The Obsidian Oracle

by Denning, Troy

  “Is not as great as your duty to your king,” Tithian said, watching the pair carefully. After judging that the spirits had accepted him as a true messenger of Rkard, he added, “Nor is it as great as your duty to uphold the oath you swore to kill Borys.”

  Sa’ram’s eyes flashed. We cannot keep that oath.

  “Not directly, but the time will soon be at hand—when Rkard is old enough to assemble the armies of men and dwarves,” Tithian said. “The weapons he needs are within his grasp: the Scourge of Rkard, a sorceress with the magic of the Pristine Tower, and, here on Lybdos, the Dark Lens. All you must do is guard the child until he’s old enough to slay the Dragon. I’ll stay with the lens until you return for it.”

  “No. We have learned that there are worse evils than Borys,” objected Jo’orsh. “Otherwise, we would not have forsaken our pledge to kill him, nor condemned ourselves to this.” He ran the gnarled stump of an arm down his skeletal body.

  If the Dragon dies, Rajaat will be freed, Sa’ram added. He’ll resume his wars on the green races and won’t stop until all of them have perished. We cannot condemn all the races of Athas to death to avenge the dwarves on Borys, or even to spare ourselves an eternity of suffering.

  “That’s why we must all do as the king commands. Rkard has returned to defend not only the dwarves of Kemalok, but all the races of Athas as well,” Tithian argued, bringing all his persuasive talents to bear—even though he cared little for the causes he espoused so eloquently. “The Dragon and his champions have turned the land into a wasteland. If we don’t kill Borys, there’ll be nothing left for the dwarves or any other race to inhabit.”

  “And what of Rajaat?” demanded Jo’orsh. “It will do no good to kill Borys if Rajaat destroys the world.”

  “We’ll find a better way to take care of Rajaat. But even if we cannot, what difference will keeping him locked away make if Borys destroys the world?” Tithian asked. “For too long, we’ve tried to trade one evil for the other. We must eliminate them both, or Athas will perish as surely as if we had let them both roam free.”

  His words have the ring of wisdom, Jo’orsh, observed Sa’ram.

  “He has never fought Rajaat,” countered Jo’orsh. “He did not see the massacres of the Green Age.”

  “But your king did. He’s the one who sent me to take over for you here,” Tithian countered. When the two spirits still seemed unconvinced, he added, “On the way to Kemalok, you’ll see what has become of Athas. After your journey, you won’t think the world is a better place with Borys free.”

  “And if we do?” asked Jo’orsh.

  “Then all you have to do to save the Dragon is kill one child and return to the Oracle. But I’m sure you’ll see that your king is right, or I would never suggest such a thing to you,” Tithian said. In truth, it did not matter to him whether the spirits protected Neeva’s child or killed the young mul, so long as they left Tithian alone with the Dark Lens. “Now go! You have no choice, for your king has summoned you. You must keep the pledges you made when you were alive!”

  He’s right, Jo’orsh, said Sa’ram. We must see what has become of the world. It may be that we’ve done more harm than good.

  “And it may be that we’re about to,” Jo’orsh responded. “But we shall see.”

  The two spirits started up toward the surface, Sa’ram carrying the belt and Jo’orsh the crown. Tithian watched them for a short time, then started down the tunnel. With the two spirits gone, all that separated him from the lens were a few yards of darkness.

  THIRTEEN

  THE BATTLE OF

  TITANS

  “FORGET MAG’R! YOU’RE GOING TO LOSE THE ORACLE to Tithian!” said Agis.

  “The Oracle can take care of itself,” grunted Nal, paying little heed to his prisoner.

  Agis sat in the crook of the bawan’s elbow, where he had been trapped since being delivered by the Poison Pack. The noble and his beasthead captor were peering out from behind a jagged merlon, watching Joorsh warriors wade back and forth through the Bay of Woe. The giants were filling the sails of Balican schooners with boulders from Lybdos’s rocky shores, then slinging the makeshift sacks over their shoulders and returning to their battle posts in the silt to hurl the stones at the Saram castle.

