The Obsidian Tower

by Melissa Caruso

  I needed to figure out some solution for the diplomatic disaster, too. Holy Graces, this was bad. I couldn’t see a path that led to peace. The wheels of my mind were stuck, too shocked to turn, and I couldn’t think.

  It was the time of night my mother called the demon’s hour, when all the world lay asleep. No lights shone through the shuttered windows in the huddled gray villages I passed through, though the scents of livestock and woodsmoke thickened the night air. As an atheling of Morgrain, if I knocked on any door, the inhabitants would rouse and give me whatever aid I asked for: food, a horse cart, anything, their fingers flicking out from their chests and their eyes averted.

  Outside of Gloamingard, however, no one was practiced in staying away from me; to interact with the townsfolk would be to put them in danger. All it would take was one unexpected movement, one misjudged reach or stumble. A hobbyhorse leaned by one weathered cottage door, its mane carefully crafted from horsetail clippings; a child’s enthusiastically messy brushstrokes had painted flowers on another. These were my people, secure in their beds with the knowledge that my family watched over them. I wouldn’t risk their lives for my comfort or convenience.

  The stars gleamed hard as chips of broken glass in the sky above, watching, judging. Fields of silvery windswept grass and leaning lichen-scarred rune stones gave way to a black patchwork of forest shadows. Reaching pines swallowed the sky, leaving only a ragged ribbon of stars above the road for me to follow.

  I was safe enough from any perils others might fear in the wild inky night; this was my grandmother’s domain, and every living thing here knew me and would defend me from harm. But it was too easy for my mind to fill the darkness with blazing red lines of light and a single vertical slash of terrible white radiance, and Lamiel’s eyes going dull and flat.

  The Shrike Lord would know she was dead by now. She was part of his domain, and he’d have felt her die. He wasn’t the sort of man to let such a terrible grievance pass unanswered; the question was what form his retribution would take. I could only hope we wouldn’t be at war by the time the imperial envoy arrived tomorrow morning.

  I wasn’t looking forward to explaining that the ambassador they’d come to negotiate with was dead.

  Hell of Discord. Everything I’d worked for, everything I wanted to preserve, was falling apart around me. No, not falling—I’d smashed it to pieces with my own hands. I had to get back to Gloamingard with the Rookery as soon as possible.

  Finally, the warm light of a campfire flickered between the trees in distant glimpses, promising a normal sort of warmth and comfort. A traveler’s shelter, like my grandmother had said. Hope pricked up its tired ears within me. Graces, please let this be the Rookery’s fire.

  I picked my way along the narrow side path that led to the shelter, straining toward the cheery light. The campfire ruined my night vision and robbed the forest around me of depth, turning the tree trunks into flat black bands of shadow and making the darkness around me impenetrable. Even with the blood connection to my grandmother’s land that gave me an instinctive feel for the terrain, it took concentration not to trip over rocks and roots with every other step.

  I hesitated a few paces before the edge of the clearing, peering in through the trees. A brightly painted wagon stood by the crude wooden shelter; several horses dozed nearby. One big gray lifted his head at my approach and pricked black-tipped ears in my direction. A dark-haired young woman sat on a sawed-off stump before the fire, poking it with a stick. Kessa.

  “I’ve come to the right place,” I breathed aloud.

  “I wouldn’t be so sure of that,” said a shadow.

  Steel scraped against leather, and the firelight caught the edge of a sword leveled straight at me.

  I backed away, my hands lifted empty before me. “I’m not your enemy. And you don’t want to point that at me.”

  “Oh, but I think I do.” The swordswoman advanced a step to match me. With the light behind her I couldn’t make out any details, but she was whipcord wiry and couldn’t be much more than five feet tall. “No one up to any good stays out past dark in the woods of Vaskandar.”

  I couldn’t really argue with that. Many Witch Lords let all the fiercest wild denizens of their domains hunt freely at night—natural predators and mage-made chimeras alike—on the assumption that anyone with honest business would be indoors. “Well, I’m here to talk, so you can put your sword away.”

