A hush fell over the canyon, then Mag’r leaned down to inspect the king and his companions more closely. “No one rules the Sea of Silt,” he said.
“Not now, perhaps,” replied the king. “But with what they stole from Tyr …” He let the sentence trail off. After a moment’s pause, he added, “Let’s just say it would be better for both your tribe and my city to work together to make sure they don’t keep it.”
The giant chiefs muttered quiet comments to each other, studying Tithian and shaking their heads suspiciously. Mag’r allowed the murmur to continue for a moment, then said, “Good story, but I have no reason to believe you.”
“Perhaps you’d believe us if you knew the artifact had come from the Pristine Tower,” said Agis.
Tithian cringed, for the noble was gambling that just because their tribes were named after the thieves who had stolen the Dark Lens from the Pristine Tower, the giants would know what the Tower was. Agis’s strategy seemed to work, however. A squall of concerned whispers rose from the entire gathering of giants, and Mag’r scowled at his captives suspiciously. “What do you know of the Pristine Tower?” he demanded.
“Very little, save that the legends claim my amulet came from there,” Tithian lied. He cast an annoyed glance at Agis, then used the Way to send a message: Your gamble was a bold one, but unnecessary. I have matters well under control.
I’ll believe that when they let us go, the noble replied. Despite his acerbic comment, Agis did not voice any further doubts.
When Sachem Mag’r accepted Tithian’s explanation without further inquiry, the king continued, “Andropinis loaned me a fleet because he believed what I said. If he was concerned enough to risk his ships, perhaps you should worry, too. The Saram must conquer you before they capture Balic.”
“No one will conquer the Joorsh!” protested Orl.
Several other giants voiced their agreement, but Mag’r remained thoughtful and studied his chiefs for several moments. Finally, he raised his hand for silence and looked at Tithian with something other than spite in his eyes.
“If we let you live, how will you help us beat the Saram?” the sachem asked.
Tithian smiled. “That’s for us to decide together,” he said smoothly. “Perhaps your army can lure the Saram out to do battle while we sneak into their castle. We’ll steal what we came for, as well as rescue the Oracle for you.”
Mag’r shook his head. “We’ll have to think of another plan,” he said. “You’re too small to carry the Oracle.”
Tithian breathed a sigh of relief. “Don’t worry about that. Together, Agis and I can lift even the largest giant here,” he said, laying a hand on Agis’s shoulder. “Isn’t that right, my friend?”
“If we have to,” the noble replied, stepping away from the king’s grasp. But that doesn’t mean we’re friends.
EIGHT
THE BEAR
AS THE SKIFF CREPT AROUND THE CRAGGY POINT, AN unexpected wisp of dank air wafted over Agis’s face. In the blackness of the night, it took him a moment to locate the source of the breeze: the gaping mouth of a grotto, less than a dozen yards away.
The cave opened into the base of a rugged peninsula, a stony bluff that rose straight out of the Sea of Silt. From Agis’s perspective, its sheer cliffs appeared to stretch clear to the sky, but the noble knew better. Earlier that night, as Kester had poled the skiff across the dark bay, he had seen a ring of lofty ramparts crowning the summit. The walls stood twice as tall as a giant, with flying turrets at every bend and jagged crenellations capping the entire length.
Agis motioned toward the shadowy cavern. “This one looks small enough,” he whispered. “Let’s see where it goes.”
Nymos raised his narrow snout and sniffed at the draft, then a shudder ran down the entire length of his serpentine neck. “That wouldn’t be wise,” he said. “There’s a dreadful odor inside.”
“What’s it comin’ from?” demanded Kester, using her plunging pole to hold the skiff motionless.
“I’m not sure,” replied the jozhal. “But it’s foul and savage. There’s no other way to describe it.”
“Whatever it is, I doubt it’s any more savage than her,” said Tithian, looking up from his duties as floater.
The king pointed at a low isthmus curving out from the forested hills of Lybdos to connect with the rugged peninsula beneath which they hid. Directly behind the rocky neck, Ral’s golden disk hovered low on the horizon, silhouetting a chameleon-headed Saram against its golden moonlight. She paced along the treacherous crest with great care, studying the placement of each step before taking it.