  As Agis and Nal watched, a group of Joorsh launched a flurry of boulders in their direction. A half dozen smashed into the ramparts with thunderous booms, shaking the castle to its foundations and dislodging jagged chunks of wall. One missile knocked a hanging turret from its buttress, plunging the screaming beasthead inside to his death. Two more struck Saram warriors in the heads, drawing geysers of hot blood and stunned death cries. Another stone shattered the merlon behind which Nal stood, sending a painful crash through Agis’s ears and gashing his face with jagged shards of stone.

  “It seems the battle is going against your tribe,” Agis observed, using his sleeve to wipe the blood from his face.

  “I didn’t have you removed from the crystal pit because I value your observations,” replied the bawan.

  Nal moved past several of his own stone-hurlers to find a new position on the wall. He stopped behind a free merlon and peered out over the isthmus connecting Castle Feral’s peninsula to the forests of Lybdos. At the far end of the causeway, Sachem Mag’r stood on the island’s shore, as tall as the thorny trees behind him and twice as round. He was flanked by thirty of his largest warriors, all with kank-shell bucklers strapped to their forearms and spiked, schooner-mast war clubs resting over their shoulders. In front of this company stood twelve more warriors, six to each side of the causeway and waist deep in dust. Between them, the two lines held a massive battering ram, capped with a wedge-shaped head of granite. To deflect boulders dropped on them from the castle walls, these giants wore crude, mekillot-bone armor over their shoulders and heads.

  To one side of the isthmus sat the Shadow Viper, half-submerged in the silt bay and turned so that its bow ballistae and the port catapults could fire at the castle. Behind the ship stood a pair of Joorsh warriors, using mekillot shells to shield the decks from Saram boulders and shouting commands at the weapon crews.

  The catapults and ballistae clattered, launching two massive spears and a volley of stones. Nal ducked as the boulders sailed over the walls, but the crow-headed warrior at the next merlon was not so quick. The barbed tip of a harpoon came shooting out of his neck, scattering blood-soaked feathers in all directions. A garbled cackle rattling from his beak, he fell at his bawan’s side.

  Nal put a foot on the warrior’s chest to hold him still. Cradling Agis in one arm, the bawan grabbed the base of the spear with his free hand.

  “As bad as this looks, the Joorsh are the least of your worries,” Agis said, cringing as the bawan snapped the shaft off. “You’ve got to do something about Tithian, or neither you nor Mag’r will have the Oracle when the battle is over.”

  “Even if the Oracle did not have its own defenses, it is protected,” the bawan said. He rolled the wounded warrior over, grabbing the spear just behind its barbed head. “A Poison Pack sentry remains with it.”

  “One sentry!” Agis objected, realizing that Nal had just inadvertently revealed the location of the lens. When the noble had been plucked from the crystal pit, the bat-headed Saram who had been sent to fetch him had spoken of being summoned from the Mica Yard. “A single guard won’t stop Tithian.”

  “A member of the Poison Pack is no ordinary guard,” Nal responded, slowly pulling the shaft through the crow-head’s throat.

  “Tithian is no ordinary man,” Agis replied. “If you won’t kill him yourself, let me do it for you.”

  “What kind of fool do you take me for?” scoffed the bawan. The broken end of the harpoon emerged from the wound. “Do you expect me to believe you’d kill your companion on my behalf?”

  “Not on your behalf,” replied Agis. “On my own. Tithian betrayed me.”

  “You’re wasting your breath,” said Nal. “I won’t fall for your ruse.”
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br />   “It’s no ruse,” Agis insisted. “Tithian and I were never partners. We each wanted the Oracle for our own reasons.”

  “And I suppose you no longer want it?” mocked Nal. He tossed aside the broken spear. “You’ve suddenly decided that killing Tithian is more important than the Dark Lens?”

  “You were inside Tithian’s head!” Agis objected, avoiding a direct answer to the question. “You know what he’ll do if he gets the Oracle!”

  The bawan nodded. “That’s true. I also know what he intends for you.” He ripped the crow-head’s breechcloth off the warrior’s loins, then stuffed the filthy rag into the gaping wound to stanch the bleeding. “If you know as well, you could be telling the truth.”

  “Let me go after him,” Agis pressed.