  “Talk fast. You can start by telling me what you’re doing sneaking around our camp.” The angle of her sword changed, flashing firelight; a reflected gleam caught at the corner of her eye.

  The tree branches shivered. My awareness of the pines around us sharpened, as if they were coming suddenly awake. The land sensed a threat, and it was responding.

  The last thing I needed was to kill someone else today, all because the trees were feeling overprotective.

  “I’m not sneaking around,” I objected. “I have an urgent message.”

  “That’s what all the assassins say.” The girl shifted her stance in the darkness, and the trees came wide awake, their attention focusing on her as their branches quivered. Everything balanced a hairsbreadth from blood and violence.

  “Asheva! Are you threatening random passersby again?” called a familiar voice.

  Kessa stood at the edge of the clearing, peering down the dark path at us, her hands on her hips.

  “Nothing random about it,” the swordswoman—Asheva—said. “She was skulking around alone in the darkness.”

  “This is a traveler’s shelter, dimwit. People come here to be safe. I’m so sorry.” She addressed this last to me, her voice softening. “Please disregard my overly suspicious friend, and come join us by our fire.”

  She clearly hadn’t recognized me in the darkness. As I hesitated, she turned to the swordswoman. “Ashe—Rule Four. Back off, and let her come into the light.”

  “You’re no fun, Kessa. Besides, this one’s dangerous.” Asheva let the tip of her blade drop to a more relaxed guard, however, and slipped out of the covering shadows into the firelight.

  With ice-blue eyes and spiky tufts of near-white hair to match her pale skin, she could have come from Morgrain or any of the mountain domains of Vaskandar. She was older than her size had led me to believe at first—around my age—and wore breeches tucked into boots beneath her short, fur-trimmed vestcoat, along with an air of barely leashed violence.

  “Now, what would make you think that?” Kessa sounded amused, but she paused in the act of beckoning me forward.

  “Because she’s out alone after dark, just had a sword pulled on her, and she’s not afraid.”

  She was wrong. I was desperately afraid—just not of her.

  “I don’t care if you trust me, so long as you listen.” I stepped out into the light, careful to maintain a safe distance between us. “I have a message from the Lady of Owls.”

  Kessa’s welcoming smile froze, and a more guarded, calculating look entered her sparkling brown eyes. She bowed, with more courtly grace than she’d shown when she was pretending to be a simple traveling player. “Exalted Atheling. Please forgive our poor reception of such an august visitor.”

  “Call me Ryx. There’s no time for niceties. We have a magical emergency at Gloamingard.”

  Kessa whistled. “An emergency indeed. I’ve never known a Witch Lord to ask for help.”

  “I know.” My grandmother never had before today. She’d never needed it. I swallowed to wet my raw throat. “Please hurry. I don’t know what’s happening at the castle.”

  Kessa and Ashe exchanged a meaningful look. Without another word, Ashe rolled her neck, slammed her sword into its sheath, and moved with quick springy grace toward the horses.

  “I’ll wake the others,” Kessa said grimly. “We’d better go at once.”

  The Rookery clearly were no strangers to late-night emergencies. Kessa and Ashe worked as a reassuringly swift and competent team to harness the horses, while a gangly, sleepy-eyed
man in a burgundy jacket packed up their belongings from the shelter and tossed them in the back of the brightly painted wagon with equal speed. They left me no doubt they were taking this seriously and moving as quickly as possible, so I squashed down my urge to tell them to hurry.

  The fourth member of the Rookery, an elegant gentleman in an exquisitely tailored dove-gray frock coat, approached me with the wary grace of a big hunting cat. He paused a safe distance away and gestured to a ring of sawed-off stumps surrounding the fire.

  “Sit down, my lady. Let’s talk.”

  His use of my lady rather than Exalted Atheling marked him as Raverran, sure as his clothes and accent did; his deep brown skin and eyes like dark honey suggested ancestors from the imperial client state of Osta. Beneath his open coat, a belt with dozens of small pouches rode his hips, with a flintlock pistol slung on one side and a dagger on the other.

