“Are you certain?” he whispered, his breathing husky. “There are … bad memories for me down here. I don’t know if …”
“Shhhhh,” Fiona hushed him quietly, putting a finger to his lips. He stopped and looked at her with such an ache of loneliness it almost broke her heart. She slowly stroked his cheek. “I am tired of pain. So tired. Aren’t you?”
His answer came as he leaned in, his kiss gentle as if he thought her fragile. And then another followed, and then another.
Damned be the darkness, she thought.
She let the light of the staff extinguish.
15
Genevieve moved alone through the underground tunnels.
She used a torch to light her way initially, but as she progressed farther into darkspawn territory she found that more and more of the tunnels were lit by the phosphorescent lichen that lined the walls like mold. For all she knew, it could even be mold. Perhaps the corruption that coated the stone like slick bile had its own growths, its own pro cess of decay. What ever the source, the sickly green light in the tunnels was eventually strong enough that she could extinguish the torch and move through the shadows without it. She could save it for later.
If later came at all.
This was likely to be a one-way trip. That truth had been staring her in the face for some time now, but she had refused to acknowledge it. Abandoning the others was the right thing to do. Bregan was her brother, and it was she who insisted that he was alive. This was her responsibility. The talents of the others had been useful, but it was better if she did the rest on her own.
Kell would wake up to find her gone, and rightfully judge that it was better to abandon the mission and return to the surface. It would be a difficult ascent for the others, but Genevieve was confident they could do it. She was less confident that she would succeed in reaching her own goal.
But she had to believe. She felt Bregan out there, felt him just the same as she felt the darkspawn. Every now and again she would turn a corner in the tunnels and would feel her brother’s presence on the edge of her senses, almost as if his scent had been carried to her somehow on an invisible wind. Why she felt him now when she had only dreamed of him before, she didn’t know. Perhaps it was because she was so close. It burned under her skin, the knowledge that he was near enough to touch.
Dizziness overcame Genevieve and she paused, leaning against the rough-hewn stone walls for support. The dark mucus there smeared on the shoulder of her armor, but she barely noticed. That infernal song! The more she concentrated on trying to feel where her brother was, the louder it became, the more it infused itself inside her very mind. It was maddening, and yet she steeled herself against it. She could not let it overcome her now.
She had begun to hear it weeks ago, before they even arrived in Ferelden. The faintest whispers at first, an odd humming that she assumed was a residue of the powerful dreams. And then she realized what it was. Her time had come, just as it had come for Bregan.
They had taken their Joining together, so she had known that it would not be long in coming, but somehow she had assumed she would have more time. The Grey Wardens had elevated her to her brother’s rank knowing that it was a temporary mea sure, something sure to last less than a year or two at best, yet still she had been determined to prove them wrong. All those years of living in her brother’s shadow and finally her time had come, and then the whispers had come and ended even that.
She hadn’t told anyone. The Grey Wardens had ignored her warnings about Bregan, at best suggesting that the order would need to prepare itself if what she said proved to be true. The possibility of preventing the calamity didn’t even enter into their minds. Such fools. If she had told them of the whispers, then they would have leaped upon it as an excuse to send her into the Deep Roads—alone, and to die.
Genevieve wiped the sweat from her brow. She stared at her steel gauntlet and watched it shake. She felt weaker than she had in ages, like there was a thick poison loose in her blood. It made her skin itch and she wanted nothing more than to strip off her armor and scratch until she stripped the flesh from her bones.
There was no stopping now, however.
Banishing the fear that curled like a serpent in the pit of her stomach, she pushed herself away from the wall and began to walk. Her balance wavered, but by pure force of concentration she made herself place one foot in front of the other. I have come this far, she thought. I will not be denied now. I will stop the Blight.
For what seemed like endless hours she trudged through corruption and the mire, the dim greenish light of the lichen sometimes becoming a glare that sickened her and at other times becoming so faint that she was tempted to relight her torch. She moved through the shadows, stopping at every junction of the tunnels to listen and see if the feeling of Bregan would return again. She pressed her mind outward, feeling for anything, and yet all she heard now was that alluring song off in the distance.
Where were the darkspawn? At one point the creatures had been hounding their every step, and her Grey Warden senses could tell they lay in every direction even when they weren’t actively on top of them. Then they lost them in the lower caverns and, what? They had simply vanished.
She found it difficult to believe. No matter how effective the brooches given to them by the First Enchanter were, that shouldn’t change how darkspawn behaved. As soon as the creatures got a hint of their intrusion, the activity should have built until the Deep Roads were buzzing like an angry beehive. Losing their prey should have only increased their exertions. The idea that the darkspawn might be looking in completely the wrong direction, and only there, was too bizarre.
Something was not as it should be. She felt frustration as she realized she was missing an important piece of the puzzle. What was making the darkspawn act so strangely? Assuming Bregan had indeed been taken captive, why do that now when they had never once done so in all the centuries the Grey Wardens had sent elder members of their order to the Calling?
Unless they had. Those who went to their Calling were never heard from again. What if they had been sent into the darkspawn’s arms, and not to their deaths at all? Yet the order claimed it knew, and she had to believe.
The rocky passage opened up slowly, and she noticed smoother walls now. Architecture. Dwarven handiwork. The tunnels had circled around to an older part of the Deep Roads, then. Here the statues seemed to be absent, the craftsmanship less precise, the lava flows missing. What was it, then? The Deeper Roads? She had never heard of such a thing.
Almost without warning, she received a sense of darkspawn approaching. She tightened her grip on her greatsword and waited. Why hadn’t she detected them sooner? Had they found some way to mask themselves from Grey Warden senses, just as the brooches masked the group from them? A sobering thought, to be certain.
As she inched forward, sweat beading down her forehead, and her eyes trying vainly to pierce the shadows as she watched for an attack, she realized that there was only a single creature coming. A lone stray, then? A forager, perhaps, unable to sense her through the brooch’s cloaking?