Black Stone Heart (The Obsidian Path Book 1)

by Michael R. Fletcher

  I shrugged.

  “There’s a trigger phrase,” she told Shalayn.

  Tien wrote the words ‘I deserve better,’ on the table top with her finger. They glowed for a moment before fading.

  “Don’t say them aloud until you have the ring on, and the stained-soul here in your loving arms. If you do—”

  “Stained-soul,” I interrupted. “I’ve heard that before. Why do they call me that?”

  She looked annoyed at being interrupted, but answered. “Darkers—islanders—were at the heart of the old empire. Some were demonologists, stained-souls making dark deals. Now, if I may continue?”

  Dark deals. I nodded.

  “The ring will bear you up at a comfortable speed, but if it isn’t carrying your combined weight, it’ll take off pretty fast. You’ll have some control. Say forward, back, left, right, to direct it. When you’re over the roof, remove the ring to drop down.”

  “What will happen to the ring?” I asked.

  “It’ll disappear straight up.”

  “After, how do we get out of the tower?” asked Shalayn.

  “Through the front door,” answered Tien. “From the inside, it should be easy.”

  “Should?” I asked. “You ever been inside one of these depot towers before?”

  “Of course not. It’s suicide.”

  Great.

  “You remember what I want, right?” She directed her question at Shalayn.

  “We do.”

  “And the writing?”

  Shalayn glanced at me and I nodded. “We remember,” she said.

  And I did. I remembered it perfectly. It was branded it into my brain, too teasingly familiar to ever forget. I felt like I should know what it said but couldn’t quite recall, a language once learned, and now forgotten.

  Tien glared at Shalayn. “Remember, you are not to touch it. It’ll kill you.” For a moment, I thought she was going to reach out and grab Shalayn’s hand. “It has to be a man,” she finished.

  “I remember,” said Shalayn.

  The wizard turned her attention on me. “Do you love her?” She pinned me with green eyes.

  Did I? I thought I might. I wanted to be with her, and I wanted her to be with me.

  Shalayn groaned and closed her eyes.

  I nodded to Tien.

  “Then don’t do this,” she said. “Take her away from here. Take her away from this life. Make her stop drinking. Give her a reason to live forever.”

  Conflict tore me. I wanted that, but I needed what was in that tower.

  “Shalayn,” I said, touching her arm. She remained still, eyes closed, jaw clenched. “Is that what you want?”

  “No.”

  I wanted to ask if she was sure. I wanted her to look at me, to tell me the truth, but I got the answer I’d hoped for. I hated myself a little, then.

  “That’s not what she wants,” I said to Tien.

  The petite wizard’s shoulders sagged. She shook her head, sighing with disappointment.

  Shalayn rapped the table with a knuckle. “We’ll be back with your bauble.” She wore an impenetrable mask of calm, a wall between her and the world.

  Tien nodded, her own gaze hooded. I saw through her. There were cracks in her defences. Pain hid behind those green eyes.

  Shalayn spun and left, stomping across the wet floor.

  I realized we hadn’t got everything yet. “How do we get through the door?”

  Tien handed me a key. “Give this to Shalayn. There’ll be a keyhole. Tell her to insert it. It’ll fit any lock.” She examined me. “It has to be her. It won’t work for you.”

  “Fine.”

  “If you come back and she doesn’t…”

  “You’ll boil my blood?”

  “You’ll wish.”

  Pocketing the key, I turned to leave.

  “Please, if you care about her at all, don’t let her touch the ring in the tower.”

  “I won’t.”

  “You’re a selfish asshole,” said Tien. “I know, because I’m one too.”

  I followed Shalayn out of the basement cafe.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I caught up with Shalayn a block later, my head feeling like it might burst like an over-ripe melon from the jog.

  “Where are we going?” I asked, when I got my breath back and thought I might not vomit.

  “To the tower,” she said, eyes ahead.

  “Shouldn’t we go back to the inn, plan this a little?”

