The Obsidian Tower

by Melissa Caruso

  That was all plausible enough, but it also served Severin’s interests. “Funny how you ask me to take that on faith, when you told me last night not to trust you,” I pointed out.

  “Ah, there’s the trouble.” His smile was all sharp edges. “I’m an atheling of an enemy domain and I’m only helping you to save my own skin. Which is exactly why you can believe me, but by no means should you trust me.”

  “Oh? To save your skin, you say?” I put my hands on my hips. “If Voreth believes Karrigan and Lamiel’s killer to be the same, how will it satisfy your brother if we find the assassin and my grandmother takes her vengeance? What will you bring back to Alevar for him? The corpse?”

  Severin bit his lip; the uncertainty of the gesture startled me, but I didn’t let my wary stance soften. Finally, he sighed. “No. He’s going to want to do it himself.”

  “Then it seems to me we’re still left with a vengeful Witch Lord.”

  “I suppose I’ll have to convince Voreth that Lamiel’s killer was different.” He glared at me. “Which isn’t good for you, because he’ll go back to suspecting your family. You make yourself hard to help.”

  “I never asked for your help.”

  “I can leave you bleeding on the floor next time, if you like,” he snapped.

  I grimaced. “I didn’t say I wasn’t grateful for it.”

  Severin shook his head, setting the long glossy tail of his hair to dancing. “If we can’t come up with a likely suspect for Lamiel’s death, I’m going to have to demand the gate at the Rite of Blood and Water. Which I’m certain will make me dreadfully popular with the Serene Empire.”

  “Forgive me if I feel popularity is the least of our concerns, given the circumstances,” I said.

  “Maybe I could just not go home,” he said wistfully. “I could stay here, in your cursed castle, trying not to get killed by your terrifying grandmother, keeping warm through the winter by the heat from the gate to the Hells in your tower.”

  My brows flew up. “Your brother is that bad to live with?”

  The question seemed to catch him off guard. “He’s…” He frowned, and his voice softened, picking up an odd catch. “He isn’t always. He can be affectionate, charming, downright heroic when the mood strikes him. He saved me from an assassin once.” Severin grimaced. “Best not to mention what he did to the assassin afterward.”

  “But you want to escape him?”

  “He can’t forget how he came to be the Witch Lord, and he’s grown more and more suspicious of me. Now if I say or do the slightest thing he interprets as a challenge, he changes quicker than a trap closing.” Severin grinned, but it didn’t reach his eyes. “You may have noticed that I have trouble keeping my clever comments to myself. It’s rather wearying going through life never knowing when you’ll suddenly get flung across the room for some chance remark, or because you looked at him the wrong way.”

  I frowned. “And you don’t stand up to him?”

  I expected him to laugh at me, but Severin dropped his eyes. “You can’t stand up to a Witch Lord in his own domain, Ryxander. You know that.”

  “Ryx,” I corrected him.

  “What?” He looked up, surprised.

  “Call me Ryx. At least when Voreth’s not around.” I lifted a finger between us. “And you absolutely can stand up to a Witch Lord in their own domain, if you’re willing to face the consequences.”

  Severin snorted. “I don’t want to die, thank you.”

  “Then why don’t you run?” I challenged him. “If you hate it there so much, why don’t you go live somewhere else? There are plenty of other domains that would be happy to take in a powerful mage like you.”

  He shook his head. “It’s not that easy.”

  “I never said it was.”

  His face was too close to mine. Our eyes locked, mage mark to mage mark, and it was as if some energy passed between us. Anger sparked in his eyes.

  “You have a loving, supportive family,” he hissed. “You have no idea what it’s like.”

  I couldn’t help myself; I laughed. “Loving and supportive? My aunt said our domain would be better off if I’d died as a child. My uncle has met my eyes maybe six times in my life. Vikal called me a murderous freak.”

  “But they never…” He stopped, and rubbed the scar that ran down from his temple. “How did we get here? We’re supposed to be talking about how to stop my brother from invading your domain.”

