I knew that face.
I didn’t know that face.
The features were strange to me, unlike Shalayn’s or any of the people I met since leaving the north. Where they had small noses and soft, rounded faces, mine was all angles and planes.
Pulling myself away, I followed the wall to the main gate. A portcullis of iron, bars as wide around as my legs, separated me from a door into the castle. Even if I managed to pass through this first obstruction, the door beyond, a monstrosity of oak and iron, would easily stop me.
With few choices, I called out, “Hello!”
I waited, listening.
When I got bored, I turned a complete circle, again taking in the obsidian mountain, the sky-devouring red sun. Another mountain floated past, this one either smaller or farther away.
I stood screaming and bellowing at the tower for hours. The sky never changed. The red sun sucked in the purple and black clouds and never moved. Mountains floated by, some bigger, some smaller. Distance was impossible to judge. I couldn’t tell if I was seeing the same ones over and over, maybe at different distances, or if it was new mountains each time.
If I ran and jumped, assuming I didn’t plummet to my death, could I make it to one of the other mountains. What if I missed, would I float forever? What if there was nothing on that other rock? At least here there was a castle, some sign of habitation. Though all these ancient corpses hardly filled me with hope for gaining entrance.
Come to think of it, I couldn’t see any small debris floating between the rocks. That seemed to make falling the likely answer. But then fall to where? I’d looked down. There was nothing there.
I wasn’t that desperate. Not yet. How many others jumped?
I yelled and screamed at the tower until I lost my voice. I was so thirsty my throat felt like I’d gargled obsidian dust.
At some point I wandered back to where I first appeared on this rock and searched for some clue as to how I got here, and some way back to Shalayn.
Nothing.
Giving up, I returned to the castle, staggering from exhaustion, weak from thirst and hunger. How long had I been there? Hours? Had it been a day? Longer? I croaked ever quieter pleas to whoever remained hidden within. Desperate to be heard, I grabbed the portcullis, shaking them. Nothing. I decided to try and lift it high enough to wedge a little rock under. Maybe I could slowly create enough space I could crawl through.
The portcullis lifted easily, sliding silently up to disappear into the stone above.
I stood staring for a moment, stunned. Had none of the others tried to lift it? I couldn’t believe that. I stepped forward and it slid down behind me without a sound. I turned and gave it a tentative lift, worried I’d now trapped myself in the castle. It rose easily. What the hell was the point of a portcullis someone could simply lift?
The huge iron door beyond opened with equal ease. While, from the outside, the tower looked to have been carved from the obsidian mountain, the interior was finished in normal stone. It could have been any tower I passed on my caravan ride south.
Thinking of that reminded me of Henka, the young necromancer, and my insane promise to return and help her find her heart. A promise it looked increasingly unlikely I’d be able to keep. What would Shalayn have thought? Would she understand? Would she come north to help me? Did I want her to? The thought of the two meeting left me uncomfortable.
A heavy layer of black dust coated the stone floor. There were no foot prints. Nothing had disturbed this dust in a very long time. That didn’t bode well. If the castle was deserted, I’d die here. A long hall disappeared into the dark, torches sitting in brackets every half-dozen strides. I had nothing to light them with, but hoped I might find something in the keep. Blundering around in the dark held no appeal.
As I stepped through the door, the first torch sputtered to life. The dry stench of burnt dust filled the air, a strangely familiar scent. The fire looked odd, too red, too even. The flames danced, but I saw none of the chaos inherent in fire. It looked choreographed, predictable. Structured.
Curious, I took several more steps down the hall. The door swung silently closed behind me, but as I approached the next torch, it too sparked to life. This flame looked identical to the last. I stood entranced, watching. They cavorted together to the same unheard rhythm.
Turning back, I headed deeper into the obsidian castle. As I reached each torch, it burst into flame, joining the rest. The hall ended in a huge cathedral of delicate black pillars reaching sixty feet up to meet the stone ceiling. Looking back the way I came, I saw the torches, flames identical.
