Troy Denning - The Obsidian Oracle

“Come, Fylo,” he called. “Bring your brother to his new home.”

The bawan’s invitation helped soothe Fylo’s mounting fears, and he obediently started up the path. The bear followed a few steps behind, grunting softly with each step. By the time they reached the midway point, the grunts had changed to a sort of labored wheeze, and the beast was stumbling more often than it should.

Fylo paused and laid a hand between the bear’s massive shoulder blades. “Plan working good,” he whispered, worried that the effort of animating the beast was tiring Agis more quickly than they had expected. “Not much farther.”

The bear brushed past him and kept climbing. Then, three-quarters of the way up the slope, it tripped over a knob in the rocky trail and fell to its stomach. The giant waited for it to rise again, but the creature did not move, and from inside came muted voices. They were so soft that Fylo could barely hear them, but that did not diminish his concern.

“Get up, bear!” Fylo yelled, banging his fist on its mighty rib cage to alert Agis to his alarm.

“Fylo! Is that any way to treat a friend who’s about to give up his head for you?” chastised Nal, waiting at the top of the path. The bawan’s feathery ears were laid flat out to the sides, and his golden eyes were fixed on the bear’s motionless form. “Perhaps your bear is ill. That would explain his fatigue.”

The half-breed shook his head. “Bear strong-but clumsy.”

This did not seem to satisfy Nal, who sent a query to the bear’s mind. What’s wrong, my friend? Surely, you aren’t afraid?

Again, he addressed the beast as though it could understand his words, and once more Fylo’s heart began to pound with fear. He looked toward the bawan, asking, “Bear can’t understand. How come Nal talk to him like that?”

As the half-breed finished his question, the bear rose up on its hind legs and let out a long, furious growl that echoed off the ramparts.

“I think he understands, Fylo,” chuckled Nal. “No bear likes being called a coward.”

The bawan lifted his own head and issued a series of resonant hoots, every bit as loud as the bear’s growl and just as savage. The lion-headed guards in the courtyard below answered with a pair of mighty roars, then a cacophony of wild yowls, bellows, caws, and other calls rolled off the cliff top. Even Brita screamed wildly, her hissing voice drifting to Fylo’s ears over the top of the gate.

Nal turned to the ball at the top of the trench and banged his beak against the stone in encouragement, until the din grew so ferocious that the granite cliff itself trembled. Even the bear’s body armor shook visibly.

Fylo laid a hand on the bear’s shoulder and gently pushed it back down to all four feet, then led it the rest of the way up the path. When he finally stepped past the round stone at the top, Nal raised a hand to silence the maelstrom he had caused. The bawan walked slowly around Fylo’s beast, then gave the half-breed an approving nod. “A handsome animal-brother,” he said, taking Fylo’s arm and leading him into the castle interior.

The place was nothing but an offal-littered plain of barren rock, with at least two hundred Saram giants roaming over the stark granite. Like all the beastheads Fylo had ever seen, none wore anything more than a loincloth, and sometimes not even that. They were all going about their business in a state of chaotic disorganization-butchering sheep, sleeping, rolling around in vicious wrestling matches, even making love-with total disregard for what was happening a few feet away. In one place, an eagle-headed mother was trying to lull her newborn infant to sleep, while less than ten yards away, a dozen of her tribesmen danced in a circle, madly screeching, howling, and chirping at the twin moons.

In contrast to their parents, the children all had distinctly human heads, though their features were always marred by some gruesome blemish. Less than ten yards away, a seven-foot toddler was playing in a dust pit. She looked completely normal, save for the trunklike extension dangling off her nose. Near her, two brothers were playing catch with a full-grown ram. With their dark hair and patrician features, they did not look so different than the few Joorsh children that Fylo had seen, save that the oldest boy’s ears dangled down to the ground, and the right eye of the youngest was so large that it covered the whole side of his face.

Beyond the two boys, huge walls of crystal stood scattered across the entire plain, each formed from a different mineral and each enclosing an irregular patch of ground. There were quartz enclosures, mica, tourmaline, and a dozen others. The compounds could not have been called buildings, for they lacked anything that looked like a roof, a door, or a window. Instead, they resembled the cactus hedges that Fylo had seen around the estates of some Balican nobles when he went to steal sheep or grain.

The only thing standing higher than the crystal walls were the blocky fortifications that encircled the top of the stony bluff. The walls stood twice as high as a giant, with huge piles of stones heaped all along their foundations. These mounds were interrupted only occasionally by rough-hewn staircases or murky doorways that led to the hanging turrets outside the castle. In many places, beastheads were passing boulders up the ramparts, where other giants loaded the stones into huge carts and transported them to strategic locations along the wall.

As Bawan Nal led Fylo toward the back of the citadel, he continued to hold the half-breed’s arm. “You’ve done well to win the heart of such a magnificent creature, my friend,” he said, twisting his owl-like head almost completely around to watch it. “Soon, you and he shall be the same.”

“What you mean?” asked Fylo, worried that the bawan meant he would be dead-the same as the bear.

Nal smiled. “You shall see soon enough.” Without stopping, the bawan suddenly tipped his head back and sounded a series of deep hoots that set his feathers to waving. The cries were long and sonorous, more like the trumpeting of a horn than the call of a living creature.

A hush quickly spread over the yard. As Nal led Fylo and the bear toward a quartz enclosure in the far corner of the citadel, Saram giants began to fall in line behind them. The beastheads with the deepest voices sang an eerie lyric composed entirely of long, sad howls. Despite the lack of words, the strange song sent shivers down the half-breed’s spine. When the procession reached the compound, the bawan raised a hand to halt the procession.

The bawan stepped into the entrance of the enclosure-an unadorned break in the wall of quartz-and addressed the tribe. “We will soon welcome a new warrior to the Saram,” he said, his eyes gleaming yellow with reflected moonlight. “Fylo has already proven his worth to us by warning me of the Balican fleet, and he has proven himself worthy of our admiration by selecting as his animal-brother the mightiest of all Lybdos’s beasts: a bear!”

The crowd broke into a chorus of wild growls. Fylo beamed at them in delight, then looked into the bear’s eyes. He nodded, signaling Agis that now was a good time to reveal the secret that would keep Nal from being angry. The half-breed suspected that they did not have long before the bawan was ready to cut the bear’s head off.

Nal continued, “As if he had not already done enough to earn our esteem, Fylo brought his animal-brother to us in a third the time that any convert has ever done it before!” The bawan gestured at the bear. “It only took him five days to convince this mighty beast to give up its head!”

Fylo did not miss the note of mockery in Nal’s voice, but the wild shrieks and whistles that accompanied the crowd’s cheer reassured him that all was well.