“Battle map?” Isseya inquired, gesturing at the saltcellar with her mug.
“Indeed.” Garahel moved his arm back so that she could have a better view. “Does it seem accurate?”
“As much as a map made of breakfast can be.” She put down her porridge bowl and tried the tea. It was, somehow, worse than she’d expected: not just bitter, but so astringent that it curdled her tongue.
It woke her up, though, and that was the point. After a full night without sleep, she’d welcome anything that could keep her awake a while longer. Isseya took another sip of the acrid brew and made a face. “Is it really necessary to plot out a map for this attack? I told you yesterday the darkspawn don’t guard it. We shouldn’t encounter much resistance.”
“We shouldn’t,” Garahel agreed, “but we might. Best to be prepared.”
“Not if it means leaving Hossberg unguarded. Who knows when the darkspawn will try to hit us again? If you take all our griffons out of the city, even the darkspawn will have to recognize the opportunity.”
“I wasn’t proposing to take them all,” her brother said mildly. “I think four should do it. Four griffons with eight riders is a large sortie, but not large enough to give your purpose away. Set off in different directions, regroup near the Deep Roads entrance, bring it down, come back to Hossberg. I’ll send four mages, two archers to give you air cover, two warriors for ground protection. Does that sound reasonable?”
“Quite.”
“Good. Calien, you’re with Isseya. Felisse, take Danaro, Jorak, Lisme, and … oh … let’s say Tunk and Munk.”
The redheaded archer recoiled. “The dwarves? They always get sick when we take them up. Last time I was cleaning vomit out of Traveler’s wings for days. His harness still has stains.”
“That’s true,” Garahel said with the same easy equanimity, “but nothing gets past those two in a fight. Those brothers alone could hold Hossberg’s gates for days. Besides, they know the Deep Roads better than any of us do. They might be able to see things on the ground that the rest of us would miss. I don’t ask you to fly them often, Felisse. Do me the favor this once.”
The archer threw her hands up in exasperation. “Fine. I’ll go find Danaro. Hopefully we can get the dwarves out of here before they finish breakfast. The less that’s in their bellies, the less I’ll have to clean up.”
“Very sensible,” Garahel said. He pushed Isseya’s untouched porridge bowl back toward her. “You, on the other hand, should probably eat some food. Did you get any sleep at all last night?”
“Not much,” the elf admitted, taking the bowl. Her appetite was nonexistent, but she made herself eat the cold globby oats anyway. “But I’ll be all right.”
“You’d better. Finish that, and then get out to the courtyard. I want you to use all the daylight we’ve got. Nightfall might bring a fresh wave of darkspawn to the fight.”
“Yes, sir, Field-Commander, sir.” Isseya lifted her porridge-flecked spoon in a sardonic salute, earning a snort of amusement from Amadis. “You won’t be coming with us?”
“I can’t.” Garahel made a face. “I’m Field-Commander, remember? I don’t get to run off and fight darkspawn every time I want to. I’ll be at the fore when we actually break this siege … but for a sortie, well, you’re in charge.”
“I’ll try not to disappoint.”
“You won’t.” The smile stayed on her brother’s face, but his eyes took on a faintly sad cast. “I know you, Isseya. You can’t.”
12
5:19 EXALTED
The entrance to the Deep Roads was an irregular cleft in the hills, ugly as an axe wound. Some long-ago tremor in the earth had broken the rift open, and although it had probably lain unnoticed for decades, if not centuries, the Blight had broken that stillness and drawn darkspawn up through its depths like a moon-pulled tide.
By day, however, the hills were quiet. The Anderfels had always been a hard land, but under the Blight, even the toughest of its inhabitants were suffering. Parched plants and dead brown grass crackled dully in the breeze. Not a single sparrow sat in the branches of the bent, leafless trees. The unnatural storms of the Blight cast a pall over the morning, although it seemed that enough weak light spilled through to keep the darkspawn down.
Isseya, flying at the head of their small formation, signaled Revas to land and the others to follow her lead. The black griffon descended in a tight, controlled spiral, alighting on a hill near the gap in the earth. A moment later the others touched down around her.