When I stepped into the great hall, a thousand torches sputtered to life and joined the dance.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
I spent hours—maybe days—exploring the castle. I found chambers for hundreds of guests, bedrooms so fantastically laid out it made the wealth and comfort of the wizard’s tower look pathetic by comparison. Walls of colossal murals and hangings portrayed strange scenes. Men and demons working together. Battles where wizards, guarded by phalanx of demons, called rocks from the sky to crush their enemies. Elementalists rousing mountains and burning entire forests to birth fire elementals of incredible power. They reminded me of my dreams.
I remembered something then, something I knew in another life. Everything is alive. Every tree, every rock, every body of water, and every fire. Oceans were mammoth water elementals as old as the world. The larger and older an elemental was, the more powerful, the more difficult to awaken. And the more difficult to control.
I remembered a man, a master elementalist, though his name escaped me. He smashed elements together to create strange new blends. He commanded lava and mud and clouds. He made something for me—dust and wind and debris—something I left roaming in… I couldn’t remember.
I put the thought aside. There’d be no answers, that elementalist would be long dead now.
Thirst and hunger drove me. I found kitchens, devoid of food. I found libraries filled with thousands of ancient books, pages dry to the touch, but miraculously preserved. Shelves reached up to thirty-foot ceilings, packed with knowledge, information, and gods knew what else. I wanted to stop here, to spend my last days reading, to lose myself in their pages.
Self-preservation pushed me on. I couldn’t surrender, not now.
I climbed spiralling stairs. Everywhere I went torches, mounted in brackets, burst into flame to light my way. Fire writhed its perfect dance, winked at me with the joy of being alive. Silence echoed long halls. I left wandering trails in the dust.
I found rooms with huge wood tables where scores could meet in discussion. Leather chairs, blanketed in thick dust but still supple to the touch, surrounded every table.
I found water closets with no water.
I found pantries of dust.
On the top floor of the castle, I found a single bedroom. Though huge, it was simple. One large bed. One oak desk, papers laid out as if whoever worked here had been interrupted but moments ago. A wall hanging depicted a woman caught in the act of turning away. Her hair, long and black, flew in the wind. One hand, skin white and porcelain perfect, trailed behind her as if she’d just released mine. So familiar, and yet I knew nothing of her.
I stood, staring, until exhaustion cracked me. Stumbling, I made it to the bed. Clouds of dust billowed up around me as I collapsed onto it. I was too tired to care. Tomorrow I’d explore downward.
I thought sleep would be an escape from thirst and hunger. Instead, I dreamed of fountains and feasts.
The torches must have gone out as I slept. They sparked back to life the moment I woke and pushed myself, groaning, into a sitting position. Struggling from the bed, I rose. I felt weak, dry. Thirst clawed at me. Dust caked my throat closed.
I found a small room, devoid of purpose, with a single table, empty, against one wall. There was no chair. No decoration.
I searched on.
Spotting a doorway I’d missed in my exhaustion, I went to explore. A sec
ond room awaited beyond. A suit of crimson armour, plates formed of some strange material, sat on a steel-frame mannequin. Accords, ancient bargains, a thousand times more complex than those on the ring Tien wanted, were carved into the material. The armour terrified me, exuded a presence I didn’t understand. It felt like death, like standing in a mausoleum of souls surrounded by husks of devoured ghosts. I wouldn’t touch it, not for anything.
Above the armour hung an oil painting. A man, dark and brooding, stood in a field of battle. He wore the bloody armour. Corpses surrounded him. The sky burned. Rolling fields of torn earth and shattered trees. He leaned on a red sword, huge and splashed in gore, as if exhausted. I knew how he felt. Like the armour, the sword bore twisted runes snaking the blade.
I saw his face. Midnight skin. Features sharp and chiselled. But the eyes were wrong, too confident.
“He knows who he is,” I whispered.
