The Obsidian Tower

by Melissa Caruso

  “Graces know I don’t want to believe it,” Foxglove said, pacing. “But Bastian has a point. If you follow a story to its roots, you often find truth there. How many times have we used local legends to trace down forgotten artifacts or buried curses?”

  “It’s real,” I said quietly. “I don’t know if the stories are true, but the gate is real.”

  Bastian paused, a book in his hands, his chin quivering with some barely contained emotion. “I have to admit, even though it’s part of my religion, I always assumed the story of the Dark Days was an allegory.” A strained laugh burst out of him. “Times were hard, but we developed all these good things like art and charity to help us through them. Not literal demons coming into the world through an actual gate to the Nine Hells which is still around.”

  “I never doubted the Hells were real,” Foxglove said darkly. “I grew up in the poorest part of Raverra during a plague year. I saw plenty of the Nine Hells on earth.”

  “Well, Ryx apparently had them in her cupboard all this time.” Ashe shook her head. “We just had spiders in ours.”

  Kessa let out a great huff of breath at that. “That’s right. If this is hard for me to accept, I can only imagine you must be ready to spit up your own brain in a jar, Ryx.”

  Ashe grunted. “Yeah, if it is a gate to the Nine Hells, I’d hate to be the one who opened it.”

  Kessa made a noise of protest and punched Ashe’s arm.

  “Thanks.” I rubbed my forehead, which was more than half an excuse to cover my eyes. “I assure you, I’d already thought of that.”

  I didn’t know what to feel beyond pure shock. We’d slipped into the wrong world somehow, some strange place of dream or story. Surely we’d snap back to the real, rational world at any moment.

  But I knew it was true. I’d found my answer, writ in bone. The deep instincts that tied me to the land knew it was no lie.

  “Aha!” Bastian lifted up a book, triumphant. “Here it is. Diaghra’s Translations of Ancient Ostan Tablets.”

  Foxglove’s brows lifted. “I’d assumed you were digging for a book of legends of the Dark Days.”

  “Oh, certainly, but I always do prefer to find as close to a primary source as possible.” Bastian paged eagerly through the book. “Most of the stories place the Dark Days at about four thousand years ago. Vaskandar and the continental Serene Empire didn’t have much in the way of writing then, but Osta did. There’s an account on a fragmentary tablet found in one of the oldest temples in Osta—likely not contemporaneous, but probably within a century or two, which is—”

  “Skip the introduction,” Ashe interrupted. “Get to the part where you tell us how to lock the damned gate and maybe stab some demons.”

  Bastian ignored her. “From the north came the Nine Demons,” he read, “and they spread across the land in plague and misery, terror and death. Neither great armies nor works of potent magic could stand against them. All was ruin.”

  Sudden guilt twisted my stomach, sharp and fierce. This was what I’d risked unleashing again.

  “The people lost themselves to despair,” Bastian read on, while the rest of us exchanged somber glances. “The Nine Demons ruled for a hundred years, and life became a suffering to be endured.” He lifted his eyes from the page. “I’m not certain what this next part means.”

  “Just read it,” Foxglove said, fidgeting with his cuffs.

  “Very well.” He squinted dubiously at the page. “Some among the demons wore the masks of kings and queens. And there were those courageous ones who strove to slay them. But if one mask became broken, the demon without delay put on another. Therefore all attempts at their destruction proved in vain.”

  “I’ll bet ‘masks’ means possession,” Ashe suggested. “A lot of the old stories of the Dark Days in my part of Vaskandar are tragic tales about people getting possessed by demons and their friends needing to kill them.”

  Kessa grimaced. “That seems excessively awful.”

  “They’re demons,” Ashe said. “They’re supposed to be awful.”

  I raked my fingers through my braid, unraveling it so I could do it up again and give my hands something to do besides twist against each other in my lap.

  “Possession shows up again and again in the legends,” Foxglove said, fingering the pouches at his belt. “In the Empire, too. We’d best assume it’s a danger we may have to face.”