Dismounting, Isseya walked over to the rift. The earth around it was dry and brittle; pebbles crumbled loose under her feet and tumbled into its depths. The cold, foreign smell of darkspawn corruption wafted up from the chasm.
The crevice’s interior surfaces were oddly stained, like a long-used teacup that had never been washed. Their discoloration made it difficult to gauge how far the rift ran or what twists and turns it might take during its descent. Isseya summoned a flicker of magical light to the head of her staff and extended it over the crack, hoping to illumine a little more … but there was virtually nothing to be seen. The black stains on the stone defeated her eyes.
It didn’t look difficult to collapse, at any rate, and that was the important thing. She motioned for the other mages—Calien, Danaro, and strange, beautiful, unsmiling Lisme—to join her.
While the mages gathered around the crevice, and Jorak and Felisse checked over their bows, the dwarven brothers Tunk and Munk noisily washed out their mouths with a shared canteen of ale and spit into an abandoned rabbit hole. Isseya had expected the dwarves to take more of an interest in their attempted demolition, but the brothers seemed entirely preoccupied with their ale-rinsing. Judging by the vigorousness of their gargling and the sour expression on Felisse’s face, it seemed that archer’s gloomy predictions had come true, and the dwarves had indeed dropped their breakfasts somewhere over Hossberg. Isseya could only hope they’d cleared the city first.
“How do you want to break it?” Lisme asked as she and the others came to the bottom of the broken hill.
The tallest of the three mages, Lisme was an intentionally unsettling presence. She used wigs and paints and other cosmetic tricks to give herself exaggerated, inhuman looks. Some days she appeared male; others, female. Isseya had worked and fought alongside her for years and still wasn’t sure which, if either, was the truth. The mage seemed to change genders as easily as she changed her clothes, and with the same air of artificial performance. To her, being a man or woman seemed to be a matter of theater, not identity. She had heard that Lisme had been subjected to considerable persecution before and during her time in the Circle of Magi, and that her bizarre guises since joining the Grey Wardens were colored by those earlier attempts to control her identity. Having survived erasure, she made herself indelible.
Today Lisme was dressed as a woman, and her hair was a tangled mass of old sea nets, the ropes stiff with salt and bleached white by the sun. Her eyes were a pale, washed-out bluish-green, the same shade as the cloudy glass beads she’d strung into the netting. Somehow she’d procured dozens of opalescent fish scales and had glued them to her cheeks and eyebrows, masking her pale skin under the guise of some fey, dreamlike creature.
There was nothing dreamlike about the intensity in her eyes, though. Lisme hated darkspawn. Her hatred burned with a heat that Isseya had rarely seen in any man or woman, even after seven years of fighting against the Blight. She hated darkspawn the way Revas hated them: with the all-consuming, unthinking ferocity of a raptor’s soul.
“Earthquakes would be the easiest way, don’t you think?” Isseya said. “Shake the hill down on top of it.”
“Or into it, if the hole is bigger than it looks from here.” Lisme leaned over and peered intently into the hole. The opalescent bead-scales on her cheeks shimmered like tears in the Fade.
Suddenly she recoiled. “Never mind. No time for doubts. Collapse it now. They’re here.”
“What do you—�
�� Isseya began, before the slap of hurlock footsteps and the echoes of their guttural grumblings reached her. The darkspawn were coming, and they were coming fast. The way that sound bounced off subterranean walls made it hard to tell, but she guessed there might be anywhere from thirty to a hundred hurlocks and genlocks in the swarm, and the whispery ear-shrilling flitters of shrieks suggested that those infernal assassins were among them too. She recoiled instinctively.
“Bring it down,” she said.
The scale-wearing mage nodded and raised her staff. She was the only one among them who could command the primal forces of earth to tear themselves apart in a controlled quake, but the others had their own methods of destruction. Isseya began pulling power through her own staff, shaping the raw energy of the Fade into telekinetic waves that would amplify whatever damage Lisme’s quake wrought under the surface. Around her, she felt the prickly spiritual tension that indicated the others were crafting complementary magic.
