Black Stone Heart (The Obsidian Path Book 1)

by Michael R. Fletcher

  “Souls were sacrificed to summon and bind you?”

  “Many,” answered Nhil. “For I am no minor demon.”

  “Really?” I eyed the old man. Even weak from hunger, I was pretty sure I could wrestle him to the ground and subdue him without much trouble. Remembering my dreams, the armies of monstrous demons, I said, “You don’t look like much.”

  He darted a sly glance at me. “Looks can be deceiving.”

  “What are you capable of?”

  Nhil shrugged.

  “Tell me.”

  He grinned, showing those narrow teeth.

  “You are a bound demon. I bound you, didn’t I.” It wasn’t really a question. “I command you, tell me of your power!”

  “I am not bound. You set me free.”

  “I did? Why?”

  “Because, after thousands of years together, we are friends.”

  Were we? Was he lying?

  “Ah,” he said, “I see you are sceptical.”

  He didn’t seem upset.

  “When you are you again,” he continued, “I will answer your questions.”

  “I don’t want to be that man.”

  “Of course,” he said, ignoring my words, “when you are you again, I won’t need to.”

  “I will never be that man.”

  “And yet you seek out the shards of your heart.”

  I had no answer for that.

  For the next week, he taught me how to access the souls in the stone. It required exactly the right frame of mind, a relaxed state of meditation, empty of worries and concerns. Not easy for someone starving to death.

  “Hunger is a distraction,” Nhil told me. “You will find this much easier once fed. You used to be able to achieve this state in an instant.”

  So, I was good at spending souls.

  “Tomorrow,” he said, “we will begin work on your visualization skills.”

  I was too tired to listen, too hungry to care.

  When I awoke, I pushed myself to my feet and shuffled to the bowl. There was still water from the previous night. Nhil watched me drink.

  During the day I worried about Shalayn, alone in the tower. I imagined finding Tien and killing her, the look of shock on her face at seeing me returned.

  At night I dreamed of a world-spanning war and the fall of a ten-thousand-year-old empire.

  My clothes hung off me. I was sunken, a man caving in on himself. My ribs protruded, ridges of bone in black flesh. My hip bones stood out, giving me a decidedly skeletal appearance. I stared at my arm. What muscle I’d possessed was gone. Day by day I wasted away. Hunger ate me, devoured me like the sun god devoured the swirling clouds.

  I was always tired and never really slept. Emptiness was a state of being. Sometimes I drifted off, eyes open and seeing nothing. Nhil stood, patiently awaiting my return.

  I told him of Shalayn and our time together. I told him I loved her, that she made me happy. I had to return to her. I had to save her.

  He cried and I did too.

  I told him I killed myself, cracked my ribs open, and dug out my own heart.

  I told him of the people I murdered, the Septk youth. I wanted to tell him of the necromancer girl, Henka. I wanted to tell him how I hadn’t killed her when I had the chance. I wanted to admit that I cared more about her and her stolen heart than I did for the people she would kill. But I hesitated, unwilling for him to know such things about me. Shame silenced me.

  I asked if I was evil, if my choices were evil.

  He asked what evil was.

  Exhaustion left me stupid. I was too hungry to think. Surely evil didn’t depend on perception or sides.

  “Stop shying from it,” he said. “You know who you are. You held an empire together for millennia. The world knew peace under your rule. There were no wars. The people were educated. Civilization thrived, working miraculous wonders the wizards only play at mimicking. There was a cost, there always is. Civilization comes at a price. If millions live safe, happy lives, is it not worth the sacrifice of a few?”

  I didn’t know. But in my gut, I thought he was wrong. A civilization that sacrificed human lives, be it to summon demons, or in fighting wars, was evil.

  “The world needed you,” he said. “Needs you still.” He sighed, looking away. “The man you were.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Offering a sad smile, he said, “Another time.”

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  The Soul Stone, a small diamond, weighed nothing. And yet it weighed heavily on me. I held it between thumb and forefinger. How many destroyed lives were trapped within?

