The Obsidian Tower

by Melissa Caruso

  Still, by the time I trailed back to my room in a cloud of silk and straggling hair and a faint sheen of perspiration, I had to admit that the reception had gone well. My aunt’s reaction to the jess had been predictable, if maddening; but the ceremony had gone smoothly, the food and music had been good, everyone had mingled politely enough, and there’d been no diplomatic disasters.

  And then there was Severin, who seemed willing to speak critically of his brother in private, which was something—even if I still had no idea what he was up to. The memory of his hand on my back set a flush in my face that had no business being there. The man had demanded my death, for Graces’ sake.

  I shook the thought from my head, cheeks burning. I had to focus on holding the negotiations together. I had separate meetings with each side scheduled tonight and hoped to wrangle them to an agreement tomorrow morning. If nothing went wrong, we might have the Raverran warships sent home by sunset tomorrow. After that I’d just need to find some way to appease the Shrike Lord’s grievance that didn’t involve my grisly death.

  I opened the door to my room, ready to kick off my boots and begin changing into regular clothes to go meet with the Rookery for another look at the obelisk—from a safer distance, this time.

  Yellow eyes gleamed at me from the long afternoon shadows. Whisper sat on my bed, waiting for me. Sweet Graces.

  “Hello,” I said cautiously.

  “You’re going back to the tower,” he said. It wasn’t a question.

  “Yes.” I crossed the room and sank down beside him in a puff of skirts. I started pulling off my shoes as if I didn’t care what he wanted and no flame of curious dread burned inside me.

  His bushy tail lashed across the covers. “Don’t touch the stone again.”

  “Do I look like an idiot?”

  “You’re a human.” He licked a paw and let me chew on that. “What do your Rookery friends plan to do with the obelisk?”

  “Study it.” I considered my answer carefully. If Whisper’s purpose pertained to the Black Tower, what I said next might determine whether he helped us or hindered us. “Figure out whether it did any harm when I triggered it. If the seals need any repair or reinforcement, see to it. That’s my understanding, anyway.”

  His eyes narrowed. “You should send them away before they can decipher what it does. That stone is more dangerous than they can imagine.”

  Given that I’d heard stories about the Rookery handling everything from ancient artifice weapons that could destroy a city to war chimeras created to take on small armies, this was unnerving to hear—and more so from Whisper, who I’d never known to fear anything.

  “I don’t have the power to send them away. They’re backed by the Conclave and the Council of Nine.” I took a deep breath. “And I wouldn’t send them away if I could. Grandmother’s disappeared, Whisper. Something strange and terrible happened that night. I need to understand what it was so that I can protect Gloamingard.”

  “You always were a sentimental fool,” he muttered, and began pacing a sleek figure eight on the bed, his tail swishing in curt strokes behind him. “I could kill them, I suppose.”

  I froze, one stocking dangling from my hand, a chill blooming in my stomach. I couldn’t tell how serious he was. For all I knew, he could do it; as a chimera he might be poisonous, or spit fire, or have claws that cut through stone.

  “Please don’t,” I said. “They’re Grandmother’s invited guests, and my friends.” I wasn’t completely certain of that last—it was still a new concept, not yet broken in—but close enough.

  Whisper’s ears flicked a dismissal. “I suppose they’d only send more investigators if the first batch turned up dead.” He gave me an unreadable glance. “You’re not making this easy, Ryx.”

  “Sorry,” I said softly, feeling an inexplicable pang of guilt. “I’d help you if I could. But I don’t know what you’re trying to do. Can’t you tell me, Whisper?”

  “I’m trying to protect you. And your precious Gloamingard, for that matter. I can’t say any more than that without breaking my promise.” He settled on his haunches with an air of complete disgust. “Ugh. If I can’t keep you all away from the stone entirely, I suppose it’s better to get this over with. The longer you spend poking at it, the greater the chance of catastrophe. I’ll help you make this terrible mistake, if it’ll get everyone to leave the obelisk alone as quickly as possible.”

  “Thank you.” I barely dared to breathe for fear he’d change his mind.