  “There’s no time,” I objected. The last thing I wanted to do right now was sit, despite my aching feet.

  “Unless you want to walk back to Gloamingard carrying all our equipment, we’re not going anywhere until the wagon is ready. You’re weary, and there are things that should be clear between us. Please, have a seat.”

  His voice remained smooth and calm, but there was iron in it. I sank onto a stump, cradling my wounded arm in my lap, still stiff with tension.

  He settled onto another stump just out of lunging range, poised as if the smoke-scented clearing were some fine Raverran salon. “You can call me Foxglove. I’m the leader of this Rookery field team.”

  I jerked my head in a nod.

  “Now. What kind of magical accident are we talking about? Alchemical leak? Escaped chimera? Explosion? And how long ago did it happen?”

  “A few hours, and I don’t know.”

  Foxglove regarded me a moment, the firelight drawing fingers of light and shadow across his face.

  “My lady,” he said, “I possess many skills, but mind reading isn’t one of them. I can’t help you without information.”

  “Fair enough.” The Gloaming Lore said Keep your secret, guard your lore. Still, my grandmother had sent me to the Rookery; she couldn’t mean for me to keep them ignorant of the situation. “There’s an ancient artifact in Gloamingard, sealed and locked away. It’s… been activated. By mistake.”

  One eyebrow lifted, but there was no real surprise in it. “An artifact, you say. The one we were trying to investigate?”

  I grimaced. “Yes.”

  Foxglove rubbed his forehead. “I’m about to be blunt, my lady. You do realize that if the Lady of Owls hadn’t ejected us from her castle this afternoon, we might have been on hand to deal with—or even prevent—this magical catastrophe in the first place?”

  “The irony hasn’t escaped me,” I assured him.

  “Then let me make something clear.” He leaned his elbows on his knees. “If you invoke our aid, you can’t change your mind. We’ll help you on our own terms. No trying to stop us from doing our work because we’re getting too close to family secrets or uncomfortable truths.” The weary undercurrent in his voice suggested this was a common issue. “I’m well past the point in my career where I’ve got any patience for people who tell me to ignore the skeletons in the well or to not ask questions about the howling in the attic.”

  “I have every intention of letting you do your work,” I said, “but I can’t make promises on behalf of my grandmother.”

  “The Lady of Owls should understand what it means to call on us for help. Once you bring us in to clean up a mess, we’ll finish the job. Whether you want us to or not.”

  His gaze held mine, steady and sharp. It was unnerving. No one looked me straight in the eyes besides my immediate family.

  I nodded slowly. “Fine. But you should understand that if I think you’re about to do something that could pose a risk to the inhabitants of the castle, I’ll stop you. I’ll explain, but I’m not going to let my people get hurt.”

  “I wouldn’t want it any other way.” Foxglove dusted his hands together as if that were that. “Let’s get going. You can explain the rest as we travel.”

  Morgrain was restless.

  Tension ran through the earth. Leaves stirred without a breeze to shake them. Unnerving calls split the silence of the night at odd intervals from birds that should have been asleep: the scream of a jay, the mournful cry of a dove. It surged in my blood, too, and I leaned forward on the wagon bench as if I could somehow urge it to move faster as it rattled along the night-empty road toward Gloamingard.

  I’d never felt anything like this through my link to the land before. Whatever was happening back at the castle, it was bad enough that my grandmother’s agitation had infected the entire domain. Terrible possibilities chased each other through my head: the Shrike Lord could have already declared war over Lamiel’s death, or the obelisk I’d activated in the Black Tower could have unleashed some wave of deadly power upon Gloamingard. I kept imagining people I knew sprawled dead on the castle floor: Odan protecting his young nephew Kip, both of them inexplicably in pools of blood; Gaven lying in a twisted heap, ungraceful for once at the end. Seasons have mercy.

  “So, tell me about this artifact.”

  I almost jumped. It was the gangly man in the high-collared burgundy jacket. He leaned forward with a charcoal pencil poised over a leather-bound notebook, his liquid brown eyes riveted on my face.

