Obsidian

by Alan Baxter

  12

  Alex and Sil stood as forlornly as they could manage, hidden in the hoods of their Austere robes, and watched the entrance to the tall edifice. Jarrod, Claude and Rowan loitered not far away, stooped and lacklustre. The Tower of the Autarch rose from the centre of Obsidian, a shining black obelisk of power, seeming to scrape the shimmering blue of the dome high above. All around its broad courtyard other buildings glimmered in the wan light. People lounged around near doorways, many looked broken and lost. Others stood and conversed in groups, some mingled near stalls, trading, bartering all manner of goods. A building that Alex could only assume was a church stood at the foot of the Tower, the only building in the wide space around the base. Several people milled around near the church. One group danced listlessly to a sung melody heavy with melancholy. A few other Austere loitered, looking at least as stooped as Lily had suggested. Alex couldn’t imagine a life that was nothing more than simply waiting to die, but nothing about Obsidian gave him any reason to think that living held any great reward.

  ‘If the people we need are in there,’ Sil whispered, ‘we’re not going to have an easy time getting them out.’

  Alex sighed, scanned the surrounding buildings. ‘We would have to walk through a wide open space to get to it and those Autarch Guards at the door look pretty alert.’ His gaze swept up the building. ‘And even if we got in, that’s a hell of a lot of space to search.’

  ‘If they’re prisoners, they’re probably held underground, in dungeons.’

  Alex laughed softly. ‘Maybe. But just because this place is so medieval-seeming doesn’t mean all the clichés fit. They could be held at the top, like the Tower of London.’

  Silhouette turned her head to stare at him. ‘Like the Tower of London?’

  He grinned, despite the discomfort of their situation. ‘Well, whatever. You know what I mean.’ Frustration settled quickly over them again. ‘Regardless, getting in will be close to impossible for us as a group. I could maybe go in alone, like I did at the Den in Rome.’ His ability to mask so completely that he became invisible was valuable, but it meant going without backup.

  He let his senses quest gently, watched the shades of the people all around. ‘The Guards are Kin,’ he said. ‘All the other people here are human, so broken, but the Kin are healthy. And there are so many people. This place is huge, there must thousands trapped here, tens of thousands maybe. Living in such squalor, never seeing the sun. It’s like …’ He trailed off, not wanting to finish the thought, let alone the sentence.

  ‘A farm,’ Silhouette said, her voice hard.

  ‘Is it?’

  She looked at him, eyes glittering in the darkness of her hood. ‘You know it is, don’t pretend it hasn’t occurred to you. I don’t know how, or where this place came from, but all these people are nothing more than battery hens for the ruling Kin.’

  Alex nodded, said nothing. She was right, what other explanation was there? Removed from everything, unaware of the outside world, held in some kind of religious thrall with the promise of Ascension. It was sickening.

  ‘Look.’ Silhouette gestured subtly across the square.

  A tall woman, all curves and long brunette hair, led a contingent of people towards the Tower. She was unmistakably Kin, but not dressed as a Guard. Her dress was ostentatious, flowing dark blue velvet, quite at odds with the canvas rags of the people. She had the demeanour of power about her. Lowen all around dropped to their knees and laid their palms to the ground as she passed. Several other Kin were with her, three Autarch Guard, three men dressed in the cassocks of Priests but with strange iconography embroidered into the heavy material. In the middle of the group, bowed and haggard, stumbled an old man in chains, waif-thin, long, unkempt hair and a deeply lined face. Alex read their shades. All Kin, even the manacled one, all doing nothing to conceal their true nature. People in the square were universally ignored.

  ‘What’s that all about then?’ Alex asked.

  ‘A Kin being treated that way here seems very out of place,’ Sil said. ‘It looked like he’d been a prisoner for a long time.’

  ‘So thin, he looked close to death, but his shades were strong enough, if a little tinged with madness.’

  Silhouette nodded. ‘Kin only need to eat infrequently. A good feed every couple of weeks is more than enough, our metabolisms are very different to humans. Equally, we can go months without a feed and survive if we have to. He’s probably fed paltry amounts once a month or so to keep him alive.’