  Before replying, Nal rose back to his feet, pulling the wounded warrior along with him. “Back to your post!”

  The crow-head obeyed, looking dizzy and weak. His feathery ears twitching in irritation, Nal turned his full attention to Agis. “No. However much you despise Tithian, you still want the Oracle for yourself,” he said. “Besides, you must repay me for all the trouble you caused by freeing the Castoffs.”

  “How?” Agis asked.

  Nal pointed across the causeway to where Mag’r stood with his bodyguards.

  “Surely, you don’t think I can kill the sachem single-handedly?” Agis asked.

  “No, but if Mag’r has not yet assaulted the gate, it’s because he still hopes you’ll open it. I want you to oblige him,” said the bawan. “The Poison Pack will take care of the rest.”

  The bawan pointed toward the gate area. The company of fanged warriors that had fetched Agis from the crystal pit now stood waiting on the cliff overlooking the entry yard. In addition to their steel-tipped lances, each member of the pack had an entire cartload of boulders sitting nearby.

  “It seems a risky plan,” Agis observed. “Once the gates are open—”

  “I’ll kill Mag’r, and that will end the battle—if not the war,” Nal interrupted. “The Joorsh chiefs will fall to bickering over the next sachem. By the time they sort the matter out, my reinforcements will arrive from the outer islands to replace our losses against the Balican fleet—and I will have returned the Castoffs to their pit.”

  After he spoke these last words, he snapped his beak closed with an angry clack and lowered his head toward Agis. For a moment, the noble feared that Nal would attack him, then the bawan said, “It’s the least you can do to repay me for what you have done.”

  “You brought this upon yourself when you refused to give the Oracle to the Joorsh,” Agis replied. “And I don’t see that you need me to open the gates.”

  “Mag’r is no fool,” the bawan replied. “If he doesn’t see you, he’ll smell a trap and stay away.”

  Agis sighed. “If I do this, will you at least send a detail of your own warriors to guard the lens? Perhaps they’ll even be lucky enough to kill Tithian.”

  “And where am I supposed to get these warriors?” Nal demanded, waving his hand around the citadel. “The Castoffs that you unleashed have left me with nothing to defend the walls. The Joorsh could break through in a dozen places.”

  What the bawan said was true. There were several gaps along the walls, with unconscious Saram slumped down behind the merlons, draped over rock carts, and even sprawled on the staircases. More than a dozen of the warriors who remained standing had been beset by Castoffs, and were tearing the hide from their own faces or banging their heads into the walls.

  “If I didn’t need you to lure Mag’r into my trap, I would kill you now for the trouble you have caused,” said Nal, one golden eye fixed on a flock of nearby Castoffs.

  “What you’ve done to them is wrong,” said Agis. “I’m glad they’re free.”

  “Don’t be too glad,” said Nal. “One of the bawan’s duties is to protect his tribe from the Castoffs. Once this battle is over and I have time to gather them up, I’ll make their return to the pit as unpleasant for them as the Castoffs are making my warrior’s lives right now.”

  With that, the bawan climbed down from the wall. He took Agis to the path leading down into the gateyard, stopping beside the huge stone ball at the top of the path. “After you open the gates, make sure that the Joorsh see you,” said Nal.

  Agis eyed the scene below. The path had been carved into the cliff with a high lip on its outer side, so that it formed a deep channel down which the stone ball would roll. At the bottom of the steep slope, this gutter curved gently to the right and opened into the entry yard, directly across from the gates themselves.

  Between the trench-path and the gates sat the small courtyard where most of the killing would take place. It was surrounded on all sides by the high walls of the outer curtain, the two gate towers, and the cliff upon which the noble and Bawan Nal now stood. A dozen ordinary Saram warriors crouched atop the gate towers, boulders heaped at their sides. The Poison Patrol manned the cliff top, ready to charge down the path as soon as they threw their cartloads of boulders down into the yard. Only the walls of the outer curtain were lightly manned, for any warriors there would be visible on the shores of Lybdos, and might cause Mag’r to grow suspicious of a trap.

