“We did. But not everyone knows that.”
“Oh, it’s a gift?” Isseya looked at the book with renewed curiosity. “Who would give you a book of prayers? Must not know you very well.”
“No, not really.” Calien closed the book and tucked it behind his bedroll, out of view.
Isseya caught a note of subdued hurt in his voice. She lifted a hand in apology. “I didn’t mean—”
“I know. Truly, it doesn’t matter. I take no offense. And you’re right, she doesn’t know me very well.”
“Who gave you the book?” Isseya asked.
“The mother of one of my victims,” he answered. Seeing her surprise, Calien smiled wryly and leaned back on the blanket-piled bulk of his traveling chest. “She doesn’t know that. She doesn’t even know he was assassinated; she thinks he happened to be struck by a windblown tile that fell from a damaged roof, and that I was just a compassionate stranger who chanced to help her through a time of grief.”
“Why did you?”
“Because she wore the same perfume as my mother.” Calien picked up the little book again and gazed down at its cover. The title was inscribed in gilt, and it gleamed in the lamplight; Isseya caught the flash of its fire-washed silver, although she could not make out the words. “I remember almost nothing of her. Not her face, not her name. She left when I was very young. All that stays with me is the scent she wore … and I don’t even know what it is. Something sweet, like lemon blossoms, but that’s not exactly right.
“For years I wondered if I had only imagined it, but then I caught it again when I was stalking the target. I would have paid no mind to his mother otherwise. She was an Orlesian noblewoman, mistress to a powerful man and mother of his child, whereas my mother was no one of note, certainly neither powerful nor wealthy. But they wore the same perfume, somehow, and the noblewoman was about the right age, and something about that made me desperately stupid.
“I finished the job, of course. The Antivan Crows do not fail to fulfill their contracts, even when the target is a child whose only crime is complicating questions of succession. But when it was done, I lingered in the city longer than I had to, and I arranged to offer the grieving mother some comfort through her tears. Afterward we struck up a correspondence. Over the years we became close. She’ll never know the truth, of course. She only knows that I’ve been fighting with the Wardens since Antiva fell.”
“And for that she gave you a book of prayers?”
Calien inclined his head. “She sent it from Orlais. One of the Grey Wardens brought it a few days ago. Her hope was that the Maker might hear her prayers, watch over me, and guide me safely through the Blight.”
Isseya wanted to scoff at the sentiment, but something in the mage’s expression held her back. Yes, there was something cloying about the notion that the Maker would guard any of them against the coming danger, and something awful about a killer offering solace to a bereaved mother after murdering her son … but there was something terribly human about it too.
She couldn’t begrudge Calien for straining to find a connection to the faceless ghost of his mother, nor could she fault the woman in Orlais for finding a false son to assuage her loss. Neither really had what they wanted, but they had accepted a different sort of love in its stead—and if it was imperfect, it was still more than she had.
“She’s still alive, then?” the elf said.
“Yes. The Blight poses no threat to her yet, or anyway, no more threat than pushing a surge of bandits and penniless refugees into the city.” Calien exhaled a long soundless sigh. “Maker willing, it never will.”
“It won’t,” Isseya said. She pushed the bristly brown pillow to the side as she retreated to the door. “Thank you.”
“For what?”
“Reminding me why tomorrow matters,” the elf said, and slipped back into the night.
22
5:24 EXALTED
The Grey Wardens assembled at dawn. They were a glorious sight, even to Isseya’s jaded eyes: a streaming procession of fifty griffon riders in burnished plate and gray-blue surcoats, their aerial lances tipped with fluttering pennons of snowy white silk. Dawn’s light gleamed off their breastplates and pauldrons, defiantly brilliant in its rosy glow, despite the storm clouds’ attempt to mute it. The griffons, sensing their riders’ excitement, pranced and snorted in their harnesses. Even the beasts who had been through the Joining seemed more eager and less angry than usual. Their coughs had subsided into hisses of anticipation; not a few of them licked the blood-froth from their own beaks as if imagining it was their foes’.