  “Why? We don’t know what’s in there. We don’t know what we’re facing. What can we plan?”

  “Well… maybe we should do this at night.”

  “No. Now.”

  “People will see us.”

  “When they see us levitate up to the roof, they’ll assume we’re wizards. They’ll find something else to look at. No one messes with wizards.” Finally, she did snap a glance at me. “No one except you, apparently.”

  “We don’t look like wizards.”

  “Does Tien?”

  She had me there. “Speaking of Tien…” I fished the key out of my pocket and offered it to Shalayn. “She says it’ll open any lock and only works for you.”

  “Typical.” She took the key and stuffed it into the same pocket as the ring.

  “She also said that if I loved—”

  “Don’t want to hear it.”

  We walked in silence for several blocks until I spotted a shop with candles and lanterns on display.

  “We should grab a couple of lanterns. Who knows what it’s like inside the tower. There are no windows.”

  After purchasing one each, and flint steels, char cloth, and tinders for lighting them, we continued on our way.

  “We’re going to have to leave Taramlae after, aren’t we?” I asked.

  Shalayn grunted. “Probably best.”

  “We’ll need funds. I’d like some new clothes, boots that fit. A sword, maybe some armour.”

  “Yay,” she dead-panned. “A shopping spree.”

  “I can’t keep sponging off you.”

  “Need to be self-sufficient, eh? Your own man?”

  I wasn’t even sure what she was angry about.

  “Once you have whatever is in the tower you won’t need me anymore.”

  Ah. “That’s not—We are going to need money.”

  She turned a corner and I followed.

  “I think we should take a couple of things while we’re in the tower,” I said. “Sell them to fund our trip to wherever we’re going next.”

  “And where is that?”

  Good question. “I don’t know yet. I just know there’s a piece of me in that tower. It’s calling so loud I can’t hear anything else. Until I have it in…” I didn’t want to explain the heart thing. “Once I have it, I think I’ll know where the next piece is.”

  “Have you been lying?” demanded Shalayn. “This whole time, has all this been about robbing a wizard’s tower to steal a bunch of forbidden magical items?”

  “No. There is only one thing in that tower I want. If you’d rather, we can walk out of there with nothing else.”

  She kept walking, jaw muscles working.

  I grabbed her arm and dragged her to a halt.

  “You decide,” I said. “You decide what we take.”

  “If I walk away right now? If I take the key and the ring and leave?”

  What would I do? “I’ll watch you go.”

  “And?”

  Damn. I decided to be honest. “And try and find another way into the tower.”

  “And if I ask you to walk away with me?”

  I swallowed. This close to the tower, the draw was intense, a constant pressure battling the hangover. Who did I want more, me or her?

  “We’re going to the tower,” she said, not waiting for an answer. “We’ll find your memories. Somehow. We’ll steal a few magical trinkets while we’re at it. Then, we’ll escape and live happily ever after.” She laughed, a humourless chuckle. “Right. I forgot.
This isn’t the only piece. Somewhere, there is more of you.” She shook her head. “Let’s go.”

  It was midday by the time we reached the tower. My hangover deepened, festering in my skull, and infusing my spine. I couldn’t keep doing this.

  The cool breeze of the morning died, replaced by a still heat. I was almost comfortable. The pale people of Taramlae turned pink and red and dripped sweat and found a new reason to hate me.

  From a couple of blocks distance, a thirty-five-foot-tall tower of mortared stone doesn’t look terribly imposing. Standing at its base, lost in its shadow, you come to realize just how a fall from that height will break you. The tower was also much wider around than I realized. Walking its circumference took several minutes.

  Grey and black, the stones looked damp. When I touched one, my hand came away dry. I peered up. The slightly conical shape of the tower, tapering in a little toward the top, didn’t help.

  “Let’s not fall,” I said.

  Shalayn nodded agreement. “Stop looking around to see if anyone’s watching. We’re wizards. We’re going to fly to the top of our tower.”