  “The moment of truth,” said Nhil, watching me examine the stone.

  While I wasted away, melted to nothing, he remained unchanged.

  “Smash the stone,” he said. “Set the souls free to be reborn. I’ll fetch a hammer if you wish.”

  The smug bastard waited.

  I hated that he never ate, never drank, never felt hunger. Last night I dreamed I killed him, dragged his corpse to the kitchen, chopped him up, and made the most delicious roast.

  “No?” he asked. “Then let’s begin.”

  Crawling about the floor, I painted the symbols from memory. I screamed the chants, the bargains set down by unknown gods, until I was hoarse. I called the portal demon, offering it a soul from the Soul Stone, my end of the bargain.

  It came.

  It filled the circle with its ravenous presence. It hungered.

  Next, I completed the Ritual of Binding and smashed my will against its own. Even weak from hunger I felt an exhilarating rush as it caved before my need. I crushed it, made it mine, owned it in every way.

  Felkrish, it told me, was its name.

  I locked Felkrish in a white gold ring Nhil provided me with.

  Starved to the edge of death, barely able to stand, I gloried in the power.

  I hated myself.

  Opening my eyes, I saw Nhil watching me. “You feel it,” he said.

  I nodded, unwilling to speak.

  “In the future,” he said, “when you find yourself some sanctuary, such as this, memorize it. With practice, you’ll be able to build rooms and places in your mind very quickly.” He grinned narrow teeth. “I think we’ve spent enough time in this library—” I hadn’t left the room in weeks. “—that you’ll have no trouble returning.”

  I wanted to tell him I was never coming back, that everything here was evil. It was a lie. There were answers here. Nhil had answers. Somehow, Nhil was answers. And there was knowledge. Dark knowledge, to be sure, but things I’d need to know if I was to survive the wizards.

  For two weeks Nhil taught me the skill of visualization. While I no longer felt hunger, concentration became an act of supreme will. My thoughts would wander, drift away, and Nhil would use sharp words or a slap to bring me back. Sometimes my vision blurred or suddenly doubled. Luckily, visualization was mostly done with one’s eyes closed. I could no longer stand without help, and if Nhil released me, I crumpled back to the floor. Flesh continued to melt away as my body devoured itself. My breath stank of rotting apples, an incongruous scent for one starving. Soon, I spent more time comatose than alert.

  I was dying, and dying fast.

  And still Nhil continued. He talked even when I teetered on the edge of consciousness, his words creeping into my thoughts.

  Portal demons of the type I summoned, he said, were only capable of taking me somewhere I had already been. Even then, I had to visualize it perfectly. Portal demons are telepaths, he told me, and rely on the demonologist to supply the location.

  “And if I fail to remember something in enough detail?” I whispered.

  “Either it won’t work, or you end up lodged in some piece of furniture that wasn’t where you thought. Or you disappear, never to be seen again.”

  Nhil told me to pick some simple place, not too busy, not too packed full of details to remember. A place unlikely to change. A completely unadorned stone box with no detail, he
said, was a bad idea. They all looked the same. I wouldn’t know which one I would appear in. A stone box with a single detail was perfect. I remembered the empty room off the master bedroom floors above me. The door closed, with the single table, empty, against one wall. Had that been the purpose of that room?

  I chose one of the bathrooms in the wizard’s tower, specifically the small room where water rained from the ceiling. I remembered the tiled walls and floor.

  Nhil had me describe it over and over, narrowing in on different details each time. Were some of the tiles chipped? How did it smell? How did the floor feel? Did the room have interesting acoustics? On and on it went, always doubling back to confirm some detail, ask about the shape of some crack.

  My memory was either better than I thought, or I was losing my mind and making things up.

  “Now,” said Nhil, once he was confident I’d mastered the skill, “you must visualize your destination.”

