Obsidian

by Alan Baxter

  ‘Supplies coming in from our realm?’ Jarrod mused.

  Silhouette watched the two push the laden cart, wheels creaking, away towards the Tower. ‘Must be. There’s no way this place could be entirely self-sustaining. They at least need raw materials to work their magic on.’

  The building was devoid of activity again, no more Kin came or went. After a couple of minutes Silhouette gave in to her frustrations, her need to act. ‘Now we have to chance it,’ she said, breaking into a run. ‘And take out anyone inside.’

  Jarrod sprinted after her. ‘There could be any number in there!’

  Silhouette buzzed with her sudden and impetuous risk-taking. ‘Well, we’re about to find out.’

  Jarrod barked a curse that could only be in the Maori language. ‘Try to keep one alive! We need to know how this pathway works.’

  They burst into the building, throwing back the hoods of their Austere robes, and two Kin spun to face them. Two more Kin stood further back in the large, single room.

  Silhouette cast a quick grin at Jarrod. ‘Oops!’ She morphed into her panther form and rushed to meet the four as they barrelled forward.

  All the sneaking and hiding and worry about being trapped had settled a weight onto her that she desperately needed to shake off. A big old fight was just the ticket. She hoped Jarrod could hold his own, as two against four were heavy odds. From the corner of her eye she saw his shape shifting into something wolf-like as he ran beside her, then all thought was gone as the battle engaged.

  The four Kin all shifted, three dog-like, one a lumpen thing, ursine but horned. Some Kin found a strange totem shape. They flanked wide, fanning out before Silhouette and Jarrod. Sil picked one of the middle ones and leapt. She slammed into him and they tumbled backwards, claws and teeth rending as his jaws snapped rapidly inches from her face. She let her form shift between animal and human, using the best of both, claws and teeth giving way to fists and elbows, slashing and crushing. As a blow dazed the Kin beneath her, she leapt free as his friend was about to open her back. The second Kin staggered, surprised by her speed and agility. She landed, spun on one foot and let out a kick to crack into the Kin’s head. He stumbled, momentarily stunned, and Sil turned again. As her first victim tried to gain his feet, she jumped away.

  With a frustrated roar he chased her down and she leapt up against the wall, used her strong, panther legs to spring back off it, and drove a shoulder into his chest. The impact jarred them both, but she was ready for it. As they went down, she drove her fingers into his throat, let hand become claws, and tore out his windpipe with a snarling scream of pleasure. His blood sprayed into her face as the other Kin’s heavy arm cracked into the side of her head.

  Time dragged for one long, gelatinous moment, sounds whined down to silence. She saw Jarrod locked in battle with one Kin, another prone and still at his feet. He’s doing better than me, she thought distantly, and the hard floor rose up to meet her. The impact restarted time. An image of Alex’s face flashed through her mind and she refused to fail him, to fail them all. She rolled onto her back and kicked up as the Kin fell upon her, a snarling canine again.

  The Kin’s front paws hammered into her chest, his snout snapping right before her face, even as his back end went up and twisted over from her kick. She morphed her form, human and cat, cat and human, slammed her elbow towards his snapping face as she twisted her head frantically left and right to avoid his bites. But he was heavy, strong, determined.

  His back end came down again and Silhouette bucked up and sideways, shifted her body out from underneath. She grabbed one of his arms as she went, earned herself a savage gash across the face from his teeth for her efforts. She ignored it, rolled, pulled. As his weight shifted, she spun, threw one leg over his chest, the other over his neck and arched her back upwards, cranked his arm back over her hips until it cracked with a sickening pop. He howled and Silhouette rolled upright, slammed one knee down onto the ruined elbow and a fist into his face. His head cracked back against the hardened floor and he fell still.

  ‘My boyfriend taught me that technique,’ she said with a feral grin, but the Kin was past hearing anything.

  Gasping, bleeding, pumped and grinning, she looked up. Jarrod knelt over one of the prone Kin before him, feeding noisily. He grinned at her, blood all over his wolfish snout, and nodded. Silhouette ran to him, panther-formed, and they fed together, exultant.

  As the fight adrenaline eased and the feeding frenzy waned, calm settled over the building. Silhouette sat back, resumed her human form. She wiped blood from her face. ‘That was fun.’