  “Maybe if you were willing to stop appeasing him, that would be a good starting point.”

  I immediately regretted saying it. He’d just shown me a soft spot; now wasn’t the time to jab him in it. Hurt flashed in Severin’s eyes.

  Before I could find some way to soften my words, Voreth strode toward us, a satisfied almost-smile sitting at odds with his sour face, no doubt pleased with whatever lecture he’d given Kessa. I spotted her behind him at the table, pouring herself a rather early glass of beer; she gave me a wink and made a face.

  Severin’s entire posture shifted as Voreth approached, tension returning to his shoulders and spine. “Let’s talk again soon,” he said. His voice was quiet, but a cold stiffness had returned to it. “And… thank you. For stopping her from killing me last night.”

  “Just paying back my favor,” I said, tension flaring down my nerves as it finally sank in that he had carried me bodily around Gloamingard in those lean-muscled arms while I was unconscious.

  “Is that all?” An odd catch entered his voice.

  Before I could frame a reply or even try to read the fleeting vulnerability in his eyes, Voreth arrived, and the moment was gone.

  The wind stroked shivers from the wild grasses that buried half the stone circle. Blue sky stretched above, and the lumpy green earth below; Gloamingard held the two braced apart, all clawlike points and sharp angles, crowning the hill on whose side I stood. A few lichen-scarred gray stones lay on their sides, bones half showing through the grass; a handful more still stood, leaning at odd angles.

  This place had always drawn me. Now I was using it to try to draw out my grandmother.

  I could barely make out the runes, faint as the line a child’s finger might draw in dry sand. But I knew what they said, from all the days I had explored here when I was small, leaving a trail of dead withered grass behind me.

  Nothing must unseal the Door.

  Pieces of the Gloaming Lore poked from beneath the smothering earth, on these stones older even than the keep at the heart of the castle, from the time of the ancient republic that rose after the Dark Days and fell to the Storm Queens. At the center of the ring, a newer stone stood taller than the rest, the lines carved into it sharper and more deeply. It bore another piece of lore that had been added at the same time the old stone keep was built, in the time of the bandit kings, when strong walls were necessary and sufficed:

  I stand before the light

  And hold the dark at bay

  I am the guard at the gloaming

  I’d known this was where the castle’s name came from, even as a child, but I’d assumed it had something to do with the way the light of dawn and sunset caught on the castle walls. Now, as I traced the words carved in rough rock with a bare finger, it all seemed so much clearer.

  It was my family’s task to stand before the terrible white light of the Hells and stop it from spreading, to keep the Dark Days from falling upon us again. To hold our secret place in the twilight shadows and guard against both dark and light.

  Maybe I hadn’t failed that trust after all. Not yet. It all depended on exactly how much of herself my grandmother retained.

  “I suppose you’re going to insist on doing this.”

  I glanced up, not really surprised, to find Whisper looming above me, perched on top of the center stone.

  “You don’t want me to talk to her,” I said. “Interesting.”

  “It would be easier for me if you would stop trying to learn things you’re only going to regret knowing.”

  I met
his yellow eyes, unblinking. “Easier for you to do what, exactly?”

  His tail swished back and forth, painting his thoughts on the rock, but he didn’t answer.

  Time to try being blunt. “You seem to know a great deal about demons, for a chimera.”

  “You seem to have a great many questions, for a human,” he retorted.

  I plucked a strand of grass and rolled it between my fingers, eyeing him with wary frustration. “I like you, Whisper. I trust you, even. But I don’t know what you’re trying to do. You’ve said yourself that we may not be on the same side. And now my grandmother is a demon. If your loyalty is to her, where does that leave us?”

  He stared at me a long time, blinking only once. Finally, he spoke. “My loyalty is to myself.”

  “Well, that’s something, anyway.” I shook my head. That was even less reason I should trust him, but I couldn’t help it. He might not often tell me the whole truth, but he’d never lied to me. “Yes, since you asked, I do insist on talking to my grandmother. I have to try to find some way to keep this all from unraveling into total disaster.”

