The Obsidian Oracle

by Denning, Troy

  The king pressed his palms to his temples and closed his eyes. Fighting back the wave of panic rising in his chest, Tithian tried to think of where he had gone wrong, to identify the crucial detail that would help him understand what was happening to the Oracle.

  The only thing that came to him was a growing awareness of his own frustration.

  Tithian switched his thoughts to his satchel. He knew even less about it than he did about the lens. He had found it in Kalak’s treasury soon after becoming the King of Tyr, along with a hundred other magic objects. He had quickly learned how to use it, then forgotten about it until he began to prepare for this trip and realized he would need a way to carry the Dark Lens. He could remember nothing about the sack that would help him escape.

  The king raised his hand and thought of the book in which he stored his spells. An instant later he was holding a well-worn volume with a leather-bound cover and parchment pages. Trying to remember all the spells that might help him make sense of his current situation, Tithian opened the book, uttering his angriest curse. This would take time, and time was one thing that he did not have. Sooner or later, the giants would realize that their Oracle was missing. Even more dangerous, Agis might escape the crystal pit and come looking for him.

  Tithian fixed his eyes on the mystic runes in his book, impressing his memory with their magical shapes, silently mouthing the strange syllables of the incantation, and rehearsing the awkward gestures his fingers would have to perform to shape the mystic energy when he released it.

  It was not until he had memorized his first spell that it occurred to him that there were no living plants inside his satchel. Quite possibly, he would not be able to summon the mystic energy he needed to cast a spell. On other hand, his experiences in the mica tunnel suggested to him that he might be able to use the energy of the lens to cast his spells—albeit with unpredictable results. Tithian put the book aside and reached for the sleeve that he had knotted to seal off the Dark Lens.

  The king stopped short of untying it. All around him, above and below as well as to every side, strange eddies had formed in the grayness. They were about as tall as a man, oval in shape, and from the center of each one peered two heavy-lidded eyes. Some eyes were blue, others were brown, green, or black, but no matter what the color, all were equally lifeless and glazed, and all were fixed on Tithian’s face.

  “We didn’t expect you so soon, Tithian, but welcome all the same.”

  The voice, issuing from beneath a pair of brown eyes, had a bitter, nasal quality that seemed vaguely familiar to the king.

  “Where am I?” Tithian demanded, desperately trying to link the voice with a face.

  “Nowhere,” chorused a hundred monotonous voices.

  The king scowled. “I’m in no mood for jokes,” he warned.

  “We never joke,” replied the voice.

  “Then answer my question,” Tithian snapped.

  “We have.”

  Echoes of the same voice began to well up from Tithian’s memory. He had heard it a thousand times, but the lethargic tone seemed sorely out of place, making it difficult for the king to place firmly.

  “Who are you?” he asked.

  “No one,” came the reply, again from a hundred voices.

  “Don’t play games with me!” the king yelled. “I won’t stand for it!”

  This brought a chorus of dreary, humorless chuckles.

  Tithian untied the sleeve of what had been his cassock, then thrust his hand down to touch the hot surface of the Dark Lens. A surge of energy rushed up his arm, but, much to his surprise, the sensation of movement did not return. Apparently, the lens had reached the end of its journey.

  “Tell me who you are,” the king threatened. “Or I’ll use the power of the Dark Lens against you.”

  “You’ve already done all the harm to us that you can, my brother.”

  This time, Tithian recognized the voice. “Bevus?” he gasped.

  “I was Bevus once,” said the figure.

  As the voice spoke, the brown-eyed eddy began to coalesce into the form of the king’s long-dead younger brother: a youth of about seventeen years, with the beady brown eyes and hawkish nose so typical of the Mericles line. There the resemblance to Tithian ended, however. Where the king’s features had always been gaunt and sharp, with a hard, bitter edge to them, Bevus’s were well proportioned and warm, with a tender quality that bespoke his sheltered upbringing.

  In spite of the fiery energy flooding through him, Tithian suddenly felt so cold he began to shiver. “Then I’m dead?” he gasped.