  Jarrod moved back from the shredded corpse. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘You didn’t think to help me, little brother? Just have lunch while I fight for my life?’

  He grinned, eyes sparkling. ‘You were doing okay.’ His eyes softened. ‘Little brother. Heh.’

  Silhouette squeezed his forearm. ‘I like the idea.’

  ‘Me too.’ He looked at the desecration in front of them. ‘Always feels weird to feed on our own.’

  ‘And never as satisfying as pure human. But we gotta eat, and there’s human enough in Kin.’

  ‘I hope yours is still alive,’ Jarrod said, looking over at the carnage from Sil’s fight.

  She nodded. ‘One of them is, just out cold. Didn’t you tell me to make sure one lived?’

  Jarrod looked at the mess on the floor, at the other Kin with his neck at a horribly unnatural angle. He gestured. ‘That one broke far more easily than I expected and this one … Well, I got a bit carried away. I was hungrier than I realised, perhaps.’

  Silhouette took her pouch of healing powder, dabbed a pinch onto her tongue. It fizzed and roiled, bitter as hate and sweet as sin. She winced, offered some to Jarrod. ‘It’s far better in dilution, but this will help to knit you back together.’ The gash in her face began to cool and heal as Jarrod took the offered medicine.

  The Kin with the ruined arm groaned and stirred. Jarrod and Silhouette moved in a flash, held him down. His eyes swam as Sil leaned forward, stared hard. ‘Off somewhere, were you?’

  The Kin groaned, pain evident in his features. ‘Fuck you,’ he managed weakly.

  Silhouette pressed very gently on his shattered elbow and he barked out in agony, writhed under their grip. ‘I can make this much worse, or I can make it go away. Which I choose depends on what you tell us. Where is the pathway?’

  Despite his pain, the Kin’s eyes narrowed.

  Silhouette smiled. ‘Oh, yeah, we know plenty about what’s happening here.’ She pressed gently once more, felt shards of bone grind together. ‘Where’s the pathway?’ she shouted over the Kin’s howls.

  He glanced to his left, towards the back of the room. ‘Basement. That way.’

  ‘Any magical passwords I might need or anything?’

  The Kin shook his head, face twisted in pain. ‘You’re Kin. You’ll see the magic. But your human friends are stuck here!’ He laughed, thick and phlegmy. ‘The fuck are you doing running around with food anyway?’

  Silhouette shot a questioning look at Jarrod. He shook his head. ‘Thanks, pal,’ she said to the writhing Kin and drove iron-hard claws into his chest, puncturing his heart.

  He bucked, eyes wide, coughed once and dropped still.

  Silhouette stood. ‘Feeling better?’

  Jarrod nodded, stood beside her. ‘Yep. That’s some good stuff you’ve got there.’

  ‘Should be. We paid enough for it. We should hide these bodies. Better not to leave too much evidence around.’

  It took a few minutes to stack some boxes and broken timber to look casual enough with the four corpses underneath, back in the shadows at the rear of the building. ‘Will that do?’ Jarrod asked.

  ‘It’ll have to. It’s not going to withstand close scrutiny, but hiding four bodies is never easy.’ She winked and Jarrod smiled. ‘So, to the basement then.’

  Wooden steps led from the back of the room down into earthy darkness. The presence of
Kin magic was immediate and stark, coppery in the air. Four slabs of stone stood in guttering oil-lamplight, making an equal-sided square freestanding in the middle of the small cellar. Glyphs and sigils carved into the stone writhed with sparks of light. Silhouette opened her vision, studied the magic contained there. ‘Powerful stuff. Simple enough, but that would be very hard to undo.’

  ‘And impossible to change,’ Jarrod said. ‘At best you could destroy it, but there’s no way it could be changed. You know, to allow anyone other than Kin to pass.’

  Silhouette sighed. ‘Well, we’ll find another way out for the others. You do your bit and go on through. Do what you can to prepare. If nothing else, the story will get out.’

  Jarrod frowned, put a hand on Silhouette’s shoulder. ‘You can get out this way.’

  ‘I’m not leaving Alex.’

  ‘I don’t want to lose the closest thing I’ve ever known to family as soon as I find it.’