  “There’s more.” Bastian’s voice had gone hoarse. He reached out, searching blindly, and Kessa put a cup of water into his hand; he drank a long swallow and continued. “The Great Sage of Parha discovered that the demons had come from a realm of light and fire through a pass in the distant mountains of the north.” Bastian tapped the page. “If my recollection of Ancient Ostan is accurate, they use the same word for pass and gate.”

  Kessa sank back in her chair as if the spirit left her. “And here we are, in the foothills of the northern mountains, with a gate to light and fire locked up behind the most excessive wards I’ve ever seen. All right, you’re beginning to convince me. And I need a drink.”

  “The Sage of Parha.” Foxglove frowned, rubbing his chin. “My Ostan grandmother sometimes used that name for the Grace of Wisdom.”

  “There are some Ostans who believe the Graces were extraordinary people rather than divine beings, yes,” Bastian said, with a careful glance at Foxglove as if measuring his reaction to this possible blasphemy.

  “The Vaskandran legends of the Dark Days don’t include the Graces at all,” Kessa said, with an apologetic shrug for the Raverrans. “They speak of heroes who drove back the demons, but the stories say they were Vaskandran mages, not divine beings.”

  “Or not mages,” Ashe put in. “I like the ones where they’re regular people.”

  “One way or another, forgive me, but I don’t think we can rely on your Graces to save us,” Kessa said. “Whatever they were, or are, they’re not here now.”

  It was an uncomfortable thought; my mother had raised me to make offerings to the Nine Graces and pray to them when I was in need, but had scoffed at demons and Hells, saying they were made up to scare people into obedience. The idea that the Hells were real and here, and the Graces beyond reach in the uncertain realm of divinity or myth, was terrifying.

  I shook my head. “The message of the Graces was never that they would come and save us.” Everyone looked at me; I took a deep, ragged breath. “If you’re Raverran, you know how it is. You pray to the Graces for strength—for wisdom or courage, for luck or mercy. In the end, though, it’s up to you to get it done. No one will do it for you. That’s the Raverran way.”

  Foxglove nodded, his lips shaping the ghost of a smile. “So it is. And anyone who says it’ll be easy is trying to sell you something.”

  “What’s the Vaskandran way?” Bastian asked, with the nervous tone of someone not sure he liked the answer he had and hoping for a better one. “What do you do when everything is terrible?”

  Kessa and Ashe exchanged a long glance. It was a more complicated question than Bastian probably realized. In Vaskandar, the Witch Lords regularly delivered miracles to avert the worst cruelty the turning seasons could deliver, from counteracting drought to quelling bandits. They were certainly more accessible and present than the Graces. But in some domains, the Witch Lord was the reason everything was terrible in the first place, and then no amount of Raverran-style cleverness and pluck could save you.

  At last, Kessa said, “We endure.”

  Bastian swallowed visibly. “That’s not reassuring, either.”

  Ashe poked his side. “Since we’d rather not endure another round of Dark Days, does your rock say anything about how they got rid of the demons and closed the gate?”

  Bastian closed his book, shaking his head. “No. The tablet is broken, and the rest of it was never found.”

  “It’s all right,” Kessa said, lifting her chin. “We’ve got a gate to the Nine Hells in Ryx’s tower, and that’s extremely unfortunate, but it’s closed.
It was closed for thousands of years before our brief little indiscretions, and it’s closed now. The Nine Demons don’t appear to have come sweeping through to plunge the world into the Dark Days again.”

  “That we know of,” Ashe added.

  “Fair.” Bastian took a deep breath. “All right. What do we do now?”

  Foxglove’s pacing stilled. “Technically,” he said, with a grave glance around at all the members of the Rookery, “when we discover a threat to national security, it’s my obligation to report it to my superiors in the Empire and Vaskandar.”

  My heart tried to jump up my throat. “You can’t tell them we’ve got a gate to the Nine Hells in Gloamingard. Everyone will declare war on Morgrain in a panic.”

