Kester gnashed her fangs for a moment, then crumpled her heavy brow into a wrathful scowl. “All right, we’ll chance the back side of the island,” she snarled. “And when we get ashore, I’m going to snap Tithian’s neck with me own hands.”
As the tarek had her helmsman swing the ship around, the image of a kes’trekel appeared deep within the dome. The raptor’s ragged wings flapped in great sweeps, lifting it out of the black depths and up toward the noble. At the elbows of its wings it had tiny, three-fingered hands, one clutching a many-stranded scourge and the other a curved scythe. On the bird’s shoulders sat a human skull, a tail of long auburn hair dangling from beneath a battered circlet of gold. The bird continued to rise until its fleshless head filled the entire dome.
Agis! came Tithian’s voice. You can’t float this ship for long, but I can. Let me take over.
I’d sooner trust a scorpion, Agis replied.
This isn’t about trust, replied the king. It’s about practicality. By working together, we’re both more likely to recover the Dark Lens.
So you can murder me and steal it for yourself? the noble asked. I’d be mad to give you that opportunity.
Consider the opportunity you’re giving up, Tithian pressed. Isn’t the possibility of killing Borys worth the risk that I might recover the lens?
Not if it’s a risk I don’t need to take, Agis replied. Now leave me alone—before I slip and let us sink.
The embers in Tithian’s eye sockets flashed in anger. You can’t do this alone, he said, diving back into the dome’s black depths. Before this is over, you will let me out.
Kester appeared at the edge of the cockpit. “Look lively down there!” she barked. “We’re taking silt over both sides!”
Agis put the king out of his thoughts and focused on the sea inside his mind. The water had grown slightly darker and more viscous. The difference was so imperceptible that the noble might not have noticed it on his own, but it was clearly affecting the ship.
Cursing Tithian for making his task more difficult, Agis visualized the sea as the floater had first shown it to him, sparkling and pure. He felt a brief surge in the stream of energy flowing from his nexus, then the water faded to a lighter shade of brown. The Shadow Viper in his mind rose a little higher, slipping through the waves as easily as it had when Damras had been there to help him.
“Better,” commented Kester, nodding her approval. “Are ye sure ye can’t do this for a dozen hours or so? We’d be wise to land almost any place but Mytilene.”
Agis shook his head. “By then, I’ll be as dead as Damras,” he replied in a strained voice. “We have to land soon, so I can stop Tithian’s interference and improve my control over the dome.”
“If ye say so,” sighed Kester. “But it’ll be another ten minutes before we round the point, and who knows how long after that before we find a place to land.”
“There must be someplace on this side of the island,” objected Agis.
“There’s one—where the giants wade ashore on the way up to their village,” allowed Kester. “I’m sure ye don’t want to land there.”
“No!” snapped Nymos. “Our chances are much better on the back side. With the dust curtain hiding us, it could be days before they realize we’ve landed.”
“I’m afraid not. Our masts will give us away,” said Kester, gesturing at the great shafts that towered so high above the decks. “I’m just hopin’ it will take ’em longer to catch us.”
“What are you talking about?” asked Nymos, turning his slender head from side to side in an attempt to gain some sense of Kester’s concern.
“The masts extend above the dust curtain,” Agis explained. “I don’t suppose you could hide them, could you Nymos?”
The jozhal thought for a moment, then said, “I can’t hide the masts.” He pulled a small wand from his stomach pouch.
At the end of the stick was a tiny mask. “But I can disguise them as giants.”
Kester rubbed her lumpy head in thought, then shrugged. “Go ahead and try,” she said. “I don’t see how ye can make matters any worse.”
With that, the tarek returned to her usual station, and Nymos scurried off to work his magic on the masts. The Shadow Viper skirted Mytilene’s shore slowly, steadily riding lower in the dust as Agis grew sicker and more fatigued. Soon, in addition to his nausea, the noble felt feverish and weak, and rivulets of bitter-smelling sweat ran down his brow. He began to think he would have to call for a chaperon to keep him alert, then Kester’s voice boomed across the deck.
“Foredeck squads to their ballistae!” she ordered. “Crew one, raise the keel. All others, furl the sails!”