  Silhouette smiled, stretched up on tiptoe to kiss Jarrod’s cheek. ‘We’ll be fine, little brother. Alex has a way of getting out of tight situations. We’ll find a way out of this one.’

  Jarrod continued to frown, said nothing.

  Silhouette slapped his arm. ‘Go! See you soon.’

  He nodded, squeezed her shoulder once, and turned to the portal. Silhouette watched his shields and auras drop and he stepped forward.

  ‘Be careful!’ she said. ‘There will surely be allies of those bastards on the other side.’ She nodded up towards the floor above them. ‘You’ll probably have to sneak out.’

  Jarrod winked at her. ‘I can be pretty damn sneaky,’ he said and stepped between the stones. Arcane light flared and warped, black and opalescent at the same time, and he disappeared from view.

  Silhouette sighed, cracked her neck. ‘Come on then, you,’ she said to herself. ‘Let’s find this fucking anchor stone.’

  Salay Armand hung from a metal frame in a tapestry bedecked room and cursed the soul of Nicholas Haydon. Pain racked his naked body as the Autarch, the bear-man of this place, used sharp and gleaming knives to extract information with searing pain.

  ‘Why don’t you ask him?’ Salay yelled through thick and swollen lips.

  ‘Oh, I will, human. But I’m asking you first.’

  ‘I don’t know.’ Salay hung his head and sobbed. How could something go so very wrong? Why hadn’t he insisted that Haydon tell them everything? They had followed like children, amused and intrigued, and every step of the way Salay had known something was terribly amiss. He had known they would at some point meet a fate they would very much like to run away from. He was foolish enough to think they would have had the opportunity to do so.

  The Autarch’s hand slapped his face. His teeth chipped together, left tiny shards of enamel swimming over his blood-soaked tongue. ‘What did you plan to do once you got here?’ the Autarch demanded again.

  ‘Haydon, he knows a ritual or something. He says the magic is in him. He said he’d know what to do when we found the nexus.’ Salay barked a humourless, dejected laugh. ‘We fucking believed him.’

  ‘You keep talking of this nexus. What is it?’

  ‘We don’t know. It was revealed to us. “Seek the place where the power resides, the nexus of the mystery” we were told.’

  The Autarch leaned close, his breath sweet with the smell of blood. He traced a hot line of stinging pain through the skin of Salay’s shoulder with his knifepoint. ‘And what, exactly, did you expect that to show you?’

  ‘I don’t know! The prophecy said, “At the nexus lies death and danger. At the nexus lies revelation.” We sought this revelation, but we didn’t know what it might be.’

  The Autarch leaned back, laughed softly. ‘The death and danger bit was right. I wonder if the revelation was something as simple as, “Do not fuck with the Autarch of Obsidian!”’

  Salay hung his head again. His body dragged against his shoulders as he swung from tight chains that rasped around his wrists. It was difficult to draw air into his lungs against his weight, past the blood in his nose and mouth. He stared beyond his gore-soaked legs to the shining black floor beneath him and prayed for release. He wanted to wake from this nightmare, he wanted to see sunlight, he wanted to sleep. More than anything else he simply wanted the pain to stop.

  ‘This ritual your friend Haydon has in mind? He didn’t care to share it with you?’

  Salay nodded. ‘He’s no fucking friend of mine,’ he whispered thickly.

  The Autarch lifted Salay’s head by his hair, looked deep into his eyes. ‘So I really have no more use for you then, do I?’

  Salay knew the only relief he would see would be the dark and empty escape of death. He cursed again the heart and soul of Nicholas Haydon and spat into the Autarch’s face.

  Anger flashed in the Autarch’s eyes, then surprised amusement. ‘Well done,’ he said softly, but the words were unclear as his face twisted into the bear snout, teeth extended to long, yellowed fangs. He leaned forward and closed his powerful jaws over Salay’s shoulder and crunched through flesh and bone. Salay screamed, high-pitched and echoing, as the Autarch pulled away, chewed slowly as he growled. Salay’s arm hung by strips of lacerated flesh, the pain, white and searing, arcing through his body in pulsing waves. Darkness swam in at the edges of his vision and he prayed for death.

  A voice drifted through the haze of suffering. ‘Autarch, please forgive the intrusion. There is someone here to see you. You won’t believe who it is.’