  In the courtyard itself, Nal had laid a pair of dead beastheads near the exit, where they would be seen by anyone entering the castle. Their purpose, Agis assumed, was to reassure the Joorsh that the gates had not been opened without a fight. The noble was about to comment on the bawan’s preparations when he noticed that the stonework around the gate was not up to the quality of the rest of the castle. The blocks were much smaller and fitted together less tightly, as if it had been necessary to rebuild the entryway and the task had been done in a hurry.

  “You intend to capture Mag’r in the yard?” Agis asked.

  “How perceptive,” Nal replied sarcastically.

  “Then there’s a flaw in your plan,” the noble said, eyeing the huge stone at his side. “That ball will never stop when it hits the gateway. It’ll crash through the front wall like paper.”

  “Probably,” replied the bawan. “But what makes you think I intend to loose the ball?”

  “How else can you seal the gate after I open it?”

  Nal put the noble down and gestured for him to descend the path. “You shall see soon enough,” he said. “Now go.”

  Agis started down the trench path at a run, keeping his eyes fixed on the broken ground beneath his feet. When he had guided the dead bear up the lane, the surface had not seemed quite so uneven, perhaps because of the great size of the beast’s paws. To Agis’s feet, however, the loose rocks and enormous potholes were sizable obstacles, and he had to pick his footing carefully. As he ran, Joorsh boulders continued to pound the gate area, filling the pit with deafening booms and rumbles.

  Whenever the path was smooth enough that Agis could lift his eyes without running the risk of breaking a leg, he searched the courtyard below for a place to hide. Once the Saram sprang their ambush, he knew, stones and lances would rain down into the pit with unimaginable ferocity. If he had not concealed himself in a safe place by then, it would hardly matter that he now knew where to look for the Oracle.

  To his dismay, there were no doorways or arrow loops into which he could duck, no alcoves where the sentries had once gone to escape the blazing sun, not even any man-sized nooks or crannies in the stone blocks. The only place he could see that would be sheltered from the rain of boulders and lances was beneath the gate arch itself—which hardly seemed like a wise place to stand, given that it would be the Joorsh’s only escape route once the battle began.

  The best chance of survival appeared to lie outside the citadel. After opening the gates, Agis would use the crossbar to prop them open, then wait on the other side of the walls. Once the ambush ended, picking his way back through the ranks of wounded Joorsh might be difficult—but not nearly as difficult as surviving a torrent of Saram boulders.

  Upon reaching the bottom of the pit, the noble sa
w that Nal had thoughtfully left a spiked club propped against one wall. The weapon was just long enough for him to reach the gate’s crossbar, which hung several feet over his head. The noble picked up the cudgel and went to one end of the beam.

  That was when he saw Brita, the chameleon-headed sentry who had challenged Fylo when they sneaked into the castle. She stood a few feet to one side of the gate, her skin exactly matching the color and texture of the red granite blocks from which the walls had been built. Only her body’s shadow, the fact that her breechcloth had not changed color with her skin, and the huge bone sword in her hand alerted him to her presence.

  “What are you doing here?” he asked.

  “Punishment, for letting a dead bear walk into Castle Feral,” she replied. The flange behind her wedge-shaped head flared in anger, then she added, “Now open the gate—and be sure to show yourself.”

  Agis pushed the club up to the crossbar, groaning with effort as he lifted the heavy timber. The beam tilted toward the other side of the arch, finally sliding off its hooks and crashing to the ground. The noble tossed the war club aside and braced his hands against the gate. Slowly, he began to push.

  The gate was about a quarter of the way open when a tremendous boom and a terrific shock ran through Agis’s body, knocking him away from the gate. He landed halfway across the yard, flat on his back and trembling in shock.

  “Get up, coward!” hissed Brita. She had directed one of her conical eyes toward him and the other toward the gate. “You’re not hurt.”

  Although he was not sure his aching bones agreed, Agis pushed himself back to his feet. The gate had been pushed shut again, and the head of a Shadow Viper harpoon was sticking through it. The weapon could only have come from the Joorsh ranks.

  Agis closed his eyes, picturing Mag’r’s face and summoning the energy to use the Way. It was not an easy task, for he was still tired from his efforts in the crystal pit. In the short time since, he had recovered part of his strength, but far from all of it.