The Obsidian Oracle

by Denning, Troy

  Tithian reached the passage and stopped. The tunnel entrance was covered by a single flake of mica, as thin as paper and as clear as glass. Behind it, the hole descended into the bedrock at a steep slope, lined on both sides by smooth walls of the mineral. The floor and ceiling looked like the torn edges of a book, showing the ends of hundreds of closely-pressed mica sheets.

  “What are you waiting for?” snapped Sacha. “Go get it!”

  The king opened his satchel and removed a black belt, so wide it was almost a girdle. The buckle was hidden by a starburst of red flames, with the skull of a fierce half-man in the center. As Tithian laid the belt over his arm, the stiff leather crackled like breaking fingers.

  “That’s the dwarven Belt of Rank!” gasped Wyan.

  Tithian nodded. “A little token for the ghosts of Sa’ram and Jo’orsh,” he replied. “You remember those slavers Agis is so mad about?”

  “The ones that mistakenly raided Kled,” confirmed Wyan.

  “Yes, except it was no mistake—and they weren’t after slaves,” said the king, smiling.

  With that, he pressed his fingers against the shimmering mica. He felt a brief burning sensation as they sank through, then he was looking at his hand through the silvery sheet. The membrane reminded him of the lid that covered the pit where he had left Agis. Remembering how difficult it had been to get out of there, he hesitated before stepping through.

  “You two wait here,” Tithian said to the heads. “I may need you to help me get back through this.”

  “I’ll come with you,” said Wyan. “Sacha can wait here.”

  Tithian considered this for a moment, then shook his head. “Have you forgotten that I found the lens by locating the undead spirits of Jo’orsh and Sa’ram?” Tithian asked. “I’m more certain of finding them down there than the Dark Lens. It wouldn’t do to have them recognize you from the days of Rajaat.”

  “As you wish,” replied Wyan. “But if you fail—”

  “You won’t do anything to me that will be worse than what Sa’ram and Jo’orsh do,” Tithian replied.

  The king stepped through the mica, then looked back toward Sacha and Wyan. The two heads continued to hover outside the entrance, watching him with suspicious frowns.

  “Hide yourselves!” Tithian ordered. “I don’t want you here when I send Jo’orsh and Sa’ram out!”

  The pair narrowed their eyes and began to drift away. “We’ll be watching!” warned Sacha.

  The king shuffled down the slanted tunnel. Each time he touched the mica’s slick surface, a feverish tingle buzzed through his fingers. The air felt sweltering and still, heavy with the stale smell of dankness. There was no sound, save for the whisper of Tithian’s breath hissing past his lips, and the soft crunch of his boots on the floor. As he advanced down the corridor, the color of the walls changed from silver to lavender, then to green, brown, and finally, when he had gone so deep that the entrance was only a point of light far behind, the tunnel became jet black.

  Soon it grew too dark to see what lay ahead, and Tithian stopped to prepare a light spell. When he opened his palm to summon the energy he needed, his whole arm began to tingle with the same burning sensation that he felt whenever he touched his fingers to the walls. Before he could close his fist to cut off the flow, the strange force rushed into his body of its own accord, as if it were being driven into him by some external pressure.

  Hissing in pain, Tithian opened his palm and tried to expel the searing energy. Nothing happened, save that the smell of his own scorched flesh rose to his nostrils. Fearing he would burst into flames, the king fished a wad of glowing moss from his satchel and cast his spell.

  A blinding flash filled the passage. The fiery tingle inside Tithian’s body faded as his spell consumed the energy that had pervaded his form. The rancid stench of burning flesh did not fade, however, nor did the scalding feeling inside his body. The king found himself sucking his breath through clenched teeth, and the vial inside his mind was overflowing with the brown syrup of pain.

  To his dismay, the spell did not work quite as he had planned, either. Instead of the soft crimson glow he had expected, the corridor was filled with hundreds of globes of scarlet light, erupting into existence one moment, then, an instant later, expiring in a maroon burst.

  It took Tithian’s eyes a few moments to adjust to the strange illumination. When they did, he almost wished that he were still blind.