A dusty croak of a laugh escaped my dry throat. It was me. Some other me from gods know when.
This was my castle on my floating mountain.
I’d found myself and I’d found nothing.
“I’m going to die in my own tower.”
I wanted to laugh, to scream and cry.
Choking down my emotions, I turned from the painting.
The armour was here, but where was the sword? A nonsensical string of words stumbled through my thoughts, something about how I can’t lament the End of Sorrow. What the hell did that mean? Was death the end of sorrow?
Much as I wanted to stay, to examine the armour and the painting in minute detail, search through that desk and read every book, thirst drove me on. I retraced my steps, descending stair after stair, torches coming alive as I went. Thirst pushed my pace, shoved me past tapestries screaming to be admired and studied, drove me from libraries of enticing tomes. On the ground floor, in an otherwise unremarkable pantry, I found stairs down I had not seen the previous day. With no other choice, I descended.
Steps led me deep into the mountain, torches sparking to life, stinking of burnt dust, as I went. The stone ended abruptly, replaced by raw obsidian, surface mirrored and smoky in the torchlight.
Smoke.
I stopped.
The torches emitted no smoke. Moving closer, I raised a hand to the perfect flame. I snatched it back, hissing in pain. Definitely fire. Sucking at a burnt finger, I leaned as close as I dared. The wood of the torch wasn’t being devoured by the flame, showed no sign of heat damage. Glancing back up the steps, I realized the torches had been winking out behind me.
Thirsty.
I continued down.
At the bottom of the steps stood an iron door adorned in in symbols like those on the sword and armour. They looked like they’d been painted in blood but moments ago. I reached forward to touch the blood, to see if it was as wet as it looked, and the door swung open before me. Beyond lay more rooms. Here, strange runes were carved deep into the floor like gutters. I imagined them filling with blood. They looked like what I’d drawn on the floor in chalk and blood when I tried to bind the demon in the ring, but infinitely more complex.
I glanced at the ring. “You alive? Take me back to the tower.”
Nothing.
I screamed at it then. I broke down and I begged and screamed and threatened.
Nothing.
Thirst. I couldn’t manage much more than a dust-clogged whisper.
Exploring deeper, staggering, sheer will driving me on, I found room after room of increasingly alien script carved into the obsidian floor. The air felt heavy down here, with the weight of countless millennium.
I passed through a room filled with strange things. Chalks in every colour. Buckets of dark earth. Bowls rimmed with salt like they once held sea water, which I would happily now drink. Alongside these, sat jars stained brown and stinking of ancient blood. Bright metallic tools, knives and blades, devices for spreading flesh and ribs, were laid out, orderly and neat, on a long table. Sheets of tanned paper hung from one wall as if left there to dry. Moving closer, I spotted the wrinkles and whorls of flesh. Not paper. Sheets of human skin. Reaching out to touch one, I found it soft and warm. I would have puked then, had there been anything in me to vomit forth. Instead, I retched thick sour drool into the dust.
“Is all this mine?” I whispered to the room.
Implements of torture. Flayed flesh. Was this me, had I done this?
The oak doors at the far end of the room swung open at my approach. Beyond, I saw another library, this one smaller than those on the floors above. Rows of dark oak shelves held tightly packed books of all shapes and sizes. As I entered, torches along the perimeter came to life, danced their synchronized jig. A single leather chair, big enough to swallow a man, sat in front of a fireplace loaded with dust-covered wood. It was cosy, inanely sane in comparison to the room I just passed through.
Could one man flay flesh from his victims, and then come here to read and relax?
A grey statue of an old man stood off to one side of the fireplace, covered in a heavy blanket of thick dust. No door led out. Barring hidden passageways, I’d seen everything. There was no food here, no water.
I was going to die here.
My knees wobbled, almost buckling me to the floor. So thirsty. So tired. I wanted to sit.
Heading toward the big chair, I froze when the statue moved. Dust rained from it as it turned to look at me.