At the far end of the ship, a dozen sailors worked the ballistae windlasses, cranking back the arms on three separate engines. Within moments, the weapons were loaded with heavy harpoons, the ends tipped with barbed heads as thick as a dwarf’s body.
On the main deck, a group of nervous slaves gathered around the capstan and leaned into the crossbars, winding a thick black rope around a massive wooden drum. As the line was gathered up, it pulled the keel—a mekillot’s shoulder blade—out of the deck’s center slot. The bone had been laboriously carved into a finlike shape, and polished to a smooth sheen to keep silt from clinging to it.
While their comrades struggled to raise the keel, the rest of the slaves crawled up the masts and out onto the yardarms. Slowly, they pulled the heavy sails up to the wooden beams and secured them into place with quick-release knots. By the time they had finished, the Shadow Viper’s progress had slowed to a near standstill.
Agis heard Nymos utter a magical command word, then saw the jozhal standing amidships, gesturing at each mast with his tiny wand. A trio of giants appeared where the masts had been. They were all somewhat smaller and less hairy than Fylo, with lanky builds and rough, sun-bronzed hides. On the shoulders of the first sat a ram’s head, on the second an eagle’s, and on the third a serpent’s.
“Man the plunging poles!” Kester ordered. The tarek was peering through her king’s eye, her gaze fixed far ahead of the ship. “Ahead slow.”
The crew took their positions and began to push. To Agis, this part of the journey seemed to take as long as the trip around the island. Once he almost retched, while another time he found himself gasping for breath as though he had been running. Still, the noble managed to hang on, and soon the craggy silhouette of a shoreline loomed just a few dozen yards off the bow.
“Ready the gangways,” Kester called, still peering through the king’s eye.
The slaves had barely moved to their positions when a lookout’s voice echoed down from the crow’s nest. “Giant to starboard!” There was a short pause, then he added, “Four more to port!”
“So much for disguises,” Kester growled, lowering her king’s eye. “How close?” she yelled, raising her gaze to the top of the mainmast.
When the tarek saw three beasthead giants standing on her deck, her leathery skin went pale. At first, Agis thought it was Nymos’s illusion that had flustered the tarek, but he quickly realized that was not the case.
“Not beastheads!” the tarek gasped.
In the same instant, a hulking silhouette came into view off the port bow, six braids of hair sweeping back and forth like pendulums as he waded out to intercept the Shadow Viper. Although the dust curtain prevented the noble from getting a good look at the giant’s face, he could see enough to tell that it was more or less human, with a blocky shape and a hooked nose as long as a battle-axe. As the noble watched, the colossus lifted his arms over his head, raising a huge boulder as high as the Shadow Viper’s tallest mast.
“Go away, you filthy Saram!” he boomed.
As the giant cocked his arms to throw, Kester yelled, “Fire at will!”
Agis heard the sonorous throb of a skein releasing its tension. A tree-sized harpoon rasped off a ballista and sailed straight at the titan’s chest. It struck with a loud crack, burying itself squarely in the target’s sternum.
The giant’s breath left him in a pained gale. The boulder he had been holding slipped from his hands and plunged into the dust. Casting a slack-jawed look of surprise at the Shadow Viper’s bow, he lowered his hands and closed his fingers around the shaft, narrowly missing the ship’s bowsprit as he pitched forward.
As the firing crew cranked the ballista arms back into the cocked position, Kester whooped in joy. “That’ll teach ye to raise a stone to us!” she yelled.
“Should Nymos drop his spell?” Agis asked.
“Not now,” came the reply. “Let ‘em think it’s beastheads killin’ their friends, not the Shadow Viper.”
She had hardly finished speaking before a second boulder sailed out of the dust haze and crashed through the rigging, tearing the crow’s nest from the mainmast and snapping ropes from the spreaders. Followed by the body of the screaming lookout, the rock bounced off the keel and plunged through the main deck.
“All back!” Kester yelled.
The slaves dipped their plunging poles into the silt and began to push the Shadow Viper away from the shore. Kester cursed them for being too slow, then peered into the floater’s pit. “Keep us light an’ lively, Agis, or we’re lost!”