  “When you go to the Black Tower,” Whisper said, “consider the Gloaming Lore. Your ancestors did create it to give you the answers you need, after all.” His tail tip twitched. “Whether they did a competent job or not, I will leave to your discretion.”

  I turned that over in my mind. The answers we needed, eh?

  “Guard the tower, ward the stone; find your answers writ in bone,” I murmured. I’d always assumed that line referred to the pieces of Gloaming Lore carved all over the castle, including the Bone Palace. But that line had to be older than the Bone Palace, if our family legends were to be believed—and Whisper had said to consider the lore in the tower itself.

  “There’s no bone in the Black Tower,” I observed.

  Whisper tilted his head, pointed ears cupped to catch some secret sound. “Isn’t there?”

  “Maybe I should look closer,” I said. “Thanks, Whisper.”

  I reached out casually toward him. He sniffed my offered fingers with great dignity, then shoved his head into my hand. I scratched behind his ears until he sighed with contentment.

  “Don’t thank me yet,” he warned me, his eyes half closing. “You’ll be wishing you’d never heard of the Black Tower before the night is through.”

  “Blood of the Eldest, it feels wrong to be idling about in a room with that thing,” Ashe grumbled. The harsh light of the Black Tower wards turned her pale hair scarlet and gleamed at the corners of her eyes. “All my instincts say to fight or run.”

  “Mine too.” I shuddered and rubbed my arms. Even with the seal back to what Bastian and Foxglove assured me was full strength, power crawled under my skin and throbbed in the air around me like a dull ache.

  It didn’t feel like a room a human could live in for long.

  Kessa seemed to share my opinion. She crouched on the floor and put her head in her hands. “This place is making me sicker than the day after a night of bad choices. We should leave.”

  Ashe crossed to Kessa’s side at once and laid a hand on her shoulder. “Go,” she said, surprisingly gently. “This is Foxglove and Bastian’s show. You don’t need to be here.”

  Kessa shook her head and rose to her feet, but she squeezed Ashe’s hand. “If I leave, who’ll keep you all from doing regrettable things?”

  Ashe snorted. “What makes you think you can stop us?”

  I felt an inexplicable pang at the closeness between them. But I’d never had a chance with Kessa, even now that I had the jess. If I dared to court someone—a thrill raced along my nerves at the exciting, terrifying prospect—it would have to be a mage with the mark, or perhaps an unmarked atheling from a royal family, to seal or strengthen an alliance. Someone like Rillim—or Severin.

  Memories teased my senses of Kessa’s fingers sliding through my hair, and Severin’s lean body clasped close to mine as we danced. I shook them away with difficulty. Bones. I was supposed to be looking for bones.

  No matter how I scanned the chamber, all I saw was shining black obsidian and glowing scarlet wards.

  Foxglove paced the room, his hands clasped behind his back. “This isn’t anything so benign as a power storage device,” he said. “It’s something more dangerous, with all these wards. Perhaps a weapon—or a prison.”

  Ashe stroked the hilt of her sword, as if soothing it. “I have to admit even I wouldn’t want to fight something that’s leaking power like this.”

  “I keep hearing this sound,” Bastian said nervously. “A hissing, or a scratching. Almost like
voices.”

  “You’re going mad,” Ashe suggested. “I don’t hear anything.”

  “No, I can hear it, too,” Kessa said, her voice strained. “Ugh, that’s creepy. Close your eyes and listen.”

  I did, torn between curiosity and dread. A sound scratched at the edges of hearing—almost a whisper, but not in any human language I could understand. It was more like the scuttle of insect legs, or the hiss of the wind. The moment I tried to focus on the noise, it fell silent. I shuddered.

  Kessa had the right idea. With my eyes closed, the stark visual impact of the Black Tower no longer assaulted my vision, overwhelming my perceptions. As the green afterimage of runes and patterns danced on the inside of my lids, I tried to open my other senses.

  I caught a scent like the eerie freshness after a lightning storm in the air. The voices of the Rookery echoed oddly around me, bouncing off the tower walls. And the press of magic became even more overbearing, nearly crushing the breath from my lungs.

