The Obsidian Tower

by Melissa Caruso

  “Silence,” the Shrike Lord said.

  Something dropped from a tree branch above the cabriolet, landing in looping coils around Foxglove’s neck. He flinched under its sudden weight, then went very still. I remembered what Severin had said about the swamps being full of deadly venomous snakes, and gooseflesh rose on my arms.

  Another snake reared up between me and Bastian, massive and muscular, its triangular head weaving at him. He leaped backward with a startled oath, his skin going mottled as the shadows around us. Kessa reached for some weapon in her boot—and stifled a shriek as another snake, slim and delicate as a jess, glided up and around her wrist.

  “Don’t hurt them,” I cried, rising from the muddy road. My wounded leg trembled under me, and rain slid cold fingers through my hair and down my face. “You have no grievance against any of them. Only me.”

  “Unlike you, I am no murderer, Exalted Ryxander.” The Shrike Lord glanced at Ashe, who stood protectively between us, her sword out and ready. The ground beneath her feet suddenly gave way, the roots that held the road together above the swamp pulling back to let the earth crumble into a muddy hole. Ashe let out a curse and leaped to safety before she could tumble into it; a pair of trees bent down to cut her off from me, quick as a portcullis falling.

  He’d neutralized the Rookery so quickly. At least they’d be safe this way—provided those snakes weren’t too excitable. Worry for my friends sat like lead in my stomach as I raised my empty fists to face the Shrike Lord.

  “Sorry. You’re going to have to do much better than that.”

  It was Ashe, stepping into the Shrike Lord’s way again. She’d somehow slipped through the trees that caged her. My heart leaped to see her bright and slim as her own drawn sword before me.

  The Shrike Lord flicked a contemptuous hand; more trees reached for her, but Ashe dodged them with casual ease. Roots grabbed at her from below, but she leaped over them. A snake lunged at her, and she kicked it off the causeway.

  “So slow,” she taunted him. “Sure you’re not the Turtle Lord?”

  I scrambled away, opening up space, my heart pounding. Ashe was an insect to him; she couldn’t hurt him, only annoy him. But he couldn’t seem to swat her, either, and she was buying me time. I had to use it wisely.

  “Listen, everyone,” I called, desperate to at least pass on my message. “I met my grandmother on the way here. The entire obelisk is the seal on a tear in the world. If you destroy it, you’ll open the way to the Nine Hells permanently.”

  “Curse it,” Bastian exclaimed, loosening his collar. “I knew something in those artifice patterns didn’t add up.” He glanced over at where Ashe danced around the Shrike Lord; then he grimaced, made a casting-off motion, and seemed to vanish.

  What the—Oh, right. He’d been modified for stealth. His guardian snake reared back its head in confusion, flicking the air with a forked tongue.

  “Quickly,” he whispered, suddenly beside me, all but invisible with a pattern of leafy shadows across his skin. I barely stifled a startled shriek. His burgundy jacket lay in the muddy road, the false front of his shirt crumpled with it. I couldn’t feel any heat coming off him, even though he was far too close for safety; he must be able to regulate that, too. “Get out of here. We’ll hold him off.”

  Foxglove beckoned me surreptitiously from his cabriolet, pocketing an artifice device shaped like a wire-wrapped tuning fork; the snake that had held him hostage lay draped around his shoulders as if it were a fashionable scarf, seemingly unconscious. Kessa had calmed his horses despite not being quite able to reach them; she sat stock-still on hers, sweating with concentration, still looking weak and pale from her brush with death.

  The Rookery was not so easily defeated, after all. Hope spread its giddy wings in my chest. I had a chance.

  I ran for the cabriolet, nerves singing. A wave of dizziness threatened to overwhelm me, my body protesting such quick movement after I’d lost so much blood and replaced it only with stolen life. Just a few more steps—

  With a horrible groaning crash, a massive tree slammed down between me and the carriage, barely missing Foxglove and Kessa, completely barring my way. Pox. The horses reared and screamed, terrified. There came a splash from the water below the causeway, accompanied by a frightened yelp; Bastian became fully visible once more, knocked into the water and half pinned under the fallen tree’s spreading branches.