  “You can’t,” he said softly.

  My breath skipped roughly in my chest. “What do you mean?”

  What did he know that I didn’t? Had more demons already come through the gate? I couldn’t take more bad news, not now, when everything I was trying to save already balanced on the edge of a cliff of futility.

  “You always did like this place,” came a hauntingly familiar voice, rough as the stones around me, deep as the roots of the earth, fathomless as the sky.

  I turned, my heart aching with each beat as if she’d impaled it on a pike, and faced my grandmother.

  She crouched atop one of the fallen stones with animal comfort, wind stirring her white hair. Herself and not herself. Human and demon.

  I swallowed, my dry throat rasping. “We both did. It’s peaceful here.”

  The fierce orange rings of her mage mark flicked up to Whisper. “And you? Joining our little family talk?”

  Whisper gazed down at her, aloof, inscrutable. “I’m here to protect my promise.”

  “Huh.” My grandmother’s eyes narrowed. “That’s going to be difficult now, you know.”

  “Nevertheless.”

  I barely heard them. I couldn’t take my eyes off her face, seeking out and finding every familiar freckle, the laugh lines beside her eyes, the faint crease between her brows.

  “I missed you,” I blurted, and immediately felt like a fool.

  Her eyes softened, a little. As much as they ever did. “But that’s not why you’re here, is it.”

  “No.” I swallowed. “I’m here to talk.”

  “To spy,” my grandmother corrected, her teeth shining sharp in the golden autumn light. “To find out my plans, my intentions, my secrets. To gain a hold over me, if you can.” She tilted her head. “At least, I hope that’s why you’re here. I’d be very disappointed in you if it were simply a social visit.”

  I’d come here to find out who and what she was, but I was perilously close to wanting nothing more than a hug and a soothing word. To be a child again, here in this circle, clearing dirt and grass away from the stones so I could read the runes. Safe, protected, and oblivious to the dangers these very ruins warned me against.

  But Whisper was right. Everyone changed, and nothing could make you again who you were before. I couldn’t become a child under my grandmother’s wing any more than I could return her to exactly who she had been.

  I forced a smile. “Since you mention it, I don’t suppose you’d like to tell me what you intend to do now? I’d love to be able to reassure the Rookery that you’ve got no ambitions greater than a bit of gardening, and Eruvia will never know you’re here.”

  She chuckled, a sound that made my stomach drop half a story. “Oh, Eruvia will know.”

  “This isn’t a joke,” I said, urgency burning in my lungs beneath the words. “The Empire and the other Witch Lords are bound to learn about you soon. And when they do, if we can’t assure them that you’re not a threat, they’ll—”

  “Try to kill me?” my grandmother interjected. She laughed, a full-body laugh as if the idea were ridiculous, but it faded abruptly, and her expression turned sober. “Do you think I deserve to die for being a demon?”

  “No,” I said, instinctively and fiercely. “Of course you don’t.”

  “I doubt many people will agree with you,” she said, irony edging her voice.

  I grimaced. “The Dark Days did leave deep scars on Eruvia’s memory.”

  “The Dark Days?” The demon that was my grandmother snorted her contempt. “The Dark Days were a mistake. We came through that gate knowing nothing about this world, with no way to understand what we were perceiving and experiencing. We were beings of pure energy, suddenly taking on physical forms in a world of matter and life. We flailed about with no idea what we were doing, each following our own nature and impulses. Without goals, without plans. And still we essentially destroyed civilization.”

  “And now?” I asked, hugging myself against the chill that originated not from the wind teasing my braid and vestcoat, but from deep within, called up by her words.

  My grandmother looked about her, taking in the hillside in a proprietary, satisfied sort of way. “Now I am human,” she said. “I have human desires and human loves. And I will protect what is mine.”

  “You could protect it better if there were peace in the region,” I suggested.