“The less time we give her to spot us, the better,” Tithian said. “Go into the cave.”
“Let’s try another,” insisted Nymos. “Mag’r said the peninsula is honeycombed with grottoes.”
“That may be, but it could take us all night to find the passage we need,” countered Tithian. “We don’t have time to look for a cave you think smells nice.”
“I agree,” said Agis.
“You see, we can work together,” said Tithian.
“Agreeing is not trusting,” warned the noble, his hand brushing a coil of giant-hair rope that hung from his belt. As soon as Tithian’s freedom was no longer necessary to the company’s safety, he would use that rope to bind the king—and this time, there would be a choke loop to tighten at the first sign of trouble.
Tithian smiled at the noble’s gesture, then said, “But you must admit, it won’t be easy to find another cavern like this. It’s big enough to hide our skiff, yet small enough to keep giants away from it while we’re gone.”
“What does that matter?” objected Nymos. “This plan is ludicrous. It’ll never work.”
“Don’t ye start with that again,” growled Kester, pushing the skiff forward. “Sit down and spare us yer ranting.”
They were all familiar with the jozhal’s objections to the plan Tithian and Mag’r had worked out. Upon hearing that the Saram citadel sat upon a peninsula riddled with grottoes, and that caves opened both inside and outside the castle, the king had suggested they might sneak inside through a subterranean passage. Nymos had immediately pointed out that even giants were smart enough to seal off such a connection. Tithian had shrugged the reptile off, assuring him—and the others—that he could break any Saram seal and rescue the Oracle.
Mag’r had liked the idea, except that he wanted the companions to open the castle gates for his warriors so that they could rescue the Oracle. To make sure Tithian and the others kept their part of the bargain, the sachem had threatened to sink the Shadow Viper if the gates were not opened when he attacked at dawn.
As the skiff slipped into the grotto, it grew so dark that Agis could not see the bow of the craft, much less anything that lay beyond. Still, he did not kindle a torch, fearing that its flickering light would spill out of the cave mouth and draw the sentry’s attention to them. Instead, the noble borrowed Nymos’s cane and knelt on the forward deck. He swung the small rod slowly back and forth, searching for obstacles in front of the ship and softly tapping the walls to keep track of them.
They continued in this manner for many minutes before a low rumble shook the cavern, stirring up a choking cloud of silt. So deep and muffled was the sound that Agis felt it in the pit of his stomach more than he heard it.
“Far enough!” hissed Nymos. His twitching tail thumped softly against the skiff’s gunnels.
Kester stopped the boat, and Agis peered back toward the cavern exit. The noble saw nothing but deep, profound darkness. “Perhaps we’re in far enough to light a torch,” Agis suggested.
The others agreed. Nymos fumbled about in the bottom of the boat for a moment, then passed a rancid smelling torch forward.
“What about fire?” asked the noble.
“Allow me,” said Tithian. The king rummaged around in his satchel, then said, “Kester, strike this stake over this plate.”
The noble heard what sounded like a stick being drawn over a ro
ck wall, then the acrid stench of brimstone filled his nose, and a white sparkle of light momentarily blinded him. When his vision returned to normal, he held a burning brand. In the bottom of the boat lay the greasy skin from which the torch oil had come, while Kester held a slate of white pumice and a blackened stick in her hands.
Nymos snatched the implements from the tarek’s hands and sniffed them with his twitching nose. “Magic?” he asked, his tone covetous.
“Hardly,” replied Tithian. “A simple bard’s trick.”
Kester retrieved her plunging pole from across the beam. “Magic or not, light is light,” she said. “Now we can go on.”
The tarek pushed on.
By the light of the torch in his hand, Agis saw that a stain of milky white calcium coated the ceiling of the grotto. Slender gray stalactites pierced the veneer in a hundred places. The tips of the pendant spears had snapped off at a height half again that of a man, leaving the ends sharp and jagged. The breakage puzzled the noble, but even after studying the formations carefully, he could not determine what had caused it.