  This brought another chorus of funereal chuckles.

  “Worse,” answered Bevus, curling his gray lips into a hateful snarl. “You’re alive, and we want to keep you that way!”

  He drifted toward the king, and all of the other gray eddies also began to close in.

  “Stay back!” Tithian warned.

  Bevus’s face flopped down onto his chest, exposing a bloody, jagged wound in the back of his neck. The slit ran from the base of his skull clear through the spine, stopping just short of the adam’s apple. Barely enough skin remained intact to keep the head from falling off his shoulders. It was, as Tithian remembered, the condition in which the young man’s dead body had been discovered.

  The king raised a hand to shield his face and looked away, unable to bear the sight. “In the name of our ancestors!” he cursed. “Think of how you look!”

  “You shouldn’t have done it,” came the reply.

  Tithian returned his gaze to his brother. Bevus and the others had stopped advancing. “You think I did that?” the king gasped, gesturing at the gruesome wound.

  “You deny it?” asked Bevus. His words were muffled and difficult to understand, for he had left his head dangling on his chest.

  “Yes, I deny it!” Tithian yelled. As he spoke, he felt a terrible, icy lump where his heart should have been. “I’m not the one who did that to you!”

  In truth, the king’s recollections of that time were a fog. He had been a young templar in the Royal Bureau of the Arena when he had learned of his parents’ untimely deaths at the hands of a marauding slave tribe. Two of his compatriots had taken him out to console him with drink, and the conversation had turned to his inheritance. He had angrily berated his brother, accusing Bevus of convincing their parents to disinherit his older sibling in his favor.

  Tithian and his friends had drunk some more. Barely able to stand, they had filled their waterskins with wine, hired some kanks, and ridden off toward the Mericles estate. That was all the king had ever remembered of that night.

  The next dawn, Tithian had awakened in the desert not far from his family lands. At first, he had thought that his friends had led him into the desert and let him vent his wrath until he passed out from drink and exhaustion—then he had discovered that the robes of all three were soaked with blood. The king remembered being seized by a terrible sense of disgust and hatred. He had killed his two sleeping companions and gone to the irrigation pond at the Asticles estate where he washed both himself and his robes. Once everything had dried, he had hiked down to the house and passed the day weeping in the company of Agis and Lord Asticles, who had assumed he was distraught over the death of his parents and warmly offered their condolences.

  It had not been until three days later, after he had returned to his duties in the Bureau of the Arena, that he had heard how someone had brutally murdered his brother. Of course, there had been those who whispered that Tithian had murdered his younger brother to recover the Mericles fortune, but Agis and his father had steadfastly maintained that Tithian could not have been responsible, as he had been at their estate, mourning. No more questions had been asked, since the Asticles name was well-known for honesty—and since King Kalak had seen good advantage in having a wealthy noble serve in the ranks of his templars.

  Bevus said, “A man always knows who his murderer is—even if the coward hides behind another’s face!”

  “It coul
dn’t have been me. I passed that night at the Asticles mansion,” he said, falling back on his customary alibi.

  “You’re choking on your own lies,” Bevus scoffed. “You killed me.”

  “Never!”

  “An’ I suppose ye never killed me?” growled a tarek’s lifeless voice.

  Voice after voice asked the same question. There were nobles who had speculated too openly that Tithian might have been responsible for not only the death of his brother, but of his parents as well. Several voices belonged to templars who had stood in his way as he climbed the ranks of the king’s bureaucracy, and others to slaves who had tried to escape his service. There were even the voices of a few noble ladies and templar priestesses, heartless women who had laughed at a young man’s awkward advances.

  Tithian recognized all of the voices, and he remembered killing each and every one of them—not by issuing an order or passing a coin over some bard’s palm, but murdering them himself. Sometimes, if they were weaker than he was, he had strangled them with his own hands. If they were stronger, he had planted a dagger in their backs at unsuspecting moments. For the cautious ones, there had been poison. For the slaves who had thought dying to be easier than serving their master, always some slow and hideous death to prove them wrong.