  Curiosity tried to play in Salay’s mind past the hurt, but what difference did it make? The darkness kept encroaching. He felt warmth flood down his arm, saw a rapidly spreading pool of blood, strangely beautiful on the obsidian floor as it reflected the flickering light of a candle chandelier in the high ceiling.

  ‘Really?’ The Autarch sounded intrigued.

  Thick, black claws raked through Salay’s throat. The pain was distant, like someone else’s description of agony, but he screamed anyway. The scream was silent, hissing through his rent neck, past tattered, ruined vocal cords that hung against his chest like giblets. The darkness closed tight.

  18

  ‘Back so soon, are ye?’ Parlan’s voice was high and thin, the madness barely concealed, like leaves trapped by the thinnest ice over a pond.

  Katherine smiled, her look predatory and seductive. ‘We have an offer for you.’

  ‘Is that right? You’re too late, aye, too late by a long way!’

  Katherine’s expression hardened, even her body stiffened in her tight, blue gown. ‘What do you mean?’

  Parlan batted at invisible things that circled his head, laughed, sobbed. He squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that he grimaced. ‘What’s your offer, eh?’

  ‘We thought perhaps you deserved a reward for your help, assuming you choose to help us.’

  Parlan’s eyes popped open, his face suddenly still, enraptured. ‘Is that right? What kind of reward?’

  ‘If you tell us what you know about how these people might have breached our magic, and what we might do about it, we’ll give you a place to live above ground and regular feeds.’

  ‘Your magic?’ Parlan was incredulous, his eyes bulged. ‘Your fucking magic? Ahahaha!’ He collapsed to the floor, writhed and slapped himself.

  Katherine frowned, drew breath to speak again, when Parlan leapt to his feet.

  ‘Take me above first! Then I’ll tell ye something that’ll make your pretty hair curl!’

  Katherine absently ran one hand over her thick, shining, straight dark hair. ‘Come on then.’ She gestured, magesign swelled as she released the binding magic on the cell. She produced a heavy metal key and turned it in a lock near the wall and one section of bars swung open.

  Two Autarch Guard, a heavyset Kin male and a tall female, stepped forward from the shadows. They each took one of Parlan’s arms and led him up the stairs, Katherine strolling sedately behind, her face set in a worried frown.

  They emerged from the churc
h doors and Parlan stopped, scanned the fields of crops. His gaze lifted to the buildings across the way, up to the shimmering dome.

  ‘Come on,’ Katherine said. ‘I’ll show you your new home.’

  They made their way between the tall, sickly stands of wheat and barley and into almost the first dwelling on the other side. More Autarch Guard sat at a table downstairs, watching curiously as Parlan was led up to the second floor. The windows upstairs were barred, shielded and heavily warded, as was the doorway into one room. A heavy wooden door blocked the way into the only other room.

  Parlan was pushed into the barred room. Katherine and the two Guards followed him in. A bed sat in one corner, with an actual mattress on it. A chair, rough but comfortable-looking, had been placed before the window. A table in the middle of the room had chunks of Darius Grabowski on it. Parlan looked at the food and openly drooled.

  ‘All yours,’ Katherine said, her voice husky and soft. ‘But after you tell us what you know.’

  The two Guards kept a tight hold of Parlan’s arms as he turned to face Katherine. ‘I saw the hatred in his eyes,’ he said. ‘Oh, he was curious enough at first, aye, but the hate filled him like rain fills a gutter as he learned about what we’d done.’

  Katherine tipped her head to one side. ‘What? Who?’

  Parlan laughed, wincing as he ducked his head left and right, trying to avoid things only he could see. ‘He’ll no come back for me like he promised, oh no. Not now he knows what we did!’

  ‘Someone came to you?’ Katherine said, aghast. ‘When? How?’

  Parlan screeched with laughter, high and crazed. ‘Oh, you’re in the shit now, there’s going to be a reckoning! And I’ll no be saved and Obsidian will suffer and ye’ll be fighting for your worthless lives!’

  He flexed forward, pushed his chest out as his face split impossibly wide. The Guards either side of him cried out as his arms pumped up into thickly muscled limbs, black-furred and long-clawed. His back arched and his face stretched, teeth bristled forth. Some hideous cross of four-limbed mammalian predator and bat he became, huge and powerful, his magic bursting forth.