Garahel rode at their head, resplendent in a rich blue cloak and carrying a round shield with the Grey Wardens’ heraldic griffon worked in shining platinum. He was more lightly armored than most of the other Wardens, eschewing their heavy plate for a simple helm, vambraces, and breastplate over hardened leathers. Crookytail waved his bushy, white-tipped tail at the gathered soldiers, as jaunty as if they were trotting off to a parade. The odd-looking griffon had endured the endless battles of the Blight without any apparent diminishment of his spirit; the floppy tip of his bent left ear jounced with every high-footed step he took toward the battle.
Isseya kept to the back. Her cowl was pulled low, and she’d wrapped scarves tightly around her patchy scalp and pallid face. The wind of their flight might blow back her hood, but no one would see the taint’s marks on her.
Revas was irritable under her saddle, hackling and flattening her ears at anyone who got too near. Many of the griffons seemed equally agitated, and Isseya wondered how much of their riders’ tension was being communicated down the reins to their steeds. For all the stoicism on the Grey Wardens’ faces, she knew many of them had to be feeling some fear.
The tainted griffons, however, did not. In their thoughts was only boiling rage and the burning desire to vent that rage upon their enemies. Isseya held them in an iron grip of possession to prevent them from acting on that anger. She controlled eight of them, and Calien held four more. Two other blood mages possessed another half dozen griffons between them. She had not told them the details of the Joining—that was a sin Isseya had no intention of forcing others to share—but she had enlisted their aid to control the tainted creatures.
Together with the rest of the Grey Wardens, they took to the cloud-purpled sky.
They flew high over the Blight-scarred ground, letting the storm veil the diseased earth from their view. The darkspawn had been driven far back into Antiva, almost to the coast where the fallen city lay, and for an hour or more, Isseya saw nothing but the bleak marks of their passage. The shells of fire-gutted farmhouses and ruined walls flitted by underneath, tombstones to nameless towns. Rivers crisscrossed the dead earth, some slow and shrunken and gray between wide banks, others whipped to white fury over a tumult of jagged stones.
Then, abruptly, the darkspawn were there, crawling over the corpse of Ayesleigh like spiked black maggots. From this height, Isseya could not make them out clearly, except for the sweeping horns of the ogres lumbering over the others. Even they were only larger shapes, indistinct amid the faceless mass.
That was enough for her to target, though. At the head of the griffons’ flight, Garahel’s arm went up, holding a streamer of vivid crimson silk to the wind. Upon seeing his signal, the riders dove, splitting into two lines as they hurtled toward the darkspawn.
Just above bow range, the flight leveled off, and the passengers on each griffon began emptying the satchels Garahel had distributed to them before they’d left camp. Dozens of elongated, weighted clay balls fell through the air, tumbling down onto the darkspawn like lumpy gray hail. Upon hitting the city’s cobbled streets, they exploded, erupting in a variety of toxic clouds, caustic fogs, and geysers of ruptured earth thrown up by dwarven skyburners. Empty shops and houses collapsed in a thunder of cracking beams and tumbling tiles.
Impressive as the fusillade was, it wasn’t an attack the Grey Wardens could sustain for long. Garahel had mentioned
the cost of their artillery when he’d discussed their strategy with Isseya—only once, and in passing, but the number had stayed with her. They might have been raining rubies encased in gold on the darkspawn for the price of those bombs.
Rubies wouldn’t have been so devastating, though. The angry, agonized cries of darkspawn followed the Grey Wardens as they wheeled their griffons back up through the clouds. And for all its infernal cleverness, the Archdemon that controlled them had no understanding of the politics or commerce of Thedas. Neither the draconic darkspawn nor its minions had any way of knowing that the Wardens couldn’t afford to repeat the barrage ten or twenty or a thousand times. And they lacked any way of meeting the griffons in the air … except for sending out the Archdemon.
Garahel’s gamble was that they would. As far as the darkspawn knew, it was their only hope of stopping the Grey Wardens’ barrage.
The red flag went up again, and the Wardens dove for a second pass, dodging around the smoke and grit blown up by their first sweep. Again the earth erupted into poisoned flames behind them, and again the shrieks of dying darkspawn filled the air. Foul green vapors poured from the windows of the few houses that hadn’t tumbled into wreckage.