  ‘Fed?’

  She turned to face him, her face serious in shadows. ‘Yes. Plenty of flesh and bone is best, especially marrowbone. We can get by for a fair while on a few cups of blood, but the meat and bone of humankind is the real stuff of substance.’

  Alex nodded, gave her a half-smile from his own shadows. ‘I’m doing my best to get used to it. What constitutes a good feed? As in, how much … of … a person?’

  Soft laughter came from Silhouette’s hood. ‘Several Kin could survive for quite a while on one whole person if necessary. You’ve seen lions feeding on a buffalo on the savannah? It’s a bit like that. A lot of Kin keep a kill on ice and it lasts them months and months. Some just kill, take a feed and leave the rest. A place like this?’ She gestured, encompassing all of Obsidian. ‘This many people could keep a fair few Kin well fed indefinitely. I’m sure that’s why the breeding laws Lily mentioned are in place, to keep the fucking farm running.’

  ‘So you don’t approve of this, then?’

  Silhouette looked across the square, the slowly dancing people and their mournful song. ‘No, I certainly do not. We’re a complicated species, Alex. We must feed on people, but we don’t have to torture them. We all have some human blood in us, mixed with the Fey. For some Kin, their humanity is so buried they are truly monsters and delight in the kills. For others, feeding is a necessity they don’t enjoy at all. The Kin who run this place clearly sit firmly in the first camp.’

  ‘We need to know a lot more about where we are and how it works,’ Alex said, biting down the frustration that waiting raised. ‘Let’s sit and watch for a while, see if we can’t get a better feel for the place. Then we might have to go back and talk to Lily and Duncan some more.’

  Katherine brought the prisoner before the Autarch, dismissing the Priests and Guard at the door.

  The prisoner was pushed to his knees, the old rage a distant yet ever-present fire deep in his memory. He looked up into the wide, dark face of the Autarch and smiled.

  The Autarch sneered, turned away. ‘Bring him through.’

  Katherine dragged him behind her, stumbling, into the council chamber. She took her seat with the other members and reached for the bloodied stump of an arm on the table. Others wiped their mouths, crunching down bones to pay attention, faces morphing between animal and human as they fed.

  The Autarch waited until they were settled, Katherine idly chewing at fresh meat, before he spoke. ‘We need you to solve a mystery for us.’

  The prisoner stood in his chains not far from the door. ‘Use my name,’ he said, his Scottish accent strong.

  The Autarch scowled.

  ‘Use my name, you fuckers. You keep me alive for your amusement and little else. Now you want something from me. The least you can do is use my name.’

  The Autarch sat heavily into his chair. He reached for a thinly muscled lower leg from the huge platter on the table, looked at it disdainfully. ‘Not much meat on this one,’ he said. ‘A shame the other one, Haydon, didn’t make a run for it. He’s much meatier.’

  ‘From the sound of it,’ Salome purred, ‘it’s Haydon that might prove the most useful. Anyway, this one is quite delicious.’

  The Autarch bit, crunched, chewed, swallowed. He eventually looked up to the prisoner. ‘All right, Parlan.’ He made the prisoner’s name sound like a disease.

  Parlan shook his head in disgust. ‘Just kill me already. Your cruelty is beyond the pale. Too many lights, I see. Too many!’


  ‘You’re too useful and you know it. Hungry?’

  Despite his hatred, Parlan’s mouth watered. He couldn’t remember the last time he’d been given some rancid lump of lowen. The fresh, recently very healthy, food on the table was intoxicating. But he refused to answer the question.

  The Autarch grinned. ‘Tell us what we need to know and you can have some.’

  Parlan lifted his chin, his lank beard dragging across his concave, xylophone ribs. Even after all this time his instinct for self-preservation was strong. Some part of him, deep inside, almost buried, almost fossilised, still entertained the idea of escape. ‘What do you want to know?’

  ‘How can humans have entered Obsidian?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s one thing to think that some Kin may have somehow stumbled onto the pathway, but how can humans have come here?’

  ‘They can’t.’

  The Autarch bit, chewed again. ‘Humans definitely cannot enter Obsidian? So would you care to explain to me how several people have recently entered, at least three of them human?’