As the company passed deeper into the gloom, the calcium stain began to cover the cavern sides as well as the ceiling, until the whole passage was coated in milky white. At regular intervals, the skiff passed limestone curtains flowing out of wall fissures, or shelf formations covered with knobby constellations of dripstone. Like the stalactites, many of these were scraped and broken, as if something just barely small enough to fit occasionally passed through the tunnel.
“The odor’s getting stronger,” Nymos warned. “Can’t you smell it?”
Agis sniffed the breeze, but smelled only stale air and the acrid stench of burning torch oil.
“It’s just a rotting animal,” Kester said, her nostrils flaring. “Nothing to worry about.”
In spite of the tarek’s reassurances, the noble drew his sword. The passage meandered back and forth, growing larger and less cramped with each turn, until the noble could not have touched his blade to either wall. At the same time, the milky ceiling sloped gradually upward, and the stalactites were broken nearer and nearer to their tips. The skiff’s hull scraped over several buried obstacles, and the caps of broken stalagmites started to jut from the dust bed.
Agis was beginning to fear that the skiff would go no farther when the cave intersected another passage, this one so large that his torch did not illuminate the ceiling or far wall. The floor, which sloped upward from their tunnel, was littered with broken stalagmites, weathered ship timbers, and graying skeletons—both beast and human.
“We’d better take a closer look at this,” Agis said. He raised his hand, and Kester stopped the skiff just a couple of yards shy of the larger cavern’s entrance. “Is the channel too deep for me to wade?”
The tarek eyed the length of plunging pole still showing above the silt. “It’s possible,” she said. “But I wouldn’t fancy stepping into a hole.”
Agis sat down on the bow, preparing to slip into the silt channel, and suddenly found himself gagging for breath. A thick, rancid odor filled the passage, so insufferable that it made his knees tremble with nausea.
The noble felt an eerie shiver at the base of his skull, and his entire body began to tingle with spiritual energy. The torch flame flared brilliant white, then abruptly turned black, plunging the companions into darkness. Had it not been for the soft hiss of burning oil, Agis would have assumed the fire had died away. But he could feel its heat against his skin, and, instead of tossing the stick back into the boat, he had to hold the useless thing in his hand.
“Light, Nymos!” said Kester, her alarmed voice echoing off the cavern walls. “Everything’s gone dark.”
Nymos’s claws ticked nervously, and he uttered the incantation of a spell.
“What’re ye waiting for?” growled Kester.
“Agis’s sword isn’t glowing?” the jozhal asked.
“No,” reported Agis. “We’re fighting the Way, not sorcery.”
“I feel it, too,” said Tithian. “And the skiff dome is crackling with energy.”
A deafening growl rumbled out of the larger passage, so sonorous and low that it made the skiff tremble beneath the noble’s feet. A wicked presence, as black as the torch flame and just as scorching, tore into Agis’s mind. The invader rampaged through his thoughts, attacking from behind its mask of darkness. In its wake, it left nothing except searing anguish and unnatural fear, a fear such as he could not remember feeling before.
Agis tried to form an image of the crimson sun, determined to expose his attacker. The red disk had barely formed when a huge black claw rose from the murk and swatted it away, plunging the noble’s mind back into darkness.
Nymos shrieked in terror, as did Kester, and even Tithian let a groan escape his lips. Their reactions did not concern Agis so much as amaze him. He had never faced a mental onslaught of such raw power and could not imagine an attacker strong enough to press four such assaults at once.
A loud scrape sounded ahead as something huge forced its way into their small cavern. From the grating rasps that shuddered down both walls, it seemed to Agis the thing filled the passage from one side to the other. The noble tried to lift his sword and found that his arm would not obey his wishes.
“Push us back,” Agis said. “I could use a little distance.”
The skiff lurched into motion. It moved a few yards to the rear, then suddenly stopped.
“Kester?” Agis asked.
No answer came.
“I think the tarek is paralyzed with fear,” Tithian said. “This thing must be powerful.”