Lisme’s eyes went white, like a night sky electrified by a flash of lightning. The hillside rumbled underfoot, and fissures snaked out from the visible crevice with alarming speed. Isseya caught a glimpse of sunlight reflecting off wide darkspawn eyes and hurled her own forcespell at it, angling its impact to hit the reverberations of the other mage’s earthquake. The fissures widened and expanded rapidly, and the ground dropped underfoot with a sickening lurch. Dust billowed into the air, coarse and gritty.
Isseya stumbled back, sneezing helplessly and trying to wipe the stinging grit from her eyes. Through the haze, she glimpsed a flare of sickly reddish light from the hill’s interior, like a cough in the hot throat of a volcano. It arose from somewhere in the tunnels below, and it did not come from any of their spells.
“They’ve got emissar—” she began to call through the dust, but before she could finish the words, fire and rock erupted through the hillside. Fragments of heated stone blasted across the group of Wardens, drawing a chorus of curses and cries.
Even before the blinding fountain of rock and smoke fell from the air, the ground dropped out from under their feet. Lisme’s guess had been accurate: the fissure that ran to the Deep Roads had been larger than any of them had realized, and the hill was not collapsing over it, but into it.
And the darkspawn were there, waiting.
Isseya lost her footing and tumbled hard to the ground. A shock of pain shot up from her tailbone; she thought it was broken. The earth bucked and jolted under her like an unruly stallion. From its ruptured depths, hands emerged.
They were monstrous hands, innumerable and greedy, their nails shattered from clawing through the dirt. Some had three fingers, some six or seven. Some were soft and pale as rain-drowned worms, while others were covered in coarse scaly calluses. Black blood, whitened with a powdery coating of grit, seeped from cuts and abrasions on their skin. The blood was the only thing they shared.
The blood, and the cold clammy hunger.
The hands tore at her flesh, pulling her into the earth, and as they dragged Isseya down, their own faces began to rise through the spell-torn soil like those of swimmers emerging from some nightmarish sea. Hurlocks and genlocks and gaunt-faced shrieks, their pointed ears plastered flat against vein-webbed skulls, came up with dirt between their teeth and hatred in their eyes. They bit and ripped at whatever they could reach, and as Isseya tried desperately to flounder away across the tumbling, treacherous ground, she saw that the other Grey Wardens were faring no better.
Some were doing far worse. Jorak, the archer, lay motionless amid the flailing hands of his assailants. The dirt and scattered stones to his left told the tale: they’d been sprayed with scarlet arcs of blood from a torn artery in his neck.
Twenty feet from the dead archer, Felisse fought to kick away more hands that grabbed at her thighs and ankles. Her arrows fanned uselessly over the ground, just out of reach. A hurlock’s arm, buried past the shoulder, bashed blindly at the ground near the woman’s head with a large stone. It had already caved in the partly submerged head of a genlock, which it had apparently mistaken for the Warden’s, but the darkspawn had clearly realized its mistake and was viciously hammering the bloodied rock over and over into the earth, moving ever closer to striking Felisse.
Blast after blast of incandescent fire marked where Lisme fought. The androgynous mage was hurling incendiary spells point-blank into the darkspawn, immolating herself together with them. The salt-caked netting of her wig was alight with green-edged tongues of flame; most of the cloudy glass beads woven into it had burst. Her flesh was seared raw, red, and black, and the fish scales on her cheeks and brow had crisped white and flaked away. It hardly seemed possible that she was still alive, and she wouldn’t be for long.
Isseya couldn’t see the others, and she didn’t want to look. Taking inspiration from Lisme, she reached for the Fade and channeled its energy into a blast of pure force, aimed directly at the darkspawn grabbing her through the dirt.
The impact threw up a cloud of grit and blood and shattered stone. Isseya, who had closed her eyes in anticipation of the blast, let out an involuntary shriek as a shard of rock cut across her forehead. Warm blood ran down her skin and over her eyelids.
But the spell had knocked the darkspawn away from her, at least temporarily, and she wasn’t about to waste the chance. Wiping a sleeve hurriedly across her brow, Isseya kicked herself upright and scrambled down the hill, skidding on loose dirt and tripping over the clutching hands of more half-buried darkspawn. Blood stung her eyes mercilessly, but she dashed away the pink-stained tears and kept running.
