness and the exhilaration of her flight, watching the mountains flash by in fields of white and fissured blue. Slopes of gray stone replaced them, barren on the higher reaches, then softened by a quilt work of lichens that soon gave way to tall dark pines.
A gold-throated bull wyvern bellowed a challenge at Revas as the griffon flew past with her dangling burden. Isseya stiffened, afraid that the wyvern might go after her, but either the wyvern failed to recognize the elf as a potential meal or it had learned a healthy respect for griffons, for it did not give chase.
Half an hour later, they were descending into Fortress Haine. Revas had never been particularly careful about landing with a dangling passenger, so Isseya wrapped a shielding sphere of force around herself as the griffon began to decline. It was a wise decision: her force sphere bounced against the castle walls as Revas landed on the parapets and let her mistress hang. Unprotected, she’d have been bashed to pieces.
When the force field finally came to rest against the stone wall and Isseya felt reasonably safe, she dismissed the spell and carefully extricated herself from the rope harness, then dropped the last few feet to the ground. She rubbed her aching arms, which had gone numb from cold and pressure during the flight. There’d be bruises on her chest and upper arm from the rope tomorrow, she knew.
Ogosa was already in the courtyard. Steam frizzled the loose strands from the dwarf’s red braids and misted the copper medallions of her necklace. Beads of water pearled on her waxed leather boots.
Clearly the mission had succeeded. Yet there was none of the exhilaration Isseya had expected on the dwarf’s face.
“What happened?” the elf asked as she brushed the last dewy drops of snowmelt from her clothing. “Did the tunnel jam? What went wrong?”
Ogosa shook her head. “The tunnel’s fine. Lisme’s down there breaking up the last chunks to get them into the lake, then we’ll leave them to thaw in their own time. We have enough, though. Enough for five hundred or five thousand, as many as the First Warden wants to send us.”
“Then what’s the matter?”
“The First Warden wants to send them now.” The dwarf exhaled and kicked water droplets from her boots, one after the other. “You’d better go inside. Your brother’s waiting.”
“Garahel? He left the field to come here?” Her hair had come undone during the flight, but there was no time to brush out the tangles. Isseya wrapped the whole unruly brown-blond mess into her hand and tied a thong around it. “Is it that urgent?”
“Evidently,” Ogosa said. “He’s in the stateroom.”
Isseya hurried in.
Her brother was alone, paging through a mildewy history of Kirkwall that had belonged to the late Lord de la Haine. He set it down as she entered, greeting her with a wan smile. “Isseya. It’s always good to see you.”
“Garahel.” The mage embraced her brother briefly and stepped back. He’d gotten even thinner in the few weeks since she’d last seen him. She could feel his bones through the wool and soft leather of his clothing. “What’s so urgent that it’s driven you out here?”
“What is it ever?” Garahel raked his fingers through his hair. The streaks of silver in it had grown considerably wider. “The Free Marches are in crisis. The Archdemon has succeeded in splintering the major cities by attacking each of them sporadically and pretending to be driven off by their armies. And it is pretending, Isseya, make no mistake of that. But their rulers refuse to believe it’s a ruse. They won’t release their armies, and so they’re all being whittled slowly down while they’re paralyzed in place. In a few months it won’t matter if they finally decide to unite under our command. There won’t be enough of them left to overcome the darkspawn.”
“What do you want me to do about it?” Isseya asked, although she had a strong sense that she already knew what his answer would be.
“We need you to evacuate the cities. Cumberland and Kirkwall are likely the best targets. They’ve already lost enough people that you should be able to house most of the remainder in Fortress Haine. Once their population has been moved to safety, their rulers may finally see reason. But it has to be now. Every day the Archdemon bleeds away their strength. We can’t afford to lose more.”
“I’m guessing you can’t afford to send many soldiers to help protect the refugee transports either, then,” Isseya said.
“I’m afraid not.” Garahel grimaced. “Each city’s army will do its best to cover you on the way in and the way out, but they can’t accompany you across the entirety of the Free Marches, and I don’t have any Grey Wardens to spare. For most of the run, you’ll have to rely on your own forces for escorts.”
Isseya could only stare at him. “That’s insane,” she managed eventually. “I have twenty-one Wardens, of whom six are too injured to fight. I have ten, maybe twelve griffons capable of pulling caravans, and only half of those are in any condition to face a battle. The rest will just get overexcited and injure themselves. And none of the refugees are capable of this type of mission. It’s impossible, Garahel. If you want me to evacuate the cities, fine, I’ll do it … but I need enough soldiers to make it something other than suicide.”
“We don’t have them,” her brother repeated. “But you do.”
“No, I don’t. Were you listening to anything I just told you?”
He didn’t answer immediately. Instead he reached into his cloak and pulled out a coarse cloth bag. It was dirty and bloodstained, obviously salvaged from some battle’s spoils.
Garahel opened it and took out a second pouch, this one of soft leather and embossed with a mage’s sigil in gold. The blue and gold braided silk of its drawstring told Isseya what was inside: lyrium dust. There must have been almost a whole pound in there, a fortune’s worth.
Next to the bag of lyrium dust, he put a carved glass bottle of viscous
black fluid. The glass was etched into the shapes of gargoyle faces and grasping claws, fanciful decorations that did not begin to convey the true horror of the bottle’s contents—or its presence in the room.
Isseya shook her head, stepping back blindly until she stumbled into the wall behind her. She hardly felt the bruise of its impact. “No, no, no.”
“It’s the only way,” her brother said. She couldn’t believe the words she was hearing; from the look on his face, he couldn’t believe he was saying them. But they kept coming. “We don’t have a choice. We must evacuate those cities, and we must do it with a small, mobile force. You don’t have many griffons, and most of them are injured. But if you can do to them what you did with Shrike, they’ll fight like ten times their number, and their injuries won’t matter.
“There is no other way to save the Free Marches, Isseya. I couldn’t keep your secret, not if it meant all those thousands of people would die. The First Warden has given the order. Put the griffons of Fortress Haine through the Joining.”
19
5:20 EXALTED
Isseya went to the roosts as soon as Garahel left.
Tears blurred in her eyes until it seemed that she looked at her once-familiar world through a pane of warped, melting glass. The lyrium dust and Archdemon’s blood dragged her down like a thousand pounds of steel chain. The churbling purrs and occasional snaps of griffons at rest filled her ears as she climbed into the tower that they’d claimed as their own, and Isseya didn’t know whether she wanted to glory in the sound or mourn its impending loss.
Once the griffons had passed through the Joining, all the little noises of their lives would vanish. Their huffs of contentment, nighttime crooning, and preening prideful beak-clacks would disappear; the only sounds they’d make would be snarls of anger and hate, and racking coughs as they tried uselessly to expel the contamination from their blood. There would be no more whistles, no more purrs.
Dragon Age: Last Flight Page 18