  ‘Through the pathway? Humans?’ Parlan strained to think clearly through thoughts of fresh meat and dancing lights, always the confusing lights in his eyes.

  The Autarch crunched heavily through a bone. ‘No,’ he said, cheek distended. ‘They all came through somewhere else. Several human, maybe a couple of Kin. Not via the pathway.’

  A rill of excitement passed through Parlan’s chest and he did his best to conceal it. ‘That’s no possible.’

  ‘So we thought. But it happened.’

  Was it possible? Had someone finally found a way in? ‘The only way is through the pathway. I don’t know how anyone could get in otherwise, there’s simply no way it could happen.’ Parlan kept his face as passive as he could, thoughts and possibilities tumbling over each other in his mind. He and the others, the real Original Seven, had cast the danger out into the Void, completely isolated, and left just one tiny way back for themselves. But they had begun to abuse that tiny detail and Obsidian grew, something no one should have allowed. The pathway, mistreated though it became, really was the only way in and out, unless something impossible had happened in the real world. How could he find out? He needed more than ever to stay alive. ‘Let me think on it,’ he said over the mutterings of the council and the Autarch.

  They looked up as one, the Autarch’s eyebrow raised. ‘Think on what?’

  Parlan gestured at the table. ‘Let me have a feed and some time to think. Maybe I can figure out a flaw in the magic that someone’s exploited.’

  The Autarch growled in disgust, threw a lump of Darius Grabowski into Parlan’s clawed hands. Parlan tore at it, swallowing meat, cartilage, bone in barely chewed lumps. Real world human flesh! It had been so very long.

  ‘Take him back to his cell,’ the Autarch said. He turned to Parlan. ‘You think of anything, tell a Guard immediately. We need to know what’s happening here.’

  ‘Are the people who came through refusing to speak?’ Parlan asked.

  ‘The ones we have know little. When we catch the others we’ll know more.’

  Parlan buried his face in the meat to hide his smile. They had yet to catch them all. After all these years, a sudden world of possibilities opened up.

  13

  Alex elbowed Silhouette, nodded towards the Tower. The group who had led the shackled man inside re-emerged with him. They walked determinedly away, headed between buildings on the side of the square.

  ‘That woman in the blue dress looks really pissed off,’ Alex said.

  Silhouette nodded, pulled her hood lower over her face. ‘She does. I wonder what’s going on there.’

  ‘We’re learning nothing here.’ Alex gestured for the others to follow. ‘Let’s see where they take him. Maybe he could tell us something useful. It has to be better than standing around.’

  They moved off, careful to affect the loose, weary movements of the Austere. Fortunately, the shackled man could not move fast with the heavy chains at his ankles. The group was easy to follow, through several streets, away from the Tower. They travelled for some time, always heading towards the edge of Obsidian. The place was huge, populated by hundreds, thousands of lowen. They moped about the streets, stood in small groups, looked from windows and doors. In places stalls were set up, lowen trading with each other, bartering one item for another, arguing over worth. Almost all the women they saw were pregnant or carried babies. Children filled every street, played like children everywhere, too young to realise yet that life did not care for them. It would soon show itself to be cruel and heartless. Spirits were easily broken, but for a few short years the innocence of childhood made everything okay. In one building, a man carved and whittled at wood, making a simple stool. In another, several women worked looms, weaving rough-spun garments.

  They reached a series of half-formed buildings, nubs of construction, smooth and glassy, like melted candles. On one side, a group of Priests worked together, the aura of their magic strong. The black glass grew around them, painfully slowly, rising like a bubble in tar.

  Alex and Silhouette paused, stared in awe at the strange creation.

  ‘They’re growing the city,’ Claude murmured as he, Jarrod and Rowan caught up.

  Alex looked hard at the shades, tried to fathom the method. ‘You’re right. That’s how this whole place was built, do you think? That would have taken centuries.’

  ‘I’m sure it did.’ Silhouette’s voice was hard. ‘As the population grew, the city grew with them. The farm getting ever bigger. But this is huge enchantment. Where does the energy come from? The substance?’