But this time the timbre of those screams changed in the Wardens’ wake, shifting from terror to triumph, and Isseya knew even before she turned in her saddle that the Archdemon had come to answer their challenge.
It rose through the inferno over Ayesleigh like a nightmare made flesh. The miasmic fog from their bombs rolled off its ragged black scales, eddying through the rifts in its armor and trailing after it like a venomous cloak.
Three times Isseya had seen the Archdemon since the fall of Antiva City, and each time it seemed to her that the creature had become larger and more terrible. Perhaps something in the course of the Blight gave it strength, or perhaps it was a trick of her taint-sickened imagination … but the sight of the Archdemon, frightening even in the beginning, now sent a shock of icy paralysis through her soul.
Many of the other Grey Wardens were similarly affected. Bereft of their riders’ guidance, and momentarily freed from the stunned mages’ control, their griffons balked and swerved in confusion, stalling for precious seconds instead of fleeing back toward their ambush as they’d planned. Only a few, led by Crookytail’s namesake white-plumed tail, broke away to where their hidden allies waited. The others lingered in confusion—only for a second, but it was a second too long.
Faster than Isseya would have believed possible, the Archdemon was upon them. It knocked Revas to the side with a buffet of wind from its wings and swept past her, fixated on a cluster of tightly grouped Wardens ahead. The black griffon fought to regain her balance, screaming angrily.
Past them, the Archdemon’s enormous bony jaw swung open, backlighting the corrupted dragon’s horns and the fringe of broken bone around its chin with the infernal glow that filled its throat. Then Revas’s tumble broke Isseya’s view. When they came back up an instant later, there was nothing to be seen but fire, whirling violet around a core of absolute dead black, soundless and roaring all at once.
The Archdemon’s flame scythed through the Grey Wardens’ disorganized flight. Griffons and riders went up like dry leaves tossed into a bonfire; Isseya saw their skin shrivel and their mouths expand to gaping black holes, and then they were gone, spiraling down through the swollen clouds into the waiting mass of darkspawn.
One of the mages transformed as she fell. Liquid fire burst from her skin and melted her features into those of an abomination as she lost—or surrendered—control of her connection to the Fade. Isseya had just enough time to glimpse the horror, and then the inhuman rage, that twisted the mage’s face before the woman tumbled through the storm and out of sight. The burning remains of her robe drifted in her wake, impossibly slow.
And then the griffons were coming back up through those torn, cinder-flecked clouds, looking even more horrid than the abomination that had just plummeted past.
Not all of them came back. Not even most of them. Only the two Joined griffons who had been possessed by the fallen mage, and who were now free to pursue their vengeance unleashed. Isseya caught her breath, squinting through the wind to watch them.
Their saddles were askew, the silver trappings of their harnesses tarnished to coal-colored lumps by the Archdemon’s corrosive breath. Neither carried its rider. Their feathers were molten and matted with tarry black blood—their own, twisted past recognition—and Isseya heard the wind warbling through the holes in their shredded wings. One’s face had been blasted off, leaving half its skull a shattered ruin of bare bone and blackened gore; Isseya couldn’t get a good look at it through the clouds, but she saw enough to know she didn’t want one.
But the griffons were alive, impossibly. They were flying, impossibly. And, impossibly, they attacked.
The Archdemon wasn’t looking at them. The corrupted dragon had turned its burning eyes to Garahel and the remaining riders, who had recovered some semblance of organization and were retreating toward the ambush they’d laid.
The raging griffons hit its exposed belly like a pair of ballista bolts. The Archdemon rocked to one side, knocked almost out of the air by the force of their strike. Blood and black scales rained down from its wounds, hissing as they tore holes through the clouds.
One of the griffons had broken its neck on impact; Isseya watched its corpse drop from the sky. The other sank its claws into the Archdemon’s underbelly and latched on, ripping at whatever it could reach. The dragon rolled through the air, lashing its entire body to and fro in an attempt to dislodge the griffon, but it could not shake its foe free.