  I visualized the water closet and the rain room, taking time to focus on even the smallest detail until it existed in my thoughts. I felt the tiles under my bare feet. I breathed in the damp scent of ancient mildew. I imagined Shalayn there, naked. Water cascaded down her breasts, fell from her nipples, beaded on the muscles of her belly. Her hair, soaking wet and pale, framed her face. Those eyes, ice blue, promised fire. Her lips parted and she said—

  “Pay attention!”

  “What?” I looked around, confused, dizzy and disoriented.

  Sprawled on the floor, I was still in the library.

  Nhil stood over me, violet demonic eyes studying me with concern. “Pay attention or you’ll die.”

  “Right,” I croaked.

  “Now, build the room again.”

  I built the room until I was there. It was real, solid,

  “One more small detail,” he added, voice distant, echoing off the tiles in the water closet. “Each time you use the portal demon, you must feed it a soul. And remember, each failed attempt still costs a soul.”

  “No.”

  “Then die here.”

  I fed the demon.

  Opening my eyes, I found the rain room exactly as I remembered, right to the chipped corner of a tile, and the hairline cracks in the floor I lay sprawled upon.

  Luke warm water poured down upon me and I lay there for a moment, enjoying the feeling.

  Finally, I crawled from the room, dragging myself with weak arms.

  “Shalayn.”

  Silence.

  “Shalayn!” My voice cracked.

  I dragged myself through the wizard’s tower, calling her name. It was empty.

  She was gone.

  Dragging myself to the museum room on the ground floor, I found the door still unapproachable. The room no longer stank, the corpse of the wizard Shalayn stabbed in the throat was gone.

  Surrendering to the obvious, I dragged myself back up the stairs to the kitchen. By the time I reached the top, the corners of the steps left me covered in bruises. Scores of empty wine bottles littered the floor. After my disappearance, she hadn’t passed her time here in sobriety. Not that we’d been particularly sober together.

  I crawled through the bottles to the cupboards and, with every last ounce of will, managed to drag myself upright using the handles. Though she’d made a dent in the stored food, plenty remained. I swept what I could to the floor and collapsed.

  I ate cautiously, just a few nibbled bites. Still, I vomited. When the nausea passed, I struggled to decide what to do.

  Had she found a way out?

  No, the wizards found her here, alone. They took her.

  How long ago?

  The ceiling lost its glow, plunging me into darkness.

  Was that an answer? Had I just missed them?

  If that was the case, I should go after them now, maybe catch them unaware. My starved mind, thoughts sluggish and confused, wrestled with the problem. I had to save her, but I couldn’t even walk.

  Then it hit me. I had three places I knew well enough to use Felkrish, the portal demon: The rain room in this tower, the library in the floating mountain, and my wood and mud shack far to the north. I’d spent years there, knew it in intimate detail.

  “No,” I whispered. “There has to be somewhere closer.”

  I couldn’t think. Months of starvation left me weak and stupid.

  I ate a few nibbles of preserved vegetables, this time managing to keep it down, and slept alone in the dark, surrounded by the empty bottles of a woman abandoned to her demons.

  Time had been difficult to judge in the world of the floating mountain. Here, in the perfect dark of the wizard’s tower, it was impossible. I don’t know how long I spent in that kitchen, eating and sleeping. At some point I barked at the elemental in the centre of that floating mountain to bring me water. It took several attempts before I remembered I was no longer there.

  With nourishment and sleep, my senses returned. Scrambled as my thoughts were, I figured no more than a week passed since my return. No matter how much I wanted to rush to Shalayn, to save her from the wizards, I could not. I was still too weak.

  I’d spent days building the rain room in my thoughts and it would likely take me near as long to create another place. But where?

  The only place I could think of was the room Shalayn and I shared in the Dripping Bucket. We spent a fair amount of time there, either tangled in the sheets, or nursing hangovers. Could I remember enough detail to make it real?

  I got to work.

  Two days later, to my best guess, I thought I was ready. Drawing the Soul Stone from its place in my pocket, I glared at the damned thing, invisible in the perfect black.