  I focussed on her and she grinned at me. I felt off balance, confused by her rapidly shifting moods. Running fingers through her close-cropped hair, she leaned back to stare at the top of the tower.

  “Are you afraid of heights?” she asked.

  “No.”

  She punched me in the shoulder, a playful jab that only stung a bit. “How do you know?”

  That stumped me. “I just do.” I imagined riding something high above the ground. Clouds, white and fluffy yet strangely solid-looking, flashed past beneath me. Cold air chilled my face while the rest of me remained comfortably warm. We banked, wings spread wide, and the world tilted and I gloried in the sheer joy of the moment.

  “What are you smiling about?”

  I blinked away the memory, if that’s what it was. “Daydreaming about flying.”

  Shalayn removed the ring from her pocket and slid it on her finger. “Get over here and hold on tight.”

  I stepped close and wrapped my arms around her. “You sure you want to do this?” I asked.

  “I deserve better,” she said, and we rose up off the ground.

  As long as I stayed close, the field enveloped me, but I suspect if I pushed away I’d drop like a stone. I decided not to experiment.

  “Remind me to thank Tien for her excellent choice of trigger phrase,” I said.

  “She always does that.”

  Always? I wondered how many times Shalayn had been in similar situations, and with whom.

  By mumbling ‘forward’ at regular intervals, she kept us close to the tower wall as it sloped inward. As soon as we crested the top she moved us forward again and then removed the ring from her finger. Releasing it, it shot straight up.

  We dropped a foot or two and landed on the tower’s roof. I held her a moment longer and she gave me a quick kiss on the cheek. Glancing up, I couldn’t find the ring.

  “Let’s rob these bastards blind,” she said.

  Releasing her, I surveyed the rooftop. “We were right.”

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The roof was flat with an iron trapdoor in the middle. A heavy table, wrought of twisted black iron, sat surrounded by six similar chairs. A short length of chain attached each chair to the roof.

  “So they don’t blow away,” said Shalayn.

  “An iron chair falling on you from thirty feet would ruin anyone’s day.”

  Shalayn collapsed into one of the chairs and grinned at me. “We should have brought something to drink.” She waved an arm at the scene below. “Look at the view. This is the best patio in the city.”

  Too damned hungover to even think about booze, I turned in a complete circle. Taramlae, while orderly and clean enough, at least from up here, nonetheless seemed somehow crude. Something was missing, and I couldn’t imagine what. There weren’t enough people, I decided. For what was supposed to be the capital of the wizard-run world, Taramlae was too damned small.

  “Where are all the people?” I asked. “If this is the capital, it should be bigger.”

  Shalayn frowned at the city, shrugging. “It’s huge.”

  She was right, and yet I still expected more.

  “In school,” she said, “we learn that the Great War killed seven in ten people. The following wars, as the various schools of magic battled for supremacy, killed three in ten of what was left.”

  “Let me guess, the wizards run the schools.”

  “They run everything.” Seeing my face, she held up a stalling hand. “The wars brought us to the edge of extinction. The wizards saved humanity.” She gestured at the city. “They built this from the ashes of the old world.”

  “History is written by the winner. That wall,” I said, abruptly changing the subject. Even at our elevation, the outer wall towered over us. “What was it built to keep out? Dragons?”

  “Dragons would fly over the top,” she said. “Anyway, the big ones are all but extinct, except around the Deredi Mountains, and that’s thousands of miles from here.”

  “Right.”

  “I heard it was built during the Great War as a defence against the demon armies. Apparently, there are wards built into the wall. Huge circles of wizards powered them.”

  “Circles?” Why did I remember some things, but not others? Sometimes it felt like whoever broke me did so with an eye to what memories this fragment retained.

  Slumped in the iron chair, looking like she ought to be sipping beer on a patio bar, Shalayn examined me with narrowed eyes. “Wizards meditate to draw power from chaos, which they can then shape. Tien told me it can take years of meditation to fuel a really serious spell. But they can work in circles, pooling their resources. Instead of one wizard spending power built over hundreds of hours of meditation, one hundred wizards can spend one hour’s meditation each.”

