Dragon Age: Last Flight by Liane Merciel Read Free Book Online Page B

it.
    “But we don’t have months. There’s a Blight on, and we need the palace evacuated before the sun sets and the darkspawn surge. You’ve had some training, enough that I believe you can be ready to go into the field, but we don’t want you fighting. Your mission is to take one passenger each and flee. Do you understand? You don’t engage the darkspawn, you don’t hold ground. You take to the air, high , and you get your charges out of Antiva City as quickly as possible. Huble and Dendi will be with you, and I want you to follow their lead—but if you get separated, or they fall, head for Wycome. Any questions?”
    Isseya shook her head along with the others. She might have had questions if she’d known where to begin asking them, but it was all too much, too fast. None of the others seemed eager to speak up either.
    Turab looked them over deliberately, then jerked his head in a nod. “Fine. Back down to the audience chamber. The senior Wardens will meet you there.”
    It was hard, climbing down from Revas’s saddle. Isseya had just met her new griffon, and she did not want to leave as they were beginning to form their first fragile bond. The fear she felt at the prospect of their mission warred with the exhilaration of finally becoming a true griffon rider, and she wondered if that was why the Warden-Commander had arranged things as he had. Nothing else could have distracted them so effectively from the likely doom they faced.
    But they still had to go on and face that doom, so, reluctantly, she pulled herself off Revas, patted the griffon’s scarred neck in farewell, and followed the Warden-Commander back into the cool blue shade of the Royal Palace.
    The halls were nearly deserted as the young Wardens made their way down. The climbing roses, wilting in the twilight after a long day in the sun, swayed gently in the sandalwood-scented breezes of the interior palace. Along with the flitting of the small yellow-breasted birds that darted amid their thorny branches, those wind-stirred flowers were the only movement Isseya saw. Guards and gardeners alike seemed to have abandoned the place.
    “Word must have gotten out,” Garahel said. His usual easy smile was gone, and he kept his hands close to the pair of black-handled knives tucked into his belt. “If they’ve panicked…”
    Isseya unlimbered the staff from her back. Magic thrummed through the rune-carved steel. She could feel the strange reverberations of the Fade in the metal, both real and not real. By her will, that amorphous energy could become fire, lightning, ice, or pure entropic ruin as it came leaping down the channel of her staff.
    However reassuring the feel of that power was, the thought of turning it against people made her stomach twist. Isseya clutched the staff tightly as she walked alongside her brother down the eerily empty halls. “Do you think there will be fighting?”
    “I hope not,” Garahel answered, “but if the people feel that their rulers have betrayed them…”
    They did, and it had driven them to violence. Isseya saw the first victim as she came around a great bronze statue of a drake. The statue’s wide-flared wings hid the woman initially, but as the elf stepped around it, she could see the corpse all too well. Blood, bright as the statue’s ruby eyes, soaked the snowy white linen of the victim’s dress. The gold trim on her sleeves said that she had been nobility, if not royalty; their pristine cleanliness, unmarred by defensive wounds, said she had been taken unawares. She had fallen facedown. Isseya hoped it had been quick.
    “There’ll be more,” Garahel said grimly, striding past the dead woman. An instant later Isseya heard it too: the clang of steel on steel, the hiss of magic being pulled from the Fade and hurled into reality.
    It was coming from the audience chamber. The realization seemed to hit them all at once. As a group, they broke into a run.
    The Anderfels man was faster than the rest of them; he