  I spun, panic buzzing in my brain, to face the Shrike Lord. He’d opened a gap several yards wide in the causeway, letting the water pour through it; Ashe stood on the far side, sword in hand, bouncing on her toes as if yearning to make the impossible jump. She couldn’t reach me, either. Hell of Despair—I was on my own again.

  The Shrike Lord had never slowed his advance. He strode inexorably closer, oblivious to the rain that poured over us both. He wasn’t even breathing hard.

  Of course he wasn’t. He could have done much worse than this. He was barely trying. A shudder of exhausted fear shook me all the way up my spine.

  Dozens of snakes crawled from the swamp, winding their way through the mud of the causeway, elegant and deadly in the dim gray light. I had no doubt all of them were lethally venomous; there was no way I was getting past them alive. I could only pray silently to the Graces that the Rookery would have the sense not to try anything too daring that would get them killed as well.

  The Shrike Lord was almost upon me now, looming against the branch-twisted sky. Time to try talking, if I could force words past the fear and anger burning my nerves like acid. I took a shaky breath.

  “I can’t stop you from killing me,” I began. “But if you have any sense, work with Morgrain after that. Eruvia needs—”

  Suddenly I was kneeling in the mud again, pain exploding in my jaw. Kessa cried out my name.

  I hadn’t seen his fist coming; nothing had flickered in his eyes to warn me. Hells have mercy. He didn’t need magic to kill me. He was fast as a cat and built of limber steel.

  A long bone knife hissed out of its sheath at his side. “Lamiel was the one person in the world I loved.” His voice caught on the last word with genuine grief. “Now that she’s gone, I don’t care if Eruvia goes to the Nine Hells.”

  I lifted groggy eyes to meet the blazing white rings of his mage mark. At least let me die standing. But my body was too broken, too exhausted, my hold on it slipping in the mud and the rain as a dull roaring filled my ears.

  “I do,” Severin said, and stepped between us.

  “Get out of the way, Severin,” the Shrike Lord said.

  “No.” Severin’s voice was quiet but unshakable. I would never have known he was afraid if I couldn’t see his hands, clenched white-knuckled behind his back. “Enough. You’ve hurt Ryx enough. Let her go help them close the damned gate.”

  The Shrike Lord surveyed his brother for a long moment as the rain poured down on both of them, his lips pressed together as if to hold back some word of anger or pain. I held my breath, not daring to interrupt with the slightest sound, even though I wanted to cheer for Severin.

  The Shrike Lord whispered, “You were the only one I could trust. All those years, with our father trying to make us kill each other, you were my ally against him instead. And now you turn on me? Over this?” He waved his bone knife at me, incredulous. “I thought I’d taught you loyalty. I see that I was wrong.”

  Severin winced, his hand going involuntarily to the scar at his temple, but he didn’t give ground. “I’m loyal enough to tell you that you can be better than this.”

  His brother’s hand cracked across Severin’s face. He staggered under the blow; I scrambled back to make sure he wouldn’t stumble into me, rising from the mud at last.

  A white-hot spike of anger flared through me. Power stirred beneath my skin, straining to blaze to life—to hurt the Shrike Lord as he’d hurt Severin.

  Oh, Hells, no. I throttled it back, breathing hard, rain running down my cheeks.

  Severin wiped blood from his split lip w
ith a shaking hand. “You can be better than this,” he repeated firmly.

  The Shrike Lord raised his knife. “Get out of the way, Severin. Don’t think for a moment that the blood we share protects you from me.” The unnatural evenness of his voice had cracked at last, and it quavered with emotion.

  “Oh, I’ve never held any illusions about that.” Severin laughed bitterly. “But you did fool me into thinking you had a sense of honor, ruthless though it might be. Everyone else I’ve watched you execute was a criminal or a traitor, someone who genuinely tried to do you or Alevar harm. You know damned well Lamiel died because of her own stupid plot. If you kill Ryx now, it won’t be justice. It’ll be murder.”