  For reasons I couldn’t explain, that only made me hate them more. It bothered me that cooperation was their strength.

  I glanced into the sky. “How high do you think Tien’s ring will go?”

  Shalayn gave a disinterested shrug.

  “Do spells wear off? Will it eventually fall back to earth? Are the clouds littered with wizard junk?”

  “For someone who hates wizards, you’re awfully fascinated by them.”

  Know your enemy. I kept that thought to myself.

  Shalayn pushed herself out of the iron chair and stretched, a languid twisting of her torso doing all kinds of interesting things, even with armour on.

  “Let’s do this,” she said, approaching the trap door and scowling down at the iron slab. Kneeling over the door, she found the keyhole and inserted Tien’s key. I heard a dull click the instant the key entered.

  “Let’s hope the rest of this is that easy,” I said

  Shalayn swung the door open with ease, despite its being half a foot thick.

  “Don’t know if that was magic,” she said, peering down into the stairwell. “Good thing I thought to get lanterns. It’s damned dark down there.”

  I joined her. The sun overhead lit the room beneath. Everything else was black. “Yeah. Good thing.”

  Drawing her sword, Shalayn descended. I followed, not bothering with my knives.

  The room we entered looked like a kitchen in a well-appointed inn. There was a large wood-burning oven and enough firewood to cook several weeks’ meals. Huge countertops finished in thick slabs of white marble seemed to stretch on for miles. Shelves, mounted above the counters, were stacked with flour, grains, and jars of fruit and vegetable preserves. One wall was a massive wine rack holding thousands of bottles.

  “No,” I said, “leave the wine.”

  “You’re no fun.” She stole a long plaintive look at the wall of wine, one arm lifting a little as if she wanted to touch one, just for a moment. “I bet some of those are worth a fortune.”

  “Do you know which ones?” Wine seemed like something pretty safe to sell with
out drawing wizardly attention.

  “Nope.”

  “Would you actually sell them?”

  She flashed a grin. “Nope.”

  Stairs followed the outer wall, spiralling into darkness.

  “Let’s give the kitchen a quick look,” I said, “and then we’ll—”

  The trapdoor above us swung closed with a soft click, plunging us into utter black. No hint of light made it through. Climbing the steps to the door, I gave it a tentative push. It didn’t budge. Running fingertips across the ceiling, I searched for seams and found nothing, though I did discover what I assumed to be a keyhole.

  “I don’t suppose you grabbed that key before we came down?” I asked.

  “Fuck.”

  I took that as a no.

  Sparks slashed the dark as she worked to light a lantern. I closed my eyes to save my night vision and then realized how pointless that was. With there being absolutely no light in here—not even a whisper made it past the trap door—no matter how much my eyes adjusted, I’d never be able to see. I gave up searching the ceiling. Other than the key hole, I found nothing. Not even hinges. I couldn’t remember seeing them when we were outside, but couldn’t figure where else they’d be. Damned wizards. I heaved my full weight against the door a few times but it was an immoveable slab of iron. I might as well have thrown my scrawny and still slightly malnourished body against a stone wall.

  As I descended back to the kitchen, Shalayn got the first lantern lit. Yellow light filled the room and set shadows dancing as she started on the second lantern.

  With both lanterns lit, she lifted one to examine the ceiling above. “We aren’t getting out that way.”

  I agreed. Being able to see didn’t change the fact that this was a magically locked door and we were on the wrong side of it.

  She passed me one of the lanterns and then once again drew her sword.

  “I don’t think you’ll need that,” I said. “I’m guessing we’re alone in here.”

  “Sure, but when we get hungry because we can’t escape, I may have to kill and eat you.”

  I took in the extensive larder. “There’s enough in here to keep us fat and drunk for years.”

  “That doesn’t sound all bad,” she said, looking wistful as she again eyed the wine racks.