  The king remembered the details of each and every murder right down to what he had been wearing, what the victim had said as he or she fell, even the foul odors that had come from their bodies as they expired. The only exception was the murder of Bevus, which, with the same certainty that he remembered committing all the other murders, he knew he could not have done.

  “Do you remember now?” Bevus asked, starting to advance again.

  “Stop!” Tithian yelled, opening his body to the fiery energy of the lens. “I didn’t kill you then—but I will now.”

  Bevus stopped at Tithian’s side and laid a hand on the king’s wing. “You fool—you can’t kill a dead man. Do you think we would have brought you into the Gray if you could hurt us now?”

  “You lured me down here?” Tithian roared.

  “We called the lens,” confirmed Kester’s voice. “Ye followed it.”

  “Yes, Kester knew you would,” Bevus confirmed. “She said it would be the one thing you valued more than your life.”

  A chill finger scraped down Tithian’s leathery wing, drawing a howl of agony. It felt as though Bevus were ripping away a strip of hide, but when the king looked over his shoulder, he saw that was not the case. His brother’s incorporeal finger had penetrated his flesh without tearing it, causing a painful welt that seemed to be the sole injury caused by the digit’s passage.

  “And do you know what the best part is? I can keep doing this forever, and you’ll never die!”

  Tithian screamed and flailed at his brother’s face. His hands sank right through Bevus’s chin. As spirits, it seemed his captors could not be harmed bodily. But, as the king knew better than anyone, the worst pain was seldom physical—and after the trouble they had caused him by bringing him into the Gray, he had every intention of making them suffer now more than they had in life.

  Tithian looked at the nearest set of eyes. Recognizing the voice as that of Grakidi, a young slave he had once used as an example to keep Rikus from trying to escape, the king visualized himself laying a purple caterpillar on a slave boy’s upper lip.

  Grakidi’s terrified face appeared in the center of the eddy, and the caterpillar instantly crawled up his nose. An instant later, blood began to stream from both nostrils, and the slave screamed in terror as the eddy faded from sight.

  Tithian forced a smile across his lips, feebly trying to ignore the pain of his terrible wounds. “You see? You can kill a dead man—over and over,” he sneered, glancing over his shoulder at the third welt that his brother was raising on his wing. “What are a few scratches compared to the joy of murdering you all again?”

  As he spoke, he fixed his gaze on a set of lavender eyes. They belonged to Deva, a young noblewoman who had been fond of Bevus, and who had lacked the good sense not to voice her suspicions in public. She had been one of his less imaginative murders. Still, when he visualized an obsidian blade pressing against her throat, the woman screamed and vanished before the tip could pierce her skin.

  More than half of the other spirits also succumbed to the terror tactics, fading silently into the Gray. The others were not so easy to chase off. Assuming forms that resembled the bodies they had occupied in life, they crowded around, gouging at Tithian’s face with talonlike fingers and ripping at his flesh with keen-edged teeth. As with Bevus, each attack sent an icy bolt of pain shooting through his flesh, and ugly welts began to rise over his entire body.

  Shrieking with pain, Tithian fought back in the only way he could, by identifying each of his attackers and recreating their deaths. Using the power of the Dark Lens, he fashioned a dozen different kinds of murderous utensils: the dagger he had used to kill the templars who had accompanied him into the desert, the looped wires with which he had choked unsuspecting rivals, the lingering poisons he had so graciously poured for women who spurned him, the rare venomous beetles he had sent scurrying under the door of a hated superior, even the crude axe he had once used to vent his wrath on an undeserving servant. With each attack, another spirit screamed and vanished, leaving one less set of claws to rake at him. Had it not been for his own agony, the king might well have enjoyed his encounter with the spirits.

