Troy Denning - The Obsidian Oracle

The walls of a mountain canyon flanked the table on both sides. A pair of stone benches, as tall and broad as Tyr’s ramparts, had been carved into each of these rocky slopes. On these benches sat a dozen giants, all with blocky, humanlike heads marked by lumpy features and rough skin. Each wore the crude figure of his tribe’s totem-a sheep, goat, erdlu, or similar domestic animal-tattooed on his sloped brow. Most wore their hair and beards in the long, snarled braids coveted as raw material by Balican rope makers. Their angry shouts rumbled back and forth over the table like thunder, so loud that Tithian could understand only half of the words.

“We’ve been ignored long enough,” Tithian growled.

The king started across the broken slate toward the head of the table, where a round-faced giant sat upon a throne of black basalt. Carved from the shoulder of a volcanic peak, the great chair was as large as the Golden Palace itself. On the titan’s clean-shaven head rested a circlet of tree boughs woven into a brown-leaved garland of royalty, identifying the wearer, Tithian supposed, as the monarch. The giant’s eyes were witless and dull, with puffy lids and brown irises that showed life only when they flashed in anger or malice. From his bloated cheeks sagged great jowls, hanging well over his fleshy neck and trembling like a loose sail whenever he bared his jagged teeth to sneer or laugh.

Tithian had taken only a half-dozen steps when Agis’s fingers gouged into his arm. “What are you doing?” the noble demanded.

“Saving us,” the king replied.

“Ye’ve done enough already,” hissed Kester, her eyes narrowed in anger as she joined the pair. “We wouldn’t be here if ye hadn’t killed my floaters.”

“I wouldn’t have had to, if you hadn’t locked me in the brig-but here we are,” Tithian hissed. He looked back to Agis and locked gazes. “I warned you it would be impossible to recover the Dark Lens without me. Now I’ll show you why.”

The king pulled free and continued forward, stopping next to a clay tankard as high as his chest. The giant in the throne paid him no attention, but continued to bellow at a tribesman near the middle of the table, more than thirty paces away. Tithian casually turned his palm groundward and summoned the energy to cast a spell.

On the rocky hillsides above the giants’ heads, grassy clumps of daggerblade and balls of yellow tumblethistle began to wilt as Tithian drained the life force from their roots. Within an instant, every plant within the reach of a giant had turned to ash, leaving the canyon walls as black and lifeless as the surface of the slate table.

The giant’s hand descended like a kes’trekel on a sun-bloated corpse. He grabbed his tankard and flipped it over, spilling five gallons of golden mead over Tithian’s head, and placed the vessel over the king’s shoulders.

“No magic!” he boomed.

Inside the mug, the muffled voice echoed painfully in Tithian’s ears.

“Too late!” Tithian hissed.

The Tyrian brought his hands up and plucked a stray thread from the hem of his cassock, then wrapped this around the tip of his index finger. Pointing the digit at the giant, he uttered a spell and pulled the thread down past his first knuckle.

Again, the giant’s voice reverberated through the tankard, this time screaming in surprise as his crown slipped down around his throat and began to constrict. Cries of alarm erupted all around, and the table began to shake as giants to both sides leaped to their feet. Tithian smiled to himself and twisted the ends of the thread, tightening the loop until his finger began to throb from having the blood cut off.

Tithian felt the tankard being lifted from his head. “Is this your idea of help?” Agis demanded, tossing the vessel aside. “You’ll get us killed!”

“Do I strike you as someone with so little regard for his own life?” Tithian replied.

“You strike me as a maniac,” sneered Nymos. The little jozhal teetered at the noble’s side, holding himself upright by clinging to Agis’s belt with a three-fingered hand. “Now cancel your magic, before-”

“Too late for that!” said Kester, pulling Nymos and Agis away by their arms. “Stand aside, unless ye want to get mashed with him!”

Tithian looked up to see several giants stretching their arms toward him, their palms stretched out to smash him flat.

“Stop!” Tithian yelled. “If I die, so does your chief!”

Tithian pointed toward the basalt throne. The ruler’s crown had all but disappeared into the folds of his corpulent neck, and the giant’s filthy nails were scratching great rifts into his flesh as he tried to work a fingertip beneath the constricting boughs.

“You’re lying!” growled one of the giants, a lanky fellow with red beard and hair. “How can you kill our sachem if you’re dead?”

“Magic,” Tithian replied, raising the finger with the thread looped around it. “If I die, this string will tighten until it cuts the tip of my finger off. Your sachem’s crown will do the same thing, except that it will cut off his head instead of his fingertip.”

Several giants lowered their heads and eyed the digit raised toward them. Their breaths washed over Tithian like a stale-smelling wind, but they made no move to attack.

The king smiled. “That’s better,” he said. “Now-”

He was interrupted by a rumbling voice from the far end of the table. “Let Sachem Mag’r go, or I’ll sweep your friends off the Table of Chiefs.”

Tithian glanced over his shoulder to see that a giant had laid his massive arm across the width of the table, and was ready to sweep Kester’s cowering slave crew over the edge into the Sea of Silt.

“I don’t care what you do with them,” the king said, looking back to Mag’r. The sachem’s face color had deepened from red to purple, and his eyes were bulging from his head. “They’re no friends of mine.”

“But they’re me crew!” Kester growled, stepping toward the king. “I need ’em to sail the Shadow Viper. ”

“Crews can be replaced.”

“Not out here,” observed Nymos, standing several paces away. “If this is your idea of saving us, you’re a fool.”

“The crew is a liability,” Tithian retorted. “If we let the giants think they’re important to us, Mag’r will use them against us.”

“I won’t allow you to sacrifice them,” Agis warned. “They’re living beings, just like any citizen of Tyr.”

The noble’s hand dropped to his side, where his sword still hung in its scabbard. The giants, no more concerned with human-sized blades than a mul gladiator would have been with a child’s wooden dagger, had not even bothered to take their weapons away.

“You’ve always placed too high a value on other people’s lives, Agis,” Tithian said, loosening the string on his finger. “But if that’s what you want.”

As the circlet loosened, Mag’r slipped a finger behind the boughs and ripped the crown off his neck. He flung the broken garland into the mountainside, then grabbed his throat, wheezing and hacking. With each cough, he sprayed gusts of gale force wind down the canyon.

At the other end of the table, the giant withdrew the arm with which he had threatened to sweep Kester’s crew away, drawing a relieved murmur from the slaves. Sparing them no more than a glance, Tithian drew a live firefly from his satchel and crushed it over the blade of his dagger, then quickly summoned the energy to cast another spell.

By the time he finished, Mag’r’s face had returned to its normal color, and the giant had recovered his breath. The sachem looked down at Tithian. “I’ll pluck your arms and legs off-one each day!” he growled, his eyes flashing yellow in his anger. “You’ll wish you had died fast, like your friends!”