  Crawling up the corridor were two skeletal lumps, about the size of Saram giants and warped into shapes scarcely recognizable as manlike. Their legs were gnarled masses, with knotted balls for feet, while the thighs, knees, and calves were all curled together in a single coil. Long, twisted shards of bone jutted out from their shoulders, lacking any sign of elbows, wrists, or hands. One figure had fused ribs and a hunched back, with a slope-browed skull sitting on his squat neck. The other’s torso was more normal, except that his neck ended in a knobby stump with no head at all.

  Regardless of whether or not they had skulls, a pair of orange embers burned where their eyes should have been. Where the chins had once been, coarse masses of gray beard dangled in the air, unattached to any form of flesh or bone.

  Tithian took an involuntary step backward. His research had revealed to him how to find Jo’orsh and Sa’ram, what he needed to make them listen to him, even how to force them to forsake the lens—but it had not prepared the king for the horrors he saw before him.

  Nevertheless, he gulped down his fear, then demanded, “Are you Jo’orsh and Sa’ram, the last knights of Kemalok?”

  Tithian asked not because he doubted their names, but because he wanted to remind the spirits of who they had once been. The king had learned that after dying, a dwarf who violated his life’s focus slowly forgot his identity, over the centuries becoming an unthinking monster. Such oblivion, it seemed, was the only way for him to escape the terrible pain of betraying the very essence of his own being. For Tithian’s plan to work, Jo’orsh and Sa’ram could not be allowed that small comfort. They had to be reminded of who they were.

  The spirits showed no sign of recognizing their names. Instead, they continued to shuffle forward, stopping less than two paces away. They remained motionless for a moment, then voiced two deafening wails that sent pangs of fire shooting through Tithian’s head. A scorching gale blasted over his face, searing away the top layer of his skin and leaving what had been underneath cracked and wrinkled. He opened his mouth to scream, and a fiery draught filled his lungs. The inferno of pain quickly spread through the rest of his body, charring his bones and searing his flesh, until even his joints erupted into unbearable anguish, burning away the few vestiges of youth that remained to the king. He focused his thoughts on the vial inside his mind, trying to enlarge it so that he could pass more of this new pain on to Agis.

  The vial shattered, spilling its contents back into Tithian’s body. His mind was filled with a churning torrent of misery. Agis’s face disappeared in the flood, leaving the king feeling feverish, weak, and scorched.

  Tithian dropped to his knees and brought his satchel around in front of him. The hand he thrust into the pouch was that of an old man, gaunt and flecked with liver spots, flesh hanging off the wrist in pallid folds and the joints swollen with infirmity. The king gasped, and though he could not hear it above the keening of the spirits, the voice that rattled in his throat felt coarse and feeble.

  Still, the gruesome pair did not end their wails, and Tithian sensed that he was growing older by the instant. He pulled an owl’s feather from his satchel, then turned his palm toward the ground. Again, the energy that rushed into his body caused him great pain. He could feel it literally broiling his flesh from the inside out, but that hardly seemed noticeable compared to the agony being inflicted on him by the two spirits.

  Tithian tossed the feather into the air and croaked his incantation, using his tongue to feel his way through the syllables. Again, the spell did not work quite as he had expected. Instead of imposi
ng an absolute silence over the area, it muffled the keening, so that the terrible sound seemed to echo from the far end of a long canyon.

  The searing agony slowly faded, leaving a thousand minor pains in its place. Every joint throbbed with a feverish ache, his stomach churned as though he had eaten a meal of brimstone, and his ears rang with a terrible chime that would not die away. Nevertheless, Tithian knew that he had, for now, survived the ill effects of the keening.

  The king pushed himself to his feet and stood before the two spirits, his head swimming from the effort. Doing his best not to tremble and not to cower when he met their fiery gazes, he demanded, “Again, are you the last dwarven knights, Jo’orsh and Sa’ram?”

  To the king’s surprise, this time the spirits answered—and they seemed anything but unthinking. “We are not dwarves, human!” thundered the figure with the head. “We are Jo’orsh and Sa’ram, the first giants! We have felt your magic searching for our Oracle, and you shall not have it, thief!”