A loud snort whooshed through the cavern, sending a rancid wind washing over Agis’s face. The scraping ahead grew louder and deeper, while the muffled clatter of claws on stone rose from beneath the dust.
Agis called, “Everyone, imagine my sword glowing inside your minds. We all have to fight, or this thing will beat us.”
As the creature clawed its way toward him, the noble followed his own instructions. For a moment, the blackness in his mind seemed to grow thicker in response, and he could do no better than to visualize the faint gray outline of his blade. Then, as the others joined in, the beast was not strong enough to keep them all plunged into darkness. The noble’s sword, both inside his mind and outside it, illuminated the grotto in glorious white light.
Still, Agis could not concentrate on the cavern around him. Now that the neatly ordered halls of his mind were illuminated, he saw the reason for his paralysis. On the bloody floor of a corridor lay his body—or at least he thought it was his body. The corpse had been terribly mauled, so that the noble could recognize it only by his long black hair and the Asticles sword clutched in one bloody fist, now glowing with Nymos’s light spell.
From the gasps of his companions, the noble could tell that each had found a similar image inside his own mind.
“See yourselves standing,” Agis said, still fighting to keep the sword lit in his mind. “We’ve tired the beast, and now we can defeat it—but we must work together!”
A throaty growl rumbled through the cavern. A heavy paw slapped at the skiff’s bow, filling the passage with silt as it fell just a few feet short of its target. The foot sank into the dust with an ominous silence, then a loud scraping sound once again filled the passage as the beast dragged itself forward.
Agis focused his thoughts inside his mind, bracing his mutilated corpse to rise. The clawed foot of a beast materialized out of the ceiling and stamped down on his chest, pressing him back to the floor. He hacked at the leg with his glowing sword, showering himself with hot blood as he cut through ropy tendons and arteries.
Still, the foot did not move.
The noble stopped attacking and spread his arms out to his sides. He visualized his body changing into a spring-loaded leg trap, such as those used by slave trackers, lirr hunters, and others who preferred to catch their quarry without fighting it face to face. A surge of spiritual energy rose from within himself, then his arms became
the jaws of the trap. They sprang up and clamped their sharp teeth into the massive leg that had pinned him to the ground.
The claw jerked back, but Agis’s trap held fast. The paw twisted and pulled in every possible direction, tearing the flesh away until raw bone lay exposed on all sides. The thing continued to struggle for a few moments, until it became apparent the foot could not be freed.
The leg fell abruptly motionless, and the wounds on Agis’s corpse began to heal. The terrible weight on his chest slowly eased, and the paw faded from his mind.
“I’m free!” Tithian reported.
“Me too,” Agis replied.
As the noble spoke, the torch in his hand returned to its normal color, lighting the cavern in flickering yellow. Agis’s sword, too, was glowing with the white light of the spell Nymos had cast on it earlier.
The noble shook his head clear, then raised his eyes to the creature that had so nearly used the Way to kill them. When he saw what had crawled into the passage after them, Agis almost wished that the passage had remained dark. He was staring at a fanged behemoth with a black nose the size of his own head and a squarish snout longer than the skiff’s bow. The beast’s enormous jaws hung parted in exhaustion, the tip of a scarlet tongue just showing from between its lips, streams of drool running off the flews of its mouth. At the other end of the muzzle was a pair of tiny, fatigued eyes, set into a round, thick-boned skull covered by brown fur. Atop the head sat a pair of perky round ears, eerily gentle in their juxtaposition to the rest of the fearsome mien.
The rest of the creature was even more horrifying than its head. Long tufts of brown fur rose from the joints of the articulated shell that covered its entire body. Its bulky shoulders touched the passage walls on both sides, its belly rested on the stalagmites in the dust bed, and the ridge of its spine pressed against the ceiling.
“Ral protect us!” gasped Kester. “A bear!”
Shaking the cavern with a great roar, the beast pulled itself forward and raised a massive paw out of the dust bed. Agis dropped his torch and leaped off the deck, bringing his glowing blade down in a wild slash. The bear’s paw came down behind him, splintering the skiff with a single crunching blow.
The Obsidian Oracle Page 13