  ‘A farm,’ Claude spat. ‘Where the fuck are we, really?’ He shoved at Alex’s shoulder, clearly discomforted by everything he saw, all they learned. ‘Where have you led me?’

  Alex scowled. ‘Don’t fucking touch me. I told you before, you didn’t have to follow us here. I’m just trying to get us out.’

  They passed beyond the new structures and the city petered out, a wide expanse leading to the ragged edge of Obsidian. The shimmering dome dropped down to meet the end of the land a few hundred metres from them. A single building stood beyond the open ground, similar to the church at the foot of the Tower of the Autarch. In the space between, crops grew in waving fields as far as they could see to either side. Alex and his friends stopped, lingered near the edge of habitation, away from the Priests growing more. The woman in blue led the party and their captive along a path between fields to the church.

  Jarrod waved a hand, indicated the tall crops. ‘How does it grow, with no sun, no rain?’

  Alex looked up to the shimmering dome. ‘There are strange magics at work here, the magesign is so confused. Presumably this is farmland to feed the lowen.’ He opened his vision, studied the overlapping shades high above. It was intricate, powerful stuff.

  Silhouette pointed away to their right. ‘There are lots of people working the fields further that way. It must be quite an effort to sustain this population.’

  The woman in blue emerged from the church again, accompanied by the three Guards, but not the three Priests or the prisoner. Alex and his friends drifted between high walls, away from the fields and the approaching group, waited until they passed.

  ‘So the fellow in chains is kept in there,’ Alex said. ‘I hope we can learn something from him. I’m guessing it’ll be easier to get in there than the Tower.’ He turned to Jarrod. ‘You, Rowan and Claude wait here. Just loiter like … well, like Austere. Silhouette and I will see what there is to know over there.’

  ‘Giving me orders too, now?’ Claude asked. ‘I’ll just fucking stand and wait for you like a bitch, shall I?’

  Alex swallowed his immediate anger, put a hand on Claude’s arm. ‘I’m sorry. I really am. You didn’t have to follow us, but I’m sorry you’ve been dragged into all this. I’m just trying to get us out. Then we can go toe to fucking toe if you like. Do you have a better plan?’

  Claude sla
pped Alex’s hand aside. ‘Fuck you, Caine. I followed you in to find out what happened to my father. Got an answer for that yet, have you?’

  Silhouette moved between them before Alex could answer. ‘Enough, this is not the time.’ She looked nervously left and right, but the narrow alley was empty.

  Claude pushed her aside. ‘Oh, it’s the time, all right. I’m fucking sick of tramping around this place!’

  Alex struck Claude hard in the chest, sat him heavily back against a wall. ‘Don’t you fucking touch her!’

  Claude gathered energy, his façade falling away as he muttered incantations and threw a blistering ball of energy at Alex without even standing. Alex raised a hand, tried to focus his magic against the attack, but it still burned, forced him staggering backwards. His hood fell back and his snarl of fury was clear for all to see. Before Claude could draw breath again, he rushed the fallen man. ‘I’ll fucking kill you!’

  He was pulled up short by Jarrod grabbing his robes and Silhouette dived between them again. ‘For fuck’s sake, you two, you’ll get us all killed!’

  ‘Look!’ Rowan pointed out towards the fields, narrowly visible between the buildings.

  A group farming a couple of hundred metres away had stopped, squinting across the distance to see what was happening. An Autarch Guard moved towards the mesmerised workers. Alex dropped, pulled his hood back over his face. The others crouched, hiding deeper in the alley.

  Alex ground his teeth, his rage burning. He stared hard into Claude’s angry eyes. Claude stared back, defiant.

  Silhouette slapped them both, one with each hand. ‘Enough! Save this for later.’

  ‘It will come up again,’ Claude said. ‘Don’t think it won’t.’

  Alex forced his breathing to settle, reknitted his shields of mundanity. ‘Not now.’

  Jarrod had moved forward, peeked over the crops. ‘Those lowen have gone back to work, but even from here you can see they’re talking quite animatedly about what they think they saw.’ His voice held strong tones of admonishment.