  The gaze she turned on me was strange, almost pitying. “There will be no peace, Ryx, and you know it.”

  “I won’t accept that,” I said stubbornly. “No matter how unlikely it seems, I have to try.”

  She tilted her head as if I were a curious animal, some stranger to her domain she’d never seen before. “I made a mistake with you, Ryx,” she murmured.

  “What do you mean?” The mad intensity was back in her eyes; I took an instinctive step away from it.

  “I should never have taught you to suppress your power, to reject the damage you cause.” She rose with a predator’s slow grace, balanced on her stone, slim as a knife but far more deadly. “I should have raised you to embrace what you can do. To revel in the glorious wake of chaos you leave behind. I can see that now.”

  I fell back another step, into the shadow of the central stone, my heart stumbling. Her power unfolded invisibly around her, charging the cool dry air with the hum of an impending storm. I clamped a hand over the golden jess circling my wrist, instinctively protecting it. “I like it better this way, I assure you.”

  Whisper leaped down from his stone, landing on the wind-flattened grass beside me. He stretched, yawning to show his teeth.

  “I think this has gone far enough,” he said.

  My grandmother chuckled, and the pressure of her power eased. “So protective.”

  “You asked me to be,” Whisper said.

  Ah. Perhaps that was it; his mysterious promise had been to keep me out of trouble. A strange disappointment tugged at me; it was so simple, so benign.

  But no. I did risky things all the time, and he didn’t seem to feel obliged to stop me—and he hadn’t seemed concerned that the attempt on my life had endangered his promise. He was far more protective of the Black Tower and its secrets than he was of me. He must be referring to a more simple, mundane request, of the sort he could feel free to ignore when it was inconvenient.

  My grandmother looked at me—truly looked at me, in the way she always had, where her eyes seemed to pierce through to my soul and absorb everything there was to know about me in one glance.

  “So I did,” she said softly. “Very well, Ryx. I suppose you’ve learned enough for one day. You can go back and give your friends your assessment on the dangers I pose.”

  She turned to go. I didn’t want her to leave, even knowing she was a demon; even feeling the wrongness, the bright sharp edge in every movement and look.

  “And what should I tell them?” I called a
fter her, barely stopping myself from reaching out.

  My grandmother glanced back over her shoulder. A sickle-sharp grin split her face, and her eyes burned with an unholy light.

  “Tell them that it doesn’t matter whether I’m a threat or not,” she said. “Because if I am, there’s nothing they can do to stop me.”

  Bastian stared at me, eyes wide. His teacup had frozen halfway to his mouth when I told him about my grandmother’s sudden appearance in the stone circle, and had stayed there through my increasingly distraught description of our conversation.

  “… And she was right there, Bastian. Right there in front of me, like she was never gone. It was her, and it wasn’t.” I swallowed a great scalding gulp of tea.

  I wasn’t sure Bastian had blinked more than about twice since I showed up at the Rookery guest quarters with the last vestiges of my precious control slipping through my fingers; I’d found him the only one there, with the others out on various business. Stop, I told myself. This is too much. Look at his face. But my mouth kept going, disgorging the whole messy tangle of my feelings on the paper-strewn table between us.

  “I don’t know what to do. She’s not dead, so I can’t mourn her. She’s still my grandmother, so I can’t hate her. She’s also a demon who remembers causing the Dark Days, and I can’t…” I gestured wildly around the room. The words that had tumbled out of me in an incoherent rush abandoned me all at once.

  Bastian set his teacup down, slowly and carefully as if it might explode. “She still seems to care about you.”

  “Yes. That’s part of what makes it so awful. She’s still my grandmother, but she’s not…” I shuddered. “Not human.”

  Bastian winced. He settled back in his chair, tugging at his jacket collar. “I suppose that depends on how you define humanity. The philosophers have different opinions on the subject.”

  “What do you mean?” I didn’t honestly give two figs about something as abstract as philosophy right now, but I was willing to clutch at any hope he had to offer.