  He sat on a costume trunk in the back of the wagon; Foxglove drove, and Ashe rode alongside. They’d given me a seat on the bench next to Kessa, who’d laid out an offering of bread, apples, and cider as a barrier between us, making hospitality out of necessity. The hard knot in my stomach wouldn’t let me more than nibble any of it.

  “This is Bastian,” Kessa said, gesturing to the young man with a teasing flourish. “I’m sure he’s very pleased to meet you. You’ll have to forgive his lack of manners; he thinks an introduction is the thing you find at the beginning of a book.”

  Bastian winced. “Sorry. My mentor at the University of Raverra was very, ah, results-focused, and sometimes my social graces can be lacking.”

  “That’s all right.” I couldn’t stand the thought of wasting time with pleasantries right now. I tugged at my bloodstained gloves as if I could somehow draw them on even further. “Ask me your questions. I want to get this… thing safely locked up again as quickly as possible.”

  “What is it?” Bastian’s pencil hovered eagerly over his notebook. His long, graceful fingers contrasted with the roughness of his olive skin, as if those elegant hands had seen hard use. “A vivomantic artifact, I assume, like a domain boundary stone?”

  It was a reasonable assumption. In Vaskandar, nearly all mages were vivomancers, unlike in the Empire, where magical bloodlines held more variety due to their long history of trade. But while I had little familiarity with the other kinds of magic—my knowledge didn’t go much further than that alchemists made potions, artificers made wirework devices and enchantment circles, and warlocks left trails of destruction through fire or storm—my home and family were drenched in life magic. And this wasn’t that.

  “No, not vivomancy.” I shuddered at the memory of the terrible power that had ripped through me in a great tide. “Something else. The wards on the Black Tower are all artifice seals, hundreds or thousands of years old. Maybe the stone was an artifice device, too; I don’t know.”

  Bastian scribbled in his notebook. “So you have family stories about this artifact? What do you know about it?”

  “That it’s too dangerous to let anyone pry around it,” I said stiffly.

  “Mages,” Ashe snorted, from the back of her horse. “You keep everyone else away from your bad-idea death traps because you don’t want to share power, and then you set them off yourselves. And call us in to clean up after you.”

  “My family knows better than to meddle with the Black Tower,” I retorted angrily. “It was Exalted Lamiel who opened the Door.”

  “Exalted, you say. Which me
ans mage-marked,” Ashe pointed out, in an I-told-you-so voice.

  “Yes, but—” I stopped myself. Arguing with the Rookery would do no good. And besides, she had a point. “What bothers me is that Lamiel shouldn’t have known about it. You shouldn’t have known about it, for that matter. How did you find out?”

  Kessa exchanged a long glance with Foxglove. “You can’t have a giant, sinister, sealed-off obsidian tower at the heart of your castle and not leave people wondering about it. I’m sure there must be all sorts of rumors. Most likely Exalted Lamiel was reacting to the same ones we were.”

  Her evasiveness reminded me all too sharply of how she’d acted so friendly when I’d nearly run into her in the corridors of Gloamingard—too sympathetic, and with such gentle questions about how my magic worked. I kept wanting to trust her because of her lovely face and warm smiles, but I needed to be more wary.

  Questions about my magic, indeed.

  “You didn’t come to Gloamingard to investigate rumors of some ancient artifact,” I realized. “There are ancient artifacts all over the continent of Eruvia, and ours wasn’t causing any problems. You came to Gloamingard to investigate me.”

  Bastian buried his face in his notebook, color creeping onto his cheeks.

  Kessa let out a long sigh. “Well, this is awkward, but you’re right,” she said. “We did hope to sneak a look at the artifact while we were in the castle—though you caught me before I could get close—but we were primarily there for you.”

  “Because you heard I was a Skinwitch.” My stomach turned over, and I clenched my hands tightly enough in my lap that my gloves nearly popped a stitch.

  “We know you’re not, though,” Kessa said. “A Skinwitch wouldn’t kill people by accident; all those safety vines and such wouldn’t make any sense. So it’s all right.”