  But there was something else, beneath the pall of power hanging thick in the room. Something that tugged at my blood connection to Morgrain. All through the walls, reaching up to the roof of the tower and down beneath the floor, stretched a delicate tracery of life.

  No. Not quite life. The magical energy of life, imbued into a thin filigree of bone within the chamber walls.

  The Black Tower itself was a chimera.

  “Holy Hells,” I breathed.

  Bone chimeras were forbidden by laws more ancient than Vaskandar itself, but the Black Tower long predated such rules. It didn’t seem aware, thank the Graces—not truly alive, not even to the degree that an insect was alive—but someone, long ago, had imbued it with power and given it bones.

  And those bones, hidden within the walls, spelled a message. The intricate patterns and thin spiraling traceries all came together on the far wall, behind and above the obelisk, to spell out words taller than a man, bold and urgent, an ancient warning hidden so that only one bound to the life of Morgrain could see it.

  THE GATE MUST REMAIN CLOSED.

  In the darkness behind my lids, I puzzled that over. It didn’t make any sense. By the time anyone saw those words, the Black Tower would by definition already be open.

  Seasons preserve us. Nothing must unseal the Door. The earth seemed to shift under me, reality itself tilting into a dizzying new perspective.

  The Gloaming Lore had never meant the door to the Black Tower.

  “It’s a gate,” I gasped. I kept my eyes squeezed shut, afraid I’d lose my tenuous sense of the words if I opened them. “The obelisk. It was the Door all along.”

  “What? How do you know?” Ashe demanded, as Bastian excitedly exclaimed, “Oh, that could be it!”

  “Someone left a message written in life magic inside the tower walls, so only a member of my family could see it.” I didn’t mention the part about the entire tower being effectively a chimera, not yet; this was hard enough to believe as it was. Footsteps and the rustle of clothes sounded as the others gathered around me.

  “I knew it was a good idea to recruit you!” Foxglove crowed. “What does it say?”

  “The gate must remain closed.”

  It didn’t sound nearly important enough when I said it in my feeble human voice. They didn’t understand the urgency, the dread, the centuries burdening this single commandment. I shook my head, took in a deep breath, and tried again.

  This time, some of the power in the room slipped into my lungs. My voice reverberated in the walls themselves, as if the Black Tower said it with me.

  “The Gate Must Remain Closed.”

  A shiver traced its path across my skin.

  “Grace of Mercy,” Kessa swore.

  “That was cursed spooky,” Ashe said.

  “Sorry. I don’t know why that happened.” It was all I could do to keep my eyes closed; I was more than a bit unnerved. “The gate to where?” I wondered aloud.

  A slithering, grinding sound grew within the tower walls, grating on my nerves like nails against slate. I clapped my hands over my ears.

  “What’s wrong, Ryx?” came Kessa’s muffled voice, and she touched my arm, lightly.

  “Can’t you hear? No, I suppose you can’t.” It was the latticework of bone that ran through the walls. The words shifted and blurred, running into each other as the chimera changed its form, letters twining and untwining to form new shapes.

  An answer, writ in bone.

  Slowly, slowly, new words formed, traced in ancient magic and nameless bone. Stark letters spelled out a truth so awful it stole my breath and dropped me to my knees.

  “Ryx?” Kessa shook my shoulder. “Ryx, are you all right?”

  This was what we had been guarding, all along. This was what I had unleashed.

  “No,” I whispered. “It can’t be.”

  But I knew—knew, by the blood that ran in my veins—that the tower’s answer was true.

  THE GATE TO THE NINE HELLS.

  We need to get out of here,” I said, my voice scraping roughly through my throat. “Out, now, and seal this chamber.”

  I lurched to my feet, shaking off Kessa’s concerned hand. I’d opened my eyes to the scarlet-drenched room, but still the tower’s answer burned itself into my senses. I couldn’t unsee it, couldn’t unlearn it. The pressure and heat in the air became too much, now that I knew what power lay behind them; I struggled against the need to breathe it in.

  Foxglove took one look at my face and nodded, his bright eyes gone grim. “All right. Out!”