Two more giants came into view just beyond the bow, waist deep in silt and coming after the ship as fast as they could plow ahead. The leader held a huge boulder in front of himself, using it like a shield to protect himself and his companion from any more attacks.
“Tell the slaves to raise their poles,” Agis said.
Kester furrowed her heavy brow. “Why?”
“Do you know what ice is?” the noble replied, turning his concentration inward. Without waiting for a reply, he opened his spiritual nexus wide, allowing his life-force to flow through the dome in a torrent. The sea in his mind lightened from a turbid brown to a pale yellow.
Agis heard Kester’s voice yell, “Raise poles!”
The noble took a deep breath and visualized something he had seen only once in his life, on a bitter cold morning during a hunting trip into the high mountains: a frozen pond. In his mind, the yellow waters around the caravel turned the color of ivory and became as hard as a rock. The frost spread steadily outward, changing the sea into an endless white plain, as vast as the stony barrens and as smooth as obsidian.
The noble did not stop there. He visualized a pair of outriggers stretching down from the ship’s gunnels. Where the floats should have been, there were obsidian runners, as sharp as swords and thick enough to bear the immense weight of the Shadow Viper. Agis imagined these outriggers growing longer and longer, lifting the caravel’s hull out of the ice until it sat free, ready to shoot across the frozen sea at the slightest impetus.
A boulder crashed down on the deck of the bow, drawing the noble’s attention away from his preparations. It smashed through a rack of spare harpoons and upended the foremast. As the great staff toppled over, a giant’s angry voice jeered, “You other Saram will die, too!”
“Push off, Kester!” Agis yelled. “And tell everyone to brace themselves.”
“Fast to stern!” yelled the tarek, not bothering with the warning Agis had suggested.
The slaves lowered their plunging poles and pushed. The Shadow Viper shot away from the giants like an arrow from a bow. The ballista crews, who had been holding their fire for the most opportune moment, triggered their weapons. The skeins throbbed and a pair of harpoons whooshed away. The first lance sank deep into a giant’s stomach. He bellowed, clutched the shaft, and crumpled forward into a dead heap.
The second missile gashed across the last giant’s elbow, spraying a cloud of red mist high into the air, then vanished into the dust haze. At first, Agis thought the titan had narrowly avoided death, but the fellow’s eyes glazed over and he began to stagger about as though he were too intoxicated to stand. A moment later, his knees buckled and he fell into the dust, his muscles twitching madly.
“Poisoned harpoons. Now ye know why we call her the Viper,” Kester chuckled, using the king’s eye to watch the giant die. “That makes three of five. What happened to the other two our lookout reported?”
Agis did not answer, for he had broken into a cold sweat and fallen to quivering. His temples throbbed with a fierce, maddening pain, and his intestines burned as though he had swallowed fire. He felt a terrible punishment rising from his gut, and the noble knew he had overreached the limits of his endurance. He found himself leaning over to void his stomach, still struggling to keep his hands on the floater’s dome.
“What’s wrong with ye, Agis?” demanded Kester. “If ye let us down now, we’ll sink!”
“It’s Tithian’s fever!” Agis gasped, struggling to pull himself upright. “I can’t—”
A tremendous boom sounded from the Shadow Viper’s stern, bringing the caravel to an abrupt halt. Agis flew out of his seat and rolled clear to the rear gunnel. He hit his head against a bone stanchion, then found himself lying in a tangled mess with Kester, the helmsman, and a half-dozen other sailors. A foul smell, almost as rank as the one he had left behind in the cockpit, filled his nostrils.
Agis looked up and found himself staring at two sets of immense blue eyes. Beneath each pair of orbs were a craggy nose and cavernous mouth filled with broken teeth as large as stalactites.
“They’re too small to be Saram spies!” growled one giant.
The other scowled in confusion, then raised a sword-length finger to scratch between the mats of his hair. “We’d better take them to Mag’r,” he said. “The sachem will know what they are.”