  Severin must have known his brother would hit him again for that. He seemed to turn and flow with the punch, and I could only hope it didn’t hurt him too badly. He straightened slowly, the rain plastering his shirt to his wiry shoulders.

  “For the last time,” the Shrike Lord growled, the trees around us quivering with his fury. “Move. Or I’ll clear you from my path.”

  I stepped forward, anger shaking me like the last leaf in a hurricane, my power barely held in check. “Don’t touch him again,” I snarled. “Seasons witness, he’s your brother. If you hit him again, I swear to you I will die making sure you remember it.”

  The Shrike Lord started to pull back his lip in a sneer of contempt. But as the frost-white rings of his mage mark fell on mine, something stopped him. He went very, very still.

  He must have noticed when I let my power loose in his castle, even through his drugged sleep. He must have felt the rumbling deep in his earth, the stealing of his lives. He wasn’t as afraid of it as I was—not by a long stretch—but it was enough to put a faint glimmer of caution in his eyes.

  Severin’s gaze never wavered from his brother’s face. “Go ahead and move me,” he said, his voice soft. “Kill me, if you want. But if you kill Ryx now, when the Rookery needs her to deal with the most serious threat Alevar has ever faced, I’ll know you for a liar who only pretends to care about protecting his domain. And I’ll know your measure is forever less than I thought it was.”

  The trees encircling us tossed as if in a high wind. Harsh cries and hisses came from the swamps around us. Kessa was down off her mount now on the far side of the fallen tree, shivering in the rain, desperately trying to soothe all of the Rookery horses at once; their attention stayed on her, but their ears flicked and their eyes rolled at all the furious noise. Ashe… I’d lost track of Ashe, and I hoped to the Nine Graces that didn’t mean she was about to stab the Shrike Lord in the back or some such foolishness and ruin everything Severin was trying to do.

  The two brothers stared at each other, eye to eye, mage mark to mage mark, for a long time. I didn’t dare move. If I drew attention to myself, I had little doubt it would tip the balance in the wrong direction, and I’d be dead in a heartbeat.

  Finally, the Shrike Lord turned away, his cloak shedding rain in a swirling arc, his back rigid.

  “Get out of my domain,” he said.

  Severin’s shoulders slumped, and his knees looked ready to buckle. “Fine.”

  “And don’t come back, Severin. I’m through with you.”

  He winced at that, as if his brother had struck him again. “Just as well,” he said, with forced lightness. “I’m tired of you, too.”

  The Shrike Lord began walking away. Without looking back, he called, “If I ever see that murderer again, I’ll kill her.”

  It took me a moment to realize he was referring to me, and that this meant he wasn’t going to kill me now. Relief crashed down on me in a giddy wave, and I swayed on my feet.

  Severin waited until the darkness and the rain swallowed his brother from sight. Then he dropped suddenly to sit in the mud, ignoring what it did to his fine clothes, staring after his brother with a stunned expression.

  “I finally did it,” he whispered.

  I reached out, hesitantly, and offered him my hand. He took it and looked up at me, his eyes gleaming in the moonlight.

  “I stood up to him, Ryx. He exiled me from my home, but I stood up to him, and he didn’t kill either of us.”

  “You were wonderful,” I assured him. “Now let’s get out of here, before he changes his mind.”

  It was a long, wet, bone-jarring ride through the night in Foxglove’s cabriolet. He perched on the driver’s seat, while Severin sat beside me, the only one who could safely do so; I kept a few inches between us anyway, since I didn’t trust him to stay awake in his current state. I sat rigid with tension and armed with a stick, ready to poke him if he looked like he might nod off.

  Everything hurt. My whole body felt sick and exhausted and broken. But my heart kept beating, wild and fierce, despite all the Shrike Lord’s attempts to stop it. And I was surrounded by friends who’d cared enough to come to my rescue, after all.

  “We sealed the door to the Black Tower as soon as we got Kessa out of there,” Foxglove informed me as we raced through the night, the horses magically enhanced by Kessa and Severin to make the journey through the darkness without resting. “Fortunately, it seems anyone can close the door; you only have to have the right bloodline to open it. The gate was still glowing then, but the seal should have restored itself by now.”