  Damned, indeed.

  There was another much larger diamond down on the ground floor. Thousands of facets. How many souls did it hold? I wanted it.

  “I will not be that man.”

  This small diamond with its sixty facets was already too much, too evil.

  I laughed in the dark. I’d never find it anyway, and what would happen if I picked up the wrong stone and it had something powerful bound to it? So much potential power, so close and yet unattainable.

  Nhil said every attempt to use Felkrish cost a soul, successful or not. The stone had sixty facets and could hold, at most, sixty souls. Unfortunately, I had no idea how many souls were actually in there. It was possible there’d only been one and I’d used it getting here. Should I wait, spend more time building the room in my thoughts?

  Having found her in their museum of demonology artefacts, what would the wizards do to Shalayn?

  They’d kill her. But first, they’d question her, torture her to discover how she got in there and if she had help. She’d talk, she’d tell them everything. Hurt someone enough, and they’ll share their deepest secrets. Once they heard there was a living demonologist—thankfully Shalayn had no idea who I really was—they’d come for me in force.

  I had to save Shalayn.

  Soul Stone in one hand, white gold ring worn on the other, I built the room in my mind.

  It didn’t work. I didn’t get sucked into some hell, and I didn’t explode or die or appear stuck in a wall. I sat there, in the dark, on the kitchen floor.

  “Idiot,” I said. I’d rushed it. Even if it did work, I was still too weak to rescue her.

  I tried again, spent days imagining the room, building every detail. I ate continually, washing every meal down with wine I barely tasted. When I needed breaks, I exercised, first shuffling, later walking up and down the stairs. By the end of the second week I’d filled out a little and even managed to regain some small amount of muscle.

  I searched for the lanterns Shalayn and I brought with us but couldn’t find them in the dark. The wizards must have taken them. I existed in perpetual night, doing everything by feel. I bathed in the rain room in pitch black. Then I went in search of clothes, the ones I’d worn previously reeking of sour sweat and starvation. Dressing in the dark, I had no idea what I looked like. Sartorial splendour would have to wa
it.

  My third attempt failed too, and I sat on the kitchen floor eating a jar of something slimy I hoped was preserved peaches. How long before they tortured and killed her? Was I already too late? Emotions warred within, each taking their turn to grind me down, to bend me toward submission. I felt rage at my pathetic helplessness, frustration at my inability to build the room in my thoughts, and the blackest self-hate.

  Three souls. I spent three souls, fed them to a demon, and achieved nothing. How many times could I do this? What if the stone was full and there were sixty souls within? How many would I use? How many souls was Shalayn worth?

  I realized the answer, and loathed what it said of me. No matter how many souls were within this stone, I would spend each and every one to get her back. And then I would wander blind on the ground floor until I found that larger diamond and spend a thousand more.

  I imagined Shalayn asking, “Are you doing this for me, or for yourself?”

  “For you,” I answered, knowing I lied.

  I hated myself for that too. Not for the lie, but because I was doing it for myself, for damned near entirely selfish reasons. I wanted her back.

  “They took you from me,” I told her.

  The wizards would pay for that. Tien, first and foremost. Whatever she used to be to Shalayn, the little wizard would die. I grinned, imagining how I’d end her.

  I spent days going over details of the room at the Dripping Bucket and worrying. What if they changed the blankets? What if they changed the curtains, or moved the furniture? What if I failed each time because someone was there, in the room, changing it with their presence?

  “I’ll try again in mid-afternoon, when the room is most likely to be empty.”

  Anger flooded me. It could be midnight now! I had no way of knowing.

  I tried again and failed.

  What if I’d used the last soul?

  An hour later, I tried again. Again, I failed.

  I waited, counting the seconds, the minutes, the hours. The room I’d built in my mind was perfect, I was sure.

  I tried again.

  Sitting in the dark, I cursed. How many souls were left? Would I even know when I’d used the last one? Nhil hadn’t mentioned it.