SEVEN
TABLE OF CHIEFS
BATHED IN THE FULL FURY OF THE CRIMSON SUN, Tithian and Agis stood on a slate-topped table more expansive than a Tyrian plaza. The heat shimmered off the black surface in torpid waves, blistering their feet and scorching their lips, leaving their parched throats bloated with thirst. Nymos lay half-conscious at the king’s side, his reptilian body unable to cool his blood in the face of the scalding temperature. At the jozhal’s side stood Kester, swaying and perilously close to collapsing herself.
The ship’s crew cowered a short distance away. Despite the helmsman’s efforts to keep them quiet, the terrified slaves murmured anxiously among themselves and cast nervous glances over their shoulders, where the end of the table overhung a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet into the Sea of Silt’s pearly haze.
The walls of a mountain canyon flanked the table on both sides. A pair of stone benches, as tall and broad as Tyr’s ramparts, had been carved into each of these rocky slopes. On these benches sat a dozen giants, all with blocky, humanlike heads marked by lumpy features and rough skin. Each wore the crude figure of his tribe’s totem—a sheep, goat, erdlu, or similar domestic animal—tattooed on his sloped brow. Most wore their hair and beards in the long, snarled braids coveted as raw material by Balican rope makers. Their angry shouts rumbled back and forth over the table like thunder, so loud that Tithian could understand only half of the words.
“We’ve been ignored long enough,” Tithian growled.
The king started across the broken slate toward the head of the table, where a round-faced giant sat upon a throne of black basalt. Carved from the shoulder of a volcanic peak, the great chair was as large as the Golden Palace itself. On the titan’s clean-shaven head rested a circlet of tree boughs woven into a brown-leaved garland of royalty, identifying the wearer, Tithian supposed, as the monarch. The giant’s eyes were witless and dull, with puffy lids and brown irises that showed life only when they flashed in anger or malice. From his bloated cheeks sagged great jowls, hanging well over his fleshy neck and trembling like a loose sail whenever he bared his jagged teeth to sneer or laugh.
Tithian had taken only a half-dozen steps when Agis’s fingers gouged into his arm. “What are you doing?” the noble demanded.
“Saving us,” the king replied.
“Ye’ve done enough already,” hissed Kester, her eyes narrowed in anger as she joined the pair. “We wouldn’t be here if ye had
n’t killed my floaters.”
“I wouldn’t have had to, if you hadn’t locked me in the brig—but here we are,” Tithian hissed. He looked back to Agis and locked gazes. “I warned you it would be impossible to recover the Dark Lens without me. Now I’ll show you why.”
The king pulled free and continued forward, stopping next to a clay tankard as high as his chest. The giant in the throne paid him no attention, but continued to bellow at a tribesman near the middle of the table, more than thirty paces away. Tithian casually turned his palm groundward and summoned the energy to cast a spell.
On the rocky hillsides above the giants’ heads, grassy clumps of daggerblade and balls of yellow tumblethistle began to wilt as Tithian drained the life force from their roots. Within an instant, every plant within the reach of a giant had turned to ash, leaving the canyon walls as black and lifeless as the surface of the slate table.
The giant’s hand descended like a kes’trekel on a sun-bloated corpse. He grabbed his tankard and flipped it over, spilling five gallons of golden mead over Tithian’s head, and placed the vessel over the king’s shoulders.
“No magic!” he boomed.
Inside the mug, the muffled voice echoed painfully in Tithian’s ears.
“Too late!” Tithian hissed.
The Tyrian brought his hands up and plucked a stray thread from the hem of his cassock, then wrapped this around the tip of his index finger. Pointing the digit at the giant, he uttered a spell and pulled the thread down past his first knuckle.
Again, the giant’s voice reverberated through the tankard, this time screaming in surprise as his crown slipped down around his throat and began to constrict. Cries of alarm erupted all around, and the table began to shake as giants to both sides leaped to their feet. Tithian smiled to himself and twisted the ends of the thread, tightening the loop until his finger began to throb from having the blood cut off.
Tithian felt the tankard being lifted from his head. “Is this your idea of help?” Agis demanded, tossing the vessel aside. “You’ll get us killed!”
The Obsidian Oracle Page 11