It wasn’t a statue, it was an old man in long robes, skeletal and gaunt, flesh grey, but very much alive.
Sunken eyes examined me.
“Welcome back,” he said. Dust fell from his bald head and sloping shoulders. He scowled and then shook himself raising a great cloud. “It’s been a while.”
“You know me,” I croaked.
“Oh,” he said. “I see.”
He did? “Who are you?”
“Nhil,” he answered, this time bowing low and cascading more dust to the floor. “At your service. As always.”
I swallowed dust, coughed. I could barely speak. “I need water.”
“There is none. Not after this long.”
“I’m dying.”
“I see,” he repeated.
Knowing thirst and hunger would end me before long, I lost my fear. I moved closer. Something was wrong with the old man; he wasn’t quite the right shape. His skull, a little too oblong, his limbs a little too long. He looked stretched. Eyes, too large, oddly oval, glowed violet as he studied me. He blinked wrong, liquid, one eye at a time.
“What are you?”
“I am your assistant, your confidant for many years. Your closest friend. At least until you left me here and never returned.” He examined me, eyes doing that sliding, mistimed blink. “I waited for a long time.” He shrugged, displacing more dust. “Eventually, I gave up hope.”
“I have returned.”
“Some of you.”
Some of me.
“Can you bring me water?” I asked, hope making me desperate.
“No.”
“I was in a wizard’s tower with a woman. There was water there, food. I have to go back. Can you leave, can you get me back to the tower. She’s alone. I have to…”
He waited with the patience of a man who stood motionless for thousands of years. “No.”
“She’s alone! The wizards will take her!” If she didn’t die there first. My fists clenched. Tien did this. I’d take my time killing her, maybe bring her back here, show her the implements of torture—I stopped, swallowed the building anger. That wasn’t me.
“I can’t leave,” said Nhil. “That is beyond my power.”
“You have power?” Desperate hope. “What is your power? What can you do?”
He laughed, a deep sepulchral sound from such a slim old man. “I teach. I am a receptacle for knowledge. Ever was it my task to advise.” Sunken, violent eyes watched me. “And I am your friend.”
My friend? Was he lying? I couldn’t tell. Those eyes, those subtly inhuman features, told me nothing.
“That was a long time ago,” he continued. “A different you.”
“If you are truly my friend, help me. Please.”
“It might be too late. But I shall try.”
Turning, he approached the bookshelves, his gait strange and gliding, too graceful for one so old. Nodding to himself, he reached out a skeletally thin grey arm and selected a book.
“This one, I think.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“A binding for water elementals.” He turned to face me. “Normally it wouldn’t work somewhere like this. Luckily there is a reservoir at the centre of this mountain.”
“How did it get there?”
“You put it there.” He cocked his head in thought. “Hopefully it hasn’t gone dry.” He grinned then, teeth too small and slightly pointed. “Of course, there was a fair amount of water in there and it’s been a long time. It may have gone feral.”
Feral water? I didn’t care. I was thirsty enough to risk anything.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
“Normally,” said Nhil, “a would-be-elementalist would spend two years learning about the elements, the strengths and weaknesses of each, their characteristics and personalities. They wouldn’t begin even the simplest summoning until sometime into their third year.”
“I’m not even going to make it to the end of your Introduction to Elementalism speech.”
“Quite.”
“You think I have the potential to be an elementalist?”
“Everyone does. Anyone can learn any branch of magic given the time and interest. That said, you were always drawn to the darker arts, the power and influence.”
“Why ‘darker’?” That seemed oddly judgemental, particularly from someone who I was pretty sure was a demon. “Magic is just a tool. The purpose it’s turned to defines whether it’s good or bad.”
“Does it?” Nhil studied me. “I think, perhaps, we don’t have time for that conversation right now.”
I nodded agreement and set aside my curiosity.
For countless hours Nhil taught me the rudiments of the language of water, and the words of the ancient bargains.
Black Stone Heart (The Obsidian Path Book 1) Page 13