The sound of a griffon’s wingbeats made her look up.
The griffons were coming to their riders’ rescue. Shrike, Danaro’s black-banded gray griffon, dove across the hillside. Isseya hadn’t seen Danaro since the collapse, for the mage had fallen early in the attack and been obscured by the thrashing of the half-buried darkspawn around him, but Shrike had spotted him instantly from the air. The griffon landed, screaming, and tore at the darkspawn around his fallen rider, ripping the emerging hurlocks and genlocks apart with claws and beak as fast as they dug themselves out of the ground.
Felisse’s tawny-bellied Traveler flashed overhead, his wings blazing copper and silver in the sunlight. He turned into a swoop and landed near the archer, kicking up a storm of dust. Traveler tore off the rock-wielding hurlock’s arm with a contemptuous rake of one fore claw, grabbed Felisse about the waist in another, and beat his wings wildly to lift off—only to find that he couldn’t. The churning earth was too treacherous for the griffon to get the footing he needed to launch.
The ground lurched and dropped again. Isseya fell to her knees, suddenly four feet below where she’d been standing a second earlier. Under her feet, the dirt ran like water down an incline that hadn’t been there a heartbeat ago. Stones and debris hopped along the tumult. Revas, unable to reach the elf, circled the collapsing hill and screamed her frustration.
The portion of the hill where Traveler was struggling had collapsed like a crushed melon. A gaping hole yawned in its center, and the rest of the hillside was rapidly sliding into its maw, taking the griffon along with it. Traveler scrabbled along the sliding earth and flailed his wings frantically, but he could get no traction, and the darkspawn that wriggled through the broken ground like monstrous earthworms were tearing him apart as he fought. Their claws sank into the griffon’s bright fur, staining the rich gold red.
Shrike was faring slightly better. He’d grabbed Danaro’s limp form in his front claws and was half running, half skidding down the hill as he tried to gain the momentum he needed to lift into flight. The griffon had few injuries of his own, but the blood of darkspawn soaked the fur around his beak in a black beard. The raptor’s amber eyes met Isseya’s from across the hill, and in them she saw a flash of recognition and an acceptance that, despite her years of close work with them, she would never have believed the griffons capable of.
The darkspawn taint would kill Shrike. That was why the Grey Ward
ens trained their griffons never to bite in combat, and sometimes went so far as to put armored muzzles over their beaks before sending them out to battle. The corruption in darkspawn blood, if ingested, would warp, madden, and eventually kill whatever had swallowed it.
There was no known cure, no way to stave off its deadly effects. She knew it, and Shrike knew it too. The resignation in the griffon’s eyes told her that much.
Resignation, but not regret. Shrike caught the wind in his wings and was gone, peeling off toward Hossberg with Danaro in his grip.
Isseya hesitated, wondering if she might be able to break Traveler free with a forcespell.… But no, in the chaos and struggle, she couldn’t see well enough to gauge the angle she needed to hit. The griffon was moving too fast, too frenetically, and she couldn’t see Felisse at all. From the tension in Traveler’s forequarters she knew that the archer was somewhere in her griffon’s grip, but it was impossible to know where she was in the fray or whether she was even alive. Overhead, Revas’s shrieks were deafening.
She gave up. Kicking one last genlock’s scrabbling hand away, she fled their disaster. As soon as she was clear, Revas swooped down to let her clamber into the saddle. Despite her overwhelming loathing of the darkspawn, the black griffon made no effort to engage them; she hissed in impotent fury and lofted herself back into the air.
From the sky, Isseya could see the scene far more clearly. Despite her despair on the ground, it seemed they’d succeeded after all. The hill’s collapse was slowing; the pit’s appetite was slackening. And few of the darkspawn who’d clawed at them so viciously through the ground had been able to pull themselves free. Mostly they were dying where they lay, trapped in the earth’s merciless vise.
The Wardens had left a tremendous dent in the Anderfels’ landscape, but they’d won. The way to the Deep Roads was sealed.
Dragon Age: Last Flight Page 12