  Tiny red flames sprouted from the stumps of the spirits’ arms. They began to crawl forward, slowly bringing their twisted limbs around to point at his face. Tithian backed away, stumbling and nearly falling when his old man’s legs did not respond as he had expected. He started to reach into his satchel for the components to another spell, then, remembering how the last two spells had seared his flesh, he elected to try something different.

  Tithian closed his eyes and visualized himself as a statue, carved from a solid block of granite. As he summoned the spiritual energy to use the Way, the statue’s features changed with no input from him. The gaunt features became haggard and almost skeletal, deep circles appeared beneath his eyes, and his hawkish nose protruded so far that his thin-lipped mouth seemed little more than a shadow. His shoulders hunched over, and his long hair stuck out at all angles.

  Although repulsed by the image, Tithian did not bother to change it. The flesh had become stony and resistant to fire, which was what mattered most at the moment. He forced himself to stop retreating, then stood up straight as his two attackers approached.

  The bony creatures stopped less than a pace away, pointing their arms straight at Tithian’s chest. The flames at the end of their stumps shot out, washing over the king’s body as had their scorching breaths earlier. The fire had little effect, swirling harmlessly over his breast.

  “You may have fathered giants, but you were born dwarves,” Tithian said. He focused his eyes on the embers floating above the necks of the headless spirits, then quoted the first line from the dwarves’ sacred text, the Book of the Kemalok Kings: “ ‘Born of liquid fire and seasoned in bleak darkness, we dwarves are the sturdy people, the people of the rock.…’ ”

  While he spoke, the king formed the ludicrous image of a bearded, hairy dwarf, as he understood that the ancient dwarves were portrayed in their portraits. He used the Way to project this construct toward the burning embers of the headless bone creature. He was not making a mental attack so much as simply hoping to contact whatever passed for the thing’s mind.

  He continued to recite: “ ‘It is into our bones that the mountains sink their roots. It is from our hearts that the clear waters pour. It is out of our mouths that the cool winds blow. We were made to buttress the world, to support the cities of the green races, to carry the weight of the verdant fields upon our shoulders.’ ”

  Tithian’s dwarf construct passed into what remained of the spirit’s intellect, and the king was suddenly blinded by a brilliant crimson glow. The ground vanished from beneath his feet, sending him tumbling head over heels into the red radiance.

  The king visualized a pair of wings sprouting from the dwarf’s back, trying to bring the descent under control. He had a queasy feeling in his stomach as a surge of energy rose from deep within his aged body, and the appendages appeared on the back of his mental construct. Wisps of smoke began to rise from the wings almost instantly, then they burst into flame.

  Hoping to reach the spirit’s memory before his construct went the way of his wings, Tithian had it repeat the opening lines from the Book of the Kemalok Kings: “ ‘Born of liquid fire and seasoned in bleak darkness, we dwarves are the sturdy people, the people of the rock. It is into our bones that the mountains sink their roots. It is from our hearts that the clear waters pour.…’ ”

  The dark circle of a cave’s mouth appeared in the crimson glow, directly in front of Tithian’s construct. As the imaginary dwarf continued to fall, the black disk grew larger and larger. Soon, it replaced the crimson fire altogether, and the king’s construct was lost in the darkness. Somewhere in the blackness, a stream of water trickled into a still pond, and Tithian smelled a sweet odor of dampness. On his skin he felt a cool breeze, carrying on its breath the promise of shelter and safety.

  It was then that Tithian noticed that the spirits had stopped attacking his physical body. They now stood to each side of him, their mangled arms lowered and no longer spouting flame. The orange embers had been replaced by the glowing effigy of true eyes, with bushy eyebrows, long gray lashes, and a calm serenity that bespoke of ancient wisdom and integrity of character.

  Inside the mind of the headless spirit, a pair of flickering brands appeared in front of Tithian’s construct, lighting the darkness for him. To the king’s surprise, he discovered that his dwarf was not standing in a simple cave passage, but in a vast subterranean courtyard. Directly ahead lay the arched entrance to a magnificent tower, flanked on each side by a sconce holding one of the torches that lit the area. The keep rose high overhead, its roof joining directly into the ceiling of the cavernous chamber in which it had been built.