  “But—” Bastian’s pencil hovered over his notebook.

  Ashe grabbed him by the back of the jacket, like a mother cat corralling a kitten. “I swear, you’d try to sketch a chimera while it was eating you. Come on.”

  They hurried out into the hallway without another question; thank the Graces I was dealing with people who didn’t have to be convinced that magic could be dangerous. I slipped through the door on Foxglove’s heels, then spun at once to slap my hand against the seal. My heart pounded to rattle my rib cage as the great obsidian slab slowly ground shut, the bloody light beyond it narrowing to a sliver and finally winking out.

  My breathing rasped harsh and loud in the dusty alcove, echoing down the damp corridor of the old stone keep. The Rookery gathered around me, uncertainty and excitement and fear palpable in the air.

  “What was it, Ryx?” Foxglove asked, his voice low and intense. “What did you see?”

  Only this, and nothing more: nothing must unseal the Door.

  It would have been nice if the Gloaming Lore had warned us why. Then maybe I could have been more careful. I would have listened to Whisper and killed Lamiel rather than let her come so close to the obelisk. Stayed far away from it myself. Convinced my grandmother to bury this madness beneath a hundred feet of stone, rather than trusting magical seals and words of warning.

  Keep your secrets, guard your lore—but the Rookery were all staring at me expectantly, blissfully unaware of the horror that stood before them. My grandmother must have known; she must have accepted that the Rookery would eventually find out when she called on them for help. I lifted a trembling hand to my face, the awful truth rising up from my chest like a bubble of black poison, ready to burst through my lips.

  This secret was too big to carry alone. Its weight was crushing me already.

  “It’s a portal to the Nine Hells.” The words flew from my tongue, and now I could never recall them.

  Ashe let out a bark of a laugh that cut off abruptly halfway through. “Pox, you’re serious.”

  “Holy Graces preserve us,” Foxglove whispered. His hand lifted instinctively to an artifice charm that pinned his cravat, as if whatever small power it possessed could protect him.

  Kessa hesitated, glancing from me to Bastian, whose hands covered his mouth, brown eyes wide. “It can’t be. The Hells are a story, an overly dramatic metaphor—they aren’t real. Are they?”

  “Real enough,” I said hoarsely, slumping
against the cold stone wall. “You felt the power in there. We were wondering what could be so terrible that they’d need to construct an entire tower out of obsidian and cover it with seals and wards to contain it. Well, now we know.”

  Foxglove, usually so poised, swayed on his feet as if he might faint. “The voices. Sweet Grace of Mercy. Those were demons.”

  Bastian shook his head, eyes wide and lost. “I can’t believe it. No, I don’t want to believe it. If this is true—if that’s a gate to the Hells, and it’s been opened, what does that mean?”

  “It means,” I said, my voice raw and strained, “if we make one wrong step here, we could unleash the Dark Days once more.”

  Bastian pulled books from his trunk in the crowded Rookery sitting room, where we’d retreated to huddle in our profound spiritual terror in privacy. He barely glanced at titles before setting them aside with far less than his usual care; his long, elegant fingers trembled on their covers.

  “Every culture in Eruvia has a story of the Dark Days, when demons came forth from the Nine Hells to subjugate the earth. Every culture. Plenty of scholars have theorized that this must point to a true historic event.”

  “They’re just stories,” Kessa insisted. She drew closer to Ashe as if for comfort, and Ashe wrapped an arm protectively around her. “They’re too exaggerated to be true. People made up the Demon of Corruption to explain sickness and rot, the Demon of Disaster to explain volcanoes and blizzards, and so on; and then they invented the Hells because those demons had to come from somewhere. Only the superstitious and the gullible think they’re real.”

  “What if they are, though?” Bastian lifted his gaze from a book, his eyes dark and troubled. “Even if the Hells aren’t what we think they are, that doesn’t mean they’re not something.”

  I leaned against the wall by the hearth, shivering, arms wrapped around myself in a desperate attempt to regain some warmth. All I could think of was the terrible power that had poured through me both times I touched that seal—when I opened the gate. Hellfire.