  A shudder passed through me, blending with the rumble of the carriage. “And the demon?”

  “No sign of it when we left,” Foxglove said, but worry flattened his voice. “It may have gone back through the gate when you pulled it out of Kessa. I don’t like the idea that it’s still out there somewhere, but we have to face that it could be.”

  “And everyone in the castle is all right?” I asked, anxious. “Has Odan taken charge?”

  “Yes. Somehow, we neglected to inform your family of your situation. We thought it would be better to quietly extract you from Alevar rather than getting atheling dramatics involved.”

  “Thank you,” I said, with feeling. I was already light-headed from blood loss, and from the flight of potions Bastian had made me drink, but relief left me positively dizzy. Gloamingard was in good hands. “What about Ardith and the Raverrans? And that traitor Aurelio?”

  “Hells take it, I knew there was something important I forgot in the chaos.” Frustration stretched Foxglove’s voice. “I’m sorry. We were so caught up with saving Kessa—and then you—that I didn’t warn Lady Celia he was a member of the Zenith Society.” He shook his head. “We didn’t want the diplomats mucking around while we were gone, especially with another demon in play, so we asked them to leave the castle for safety reasons while we destroyed the gate. They were setting out when we left Gloamingard; Aurelio’s back in the Serene Empire by now.”

  “He killed my aunt,” I said through my teeth.

  “Well.” An ominous stillness came over Foxglove, like the black waters of a deep pool after the last ripples have faded. “Then he’ll face a reckoning when we return.”

  “Exalted Warden. Thank the seasons you’re home.” Odan greeted us by the Birch Gate as the sun dipped down behind the western hills and the hard light of day softened into purple twilight shadows. His usual unruffled calm had a few cracks in it; his mustache was positively unkempt. “I’ve done my best in your absence, but these are challenging times and somewhat beyond the usual scope of my duties.”

  “Gloamingard could not have been in better hands, Odan. Thank you.”

  He took in our ragged appearance with a frown. Kessa leaned on Ashe for support, and I had to favor half a dozen healing wounds as I climbed down from the cabriolet; I winced at every motion until Severin came, worry tightening his face, and gave me his hand to help me down. The warmth of his touch was a welcome distraction from the pain.

  “Exalted Atheling.” Odan bowed deeply to him. “My apologies that I have no better reception prepared for our noble guest. I didn’t expect we would be hosting you again so soon.”

  “I’ve had a change in plans,” Severin said dryly.

  “Our
other guests have mostly departed,” Odan told me. “The Raverran delegation left a couple of observers to verify that the gate was actually destroyed. I believe they’re planning to call their warships home as soon as they have that confirmation.”

  “That’s going to be an interesting discussion,” I muttered. “Thanks, Odan.”

  I limped toward the Birch Gate; everyone fell in around me as if I were my grandmother—except giving me more room, of course—which was an odd feeling. “Any new emergencies while I was gone?”

  Odan’s mustache twitched. “It would seem that when you leave, everything is suddenly calm, Warden.”

  I lowered my voice. “Did the Rookery tell you about the second demon?”

  “Yes, Warden. There’s been no sign of it.”

  Kessa shivered. “Good. I hope that horrid monster went back to the Nine Hells.”

  Ashe put an arm around her shoulders, apparently without thinking. Kessa tucked herself in tighter against her side; Ashe’s eyes grew bright and soft, and her expression ever so slightly panicked. I suppressed a smile.

  “We should do something about the gate right away,” I said, ignoring the trembling exhaustion in my legs and the dozen pains that stabbed me with each movement. “I don’t want the Empire to decide we’re taking too long and they should rain ruin down on us just to be sure, and every moment we delay is another that my grandmother might decide she has her own plans for the gate and intervene. What’s the next closest thing to destroying it?”

  “Changing the locks.” Bastian exchanged glances with Foxglove. “We already had those plans to modify the Black Tower wards to keep out the Lady of Owls in addition to anyone not of your family. That way at least she can’t open the gate and let the rest of the demons through.”

  “That’s better than nothing,” I said, with some relief. “How close are you to ready?”