Their struggle carried them through another bulwark of bruise-dark clouds and over the water of the nearby bay, well out of Isseya’s sight. Revas kept flying, rushing to catch Garahel and the others. Her wide black wings cut through the storm, and rapidly they closed toward the remaining Wardens.
“What happened?” Garahel called as Isseya reached earshot. He and the rest of the flight had been too far ahead to see what had caused the Archdemon’s sudden distraction, although they had surely seen that it had broken off its pursuit.
“The griffons came back!” Isseya shouted in reply. “The tainted ones. They attacked. One died, the other’s still fighting.”
“Alone?” Garahel’s incredulity carried clearly across the wind. “It’s fighting the Archdemon alone?”
“Yes,” Isseya said, but even as the word escaped her, the Archdemon’s spiked head speared through the clouds behind them. With each beat of its wings, the immense dragon closed on them as inexorably as a warship crossing a rough sea. There was no sign of the other griffon, and no indication that any wounds it had inflicted were slowing the Archdemon at all.
A familiar prickle ran across Isseya’s skin. She had just enough time to think, Magic? before a spinning vortex of violet and black energy whirled open in the Wardens’ midst.
Crookytail reacted fastest. The brindle-and-white griffon folded his wings and plummeted straight down, dropping altitude with reckless abandon. Revas tried to do the same, but age and injury had slowed the older griffon’s reflexes, and she couldn’t fall far or fast enough.
The other griffons tried to split right or left. One even tried, foolishly, to climb up. The vortex seized them like straws in a hurricane, tearing the beasts from the sky and hurling them against one another. Isseya, clinging desperately to Revas’s reins, winced at the percussion of snapping bones and crushed plate armor that peppered the deafening roar of the winds.
She couldn’t see anything. The wind stung her eyes mercilessly; she had to close them against the tornado of feathers and bloody debris. The whispers of the Fade’s demons rose to a thunderous cacophony in her mind, but even they were not enough to drown out the cries of fear and pain from the Grey Wardens all around her.
The Archdemon strafed the disoriented Wardens with blast after blast of corrupting flame. Isseya saw the bright streaks of it painted against her ey
elids; she felt the indescribable alien chill of it rush past her, shivering through her soul.
It overwhelmed her. She couldn’t possibly hold all the blood-bound griffons in her web of possession, not with Revas fighting desperately to stay in the air, not with the Archdemon so close, not with the darkspawn corruption thrumming its response through her veins and the Fade demons clawing at the insides of her skull.
She let go. Three of the possessed griffons slipped from her grasp. Isseya saw the magic break apart in her mind like glowing filaments that had frayed too far, trailing sparks across a limitless expanse of blackness. The rest of them she held.
The freed griffons launched themselves at the Archdemon, flying heedlessly into and through its stream of fire. One went up in a burst of purple flame, casting burning feathers into the vortex with every beat of its wings; then the whirlwind caught Revas’s left wing and spun her away, and Isseya could see the Archdemon no more.
Just as she was despairing of escaping its grasp, the vortex died.
Feathers spun in the empty air. A rare shaft of sunlight hung like a benediction in the stillness between them. For a frozen, eternal instant, Isseya sat transfixed by the slow dance of wing feathers and sunlight where two dozen Wardens had been.
Then the Archdemon boiled back into her view, tangled with a pair of tainted griffons who fought long past the point that they should have been dead. Around and around they somersaulted through the air, a ball of spikes and scales and singed feathers and fur. Blood rained from them in staccato showers of red and black, punctuated by flares of magic and abbreviated arcs of flame as the Archdemon sought to be rid of its assailants and the Grey Wardens who had evaded the vortex threw spells as fast as they could to bring the corrupted Old God down.
The dragon had hooked one of its hind claws into a tainted griffon’s belly, yet the smaller beast fought on, insanely, refusing to accept death or defeat even as the Archdemon’s talons splintered its ribs and snapped the thick leather of its saddle girth. The empty saddle went spinning away, and the griffon screamed and tore its hooked beak along the dragon’s flank.
Dragon Age: Last Flight Page 22