  Kessa frowned. “She’s got a point. Think how hard it was to talk down the Serene Empire from attacking their own client state when Calsida was slow to hand over that doomsday elixir, or how willing the Witch Lords are to saddle up the war chimeras anytime we find a Skinwitch. It’s also our duty to avert these sorts of diplomatic problems, after all—and if we’re speaking of technicalities, this gate hasn’t been a threat to anyone’s national security for four thousand years.”

  “Because it was a secret,” Foxglove pointed out. “People may not know it’s a gate, but they know it’s powerful and dangerous. If nothing else, the Zenith Society will be sniffing around after it soon enough.”

  Kessa grimaced. “Can you imagine what they’d do with that gate? They’d be lining up like it was free-drinks day at the local tavern to see which of them could make bargains with all Nine Demons first.”

  “They’re a Raverran political faction, aren’t they?” I had to be missing something. “Raverran culture paints demons as abhorrent—pure evil. Would they really go so far?”

  The Rookery exchanged meaningful glances; Bastian had gone an odd pale shade, almost greenish. Unspoken history hung thick in the air.

  “Some of their members may honestly believe they’re just a political faction,” Kessa said, with a careful glance at Bastian. “But the core of the Zenith Society is something far worse. They’ve indulged in all sorts of repugnant magical experiments, collected highly illegal artifacts, and even tried to pull off a coup a few years ago.”

  “A coup!” I didn’t think the Raverran government was particularly lenient about that sort of thing. “How are they still around?”

  “We—or the Council of Nine, rather—obliterated the branch that was behind the coup.” Foxglove’s hand rested briefly on his pistol. “The rest of the Zenith Society swore they knew nothing about it, and were simply scholars of magic and concerned patriots with no interest in treason. They had enough influential members that the Council accepted this and left the rest of the society intact, but some of us are skeptical.”

  “Some of us have very good reason to be skeptical,” Kessa muttered darkly.

  Bastian still looked as if he might faint. “If the Zenith Society learns of the gate, they’ll do anything to get control over it. I know them. They’re desperate for some ultimate edge over Vaskandar, and they’ll think this is the answer to their prayers.”

  “Anyone who thinks the Graces would give them the Hells in answer to their prayers has been seriously derelict in their attention to the shrinekeepers,” Foxglove said dryly.

  Kessa laid a calming hand on Bastian’s arm and gave Foxglove a meaningful stare. “Maybe we should wait before reporting this. And not only because of the Zenith Society, much as thwarting those poxweasels is a good enough reason for me. Ryx is right; if we let this information loose at the wrong time, we’ll start an international panic that’ll make that time someone unleashed blood hornets at a harvest festival look like a courtly dance.”

  “Give us time,” I urged them. “Let me sort out the current diplomatic crisis before we start a new one. I’ve got to meet with the envoys in an hour to talk about Windhome Island, for Graces’ sake. We don’t even really know what this discovery means yet; let’s not make any irrevocable decisions about how to act on it when we haven’t had time to think it through.”

  Bastian tapped his pencil against his notebook. “This is still technically just a theory. We don’t have to report theories.”

  Silence fell on the room. The Rookery exchanged meaningful gazes, the conversation continuing unspoken between them. I held my breath.

  Finally, Foxglove leaned heavily on the mantel and sighed. “I can’t put this off long.”

  “Just until we’ve got a solution,” Kessa suggested. “They’re far less likely to panic if we’ve already fixed it.”

  “How do we fix this?” Foxglove asked, the full impossibility of the situation weighing on his words.

  “I’ll get to work researching,” Bastian said, digging into his chest for more books with the desperation of a man seeking escape. “The better I understand the enchantments, the more options we can come up with for reinforcing the seals, or possibly even destroying the gate.”

  “Feel free to search Gloamingard’s library for anything relevant,” I offered. “I’ll check my grandmother’s papers to see if she’s got any notes on the Black Tower.” I suspected that all my family’s advice on the matter had already been carved into the castle walls in the Gloaming Lore, which mostly focused on never opening the Door in the first place, but I’d give that some further thought, too.

  Kessa tapped her lips. “I’ll make friends with the support staff in the diplomatic delegations—the clerks and guards and such—to see if I can get us some warning before they make any moves or figure this out.”