  At last, after Tithian had recreated the dagger that he had plunged into Kester’s back just a few hours earlier, only two spirits remained: Bevus and one other that he did not recognize. Although his brother continued to torment him, slowly running a claw down his spine, the second spirit remained motionless. It had neither spoken nor laughed the whole time, and its beady black eyes did nothing to help the king identify who it had been. Tithian racked his brain, trying to remember all of the people he had murdered and match them with someone that he had chased off, but he could not think of who this last spirit could be.

  “You have an excellent memory for murder,” snickered Bevus.

  The king hardly heard, so awash was he in pain. From head to foot, his body seemed nothing but a single, aching welt. Even his wings were so red and abused that they looked like the twin dorsal crests of some deformed lizard. He felt dizzy and sick from the pain, perilously close to falling unconscious.

  “It’s too bad you can’t remember how you killed me,” Bevus continued. “Perhaps it’s because you were in such a drunken stupor.”

  Fighting through his pain, Tithian visualized a large steel-bladed axe that had been in the Mericles family for years. It had been found in the desert several weeks after the murder and was commonly assumed to be the murder weapon.

  Bevus merely laughed. “It wasn’t the axe, dear brother,” he said, flopping his half-severed neck around. “Your friends didn’t do this to me until after I was dead.”

  Tithian closed his eyes, trying again to remember what had happened that night. He and the two templars had dragged the liveryman out of bed, claiming they were on official business so they would not have to pay for his kanks. They had galloped the beasts through the dark streets, trampling a half-dozen derelicts too drunk to leap out of the way. At the night gate, they had merrily bragged to the guards that when they returned they would be wealthy men, and they had ridden into the desert. After that …

  It was no use. Tithian could remember no more.

  The king looked toward the last spirit. “Were you there that night?” he asked. “Perhaps you were one of my brother’s guards?”

  “Weak fool!”

  Tithian’s jaw dropped as he realized the identity of the last eddy. “King Kalak!” he gasped. “I didn’t kill you!”

  “Of course not. The honor belongs to that jackal, Agis, and his friends,” hissed Kalak, coalescing into solid form. Although he had been well on his way to becoming a dragon when Tithian had last seen him, he now assumed the shape of a skinny old man with a bald, s
caly pate and a face buried beneath wrinkles. “You merely betrayed me to them.”

  “Then what are you doing here?” Tithian asked.

  “I came to see if I should help you,” said Kalak. “I thought you might avenge my death—but I see that’s unlikely. You’re as big a coward as ever. If you can’t face your brother’s murder, you’ll never murder Agis.”

  “I didn’t kill Bevus!” Tithian protested, his pained voice a mere croak. “Everyone else—but not him.”

  “I know what happened,” snorted Kalak. “You called on my magic—”

  “King Kalak, no!” protested Bevus, reaching out to quiet the old man.

  Kalak slapped the hand away, then continued to address Tithian. “When I saw how you killed your brother, Tithian, I ranked you a true murderer—as fine as any since Rajaat,” Kalak said. He paused a moment, then shook his ancient head in disgust and reached up to take the battered circlet from Tithian’s welt-covered head. “But I was wrong. You don’t deserve this.”

  Kalak flung the crown into the grayness, then looked back to Bevus. “If you really want to torture your brother, I suggest you let him go.”

  “Why should I help him?” demanded the spirit.

  “You wouldn’t be helping, fool. Tithian can’t remember murdering you, and he balks every time he has the chance to kill Agis,” the sorcerer-king sneered. “If a coward like him uses the Dark Lens against Borys, nothing you can think of will compare to what the Dragon does to him.”

  As Kalak faded away, Bevus turned to consider his brother’s tormented form. “I think Kalak is underestimating me,” he said, reaching for Tithian’s eyes. “Don’t you?”

  The king turned his head away, fighting through his pain to keep his mind clear. Bevus began to harass him, tracing agonizing circles around the king’s eye sockets, moving just slowly enough so that Tithian could always look away in time to save his eyes.

  As he was tormented, the king focused his thoughts on saving himself. He did not try to remember what had happened the night of Bevus’s death, but concentrated only on accepting that the first person he had ever murdered had been his younger brother.