Troy Denning - The Obsidian Oracle

When the tarek saw three beasthead giants standing on her deck, her leathery skin went pale. At first, Agis thought it was Nymos’s illusion that had flustered the tarek, but he quickly realized that was not the case.

“Not beastheads!” the tarek gasped.

In the same instant, a hulking silhouette came into view off the port bow, six braids of hair sweeping back and forth like pendulums as he waded out to intercept the Shadow Viper . Although the dust curtain prevented the noble from getting a good look at the giant’s face, he could see enough to tell that it was more or less human, with a blocky shape and a hooked nose as long as a battle-axe. As the noble watched, the colossus lifted his arms over his head, raising a huge boulder as high as the Shadow Viper’s tallest mast.

“Go away, you filthy Saram!” he boomed.

As the giant cocked his arms to throw, Kester yelled, “Fire at will!”

Agis heard the sonorous throb of a skein releasing its tension. A tree-sized harpoon rasped off a ballista and sailed straight at the titan’s chest. It struck with a loud crack, burying itself squarely in the target’s sternum. The giant’s breath left him in a pained gale. The boulder he had been holding slipped from his hands and plunged into the dust. Casting a slack-jawed look of surprise at the Shadow Viper’s bow, he lowered his hands and closed his fingers around the shaft, narrowly missing the ship’s bowsprit as he pitched forward.

As the firing crew cranked the ballista arms back into the cocked position, Kester whooped in joy. “That’ll teach ye to raise a stone to us!” she yelled.

“Should Nymos drop his spell?” Agis asked.

“Not now,” came the reply. “Let ‘em think it’s beastheads killin’ their friends, not the Shadow Viper .”

She had hardly finished speaking before a second boulder sailed out of the dust haze and crashed through the rigging, tearing the crow’s nest from the mainmast and snapping ropes from the spreaders. Followed by the body of the screaming lookout, the rock bounced off the keel and plunged through the main deck.

“All back!” Kester yelled.

The slaves dipped their plunging poles into the silt and began to push the Shadow Viper away from the shore. Kester cursed them for being too slow, then peered into the floater’s pit. “Keep us light an’ lively, Agis, or we’re lost!”

Two more giants came into view just beyond the bow, waist deep in silt and coming after the ship as fast as they could plow ahead. The leader held a huge boulder in front of himself, using it like a shield to protect himself and his companion from any more attacks.

“Tell the slaves to raise their poles,” Agis said.

Kester furrowed her heavy brow. “Why?”

“Do you know what ice is?” the noble replied, turning his concentration inward. Without waiting for a reply, he opened his spiritual nexus wide, allowing his life-force to flow through the dome in a torrent. The sea in his mind lightened from a turbid brown to a pale yellow.

Agis heard Kester’s voice yell, “Raise poles!”

The noble took a deep breath and visualized something he had seen only once in his life, on a bitter cold morning during a hunting trip into the high mountains: a frozen pond. In his mind, the yellow waters around the caravel turned the color of ivory and became as hard as a rock. The frost spread steadily outward, changing the sea into an endless white plain, as vast as the stony barrens and as smooth as obsidian.

The noble did not stop there. He visualized a pair of outriggers stretching down from the ship’s gunnels. Where the floats should have been, there were obsidian runners, as sharp as swords and thick enough to bear the immense weight of the Shadow Viper . Agis imagined these outriggers growing longer and longer, lifting the caravel’s hull out of the ice until it sat free, ready to shoot across the frozen sea at the slightest impetus.

A boulder crashed down on the deck of the bow, drawing the noble’s attention away from his preparations. It smashed through a rack of spare harpoons and upended the foremast. As the great staff toppled over, a giant’s angry voice jeered, “You other Saram will die, too!”

“Push off, Kester!” Agis yelled. “And tell everyone to brace themselves.”

“Fast to stern!” yelled the tarek, not bothering with the warning Agis had suggested.

The slaves lowered their plunging poles and pushed. The Shadow Viper shot away from the giants like an arrow from a bow. The ballista crews, who had been holding their fire for the most opportune moment, triggered their weapons. The skeins throbbed and a pair of harpoons whooshed away. The first lance sank deep into a giant’s stomach. He bellowed, clutched the shaft, and crumpled forward into a dead heap.

The second missile gashed across the last giant’s elbow, spraying a cloud of red mist high into the air, then vanished into the dust haze. At first, Agis thought the titan had narrowly avoided death, but the fellow’s eyes glazed over and he began to stagger about as though he were too intoxicated to stand. A moment later, his knees buckled and he fell into the dust, his muscles twitching madly.

“Poisoned harpoons. Now ye know why we call her the Viper ,” Kester chuckled, using the king’s eye to watch the giant die. “That makes three of five. What happened to the other two our lookout reported?”

Agis did not answer, for he had broken into a cold sweat and fallen to quivering. His temples throbbed with a fierce, maddening pain, and his intestines burned as though he had swallowed fire. He felt a terrible punishment rising from his gut, and the noble knew he had overreached the limits of his endurance. He found himself leaning over to void his stomach, still struggling to keep his hands on the floater’s dome.

“What’s wrong with ye, Agis?” demanded Kester. “If ye let us down now, we’ll sink!”

“It’s Tithian’s fever!” Agis gasped, struggling to pull himself upright. “I can’t-”

A tremendous boom sounded from the Shadow Viper’s stern, bringing the caravel to an abrupt halt. Agis flew out of his seat and rolled clear to the rear gunnel. He hit his head against a bone stanchion, then found himself lying in a tangled mess with Kester, the helmsman, and a half-dozen other sailors. A foul smell, almost as rank as the one he had left behind in the cockpit, filled his nostrils.

Agis looked up and found himself staring at two sets of immense blue eyes. Beneath each pair of orbs were a craggy nose and cavernous mouth filled with broken teeth as large as stalactites.

“They’re too small to be Saram spies!” growled one giant.

The other scowled in confusion, then raised a sword-length finger to scratch between the mats of his hair. “We’d better take them to Mag’r,” he said. “The sachem will know what they are.”

Bathed in the full fury of the crimson sun, Tithian and Agis stood on a slate-topped table more expansive than a Tyrian plaza. The heat shimmered off the black surface in torpid waves, blistering their feet and scorching their lips, leaving their parched throats bloated with thirst. Nymos lay half-conscious at the king’s side, his reptilian body unable to cool his blood in the face of the scalding temperature. At the jozhal’s side stood Kester, swaying and perilously close to collapsing herself.

The ship’s crew cowered a short distance away. Despite the helmsman’s efforts to keep them quiet, the terrified slaves murmured anxiously among themselves and cast nervous glances over their shoulders, where the end of the table overhung a sheer cliff that dropped a thousand feet into the Sea of Silt’s pearly haze.