  Tithian took his construct past the bronze-gilded doors and entered the keep. He found himself standing in a dimly lit foyer. To one side of the entrance sat a low stone bench, sized for the short legs of dwarves. On the other side was a higher bench, appropriate to the longer legs of humans. Another door opened on the opposite side, and above this arch hung a pair of crossed battle-axes, ready to fall on the neck of anyone who passed through that portal without permission.

  A pair of dwarves stepped through the inner door. Both were dressed in gleaming suits of steel plate, embossed with simple geometric patterns and trimmed in gold. One of the figures carried his helmet beneath his arm. Still, all that could be seen of his visage were a pair of steady brown eyes and his proud hooked nose, for his long hair and bushy beard formed a mane that hid everything else from view. The second dwarf wore his helmet with the visor down, leaving nothing but a pair of green eyes and the tufts of his long beard exposed to view.

  “Why have you called us back to the caves of our ancestors?” demanded the helmeted figure. “Why have you come to us speaking of the roots of mountains, of clear waters and cool winds—of the people of fire and darkness?”

  “The time has come for you to rejoin your king, Sa’ram,” Tithian replied, reasoning that the dwarf who refused to show his head would be the ancestor of the beasthead giants.

  The dwarf showed no reaction to the mention of his name, but said, “That is not possible. We have a duty to perform to our descendants.”

  “You have a duty to perform to your king!” Tithian said sharply. “Rkard has summoned you, and you must obey.”

  “Rkard is dead,” replied Sa’ram, angry orange embers beginning to glow behind his visor. “He has been dead these many centuries.”

  “Rkard has been reborn, and I have come to summon you back to his service,” the king said. If the spirits discovered his lie, Tithian had no doubt that he would suffer a terrible and lingering death. But he had no intention of letting them find him out. He had come prepared to corroborate his story, or he would never have made such an outrageous claim. “My body holds in its hands the symbols to prove that I speak the truth.”

  Tithian found his construct ejected from the spirit’s mind. Once again, he was standing in the sweltering mica tunnel, flanked on either side by a giant-sized lump of fused bone that had once been a dwarf.


  These symbols—show them to us, ordered Sa’ram. Lacking a mouth, or even a head to put it in, he used the Way to send his message.

  Tithian held out the Belt of Rank, draping it over Sa’ram’s fleshless arm.

  “That is the Goblin’s Head,” objected Jo’orsh. His eyes also began to glow orange. “It is the crest of the dwarven general, not the king.”

  “Were they not one and the same when Kemalok fell?” Tithian countered. Judging by the orange color returning to their eyes, his plan was not working quite as well as he had hoped. He plunged his hand into his shoulder satchel, then said, “Nevertheless, I feared that one symbol would not be enough. That’s why I brought this as well.”

  Tithian pulled a jewel-studded crown of white metal from his satchel, then slipped it over the stump of Jo’orsh’s arm.

  “Rkard’s crown,” confirmed the spirit. He sounded strangely disappointed, and the orange glow faded from both his eyes and those of Sa’ram. “What does he wish of us?”

  “Return to Kemalok,” Tithian replied, breathing a secret sigh of relief. “There you’ll find a young dwarf-human crossbreed with crimson eyes. He is the vessel in which Rkard has chosen to reincarnate himself. You must guard this child from harm, for it is his destiny to unite the armies of men and dwarves under the Tower of Buryn’s banner.”

  Despite what he said, Tithian had no knowledge that Rkard had been reincarnated in any child. Instead, the king had fashioned the lie after several painstaking months researching archaic dwarven legends and interrogating his disembodied tutors. He had based his final story on the ancient dwarven belief that the kings of Kemalok would always rise to answer their city’s call for protection. Since he knew that Rkard had, in fact, recently risen to protect the city, Tithian felt confident that Sa’ram and Jo’orsh would not have too much trouble accepting his fabrication.

  For several moments, the two spirits stared silently at each other. Finally, Jo’orsh shook his head. “We cannot answer our king’s call,” he said. “Our duty to guard the Oracle—”