  Foxglove rubbed his hands. “I’ll study our sketches of the Black Tower and the obelisk. And I’ll also sit down with Lady Celia and a glass of wine and have a little chat about the Zenith Society. I want to find out how deeply they’ve infiltrated the imperial government.”

  I rose, full of grim determination. I knew what I had to do, and I had less than an hour to fit it in, though I wasn’t looking forward to it.

  “Where are you going?” Kessa asked, her head cocked questioningly.

  “To talk to my aunt,” I said.

  Karrigan shook her head, dappled shadows sliding across her face. “A gate to the Hells themselves. Blood of the Eldest. That’s what she wouldn’t tell me.”

  We’d met in the deserted Aspen Hall, beneath the whispering leaves. It was as good a place as any to have a conversation without being overheard; the empty space around us ensured that no one could get close without being seen.

  “I’m sorry.” I wrapped my arms around myself against the nighttime draft weaving cold fingers through the hall. “It went undisturbed for four thousand years, until I stumbled into it.”

  Karrigan grunted. “Don’t flatter yourself. Four thousand years? Maybe more like forty.”

  I stared at her uneasily. “What do you mean?”

  “Don’t you think it’s odd that our family has held this castle for four millennia?” Karrigan swept a broad gesture to encompass all of Gloamingard with her bear-claw gloves. “From the Dark Days through the bandit kings to the rise of the Witch Lords, we’ve guarded the Black Tower and passed down the Gloaming Lore, and no one has taken this place from us. It’s not as if this little hill provides some impenetrable defense. How do you think we did that?”

  Her scarlet-ringed eyes pierced through any comforting what ifs or maybes I might have thought to utter. She was right. A growing dread built in my stomach. “The Gloaming Lore—”

  “Says not to open the gate. But that doesn’t mean there’s no way to use the power.” Karrigan started pacing, her boots striking hard notes from the wooden floor. “Do you know what my mother said when I asked her, years ago, if she’d ever been in the Black Tower?”

  “No.” The word came out strangled.

  “‘Once.’” The fur of my aunt’s mantle lifted in response to her agitation, like a beast’s hackles rising; it made her look fierce and wild and dangerous. “She’s been in there, Ryx. I asked her why, and she got this cold
and distant look, and I knew she didn’t want to tell me. She said there was a terrible secret in there, to be used only in the time of greatest need. To be used, do you hear me?”

  “We can’t use it,” I objected, horrified. “It’s the power of the Nine Hells.”

  “Oh, it’s eager enough to be used.” She stopped her pacing and turned to face me, a strange light in her eyes. “I barely touched that obelisk, and I heard something calling to me, offering all kinds of things.”

  “That was a demon,” I hissed. “For blood’s sake, Aunt Karrigan, remember the Gloaming Lore. Give no cunning voices heed, make no bargains born of greed—”

  “Never for greed.” Her voice went deep and grave. “To protect Morgrain. To protect the Black Tower itself, and the secret it holds. Our ancestors must have done it dozens of times.”

  “Are you trying to tell me that our family has always been allied with demons?” The idea made me sick—the deep, sinking, terrible sickness of an ugly old truth.

  History didn’t leave one family in power for millennia without some telling advantage. Before the rise of the Witch Lords, Morgrain had survived eras of feuding bandit kings and the marauding Storm Queens, and our family had always held Gloamingard. Always. That stability had been a point of pride—but if the foundation we stood on was the pits of the Hells, surely that tainted everything we’d built.

  “Maybe,” Karrigan said. “Or maybe there’s some way to use the power that bleeds out of that gate without getting demons involved at all.”

  “We don’t know that,” I objected. “We can’t risk it.”

  Karrigan dropped her voice until I could barely hear it over the rustle of the aspen leaves. “We’ve got enemies circling us, waiting to be sure we’re defenseless before they rip us apart. And there’s still no sign of my mother.” She took a deep, uneven breath. “We need every advantage we can get, Ryx. And if that means allying ourselves with demons, so be it.”